by Carol Zoref
On one of those early weeks of school, a small girl, her fingers swollen and copper-colored from animal flesh, looked in our direction. Surrounding her was a score of screaming seagulls, as busy as she was picking at the dead animals. I did not remember seeing this particular girl before, though I recognized the others scrounging around her, including Joey Pessara, a boy from Barren Shoal close in age to Noah and Yorgos. He was wearing a blue rag tied around his brow to keep the sweat from his eyes, and was working his knife into the ribcage of a horse. I was surprised to see someone we knew so feverously groping for something to eat.
“Look,” said Sofia, pointing. “A girl.”
“She’s got a knife,” I said.
The barge was shifting on the swell of the tide and a breeze was rushing the skirt of the girl’s brown dress between her legs. The girl raised one arm. The seagulls scattered. I raised my hand and waved. There was a look of surprise on her face as she grabbed at the air with both hands, which I now saw was her intention all along. I lifted my other hand too, as if doing this would keep the girl from falling. A moment later the girl regained her balance and turned her short knife back to the draft horse she was working on. I felt silly. The girl was trying not to fall into that hell, you should pardon me, and I thought she was waving. The seagulls settled back around her. Whatever remained of the horse—imagine how much was there to begin with if so much was left after so much had been taken—would be carted onto the greasy, bloodstained cutting floor where Mr. Paradissis and my father and the rest of the cutters would trim it down to smaller pieces still.
Sofia and I corkscrewed our nostrils as we walked but did not dare pinch our noses closed. The girl in the brown dress might think our disgust was meant for her. And maybe Mrs. Paradissis did possess the power to appear out of nowhere, like she said she could, and would be angry. Maybe the girl would tell. What were we so afraid of? That we would be punished for being impolite? To a scavenger? I am ashamed to say that no one would have cared.
We were anxious to get far past the factory, the stinking flotilla of waste at the dock, and the new girl in the brown dress. We walked slowly at first, not wanting the girl to think we were afraid of her, assuming she noticed us. The morning stench was mixing with the ash from the furnace, soaking in through our ears and mouths and the tiniest porous openings of our skin. I pressed my hand to my nose and mouth and I ran.
“You girls have no business being late,” Miss Finn scolded when Sofia and I rushed into the single, drafty classroom that was our school. “Young girls work spindles in textile mills and boys are sorters in coal mines,” Miss Finn continued as we settled into our chairs. “Sharecropper children and tenant farmer children and migrant farmer children plant and pick, as do the children of families who own their own land. Federal child labor laws mean little without the mechanisms for enforcing them.” Miss Finn turned everything into a lesson, including our being late.
She set Sofia and me and the other small children to work copying alphabet letters. She turned the attention of the older students to current events. The Young Plan, she wrote on the board. She raised a newspaper and read aloud that the “Young Plan Meets New Opposition.” Miss Finn brought newspapers that her sister in Brooklyn saved up to the island every Monday: The New York Times, The New York Post, The Herald-Tribune. The week-old newspapers took on second lives at Barren Shoal as our textbooks. Come the third week they were cut into toilet paper for the outhouses, except for the ones that Sofia and I took for our Odyssey Project. We were keeping a scrapbook of articles about all the places in the world we wanted to visit. We collected countries the way that older girls clipped out photos of Clark Gable and Greta Garbo.
“‘The Young Committee on Reparations is meeting resistance from conservative Germans and their right-wing leadership,’” Miss Finn read.
It was hard to concentrate on penmanship while Miss Finn was speaking. My strokes became confused with the Aleph-Bet-Gimmels that my father had taught me, which looked nothing like the Roman letters we were learning. Sofia confused her letters with the mysterious Alpha-Beta-Gammas of Modern Greek.
“Look,” I whispered to Sofia. “This U is a horse’s foot; this A is a house.”
“Sofia, Marta!” Miss Finn hushed us from the other side of the room. Sofia kicked my foot beneath the desk. I dropped my head lower and lower to keep from laughing until my nose touched my sheet of paper.
