He was a great big pork of a man. The word came to me years later when I was visiting my married sister in Portland, Oregon, and we happened to walk down a street of butcher shops. In every window, spiked at the throat on large steel hooks, hung a string of wax-colored gutted pigs. My sister who, like her brother, had been raised “kosher” on East Fourth Street, said it was enough to turn your stomach. Hers, perhaps. Not mine. What the sight did for me was bring back a picture of Srul Honig as I had known him when I was eleven.
His great height and girth were underscored by a number of things by which a boy of eleven could not help being impressed: a skullcap of closely cropped hair the color of a fresh pomegranate; a scarred black leather apron; biceps as thick around as a lamppost; a mat of red hair on his chest, so thick that it seemed a substitute for the shirt Mr. Honig never wore. Winter and summer he worked naked to the waist, and he worked in full view not only of passers-by but of anybody on the block who happened to look out the window. Blacksmith shop patrons need plenty of room on their way in and out, and the forge in front of which Mr. Honig worked would have been a hot background even for the asbestos cat who, in the nursery jokes I learned in kindergarten class in P.S. 188, was always stalking the tallow rat in Hades.
Mr. Honig at work was an arresting sight. He worked with his back to the horse. He maneuvered his humped back between the horse’s buttocks, lifted the horse’s leg between his own legs, and pulled from a slot on his leather apron the pair of pliers with which he tore away first the old nails and then the old shoe they had held to the horse’s hoof. With the last nail the old shoe went flying out in a wide arc to the far corner of the smithy. From another slot in the black leather apron came a short, wide-bladed, murderous-looking sharp knife.
With short, hard, perfectly directed strokes, Mr. Honig cut away from the horse’s hoof the horn that had accumulated since the last horseshoe had been nailed on. The pieces flew out in a spray of ivory-colored slivers. Having cleared the area of operations, Mr. Honig put the knife back into his apron, and from the white-hot fire in the forge, pulled the long iron rod to the end of which was attached the glowing red horseshoe. With delicate precision Mr. Honig now set the red-hot horseshoe on the horse’s hoof. A whitish sizzling smoke rose up to the red hair on Mr. Honig’s chest. It reminded me, again years later, of the smoke that floats up in a London pub when the waiter plunges his hot poker into a mug of ale. The smell in Mr. Honig’s smithy, however, was different. It was probably enough, as my sister said of the gutted pigs in Portland, to turn your stomach. Again, however, not mine. I was accustomed to the smells of East Fourth Street.
By the time Mr. Honig had the shoe set, and with another pair of pliers plucked from another slot in his black leather apron had snapped the iron rod from the still red-hot horseshoe, this particular smell had faded into the overall smell that was composed of many ingredients. The two strongest were Mr. Honig’s sweat and the manure of his charges. I don’t know why, but getting a new set of shoes relaxes a horse’s sphincter muscles. Now came the exciting part.
From a pocket in his apron Mr. Honig brought out a handful of horseshoe nails and thrust them into his mouth, blunt ends protruding. The first three, two at the tail ends of the horseshoe and one at the top of the arc, went in with a dexterity and speed that still makes me marvel. Mr. Honig had to pluck those nails from his mouth, set them in place one at a time, pull his short but heavy-headed hammer from still another slot in the leather apron, and drive the three nails home through the red-hot horseshoe with single, powerful blows. This done, he began to shape the shoe to the horse’s hoof. It was like watching a fireworks display. Each blow of the hammer sent up a shower of sparks. They spattered against Mr. Honig’s face and naked chest, but he paid no attention. The shoe had to be in place, and all the rest of the nails sunk flat with the metal, before the cooling shoe turned gray. It always was.
