They put him on the evening train to Lincoln. After that Jake could go as far as the thirty he had left would take him.
There wasn’t time to say good-bye to Maria or the Miihlsteins before his train embarked. He didn’t have a chance to tell Evie he was leaving. They put him on the train and he was gone.
Returning to his father and the farm in Jackson County crossed his mind. If the war had ended that moment in July—if it ended a few months earlier than it did—Jake might have gone home. But things didn’t happen that way. Jake was run out of Omaha. Lincoln was where they sent him. For the second time in his life, he arrived in a new city with only a little money and the clothes on his back. He’d be smarter this time.
And life would be easier here, in a way. Lincoln was safe and bland, its people mostly prohibitionist dry staters, self-flagellating Protestants, Anglicans, Methodists, government workers, students and instructors, young academics, pioneer lawyers, ministers. Its streets emptied at night. And the war was almost over. The German army was on the retreat. There were riots in their cities, famine, discontent. Civil war gripped Berlin. Once it was clear Germany couldn’t win the war, the tenor was different in America.
As it happened, Jake met Frau Voight, an old German who ran a lunchroom at the depot in Lincoln. She was plump and little. Frizzy hair fell in her eyes. She wore one of those drab dresses from the Old World, even in July, even in the kitchen, despite its layers and petticoats and white apron starched stiff. She ran around crazed, a pack of boys in her place for supper. A chicken had just finished roasting. She served it with sweet potatoes and yeast rolls and gravy. Frau Voigt watched her patrons eat, laughing and talking to herself. Young men were in her lunchroom, ranch hands headed west, college boys with nobody to cook for them, and Jake. She was happy to have them. “Ders plenty good gravy on dem sweet pertaters, yeah? I was waitink for yah boys to sit der.” She didn’t try to hide her accent; maybe she played it up. This wasn’t such a strange thing to Jake after living on Clandish, but her voice rang different in Lincoln. Frau Voigt had a lilt that made every phrase sound like it was plucked from a popular song. She called the boys meine Jungens and slipped them cookies from her apron after they soaked up the last drop of gravy with their last bit of bread. Jake laughed when the college boys teased about her accent, because she laughed too.
Classes were out for the summer, so most houses around the university lacked roomers. Jake took the front room of a white bungalow on Vine Street. It was shaped like an oval, with the front porch wrapped around. There was a big window on the street side. A family of five, the Jeffries, lived in the main house.
That first evening Mr. Jeffries offered Jake work. He was a bricklayer and repaired walkways and streets that had sunk in the dirt. Most of the time he worked alone, he said, but he liked having a helper. His three boys were too young. Jake said he’d do it.
Jeffries had a truck they used to pick up bricks from a furnace near the train station. Jake liked to ride in it. Folks gawked good-naturedly as the truck went by, its engine belching, its springs springing. He waved hello if they smiled at him. The rest of the day he’d dig up old pavers and pack dirt. They worked outside in clean air.
He’d never really seen a place so flat. Lincoln was nothing like home—which was sandy and hilly, with streams and creeks hidden all over—or Omaha, with its bluffs and swampy backwaters. There was grass everywhere here. Jake saw why they grew so much wheat.
In Lincoln, Jake worked. He lived in that room. He went to a football game on Thanksgiving Day when the Cornhuskers played Notre Dame. The game ended in a 0–0 tie, and Jake couldn’t figure what good the struggle did either squad. For hours they pushed and shoved and threw bombs downfield as hard as their might allowed. They punched and scratched and shouted and swore. Traded territory. Were injured. And for nothing. Not even one lousy point. But Jake got to shake hands with Knute Rockne afterwards, so that was fine. In winter he walked to the university library to read in its heated crannies. When the weather was nice, he went for long runs along the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks between Vine and Holdrege in the evenings. The air cleaned his lungs of black phlegm. Those who lived near the tracks must have thought Jake was some mad consumption patient trying to cough up diseased sputum, the way he hacked up the gunk he’d breathed in Omaha. He grew a beard after seeing the Swedes there with beards. His came in tinged red. He trimmed it every Sunday with grooming scissors. He improved his body. He couldn’t sleep otherwise. His brain wouldn’t shut off. He had to keep busy. Maria sent him letters from the Miihlsteins, from herself, and that helped him get along. Jake answered with a polite, stiff tone. He’d rip up half of what he wrote and cut it down so he wouldn’t embarrass himself by saying too much or writing too gaily. He didn’t understand why it was so hard to write the way one spoke. His writing always got in the way of what he was trying to say.
Jake fantasized about Evie coming to find him. The thought crept up on him as he kneeled to work after lunch sometimes. Her waiting on the Jeffries’ stoop that night or following him on the street. He hung around the station on weekends when trains came in. They could meet up and it would turn out all right. She’d have him back.
Evie never came to Lincoln. Nobody came to visit Jake, and that galled him. He knew then what a heel he’d been.