The Witch and the Borscht Pearl

by Angela Zeman

  My house is the first and only thing that’s ever been mine. After Ike’s death, I’d filled it only with what I loved, not caring about decorating or tradition. On my income, it left the place pretty bare, but what was there, was private. Except you already know about my oversized bath tub.

  As for sex, humans were created with sex as the main driving force in their lives, don’t give me that mouthwashed bull about the different drives of men and women. Even cars are sold with sex. Pete’s saxophone is the horniest horn I ever met. We all live our lives managing our longing for sex, or if you were brought up on the hidebound version, repressing our longing for sex. So do I go around sleeping with every male I meet? It’s a rare man I’d share a drinking glass with, let alone my body. That’s the catch. Charlie? Well, I’ve gotten to know Charlie in the last two years.

  I jerked myself out of my daydreams and returned to the paper. If I wasn’t careful, I’d waste the whole morning, and stacks of work waited.

  On page three I found it. I’d been distracted by the Lubavitchers and had missed it on the first pass. Cemetery vandalized, second time in a row. Same grave. Poor Solly. Too missed, too popular to let rest in peace? Somehow I doubted that that was the problem.

  With a sigh, I dug through the dried strawflowers to pull out the telephone. I gave Solly’s/Bella’s house a ring and made arrangements to meet Mrs. Risk after my shop closed.

  I pulled my list of orders over in front of me and set to work lining the baskets that would eventually hold pre-ordered Thanksgiving centerpieces (less grand than Bart Peacock’s, of course) of mums, ivy, and whatever else my customers desired. The live flowers would be inserted at the latest minute possible next Wednesday all day until late, through Thursday morning, in coordination with the delivery schedule Daniel and I both would execute. Turkey day was a week from tomorrow. Pearl’s night would arrive two days after that.

  “You want to do what?” exclaimed Charlie. His body half rose out of Mrs. Risk’s chair.

  “I called our friend at the cemetery,” Mrs. Risk began again patiently.

  I interrupted irritably, “Since when is he our friend? We just talked to him for a few minutes. Why do you have to make friends with everybody you meet?”

  “He who?” asked Charlie.

  “The guy at the cemetery. The caretaker, or whatever he is.”

  “Mr. Pollak. He’s the grounds attendant,” she corrected me.

  “The chief gravedigger,” I said to Charlie, giggling.

  “I’m not spending the night out at any cemetery,” said Charlie. “That’s crazy. In this weather we’d catch pneumonia, anyway, even if it wasn’t a creepy thing to do.” He wrinkled his nose as if he already smelled the rotted flesh in the freshly turned earth.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said in mock wonder. “I thought you were so fearless, o tough milker of enormous cows.”

  “O intelligent milk carrier, you mean. I never see a cow, but I know what one is.” He smirked at me. “I also know better than to camp in a city of dead people in forty degree rainy weather, with twenty mile an hour winds.”

  “Is that the weather forecast for tonight?” I asked Mrs. Risk, daunted for the first time. Dead people don’t scare me, but I hate cold.

  Mrs. Risk gauged me with a calculating eye. “They’ve overestimated the wind velocity, but you can wear my fur cape if you wish.”

  “I don’t care if I could wear the Three Bears. I’m not sitting in a windy freezing rainstorm.”

  “There. Even Rachel can be sensible if she concentrates,” said Charlie smugly.

  I glared. “Just keep sweet talkin’ me, and see how long it is before you find your hand on my butt again.”

  “Not soon enough to suit you, I bet,” he replied, his eyes glinting.

  Mrs. Risk considered us. “Forget whatever sexual politics you’ve got working between you. We’re going, so get over it.”

  We went.

  As we bounced along in Charlie’s truck, me sullenly perched on the hump behind the seats again, Mrs. Risk explained: “Mr. Pollak described the scene to me over the phone. I asked him if the disturbance was similar to yesterday’s. He said the only difference was that a stranded motorist, hoping to find the caretaker to use his phone, interrupted the intruder, frightening him away, so much less had been accomplished. Just bits of sod pulled up, and shallow digging. In spite of the motorist’s somewhat impaired powers of observation—he was unnerved by the surrounding graves—we’re fairly sure that the vandal is only one person, not a gang. I have several ideas about what he could have been after.”