For me, today, the most fascinating aspect of this performance was that I did not then consider it a performance. I do not think I ever stopped to watch Mr. Honig shoe a horse. I accepted what he was doing as part of the landscape. The way I accepted the wagons loaded with coal and lumber moving slowly up from the dock under the bedroom window toward a world that had for me at the time as little shape or meaning as China must have had for little Marco Polo when, with his first paddle, he was learning to maneuver a gondola along the canals of Venice. It was this total acceptance—it may even have been indifference—to my surroundings that made my friendship with Mr. Honig, when it happened, so startling. One day he stepped out of the landscape and became a human being. Literally.
I was coming down Fourth Street from Avenue D on my way home from school on what had until then been a perfectly normal, uneventful day. I was, as I recall, worrying about my work with integers and multiplicands in Miss Moerdler’s arithmetic class—my work in this area at the time was not distinguished; I was doing better with fractions—when I heard a voice shout.
“Hey, kid, c’mere!”
I stopped and turned toward the voice. It had come out of Mr. Honig’s blacksmith shop. Indeed, as I learned a moment later, out of Mr. Honig’s throat. He called again.
“Hey, kid, c’mere!”
It seems sensible to add that he said it in Yiddish. And he was holding the bridle of a rearing horse just inside the double-door, wide-open entrance to his blacksmith shop.
“Huh?” I said.
“Grab this,” said Mr. Honig.
In Yiddish.
“What?” I said.
In English.
“Grab this, you stupid little bastard,” said Mr. Honig.
In Yiddish.
“What?” I said.
In I forget what.
But I had grabbed the bridle, which I think was actually a lead strap attached to the bridle, and was hanging on. In subsequent years I have had a certain amount of traffic with people who bet on horses. From them I have picked up a certain amount of information about how to handle horses. They do, it is true, panic easily. But it is equally true that they calm down easily. Like human beings, apparently, all they want is to be assured they are loved. I had never noticed that they calm down when you grab their bridles and utter, in English or Yiddish, phrases like, “Okay, boy. Steady, now. Take it easy, kid. That’s the boy.” And so on. On that day in 1924, when I grasped the bridle Mr. Honig shoved into my hands, it worked.
Probably, I think, because the horse was scared by something I had not at the moment noticed. Another horse plunging around insanely near the forge. As soon as I took the bridle Mr. Honig shoved at me, he leaped for the head of this other horse, and in a matter of moments had him, or her, under control. With the same Yiddish phrases. “Okay, boy. Steady, now. Take it easy, kid. That’s the boy.” And so on. In a few moments, therefore, there we were, man and boy, facing each other from under the heads of two calm Percherons.
“Thanks,” Mr. Honig said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“They’re okay,” Mr. Honig said. He stroked the neck of his huge horse. It was like patting the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. “It’s just they get excited,” Mr. Honig said.
Today, I think, my reply would have been: “Who doesn’t?” But then, remember, I was only eleven. It is wrong to say I did not know what I was doing. It is, however, completely accurate to say I did not know what was going on. I stroked the neck of my horse as steadily and easily as I stroked my hair when I ran my comb through it.
“You know horses,” Mr. Honig said.
I didn’t. This was the first time in my life I had ever been this close to a horse. I plowed through my mind for some observation that would deflect Mr. Honig from further praise of a talent I did not possess.
“My father was in the Austrian cavalry,” I said.
“That’s where you learn,” Mr. Honig said.
I sensed at once that he had confused my father’s service in the Austrian cavalry with my instinctive knowledge of horses. I sensed something else. Li
fe offers you very few dividends of this kind. My reaction came from the age beyond innocence: I took advantage of Mr. Honig’s obviously innocent remark.
“There’s nothing like a horse,” I said.
In Yiddish.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Honig. He stroked the neck of the horse he was holding. “You wanna make a nickel?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Take this horse down the dock and deliver to Walter,” Mr. Honig said.
He handed me the bridle.
“What about the nickel?” I said.
“When you come back,” Mr. Honig said.
“Okay if I leave this?” I said.
I lifted my batch of schoolbooks and my pencil box. They were lashed together by the yellow leather strap every parent on East Fourth Street provided for his or her school-age son or daughter.
