Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “Do you have a sore throat?” I chimed in. “Do you want some tea and honey?”

  She dropped her gaze. She was looking at the floor. I looked at my father. He signaled for me to follow him outside.

  “Give her time,” said my father. “She’ll come around.”

  “Why isn’t she talking?” I whispered, as if my speaking in a normal voice would further upend things.

  “Be patient. You’ll see.”

  Noah right away rejoined the huddle with Yorgos and Joey. The three of them now convened every night in his room to listen to his radio and read the Daily Worker, which Yorgos now carried around freely. The Spanish monarchy had fallen. People in Europe were choosing sides, what with the monarchists and the fascists, and the communists, and so on. All of their highfalutin ideas, crumbled into useless dogmas, were little more than excuses for another war.

  When Noah was alone, he would let me listen with him. That’s Gus Hall speaking to the Wobblies at Union Square, he would explain. That’s Walter Reuther addressing the autoworkers, he would say. He played that thing for hours on end until my father finally complained about the price of electricity.

  We learned about Hoovervilles, about German-American Bund meetings, about the Nazis strolling freely through the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Come the end of July we heard the speeches by the Bonus Marchers in Washington, who were trying to collect the cash they needed now, they said, not in 1945 when the Great War pensions are due. Who knew what life would look like in 1945, except more of the same?

  “These are veterans,” my brother said, “guys who saved Europe from the Kaiser. They’re out of work. The farms are dry. They’re starving.”

  I told him to save his speeches for Union Square.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “You shut up.” Do all brothers and sisters have this same exact conversation? It might be one of the few things in the world that people can count on. “Roosevelt won’t let them starve. He’s the president.”

  I was not the first person, nor the oldest, to confuse Franklin D. Roosevelt with God, you should pardon me. Everyone, whole nations, were looking for saviors. People were pouring their faith into the hands of anyone who swore to deliver, whether it was Franco, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, or that Emperor of Japan.

  “Then why are people starving?” he said, disgusted.

  “Mom says Mr. Roosevelt’s keeping us alive.”

  “She sure didn’t say that anytime recently.”

  I repeat: Our mother had spoken her final words when she asked me to throw away the letter to her parents. This is no exaggeration. I’m telling you: go. Those were her last words—to me, at least—for years. If Noah’s radio was a voice without a body, my mother became a body without a voice. For four years she spoke through her scarred hands, inventing a sign language that the rest of us had to learn. I never stopped missing her voice the whole time. I missed Helen; I dreamt of my dead sister. Our mother was so consumed by grief that I do not think she saw that Noah and I were grieving too. May I repeat this as well: I missed everyone.

  Noah tried filling the emptiness with other sounds. He memorized Abraham Lincoln’s speeches while pacing the rows in the garden, reciting them aloud; he taught himself French from a book he got from Miss Finn and was soon calling everything by its French name, speaking sentences with a lot of English thrown in because no one could correct him. Everything français, mon la soeur. My privacy-loving brother would leave his French notebook out on the table, a reminder of how he was setting himself aside in a world that no one was invited to penetrate. Quelle est l’heure de la marée haute? he now asked, instead of asking in English about the tides. My father refused to respond when Noah spoke French, not that he understood what Noah was saying. Refusing to speak in our house was contagious. Who knows what my mother heard or did not hear or what she thought? I picked up phrases here and there from the ones he used over and over. Laissez-moi tranquille Casse-toi! Ce n’est malheureusement pas possible. Ca ne me plait pas. I never realized there are so many ways to say no.

  French was easier than figuring out the unions, about which Yorgos and Noah were all gung-ho. They spent oh-so-many evenings debating the Trotskyites versus the Bolsheviks and the Socialists, the ones that elected women to their governing boards versus the ones that refused, or if the Anarchists were covertly supporting some group while threatening them in public. Noah made a chart of all the locals. He wrote his personal commentary in French on the facing page.

