Chapter One - Unnamed LMS VII Novel

A/N: Thank you for reading to the next chapter! I am really enjoying writing this story so far, and I hope you are enjoying reading it. Let me know if you have any suggestions for how the story should go. As with last time, I have changed a little bit since posting it in my Writer's Corner thread.

Warnings: scenes in a slaughterhouse

Eduard watched as the lone cattle climbed the narrow ramp to the second floor and prayed. A heavy mallet hung limp in his right hand, a few pieces of hair still clinging to its splintered head. He wiped his brow as the cow approached him. Another laborer, forty years Eduard’s senior, closed the restraining gate behind the mooing creature. Its oversized eyes bulged in fear and reflected the incandescent lightbulb behind the young boy.

He gripped the handle with both of his bloody hands. In one unbroken swing, the hammer collided with the center of the animal’s hard skull. The cattle fell, stunned and unconscious, onto the killing floor.

“Get him up, boy,” the older man growled as he re-opened the gate. It took four men to hurry each body onto the hooks.

For six months, Eduard had been a “knocker.” He had taken a mallet to the cattle’s heads, a dozen times an hour, ten hours a day, five days a week. In between swings, he helped the other workers to tie the limp animals to the ceiling by their hind legs and slit their arteries. 

There were some days when he missed the farm. Toiling alongside his father under an unforgiving sun made for comforting memories when the cattles’ fear became too palpable. The killing floor was always filled with piercing silence that was only interrupted by stifled grunts and groans. Unlike during the corn harvest, no breeze cooled the laborers’ backs as they completed the same task over and over again. The putrid air was still around the hunks of meat hanging from the ceiling.

No two cows were the same, yet each one that passed him blended together. He just knew what part of the skull to hit, and that was all he needed to know. Callouses covered his palms. Muscles bulged under his stained undershirt. His shoes, for the first time in his life, were brand-new. 

A bell rang as a man lugged the last bovine body to be with the others. Randy was one of the only remaining strikebreakers from 1921 and rarely said a word to his coworkers. Thick warm blood rolled down his dark back as he hoisted the carcass over his shoulder.

 “See you tomorrow, Ed,” a familiar voice said in Czech.

“I won’t see you until Monday, Stan,” Eduard replied to the aging man in the same language. “I’m going home for the weekend.”

Stanley wiped his hands on his jeans. They walked out of the plant into the stockyards, where they joined hoards of other laborers heading towards the streetcars and home.

“Where are you from again?”

“Hundred miles from here.” Eduard gestured in a general western direction. “Near Wilber.”

“I’ve never been.”

“Do you like farming?”

Stan sucked in his teeth, which exaggerated the lines in his face. His skin was completely pale, a testament to the decade he had spent working inside the Armour Meatpacking Plant. He lived down the street from Eduard’s boarding house; it was only because of their shared route that they had become slightly more than acquaintances.

“There’s a reason I’m a butcher.”

“Oh, Stan. You’re barely even a butcher.”

The group of men looked up as the whine of a radial engine split through the chatter. Eduard had gone years without seeing a plane fly overhead; now, camouflaged bombers cut through the sky on a weekly basis as the country prepared men for war.

“You ever thought of flying one of those?” Stan asked as he stared at the flying beast. His nose crinkled at the sight.

“A B-17?”

“Yeah. Well, not specifically.”

Eduard shrugged. “I don’t know.”

 “What do you mean you don’t know?” Stan asked with more vitriol. Within days of meeting him, Eduard had discovered that this was a sore subject. In reality, it was a subject Eduard thought far too much about.

Yet his response was, still, “I don’t know.”

And that was the truth. In his six months in the city, he had seen innumerable blue stars appear in the windows of his neighbors’ homes. Even more concerning were the encroaching gold stars, each symbolizing a soldier who would never again walk through that house’s front door. It was only August of 1942.

“If you enlist, you can pick your branch,” Stan explained as they boarded the 24th Street trolley. “Paratroopers get you fifty extra a month.”

“My father needs me on the farm.”

“Then why are you standing here talking to me, Ed?” Stan pshawed. “Give me an actual excuse when you think of one.”

The two coworkers disembarked the streetcar and began walking to their respective homes. Stan was a full foot shorter than the younger man, but so were many people. He had several bumps and moles that rose off his face, making what would have been a decently attractive man barely average. 

“You said you were from Wilber?” He asked the farmboy as they turned onto 22nd Street. A child passed by on a bicycle, splitting the duo in half.

“Close by it. We’d drive in once in a while.”

“That that Czechoslovak town?”

“Yessir.”

Stan thwacked Eduard on his swinging arm. The latter winced.

“I’m not old enough for sir quite yet.”

They shook hands in front of Eduard’s winding front steps. The cream colored house was set back several meters from the street on a slight hill, requiring any who entered to traverse the long front yard. Stan hesitated at the foot of the stairs as Eduard began climbing.

“Why don’t you come to dinner tonight, Ed?” Stan said with his hands in his pockets. “Meet the family. Then you can go with my sons to the dance hall, introduce you to society, unless you have been already.”

“I have to start driving first thing in the morning, otherwise I would.”

Stan waved his hand.

