The Blood Lie

by Shirley Reva Vernick

  “Wha’ you say? You know something?”

  “I know what I’ve seen. I know my pap used to make good dough selling groceries. Had his own storefront on the East side of Buffalo. Then the kikes moved in. Set up shops all along Main Street. Kept jewing down the price of things, smiling all the while, till my poor pap couldn’t make a living, couldn’t even make rent on the joint. Landlord gave him the bum’s rush. Just like that, out on the street, all on account of those bohunks. Been driving a bus ever since.”

  “Might’ve been the sheeny curse, to boot,” Gus said. “I hear if they raise their skullcap at you, it unleashes the curse, the curse of going flat broke. Maybe that happened to your pap.”

  “It was right around this same time of year,” Victor went on. “Yeah, right around this same time, ’cause I was just starting at St. Agnes Academy for Boys by then—autumn. We got to school one morning, found out the chapel was broke into the night before. And what do you suppose was missing—the fancy candleholders or the pricey linens? No, the host, that’s what. Those dirty Jews stole the host!”

  “Sick, just plain sick.”

  “Hell, it don’t seem like nothing compared to this. Jeezus, human sacrifice, in this modern day and age…but—you know, the widow Durham, she thinks the girl just lost her way in the woods.”

  “That’s hooey. She’s not thinking straight.”

  “So, this Jew you talked to, this—what’d you say the man’s name is?”

  “It’s a kid. His name is Pool. Jack Pool, Pool’s Dry Goods,” Gus said.

  “Did he say where they got her?”

  “Couldn’t get that much out of him. But listen, their stores are already closed for the holiday, locked up, black as night. Wouldn’t you say that was convenient if you have a child—or her body—to hide?”

  Victor turned the steering wheel as far as it would go in both directions, then sat back into his seat, rubbing the wiry hairs of his mustache. “Okay, look, tell me exactly what this kid said.”

  Gus licked his lips, thinking about the whiskey coming his way, about how it would tingle in his mouth and burn his throat tonight when he toasted his latest stash with Royman.

  “Well, the diner was slow tonight—probably because everyone was out hunting for Daisy. I was thinking about closing up early but decided to stay open and give out coffee and pie to the search parties. So there I was, standing at the counter talking to Roy Royman about how they couldn’t find the poor little girl—this was no more than an hour ago—and in walks this Jack Pool. Jack scrambled-eggs-and-toast Pool. Orders it every time. Never a real meal. It’s the Jew way, see. They won’t eat any meat their preacher doesn’t kill personally. Now Chuck Smith—he runs the Sunflower—he makes them Jew-pies using Crisco for shortening. I hear he even plays pinochle with them, lets them—”

  “So—?”

  “Right. Anyways, when Jack bellies up to the counter tonight, I chat with him, see, being friendly like I am with all my customers. ‘What’s new?’ I ask him. That’s when he tells me about this holiday of theirs coming up. I get him his silverware and a glass of water. ‘You hear about the Durham girl?’ I say. He doesn’t say a word, but goes pale as a sheet. Then he starts twisting his napkin over and over like he’s strangling it. And right then, that’s when I remembered something my grandmother in Salonika used to tell me. Every time I’d leave the house, she’d warn me, ‘Watch where you walk. Them Jews are all born blind and need blood to be able to see.’ The Pool boy, his father is blind—you follow? So it was all beginning to make sense to me. You see how it makes sense?”

  Victor took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. He nodded slowly.

  “You ever dealt with a missing child before?” Gus asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Bet the big guys at HQ’d think you’re the cat’s pajamas if you solved this one.”

  “Or a chump if I botch it.”

  “Then here’s the part you really need to understand, Victor.” He fingered the fresh cigar in his pocket. “These Jews always leave the body where people will find it and be afraid. So even if Daisy’s already dead, she’s not under some rock in the middle of the woods. They’re gonna do whatever they’re gonna do to her, and then, after their holiday’s done, they’re gonna dump her somewhere obvious. And you’re gonna look like a fool for not noticing her there, guaranteed.”

  “Jeezus! Looks like Billy Moore got out of this hell-hole in the nick of time. All right, where does this Pool kid live? I’m gonna have myself a little talk with him.”

