Mathilda

Copyright © 2008 by Catherine M. Feldman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Glossary Of Unusual Terms

About The Author

A special thanks to my children

Kerry, Koleen, Peter, Mary, Michael and JoAnn,

and to their children

for believing in me,

in each dream I pursue.

Kudos go to Kerry for his tenacity

in wanting me to write well,

in accordance with my ability.

Prologue

On August 24th of 1885, in the small Polish town of Trecht, Anna Glantz became the wife of Walesa Vilde during a High Mass in St. Denis Catholic Church.

She’s beautiful, but she will make Walesa’s life a living hell, whispered a girl Anna’s age, who had set her sights on Walesa.

The boy deserves better, but he loves her. Maybe he can straighten her out, whispered an older man to Mr. Trietz who sadly shook his head.

The priest never should have married them, Mr. Trietz whispered, who owned the potato farms on which most of those attending the wedding worked.

Anna’s dowry was a velvet-braided rug of orange, brown, and dark green colors, pots and pans, and bedding, and they had been given a set of dishes at the chivaree that followed the wedding. The happy couple slipped away from the dancing and drinking early in the morning after the wedding, and with their gifts piled into Walesa’s horse-drawn cart, drove to their home that was built into the side of a hill. The three walls of the inside of the house were calcimined dirt. The thatched roof was held up by beams and the front of the house was made of wood with a framed door, a metal latch, doorknob, and hinges. A coal-burning combination heater and cook stove was well ventilated above the door. A square that had once held a window with glass panes was now boarded up after horses had kicked out the glass in their effort to seek shelter from the bitter cold winters. The house had been left vacant before it was given to Walesa by the owner of the farm.

The sun was starting to peer over the hills as the emptied cart and tired horse were put in the sod barn not far from the house.

I want to set up everything right away! said the excited bride.

Later, Ann, said Walesa as he glanced at the bed built against one wall.

* * *

The three girls who were born to them, always two years apart, slept in a trundle bed that was tucked under Walesa and Anna’s bed during the day because the room was so small. A living-kitchen room was the only other room in the house.

One night, Walesa said, A man comes to the field every day to tell us about a place called America. He talks about wild crazy wages that puts ours to shame. He talks of large ships that carry people to this land, and opportunity that none of us dare even dream of.

Maybe we should dream, said Anna, as she nursed the youngest child, already a year old, at her breast. We have nothing here, Walesa.

Afraid I am, that Mr. Treitz will find out I am thinking about it and I will lose my job and my home, moaned a timid Walesa.

Do not be afraid, Walesa, begged Anna. Go and see.

* * *

Walsesa found an Italian Padron, Antonio Geis, who loaned him the money for passage to America, to be paid back out of the much better wages certain to come from work in America.

When the Cunard steamship left its harbor, tall, red-headed, twenty-five year old Walesa, with his same-aged wife and their three small daughters, Nettie, Mathilda, and Velma, were among the hopeful passengers. These immigrants, often illiterate and poor, would try to cling to their old-country ways and customs. They came by the thousands to the land of opportunity, and seemed to have little desire to dissolve into America’s melting pot. They found places to live in Little Poland, Little Italy, Little Bohemia, or Jewish settlements among the slums of New York City and elsewhere. Along with immigrants from Greece, Italy, and Bohemia, the Vilde family landed, cramped and tired, at the city of Hoboken in New Jersey. They were brought by tug to Grecian Gates, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, where they were allowed to wash their clothes and take much needed baths. Within twenty-four hours they had been well fed, welcomed by Antonio Geis, and with their meager belongings tossed into a coach drawn by horses to an apartment where they would live. Built on a plot of ground one hundred feet by thirty-two feet, the apartment house had twenty four-room apartments sandwiched into it. The area was called Little Poland."

Within another day, Walesa had been given work on the dock run by a Greek foreman who spoke some Polish. Walesa was elated to be working at such high wages. The work was no harder than in the potato fields, and he was certain he would soon have Antonio paid off. What he could not know was that the high interest that Antonio tacked on to the principal of each immigrant made paying him off in full an impossibility.

Anna and the girls were settled into the airless apartment, with only one door and one window in each room, but their excitement continued to buoy them. The girls played on the cobblestones surrounding the apartments. Hundreds of other Polish children screamed and laughed and chattered with them. Soon they would have to learn to speak only English when they enrolled in the public schools.

America was a land of opportunity in spite of its negative aspects, and the Vilde family made every effort to adjust. Anna learned to turn on a gas light instead of lighting a kerosene lamp.

She was learning to clean a wood floor instead of shaking rugs that covered dirt floors. She soon caught on to the fact that if she got to the hall sink a half hour ahead of the other women, she did not have to stand in line to draw water for her household and that the bathroom was empty. She was learning that filling the reservoir on the back of her stove with water early and then cooking during the day on the hot stove, also provided her with warm water for baths, scrubbing, and washing hands before meals. She learned that if she washed clothes early and hung them around the apartment to dry, with windows open, it made the rooms cooler. She joined with the other women to confront Antonio Geis with demands to periodically dredge the ditch that ran behind the apartments to keep the stench down and to help control mosquitoes, so windows without screens could be kept open. She learned to fumigate frequently for cockroaches and bedbugs. She learned to haggle with the storekeepers for better cuts of a twelve cent per pound round steak, fresher six cent per quart milk, and other groceries to feed a hungry family with the exorbitant wages of twelve dollars a week for fifty and sixty hours of hard labor in what she learned were the gay nineties. However, what Anna did not learn, was to resist meeting her tired husband at the door with a litany of complaints about her hard day. She did not learn to curb her biting tongue when it came to disciplining her second daughter and not to favor the rest so noticeably.

