Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  The only fruits that could grow in the sandy soil were strawberries and raspberries, so they put in some of those. They enlisted Sofia and me to nurture an envelope of seeds into marigolds, which we planted to keep away bugs. The only things not collectivized were the chickens, Mr. Paradissis saying that it was one thing to share a garden, another thing altogether to look after living creatures. The truth was that Mrs. Paradissis talked to her chickens and I think Mr. Paradissis did not want other people to know. Not that other people did not talk to their chickens, too. But people talked to them about chicken concerns: how their eggs were laying or which one was pecking another, or while shooing them out of the way so the coop could be swept. Mrs. Paradissis spoke to the chickens about metaphysical things—if life was fate or life was chance; if God existed and whether it mattered—as if the cluckings of the chickens were a response. At least that was how Sofia translated the Greek.

  The double garden, with the exception of the chicken coops, became the de facto union hall on Barren Shoal, the place where the men gathered every week. Now, on top of the old clamshell covered path, there were a couple of planks of wood resting on some old bricks, benches where the boys sat and rolled cigarettes and where the men from the factory collected after dinner. Yorgos and Noah would tell them about things they learned from the union pamphlets, the movies, and their visits to Brooklyn. What would have been intolerable had it taken place in the school house—two school boys lecturing a group of factory workers—became acceptable in the garden.

  The only one who complained was Mossy Kennedy, the owner of the last remaining bar on Barren Island, where the men not playing poker would sometimes boat to after dinner. Mr. Morrow suggested that they arrange with Kennedy to send a boy over with a keg of beer. The men could bring their own glasses and the boy could collect nickels for each one he filled. This worked well enough for everyone in the warm weather, Kennedy selling beer without worrying about his place getting busted up by anti-union thugs and the men happy to be outdoors and drinking. Sofia and I were never included, of course, but we could listen from my bedroom window. Even if the men never got around to talking union, the boys always did when the others went home.

  “The question is this,” said Yorgos on one of those nights. “What do you want? Which is different than the question of what you will settle for, which is different than what you demand.”

  “We should start with what we need,” said Noah.

  “What who needs where?” asked Joey. “Which means what?” asked Yorgos at the same time.

  CHAPTER 10

  The expanded garden became a new way of tracking the passing weeks, each fruit and vegetable ready in its own singular time. Boston lettuces, parsnips, and radishes came up in late May of that warm, wet spring. Peas and beets and summer squashes were ready in June. I checked off each on Noah’s harvest map as they came in, marveling at the accuracy of the triangles and circles and squares representing the approximate dates of their readiness. Then tiny sweet strawberries that we picked greedily, popping as many into our mouths as into the bowls we brought out for them. We did not care about swallowing sand with the strawberries. We imagined them with cream but were happy to have what we had. Everything thrived as it once did under our mothers, fertilized by ground-up fish, coffee grinds, and eggshells. Three kinds of small tomatoes shot up so quickly when the heat hit that we had to stake them overnight. There is nothing sweeter than a fresh, ripe tomato off the vine and we were impatient for as many as we could get.

  “They take so long,” I complained to Noah, when he confirmed that the best would not arrive until August.

  He was sitting on one of the benches reading a newspaper that was two months old. School was out for the summer, which meant no Miss Finn, no New York Times. I was on my hands and knees weeding. Dune grass had found its way into everything, pushing up between the rows of carrots and parsley. It strangled the dill we did not get to fast enough. Sofia and Joey were tying tomato vines to new, taller stakes that Joey split from a piece of driftwood. Yorgos was stretched out on the other bench, his eyes closed, smoking.

  “Next year we’ll plant earlier,” I added.

  “Ground’s too cold,” said Noah.

  “It could be a warm winter.”

  “Stop already about the tomatoes,” said Noah. “You check the newspapers: when they tell you to plant, that’s when you plant. Not a day sooner.”

