Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “What did we do?” Sofia asked.

  Just then, Joey swiped my lunch out of my hands.

  “Hey!” I cried, reaching to grab it back, but Joey swallowed my sandwich in a couple of sticky bites that he chewed with his mouth open.

  I did not tell Miss Finn about Joey. He stole my lunch that day; the next day it would be someone else’s or who knows, maybe mine again. Joey’s thieving was partly from necessity and partly for sport. We knew that he was hungry—why else would a boy pick through corpses on a barge?—but Joey also stole because he liked getting away with it. He had delight in his eyes when he snatched the sandwich out of my hands.

  Joey’s parents came to Barren Shoal from villages near Sulmona, a valley town in Abruzzi near Mount Morrone in Italy. Sulmona had a Renaissance fountain, churches built by the town’s padrones, cobblestone streets in the fashionable sections, and market days filled with buyers and sellers from the surrounding villages. Sofia knew about it from Yorgos, who was Joey’s friend. Joey’s father, Ezio, came from Antonni, a village partway up the mountain and so poor that nobody there but the priest had enough to eat except in late spring, when wild greens pushed up through the limestone. A lot of the people there starved to death, especially children. A lot of women on the verge of starvation died in childbirth, after which their newborn babies died too.

  Ezio’s own father—Joey’s grandfather and also the father of five other children—instructed Ezio to go to Sulmona on the first market day after his fifteenth birthday, some six weeks after his mother died giving birth to the last of his brothers. He was to wait until he spotted a policeman, then steal something off the cart of the closest farmer and make a half-hearted attempt to run away. The plan was for Ezio to get arrested, hopefully without being too badly beaten. He was young and had all his teeth—if he survived the beating, the police would hand him over to the army. Forget about starving to death in Antonni like the others, his father told him; Ezio would become a soldier. With a full belly, a clever boy like Ezio might get a promotion.

  Ezio was not convinced that the army was going to fatten up a half-starved boy from Mount Morrone just to fill another spot in the barracks; he was not so sure that he was cut out to be a soldier. Partway down the mountain, Ezio stopped to get some water from a spring. He spotted a donkey pulling a cart up the road from Sulmona. At the reins was a man who was sleeping, no doubt confident that the donkey knew his way home.

  Ezio ripped the sleeves off his shirt.

  As the donkey came to a halt to drink from the spring, Ezio jumped onto the cart and tied a sleeve around the farmer’s mouth. Then he tied the farmer’s hands behind his back, lifted him off his seat, and set him down behind some rocks so someone could find him but not too soon. It would take the farmer a long time to shimmy down to the road, tied up the way he was. The farmer, fully awake now and struggling, kicked at Ezio, knocking him off his feet. Ezio threw a fistful of dirt in the farmer’s face to blind him, and landed two kicks to the small of his back before making off with the cart. In the cart were baskets of string beans, a wheel of white cheese, and the farmer’s jacket. At least that is how Joey told it.

  Ezio rode past Sulmona and onto Rome, eating cheese and trading baskets of string beans for bread and wine. When he arrived at the port at Civitavecchia, he sold the donkey and cart to a Gypsy family—Romany, you should excuse me—and with that money plus a job cleaning the ship’s latrines, bought a steerage ticket to America. His only possessions were the last basket of string beans, a half wheel of cheese, and the farmer’s blue jacket, which he never removed for the eight days it took to cross the Atlantic. On the ship he met a girl two years younger, also from a village near Sulmona, who was being sent by her family to be a maid in the house of the cousin who paid for her ticket. Ezio decided that this coincidence of her coming from Abruzzi was a sign from above absolving him of the sin of stealing the cart. By the time they docked in New York, the girl was on her way to becoming the mother of Joey’s oldest brother.

  The cousin who paid her way looked for her all along the pier. After finding her name on the ship’s manifest, he reported her missing to the harbormaster and returned home empty-handed to the equally angry disappointment of his wife. A year after Joey’s parents died of the influenza, Joey’s oldest brother—the same boy conceived on the ship—tried to give Joey away to this cousin as a servant in order to “settle the debt.” The cousin laughed at the sight of Joey, six years old then with legs bowed from rickets, and took Joey’s ten year old brother instead.

