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Lenert Tessmer walked beside the mule team along the towpath, speaking to them softly. He’d always liked talking to the animals he took care of, back on his family farm in Prussia. Now that he was in America, the animals were the only ones who understood him.
He had privately named them Hannah and Elsa, after his younger sisters, and sometimes he spoke to them the way he had to the girls. After his father had banished him from the farm, he hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to them, so it helped ease his pain and loneliness to consider these big animals his siblings.
He missed the friendship of the men he had met on the boat that had brought him from Bremen to Philadelphia. Soon after departure, he had met a Bavarian named Jonas, only a few years older than Lenert, and from the countryside, too. When the weather was clear and they were allowed up on deck, they spent much time together, talking of their childhoods and their hopes for the future.
Most of the men in their little group, like Bert, Gustav and Richter, had plans for the future, but Lenert did not. He had focused so much on leaving Prussia behind that he had failed to look forward.
“What will you do when you reach America?” Jonas asked one day. The sky above was clear and the boat knifed cleanly through the deep ocean. “Some say the streets are paved with gold, you know, but I think one must work to earn one’s keep.”
“I don’t know,” Lenert admitted. “Bert and Gustav, they go to family in Pittsburgh.” The city’s name sounded German, and Bert, the older of the two brothers, said there were many Germans there. “And Richter, he keeps going, to a farm in Ohio.” He shrugged. “I don’t know where that is.”
“I want to work in a shop,” Jonas said. “With well-made goods and wealthy customers.”
“I like to be outside. All I have known so far in my life is my parents’ farm.”
During their long conversations, he told Jonas he had left his family farm to make a better life in America – which was part of the truth. He was careful not to reveal that his parents had banished him, or what he had done to earn his passage.
By the time the ship docked, he was delighted to reach dry land. He had avoided most of the shipboard illnesses, and the movement of the boat through the water did not bother him, but he hated the enforced closeness, the stench of feces and vomit.
Jonas had the name of a woman called Frau Schmidt, who ran a rooming house that took in immigrants. “Come with me,” Jonas said as the ship docked. “We can save money by sharing a room until we both find work.”
The area around the port was filled with dilapidated warehouses and cheap-looking bars that stank of beer and urine. They passed several tumbledown houses advertising rooms for rent, and Lenert hoped feverishly that Jonas would lead him to somewhere less seedy.
Their cases bounced over the dovetailed brick sidewalk as they passed dirty-looking men lolling against walls, smoking cigarettes. The Belgian-block streets, built from old-world ballast, were busy with vendors pulling carts and boys in tattered shirts rushing past on errands.
Jonas stopped a man to ask for directions, but he spoke no German, and looked at them like they were filth. Lenert tried an older woman in a patched dress. “Pardon,” he said, using one of the few English words he had learned on the boat. “Sow-t Swanson Strit?”
She motioned forward, counted five times on the palm of her hand, then motioned a left turn.
“Denk you,” Lenert said.
When they had walked a few feet farther, Jonas elbowed him. “I should have let you talk from the start. You are a ladies’ man!”
The iron wheels of an elegant carriage clattered along the pavement. Lenert was glad that he had not given himself away, during all their long talks during the passage. He had no interest in ladies, only knew that they were more likely to be kind than men.
As they moved inland from the port, the houses were in better condition, though still weather-beaten, revealing the checkerboard design of the bricks, from a pale salmon to a golden umber to a furious red. Window shutters were painted bright green, and some of the houses even boasted hanging baskets of brightly-colored flowers.
“Look at that!” Jonas said. He motioned to a black man in a straw-colored top hat who sold oysters from a handcart. “An African! I have heard of them but never seen one.”
“Then you did not pay attention on the ship,” Lenert said. “There were several Africans working with the engines.”
Jonas turned to stare at him. “You saw them?”
Lenert did not want to admit how he had stared at the men, not only the color of their skin but the ripeness of their muscles, the sweetness of their buttocks. He merely snorted at Jonas.
He tried to interpret the signs in store windows, but his command of English was so limited that he could only recognize words which seemed to have been stolen from German. It reminded him of certain neighborhoods of Bremen, full of men in black frock coats and women in gingham dresses.
As they moved inland, the children were better dressed, in well-mended shirts and short pants or dresses, tossing hoops or playing hide-and-seek on the porches and tiny grass spaces in front of row houses that sat shoulder to shoulder.
Lenert had been counting the blocks as the woman had showed him, and when they had reached five he told Jonas they must turn. The address Jonas had was in the middle of a block on South Swanson Street, near the Swedish church, and Lenert was relieved to see it appeared to be respectable, with a clean-swept porch and well-washed windows.