  Noah and Yorgos, who were entering their final year of school, had pretty much lost interest in the day-to-day management of the garden as soon as they were done turning the soil and seeding. They covered up their boredom by setting me and Sofia to do most of the work. Talk about your exploitation of the masses.

  “Look at this,” came Noah’s voice from behind his newspaper.

  “What?” I asked as I tied another tomato plant to a stake.

  “Not you. Yorgos. C’mere.” He jiggled Yorgos’ leg to get his attention. “You know about this? The Civilian Conservation Corps. The government’s sending guys from all over—three million—to do clean up work, chop trees, clear trails. We could get jobs.”

  “How are you gonna chop trees when you won’t even pull a weed?” asked Sofia.

  “How about you shutting up,” said Yorgos.

  “How about not talking to me, Yorgos. Ever again. Ever.”

  “Washington State,” continued Noah, “Oregon, California. We could go to California.”

  “And do what?” asked Joey.

  “Pick apples, split logs....”

  “Lay tar on that new Pacific coast road,” said Yorgos.

  They were getting dreamy.

  “What about the factory?” asked Joey.

  “The hell with the factory. Come with us!” said Yorgos.

  “Can’t do that,” said Joey, seriously.

  “You got something better to do?” asked Yorgos. He lit another cigarette and flipped the still-lit match at Joey. Joey slapped at his pant leg where the match had hit and fizzled out.

  “The factory, the house, my brothers,” said Joey, as if he mattered as much to them as they mattered to him.

  “You wanna work this shit job forever? The hell with them, Joey. And your brothers? You think they give a damn?”

  “What about the three million guys ahead of us in line?” asked Joey. He drew a long line in the dirt with a tomato stake. Noah rubbed it out with his shoe.

  “There’s other places to live besides this stinking island,” said Noah. “And better jobs than making glue.”

  “And people better than those stinking brothers of yours,” added Yorgos.

  “So you guys send me a postcard from Oregon.”

  That was some surprise. Joey, whose life on Barren Shoal was worse than any of ours, did not want to leave. I figured he would be glad to get away from such a hard place with a hard history. Maybe Joey knew better than us how tough it can be letting go. Leaving would mean having a real life after his parents’ death. It would mean living somewhere they never lived. It would mean never again laying eyes on the last place he had seen them. For my mother it would mean a home without the bed that Helen slept in, without the stairs that she climbed up to our room. It was the same for Mrs. Aryeh, the wife of the photographer with the pigeons, who refused to leave Brooklyn after their son died of the influenza. She, too, could not give up the house where her son had lived. How could any of them give up the places that helped them to remember?

  “You’re a chicken shit, Joey,” said Yorgos.

  “Back off,” said Sofia.

  “Stay the hell out of this,” he said, taking a short swing at her just to scare her.

  “You want to spend the rest of your life eating rotten horses and tuberculosis-babies?” asked Yorgos.

  Joey’s fist on Yorgos’ jaw made a crack I could hear across the yard. Sofia, surrounded by tomato plants, was shouting for them to stop and shouting at Noah to make them stop. Yorgos slammed Joey in the gut. They were spitting and cursing and kicking, though prob
ably not for more than a minute. I have timed a minute on my wristwatch. It is very long time when it is a minute of something awful, never mind years of it, or centuries, or millennia.

  “Noah!” screamed Sofia. “Do something.”

  “You guys,” shouted Noah. “That’s enough, guys.” He grabbed each by a shoulder, but he was not strong enough to pry them apart.

  Blood was running from Joey’s lip and snot was leaking from his nose. Yorgos looked fine. “Get him cleaned up,” he told Sofia.

  “Wait out here,” Sofia told me. “Grandma’s sleeping.”

  I did not want to be left outside in the aftermath of the battle. I did not want to hear Noah and Yorgos going on about the Civilian Conservation Corps; I did not want to hear about them having a life off Barren Shoal, outside of Brooklyn, when I, like Helen, would not. I wanted to matter. I want to matter.

