by Sam Halpern
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go have some pie and a cup of coffee, them here pumpkins can wait.” He stuck the machete he was holding in the ground, and we walked to his cabin.
The pie was great. “You cook this yourself?” I asked.
“Yeah. Whatcha think?”
“It’s really good. Where you learn how?”
“Just picked hit up.”
“You cook lots of things?”
“Everything I eat,” and he laughed.
When we finished the pie, we set and drank our coffee. He didn’t ask why I came or anything. I didn’t know how to bring my problems up without getting all shook and crying. I didn’t want that in front of Ben so I waited for my feelings to get right.
There were some new carvings since my last visit. He had a quail with six little quail strung out behind her on a shelf over his bed. The mama quail’s head was cocked to the side, listening like a quail will do. In one corner, several blocks of walnut, some three foot square, were stacked up. There were mink and rabbit and muskrat pelts around. From the way his scissors and rawhide were laid out on the table, I was sure he was making other things too. Looking at Ben’s stuff made me feel good and pretty soon, I started talking. “I got a problem, and I was wonderin’ if you’d help me with it.”
“I can try,” he answered as he refilled our cups from his speckled black and white coffeepot. Then he sat down in his easy chair.
“Crazy man’s killin’ lots of stock now,” I said. “Dad and th’ sheriff tried to get up a posse with dogs, but the rain washed out th’ scent.” I tried to think of what to say next. It was hard to just come out and tell him I’d ignored his advice. There had to be an easier way than blurting out, I didn’t tell.
I started feeling nervous again, so I looked around some more. The trunk Ben got my clothes out of that time had been moved to the foot of the bed and on top of it was a pile of leaves and twigs. They were pretty, but it didn’t make sense to bring that many leaves into the house. Then I made out what looked like the upper part of a boy. The leaves had been put so the light-colored ones made the face, and deep red leaves the hair. The shoulders and chest were dark oak tan and fixed like a little open-neck shirt.
When I looked back toward Ben, he was slumped in his chair, with a leg thrown over one of its arms. “I didn’t tell,” I said.
There was a “blump” from the coffeepot, which was putting out some steam.
“Lonnie’s pa got on a drunk and nigh beat his mom and sisters and him t’ pieces.”
This time Ben took a sip of coffee. He still didn’t say anything, though. I was wishing he would, but I knew he wouldn’t until I talked it all out.
I shifted in my chair and took a sip of coffee. The sun coming through the window half blinded me, so I shifted back and looked at the big pin oak that shaded that side of the cabin. Two squirrels were playing on a limb.
“LD says if I say anything he’ll tell th’ whole story, Lonnie ’n’ all. We had a fight, LD and me. If I d . . . don’t tell, somebody is gonna get killed by th’ c . . . crazy man and, if I do tell and Mr. Miller finds out Lonnie knew and didn’t tell, he might kill him,” and the tears come rolling and I hated it. I seemed to be crying all the time now and here I was, crying in front of Ben. I got up, and he got up with me.
“Don’t cry, Samuel,” he said, and his hands went on my shoulders. “Maybe I—” and he stopped, then said, “Samuel, couple weeks ago a fella come here t’ buy melons and was talkin’ ’bout your pa. One of th’ things he said was he was a good man. An educated man. He ain’t gonna tell on Lonnie if you tell him why he shouldn’t.”
“It don’t make any difference if he don’t tell,” I said, sniffling. “Any time old LD hears th’ crazy man’s been caught, he’ll tell everything. He’s scared t’ death of his pa findin’ out he lied. He’ll tell everything th’ second he hears, hoping he can make things easier on hisself!”
Ben sighed. “Samuel, I’d like t’ step forward . . . I’d do most anything for you, but I can’t. Talk t’ your pa. He’ll work it out. He’ll help you, Samuel. Trust him a little. He’s your pa, and this is really important.”
Ben put his arm around my shoulders and I started toward the door. The arm felt strong and warm. It was an arm a body could trust. I wanted to twist around and squeeze his waist, but I had never done that to a man outside my family, so I didn’t.
