by Carol Zoref
We raced past wooden barrels that were lined up in soldierly rows. To the side of them were stacks of burlap bags. At the very upper reaches of the walls were some greasy windows where a little light was filtering through an overlay of grime. Below the windows were chutes and shafts and pipes poking out in every direction imaginable. They all funneled into or out of the furnace that was everything’s final destination. It did not matter.
I had never been inside the factory before, but all those years of imaginings and expectations collapsed in the face of my purpose. All that I cared about was finding my father. Useless drafts of air pushed through the open windows, all hot and damp and hopeless. The floor was thick with something slimy that seeped between my bare toes. The stench, which I had always imagined as something gaseous, became liquid inside my mouth, coating my throat and tongue.
Joey, still swinging his arms, charged into the cutting room. It was damp and hazy there too, but I found my father anyway, spotted his dark eyes and the dark wave of his hair. The sight of him made me stop. This was what I wanted. I wanted my father to make everything stop. He was hovering over a table with a butcher’s saw in one hand and the leg of an animal in the other. He was clutching it just above the hoof. Surrounding him, I could see, were more horses. They were stacked next to barrels, between more piles of burlap bags: whole ones and pieces of ones and legs in a pile here and heads in a pile there.
Some of them were still moving.
No. That was impossible. It was my own legs that were moving; it was my own legs giving way. I reached for my father, who was still holding the butcher’s saw and horse leg. I landed first on my knees; then my arms and legs splayed out into that filthy slime.
“Dad!” I wailed. My father dropped his butcher’s saw; the horse leg slid to the floor. I plowed my head into his legs, howling as wildly as my mother over Helen.
“Helen fell into the washtub,” said Sofia, sobbing. I had forgotten that she was running right behind me.
My father wiped his hands on the rough rag tucked around his waist. He pulled me up. What took him so long? He wiped my hands with his rag. “Come now!” cried Sofia.
My father pulled me away from him so he could see my face. His lips were trembling, the top one rolling over his teeth to cover his bite.
He did not ask if Helen was okay or if my mother was okay or anything about Noah. “Get them out of here!” he shouted at Joey.
My father ran ahead, stepping on horse heads and hindquarters when he had to and any other animal part that got in his way. These were no longer pathetic mounds of flesh to be transformed into fertilizer, or bones rendered into grease and glue. They had become cruel obstacles over which my father vaulted.
Joey hurried us out of the factory. We stumbled past everything my father had already raced over, grasping at one another, afraid of what our hands might land on as we struggled to keep our balance. The men we passed were silent now; I felt important. We were in the middle of a family tragedy and the lives that mattered most for that rare moment were ours, was mine.
My father was still calling my mother’s name when Sofia and I got back to the house. He ran upstairs, as if Helen might be there alive and unharmed, resting in our attic bedroom. Noah surfaced out of nowhere. “Down at the beach,” he said, his voice full of impatience, as if this was obvious.
My father followed Noah through the dune grass and the marshes. Yorgos jumped into the chase with Sofia, Joey, and me, no one waiting for anyone else to keep up even when I had to stop to pull the splinter out of my foot. The pain, no longer camouflaged by the rush of adrenaline, was climbing up the back of my leg. From the skin stuck a toothpick-length sliver of wood. The moment it was out, the pain disappeared to almost nothing. If I had taken it out sooner, the cut would have never gotten infected. Everything I thought of that day I thought of too late.
We found my mother in the cold water, up to her chest in it, Helen in her arms.
My father plunged in beside them, his arms lifted high to keep him steady. “What are you doing?” he cried.
“She’s so hot, Abe. Feel...” My mother raised Helen’s body. She did not notice the rest of us.
“Oh Rachel,” said my father, wrapping his arms around her and Helen, pressing his face into my mother’s hair. “It’s no good, no good.”
We stood in silence on the sand, watching them huddle. The tide lapped indifferently against our legs. Soon there were other people standing with us. First the women came down from the houses, startled away from their work by the commotion. Then the men arrived from the factory. Even Mr. Boyle had walked out, just like that.