  I pounded out of the garden, down the clamshell path and through the dune grass to the far side of the island. It was good to be alone watching the water. I have known people since, friends of Noah with waterfront property in Provincetown, who say that their depression is the by-product of always looking at the water’s empty horizon. I find this improbable, what with the shifting tides and the intoxicating view of the sky, where one can see nothing and see everything all at once. But that is me. Who am I to tell someone what to feel?

  Two feral cats darted in and out of the dune grass stalking the nesting plovers. One cat had the usual brown with black tiger markings and a broad, flat nose. The other, a light orange tabby, had a thicker neck, broader back, and white boot markings on its paws.

  The gulls hovering overhead were making their busy gull cries, circling tighter and tighter over the cats. There was no lack of fish in the Jamaica Bay, but the gulls ate off the garbage piles anyway. I wondered if given the chance, the gulls would eat the cats. If they could eat from piles of dead horses, why not a cat? One gull was screaming louder than the others and it dove first, grazing the head of the tiger cat. The cat crouched deep into the dune grass and the gull took another pass. The orange tabby sprang up, swatting the air. A second seagull swooped down, diving into the sand and tumbling over. It was the first time I ever saw a seagull have a crash landing. Who can blame me for laughing? The gull recovered itself and hopped towards the cats, while the other gull went on screeching and diving.

  The tiger shot out from the dune grass, in its mouth a tiny gull-chick, its black-pea eyes wide open and its little grey feet dangling. The gull on the ground was flapping its wings and screaming. The other gull, still airborne, circled lower and landed, but the cats were already gone.

  Our house was dark when I got home. I checked in the yard to see if the boys were still there or if Sofia had returned. The only sign of them was a clamshell ashtray filled with cigarette butts.

  My mother was seated in the kitchen, staring at her knees. On the table was a butcher’s knife, a cutting board, and a bowl of onions.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said quietly. It never felt good to see her. This is a terrible thing to say, but it is true.

  I switched on a small lamp on the other side of the room. My mother nodded, looking as if anything more than that small gesture would cause her pain. My once hugging, cuddling mother could not even touch me.

  I sat down where I did not have to face her and slid the cutting board to my side of the table. I slit the tips off the onions, peeled back their brass skins, and chopped them into uniform pieces that would disappear into whatever we cooked them with. I ignored the streams of onion-tears on my cheeks and worked through three pounds of them. My father arrived from work to find the table covered with onions and me covered in tears, my mother staring at her knees, and the house dark but for that one small lamp.

  “I got—we got news from Jacob today,” he said, holding out a postcard. Jacob was my mother’s eldest brother, the last one still in Zyrmuny, which was in Russia then. Or maybe it was still in Poland. It was impossible to keep track of the land deals being cut between the Kremlin and the Reichstag.

  My mother went on staring at her knees.

  “We’ve got to get them out of there. We’ve got to see about getting them papers.”

  No reply.

  I rested my hands in my lap, knife and all.

  “Rachel!” he said. “Listen to me.”

  He read the card aloud in Yiddish. He read the card again, this time translating it into English: For God’s sake, please, help us.

  My mother was crying now. And what did I do? Cry real tears instead of onion-tears. Does someone else’s anguish become yours when you cannot help them? Better yet: when they cannot help themselves? If not your anguish, then what? It should become something, but what?

  My father was on his knees, his head buried in my mother’s lap, her fingers stroking the back of his neck. The card from Uncle Jacob fell from my father’s hand. I picked it up and wiped it on my sleeve.

  “Take Marta. Go to HIAS tomorrow,” said my mother. With one of her scarred hands she rubbed his back. Take Marta. The first words I heard her speak in years. My father showed no surprise. She must have been speaking to him all along behind closed doors. I was angry. What about my anguish? What about my grief over losing Helen, about these last years I spent unmothered?