The dogs snarled as usual when we stepped out, and Cain bared his teeth. When the growling was shushed, Ben spoke. “Samuel, I’ve lived a lot longer’n you and I’ve learned a few things. One of them is, you don’t let somethin’ important fester. You do, hit’ll build up until hit’s so big can’t anybody handle it, then your whole life will change. Don’t let that happen. Do somethin’ now, before hit’s too late. Lafe Miller’s mean when he’s drunk, but I . . . I don’t think he’d hurt Lonnie about this.”
The second Ben’s voice stumbled, fear went through me. He wudn’t sure! And he wouldn’t lie. No matter what he or Dad did, LD was so scared he was going to tell the instant he heard the crazy man was caught, and it would be all over for Lonnie.
The walk home was awful. I kept thinking about Lonnie’s face and limp when he come back to school, and how I’d feel if he was killed and I was at his funeral. I couldn’t tell about the crazy man. I just couldn’t.
23
It was now many hours since I had driven away from Bert Raney’s field. I’d been all over the heart of the bluegrass, finally following the Elkhorn Creek into Georgetown. I was born near Georgetown in a little white farmhouse during what my father described as the coldest damn winter since hell froze over. I don’t know whether it was an omen, but until a half hour before I was born Dad was “sitting up” with the corpse of the “meanest white man in Scott County.” Incredibly enough, the little white house that witnessed my worldly arrival was still occupied. Not far from it I saw a diner and remembered that I hadn’t eaten. It was one o’clock and all the tables were filled, so I climbed onto a stool.
“Hi there,” said the pudgy, middle-aged, pink-uniformed waitress as she put a menu in front of me. “Care for somethin’ t’ drink? Just made some iced tea.”
“Biggest glass you’ve got.”
The waitress laughed and began fixing my tea. “Haven’t seen you in here before. You travelin’?” she asked, her back toward me.
“New England,” I answered. “I was born here, though.”
“How many years you been gone?” she asked, setting my iced tea on the counter.
“Sixty.”
“Before my time,” she said, grinning. “My folks been here since before th’ war though.”
I knew the joke. “Which war?”
“Between the States, o’course. What’s your name?”
“Samuel Zelinsky.”
The waitress thought, then shook her head. “My daddy’d of remembered but he’s gone now. Anything look good on th’ menu?”
“What do you recommend?”
“Fried chicken. That’s all ole horse feathers back there can cook.”
“I’ll have the fried chicken. I take it mashed potatoes and gravy come with it?”
The waitress winked at me. “Some things never change, do they?”
After lunch I decided my odyssey was over for the day. I drove from Georgetown to Lexington and began winding through the city to my hotel using the vehicle’s GPS. I turned a corner and almost wrecked the car. There was the old conservative synagogue where we had gone to shul. I wasn’t certain, but it looked like it was now part of a strip mall. I parked and began walking. Everything was different except for the names of the streets. Mom-and-pop businesses were crammed together, helter-skelter. I tried to remember what the buildings had originally been used for as I passed them. I was unsuccessful until I came to:
SAIGON SUE’S VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT
Instant recognition. Mr. Gollar’s butcher shop! How many times had I walked up those three concrete steps to del
iver produce? Eggs, vegetables, fresh milk in mason jars that Mom reserved special for bringing milk to our kosher friend. In return, we left loaded with deli and halava, a kind of sugary candy. That was for me. Mom never told him I didn’t like halava.
I walked in to see what the place looked like and the proprietor descended, forcing me into tea and soup. I tried, but my mind refused to bridge the gap between a kosher butcher shop and a Vietnamese restaurant.
When I finished eating, I walked to the front of the shul. My memories of those times weren’t negative, but they held little meaning for me. Judaism to me as a child was more historical than religious. In fact, a book entitled Heroes of Israel was my religious training. It was an accumulation of biblical stories for Jewish children in need of heroes who won great battles instead of being slaughtered in concentration camps.