“If you’re living here, you have to live like we do. Be at my house tonight by seven. You’ll have enough time for your beauty sleep.”

Eduard nodded. Once the other man turned around, he climbed the nineteen steps to the front porch. He checked the mailbox and, letters in hand, entered the Meyerovich’s house.

It was his habit to place Ms. Meyerovich’s mail on the wooden console table in the entryway, under the ever changing rotations of flowers in the glass vase. He would then slip upstairs to his room, unnoticed until dinner, if he chose to dine with them.

“Mr. Dostal!” A familiar Russian accent rang from the living room. His shoulders dropped, and he let his hand off the newel post.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Come, come.”

Eduard stood at attention under the stained doorframe. The furniture was older than him, unchanged since Mr. Meyerovich had succumbed to the Spanish Flu. His portrait analyzed Eduard from across the room. 

“How was the meat today?” She asked in an accent as thick as her borscht. Her greying hair was uncombed and fell haphazardly around her head.

“Work was good,” Eduard replied. He never had explained to her what his job entailed in depth. “Boy, am I glad that it’s the weekend.”

“You leave this weekend?”

“Yes—tomorrow and Sunday. I am going home.”

The woman shook her head while muttering to herself in Russian. She pushed herself off the fading armchair.

“Come, come. I show.”

Ms. Meyerovich crossed the room to the ancient radio standing vigil in the corner. On top was a photograph. She picked it up in her trembling hand.

“My daughter,” she said.

“Yes.”

Eduard recognized the woman in the photograph without a second thought. Thirty and still living at home, Galina Meyerovich slept in the room across the hall from Eduard, and took hours getting ready in the bathroom. Eduard struggled to not break the door down and throw her out of the room before work every morning.

Ms. Meyerovich pointed to the man with his arm around her daughter in the photograph. He was shorter than her by several inches and seemed to be suffocating in his oversized suit. Several of his fingers were missing.

“Joseph Shramek. Czechoslovak like you. He propose yesterday.” She shrugged. “She say yes. He work in bank, make money. But not big money.”

“Congratulations.”

Ms. Meyerovich waved her hand dismissively.

“No need. But you need know that they will live here. And have family here.”

Eduard pursed his lips.

“So I need to leave?”

“Yes. No”—She shook her head and mumbled something again—“Not yet. You can stay two month”—-she held up the number with her fingers—-“two.”

Eduard digested his eviction as Ms. Meyerovich wiped grime off the radio with her bony finger. Her nails were freshly painted in a deep red color that matched her sloppily-applied lipstick. He had never met another woman like her before he had stumbled upon her advertisement for a room in the World-Herald. He had checked her address on a map—it was in the same neighborhood that the Wassons had recommended. Within hours of arriving in Omaha, Eduard had moved into her cramped upstairs bedroom and thrown himself onto his new, thin mattress.

“Do you know anywhere else I could stay?”

Ms. Meyerovich rolled her eyes and held up her palms, recusing herself from giving an actual response. She let out a heavy sigh.

“No more renting a bedroom every week, okay? You live in city, or you live in farm. You rent apartment or own house, or you own farm, okay?”

“Okay.”

She wiped her grimy hands on her dress and returned to her armchair. Her newest needlepointing project lay abandoned on the floor.

Eduard stared out the window. Blocks upon blocks of craftsmans and family homes stretched beyond the pane, but he could not see past the houses across the street. Cars of all ages began to appear along the sidewalks as the work week came to a close. His father’s truck rested in front of the Meyerovich’s stairs, waiting for its biweekly journey home. A mourning dove was perched on its right headlight.

“You play baseball tonight?” That Russian voice asked. She had resumed her sewing.

“Pardon?”

She repeated her question.

“Yes, sorry. I won’t be here tonight,” he stuttered. Feigning an intramural baseball practice was quicker than explaining his true schedule for the night.

“Win for us.”

“I always try.”

The Czech set the bundle of mail on top of the radio. He turned to leave, but hesitated when he saw his name scrawled on the top letter in an unfamiliar script. The name on the return address bounced around his mind, searching for where he recognized it.

“This one’s mine,” he said as he picked it up, but the old woman did not look up from her needles and thread.

Eduard climbed the stairs hurriedly. Across from the stairs, Galina’s door was open. She sat on the edge of her deskchair, combing through a catalogue. He winced as he stepped on the floorboard that he so ardently tried to avoid. Galina’s head shot up.

“Did mother tell you?”

She already knew the answer to her question—-the walls were as thick as the magazine in her hands, and the floors even thinner.

“Yes, she did. Congratulations.”

“I’m sorry. I told her you could stay.”

It was Eduard’s turn to wave his hand in indifference. “Don’t be. It’s your house. Just use my room for something good.”

“I don’t know how we could ever improve on it.”

Eduard chuckled as he shut his door, leaving the conversation dead in the water. The room was bare of any personal memorabilia except for those that he had collected since moving in. A silver softball trophy sat on the windowsill, and Creighton pennants and schedules covered the wall above his twin-sized bed. A pile of letters from home littered his secretary desk.

He kicked his boots off, letting them ricochet against the wall. With a thud, he collapsed onto his sheets and tore open the new addition to his letter collection.