“Sure,” Mr. Honig said. Gravely, as though he were laying down the terms of an important business deal, he added, “You come back in one piece, you can take this horse, too, and you got yourself another nickel.”
It was the expression on his face that made me laugh. Which meant I liked him.
“Okay,” I said.
Not in Yiddish, of course. The two syllables do not really translate at all.
“I’ll have this second one ready when you come back,” Mr. Honig said.
I took the bridle of the first horse. Mr. Honig crouched down and hunkered himself in under the buttocks of the second horse. He was lifting the horse’s left hind leg up between his knees as I led the first horse out into Fourth Street and down toward the dock.
“These four things and nothing more,” Kipling wrote. “Women and horses and power and war.”
He was, of course, stating the code of the natural man. Perhaps he did not intend to state the code of the natural boy. But he touched something to which I know I responded as a boy.
Power had never crossed my path. War was still two decades ahead of me. Women were already on the horizon, but only in a vague, undefined, troubling way. Horses, however. Horses. There they were. Or rather, there was this one. In my hand, so to speak. The bridle, anyway. And the huge, beautiful locomotive that was made of flesh and blood and rippling muscle came right along. Under my command. Giving me a sense of exhilaration I had never experienced before and I have never encountered since. When the days go brown, I force my mind back through the years to that incandescent moment. The sky lights up at once.
It did just the opposite when I reached the Fourth Street dock. The sky seemed to come down on me and the horse I was leading like a collapsed circus tent. I had not been paying any attention to the weather. As I recall, on East Fourth Street almost nobody did. It was never pleasant. Always hot or cold, meaning too hot or too cold. Something you had to live through, not with. I suppose I should have noticed that a storm was coming up, but I had been too absorbed in my meeting with Mr. Honig and the discovery of horses, not to mention the two nickels I was in the process of earning, to pay any attention to the weather. When the sky opened up, I found it was too late. The horse started to buck.
“Okay, boy. Steady, now. Take it easy, kid. That’s the boy.”
The soothing words astonished me. They had not emerged from my throat. And they were not spoken in Yiddish. I swung around, into the suddenly belting rain, trying to get a better grip on the bridle, and saw that it was not necessary. Walter had come out of his cottage and had taken charge.
I suppose he had a second name, but I had never heard it spoken aloud. Perhaps because the words that were always spoken after his first name were assumed by the people of East Fourth Street to be his last name. He was known as “Walter from the Docks.”
I had never met him until that day when Srul Honig asked me to deliver my first Percheron to the Fourth Street dock, but I knew a great deal about Walter. On second thought, no, not a great deal. What I mean is that I probably knew as much as most people on East Fourth Street knew about Walter, which was not much. I knew he was the custodian of the stable on the dock that was apparently jointly owned by the Forest Box & Lumber Company and the Burns Coal Company. I knew he lived in a small white cottage with green shutters that sat at the top of the dock area, separated by a narrow patch of vegetable garden from the dark brown, almost shapeless mass of sprawling old beams in which were housed the horses that hauled the coal and lumber wagons west from the river barges to the customers uptown.
It seems strange to me now that the few things I did know about the man we called Walter from the Docks should not have seemed strange. The house he lived in, for example. I never saw anything like it until, years later, I paid my first visit to Cape Cod. How did that sunny, bright little New England fisherman’s cottage land on a dirty dock jutting out into the East River in the shadow of the most unsunny, unbright, dirty gray stone tenements ever built by Western man?
As for vegetable gardens, what in God’s name were they? Vegetables came out of the pushcarts on Avenue C. But not, apparently, for Walter from the Docks. For him, tomatoes, potatoes, scallions, carrots, and plumed ears of corn came out of the sliver of fenced earth that kept the ugly dock stable from toppling onto and obliterating the shining little white cottage in which Walter lived.