  “Right around the block, just off Maple. Big grey job. You can’t miss it.”

  Victor put the key into the ignition. “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Gus. I mean it.”

  Gus stepped out of the car. “Hell no,” he said. “Tell you what, though. When the search parties come around the diner, I’ll let them know the woods ain’t the focus anymore. I’ll say… the case is under control now, and the trooper will get the word out if he needs any more help. How’s that?”

  “You’re the cream in my coffee, you’re the salt in my stew.” Jack sat on the edge of his bunk, singing the popular song and accompanying himself on the cello. “You will always be my necess-i-ty, I’d be lost without you.”

  He’d just spent a dreamy hour practicing his audition piece, a Vivaldi concerto, all the time imagining himself playing first chair with the New York Philharmonic, sounding just like the records he listened to on the Victrola—rich, deep, like liquid chocolate.

  “All alone, I’m so all alone,” he crooned. “There is no one else but you. All alone by the telephone waiting for a ring, a ting-a-ling.” At the Bentley School, he’d be able to study and perform both classical and pop music, and that, he figured, would up his chances of turning a dream into a career. Performer, composer, teacher—or maybe all three—he didn’t know. All he knew was that music was as natural and necessary to him as breathing.

  Jack put away his cello and picked up his shofar. Rabbi Abrams had chosen him to blow the ram’s horn, the most ancient of Jewish musical instruments, this year at Yom Kippur services, and he wanted to sound good. This would be, after all, a performance of sorts. The ridges of the curved horn fit well in his hands as he forced air into the rim to produce the powerful blasts. He sounded several short notes and then the longest one he could hold.

  Yom Kippur services were long. Some people would come and go, especially the ones with small children, but Jack would stay. The only time he’d leave the building would be for Yizkor, the special prayer of remembrance for people who’d lost a loved one. Those lucky enough to have intact families waited outside the temple doors. Both of Jack’s parents stayed inside. So did Jack’s friend Abe Goldberg. Meanwhile, everyone waiting outside knew that one day they’d move inside to recite the Yizkor prayer, and that sometime later, the prayer would be said for them.

  When Jack released the last note, he sat up and stared out his window. He could see the Main Street Bridge standing vigil over the St. Lawrence, which, in another few miles, would enter Canada on its journey east to the Atlantic. He thought about his father’s voyage along this waterway on his way to America. Mr. Pool said it was the coldest weather he’d ever known—January in Quebec—and that the ferrymen showed him how to test the temperature. “Go outside and spit,” they’d said. “If it freezes the second it hits the ground, then it’s twenty below. But if it freezes in midair, then it’s at least forty below. Either way, the ferries don’t run.”

  If only Mr. Pool had entered America through Ellis Island like thousands of others, his family would probably be living in Brooklyn or Boston or some other city. Then Jack would have music schools at his fingertips, and concerts and sheet music shops. But Mr. Pool’s poor vision prevented all that. When he immigrated, people were so afraid of trachoma—a contagious, blinding disease—that if your eyes didn’t seem quite right, you could be standing right next to the Statue of Liberty and still get sent back to your homeland. So he didn’t risk it
. He came in through Canada instead, first to Montreal, then across the St. Lawrence to Northern New York State.

  Jack cursed his father’s eyes.

  And yet, if he had been able to see, Mr. Pool might not have come to America at all. He might have stayed in his shtetl—Zininka, one of the many Russian ghettos where the Jews were forced to live but were forbidden from owning land, attending school, or practicing the more profitable trades. He might have endured the empty belly, the isolation, the encroaching violence against the Jews. But word had it that American doctors could restore eyesight. Jack’s father could live without food or security, but he desperately, urgently wanted to see. And so he came.

  Of course he came. Who wouldn’t, if it meant being able to see clearly for the first time? Jack thought the only thing worse than blindness would be deafness, because then there’d be no music. Having no music would be like having no language, no passion, no inspiration. He couldn’t bear the thought.

  When Mr. Pool found out that the American cure didn’t exist, there was only one thing left to do: he threw on a shoulder pack and walked from town to town, peddling notions and a little clothing. “Lucky for me I can weigh the difference between a five-spot and a ten in my hands,” he’d joke. After a couple of years he bought a horse and wagon so he could travel farther, and that’s how he met his future wife in Santa Clara.