Other than Mrs. Paradissis, who stood beside us, I could not bear the anguished faces of these grown men and women. Mrs. Paradissis, in a hushed tone, said something to Noah that I could not hear. My brother, my know-it-all brother, let his head fall against her thick shoulder. Yorgos cupped his hands around a match and lit a cigarette. He passed the cigarette to Joey, whose shirt was soaked with sweat. Sofia had hold of my hand. She was rubbing the tip of my thumb over and over, squeezing the nail. It did not feel good, but I would not have stopped her for anything.
I cannot say how long this went on or what my father said to my mother that convinced her to come out of the water. Neither Sofia nor Noah knows either. I can see my father rocking her in his arms until she was ready, then lifting Helen from my mother and carrying her body back to shore. Helen’s face was twisted, her lips blistered in a silent howl. Her skin was scorched and puckered. My mother’s arms were burned and blistering, too.
My father carried Helen that whole horrible journey back to our house with his lips touching her head. My mother walked beside him, one arm around her own waist and the other curled around Helen’s legs. She was sobbing as they walked, but if she was in pain from the burns on her arms it did not show. The rest of us followed behind, a funeral cortége for the service that had not yet taken place.
There were no doctors on Barren Shoal. It would have changed nothing. Helen was already dead from shock. You hardly hear of it these days, but children died from scalding all the time. Or often enough that it was not uncommon. But what did that matter? Helen’s body was laid out in my parents’ bedroom. Mrs. Paradissis sent Sofia next door to break off a piece of her aloe plant, the juice of which she was now squeezing onto my mother’s blistering arms. Yorgos and Joey returned to the house with Miss Finn, who was hugging one of those white, metal First Aid kits to her chest. Sweat had turned her blouse opaline grey.
Mr. Boyle sent the men back to work, including Joey and Mr. Paradissis. He brought Noah to the dock to speak to the bosses so someone would get word to shore. A message was carried by the next barge captain, who would hand it over to a boy in Brooklyn, who would deliver it to Uncle David and Aunt Sara, who did not have a telephone. A funeral would take place the next day.
When Miss Finn noticed me, she kissed my forehead. I could smell the lavender water she was wearing.
She touched my shoulder and I followed her into the room. We approached the bed where Helen was lying. I could not look.
“Steady,” said Miss Finn.
I opened my eyes and kissed Helen’s forehead the way Miss Finn had just kissed mine. When I kissed Helen I smelled seawater. When I straightened up I could smell the factory again.
Miss Finn wrapped surgical gauze around my mother’s burning arms and blistering fingers and soon my mother looked like she was wearing mittens. No: mittens are too benign. Boxing gloves. White ones.
My mother never complained about the pain itself, though the fact was she cried the whole time without ever once drawing her gaze from Helen. My mother was weeping for Helen and for the hollow inside herself that once held Helen, not for her own scorched skin. She never said, but I know this as well as I know anything.
My father held a small glass of brandy to my mother’s lips and, to my surprise, she drank it. Then he poured one for himself, though it was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. Experience tel
ls me it is unlikely that the alcohol did a thing to them or for them, but I understand his trying to dull their pain.
My mother’s weeping, muffled by the alcohol and who knows what else, became a low and constant moan. Anyone who has ever heard a foghorn would recognize the sound. My father’s face, usually red from the heat of the cutting room, was pale; his eyes, always full of expression, were cloudy. The whites had turned pink. “Go help them,” he said, motioning in the direction of the kitchen.
Sofia was chopping the ice block from our icebox into something resembling crushed ice, like Miss Finn told her to. Chips were flying everywhere, melting on contact with whatever they landed on. Mrs. Dowd was rolling the best of Sofia’s efforts into clean kitchen towels, which she handed to me to bring into the bedroom. Miss Finn swaddled these towels around my mother’s scalded arms.
“Take Sofia and find more ice,” said Mrs. Dowd.