With whom? I don’t believe anybody really knew. As I recall the scraps of talk that passed over my eleven-year-old head, it was generally believed that Walter from the Docks was married. I think, although I am not sure, I heard occasional references to a female figure in a blue and white checked housedress who was seen at regular intervals crawling about on her knees in the narrow strip of garden. Now, of course, I know that she was not crawling about. She was weeding. Or gathering some of the ingredients for the evening meal. I don’t know.
I have, since my early days on East Fourth Street, spent some time as a householder in the country. Like most middle-aged men who have endured the suburban experience, I have learned how to cut a lawn, trim a hedge, and pay a bill for sheep manure. But I have never learned to like any of it. My wife says I have four thumbs. Not one of them, however, is green. So I did not really have much interest in Walter from the Docks and his way of life until that day when I met Walter for the first time in the rainstorm that had suddenly exploded around me.
“You go on in the house,” he said to me. “I’ll take care of the horse.”
He did it with a skill that aroused so much of my admiration, I forgot all about the rain. I stood there, sopping up water, and watched him soothe the plunging horse and lead him into the stable. When they disappeared, the door of the white cottage opened and a woman’s voice shouted at me.
“Do come in out of that rain! You’ll catch your death!”
A hand came clawing out of the partially opened white cottage door, grabbed my ear, and dragged me into the house. At that time I did not weigh much. I think probably somewhere between sixty and seventy pounds. But that is an awful lot of weight to come in behind a skinny, almost transparent kid’s ear. I screamed. The unmanly noise had the most satisfying manly result.
A pair of deliciously soft arms reached out and drew me toward a bosom that I must confess set a mark toward which I have without total success been shooting for most of my life.
After all these years, and I have had almost half a century to think about it, I believe some experiences can come too early. All things considered, I think it would have been better if I had met the wife of Walter from the Docks when I had reached, if not the age of discretion, at least my teens. Eleven was too young.
“You poor, poor lad! You are soaked to the skin. Sit here, love.”
For several moments I did not know what was happening. I do not want to give the impression that I was stupid. I may not have been as bright as I would like to think I was, and indeed am. But physical circumstances do affect intellectual capacities. I was eleven, remember. And soaking wet. Flushed with the discovery of horses and cleavage. Even today, with a lifetime of experience behind me, I feel I could be excused for not being completely with i
t.
For example, the instructions to “Sit here, love” were not exactly that. I felt myself flung into something that could have been a chair. It proved to be a small couch with a high back. I sensed a glow of warmth on my face. It proved to come from an open fire. And then I felt the hands of somebody who smelled as delicious as my mother’s lekach, or honey cake, tearing the clothes from my body.
As clothes go, these were not much. A cheesy sweater knitted by my mother? A pair of what we then called knickerbockers sewed by my father? A pair of long black ribbed stockings that dug deep streaks into my flesh all the way up from ankle to thigh? A set of Dr. Posner’s Hygienic Health shoes that had been resoled so often it was hard to tell where the original last began? A sudden blast of icy air hit me in a sensitive place. I screamed again.
“What are you doing to him?”
I turned toward the voice. It had come from the throat of Walter from the Docks. He had come through the front door of the cottage. The blast of icy air had come from the open front door.
“I must get him dry. The lad will catch his death.”
Walter from the Docks shut the door. My sensitive places calmed down. The woman with the cleavage and the wonderful smell threw a blanket around me. She tucked the edges in under my sensitive places, and stood back to admire either me or her handiwork. I did not worry too much about which it was. I was taking my first look at her.
She was plump and round and tiny. A combination that may sound physically impossible. It is not. The wife of Walter from the Docks was plump, and round, and tiny. A combination that made her look delicious. Not only to me. After all, at that particular moment I did not count. As I have been careful to point out at several crucial moments in this history, I was only eleven. Walter from the Docks must have been about the same age as Srul Honig. Mid-thirties? Pushing forty? Certainly no more than that. And all you had to do was catch a glimpse of Walter’s face to know he, too, thought his wife looked delicious. If you looked in the opposite direction, which I did, you realized at once that she thought pretty highly of him, too. How could she not?
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