  I began reading his union leaflets when he would go out, sneaking into his room uninvited. I confess, as well, to looking through his notebook, the one in French, though I barely understood what I was reading. Soon enough my mother caught me coming and going from Noah’s room. She did not break her silence even for this.

  Months passed. Noah tracked the shifting alliances of the unions and locals and devoutly revised his charts. In time, he swore, he would choose which union was best for Barren Shoal, as if all this was his decision to make.

  I threw myself into my schoolwork until that year came to a close and then another, and when I finally pulled my head out of the sand that I was stuck in after Helen died, I was twelve, almost thirteen. Two years had passed, two years in which my mother only spoke through gestures. Her hands would quiver through the air, the purple burn marks and crocodile skin a prelude to whatever else she was trying to convey. Sometimes I dreamt of her speaking, the night-sound of her voice changing as the months passed. Then I would wake up in my attic room and it became harder to remember how she sounded at all. When I woke up one morning in pajamas soaked in blood I ran to Sofia, not my mother.

  Sofia was asleep in her usual spot on the living room floor between a couch and a low table. “I’m hemorrhaging!” I said, shaking her. Grandma Paradissis, who slept on the couch, poked out from her blankets, nodding and smiling her toothless grin, wagging her bony fingers at something only she could see.

  “Come on,” Sofia said. “Let’s get you some rags.”

  It was my turn and Sofia, being Sofia, had made it easier for me by having gone first. We did not have to acknowledge what we both knew.

  When we got me cleaned up, she made me drink some ouzo straight from the bottle to help my cramps, which, unlike Sofia’s, hurt like the dickens. After, we slipped outside to get away from her grandmother’s disapproving gaze.

  “Typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, cholera...” Noah was outside with the boys reading aloud from a pamphlet he got from Uncle David’s union. It was called “Diseases of the Working Poor.”

  Sofia and I plopped ourselves down to crush clamshells, though I missed as many as I hit.

  “...yellow fever, malaria...”

  “There’s no malaria on Barren Shoal,” said Yorgos.

  “There are a zillion in the mud flats,” said Noah.

  “Not all mosquitoes are malaria,” said Yorgos, correcting him.

  “I’ll be damned: it’s Albert Schweitzer,” said Noah.

  “What did you call me?” said Yorgos.

  “Water plus heat makes mosquitoes,” chimed in Joey.

  “Another genius,” said Noah. “Humidity hatches mosquitoes. The larvae have to be there to...”

  “Asshole,” said Joey. He flicked his cigarette butt at Noah’s feet, but it landed on Noah’s shoe.

  Noah cuffed Joey on the shoulder and they wrestled each other to the ground, rolling through Mrs. Paradissis’ pole beans and tomatoes.

  “Cut it out!” hollered Sofia.

  Yorgos trampled a row of tomato stakes when he tried pulling them apart. “My mother’ll go nuts if you mess up her garden. One crazy mother around here is enough for—”

  “Shut up, Yorgos.” Sofia was now standing in the vegetable patch, too.

  Noah and Joey quit tumbling.

  “Shut up yourself,” said Yorgos, giving her a shove. I waited for him to smack her.

  Noah and Joey brushed the dirt from their trousers.

 
“The point is this,” said Noah, as if he and Joey had never laid a hand on one another. “The bosses know the science. They know the stink here won’t kill you. But the stuff growing in the garbage will make you sick; the gasses that form in the trash become poison.”

  “If you eat that crap you can die,” added Yorgos, his eyes now on Joey.

  Sofia was still standing between the three of them.

  “That’s why you gotta know what you’re doing,” said Joey, as if Noah was confirming what Joey knew all along. “Those fucking scavengers eat anything.”

  “You eat any crap you get your hands on,” said Yorgos.

  “Go to hell,” said Joey.

  “That mystery stuff from the hospital and...”

  “Quit saying that,” said Joey. “There’s no hospital stuff.”

  “You think they burn it all in the city?” asked Yorgos. “In their own incinerators? Burn all those arms and legs that got gangrene? You think the Rockefellers and Astors would put up with that stink?”