“Yorgos,” said Miss Finn to Sofia’s brother, “can you tell us about The Young Plan?”
Yorgos Paradissis was handsome at fourteen, already mannish with a five o’clock shadow.
“The Young Plan...” Yorgos stumbled, “is... is...”
I perked up. “It has something to do with...”
“No one’s asking you,” said Yorgos.
I wanted to redeem myself with Miss Finn. Children yearn for the clean slate. Mind you, if I had a clean slate now there would be nothing to remember. We make mistakes, we apologize, we take corrective action, and we remember. This is what it means to be a person. You forget, you are nothing.
But I knew as little about the Young Plan as Yorgos, who elbowed Noah, who was sitting next to him.
“Tell Miss Finn about the Young Plan, Noah,” said Yorgos to my brother. Better to be bested by Noah than by a little girl.
Miss Finn ignored the exchange between the boys. “The Young Plan will be a blueprint for German reparations for The Great War. Who will please define ‘reparations’?”
More silence.
Yorgos had been rescued from Miss Finn’s questioning, but not the rest of the class. I forgive us for not knowing about the Young Plan; we were children, even the older ones. You would think that if I could forgive us, I could forgive others for their silences too. But I cannot.
The smell from the furnaces thickened like it always did as the sun rose higher. Miss Finn was still waiting for an answer. The only sound now was the thin whistle of Marie Dowd’s breath, the remnants of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. Marie was already fifteen.
“A definition for reparations?” Miss Finn repeated.
Her voice settled into the background while she explained.
At seven years old I had already heard endless talk about the war. It was one of the reasons my parents left Poland or Russia, or wherever it was they had lived, the borders forever shifting. The new rulers had changed the names of the old towns again and again to their liking. My parents left a place that was no longer the place they had fled.
The world of the classroom was restored by the sound of Joey Pessara, who belched loudly as he wandered in late. “For heaven’s sake, Giuseppe, take your seat,” declared Miss Finn, sparing him a lecture like she had given to Sofia and me.
Seeing Joey reminded me of the girl in the brown dress, her muck-caked hands keeping her steady as she cut for food. I turned back to my copying.
Miss Finn tolerated Joey more than she did the rest of us because Joey was orphaned in 1919, when Barren Shoal got clobbered by the influenza. Joey was six when his parents died; he never matured much beyond that. The three older Pessara boys—Massimo, Niccolo, and Vincenzo—left school to take factory jobs that were opened up by the epidemic. They did nothing for Joey other than let him sleep by the stove. When it was warm they made him sleep outside. Massimo, Nick, and Vince wolfed down most of what grew in their garden or was laid by their chickens. Joey ate hard bread for breakfast and spaghetti for lunch and dinner. Joey went hungry. Maybe there was not enough food to go around; maybe they did not notice; maybe they hated him; maybe Joey was lazy. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Who knows why people do what they do?
The breeze finally turned, as it did any number of times during the day, and for a while blew the factory smell off-island. Daylight filled the classroom as the sun started its slow descent on the other side of the schoolhouse. The barges were gone from the factory dock when school let out. All of the scavengers, including the girl in the brown dress, were gone too. It was warm outside when Sofia and I
wandered toward home. We decided to see if any good, hand-sized clam shells had been beached by the incoming tide. Mrs. Paradissis used these shells as ramekins until they cracked, which they always did. Then we would break them into smaller pieces that we spread outside our houses to hold down the sand.
On our way we passed the small gatekeeper’s allotment on the far side of Barren Shoal. The Negro gatekeeper, Mr. Morgan, had grown vegetables where Mr. DeWitt now kept chickens and a couple of roosters that crowed morning and night, fooled by the glow of the big furnace. Mr. DeWitt had assembled a chicken coop using wood planks from the old gatehouse, leaving attached the newspapers and other paper that Mr. Morgan had tacked up for insulation. The chickens pretty much pecked most of that away, making nests from ads for Baptist churches and race music. There were still a couple of weatherworn photos on the outside, their edges curled by the damp sea air. Mr. Morgan was in one of them. Seated in front of him was a woman with grey hair, his wife I suppose, who moved off the island when I was too young to remember. Next to her sat a youngish woman with processed hair, who was seated in front of a young man who was two heads taller than his father. Standing to the right and left of the woman were two little girls, one with the most serious face I ever saw on a child.