  This story did not change the fact that Joey wolfed down my sandwich that day in school. Sofia gave me half of hers, a cold piece of leftover bluefish with grilled eggplant. There was also a ripe tomato that we shared, plus a very small piece of pound cake that my mother gave me for a snack. When Miss Finn gave us arithmetic problems after lunch, we knew from being hungry that one half a sandwich plus one half a sandwich equals only one sandwich, even when it has to equal two lunches.

  The older students were reading aloud from Julius Caesar and we could hear Marie Dowd saying, “‘If I could pray to move, prayers would move me; But I am constant as the northern star...’” The older students read Julius Caesar aloud every year, and every one of those times, that northern star made me think of Pluto, and how only one year, then two years, then three years before, no one even knew it existed. I was getting old enough to wonder about everything I did not know about the world, never mind not know about myself.

  We were hungry after school and walked to the dunes in search of late summer beach plums and a place where we would not be bothered. We cut a wide circle past where Noah, Yorgos, and Joey were fishing. We did not want to be forced to do errands for them, like running their catch home to be cleaned. Just the week before, Yorgos threw seaweed at Sofia to chase us away from one of their outings. The boys were always together now, although only one year ago they had ignored each other. Noah was an introvert, Yorgos was arrogant, and Joey was...well, Joey was Joey, a guy who ate trash and stole sandwiches from little kids. They did not seem to have much in common, but on a small island there is not much choice.

  “I could hear your parents fighting last night,” I said.

  Our little houses were so close that we could hear the clinking of knives and forks when the windows were open, never mind the loud clashes between people. “That was my grandmother going crazy,” Sofia explained. “My father told Mommy last night that Mr. Kostas got a job in the Bronx and it was suddenly like Grandma got all her hearing back.” Mr. Kostas was from the one other Greek family that lived on Barren Shoal. It meant the world to Grandma Paradissis—who everyone said was stone deaf and very lonely though we all knew she could hear some—to have someone outside the family to complain to in Greek. “Grandma called Daddy a liar and threw a pot of dandelion weeds in his face.”

  “From the stove?”

  “It was cooled,” she assured me, “but there were weeds all over and my mother was yelling at my father that he was stupid and should clean them up and Grandma was crying and Yorgos told them all to shut up and knocked the table over. Ba yelled at me to clean up the mess and I said, ‘Why me?’ and he said, ‘Because I said so.’” Ba was what she called him instead of Dad or Daddy. It was like calling him “Pa.”

  Then she said something in Greek I did not understand but which I knew was a curse. Not a profanity, but like the evil eye.

  “Your family fights a lot,” I observed.

  “They weren’t fighting,” she insisted, though I knew the constant tumult embarrassed her. Families on Barren Shoal tried to argue quietly, yelling and shouting in whispers so that their neighbors, who lived right on top of them, a breath away in houses that were barely better than shacks, could not hear. “They’re just loud,” she said, which was also true.

  “Your grandma threw food in your father’s face! That’s not fighting?”

  “She’s his mother.” Sofia shrugged as if this made sense.

  Commotion was
the electricity that turned all the wheels in the Paradissis house. What turned the wheels in the Eisenstein house? I want to say worry, but even that is not quite it. It was more of a perpetual, low-grade fear, an existential fever that never broke.

  “What kind of job?” I asked. Fortune on Barren Shoal was measured by a job somewhere else that did not smell. My father should only be so lucky was what I thought.

  “What?” she asked. She had kneeled down by a vine that was full of beach plums.

  “Mr. Kostas. His new job.”

  “How should I know?” she said, concentrating on pulling the plums from the stems without bursting them.

  “You were right there. I could hear them all the way next door. I couldn’t fall asleep and...”

  “You should’ve tried counting sheep instead of poking your nose into someone else’s business. Am I the only one working here?”