Grandma Paradissis looked up from her needlework when we walked in. “Aya, aya, aya,” she said. Grandma Paradissis nodded rhythmically. “Aya, aya, aya,” she kept saying, even when she returned her attention to her sewing. “Aya, aya, aya.”
We returned with enough towels to shroud a mummy. This sounds childish, but it was true. Miss Finn was sitting with Mrs. Dowd at the kitchen table, charting the order in which families would donate their ice.
“They have to ice her until it doesn’t hurt,” Miss Finn was explaining.
“A couple of hours?” asked Mrs. Dowd.
“Days,” said Miss Finn.
Miss Finn left it to Mrs. Dowd to figure out a schedule, deciding who would provide food, who would give up their ice, who would store food for the people with no ice left, and so on. She juggled and adjusted. She could have cleared Napoleon’s way to Moscow, given the chance. Imagine what that would have done to the history.
“The Pessaras are not on the list,” Miss Finn pointed out.
“If they’re near food they’ll eat it,” said Mrs. Dowd.
“What about ice?”
“They’d eat that too.”
All day women were coming and going, bringing food and ice and their own muted fears to the house. Mr. DeWitt slaughtered a couple of his older chickens kosher style and made potted chicken on his stove in the guardhouse, probably the only man on Barren Shoal who could cook. Come evening, the men from the processing plant joined the rest of the people assembled in the yard, talking in low tones, smoking cigarettes, eating dinners standing up from plates carried over by their wives.
Sofia never left my side. When I stepped out into the yard she stepped with me; when I went to the outhouse she stood beside the door. She found two forks so we could share the lamb stew her mother brought for dinner. I could not eat, but I remember the sharp, clean smell of cinnamon and cloves.
Noah walked back and forth, checking on my father, checking on me. Sometimes he huddled outside with Joey and Yorgos, the three of them sharing a cigarette, but he was always watchful. They were discussing something I could not hear, going at it with all the seriousness that looked right for the day.
A handful of Jewish men and boys, including people called over from Barren Island, assembled in the kitchen come sundown to say Kaddish with my father. There were not the ten Jewish men needed to form a minyan, but they said the prayer anyway. Noah, to my surprise, knew the words.
“Doing okay?” asked my father when the prayers were done. He placed a hand on my shoulder, then the back of my neck, then my head, like he was checking to make sure that all the parts of me were there.
No one went home after they ate, not even women nursing infants, and the place was filled by the din of people murmuring. Mrs. Paradissis said I should get some sleep at their house.
“My babies stay in my house,” cried my mother. “Helen... Helen...”
She wailed Helen’s name as if our sister was as alive as Noah and me.
“Shhsssh, shhssh,” said Mrs. Paradissis. She combed her fingers through my hair in a sweet and comforting way, as if I was the one wailing.
The offer to stay at their house was impossible anyway, what with Sofia sleeping on the living room floor and Grandma Paradissis on the couch. Only Yorgos had his own room. If the Paradissis men were the kings, Yorgos had become emperor when he announced his plans for college.
“Can Sofia stay with me instead?” I asked Mrs. Paradissis.
She gazed at me, thinking, thinking, thinking, I am sure, about what bad luck it could bring if Sofia slept in Helen’s bed, the bed of a dead girl.
“Please?” I said. My sister was dead; I wanted what I wanted.
Mrs. Paradissis, however she came to it, must have decided that no curse would befall her if Sofia stayed.
“Okay, girls. Be sweet, girls. Kalinihta.”
“ ’Night, Mommy.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Paradissis.”
“Wait a second, girls,” she said.
Maybe she was going to change her mind. Instead, she stood arranging a plate of kourabiedes, the same special-occasion cookies that had once gotten us into so much trouble. She wrapped a napkin around the plate, which she handed to me. She then poured two small cups of milk, which she passed to Sofia.
We climbed up the narrow stairs, sat on the floor, and leaned our backs against my bed. We could hear adult voices rising from the kitchen, directly below us.