Sofia and I pulled off our school shoes and walked barefoot once we passed the coop, our toes curling in the heat buried in the sand. The clear, briny smell of the sea was intoxicating. The next best thing to being in school was not having to be anywhere at all. Sofia found two driftwood sticks in the shallows and we practiced drawing the alphabet in the sand. We wrote our names over and over until we grew bored with the pointless repetition. Then we traded names and her version of mine looked as lovely, as elegant as I was already wishing I could be. I was still working on her name when we heard screeches coming from the reeds on the small dune behind us.
“Seagulls,” I said to Sofia.
“Not seagulls, stupid.”
“You’re the stupid one.”
“You’re the baby.” If Helen had been with us we could have both turned on her, but Helen was home with my mother.
We heard the screech again. “Let’s go see,” I dared her.
“You won’t want to,” she said in a superior tone.
I tugged at her. We crawled through the dune grasses. The sounds disappeared as we came closer. Then they grew louder again.
Maybe a cat, or something worse from one of the barges, was nesting. Maybe a rat had delivered a litter. A sand dune shifted; a shadow ran down the middle. It had a once-white T-shirt and short, dark hair. The dune was, in fact, Joey Pessara’s rear end. The sounds belonged to Marie Dowd, into whom he was pushing.
Sofia and I were still kneeling on the sand.
A voice moaned a question and an answer rolled into one.
Sofia and I jumped to our feet.
“Hey!” we heard Joey call after us.
“What?” cried Marie.
“What the hell!” shouted Joey.
We ran as fast as we could back to the water, where the tide had already washed our calligraphy away. I reached for our shoes, giggling. Sofia was giggling too. I covered my mouth. “Shsssh!” I warned through a space I made between my fingers. Sofia picked up our writing sticks and hurled them into the bay. No one would know we had been there. She led our race across the sand, back out of the marshes, and finally home.
CHAPTER 3
The image of Joey heaving himself into Marie drifted for years in my schoolgirl mind like the sea plants that rooted in the Jamaica Bay shallows. It was my whole idea of sex until I was grown and had experiences of my own. Sofia and I never told anyone what we were running from that day. There was plenty enough taking place in the world to keep everyone busy, what with the stock market crash and the Depression and things growing worse by the day in Europe.
The world of Barren Shoal was unchanged in those first, early days after the Crash. The Wall Street types got hit hard and fast, but everyone was touched by it sooner or later. Everyone except people who could lose a fortune and still had loads to lose. I bet they cried anyway, those greedy sons-of-guns who lived plenty well while others starved. They cried for themselves and they let it happen, just like the English let the Irish starve 100 years earlier. Does it ever end?
The dead animals kept arriving. Carthorses were now worked until they collapsed instead of being put down when they got old. We could see their ribs through their hides. When the scavenging men pulled off their shirts in the heat we could see their ribs too. My parents talked endlessly about the Depression and Europe and being grateful for my father’s steady job and Europe and the unions and Europe and the smell. Every day they talked about the smell. Every day they talked about the family back in Zyrmuny and about getting them visas. And they argued about Uncle David getting roughed up again by company goons after he spoke up at a meeting of the I.L.G.W.U.
The first time Uncle David was attacked, my father begged a ride on an empty garbage scow to Brooklyn. Aunt Sara had sent word by mail, which arrived on Mondays and Fridays on the same boat that carried Miss Finn back and forth from Brooklyn. A canvas sack went first to the little store on Barren Island, the so-called post office where it was sorted and sent on to Barren Shoal by rowboat. My father read Aunt Sara’s note aloud at dinner that night after reading it first to himself: Talk to him, Sol. Next time they’ll kill him. And for what? Why does he still believe the answer is UNION? Your loving sister, Sara.