My experiences in shul had been empty as a kid. Partly because my father became agnostic after our family was murdered in WWII, and partly because as dirt farmers we were looked down upon by the Lexington Jewish community. In my adult years I came to greatly admire my little ethnic group but sadly never got past a secular-intellectual concept of Judaism. And yet, in adolescence and young adult years, anti-Semitism was to play a dismal role in my life.
I had encountered anti-Semitism as a child before we moved to Berman’s. The comments made about Jews got me into several fights, but it wasn’t too bad, and there was very little anti-Semitism among the hill people. My adolescent years in Indiana brought about my isolation, a more subtle form of anti-Semitism. For a while that experience caused me to reject all religions.
Until Nora.
Nora didn’t profess a strong belief in Judaism, but she was extremely proud of her heritage. We argued the value of the traditions from the start of our relationship. Why, I said, should one prepare Shabbos meals or celebrate the enormous number of Jewish holidays if they didn’t believe in God? Her answer sounded like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
“Tradition!”
“And what am I to get from ‘tradition!’?”
“The wonderful comfort of being a part of the whole.”
“Nora, I have read dozens of books on Judaism, and other religions . . . Buddhism, Islam, Christianity. All have wonderful things in them, all are important as bulwarks of civilization, but the vast majority require belief in a supreme being. That’s fundamental. I have my own concepts of God and they don’t fit with organized religion. I’m a Jew by birth and very proud of my roots, but it will be a cold day in hell when some rabbi directs my life.”
While Nora wasn’t a strong believer, her parents were, and she had spent two summers on a kibbutz in Israel. She spoke pretty good Hebrew and knew the services for Shabbos and a couple of Jewish holidays. At the start of our marriage the only Jewish tradition we observed was the Passover Seder with her parents. Every year we went back to New York for Passover. I enjoyed the service. It was fun. That was especially true after the kids were born and they could join in the first Seder. I surprised everybody by getting tapes and learning some Hebrew. The results made for some great scenes.
Nora: “Chu . . . chu . . . not, huu! Hebrew is not spoken with a hillbilly dialect!”
“That’s bigotry,” I’d counter. “You wouldn’t say that about Russian, Spanish, German, Mandarin, or Urdu. Hillbilly is my language! I will not be discriminated against!”
The kids were preteens by this time and would join in the arguments. Some of the most outrageous religious discussions would take place among us. Nora, the teetering-agnostic traditionalist, raised the kids Jewish, and I did my best to help. Whenever they asked the big question, however, I told the truth as I saw it. I didn’t believe in organized religion. I told them that they should believe whatever they wanted, believe what they felt in their hearts. Also, that I thought their mother was right, tradition was important. Every few weeks Nora would prepare a Shabbos service and I would join in, yarmulke and all. The girls would laugh that I was trying to cover up my bald spot.
Both girls wound up marrying Gentile boys. One of the boys converted to Judaism and became the first devout Jew in the Zelinsky clan since my grandfather.
Though a nonbeliever, being Jewish did provide me with a temporary respite once, when the weight of the world seemed to be crushing my skinny shoulders . . .
. . . I didn’t tell. I was almost certain I wouldn’t when I left Ben’s, and by the time I got home, I was dead sure. Not being able to talk about it made things awful. It was a long Saturday night and Sunday. Monday morning, though, I started feeling better. It was Rosh Hashanah, and I figured nobody tells something like that on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. I heard Dad say to Mom one day that he figured all our relatives was dead and wudn’t any reason for it. He said Jews better plan to make it on their own because wudn’t anybody above or below gonna help. We were still going to shul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur though.
Mr. Mac and Babe agreed to milk for us on both holy days. I was in the front yard trying out my new shoes when they come rolling up in their black ’32 Ford coupe. Babe was driving like he always did unless Mr. Mac had a snootful, then he was “gonna by God drive!” As the Ford pulled up, I went to meet them. Mr. Mac come flying out of the car, flung open his fleece-lined coat, and folded me inside. He squeezed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“How ye doin’, Samuel!” he roared.
