by Jane Yolen
The beach was cold and empty. Even the gulls were mute.
“I do not like this,” Merdock said. “It smells of a storm.”
He beached the boat and walked home. The sky gathered in around him. At the cottage he hesitated but a moment, then pulled savagely on the door. He waited for the warmth to greet him. But the house was as empty and cold as the beach.
Merdock went into the house and stared at the hearth, black and silent. Then, fear riding in his heart, he turned slowly and looked over the door.
The sealskin was gone.
“Sel!” he cried then as he ran from the house, and he named his sons in a great anguished cry as he ran. Down to the sea-ledge he went, calling their names like a prayer: “James, John, Michael, George, William, Rob, Tom!”
But they were gone.
The rocks were gray, as gray as the sky. At the water’s edge was a pile of clothes that lay like discarded skins. Merdock stared out far across the cove and saw a seal herd swimming. Yet not a herd. A white seal and seven strong pups.
“Sel!” he cried again. “James, John, Michael, George, William, Rob, Tom!”
For a moment, the white seal turned her head, then she looked again to the open sea and barked out seven times. The wind carried the faint sounds back to the shore. Merdock heard, as if in a dream, the seven seal names she called. They seemed harsh and jangling to his ear.
Then the whole herd dove. When they came up again they were but eight dots strung along the horizon, lingering for a moment, then disappearing into the blue edge of sea.
Merdock recited the seven seal names to himself. And in that recitation was a song, a litany to the god of the seals. The names were no longer harsh, but right. And he remembered clearly again the moonlit night when the seals had danced upon the sand. Maidens all. Not a man or boy with them. And the white seal turning and choosing him, giving herself to him that he might give the seal people life.
His anger and sadness left him then. He turned once more to look at the sea and pictured his seven strong sons on their way.
He shouted their seal names to the wind. Then he added, under his breath, as if trying out a new tongue, “Fair wind, my sons. Fair wind.”
The Snatchers
YOU COULD SAY IT ALL began in 1827 (though my part of it didn’t start until 1963) because that was the year Tsar Nicholas I decided to draft Jews into the army. Before that, of course, only Russian peasants and undesirables had to face the awful twenty-five-year service.
But it was more than just service to the state the Jewish boys were called to do. For them, being in the army meant either starvation—for they would not eat non-kosher food—or conversion. No wonder their parents said kaddish for them when they were taken.
After Tsar Nicholas’ edict, the army drafted sons of tax evaders and sons of Jews without passports. They picked up runaways and dissidents and cleaned the jails of Jews. Worst of all, they forced the kahal, the Jewish Community Council, to fill a quota of thirty boys for every one thousand Jews on the rolls—and those rolls contained the names of a lot of dead Jews as well as living. The Russian census takers were not very careful with their figures. It was the slaughter of the innocents all over again, and no messiah in sight.
The richest members of the community and the kahal got their own sons off, of course. Bribes were rampant, as were forgeries. Boys were reported on the census as much younger than they were, or they were given up for adoption to Jewish families without sons of their own, since single sons were never taken. And once in a while, a truly desperate mother would encourage her sons to mutilate themselves, for the army—like kosher butchers—did not accept damaged stock.
In my grandfather’s village was a family known popularly as Eight-Toes because that is how many each of the five sons had. They’d cut off their little toes to escape the draft.
So many boys were trying in so many ways to avoid conscription that a new and awful profession arose amongst the Jews—the khaper. He was a kidnapper, a bounty hunter, a Jew against Jews.
My Aunt Vera used to sing an old song, but I didn’t know what it meant until almost too late:
I had already washed and said the blessing
When the snatcher walked right in.
“Where are you going?” he asks me.
“To buy wheat, to buy corn.”
“Oh no,” he says, “you are on your way,
Trying to escape . . .”