The Vilde family learned to cope with second-hand clothes that a well-dressed lady distributed to the apartments in large sacks. They learned to run when they saw the Irish policeman round the corner with his billy swinging because if something was amiss, they would be blamed, whether they were innocent or guilty. They were satisfied with one glass of watered-down milk, one piece of chicken, one gift at Christmas, and to even relish one slice of homemade bread with white lard as its spread.

Mathilda, singled out as different by her mother, learned early in life to deal with that fact. She created her own fancied world that she talked about to herself. The other children drew favors from their mother when they shunned her, and in a household where the mother’s sharp tongue and wielded strap made up the discipline, they gradually drew away from the only redhead who was favored by a father whom they scarcely knew. A free day, Sunday, he usually spent with his friends at the local bar, understandably because he was too weak to stand up to his wife. Getting drunk to drown out that sad fact somehow helped. Unable to learn at school and unable to fit in at home, Mathilda quit school at twelve and joined a street gang, comprised of other ill-fitting youth who found work at local stores at night and who slept during the day. When she was eighteen, the opportunity presented itself for her to become a nanny for a couple from a distant place called Montana. She knew that her chance to make something of her life had come and she took it. This is her story.

Chapter One

During the early days of Montana’s statehood, a comely Polish lady, Mathilda, and her somewhat older boyfriend, Theodore, filed on adjoining homesteads. They complied with the five year improvement rules, married, and set up residence in their frame house astride the connecting line of their now deeded land.

If it ain’t one thing, it’s the same thing, was the way Mathilda often adapted her own understanding of the English vernacular.

I can’t seem to get Preston to come to the picnic on the last day of school, Theodore. What is your thinking on it?

My little Mathilda, began Theodore, wanting only to still her worries with mustached kisses, but daring not to for fear the milk cow in the barn whose teats already dripping since the sun came up, might never get milked at all. Why do you worry over such things that don’t concern you?

And, for that though, Theodore, my already deaf-in-the-right-ear husband, Mathilda mumbled into her coffee mug as she sat on Theodore’s right, you shall not have yourself satisfied tonight as I see by your trembling hand on the fork you are holding. I will darn socks until I hear you snoring, and then I will milk Bessie early before you reach for me tomorrow morning and find me in the barn. Then taking her lips away from her mug, she said sweetly, But, Theodore, Preston is so lonely seeming, and the teacher comes from the same state in the East as he does, I hear. He could meet her now if your ideas I should be listening to.

Theodore longed to remind her of the times she had said how ugly Preston was, and he would have also reminded Mathilda of the man being twice the teacher’s age, at the very least, but he only said, rather sourly, He’s lived in Montana so long, he’s probably forgotten the East, and the teacher has only been here one term. Besides . . .

I know, I know, Mathilda cut in, as if he had not stopped in mid-sentence. I know all your thinking, but he is the wealthiest rancher around, which should help what ‘ugly’ you might say is. I think Preston is what the Americans call a catch. Who cares about what face has been made up of some parts?

Oh, my God, Theodore almost exploded as the horse face of Preston flashed in his mind, but he had to be careful or he’d not have a wife in bed for a week, and Mathilda in bed was all that made the hard drudgery of homesteading palatable. Theodore was not only old, he was fat and lazy. He got what he could out of his wife and homestead with as little exertion as possible, which was what may have caused his wife to act as she did and to relieve her frustrations by living romantically through the lives of others.

After a few quiet minutes, punctuated only by Theodore slurping his coffee, he volunteered, You ask the teacher. I will talk to Preston. Theodore finished a second mug of coffee that he did not especially want, but which allowed him to sit longer. Mathilda was already humming as she cleared the table and he knew that meant the conversation was over. He got up reluctantly, found his cap and jacket, and plodded off to the barn.

Sunday morning came in bright and sunny with no wind. The buggies and spring wagons that carried families of the homesteaders could be seen for miles because of the dust the trotting teams stirred up. At least thirty adults and as many children would congregate under the lone clump of cottonwoods that grew below the bubbling spring in the coulee. Blankets were spread on the grass, and clean white tablecloths were then carefully laid on wooden tables that through the years the homesteaders had built for what had come to be known as their picnic grounds. As usual, the cowboys and unmarried homesteaders had cleaned up the cow and horse manure, and thistles. As a further gesture of their good will, since they never brought food, they had acted as spring tenders and cleaned out the spring so that the sparkling water invited everyone to drink. Campfires had been laid on the side of the coulee. Huge coffee pots with enough ground coffee in their bottoms were waiting to be filled with spring water, and the men would then stand around trying not to look too hungry at the thought of something to eat besides the fare to which they had unwillingly grown accustomed. Preston had led the group in the work with as few suggestions as possible. This