  “What are you saying?” Joey barked. He grabbed Yorgos’ wrist.

  “I’m not saying anything,” said Yorgos. He twisted Joey’s arm to hold him back. “I’m just making a point.”

  “And doing what the Rockefellers and Astors and all those others want, us fighting us instead of them.”

  “More Daily Worker crap,” said Yorgos.

  “Your father knows,” said Noah. “Ask him how he likes the new fence.”

  Mr. Boyle had a gate built around the factory after Walter Reuther and his union started that job action in Detroit. There had been grumbling, too, about Robert Moses and who got hired to work on the Triborough Bridge construction site, never mind all those roads and parks he was building. There had even been a Negro riot in Harlem, more of them out of work than anyone and none of them getting what little was handed out.

  Some of the Barren Shoal men, including Mr. Paradissis, went to Mr. Boyle to complain about the fence. What if there is an accident, an explosion? What if we have to get out fast? they had asked. We put it in to protect you guys, replied Mr. Boyle. You get agitators in here and someone’s gonna get hurt. They don’t care about you. They just care about making a buck off a’ union dues.

  Mr. Paradissis got drunk that night at the cutters’ poker game and threw up on my father, who washed him down with a bucket of cold water and walked him home.

  “Is your father in this too?” asked Joey. He had a feeling for my father, probably because my father was not the kind of guy who bullied losers. Or bullied anyone, for that matter.

  There was no negotiating with Boyle over the gate. Someone had recently cut a cable at Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn and a chassis broke loose, crushing a worker who was attaching an axle. There was talk among blacks everywhere that it was the union that timed the accident so that a black man just up from North Carolina was the one killed. They said the union would not sacrifice a white man like that for the cause. At least that was the talk at the Wednesday night poker game for the Negro stokers, which Mr. DeWitt then reported to all the others on the nights that followed.

  “My father has enough troubles keeping our family organized, never mind organizing a labor union,” said Noah, obviously disappointed. “Plus, on top of that, he’s still afraid of getting deported, you know—all that crap about Communism and Jews. You’d think Immigration agents were pounding down doors on Barren Shoal.”

  “The unions aren’t all Communists,” said Joey.

  “Another astonishing observation from our resident genius!” cried Yorgos.

  “You think we only talk about garbage at the plant?” said Joey. “Get a real job, you schoolboy, and you’ll see.”

  That happened faster than anyone could have foreseen. Within weeks of them being installed, Mr. DeWitt wrecked his already arthritic wrist wrapping the chain around the new gates. The chain was made of 6-gage steel with a lock that was heavy as hell, though heaven knows a thinner chain and a lighter lock would have been strong enough. If Mr. Boyle found out about Mr. DeWitt’s wrist, he might fire him and give the job to someone else. Mr. DeWitt—and his poker game—would be sent into exile.

  Noah, to our surprise, volunteered to cover for Mr. DeWitt until his broken wrist healed. He had to slip into the factory before the gates closed for the evening and stay out of sight. He was there to do anything Mr. DeWitt could not. Before that he had just been angry—now he was alive.

  “My uncle says he’s gonna introduce me to Stanley Morrow, the union guy trying to organize the shirt factory,” he told Yorgos and Joey.

  Uncle David had stayed away from the unions when he first started in the shirt factory. He had said it was no business of his to risk his job to fight over how things were done in America. Then the floor manager, the same Mr. Greene who paid my father to separate scraps when he arrived in New York, announced that on account of business being bad and getting worse, the men would work the usual six days but for five and a half days’ pay. If they did not like it, Mr. Greene said, someone else would. As it turned out, my uncle did not like it one bit and started going to meetings. I do not know how Noah knew this; I never asked. But there were plenty of things about Noah I did not know.

  “So we’ve got to figure out when we can get off-island to meet up with your uncle,” said Yorgos.

  “What’s this ‘we’ business?” said Noah.

  “What do you think? You’re doing this alone? We’re going to Brooklyn.”

  “And what am I supposed to tell my father? And DeWitt?”