One of my uncles remarked once that the family had come over to escape the khapers in the 1850s, and I thought he said “the coppers.” For years I was sure the Yolens were but one step ahead of the police. Given my Uncle Louis’ reputation as a bootlegger, why should anyone have wondered at my mistake? But I learned about the khaper—the real one—the year I was sixteen. And I understood, for the first time, why my family had left Ykaterinoslav without bothering to pack or say goodbye.
I was sixteen in the early sixties, living with my parents and two younger brothers in Westport, Connecticut. My. father, a member of a lower-class family, had married rather late in life to a young and lovely Southern Jewish intellectual. He had become—by dint of hard work and much charm—part of the New York advertising fraternity. He had also rather successfully shaken off his Jewish identity: of all the Yolens of his generation, he was the only one without a hint of an accent. If he knew Yiddish, he had suppressed or forgotten it. My mother’s family were active leftists, more interested in radicalism than religion. I was reminded we were Jews only when we went— infrequently—to a cousin’s wedding or bar mitzvah.
I was undersized, over-bright, and prone to causes. My glasses hid the fact that I was more myopic about people than things. Recently I had fallen under the spell of a local pacifist guru who was protesting American involvement in Vietnam even before Americans were aware we were involved. While my friends were playing football and discussing baseball stats, I was standing in protest lines or standing silently in vigils in the middle of the bridge over the Saugatuck River. I even took to writing poems, full of angst and schoolboy passion. One ended:
Death you do not frighten me,
Only the unknown is frightening.
which the guru’s group published in their mimeoed newsletter. It was my first by-line, which my father, a staunch Republican, refused to read.
It was while I was standing next to Bert Koop, the pacifist guru, basking in his praise of my poetry and wishing—not for the first time—that he was my father, that I noticed the man in black. We were used to onlookers, who usually shouted something at us, then walked away. But he was different. Wearing a long, ankle-length black coat and high boots with the pants pushed into the tops, he stood in the shadow of the town library’s front door. He had an odd cap pulled down to his eyebrows that effectively hid his face, though I could tell he was staring at us. He didn’t move for long minutes, and I thought he was watching the entire line of us. It was only much later that I understood he had been staring at me.
“FBI?” I whispered to Bert.
“CIA,” he told me. “But remember—we have rights.” He turned his face toward the man in black, as if defying him.
I did the same. And then, as bravado took over—sixteen is the high point of bravado even today—I slammed my fist against my chest, shouting across the noise of the traffic: “Doug Yolen. American. I have my rights.”
At that, the man in black nodded at me, or at least he tucked his chin down, which totally obscured his face. I turned to gauge Bert’s reaction. He was smiling proudly at me. When I looked back, the man in the doorway was gone.
The next time I saw him, I was at a basketball game, having been persuaded by Mary Lou Renzetti to go with her. I had had a crush on Mary Lou since second grade, so it didn’t take much persuading. She thought of me as her little brother, though we were the same age, give or take a couple of months.
The man was on the other side of the gym, where the Southport crowd sat in dead quiet because their team was losing, and badly. I didn
’t see him until the second half. He was wearing the same black coat and cap, even though it must have been 100 degrees in the gym. This time, though, it was clear he was staring at me, which gave me the shivers, bravado notwithstanding. So I turned away to look at Mary Lou’s profile, with its snub nose and freckles. Her mother was Irish and she took after that side.
Jack Patterson made an incredible basket then and we all leaped up to scream our approval. When I sat down again, I glanced at the Southport benches. The man in black was gone.
It went on like that for days. I would see him for a minute and then look away. When I looked back he wasn’t there. Sometimes it was clear where he had gone, for a nearby door would just be closing. Other times there was nowhere for him to have disappeared.
At first I found it uncomfortable, spooky. Then when nothing at all happened, I tried to make a joke of it.
“So—you see that guy over there, Mary Lou?” I asked. “The one with the black cap?” We were standing outside in the parking lot after school. I gestured over my shoulder at the running track, now covered with new-fallen snow. “He’s been following me.”