The sound rolled like thunder in his bony chest, which was crushing the side of my head. He smelled good of tobacco and liquor. When he quit squeezing, he took hold of my shoulders, leaned back, and looked at me. “Hey, you look spiffy, boy. Hot dog, you’re shined up enough t’ go courtin’, ain’t he, Babe?” Babe grinned and said he reckoned I was and that it wudn’t going to be long before I was doing it.
Just then, Dad come out of the house, putting a tie around his neck. “Come on in, George,” he called. They did and stood by our Warm Morning stove which we had just lit for the first time since spring.
“What kind of religious doin’s is this, Morse?” asked Mr. Mac.
“New Year’s,” said Dad, finishing his tie in front of a little buffet mirror.
“What kind of celebration you have?” asked Mr. Mac.
“Oh, we thank th’ Lord for all he’s given us. And pray for th’ dead folks.”
“Way th’ world’s treated your people, you must have a lot of faith, Morse,” said Mr. Mac, opening the door to the Warm Morning and shoving the coals around.
“My daddy’d of wanted it,” said Dad and it got quiet for a few seconds.
“You know he’s gone for sure?” asked Babe.
“They’re all gone,” said Dad. “Brother, sisters . . . everybody. Gone.”
Mr. Mac nodded kind of slow, then he turned to Babe and said they better get started milking because it was getting late.
After some yelling by Dad that it always took Mom and Naomi forever to get ready, we got in the Ford and started for Lexington. The air coming through the Ford’s broken back window was cold, boy. Naomi and I huddled together on the good side of the car to keep warm.
Mom kind of shuddered. “Morris, when are you going to fix that window?”
“You want me to stop tobacco housing t’ fix a car window?”
“We finished housing a month ago.”
“Stop with the nagging,” said Dad, his voice sounding tired.
“I’m not nagging,” said Mom. “The children will freeze. They’ll catch a death—”
“All right, I’ll fix it. Just stop nagging,” and we went along a little way in quiet.
“Do you know who’s going to be president of the shul next year?” Mom asked.
“No, who?”
“Guess.”
“Pope Pius the twelfth,” Dad said, and laughed.
“Oh, Morris, guess right.”
“Okay,” he said, and quit laughing. “Uh . . . Isadore Gold.”
“No.”
“No? Then who?”
“Guess.”
“D
ammit, I guessed. Now, who’s gonna be president of th’ shul?”
“Your cousin Henshy,” she answered, kind of meek.
“Henshy!” Dad boomed.
“Henshy,” she said.
“My God! What’s he doing president of a synagogue?”
“Henshy,” Mom said again, like she knew everything.
“But . . . it can’t be Henshy! Henshy runs a whorehouse! Everybody knows—”
“Morris, the children!” Mom yelled.
“But Henshy! I can’t believe it! Not even those schlemiels could elect Henshy. It’s an . . . an . . . It’s an abomination!”
“Henshy,” Mom repeated.
“Now, that’s a sin. If you believe, that’s a sin,” and he was all over the road.
“Morris, watch where you’re going,” yelled Mom, and Naomi and I grabbed each other as the car skidded on the shoulder and tore up gravel.
When things calmed down, Mom said, “You know who’s going to be an officer?”
“Hermann Göring!” Dad screamed, and threw his arms in the air.
“Nate Berman,” Mom said, and her voice had a little laugh in it.
Dad thought that over for about five miles. It started to drizzle, and the one old wiper that worked made a little pin streak out of which Dad could see the coming cars, but the rest of us could only see moving blurs of light. Every now and then, the road would bend a certain way, and the drizzle and the smell of damp night would fill the backseat.
“Nate ain’t bad,” he said, finally.
“No,” Mom answered. “Nate ain’t bad.”
“He don’t know Judaism from a hill of beans, but he’s okay. What’s Abe Gollar?”
“Nothing. I guess he’ll still be cantor, but nothing. No officer.”
“Humph,” come out of Dad, and he didn’t say anything for two more miles.
In the back, it was getting cold, boy. I mean, I was freezing. My teeth started chattering and I couldn’t stop them.
“How come Abe Gollar is nothin’?” Dad asked.
“Morris, he’s so old-fashioned.”