My father returned the next morning on a loaded scow in time for his shift in the cutting room. When he came home that evening, he described a bruise on Uncle David’s face that left him with what my father called his “parrot eye.”
“There’s this big splotch of red...”
“Blood?” asked Noah.
“Blue-red like raspberries.”
Wild raspberries grew on Barren Shoal on vines tangled in with marsh brush and poison ivy. The berries ripened in July and August, the beach plums in September, and whatever we picked and did not eat right that very minute our mothers put up in jars for the winter.
“Raspberries are magenta,” Noah corrected him.
“On top of the magenta a blotch of purple—okay Mr.-Know-The-Word-of-Everything?—halfway down his face. More black & bluesers up and down his left arm, and a deep cut over his parrot eye, all swollen out to here.” He held his finger an inch away from Noah’s brow. “He coulda lost that eye.”
The following night my father came home late from work. Instead of smelling the factory when I hugged him, I smelled liquor. Mr. Stavros, the loader who had brought Sofia’s family to Barren Shoal, had been crushed to death that afternoon. The bosses refused to blow the emergency horn, which would have brought the entire plant to a halt. The details were not clear.
“Boyle gave us some nonsense about the back half of a horse tied by a rope to its front end, and how only the head and legs had been completely removed. How could this be? The horses get cut in pieces before it gets to the loaders. It’s supposed to go by Dowd or Paradissis or me. Where did this horse come from? How did it get to the chute?”
My mother led him to the table. “Your hands are shaking. I’ll make some tea.”
Mr. Stavros evidently threw the legs and head into the cauldron. Two larger parts of the torso came sliding down the loading chute, knocking him over and crushing him. Just like that. The plant foreman said Mr. Stavros never knew what hit him. What else would he say? That Mr. Stavros suffered? That he was terrified and in agony? The higher the power, the greater the silence.
When I asked my father to explain, he muttered something to my mother in Yiddish and told me to find something better to think about. I never considered the obvious until much later. Someone deliberately tied the pieces of that horse together. Someone wanted Mr. Stavros to die in a bad way.
After the accident at the loading shoot, Mr. Boyle gave Mrs. Stavros and the six children two weeks to vacate their house. Mr. Paradissis took up a collection among the Greeks o
n Barren Shoal and Barren Island. My father passed the collection among the Jews, then gave it to Mr. Baldwin, a stoker and a Baptist, who sent it to the other black families. Mr. Baldwin handed it over to Mr. Dowd, Marie’s father, also a cutter. He saw to it that the Catholic priest who came to hear confession every third Sunday got it to Mrs. Stavros via the Greek Orthodox priest, who made a special trip over from Brooklyn to beg for the family to stay in their house until the end of their forty days of mourning. Rumor had it that the two priests had loud words with Mr. Boyle about that, but this all took place in Boyle’s office behind closed doors and was hearsay. I do not know where Mr. Stavros was buried or how the family went to the grave every day that first year like Greeks are supposed to, there being no cemetery on Barren Island. The Greek Orthodox priest arranged for the police boat to take the Stavros family to Sheepshead Bay. Otherwise they would have made this trip in the usual way, on an empty garbage scow heading back to Manhattan. From Sheepshead Bay they went to the rooms that the priest found for them in Astoria, near his church, one of the first Greek families to move there. Seven people in two sad rooms, the toilet down the hallway. My grandson Eric lives in a room that he calls a studio. He can call it whatever he likes; it is still a room.
Two years would pass without hearing another word about Uncle David being mixed up with the unions and without running across Joey Pessara alone with a girl, which just as likely means it was all going on without my knowing. After all, when Miss Finn announced the discovery of Pluto after we had worked hard to master the names of the eight known planets it turned out that Pluto had been there all along without anyone knowing. I wondered if there were even more planets. I worried, the way children do, if there were things about me that no one knew, including me. It did not help that Miss Finn pulled Sofia and me aside at the start of the school year and announced, “On Monday, girls, you’ll stay after with me, yes? For a lesson in hygiene.” Sofia was eleven and a half years old and I was ten.
