The Miihlsteins stayed on Clandish awhile. Silke and Theresa married and had kids, as Jake once predicted, and moved to further-out subdivisions and new kit houses that came mail order from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog and arrived on a railcar to be assembled.
Anna lived in the sanitarium until she was eighteen. Over the course of those three years, her health improved greatly. She grew some but would always be small, always a little knock-kneed and fragile. But at least when she lived at the sanitarium she received some proper schooling, in between meals and absorption sessions out on the lawn in the lounging chairs. The girls there asked Anna about the riot when it happened. “That’s where you’re from?” “Yeah. Four blocks from my house!” Some of them treated her with respect after, girls Anna tried to keep clear of from the start. But her friends, Mina and Kate, they understood Anna and her temperament more after news of the riot reached them. They felt sorry about what happened, but not just that. They conveyed something more. Understanding, commiseration. “Did you hear from your brother?” Tears in Kate’s eyes as she asked, Anna shirking half a turn to sit taller and brush her dark hair back. Of course Anna hadn’t heard from Karel. She didn’t have to answer that question. “I’m so sorry,” Mina said. “You should write him and tell him what you think. Tell him it’s an abomination to have that happen.”
Mina and Kate were good friends. Anna always believed these girls were the real reason she was cured at the sanitarium.
Anna did so well over those three years at the home that she went off to a Lutheran college in Kansas upon her release and later took a job in Kansas City as an actuary at a life insurance company and made a career out of that. Kind of funny really, to the people on Clandish who heard where Anna wound up and what she did to make a living.
There isn’t much more to say about Karel Miihlstein. For how much pride the other boys on Clandish invested in Karel and his talent for baseball, he was a disappointment in the end to many of the boys, those who’d believed one day Karel Miihlstein would be as well known as Ty Cobb or Cy Young or Tris Speaker.
Karel didn’t talk much to the other boys after the riot. He was the quietest and strangest person they knew, through the end of their schooling. Karel still played ball those years, even though he severed ties with the South Omaha ball club and played only for a high school squad. Once he was sixteen, he signed a contract with a pro team and moved to Minnesota to play ball all summer and worked a job in a timber mill the rest of the time. Eight years later the boys on Clandish heard about him. His name showed up in a box score in the newspaper. KMhstn rf. That had to be him. He played four innings for the Detroit Tigers at the end of a season, in Yankee Stadium, had one turn at bat, in which he made an out.
His father had gone back to Vienna by then. Nobody could guess if Herr Miihlstein would have cared or not that his boy made it, at least briefly, to the big leagues.
A week after the riot, Karel had moved back in with his family. Silke, Theresa, Maria Eigler, and Herr Miihlstein. They picked up the damage. Almost every day they removed rubble from Clandish, like pretty much everyone did. Like this was the new life here.
The US Army sent in trucks once martial law was lifted. (Tom Dennison sent trucks too. Whatever that’s worth.) Soldiers and members of the state militia were there to help, but for the most part it was people who lived on the River Ward who were left to put things back together. People like Maria Eigler, like Ignatz and Ingo Kleinhardt’s widow and the Miihlsteins.
Maria kept Karel hidden in the attic for three days after the riot so he wasn’t grabbed by the authorities. If Karel had been taken in for questioning, if there was some witness or informant who could finger him, like had happened with Jimmy Mac, it was possible that Karel would be deported without even being convicted of a crime. Something a native-born boy didn’t have to worry about. With Karel’s involvement in the South Omaha Social Anarchists, people knew about that, his actions on the night of the riot were clear violations of the Sedition Act. Boy or not, he could have been stockaded inside an outbound steamer by the end of the week. So Maria didn’t ask if Karel was involved, or what he was doing during the riot, or why he’d been hiding on the dark ballfield when Miihlstein found him. That was his privilege. If he was able to keep his mouth shut he could shed the indecency of what he’d done. Anyway, he had to squeeze his shaking hands together to keep them still when Miihlstein brought him home, and that told all. Nobody had to guess if he’d been up to bad things. And if it was worse than throwing a brick through a window, folks didn’t want to know about it.
The police never bothered Karel. He was never brought in front of a grand jury like some boys were—like happened with William Francis, who rode a white Arabian horse and raised a noose to urge on the mob party—so Karel helped out. He pushed a wheelbarrow. He scooped up debris with a broad-mouthed shovel. He was even at the courthouse when militiamen hooked chains to a flipped-over, burned-out police Model A and hoisted the vehicle to a flatbed truck. Maria was mad about that—Karel close to soldiers, at the scene of a notorious crime. She wanted him to stay home. But Karel didn’t worry. If they hadn’t grabbed him yet, he figured they never would.
The four remaining Miihlsteins swept up glass. Washed at gasoline stains on the walkways with buckets of soapy water. Which was futile. They rested on the Eigler porch like they’d done so many times before. Watching their neighbors. Little boys stomping around with nobody minding them so long as they stayed out of the way. Folks were pretty tired of boys causing trouble just then, but these boys—five, six, seven years old—they couldn’t help themselves. They paraded around in damaged hats they found laying around, a homburg made soggy and caved in from the rain. They wrestled and took bricks from the rubble piles, lifted the bricks over their heads to show how strong they were. These imps. These kings of broken things.