The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  Even so, Clayton Jordan left each morning looking for work either at the railroad terminal or on the docks, rarely finding any. On the days that he managed to find a day’s labor, the pay was meager, rarely enough to put a decent meal on the table for his family, let alone to repay what they owed. Even on those days when he happened to find himself with a few coins in his pocket, he came to dread returning home to his family. The added burden of their expectant faces when he arrived each evening only served to deepen his already profound sense of failure. It finally became too much for him to bear, and on one cool October morning in 1932, with the Portland sky gray and threatening rain, he did what many men in his situation did in those difficult times during the Depression— he left.

  Unable to provide for her family, Alice Jordan, Ben’s mother, packed up her two young boys and what was left of their belongings and took them to live at their Uncle Billy’s farm in Waterford. The three of them moved into a spare bedroom left empty when Caroline, one of Billy’s two girls, succumbed to pneumonia the previous winter. Alice slept in what had been the little girl’s bed while Ben and Charlie shared a thin mattress that lay on the floor.

  The boys quickly learned to work on the farm, initially taking on the chores that had previously belonged to Caroline, along with any that their older cousin, Lucy, could coerce them into doing on her behalf.

  Lucy was three years older than Ben. She was a tall wisp of a girl with arms as thin as broom handles who, despite having grown up on a farm, seemed incapable of doing much of anything, at least in Ben’s estimation. It never occurred to him that she only feigned helplessness when the boys were nearby in order to get out of whatever chore she was tending to at the time so she could sneak away with one of the Steuben boys who lived on the adjacent dairy farm.

  For reasons that escaped Ben at the time, Lucy never had an issue attracting boys. In his opinion, Lucy was as plain as dirt and, but for her skills at manipulation, not particularly bright. Still, there seemed to always be one boy or another sniffing around the farm. Usually it was one of the three Steuben boys— on any given day, she might be keeping company with any one of them, if not all of them at once— but it was not unusual to catch a glimpse of one of the other random boys from town. Whenever Ben spied one of them lurking nearby, he knew that Lucy would soon disappear, abandoning any chore that briefly held her limited attention. Before long, Ben and Charlie were doing not only all of Caroline’s chores but most of Lucy’s as well.

  The boys didn’t care much for farm work at first. They enjoyed running and playing in the vast fields, and climbing up to the hayloft in the barn, which they often used as a hiding place to avoid additional chores.

  While they didn’t initially take to the vigorous and exhausting life on the farm, they enjoyed the food. For the first time in as long as either could remember, they didn’t go to bed hungry, and every Sunday, the dinner was a colorful spread of vegetables, potatoes and some sort of meat. Uncle Billy often took Ben hunting on Saturdays— Charlie was still too young— and if they were successful, they’d feast on fresh venison, rabbit or turkey. Otherwise, they’d dine on one of the many chickens that roamed the yard. Despite Uncle Billy being a skilled hunter, it seemed to Ben they ate more chicken than venison.

  Over meals, Alice would often make a point of acknowledging when they were eating food the boys had helped to provide.

  “Charlie, those are the carrots you pulled this morning,” she might say. “This is the asparagus you helped plant, Ben.”

  Charlie was unimpressed, particularly by the asparagus, which he despised, but the lesson wasn’t wasted on young Ben. He quickly learned that the meals they enjoyed were a direct result of his labor on the farm, and he became a diligent and industrious worker. He never again hid in the hayloft to avoid additional chores; he sought them out. He often did his own chores and Charlie’s as well whenever his younger brother was nowhere to be found, which was quite often. Uncle Billy often remarked that Ben seemed to always be nearby and willing when there was work to be done, while Charlie was blessed with the gift of always being elsewhere. Billy appeared never to notice Lucy’s frequent absences.

  Throughout his teen years, Ben proved to be a tireless worker on the farm, tending to chores in the morning before school and then hurrying home in the afternoon, eager to put in as much work as he could before the sun went down. After supper, he’d tend to his schoolwork until bedtime, and then he’d rise at four o’clock the next morning to do it all over again.

  He liked weekends and summers most of all, when he could toil in the fields with his uncle under the hot sun for hours at a time. He loved standing in the corn fields when the stalks rose taller than he was. Sometimes, he just closed his eyes and listened. On those hot summer afternoons, his uncle taught him, he could stand there quietly and actually hear the corn growing around him. He learned to drive a tractor and ride a horse, and he became quite skilled at both. By the time he was fifteen, his Uncle Billy often remarked that the boy could probably operate the farm by himself.

  By the time he graduated high school in the spring of 1941, he was certain he would be a farmer for the rest of his life. Even if college were an option for him, which it wasn’t, he decided that there was little of value that any college could teach him that he hadn’t already learned on the farm from his Uncle Billy. So after graduation, he simply continued working with his uncle, certain he’d found his life’s calling.

  But life had other plans for Ben Jordan.

  When America entered the war in December following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ben was conflicted. He desperately wanted to enlist, to do his part in the war, but he knew how much his Uncle Billy had grown to rely upon him on the farm.

