Der Vaterlose

Bavaria to the Arizona Territory, 1829–1856

He stood at the rail and watched Germany disappear.

It was the third of December, 1848, and the sky over Bremerhaven was the color of old pewter and the wind off the Weser smelled of salt and rot and the particular cold of a winter that intended itself seriously. The ship was a bark called the Steinadler, three-masted, riding low with two hundred and eleven souls in steerage and a captain named Foss who had made this crossing fourteen times and regarded his passengers with the flat professional indifference of a man who moves livestock. Richter stood at the stern rail and watched the low coastline go gray and then go dark and then go nothing, and he felt the loss of it as a physical sensation, a specific subtraction, the way you feel a tooth gone from the jaw, the absence more present than the thing itself had ever been.

He was nineteen years old.

His name was Georg Wilhelm Richter. He had been born in Berchtesgaden in the shadow of the Alps in the year 1829, the eldest son of a stonemason whose hands were the largest hands Richter had ever seen on a man, hands that could shape granite and hold a child with the same authority, and whose death in the winter of forty-four had left Richter the man of a household that contained his mother and two sisters and a debt to the landowner that was not the kind of debt that could be repaid in any reasonable lifetime.

He had joined the revolution because there was nothing else to join.

That was the plain truth of it, the truth underneath the truth he had told himself and the other young men in the beer halls of Munich in the spring of forty-eight, the truth beneath the speeches about liberty and German unity and the rights of working men. He had believed those things. He still believed them. But underneath the belief was the simpler fact that he was a young man with nothing and the revolution was a thing that wanted him, that gave him a rifle and a purpose and the company of men who were willing to die for something larger than themselves, and Richter had found that he was willing too. He had not yet understood that willingness and readiness are different things.

The uprising in Bavaria broke in February. By April the Prussian troops had come and the breaking of it was methodical and complete and Richter had run, not out of cowardice, but out of calculation, the same calculation that had kept him alive when three men beside him at the barricade in Schwabing had not been alive five minutes later, the calculation being that a dead revolutionary is of no use to anyone while a live one retains, at least the theoretical, capacity for future usefulness.

He had walked north for six days.

He had arrived in Bremen in November with eleven marks and the clothes on his back and a warrant in his name in Bavaria for crimes against the crown, and he had paid nine marks for a steerage berth on the Steinadler and stood in the old Lutheran church near the docks for an hour; not praying exactly but needing the quiet of it, the stone and the cold and the particular quality of light through old glass, and then he had walked to the ship.

He watched Germany until it was gone.

Then he went below.

What the crossing made of a man depended on what the man was made of before it.

Steerage on the Steinadler was a space forty feet long and fifteen wide in which two hundred and eleven people ate and slept and were sick and were afraid and occasionally died, and the dying was not metaphorical but literal, an infant in the third week and a man of sixty in the fifth, and both of them were sewn in canvas and committed to the Atlantic with words Richter did not have enough English to understand. The smell was a thing that entered you and did not leave, the smell of unwashed bodies and the bilge below and the particular sweetness of illness that has gone on too long. In storms the people screamed and in calm the people prayed and in between they endured the way people endure things that cannot be changed, which is to say without grace or dignity, simply continuing because the alternative was the canvas and the words in a language they did not know.

Richter did not pray and did not scream.

He observed.

He had found, in the months of the revolution and the months of running after, that he had a capacity for observation that was not natural in a young man, that most young men experienced the world as participants and he experienced it simultaneously as participant and witness, some part of him always removed to a distance, watching, noting, calculating. He did not know if this was a gift or a wound. He suspected it was both, that the two things were not always separable.

He watched the other passengers. He watched the sailors. He watched the captain, Foss, making his rounds of the deck in the mornings, a compact man with a gray beard who moved with the absolute authority of a man in his correct domain, and Richter understood that authority was this and nothing more: a man in the place where his competencies were not merely useful, but necessary. Necessity. Not blood. Not the say-so of kings.

He filed this understanding away.

It would serve him later.

The crossing took fifty-one days.

He arrived in New York harbor on the twenty-third of January, 1849, in a cold so hard the spray froze on the rigging, and the harbor opened before him in the gray morning and what he saw was not the promised land and not a disappointment but simply a place, large and indifferent, that had no particular interest in whether he survived it.

He thought that was probably honest.

The ship docked on the East River, the piers below Corlear's Hook, and the passengers came off in the cold and the chaos of it, the men shouting in English, the runners pressing in from every direction offering rooms and employment and assistance in the language of men who intend to take something from you, and Richter moved through it without stopping, the three marks still in his boot, until he reached the streets of the Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side and heard, for the first time in nearly two months, German spoken without fear.

He found a room. He found work. He learned English with the deliberateness of a man acquiring a weapon.

He was in New York for four years and what happened there is part of the record and part of it is not and the part that is not is the part that matters to this particular story.

What he did was this.

In the winter of 1852 he was working the docks on the East River, unloading cargo off ships from the Caribbean and the Southern ports, and there was a man in the crew named Strasser, a German from Hamburg, who had a side arrangement with a man named Coyle whose business included the buying and selling of items relieved from their original owners without consent.

Richter was not a thief. He had been poor his whole life and he had been a revolutionary and he had done things in the service of the revolution that the law of Bavaria had named crimes and that he himself named necessities, but he had not been a thief and he did not consider himself one. He told Strasser this.

Strasser told him the distinction would not feed him through winter.

Richter considered this.

