Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “Noah,” I now whispered loud, trying to get his attention across the classroom. I pointed to the article about the newly decommissioned Recovery Act. I asked one of the Dowd kids, who was seated across from me, to pass it over.

  “Now you see why we were in Union Square, whether Dad believes us or not,” he said, reaching for the paper. He had grown too tall to tuck his knees beneath the school desk, and they banged against the underside. He had grown too big for everything about Barren Shoal with a suddenness that showed on his face not as anger, but as the discomfited posture of someone counting subway stops only to realize that he has boarded the wrong train.

  “They’re gonna take away fair working hours, minimum wages, collective bargaining, the unions,” he said. He was ready to step up on the stage again at Union Square. “If we go on strike here, on Barren Shoal, no one’s gonna write about it in the newspaper. No one’s gonna give a damn.” His voice strained with frustration. “We’ve got to make noise where people will hear it. It’s our time.” He snapped his fingers, emphasizing his point. He had never been good at doing this, but now his fingers flew like he was clapping small, wet stones. Miss Finn, who had been ignoring our whispering, could no longer overlook it.

  “Is there something you’d like to share?” she asked in the same weary voice of a thousand schoolteachers who came before her, who would follow after. Now that Yorgos was working at the factory, the idea of the “you” was noticeably smaller. If it shrank any further, how many of “us” would be left? Marie Dowd would soon be leaving for Hunter College; Noah would be leaving for somewhere too, though he had not said so. I just knew. Once the signs begin showing, it is impossible to not see them everywhere.

  “The National Recovery Act,” said Noah. “They’ve taken that away too.”

  “Who is they?” asked Miss Finn, never one to let it go when we were imprecise.

  “The Supreme Court,” said Noah.

  “And therefore?” she asked again. “Accurate articulation,” she reminded him, “leads to accurate thinking.” What she did not take into account is that propaganda is the most skillful articulation of all.

  “Workers have lost everything,” said Noah. The tips of his ears turned red when the whole class looked at him. “Business can go back to doing whatever it wants. The regulations are overturned; the protection is gone.”

  “You speak as if these were rights that people are born with,” said Miss Finn, echoing our father’s words from the other night.

  “‘The inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Inalienable. Meaning we’re born with it,” said Noah. Noah believed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He took them personally, the way he took most everything. “I’m not going to live on Barren Shoal forever doing homework.”

  “Though you will tomorrow,” said Miss Finn, with a chuckle.

  “Like I said: not forever.”

  “So this is only about you?” she said, pushing him.

  Noah’s ears got that about-to-burst red look again. “It’s about all of us. Right now, right here, even in this classroom.”

  “Is anything about everyone?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he stammered. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “Perhaps it’s best to settle down and think about that.”

  I thought about it too, though obviously not in the way that Noah did. I am certain that Sofia thought about it as well, as did every chronically curious child in that room. How could we not?

  Another letter arrived from my mother’s family in Zyrmuny, a battered envelope already yellowed like old newsprint. My mother sat at the table, carefully slitting it open with a kitchen knife. She read it, set it down on the table, and gently smoothed it with her scarred hands.

  “So?” asked my father.

  She looked at him. “‘For God’s sake, help us.’ That’s all.”

  You would think that this was not the kind of plea someone would need to write twice; you would think there would have already been some help for them; you would think that what was happening would not have happened, should not have happened; you would think that there would have been a way to stop the insanity. Except nothing insane was happening in Europe; there was no epidemic of mental illness, no black plague of psychosis. People had choices. The choices they made were disastrous. They were unforgivable.

  “I’ll go back to HIAS,” said my father. Not a week had passed since my father talked with Mr. Schwartzbart, who had made no promises, who had said nothing about time, which could be any amount at all, or even which country might take the family.

  “You don’t think he’s seen a hundred letters just like this?” said my mother.

  “If he’s seen a hundred, it won’t kill him to see a hundred and one.”