  Lucy had long since run off with a migrant worker who worked the potato harvest on the Martin’s farm about a mile down the road. Rumors surfaced shortly after she left that the boy had gotten her pregnant, but Lucy, who had no great love of farm life, wouldn’t have needed a pregnancy to lure her away. They received occasional letters from her, usually with postmarks from as far south as the Carolinas, and even one from Houlton during the potato harvest— but for all the years Ben lived on the farm after she left, she never visited.

  Left with no other options, Ben decided to remain on the farm just long enough to train Charlie to take on his chores so he could be free to enlist the moment he turned eighteen. For the next few months, he worked with Charlie at his side, showing him everything he’d learned.

  Charlie, who’d once been quite adept at vanishing when there were chores to be done, learned quickly that it was pointless to try to hide from Ben. Not only did Ben know all of Charlie’s hiding places, after years of laboring on the farm Ben had grown considerably stronger than his younger brother. Over the years, whenever they found themselves in a scrape, as brothers sometimes would, Ben would always get the better of him. By the time Ben announced his plan to pass along his responsibilities on the farm to his younger brother so he could enlist in the service, Charlie had long since decided that it was easier, and wiser, to just do as his brother wished.

  In June, Ben Jordan enlisted in the Navy and was sent to boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island before being assigned to submarine school in New London, Connecticut. He spent most of the remaining years of the war bobbing around the Pacific on a sub tender servicing submarines that patrolled between Pearl Harbor and the Philippines.

  In late July of 1943, Uncle Billy was driving his tractor at the edge of the cornfield when his heart suddenly gave out. As he slumped over the wheel, the tractor ambled onward, slicing through the cornfield and mowing down a long swath of stalks from one end of the field to the other before finally overturning in a drainage ditch. It was Charlie who found his uncle face down in the water almost an hour later and carried him back to the house.

  After the funeral, Aunt Lizzie informed everyone that she planned to sell the farm. She had no interest in farming; that was her husband’s passion. Now it
only served as a sad reminder of the husband and the daughter she’d lost there. She wrote to Lucy, mailing the letter to the return address on the most recent letter she’d received from her more than four months earlier, but the letter was returned unopened several weeks later.

  Lizzie and Alice remained on the farm until it sold in November, but Charlie enlisted in the army just after the final harvest in October. He’d been eager to join the fight almost since his brother left, but he remained on the farm out of loyalty to his mother and his Aunt Lizzie, and to fulfill his promise to Ben as well. Once the harvest was finished, and the farm was all but sold, there was nothing keeping him there.

  A month later, Alice and Lizzie drove to Bath in Billy’s old pickup truck and trained as riveters at the Bath Iron Works where they spent the next three years building destroyers. They shared a small apartment on High Street, and each morning as they walked the four blocks to the shipyard, Alice was reminded of the many mornings when she witnessed Clayton’s wordless exits from their home as he headed to Rigby Yard before the Depression, and later, his glum departures from their apartment on Union Street as he set out each morning to search for work. She remembered it as an agonizingly sullen experience for her husband, but for Alice, who had never before held a job outside the home, it was exhilarating. The labor was exhausting but fulfilling. Were it not for the fact that the enormous ships they built were a constant reminder that her boys were somewhere halfway around the world fighting a war, she might have had the time of her life during those years in Bath.

  In July of 1944, while his ship was in port in Hawaii, Ben finally received a telegram with the news that his brother had been killed a month earlier in France. Charlie had survived the bloody battle on Omaha Beach only to be gunned down a few days later by a German sniper at a farm outside Isigny. (The sniper had been hiding in the hayloft.)

  Upon receiving the news, Ben wrote a lengthy letter to his mother, reminiscing about his younger brother, and assuring her that he would return safely to her as soon as the war was over. During that final year of the war, Ben saw very little action, although they were always on alert whenever they found themselves cruising near the Philippine Sea. He downplayed the danger when he wrote to his mother, choosing instead to lie to her in describing the long, tedious days spent well out of harm’s way.

  When the war ended in 1945, Ben emerged unscathed, his only lasting wound having been inflicted two years earlier by a Filipino prostitute who bestowed upon him a case of Gonorrhea that, for weeks, made the simple act of urination an agonizing affair. It would be years before Ben understood the lasting damage that had been done during that brief encounter.

  When Ben returned to Maine after the war in the summer of 1946, he found himself conflicted between his fond memories of his years on his Uncle Billy’s farm and his desire to live near the sea. Those years on the farm had been his happiest, but the real joy, he realized, came in working alongside his Uncle Billy. Now that his uncle was gone and the farm had been sold, he was uncertain whether he would ever enjoy farming as he did during those years in Waterford.