Lenert and Jonas walked up the set of steps to the porch and rang the bell. Frau Schmidt was a short, heavy-set woman with a kindly air.
“You have good luck,” she said in German nearly as heavily accented as Lenert’s. “Two of my lodgers left this morning, so there is one room for you to share. Come, I will show you.”
She led them up three flights of increasingly narrow stairs, and by the third flight they had to lift their bags and carry them in front of them. They stopped at a small landing on the third floor, with two rooms on either side. She opened the door to the room that looked out over the street and Lenert peered inside.
It was barely big enough for the two of them, with one bed in the middle, and it was under the eaves so Lenert had to stoop except in the very center of the room.
They combined their coins and paid for the first week in advance. Then Jonas sat down on the thin mattress. “At least this does not rock like the boat,” he said. “There is no chance we will be tossed together.”
They went downstairs to the first-floor sitting room and asked a man smoking a pipe man about jobs. He was a night soil man, emptying privies that families left outside, and as he spoke Lenert could smell the shit on him. He knew of no jobs for them, and neither did anyone else they spoke with over the next few days.
Lenert began to despair that he would find work, and his small remaining stock of cash would deplete quickly, leaving him stranded. Then one day Frau Schmidt took him aside. “I have a regular guest, a Berliner who comes to me every two weeks for a night or two. He is due tomorrow. Maybe he can help you find a job.”
Frau Schmidt introduced them when the Berliner arrived the next day, and they stood in front of the house, enjoying the spring warmth. They talked for a few minutes about Prussia and Germany, and why they had come to the United States, though Lenert used the excuse he had chosen on the boat, that he was looking for opportunity. “Frau Schmidt says you have a good job,” Lenert said.
“They call me a bargeman, or sometimes a hoggee. I work on the Delaware Canal.”
“What is that?” Lenert asked.
“The Delaware Canal is a very important waterway,” Karl-Heinz boasted in his accent, which sounded stilted to Lenert’s ears. “Barges transport goods to Easton and beyond and bring back coal to the city. The barges are towed by mules, and the bargeman walks beside them, making sure they keep the pace.”
As they talked, Karl-Heinz grilled Lenert about his background, where he was from and how and why he had come to the United States. Karl-Heinz had a wife and a child in Bristol, about twenty miles north of the city, but he stayed at this boarding house while waiting for the barge he worked on to be emptied and reloaded.
Lenert was so eager to find someone who might help him that he spilled out his story—kicked off his family farm, the struggle to get to Bremen and earn enough money to pay for his passage. He was careful not to provide any specific details about the work he had had done in that city.
Karl-Heinz had a crafty look on his face. “Maybe I will tell you how to get a job on the canal,” he said. “If you are good to me. Being a hoggee is a tough job for a city man like me, but you, from the country, you might like it.”
Lenert knew that look from the men he had serviced on the streets of Bremen. He thought he had left all that behind—but sex was a universal currency, and while he had so little money he had to do what was necessary. But each time he gave himself up to a man in exchange for money, it was as if a bit of his soul leaked away.
His only solace back then had been to walk, out to the edge of the city, where he could see fields and hillsides, heard the cry of birds and smell the fresh air. It helped repaid the hole developing in his heart—but only a little. And when the occasional man was kind to him, held him gently or kissed his forehead, tears sprang to his eyes.
Karl-Heinz led Lenert to his room, where he took him from behind with a ferocity that left Lenert in pain, feeling despair that no matter how far he had run, he was doomed to live the same kind of awful life.
When they were finished, Lenert’s buttocks hurt so badly he could barely stand up. Karl-Heinz took no notice of his pain, but handed him a piece of paper with directions. He was to find the station for the North Penn railroad at the edge of the city, and take the train there to Bristol, and then walk a mile toward the docks, where the Delaware Canal began. There he would seek out Frau Anderson, who would be loading her barge for a trip up the canal. She needed a hoggee because her husband, who had walked with the mules, had recently died.
Lenert had struggled up to his room, where he told Jonas nothing of what had transpired between him and Karl-Heinz. He pretended that he had eaten something bad, and took to his bed. The next morning, when he and Jonas woke at first light, he explained that he was leaving for a job in the country. “I hope you find a job in a store as you would like,” he said.
Jonas looked down sheepishly. “I found one yesterday,” he said. “A tobacconist.”
Lenert hugged him tightly. “I am so happy for you.”
“And me for you,” Jonas said.