  “They’ll be murdered whether Schwartzbart sees the letter or not.”

  My father pounded his fist on the table. “What do you expect?” Pound, pound. “He said he’ll do the best he can.”

  Which was not true. I was there; I heard him. The best was what my father had asked for; Mr. Schwartzbart said he would try.

  “And now? What? We still wait?” said my mother.

  “You have a better idea?”

  It is 65 years later and still no one has the answer.

  Everything that we ate for dinner that night we harvested from the garden or pulled from the sea: a couple of sweet flounder that Noah caught in the bay; fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with minced eggplant; sliced tomatoes with basil. For dessert my mother made rice pudding that we ate warm right from the oven. My father was digging into his second serving when Noah said he was going out, which meant he was going to meet up with the boys and do whatever it was they did until they finally quit being out and came in. I had hovered around Sofia after school that day, but she did not want to talk about the prospects of being pregnant any more than my parents wanted to discuss the situation in Zyrmuny. Silence had been silently agreed upon for both problems. Is that how it happens? You stay silent about this and silent about that until the worst possible things become easy to be silent about too?

  I slipped out of the house after dinner. Anyone would have guessed I was going next door to Sofia. I walked, instead, past the Paradissis house and up the sand road to the schoolhouse to find Miss Finn. There was enough moonlight that night for me to see the eyes of the rats skittering across the road and the feral cats chasing them. As I approached the school, I saw Miss Finn leaving. I was about to call out when I realized it was Katrine, not Miss Finn, walking down the road toward the factory.

  I do not know what went into my decision to follow her, which I did so quietly that she never noticed me over the usual sounds of the tide, the cats yawing, and the night sounds of the factory. It is a lousy thing to do, to spy on someone like that. Though I have never done it again—and I have certainly done worse—it is not a moment that I am proud of. And still, I would not do any different if I could do it over.

  Katrine was walking briskly, one of Miss Finn’s canvas grocery bags slung over her shoulder. Upon reaching the dock, she emptied the contents of two jars onto a garbage scow, then turned around and walked back up the road. I jumped into a shadow, listened to the water rats moving about the docks, breathed in the stench from the scow and the furnaces, and saw the new ashes drifting from the smokestack across the factory, then downwind into the bay. I counted Katrine’s footsteps until I could no longer hear them, until I was certain she was back at the school.

  She and Miss Finn would see me for certain if I went home the usual way. If I went through the brush instead, I would have to walk through the poison ivy beds. I removed my shoes, grabbed my dress and pulled it high around my waist. Then I dropped into the oily, scummy shallows and waded until I was far past the schoolhouse and in the water closest to home.

  CHAPTER 16

  When I stopped by for Sofia in the morning, she was telling her mother that she had cramps and needed to miss school. Yorgos was long
gone to work and the house, which should have been settled into the new quiet of the day, was filled with turmoil.

  “What a terrible girl!” cried Mrs. Paradissis, evidently more upset by Sofia mentioning cramps in front of her still-recuperating father than she was about Sofia feeling unwell. Unwell. That was the code word. Do girls use it anymore?

  Mrs. Paradissis glared at Sofia and tipped her chin twice in the direction of Mr. Paradissis, leaving no doubt about Sofia’s blunder. Mr. Paradissis, who was paging through The Daily Worker, paid them no mind. Some frantic seagulls were passing overhead, marking the arrival of another barge; the mean stench of the factory meant it was going full blast.

  “I...just...can’t...go,” Sofia moaned. She was bent over at the waist, gripping her legs just below the knees, and gagging.

  Grandma Paradissis looked up from her stitching, smiling her toothless smile. Grandma could not hear what Sofia was saying, but Grandma knew she was saying something.

  “Porta o Theos,” Grandma muttered, lost in whatever it was she imagined she had heard. God willing.