“My father says tomorrow you go to Brooklyn,” said Sofia. She might as well have said we were flying to Pluto, which was a real planet then, never mind this new hullabaloo over Pluto being a planet or something else. It is still Pluto, yes? It does not matter what the scientists call it; it is still there, circling the sun. Now, indeed, I digress.
I had not left Barren Shoal since Noah’s bar mitzvah three years earlier. Sofia, since arriving from Greece, had never traveled any further than across the shallows to Barren Island.
“For the funeral,” she explained.
I could not put the idea of Helen and a funeral together. And why should I have? Why expect me to understand?
“You’re coming?” I asked.
“Just your family,” she said. She got up to look out the window. We both heard voices below, but she cared more than I did. Or maybe all this grief was making her restless.
“What?” I asked.
“Some men,” she said, “with wood. A coffin.”
She sat down again and we ate all the kourabiedes, drank the milk, and agreed not to go downstairs to brush our teeth. The idea of saying goodnight again was unbearable, but I found myself hoping that Noah might come upstairs to check on us. He had never come up to our room in all the years Helen or I had slept there. Not once.
“I’m sleeping in your bed,” announced Sofia.
I crossed to Helen’s side of the room. I did not blame Sofia for not wanting to sleep there.
“I’m sleeping with you.”
We had shared my bed any number of times, Helen usually staying upstairs with us in her own bed instead of crawling in with my folks like we wished she would.
I turned away when I got under the covers instead of turning toward Sofia into the better position for girls trading secrets in the dark.
Sofia turned on her side too, settling us like spoons. It was the first time anyone had done that with me. She pulled her arm tight around me. I buried my face against my arm and I cried.
CHAPTER 6
My parents’ door was closed in the morning, Noah’s room was empty, and there was no sign of the coffin other than the wrinkled pinewood shavings in the yard. The kitchen was still and in order, and on the table sat a cut glass vase—I did not recognize it, it must have come from someone else—filled with marigolds. Beside it were: a fresh-baked walnut coffee cake that still smelled warm; a bowl of purple-skinned plums, the size and shape of pullet eggs; Irish soda bread with raisins; and a shimmering dish of hand-cut marmalade. Knives, forks, and teaspoons had been set out too, positioned as if someone meant to assemble one of those beautiful old Dutch still-life paintings.
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The better of my two dresses, freshly ironed, was hanging from the doorframe to Noah’s room, as were trousers and a shirt for Noah. Our shoes had been polished and placed in a row, including Sofia’s. The floor was immaculate; the broom was tucked between the icebox and the stove instead of in its usual place by the back door. It would be difficult to retrieve except for someone with longer arms than mine.
Sofia reached for a knife.
I placed my fingertips on the warm coffee cake. “Not for us.”
“Why no...” She stopped herself. “Come.” She led us across the narrow clamshell path between our houses. It was long past dawn; the sunlight reflecting off the water surrounding Barren Shoal was brighter than the rising sun itself. Mr. Paradissis was in the yard tending his beehives before going to the plant; Grandma Paradissis was curled over her needlework, a never-empty basket of socks and napkins and shirts that needed mending. Yorgos was who-knows-where, much to my relief.
Mrs. Paradissis was preparing cheese and tomato sandwiches. She had to be using a loaf of yesterday’s bread because the kitchen did not smell of baking. This meant it was Wednesday, washday. A box of Ivory soap flakes was sitting on the table and a washtub was propped against a wall. Getting it ready for her mother was Sofia’s chore, just the same as I did for mine.
“You girls sleep?” asked Mrs. Paradissis, her eyes never straying from her cutting board and knife.
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Marta?” asked Mrs. Paradissis. She did not make eye contact with me either.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
I had fallen off fast, Sofia’s arm tucked around me and the arrhythmic banging of hammers drowning out the men’s voices. Later in the night, when they had finished and it grew quiet, I woke again and again, afraid that if I moved, Sofia’s arm would move too.