She put her hand on my arm, so I enlarged on the story, hoping she’d continue to hold on. “He’s probably heard my dad is rich or something and wants to kidnap me. You think my dad will give him anything? I mean after the report card I brought home? He’ll probably have to send my dad one of my fingers or something to prove he means . . .”
“Douggie, there’s no one there.”
I felt her hand on my arm, the fingers tight. I liked how they felt, and grinned at her. Slowly I turned my head, careful not to jiggle her hand loose. He wasn’t there, of course. The snow on the running track was unbroken.
I thought about saying something to my father then. Or to my mother. But the more I rehearsed what I could say, the sillier it sounded. And though I had made a joke of it with Mary Lou, the truth is that the report card I’d brought home the week before hadn’t really put me in my parents’ good graces. It was “Douggie—you’re too bright for this!” from my father. And a searching, soulful look from Mom. To make matters worse, the twins brought home all As. But then so had I at age thirteen.
So I shrugged the whole thing off as nerves. Or glands. Or needing new glasses. Or someone playing a bizarre joke. Or a hallucination. Only I had never joined the drinking crowd at school. Wine gave me headaches and I hated the taste of beer, especially when it repeated up my nose. Drugs had yet to hit high school—or at least to hit our crowd. They filtered in slowly over the next few years so that by the time the twins were seniors, Todd had experimented with everything in sight, and Tim joined an anti-drug crusade. But that’s another story entirely.
Finally I spoke to Bert Koop about it and he was, predictably, sympathetic. And—as it turns out—totally wrong.
“Definitely CIA,” he said. “They’ve been bugging my phone, too. Probably going to try and get to me through you.”
“Well, if they think going to war is brave,” I said. “I’ll show them what real courage is. I won’t say a word.”
“Death. . . ,” Bert quoted, “you do not frighten me.”
“Right,” I said, and really meant it. After all, I had never actually seen anyone dead. Jews don’t believe in open caskets. So death didn’t frighten me. But the man in black was beginning to.
It was about a week after I first saw him that the man in black turned up at our house. Not in the house, but at it, walking slowly down the road. Grounded on weekdays ’til my grades improved, I had been working on my homework curled up on the sofa in the living room. I was pretty involved in writing a term paper on War and Peace. Tolstoy had been a pacifist, too, and I was writing about the difference between a war in fiction and a war in real life, especially Vietnam. I don’t know what made me look up at that moment, but I did. And through the picture window I saw him walking along Newtown Turnpike toward the Weston line.
I leaped off the sofa, scattering my notes and the AFSC pamphlets about war resistance all over the floor. Sticking my feet quickly into boots without lacing them, I ran out the door after him. By the time I got down the driveway and to the main road, I was shivering uncontrollably. It was late November and we’d already had two snowfalls; I hadn’t taken a coat. But I walked way past the Hartleys’ house, at least a quarter mile on up the road, right to the Weston line.
There was no sign of him.
That night I came down with a raging fever, missed a whole week of school, an interfaith peace vigil I had helped put together, the start of the big basketball tournament, and the due date for my Tolstoy paper. Evidently I had also spent one whole day—twenty-four solid hours—ranting and raving about the man in black. Enough so that both my mother and my father were worried. They had called the town cops, who questioned my friends, including Mary Lou. A police car made special rounds the entire week by our house. It seems my father really did have a lot of money, and there had been a kidnapping just six weeks earlier of an ad man’s kid in Darien. No one was dismissing it as a prank.
But then they found the gang that had kidnapped the Darien kid, she identified them all, and the special patrols stopped. And once I was well again, I swore it had all been some kind of wild nightmare, a dream. After all, I had a healthy distrust of the police because of my association with Bert Koop. I think everyone was relieved.