  I said, “Other than Solly’s casket and the body itself, what else is there besides dirt?”

  “Exactly,” she said. She sighed and stared pensively at the passing traffic. Charlie shifted up a gear and the engine responded with a lower-pitched whine.

  “Why do you think the person will return again tonight?” I asked after a while.

  “Because he was interrupted last night. He’s visited twice in a row. Something’s there that he wants, and he wants it badly.”

  “But wouldn’t he expect the cops to be on the lookout after two times? He’s predictable now.”

  “I think he’d guess that the police wouldn’t waste a patrolman on guarding a single grave from what looks like random digging. The cemetery is surrounded by a high crime area, and that precinct has too much to do as it is.”

  “Charles,” I said. “If we’re going to make a habit of cruising around in this luxury vehicle, how about installing doors and a back seat, eh?”

  “Quit complaining. You’re lucky I take you anywhere, in any kind of vehicle,” was his uncharacteristically sullen reply. Charlie was not a happy boy tonight. At that thought, I cheered up. This evening held more promise than I’d first guessed.

  We turned in through the gate.

  I gave him directions, which he followed resentfully, his gloom competing with the surrounding gloom for pure rock bottom depressing. When we finally parked the truck behind the caretaker’s building (so that if sighted, it wouldn’t seem so out of place—theoretically), we sat still for a moment. I traced a fingernail ever so lightly down his right earlobe, making him leap and bang his knee on the steering wheel.

  “Yow!”

  “Quiet, Charlie,” Mrs. Risk commanded.

  He shuddered. “Stop that!” he whispered at me. Laughing, I swung down out of the truck and began cheerfully hoisting provisions onto my back. Funny what a change of attitude can do for an outing.

  Minutes later we were circling like dogs on a hearthrug, looking for our ideal comfortable spots for the long night ahead. Fortunately for us, Solly’d chosen to sleep for eternity close to the larger-than-life statue erected in memory of the founder of the Josephus B. Tuchman family, the members of which lay shoulder to shoulder in a row beneath the gaze of—if I may be frank—the fat and nastily stupid looking patriarch himself, who was draped in ridiculously grand robes and braced aristocratically with a walking stick. An ornate concrete bench made up part of the statue’s base, beneath which Mrs. Risk stowed provisions. I heard the clank of at least two bottles of wine. We might freeze, but we wouldn’t care.

  The base that supported Mr. Tuchman’s pompous self-memorial was more than broad enough to hide us from view, it being about eight feet long and three feet high—unless the vandal approached Solly from the long way around, which in this weather, would be a ridiculous thing to do. We were opting for an intelligent grave desecrator. Even a mildly stupid grave desecrator should be efficient enough to park as close as possible to shorten his sprint to the getaway car. Solly’s new home lay in a direct line between the Tuchman dynastic plot and the nearest lane.

  Between old Tuchman’s bulging feet, Mrs. Risk wedged a camera with an infra-red lens and assorted gizmos, which, she explained, wouldn’t flash in the dark, but would capture our ghoul for all posterity. I dumped a quilt over a small Tuchman and made myself as comfortable as possible. I figured the corpse was past mind
ing.

  Long after Mrs. Risk and I had settled down, Charlie still shuffled and shifted, looking unhappy as he scraped at the flat headstones, reading each one with the aide of a penlight.

  “You are going to turn that off soon, aren’t you dear?” Mrs. Risk asked testily. “I’d hate to’ve gone to all this trouble only to warn the culprit away.”

  “Yes, yes. These are all his children, do you realize that?” he asked anxiously.

  “What, he had them without using a wife?” I asked. “Medical history, imagine that.”

  “No, there’s a wife. Over there. Under her.” He pointed to the end grave, currently beneath Mrs. Risk’s neat rump.

  “Lucky woman. Old Joe looks quite a catch,” I said acidly.

  Charlie switched off the penlight and stowed it in a pocket. He scooted so that he was situated between two graves. “How can you two sit right on top of—of—like that?” he said with a shiver. “No, my point is, there are only Tuchmans here. No spouses of Tuchmans. I think they all died single. Five of them, two boys, three girls.”