  I kneeled down. “They could’ve been quieter.” My mother had said the same exact thing about sheep when I went downstairs to complain. “Which sheep?” I asked Sofia, as I had asked my mother the night before. “Dead or alive sheep? The sheep on the garbage barge or the ones in the meadow?”

  The newspapers had reported that the city was thinking of moving the sheep out of Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. There was concern that people from the shantytown there would steal them and eat them. They would ship sheep to the country rather than feed them to hungry people. But there were lots of reports in the newspapers about things the city said it would do but never did. Like turn all of Jamaica Bay into a shipping port. There was an article about that in the paper too, but Mr. Boyle told the men that the city said the same thing twenty years earlier. He reminded them that nothing came of that either.

  “You’re disgusting,” Sofia said.

  “Says who?” I answered. I continued picking.

  “Says me,” she said.

  “And who are you?” I emptied a handful of plums into the bucket.

  We got quiet and stayed quiet while we searched the dunes for more ripe plums, which we ate on the walk back home.

  My mother was polishing Helen’s school shoes, the way she did every night, when I returned. Helen was at the table shelling peas, an easy enough chore for a little girl. She would count a few, get distracted by a pod that was hard to open, lose count, and start all over again from One. She did not become frustrated. Helen was the lucky youngest child of our trio. She thought that everyone in the house but her was an adult, including Noah and me, who she sometimes called Daddy or Momma by mistake. It must have been something to feel so well protected.

  “More beach plums,” I announced, setting down the fluted piece of newspaper in which I carried home my share of what was left. September was the time for putting up preserves and my mother was also filling jars with tomatoes and string beans, pickling eggplants and beets and cucumbers to last the winter.

  Helen reached for the beach plums.

  “Not for you,” I snapped. I shook her hand to open her fingers.

  “Let me go,” Helen complained.

  I pried her fingers apart and took away all but the two with split skins. Sticky juice leaked all over Helen’s little palms and onto mine.

  “Where’s Noah?” my mother asked.

  “With Yorgos and Joey.” I pulled Helen to the sink, washed our hands, and returned her to the peas.

  “Where?” she asked, holding up Helen’s shoe to examine her handiwork.

  “Fishing.”

  “The more time they spend fishing, the less they bring home.” She smiled a little, but her voice was full of resignation.

  “They said it’s none of my business. They threw seaweed at us.”

  “Who?”

  “The other day. All of them.”

  “Don’t bother those boys.”

  “Momma!”

  “You can stand there complaining or you can bring in the washtub before it rains,” she said, turning her attention back to Helen’s shoes.

  The laundry tub was large and was kept outside. We only brought it in when my mother washed our laundry, which she did in the kitchen where she boiled the water.

  “And remember your shoes.” She made us polish our own shoes every night as soon as we were old enough. Every single school night. As if our shoes were not covered again in dust by the time we reached the schoolhouse. As if the shoes she was shining that day for Helen and later for my father would protect us from the sorry state of affairs in Europe and the hundred-and-one diseases and infections that could have struck any of us without warning or from the Depression. Half the country was now out of work and still my mother polished.

  At dinner that night my father described how an unused, rotting pier was being replaced before it collapsed. He said that one of the carpenters told Mr. Boyle that all the tools supplied by the plant were falling apart. My father overheard this and told Boyle that the knives in the cutting room were falling apart too.

  “I told him we can keep sharpening the blades, but that won’t stop the handles from wearing down.”

  “Be careful of him, Sol,” she said. “Boyle is not your friend. Don’t forget that.”

  “I can talk to the man,” said my father. He was twirling a clean teaspoon between his fingers like a baton. “There’s a way things work at the factory that you can’t understand unless...”

  I drifted away. I wondered what Sofia and I had done to make Miss Finn think we needed hygiene instruction. Sofia and I did not spit; we did not eat from the barge like Joey, that filthy pig; we arrived at school with our hands and faces clean. We were unworldly girls with limited possibilities; we were girls who lived with the inescapable stench of Barren Shoal, but that did not make us dirty.