The thing he did was not theft, or not only theft. It began as theft and became something else in the way that things become something else when the people involved have underestimated each other. He had been told the warehouse at Pier Eleven held dry goods and nothing else. What it held, in a locked room at the back behind the dry goods, was a man named Aldrich, a clerk in the employ of Coyle, who had been skimming Coyle's proceeds and who Coyle had arranged to be persuaded of the error of this by two men with specific persuasive skills, one of whom was supposed to be Strasser but who that morning had broken two fingers in a cargo accident and sent Richter instead without explaining what the participation would involve.

Richter arrived at the warehouse and found the situation and found the other man, a man named Dix who was also German, older, with a face that had been broken several times and reset badly, and Richter understood in the first thirty seconds what was expected of him and he stood in the lamplight of that back room with Aldrich bound in a chair before him and he made a calculation.

The calculation was wrong.

Not in the way that wrong is usually meant, not morally, not by the measure of the law. Wrong in the sense of incorrect, of having failed to account for all the variables. He had calculated that Aldrich could absorb a certain amount of what Dix intended and that the debt to Coyle could be established through threat and that Aldrich would then be released and the matter concluded. He had not calculated that Dix was a man who had done this many times and who had developed in the doing of it something that was not anger and not cruelty exactly but a kind of professional enthusiasm, and that once Dix had begun the doing of it was its own momentum.

The clerk's name was Aldrich.

He was thirty-one years old.

He had a wife on Hester Street and a daughter of four whose name Richter did not know and would spend the rest of his life not knowing, the not-knowing being a decision made in the weeks after, the deliberate refusal to find out, the understanding that knowing would be a kind of ownership of what had happened that he did not want.

He had not thrown the punch that killed him.

He had thrown the others.

The distinction had seemed important at first. It had diminished over the years into something he could no longer find when he looked for it directly, something that existed only in the periphery, visible only when he was looking at something else.

He left New York three days later.

He left owing two months' rent and with the three original marks still in his boot, added to now by forty-three American dollars, Coyle's payment for the night's work, and he carried those dollars west on a railway as far as the railway went and then on a horse he bought in St. Louis and then through Missouri and Kansas and the Indian Territory and Texas and into the desert that became the Arizona Territory and he rode until the eastern United States was so far behind him it might have been in another country, which in every way that mattered it was.

He found the river in the spring of 1853.

It was the Colorado, running red with the silt of the canyon country it had come through, wide and deliberate in its moving, indifferent to the desert on both sides of it the way all large water is indifferent to the land, and he stood on the eastern bank and looked at it for a long time.

He had not seen a river this size since the Weser at Bremerhaven. He had not stood at the edge of a large body of moving water since the night he watched Germany disappear, and something in the sight of it unlocked a door he had kept locked for four years, and what came through the door was not grief exactly and not guilt exactly but the compound of the two that has no name, the feeling that sits underneath both and is older than either.

He thought about the clerk.

He thought about his father's hands.

He thought about the barricade in Schwabing and the three men who had not run and what the difference was between him and those three men, and whether the difference was character or luck or some combination of the two that was also not fully describable.

The river moved.

It had been moving since before he was born and would be moving after he was gone and the moving was neither consolation nor condemnation, it was simply the fact of the river, the river being what rivers are.

He crossed at a ford three miles north and rode west into the Territory.

He did not look back.

Years later he would find a boy hiding in the rocks above a burning wagon train and he would look at that boy and see in him the specific thing he had been looking for in himself since the warehouse on Pier Eleven and had been unable to locate, which was the capacity to survive a thing you could not fix and keep walking.

He would name that boy der Läufer.

He would understand, naming him, that names were the only absolution available in this country, that you could not undo what you had done but you could invest in what came after, that the care of broken things was not the same as the repair of broken things but was the only work available to a man like him, and so it would become his work.

The runner runs, he would think, watching the boy sleep in the camp that first night.

Und ich auch. And so do I.

He was not a good man. He had known this for long enough that the knowledge had lost its capacity to wound him, had become simply a fact about himself the way the color of his eyes was a fact, observed and noted and not otherwise available for revision. But he was, inside the limits of what he was, a man who kept his word, who paid his debts in the only currency available to him, who did not let the boys who came into his care go under if he could help it, and who stood at the edge of large water when he needed to remember what it was he was running from and why the running was necessary and what, if anything, the running was for.

The Colorado River ran south and then west and eventually, after a long journey through country that had no use for human intention, it reached the Gulf of California and went into the sea.

He had seen maps.

He knew this without having seen it, knew that the water he stood beside when he needed to remember was water that eventually reached the ocean, that the ocean was the same ocean he had crossed at nineteen with eleven marks and a warrant and Germany disappearing behind him in the pewter sky, that the water was all connected, the river and the ocean and the Weser at Bremerhaven, all of it one thing moving through the world as the world permitted.

He did not find this comforting.

He found it accurate.

That was enough.

He was Richter. He had been Richter long enough now that Georg Wilhelm had become a dead man's name, a name that belonged to a boy in Bavaria who had believed in revolutions and who had stood at the stern of a ship watching the country of his birth go dark and thought that what was ahead could not be worse than what was behind.

He had been wrong about that too.

But he was here. He had kept himself here through the crossing and the city and the warehouse and the desert and the years of the Territory and the men who had come into his orbit and some of whom he had kept alive and some of whom he had not, and being here was not nothing.

Hier bin ich, he had said once, alone at the river in the red afternoon, to no one.

Here I am.

The water moved south.

The sky went copper and then violet and then the deep black of the Territory that had nothing tentative about it, the black that was absolute and permanent and did not care whether you stood in it or not, and Richter stood in it anyway, because standing was what he did, because it was the one thing that had never been taken from him, and because the water was still there in the dark, moving south toward the sea, and the sound of it was the sound of the world continuing, which was not forgiveness but was perhaps the next best thing.

He turned and walked back to the fire.

The men were there.

Das ist genug, he said to himself.

That is enough.