  As he walked the streets of South Portland where he’d spent his childhood— past Rigby Yard and the family’s old house and even the sagging three-story walkup where they’d been living when his father left for good— he discovered a longing he didn’t realize he had before that moment. After spending the last three years pitching and rolling across the ocean aboard a cramped submarine tender, he wasn’t inclined to pursue any life that placed him out there upon the water again, but he longed to be near it. Even more, he felt his old roots there in that working-class city at the edge of the sea pulling him back. He had no unfinished business there. He had no interest in finding his father or in recapturing the innocence of his childhood; if he’d experienced anything resembling innocence during his years in Portland, he had no more recollection of it than he had of his absent father.

  Standing at the edge of the street, staring at the apartment that had been the last home he’d shared with his family when his family was still whole, he traced the path from the front door, down the sagging wooden steps and along the walkway to where he was now standing at the curb. He imagined his father lumbering along that path as he did every day until that one gray October day when he simply never returned. He could picture his father’s slow gait and his broad shoulders sagging, perhaps a little more when he returned each night than when he left in the morning, but he could never quite picture his face. The only image he could summon from his child's memory was that of the back of his father’s head as he left each morning; for his entire life, whenever Ben Jordan thought of his father, he could only picture him leaving.

  This particular July day in 1946 was one of those sweltering summer afternoons when the air was so damp and thick that even the light breeze off the ocean offered little relief. Standing on Union Street, sweating through his uniform, he produced a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his brow and the back of his neck, though the effort seemed pointless.

  “Hey, swabby,” a gruff voice call out from behind him.

  Ben turned and spotted the ice wagon parked across the road, the old mule who stood before the rig flicking his ears and his tail in a futile attempt to discourage the flies that swarmed around him. The driver peered out from the back of the ice wagon with an ice pick clasped in his big hand, and he motioned for Ben to come closer.

  Ben obliged, crossing the street, and as he stepped up to the open door at the rear of the ice wagon, the driver tapped his pick against an enormous block of ice inside, sending a cool shower of ice shavings over Ben.

  “Feels good, don’t it?” the driver said with a satisfied smile. His skin was dark and his black hair was as thick as his Italian accent. Using the ice pick, he deftly chipped off a wedge of ice about the size of his fist and held it out to Ben. “Stick this in your hanky,” he said. “It’ll keep you cool.”

  Ben cradled the ice in his hands, carefully wrapping his handkerchief around it, and pressed the cool package against the back of his neck. He smiled and thanked his new friend.

  Refrigerators were not yet common throughout the city immediately following the war. In the more affluent neighborhoods— affluence being measured differently after nearly two decades of depression— roughly half of the homes had discarded their old ice boxes in favor of electric refrigerators. However, in those neighborhoods that consisted of block after block of old tenements and walkups that the working class called home, people still relied on ice boxes for refrigeration, and on the timely arrival of the ice man in his mule-drawn cart. They were easy to identify; the ice companies provided cards to the home owners and tenants which were displayed in the window to indicate to the ice man exactly how large a block of ice they needed on any given day.

  As Ben observed, the Italian peered up at the three-story walkup before him, taking a quick survey of the ice cards in the windows. Returning his attention to one of the enormous slabs of ice in the wagon, he carved off a substantial block almost as large as his torso. He wrapped the block of ice in a leather sling and, gripping it with his iron tongs, heaved it up so that the entire package rested upon a pad strategically draped over his shoulder. He’d taken only a few steps away from the wagon when he stopped and called out to Ben once more.

  “You sit in the wagon ‘til I come back if you like,” the ice man told him. “It’s cool back there.”

  Ben thanked him and, grateful for a chance to escape the heat, climbed into the back of the wagon, the cool air from the melting blocks of ice washing over him. He pulled the doors on the back of the wagon closed, leaving one ajar so he could observe the ice man as he climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the screen door of the first apartment.

  The ice card in the window indicated that the tenants needed only twenty-five pounds of ice that day. He laid the slab of ice, still swathed in the leather sling, at his feet and he produced an ice pick that he used to swiftly carve off a
twenty-five pound block, which he lifted with his heavy tongs. He tapped again on the door, a gesture that appeared to be little more than a courtesy since he barely hesitated before he walked directly inside. With his livelihood swiftly melting in the summer heat, there was no time to waste waiting on a stoop for someone to acknowledge him. His arrival was expected, and he proceeded directly to the icebox, depositing the block of ice inside.

  A moment later he reappeared and repeated the process for the other two apartments on the third floor and then returned to his wagon.

  By then a few of the local children had arrived and were excitedly calling out to the ice man by name.

  “Zapata!” they cried. “Can we have some ice?”

  The ice man opened the rear doors and leaned into the wagon and just as deftly as Ben had watched him carve off the blocks of ice on the balcony, he jabbed at one of the large blocks in the wagon and tossed each of the three children a small wedge of ice. Then he reached in and gathered a pile of ice shavings in his thick hands and showered the children with a cool mist. They all laughed, and Ben smiled, noting that even Zapata seemed to be enjoying the ritual.

  After the children left, Zapata began carving off another block of ice which he would toss over his shoulder and carry up to the apartments on the second floor. As he did, he regarded Ben, now standing in the street enjoying the cool air spilling out of the back of the ice man’s wagon.