  “That’s no place for the girl,” said my father. “People pushing and babies crying, like animals shoved in a barn.” He had already been there time and again. After the Quota Laws, the closest that people could hope for was entry into Canada or South America, but they would have been better than Zyrgmuny. At least for now. My parents only made it through because they did it on someone else’s papers. They lied. Thank goodness.

  My mother swept half the mound of chopped onions into an onion soup for dinner that night, setting aside the other half for a split pea soup that she cooked later that evening. She did not speak again while doing either, but she was present in a way she had not been for so long. I wanted to ask her things, but did not. I no longer knew how. Why would I, when for so many years there had been no answer?

  Come mid-week my father announced that I would ride a scow with him to Brooklyn on Saturday after his half-day shift was done, if you call working for six hours a half-day.

  “What about Tosca?” I asked. Tosca was scheduled for the radio broadcast on Saturday live from the Met. I had not yet wrapped my mind around the urgency of our chore. It was hard to grasp the whole meaning of the new terror. Maybe that is why my mother wanted me to go with him. Or maybe, simply, she did not want him to be alone. How could anyone face any of this alone?

  “There will be other Toscas,” he said. The weekend before we had listened to Tristan und Isolde, which was not the last we would hear about Wagner in the months to come. Now I cannot bring myself to listen to Wagner. It is not just that Wagner was an anti-Semite: his music was the soundtrack for the Third Reich. I cannot worry anymore whether or not I am being fair minded about this. If Wagner is so important, let someone else listen.

  “Don’t you think I should stay with Momma?” Not that I wanted to be alone with my mother. But I was unsettled by the prospect of leaving Barren Shoal for the first time since Helen’s funeral.

  “Noah will keep an eye on things.”

  My mother had not done anything really crazy since that night Mr. Aryeh found her on the edge of the roof in Brooklyn. She had not done much of anything beyond cooking and staring at her knees. Mrs. Paradissis acted nutty too, spending more and more time talking to her chickens while Mr. Paradissis spent more and more time talking union. That felt different. My mother could not recover from her tragedy. But does anyone have a life spared of tragedy?

  I did not tell Sofia that I was going with my father to Brooklyn or that my mother had started speaking. I was still angry that she had shooed me away when she cleaned Joey up after the fight. Silence is a meek form of vengeance, but revenge—like charity—functions best unannounced.

  Sofia and I worked in the yard that morning pulling lettuces, staki
ng string beans, hoeing soil, and feeding tomatoes. She must have assumed that afterwards I would be eating a late lunch with my father and listening to the opera, like we always did. Instead I changed into a blue skirt and a white blouse with a scalloped collar, hand-me-downs from Marie Dowd that she had gotten hand-me-downed from cousins in Brooklyn who went to Catholic school. Chances were that Sofia would see my father and me walking to the docks, but as chance had it she did not.

  My father arranged for us to a ride on an empty garbage scow returning to Brooklyn, empty being an imprecise description for its condition. There was a shallow pool of fluid at the bottom that could not be gotten rid of without clearing the muck clogging the scuppers. From time to time someone powdered the barges with calcinated lime, which cut the stench, but that was rare.

  The bargeman pointed out a small platform near the aft where we were could sit during the crossing. Some scavengers, who had been sitting on the pilings and waiting to ride the barge too, climbed on with us. Over time, I had forgotten about the girl in the brown dress but there she was, wearing a different brown dress and not that much taller than when I last saw her. I wonder if she stayed short because malnutrition. Or maybe she was just short. But Sofia and I had added inches. The bargeman directed the scavengers to the opposite end of the barge where the girl sat down and fell asleep.

  Where my father and I sat were a couple of old, chewed up baseball bats. My father took one in his hands and banged the board beneath our feet. A rat darted out from somewhere, looked at the bat, looked at my father, and scurried past our feet and down the wall of the ship’s hold. I grabbed the other bat and started pounding.