Except—and this was the really funny thing—except my father. He made these long, secret phone calls to his brothers and sisters, and even to his Uncle Louis, who scarcely had an aggie left, much less the rest of his marbles. My father rarely spoke to his family; they were the embarrassing past he’d left behind. But since my night of raving, he insisted on calling them every night, talking to them in Yiddish. Yiddish! After that, he started going to work late and driving the twins and me to school before getting on the train to the city. Further, he established a check-in system for all of us. I was sixteen and embarrassed; sixteen is the high-water level of being embarrassed by one’s parents.
It was two weeks before I saw the man in black again. By that time, with my grounding rescinded—not because my grades had gone up but because we all had other things to think about—and Mary Lou starting to pay a different kind of attention to me, I had all but forgotten the man in black. Or at least I had forgotten he scared me. I had walked the long block to Mary Lou’s for a study date. Study on her part, date on mine, but I still got to hold her hand for about a quarter of an hour without her finding an excuse to remove it. Her parents kicked me out at ten.
The moon was that yellow-white of old bone. It made odd shadows on the snow. As I walked, my breath spun out before me like sugar candy; except for the noise of my exhalations, there wasn’t a sound at all.
I was thinking about Mary Lou and the feel of her hand, warm and a bit moist in mine, and letting my feet get me home. Since I had gone around that block practically every day since second grade—the school bus stop was in front of Mary Lou’s driveway—I didn’t need to concentrate on where I was going. And suddenly, right at the bend of the road, where Newtown Turnpike met Mary Lou’s road, a large shadow detached itself from one of the trees. He had made no sound but somehow I had heard something. I looked up and there he was. Something long and sharp glittered in his hand. He was humming a snatch of song and it came to me across the still air, tantalizingly familiar. I couldn’t quite place it, though a tune ran through my mind: “You are on your way trying to escape . . .”
I turned and ran. How I ran! Back past Mary Lou’s, past the Pattersons’, past the new row of houses that just barely met the two-acre standards. I turned left and right and left again. It was dark—the moon having been hidden behind clouds—then light once more and still I ran. I had no breath and I ran; I had a stitch in my side and I ran; I stood for a moment by the side of the road vomiting and vomiting up something and then nothing and I ran.
I got home at three a.m. My mother lay fast asleep on the sofa, a box of Kleenex by her side, her eyes red with cr
ying. She didn’t rouse when I slipped in the door. I thought of waking her, of hugging her with gratitude that I was home and safe. But I was so exhausted, I went right to bed.
I took off my shoes and, still in my clothes, lay down. A shadow detached itself from my closet. Something long and sharp glittered in its hand. I tried to scream and couldn’t, then saw it was my father and relaxed.
“Dad. . . ,” I began.
“This. . . ,” he said, as he always did when he was going to punish me, “is going to hurt me more than it does you.”
He was wrong of course. On cold nights, especially winter nights, that missing toe aches more than anything.
But I have never seen the man in black again.
Wilding
ZENA BOUNCED down the brownstone steps two at a time, her face powdered a light green. It was the latest color and though she didn’t think she looked particularly good in it, all the girls were wearing it. Her nails were striped the same hue. She had good nails.
“Zen!” her mother called out the window.
“Where are you going? Have you finished your homework?”
“Yes, Mom,” Zena said without turning around. “I finished.” Well, almost, she thought.
“And where are you—”
This time Zena turned. “Out!“
“Out where?”
Ever since Mom had separated from her third pairing, she had been overzealous in her questioning. Where are you going? What are you doing? Who’s going with you? Zena hated all the questions, hated the old nicknames. Zen. Princess. Little Bit.
“Just out.”
“Princess, just tell me where. So I won’t have to worry.”
“We’re just going Wilding,” Zena said, begrudging each syllable.
“I wish you wouldn’t. That’s the third time this month. It’s not . . . not good. It’s dangerous. There have been . . . deaths.”
“That’s ’gus, Mom. As in bo-gus. ’Ganda. As in propaganda. And you know it.”