  When Jack’s parents opened Pool’s Dry Goods, Massena was enjoying the tail end of an odd sort of heyday—thanks to its stinking water, of all things. The Mohawks had discovered a sulfur-water spring at the edge of town just after the War Between the States, and people believed it could cure a slew of conditions. Visitors started coming from all over the country, as well as from Canada and Europe. Even the Netherlands’ Queen Wilhelmina, who supposedly had a bad case of eczema, made a point of stopping by during one of her U.S. visits.

  By the turn of the century, fancy guesthouses circled the springs. Entire families checked in with their servants for a week or two at a time, bathing in the rank water and glopping on the rotten mud. Soon, laborers moved in to work as cooks, housekeepers and maids. Local boys made extra money on weekends as dippers, lugging large canisters of sulfur water to the bathtubs of guests who were too rich or too lazy to go outside.

  Then the craze passed. The laborers left town, and the guesthouses stood mostly empty. Massena was no longer special, no longer noticed. Colorless, featureless, bland. Just another pit town on the river.

  The Bentley School will be my ticket out of here, Jack told himself, gripping the shofar. First to Syracuse for two years, then maybe to a conservatory in New York City or Boston. After that, anything would be possible.

  “Birds do it, bees do it, even lazy jellyfish do it. Let’s do it…let’s fall in love,” he sang absently. “I’m sure sometimes on the sly you do it. Maybe even you and I might do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”

  Jack took up his cello again, but the doorbell rang before he could begin. He thought it might be Abe Goldberg, or maybe Mrs. Kauffman delivering her famous cheese blintzes, or even his own father, who sometimes forgot his house key. But when he heard his mother saying, “Yes?” in the same wary tone she used with traveling salesmen, he knew it must be a stranger. But at 8:15 in the evening? That’s odd. Setting his cello aside, he went downstairs to see who it was.

  “Can I help you?” Mrs. Pool was asking. She was talking to a cop—a tall man with a red mustache, a dark uniform shining with brass buttons, and a sheath of stubble starting to shadow his cheeks.

  Jack’s chest clamped. What was a cop doing at his house? Where was his father?

  “Evening,” the officer said. “Trooper Victor Brown here. I’m calling for some help with the missing girl.”

  “Missing girl?” Jack and his mother asked in unison, stepping out of the doorway to let him in.

  “It’s been on the radio—and the street—all day.”

  “I don’t play the radio on the Sabbath,” Mrs. Pool said.

  “It ain’t Sunday yet, ma’am,” Victor said.

  “Yes, but our—” She pressed her lips shut. “What girl?”

  “Daisy Durham. Mrs. Jenna Durham’s daughter.”

  “Daisy?” Jack said.

  “What? How long has she been gone?” Mrs. Pool asked.

  “Since around one,” the trooper said. “A long time. Half the town is out looking for her. Her mother’s been trying to get you all afternoon.”

  “I don’t answer the phone on the Sabbath, either,” she said. “Daisy did spend the morning with us. My son walked her home—she went straight home. Oh, this is terrible. How can I help?”

  “Actually, ma’am, the reason I’m here is, I’d like to talk to your son. Is this him here?”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “Your name is Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to ask you a few things, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Pool asked.

  “Just fact-checking, ma’am, that’s all. Sort of retracing Daisy’s steps.”

  “I guess that would be all right. Come in.” She led him to the kitchen table and then stood by the stove, pretending to watch over the already-cooked soup. The trooper glanced around the kitchen, sniffed a few times quickly, grimaced, and swallowed—all so quick, you wouldn’t have noticed unless you were watching. Which Jack was.

  He took a seat. The trooper straddled the chair opposite him. “So then, you weren’t aware that Daisy’s gone missing?” he asked.

  “No. I walked her home right at noon and haven’t heard anything since. I worked all afternoon and part of the evening, then I came back here.”

  “That so? I’m told you were down at the diner this evening.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was. I stopped at the Sit Down for a bite on my way home from work.” He paused. “I didn’t know that was important.”