  “You’re not telling anyone anything. Your uncle will keep quiet, for sure. He wants this, right? And your father: I’ll let him know that it’s time for his nice Jewish boy to go to New York and get a girl. He’ll help DeWitt lock up for the night.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?” said Noah, laughing. “No way I’m telling my father about a whore.”

  Noah finessed permission from my father to leave Barren Shoal with a promise of staying the night at Joey’s relatives’ in Bensonhurst, not that Joey even knew where they lived. I can only imagine that, having his hands full with my mother, it was easier for my father to say yes. Yes. All of a sudden leaving Barren Shoal became easy, as if they had been going back and forth like that for years.

  In return for getting to meet Stanley Morrow, Yorgos did in fact arrange for Noah to have sex with a woman in New York. The description of it in Noah’s notebook, written in French, was remarkably brief. It took time for me to figure out, not so much because of the words he used, but because among other facts it contained a description of eating lemons. I knew the word citron and thought that Noah was describing a sexual technique not included in Miss Dr. Finn’s book. Years later he explained that he sucked on lemons to get the taste of the prostitute out of his mouth. Not that it helped.

  The boys came back from Brooklyn with the name Stanley Morrow on their tongues in every conversation. Uncle David knew Mr. Morrow from the union hall and Morrow said sure, he would come to Barren Shoal, to the horse heaps, if the boys could guarantee a safe place to meet and at least ten men at the meeting. A union minyan. Noah also brought back a stack of reading material that Uncle David collected from the IWW and CIO and AF of L and YCL and YSPL and the Amalgamated this and the International that. Some had the word “union” printed in English, Italian, Yiddish, Russian, German, Greek, and Chinese. All those languages on one. These must have been from the Wobblies, since “international” in the name did not always mean “integrated.” The unions were full of bigots like everywhere else.

  “Look at this,” Noah said in amazement to no one in particular, which only meant my father or me since my mother was in their bedroom with the door closed, as always. She had not uttered a word yet in public. Not a single word. Before he had to leave that night to help Mr. DeWitt, Noah read aloud a leaflet from the ILGWU about a retreat in Ulster County sponsored by Local 22. “‘Swimming. Dancing. Lectures by David Dubinsky, Charles Zimmerman, Arturo Giovannitti. Separate ho
using for single men, families, and young ladies.’ Sounds swell.”

  “A bunch of Jews and an Italian,” said my father with a mix of pride and fear. “Is that what you want from union dues? Foolish lectures and ridiculous parties?”

  “Nothing wrong with clean air for a couple of days,” said Noah, who knew so many ways to hurt my father. “Why is that hard to understand?”

  “Lots of things are hard to understand, Noah. You going to Brooklyn and not showing up at Uncle David’s when you promised. You and Joey fighting behind the house like a couple of palookas. You and Yorgos yelling and swearing at each other in front of the girls. Talking French. And that notebook you leave sitting around: that’s hard to understand.”

  Noah folded the leaflet in half, in half again, and shoved it into his pocket. “It’s no big deal between me and Joey. Or me and Yorgos. My only beef is with Barren Shoal.”

  “Maybe it is,” said my father, “but it may turn out it’s not. Maybe it’s not your place at all.”

  “Do you have to make this so hard?” said Noah. He slammed outside; my father slipped into the bedroom.

  Noah approached Miss Finn the next day after class, his face soft and his doe-brown eyes sincere. I went over to erase the blackboard so I could hear what he was saying. On the board were the remnants of that day’s lessons, including the usual spelling exercise for the little kids and a civics lesson for us older ones, both based on the letters “WPA.”

  “...on a Saturday night, or maybe a Sunday, it won’t interfere with school. You won’t even be on the island so no one can hold you responsible.”

  “And if you get caught?” asked Miss Finn.

  “We’ll say we jimmied the lock.”

  “You’ve got to work smarter, Noah, so you don’t have to lie,” said Miss Finn. “The thing to do is put up a notice on the school door in advance announcing a lecture. You need to come up with a topic that is broad.”

  “Such as?”