  Sofia rushed off to Yorgos’ room, slamming the door behind her. Mr. Paradissis, who had promised every year to build a room upstairs in the eves for Sofia and Grandma, shouted at his wife to tell Sofia to not slam doors. Grandma Paradissis resumed chanting Porta o Theos and shooed me out the door.

  Joey was standing boot high in a scow when I passed by the dock, shoveling something in a green-black state of purification into the wooden cart that would transfer it to the sorting room, where the carcass would be hoisted away from the other, already desiccated bones and rotting flesh so that another team of men, which included Yorgos, could haul it to the cutting room. That is how it went all day, every day. Joey was taking short drags off the cigarette clenched between his long, stained teeth. The cloud of tobacco could not keep away all the gnats and flies fighting to nest in the corners of his eyes.

  “What are you looking at?” Joey hollered when he noticed me.

  He smirked and thrust his hip in my direction. He could have been an Elvis Presley, that Joey, if he had any talent for being anything other than a creep. The fact that he was sinking in rotting flesh meant nothing. Joey was an ass, if you do not mind my saying so. I would have ripped out his throat had I been close enough, or strong enough, or been able to go through with it.

  “What are you looking at?” he shouted again. He was resting a foot on the haunch of a putrefied horse. He cleared his throat and spat a yellow glob of saliva into the water.

  “Nothing, Joey,” I said. “What I’m looking at is absolutely nothing.”

  Everyone was so preoccupied with what mattered to them most that no one could see the changes in what mattered to others. Sofia was absorbed by her possible pregnancy, and who could blame her, though no one beyond Miss Finn and me knew why she was so weepy. Her moods were explained away as a girls-being-girls thing, meaning that girls were not only allowed, but were expected to be unpredictably emotional. Miss Finn was busy finding an answer for Sofia’s situation; Mr. Paradissis was consumed by the pain in his still-healing ribs; Noah and Yorgos and Joey were obsessed with the struggle to unionize the plant; and my father was struggling to get our relatives out of Zyrmuny while keeping Noah out of jail and my mother on this side of sanity. Nobody—there is not an ounce of melodrama in this, I swear—no one was keeping an eye on me. But this happens all the time. Anyone can slip through the cracks.

  Miss Finn gave us a whole assortment of arithmetic problems, penmanship exercises, and maps to draw that day. I did not touch them. How could I do anything but imagine how Sofia felt? I answer with another question: How could I not?

  I passed the day eavesdropping on the other lessons, staring out the windows, daydreaming. I smoothed out some paper that had been used on only one side and drew a picture of a garbage scow. I left out Joey and Katrine and any of the other scavengers who, at that very moment, were sifting through the one tied up at the pier. Drawing people was too hard. I outlined and shaded the bow and stern, the bilge and the deckhouse, and the fat posts on which the longshoremen knotted the ropes. I drew the cargo hold and the cargo itself. All that was sneakily tossed onto the scows meant fewer horses and far more of everything else than was ever meant to be there. A pile of putrefying horse heads could easily disguise all of this unidentifiable stuff as it decomposed into the oozing, amorphous mass.

  I left my seat once to use the outhouse. I felt detached and determined as a sleepwalker; I was there and I was not there. For lunch I peeled a hard-boiled egg that I ate in a couple of bites. Yes, it was too much all at once; yes, pieces of egg stuck in my throat until I could not breathe. Noah slapped my back to stop my choking.

  “Where’ve you been all day?” he asked. His question, like him, came out of nowhere. His attention had been focused on Marie Dowd after she got news that week of her acceptance into Hunter. Noah was probably calculating how Marie could become his emissary to that new world.

  “Where have you been?” I said, coughing out little bits of egg into my hand. I raised my eyes in Marie’s direction, implying some kind of design on her that Noah never had. “I’ve been right here. All day. Doing nothing.”

  “Joey’s in trouble,” said Noah. Slap, slap, slap. “Breath deep, Marta.”