  “Family resemblance probably scared off any prospects,” I muttered.

  Mrs. Risk gave a short laugh. “From the looks of him, he would’ve begrudged any breaking off from his sphere of influence. Tyrannical and of low intelligence.”

  “Nice that he’s gone, isn’t it?” I asked brightly.

  “Definitely,” she agreed.

  Charlie snorted. “Oh, come on. How do you know he wasn’t a wonderful leader in his community, a kindly family man. Obviously he had enough money to buy this—this—”

  “Shrine to himself?” I suggested.

  “This grossly inappropriate grave decoration that is totally uncharacteristic of Jewish custom?” added Mrs. Risk. In the dark I could imagine her eyebrows waggling humorously at Charlie’s uneasiness.

  Charlie allowed the silence to convey his indignation, which was fine with me.

  The wind, mercifully blocked somewhat by J. Tuchman’s stone podium, was fulfilling its promise and whistling eerily through the tombstones. Solly must’ve disliked traffic noises, because he’d chosen a spot nearly smack in the middle of the cemetery, giving the illusion of isolation that’d bothered me at his interment last Monday.

  Gradually, a soft noise intruded on my thoughts, a low-pitched buzz that grew to become a humming or mumbling. I turned and discovered Mrs. Risk to be the source.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  Abruptly she broke off with a sigh. “I was thinking. Unfortunately, I think best out loud.”

  “Swell. Want my penlight to help scare off our intruder?” asked Charlie nastily.

  “I’ve never seen you so unhappy, Charlie,” said Mrs. Risk in an amused tone. “You mustn’t let your fears run away with you.”

  “Would you like us to put a spell on the ghosties, ask them to leave you alone?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer, so I assumed he was pouting.

  The darkness was so complete, now, that when I flapped my hand an inch from my nose, I couldn’t see it. No wonder the intruder had felt safe about hitting this place two nights in a row. A wandering motorist would be a once in a seven year occurrence in this place on a dark night. The odds were definitely in the intruder’s favor. I giggled.

  “Spirits of evil, spirits of dead, keep your icy fingers from Charlie’s head,” I intoned, making my voice as creepy as possible.

  “Don’t you have respect for anything?” I heard Charlie say, but with indignation.

  I snorted. “Like for what?”

  “Like for an afterlife. Heaven, if you want to call it that,” he answered.

  “I don’t call it anything. I don’t think about it.”

  “I can’t believe that when we die, we just—go away. Like mulch. Maybe our live part, our spirit, inserts itself into new life,” said Charlie musingly.

  “Maybe it goes to ‘heaven’ and lives with angels and all the zillions of spirits that came before,” I said, but then laughed.

  “Why do you keep thinking this’s funny?” demanded Charlie. He scooted close to me, evidently forgetting that he was now perched on a dead Tuchman’s stomach. Or former stomach. I huddled closer to him, willing to borrow his body heat if given the opportunity.

  He put his arm around me and pulled me even closer. “Death isn’t funny.”

  “Indeed, in case you’ve forgotten, that’s why we’re here, Charlie,” said Mrs. Risk in an oddly detached tone. “Because of an untimely death. And its repercussions on other people.”

  “So see, death doesn’t just affect the one who died. Like your husband’s death,” he said to me, ruining the pleasant reverie I’d fallen into, snuggled against his broad chest and side, smelling his peculiar smell which was quite pleasant. I jerked my face away from the base of his throat that I’d been overwhelmingly tempted to nuzzle.

  “There’s no reason to discuss him. He’s dead!”

  The rain started. We hastily struggled into thin plastic ponchos. I heard, but couldn’t see Mrs. Risk open an umbrella and prop it to shelter the camera. The rain wasn’t a downpour, but a misting that crept into our clothes despite the ponchos and made us soggy and miserable.

  I felt, rather than saw, Mrs. Risk’s arms lift in the darkness, and I heard her muttering something softly.

  “What—what’s that?” whispered Charlie.

  “Me,” said Mrs. Risk complacently. “Feeling the air. Nobody is in the cemetery just yet.”