  After I washed the dishes I went to find Sofia. Crossing the broken clamshell path between the houses, I could hear Mr. Paradissis shouting in Greek and the thwunk of him pounding his fist on the table.

  “What’s going on?” I asked through the open door.

  “Something about a broken hatchet,” Sofia translated.

  “My father talked about it at dinner!” I said, as if it were something greater than coincidence.

  She slipped through the doorway and we went out back to the bench that Yorgos had built out of driftwood.

  “Ba was splitting the back of a draft horse this afternoon. The blade stuck in the horse but the handle stayed in Ba’s hand. He spent an extra hour after his shift mending it together, but didn’t get an extra hour’s pay. Mr. Boyle said it’s Ba’s fault the hatchet was broken and maybe he should even be docked for breaking it.”

  We sat facing each other as if the bench was a seesaw.

  “My father said the men asked for new tools.”

  “My father said your father is wasting his time with Mr. Boyle.”

  “I don’t wanna stay tomorrow,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Miss Finn.”

  “It’s because my father was listening to Gus Hall on the radio.” She was swinging her legs so that her shoes dragged on the dirt.

  “I meant Miss Finn and her hygiene business.”

  “I’m saying: it’s on account of Ba and Gus Hall. The newspaper said Gus Hall is a dirty communist.”

  I laughed. “Not that kind of dirty—not like he needs a bath. That’s not why she said hygiene. They mean he’s evil.”

  “Don’t make fun of my English, little girl.” Swing, swing, swing.

  “What does Miss Finn know about your father, anyway?”

  “She came to the house.”

  “TO DO WHAT?” I slammed one of my hands on each of her knees to keep her still. The way Sofia took her time explaining was driving me crazy. Well, that is one thing that never changed.

  “About Mr. Stavros,” she said.

  “Mr. Stavros has been dead forever.” By then it had been two years.

  “To bring my parents news about his family. Things Mrs. Stavros won’t ask anyone to write for her in a letter.”

  The episo
de was still the subject of widespread speculation.

  “What’s Mrs. Stavros got to do with us?” I asked. I wondered if this had something to do with Mr. Kostas leaving Barren Shoal, but I could not put the pieces together.

  “Miss Finn says Mrs. Stavros still cries all day; she yells at the priest when he comes to see her. Miss Finn says she worries for the children. She says her being in mourning for so long, the way Mrs. Stavros is, is unhealthy. That it’s contagious. That she’s making the children sick.”

  “Not that kind of contagious. Not like measles or influenza.”

  “I told you, little girl...” she said, wagging a finger at me as a reminder not to tease her. “The children cry all day, too.”

  “What did Miss Finn say about Gus Hall?” I asked.

  “What...are...you...talking...about?” she asked, pausing after each word. I was not the only one who could sound condescending.

  “That’s where you started. Your father listening to the radio.” The sun was setting now; with the dusk came more dampness and biting bugs. It was time to go in.

  “Better than what your father listens to, Kimosabe.” In addition to the communists, Mr. Paradissis also tuned into the Lone Ranger. Not my father, who listened to the Yiddish radio shows on WLTH and WEVD. Sometimes he would have us children sit with him, even though we barely understood a word of Yiddish. It hardly mattered when they were playing music and he would take turns dancing with each of us, including Noah. Later on we would listen with him to Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. And in the darkest hours he would sometimes have us listen to Father Coughlin broadcasting live from his radio pulpit in Detroit about...the international conspiracy of greedy Jewish bankers... filthy, bloodsucking, Christ-killing vermin who eat the feces of swine...Sometimes my father would have Noah or me sit with him. I understand his point now, that it is important to know what people who hate us are thinking, but we were just children. Did we have to know so soon? Did it change anything to know how much people hated us? Did it make us any safer? Was there some purpose in our being defined by someone else’s hate? Is it any surprise that we would define ourselves that way too? What does it mean to be a Jew? Aha! A complicated question with a complicated answer but for this: a Jew is a person who an anti-Semite hates. So I repeat: is there any purpose in this at all?