  “I’m told you were talking about Daisy there. So I’m just wondering—”

  Mrs. Pool slammed the lid on the soup pot and started toward the table, but Jack motioned for her to wait. “I didn’t talk to anybody about Daisy,” he said. “Why would I, when I didn’t even know she was missing?”

  The trooper didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know where Daisy is, Officer,” Jack went on. “If I did, I’d tell you.”

  “I believe you, Jack. Of course you don’t know where Daisy is. But let me ask you this. Do you have any guesses—just guesses—about how she might have disappeared?”

  “Now listen here,” Mrs. Pool said. “You have no right—”

  “Okay, listen, both of you,” the trooper said. “Jack. Mrs. Pool. I’m gonna give it to you plain. I’m told you people believe a sacrifice—a blood sacrifice of a Christian child—is proper in celebrating your holidays. You have a holiday coming up, right? And now we have a Christian child missing out of the blue. So it’s only logical for me to suppose…”

  Jack and his mother stared at the trooper. Blood sacrifice? Blood sacrifice?

  Jack wished his mother would start to cry. Someone needed to cry, and he didn’t want to be the one. Then for an instant, he thought he might laugh. He thought his churning belly and his burning throat might erupt in a full-out spasm of laughter. But that instant passed quickly, giving way to gagging fear.

  “Oh my God!” he heard his mother roar. “Get out of my house! Take your horrid lies and get out of here!”

  “Ma’am, easy.” Victor stood up. “I’m just checking out possibilities.”

  “Out!” she shouted, grabbing her broomstick from the corner and pointing the handle at him. “Get out of my house!”

  By this time, Harry and Martha had abandoned their spy post in the next room and were gaping in the kitchen doorway. “Mama?” Martha asked, wide-eyed.

  “I said get out.” Mrs. Pool’s voice turned quiet and low, like a growl, and she raised the broom a little higher. “But tell me one thing first. What does Jenna Durham have to say about this stupid idea of your
s?”

  “She doesn’t know. Not from me, anyway. She took to bed some time ago.”

  “Good. Now go.” She took a step closer and shoved the broomstick under his nose.

  “This isn’t over,” Victor said, taking a step back. “Not nearly.” He turned around and strode quickly out of the house. Jack heard the click of the door lock and the thump of the broom returning to the corner, and then his mother was sitting next to him at the table, her hands clenched and her cheeks crimson.

  “Back upstairs, both of you,” Mrs. Pool ordered Harry and Martha. “You can take down my Chinese checkers set if you wish, but don’t come down until I call you. Hurry now.”

  Mrs. Pool asked Jack, “Are you all right?”

  Jack folded his arms on the kitchen table and let out an unsteady breath. “I guess.”

  “Jack, what happened at the diner?”

  “Nothing. I sat at the counter, and Gus asked me why I was working so late. I told him we were trying to get a shipment unpacked before the holy day. That’s all. Then I ate my eggs and left.”

  “Are you certain that’s all?”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course I do. I’m just trying to figure out who the liar is—the real Jew-hating liar. Who else was there?”

  “I don’t know, there were a bunch. Roy Royman. Old Man Claghorn. Bucky Sanborn. A bunch. Mama, what did I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything. And don’t you worry—we won’t be seeing any more of that trooper, not if he knows what’s good for him. But that poor child. And Jenna. The worst thing that could happen to a mother.”

  “I need to go help look for Daisy.” He started to stand up.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “Absolutely not! They’d sooner see you hanged than let you help.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You stay put. Don’t you have some potatoes to peel?”

  “Potatoes?”

  “A basket of them. In the sink.”

  “But shouldn’t we—”

  “No. Go on now. Do as I say.” She got up and went straight to the telephone in the hallway, where she asked the operator to put her through to Jenna Durham. “Hello, Durham residence?” she said. “Eva Pool calling. Who is this? …Oh, Clarisse. I just heard. I’m so very sorry. Is Jenna available? …I see. Poor dear. Well, I don’t want to disturb her if she’s resting, of course. I’ll try her again later…I shouldn’t?…Yes, I understand. I’ll wait to hear from you, then. You will let me know if there’s anything, anything at all, I can do, won’t you?… Yes, of course. Good night, Clarisse.”