  “Nobody with a body,” I whispered back to Charlie.

  After a long moment, “What do you call the part of you that has feelings, Rachel? Spirit? Soul?” he murmured in a low voice. I heard Mrs. Risk pop the cork on one of her bottles and the soft clank of glassware.

  “Nerve endings,” I murmured back at him, as I wiped uselessly at a steady drip that congealed between my eyebrows and ran down my nose.

  “Where do you get that excited feeling, then, from those same nerve endings?” he said.

  “You mean like, when my hair stands on end because of something huge and black towering behind you at this moment?”

  Charlie’s muscles gave a jerk that he swiftly controlled, but we were clamped too tightly together for me not to detect it. I grinned.

  Mrs. Risk edged towards us. “Here, drink this. It’ll warm you so that you don’t have to huddle quite so close,” she said wryly. “And talk softer, if you must talk.”

  I shifted a few inches away from Charlie and he dropped his arm away from me. He tempted me horribly, I admitted to myself. I drank my wine and tried to distract my mind from bodily functions.

  “How did the reading of the will go today?” I asked Mrs. Risk softly.

  After a long silence, “Bella inherited everything except the legacy to Mrs. Harmon and some small charitable bequests.”

  “Everything?” I asked. “What exactly did that—”

  “An accounting will have to be done because much of it was in a stock portfolio, but since the will was extremely recent … My guess is about four million, plus the house.” Her voice was noncommittal.

  “Yikes. What did Pearl think of that?”

  “I think she was stunned, frankly. I don’t think she was aware of just how much he was worth.”

  After a pause, Charlie’s voice came in a whisper, “How could you tell no one else was in the cemetery, Mrs. Risk?”

  “I can feel them. They disturb the atmosphere when they enter the area.”

  Silence. Then, “Feel them?” he asked.

  “Mm-hmmm. We’re composed of moving, constantly changing atoms, after all, dear. When you exhale, you’re dispersing into the air the discarded atoms from your body, and I inhale them in turn. We’re all intermingled with the vast universe.”

  Atoms, shmatoms, as Zoë would say. I drank more wine, still mulling over the amount of Solly’s estate.

  “Here, Rachel. Have a sandwich.” Mrs. Risk held something out in the darkness. Her movement was barely perceptible to me, bu
t I was relieved to be able to see it. It meant some of the clouds above us were parting, allowing the newborn moon to at least glow dully down through thinner layers. Better weather was coming.

  “Thanks.”

  “Here, Charlie. Eat.”

  We became absorbed in our food.

  Eventually Mrs. Risk said, “Don’t think so much, Charlie. Try to just experience the kinship you have with all these people who used to—like us—walk around, make plans, and suffer disappointments. Especially here. This spot is rife with frustrated hopes and shattered life. A sad family, these Tuchmans. I wish I could have helped the young ones.” She sighed. “With understanding comes wisdom, and with wisdom, comes the comfort of knowing we’re all connected to each other across time and across pain.”

  By the time the food and wine had been consumed, the cold had penetrated the bones in my legs, and they ached. I began shivering and couldn’t stop. I must’ve made a noise because Charlie reached over and grabbed my arm above the elbow and squeezed. Nobody could call Charlie weak.

  “Nooow,” breathed Mrs. Risk.

  Charlie squeaked. Like a mouse that got its tail tweaked, all five foot eleven of him squeaked.

  I rolled over onto my knees and moved crab-wise on all fours to peer out between Tuchman Sr.’s legs, over the camera. A dark raggedy shape, huddled down like a ball was snuffling around Solly’s grave, scraping at the dirt. Under normal circumstances, his activities would’ve been practically unnoticeable, but in our hyper-strained silence, the sounds he made were as subtle as a herd of elephants rolling in a dusthole.

  The camera came to life at my ear. Mrs. Risk had begun using the remote control to aim it.

  Following a plan I’d evolved in the silence, I crept around the edge of Tuchman’s base, and, melding myself as low as possible to the ground, slithered in the grassy mud towards the intruder. And I got away with it for, oh, maybe six feet. Then, like a dog sniffing danger in the wind, his head reared back, and with an all-over heave, he leaped away from the grave and began to run.