  I coughed some more and sneezed whatever was left in my throat onto Noah’s shirt. If Noah knew about Sofia, that meant Yorgos also knew. After Yorgos murdered Joey, he would kill Sofia as well. It was impossible to imagine otherwise.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Noah. He brushed away the bits of egg and wiped his hand on my skirt.

  “What are we gonna do?” I asked, still struggling to swallow. I slapped his hand away from my skirt.

  “Who told you?”

  “Sofia.” I could feel the heat of my blush rising, which turned me even redder. It was not like she could hide this forever.

  “How does she know?” he sputtered.

  “What?” The remnants of egg were gurgling in my throat. The sulfur smell was disgusting.

  “Quit it, Marta. This is serious. Some union guys are trying to track him down. Remember those guys he went to see with Massimo?” Noah was so anxious to say what he wanted that he forgot I had said something else.

  “You got what you wanted, for the union to come to Barren Shoal.”

  “These guys that control the ports are waging their own little turf war now that they think we’re getting somewhere with organizing,” he said. “They’re going nuts.”

  “You wanted a union; now you’ve got two. I’d call that a blessing.”

  “Shut up and listen. Joey, that moron, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and got all chummy with the guys who handle the garbage who, it turns out, take orders from some other guys back in Italy. It’s all got something to do with a fascist syndicate against the communists and I don’t know what, except that one of the barge pilots said there were guys in suits on the dock in Brooklyn who he’d never seen before talking about coming over in a few weeks.”

  “To Italy?” I did not know the word schadenfreude, but it must have been invented to describe siblings.

  “Are you gonna be serious or what? C’mon already.”

  What I had thought was the smell of eggs was the smell of Noah being scared. His sweat smelled rotten-sour instead of its usual boy-sourness. If some men in suits had been looking for me, I would have been scared out of my skin too.

  The captain evidently explained to the union men how it was impossible to hitch a ride on the barge unless they lived on Barren Shoal, a long-standing factory rule meant to keep out “agitators” and do-gooders from the settlement houses. He could not tell if they were from the garbage union or the longshoremen. The guys in suits roughed the captain up, after which he gave them the name of a tugboat that could bring them over. So much for the rules. The barge captain, with his split lip and swollen jaw, was the one who told Yorgos, who told Noah and Joey that they were coming.

  “What do they want
with Joey? The guy is useless.”

  “They wanna beat the crap out of him, which they’ll do unless we slip him outta here first. I don’t know if someone saw him at the Union Square rally or something else. I don’t know who they are; I don’t know why they want him. Yorgos says they’re trying to get to Massimo. They might even kill him. Or at least mess him up bad enough so Massimo knows they mean business.”

  “Why not just go for Massimo?”

  “Because there’s no point messing up Massimo when they can smack around Joey. They want something from Massimo, which they won’t get if they bust him up. They’re sending a message.”

  “So they’re coming? Are they coming now?”

  “The barge captain said not for a few days. They want to make sure Joey’s good and scared waiting. And to give Massimo time to come around.”

  There were people—Mrs. Dowd, for one—who were born and raised and had grown into adults on Barren Shoal and had never left, not once. When did leaving Barren Shoal become so easy?

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But we gotta get outta here.”

  “What are you saying? Who? Where?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve gotta figure this out.”

  “Joey’s brothers—can’t they help? Shouldn’t Massimo fix this?”

  Could the Pessara brothers have gotten a decent price for Joey, they would have sold him. No wonder their parents named him Joey.

  Miss Finn made quiet preparations to take Sofia to Brooklyn and for me to go along with them; Noah and Yorgos made quiet plans to tell Mike Sierra they needed help; my father made his own plans for another trip to HIAS. We all ended up on the barge together on a glum day, none of us saying where we were going or why, everyone so absorbed by their own concerns that none of us paid attention to anyone else, or to the other boats in the bay, or to the seagulls trailing our wake, or to the light and steady rain.