Lenert packed up his meager goods and took the train to Bristol. He met Frau Anderson, captain of the barge called King Arthur, and with some sign language and the help of a German-speaking man nearby, he was hired to work for her, at a salary of ten dollars a month, two meals a day, and a place to sleep at the back of the barge in foul weather. When it was fair, he slept on the ground between the two mules, their muzzles on the ground, their sides heaving lightly with breath.
He already knew how to feed, water and harness mules, and Frau Anderson showed him how to operate the bilge pump, to remove water that had leaked into the hold. That afternoon they began the long trek upstream, and he quickly learned the best way to walk with the mules, how to slow them as they neared a lock and how to keep them moving when they were tired.
Sometimes they reached a lock in operation in the other direction, and they had to wait their turn. He discovered there were other foreign-born hoggees, though none of them Prussian, and many of the hoggees were young boys, and the occasional girl, who worked for their families.
Frau Anderson usually bought her supplies while she waited for the lock, if there was a settlement nearby. When they were near bigger cities, bum boats rowed out to pass them supplies directly.
While he loved being outside, the work was tedious and slow, and he was out in all kinds of weather. Frau Anderson was not a friendly woman, but she treated him fairly, better than Lenert expected.
No one along the whole sixty miles of the canal could understand his heavy accent, and he knew only a few words of English. It was a lonely life, but he had learned his lesson – becoming too familiar with anyone, especially another man, could only lead to trouble.
He was glad to be on his own. He had the mules for companionship, the birds in the trees, the sun and wind and rain, the quiet countryside beside the towpath. It was enough.
One day in May, six months after he had begun his march along the canal, he was startled from a reverie as a rabbit burst from the undergrowth beside the towpath, and the mules shied. “Whoa, girls,” he said, trying to calm them. “Just a rabbit.”
But a moment later the creature chasing the rabbit appeared, a sleek cat with a tawny hide. Not a lion, but something in the same family, with a square head and lean flanks. It gained quickly on the poor rabbit, grabbing the creature in its big jaws.
Lenert was frightened beyond measure. He had never seen such a big animal, nor so violent an attack. The mules were more agitated than he’d ever seen them, and he struggled to control their reins.
Frau Anderson came out on deck to see what the fuss was, and she yelled something at him. He couldn’t understand the words, but he got the tone. What was his lazy ass doing now?
She distracted his attention from the mules, and Hannah kicked out at him. A terrible pain coursed through his left leg below the knee as he fell to the ground. Ach, Sheiẞe, he thought, as he struggled to get up, but the mules were still pulling forward, as they were trained to do, and he could not get enough purchase on the reins to signal them to stop.
He let go of the reins and the mules moved forward a few yards, still agitated, shaking their heads and stomping the ground. Eventually they stopped, though The King Arthur continued to drift forward, meeting little resistance from the water, until the reins tightened and it pulled to a halt as well, a few hundred feet ahead.
Lenert tried to get up, but he could put no weight on his left leg, and he lay there on the ground like the useless lump of cabbage Frau Anderson thought he was. All his dreams of finding a new life in America vanished as he realized what had happened. He had broken his leg, which meant he could no longer walk the canal.
No walking meant no work, which meant no money. Would she leave him there along the empty canal to starve and die? He wouldn’t put it past her; she was a hard woman.
Frau Anderson continued to yell at Lenert from the deck of the barge. The big cat was long gone with its prey, and Lenert couldn’t begin to explain what had happened. Eventually the mules calmed enough and he could drag himself forward, grasp Hannah’s halter and pull himself up.
Frau Anderson called something else to him, but he didn’t understand anything except the word “stupid.” He’d heard that enough from her to know what it meant.
It wasn’t his fault, he wanted to protest. The big cat had scared the mules, and they’d reacted normally. Hannah and Elsa began to move forward again, and Lenert struggled to walk beside them, leaning heavily on Hannah.
That wasn’t good. An almost overwhelming pain raced through his left leg, and he could barely manage a few steps before he had to stop. They still had days of travel before they would reach Easton, where they would exchange their cargo of fabric, china and household goods for a load of anthracite coal. In Easton, perhaps, he could find a doctor to set his leg.
He would be lucky to make it that far. He knew no one in Easton, and the little money Frau Anderson would pay him when they arrived would only last a short while. What work could he do when he couldn’t walk, and couldn’t speak enough English to look for a job anyway?
They moved slowly for the next mile, and with every step the pain in Lenert’s leg increased. He was a big man, nearly two meters tall, and weighing ninety kilos. He reminded himself he was in America, and he had to think in feet and pounds – six feet, two hundred pounds. Too much weight to put on a broken leg for too long.
Finally, he spotted the lock ahead. Maybe Frau Anderson would let him rest there.
