I.
The union meeting let out at half past nine on a Tuesday in March, and Eddie Czernak walked home along East 28th Street with his collar turned up against the lake wind. He was twenty-four, broad through the shoulders from four years on the open hearth at National Tube.
U.S. Steel had signed with the union two weeks before. Men were still shaking hands in the aisles.
He didn’t go straight home. He turned toward the glass-walled office near the main gate, where one green-shaded lamp burned. Irish Mike was inside, bent over the gate ledger. He had been a sailor in the British Navy and a good deal else before Lorain.
Eddie knocked three times.
“Come.”
“I’m taking leave, Mike. Pittsburgh. Union work.”
Mike didn’t look up. He rolled a cigarette, slowly. “You’re a poor liar for a man with such an honest face.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s Spain.” Now he looked up. His eyes were gray and flat and not fooled. “I can smell it on you.”
“It’s a cause that needs men.”
“I watched men in Ireland kill each other over the color of a ribbon. A bullet doesn’t read your union card.”
“I’m not asking permission.”
“No.” Mike tapped the ledger. “There’s a man from the Bureau who comes round twice a month. He wants to know who’s gone missing from the mill and where they said they were going. He’s a patient man. And I’m a man who answers questions.” He let the smoke out. “Go if you’re going.”
Eddie waited for more. Mike went back to his writing, and Eddie understood he had been dismissed.
II.
The wind came off the lake smelling of cold iron and fish and the far edge of something that wasn’t Ohio. Eddie turned up Vine Avenue and passed his Aunt Wanda’s house without stopping, though the kitchen light was on and he could smell kielbasa. He wasn’t hungry.
He was thinking about what Kowalski had said at the meeting. Kowalski worked the rod mill and had been to Pittsburgh twice in January on business, and he had a way of leaning across a table that made you feel the world was on fire and only you could help put it out. “The fascists are not only in Spain,” he had said, spreading his thick hands. “They are here. In the boardrooms. In every plant manager’s office in every mill town in Ohio.”
Eddie had heard that kind of talk before. What landed differently was a newsreel he’d seen at the Palace Theater the week before: Madrid under the bombers, a woman carrying a child over broken glass, the camera not quite steady. Afterward he had sat through the cartoon without seeing it. Spain had stopped being a place on a map. It had become a place a man could actually go.
III.
The man’s name, or the name he gave, was Strelnik. He came down from Cleveland with two others, and they sat at a folding table in the back room of the union hall with coffee in paper cups, talking quietly. Strelnik was perhaps forty, thin-faced, with a small scar under his left eye he never explained. His accent was Central European, from somewhere that knew what it meant when armies marched.
“You understand what we are talking about,” Strelnik said.
“The Abraham Lincoln Battalion.”
“Part of the Fifteenth International Brigade.” He sipped his coffee. “Military experience?”
“Two years ROTC at Lorain High.”
“Family?”
“Mother. Two sisters. My father’s gone.”
“You are their support?”
“I work. My mother works. We manage.” Eddie held his gaze.
Something shifted in Strelnik’s face, not quite a smile. “No one will talk you out of anything. We will only tell you what it is.” He set down the cup. “Your passport will say not valid for Spain, and you will go to France anyway, as a tourist, to see the Paris Exposition. It is not romantic after that. It is mud and dysentery and aircraft you can hear for thirty seconds before they are on top of you. It is a cold different from this cold, because here you can go inside.”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
IV.
He told his mother he was going to Pittsburgh for union work. He hated lying to her and he was good at it, which made it worse. She packed two sandwiches in waxed paper and told him to wear his good coat and say his prayers. She stood at the door of the house on Vine Avenue in her housedress and brown shoes and watched him walk to the bus stop. He did not look back, because he knew that if he looked back he wouldn’t go.
He sailed from New York in April, third class on a French ship, with a borrowed suitcase, forty dollars, and a union card he’d been told to leave behind and hadn’t. The water went green, then blue, then a blue so dark it was almost black. At night the stars came out in numbers he hadn’t known existed. Over Lorain the mill fires and streetlights ate the sky.
He stood at the stern rail one night and tried to think about Spain, and instead he thought about the kitchen light on Vine Avenue and about how his mother had not looked surprised. He wondered if she had known all along, and if knowing had been a sorrow she had decided she could carry.
The last stretch was on foot. A guide met them in a French border town after dark and led twenty men up into the Pyrenees in a line, no talking, no matches. The path was ice and loose stone. Somewhere above the tree line Eddie’s lungs burned and his borrowed shoes gave out at the heel, and he walked the rest of the night on the sides of his feet. At dawn the guide pointed down at a valley full of pale light and said one word in Spanish. Eddie didn’t know it. He understood it anyway.
V.
They trained in Albacete, in a flat, dusty province that looked like nothing he had imagined. The instructors were a mix of Spaniards, Germans who had fled Hitler, and a Hungarian named Voros who ran physical training with punishing, impersonal efficiency. They learned to field-strip rifles of three different nationalities. They learned to dig. They learned the Spanish for stop and go and down and the left flank is broken, run.
Farris, a Black boxer from Detroit who had crossed the mountains in the same line, turned out to be enormously capable, calm under the sergeants’ screaming and good with the men.
“You from a union?” Farris asked one afternoon, sitting against a wall in the shade.
“National Tube. Lorain, Ohio.”
Farris nodded. “Longshoreman, me. Before I boxed.” He squinted into the flat light. “You think we gonna make a difference?”
Eddie considered it honestly. “I think we’re here. I think that’s a kind of difference.”
Farris thought about that. “That’s a preacher’s answer,” he said, but not unkindly.
That night Eddie wrote to his mother, and this time he mailed it. He told her he was in Spain. He told her he was well. He told her the country was beautiful in a hard, dry way unlike anything he knew, which was a strange comfort, because beauty you had never seen could not remind you of what you were missing. He told her he loved her and not to worry, which he knew was like telling the lake not to freeze.
He dropped the letter in the box and stood a moment in the warm Spanish dark, listening to artillery far enough off to be almost abstract, like something falling in another room of a large house. The stars above Albacete were the same stars that hung over Vine Avenue and the mill and his mother’s kitchen window. It was the kind of thought that either comforted a man or broke him open, depending on the man.
He went inside, cleaned his rifle, and slept.
VI.
The rest, the front, the long months, what happened to Farris, whether Eddie Czernak ever came home to Vine Avenue, belongs to another telling.
What survives is thin. In a ledger at the gate of a Lorain mill, in a hand that has long since faded, there is a single line beside his name: E. Czernak. Pittsburgh. Union work. The man from the Bureau read it twice and thanked Mike for his trouble. It was the same lie Eddie told his mother, and it was written by a man who had never been fooled by it.
And years later, in a small Ohio newspaper, in a column of obituaries, there is one sentence: He served in the Spanish Civil War.
History keeps its books in strange places. This one was kept a block from Aunt Wanda’s kitchen, which is to say, not so far from where any of us live.