Out of this furnace
This book made available by the Internet Archive.
To the Memory
of
my mother, my father and my grandfather
OUT OF THIS FURNACE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book is a novel, fiction, and — allowing for the obvious exceptions — the proper names used in it do not refer to actual persons who may bear the same or similar names.
With that said, this much more may be: I have been as true to the events, the people and the place as lay within my power.
Part One ERACRA
1
G
EORGE KRACHA came to America in the fall of 1881, by way of Budapest and Bremen. He left behind him in a Hungarian village a young wife, a sister and a widowed mother; it may be that he hoped he was Hkewise leaving behind the endless poverty and oppression which were the birthrights of a Slovak peasant in Franz Josef's empire. He was bound for the hard-coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where his brother-in-law had a job on a railroad section gang.
A final letter from America had contained precise instructions. Once landed in New York he was to ask his way to the New Jersey ferry and there buy a railroad ticket to Pennsylvania. It was likely that aboard ship he would meet Slovaks who were going his way or were being met in New York by relatives; their help should be his for the asking. If not, he was to ask his way by showing to any policeman the enclosed paper, on which was written in English : Andrej Sedlar, Lehigh Railroad, White Haven, Pa. He was to beware of strangers who tried to get friendly with him on the street, and under no circumstances should he permit anyone to handle his money.
The warnings had not been entirely necessary. Kjracha knew as well as the next man those dismal tales which had drifted back to the old country — about trusting immigrants robbed and beaten their first day in America, about others who stepped ofl the ship and were never seen again, about husbands found in alleys with their throats cut from ear to ear while their brides of a month vanished forever into houses of prostitution. Determined that no comparable calamities should befall him, he had set out prepared to assault the first stranger who so much as bade him good day.
Unfortunately no one had thought to warn him against his own taste for whisky and against dark women who became nineteen years of age in the middle of the ocean.
He had first noticed Zuska on the pier at Bremen. Later, aboard ship, he met her and John Mihula, her husband; in the crowded steerage that took no planning. They were Slovaks from Zemplin-ska, the province to the northeast of Kracha's own Abavuska, and they were going to Pittsburgh, where Zuska had a married sister. Mihula was several years older than Kracha, a pleasant, quiet young man with delicately pink cheeks and blond, wavy hair. There was nothing else noteworthy about him except, possibly, his possession of a woman like Zuska.
She was as dark as her husband was fair, as lively as he was grave, a dark-skinned, compactly plump girl who missed beauty, even prettiness, by a face too broad at the cheekbones and a nose that matched. She lacked beauty, but had no need of it; the day after she boarded the ship every man on it was as keenly aware of her as if she had come among them naked. She had a throaty laugh, a provocative roll to her hips and she could warm a man to the roots of his hair with a look.
Long before the voyage ended — it lasted twelve days — Kracha had convinced himself that Zuska was a deeply passionate woman unluckily married to a husband whose abilities were hopelessly unequal to her needs. His pity for her was as profound as his own sense of frustration; in the congestion of the steerage the privacy
necessary for such condolences as he felt Uke expressing was unthinkable.
A week or so out of Bremen, however, Zuska revealed that the day was her birthday, her nineteenth, and stirred by no clearly defined impulse Kracha bargained with a steward for two quarts of whisky and German wine in a long-necked bottle. His appearance, laden, was a triumph. The inescapable accordion player was summoned, the bottles opened, and they had a little party. They drank, danced and sang. Kracha undertook to explain why, among people who were not from Zemplinska, Mihula's way of saying he had just risen would be sure to arouse ribald laughter. He did not convince Mihula, who no more than anyone else could tolerate being told how to speak his own language, but Zuska glanced at Kracha and laughed. Encouraged, he pretended to be drunker than he was and took liberties with her person which she repulsed with surprising ferocity but without changing his opinion of her.
And that was why Kracha, who had left home with enough money to carry him from his doorstep to his destination, marched out of Castle Garden with exactly fifty-five cents in American money in his pocket and, confronting him, the necessity of getting from New York to Pennsylvania by the tedious process of putting one foot before the other.
2
T
J. HE Mihulas were still entangled with the immigration officials when he came out into the windy October sunshine. It was now well after noon. He had promised to wait for them, to say good-by before they separated, so he put his zajda, his bundle of
clothes and things, on the ground at his feet and looked about him.
The low, neutral-colored city, its edges jagged with ships' masts and rigging, was hazy with chimney smoke. The harbor sparkled with sunlight; above him Castle Garden's flag whipped at half-mast, adding its little slap to the gulls' cries and the low rumble from the city. After Budapest and Bremen, what he saw was not overwhelmingly impressive. It was America, of course, but he would not feel himself really in America until he was in White Haven, secure in a job and a place to live.
He regretted parting from Zuska though it was because of her that he would have to walk the roads to White Haven like a gipsy instead of riding a train at his ease. He wondered what she would say if she knew and decided that she would put two and two together as swiftly as the addition had ever been made and mark him down for a fool. Which he was.
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