CHAPTER 29

Tuckahoe

A week passed with no one asking me to shimmy up the flagpole or sleep in a coffin. Nothing happening except me looking over my shoulder every time I lined up to piss and brush my teeth or marched to class, or trudged up to the farm to muck out the stalls, until finally I was approached, just like Jesse said.

“Hey, Aronson.” A column of sunlight slanted into the barn between the slatted timbers. Stanley Hirsh stood at the entrance illuminated, his meaty fists on his hips.

“What?”

“I got a proposition for you and Chick Scheiner. A way for you saps to make some dough.”

I dropped my shovel and stepped out of the stall. This was it.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Charlie the porter. He has a job.”

“A feat of bravery?”

“Huh?” said Hirsh. “Listen, Aronson, you up for it?”

“What is it?”

“Whatever it is?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

“Go see Charlie when you’re done here.”

My heart raced. I prayed the swimming hole was frozen, and I prayed for Shorty’s death. I saw Chick. “Wait up.” We headed down to the cottage that Charlie the porter shared with Carl Grimm and Hymie the handyman.

“Aronson. Scheiner. Been waitin’ on youse.” Charlie handed each of us a gunnysack. “Go to the barn. Collect as many kittens as fit. Bring ‘em back to me.”

Kittens? I looked past Charlie to see if Mr. Grimm was inside the house. I wondered what he would think. Whatever it is, Jesse had said.

On the way up to the barn we passed Harry and Pinky coming from the opposite direction.

“Hey small fry, where you headed?” said Chick.

“Candy store,” said Harry.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Where’d you get that nickel?”

“I found it.”

“Better not be from Shorty Lapidus.”

“I told you,” said Harry. “I found it.”

“You better have found it. Now scram, the both of youse. Go get your candy.”

We had a job to do. Here kitty, kitty. Alice’s new litter, and others. Her grandchildren. Great grandchildren. She’d been around a while. I plucked a kitten clinging to Chick’s pant leg and dropped the cat into my sack. Big old Pussy Alice lay on her side and licked her paws. A gray fuzz ball slept next to her. The runt. Whatever it is, do it. I peered into my bag. I had four or five already. Chick had the same. It was enough. I let the fuzz ball sleep.

Charlie the porter tied the sacks shut with twine. “Take the path down to the creek over toward the aqueduct side. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, we know.” We stood in the driveway.

“You put the sack in the water, you hold it under.”

“What?”

“It ain’t frozen over. I seen it.”

“But the kittens . . . They’ll drown,” said Chick.

“That’s the idea.”

Chick and I kicked at the gravel. We were only nine, going on ten.

“We got too many on the grounds here. It’s a threat to the public health.”

We shrugged and stared at our feet.

“Far worse starving to death,” said Charlie.

“All right,” I said. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Then go. Get on with it.”

We passed through the orchard where each tree was just a bundle of dead sticks that implausibly would bloom into thousands of sweet-smelling white blossoms in a month or two and we clambered down to the gully, half-muddy, half-frozen and reached the gurgling, babbling, splish-splashing creek. A pink nose pressed against the opening of the burlap neck I held in my fist. I hardened my heart and plunged my sack into the icy water. Chick did the same. We held them under, felt their fragile shoulders under our thumbs, a haunch, an ear, forced down to the bottom. Our hands turned blue. The whitewater noise of the Sprain Brook drowned out the mewling cries.

In the spring, a team of us rebuilt the dam and reinstated the Bare Ass Swimming Hole, a task I relished and that did not require knowing how to swim. We had to engineer the whole thing on the sly, of course, since we were trespassing and the Grassy Sprain golf club members complained we were trampling on their turf. On top of that, we were forbidden to work on Saturdays. Beating children on the Sabbath was fine, apparently, but building our own Garden of Eden offended God. Supervisors and monitors occasionally traipsed through the woods to catch us in the act, so we had Cheesie as lookout. The job required days of labor. We hiked to the spot after synagogue and after classes. A bucket brigade formed for dredging mud. Slimy rocks were dug up from along the stream bed and passed from man to man until the dam wall was neatly assembled by seniors waist deep and then chest high in the cold creek creating a mighty wall of stones, logs, twigs, and mud trapping the water to a depth of five feet so we could jump in, maybe even dive. Well, so they could dive. I could wade up to my neck and I loved making things and listened closely to the older guys as they discussed the mechanics of dam building. During the week we talked of nothing else. At night, surrounded by the sighing inhale and exhale of sleeping friends, I lay in bed thinking about the task ahead, each step in the process, and what a paradise the place would be when we were done. These thoughts while lying awake were some of the most peaceful in my life. We cheered when the water rose. I spent many summer afternoons lazing on Bare Beach under the weeping willows.

Chick and I joined the farm gang because we both liked animals, especially horses. The barn didn’t interest Harry or Jesse. Most kids hated the farm detail when it came up in chore rotation. They preferred peeling potatoes, scrubbing enormous soup kettles or even scrubbing the washroom floor. Harry couldn’t believe I chose weeding in the hot sun, much less shoveling horseshit. His horse was strictly an iron charger. He hung around the auto shed watching older inmates build a motorcycle engine from scratch, learning from their grease-monkey talk. To each his own. Weeding allowed time to think with no one interrupting my thoughts. No one bothered us on the farm. The supervisors hardly ever came up there. Chick and I brushed down Joe, Playboy, and Sally the mare, then watched how the older guys harnessed the horses and hitched up the plow. Each of us learned what we wanted from the older guys. Not just dirty jokes. I admired the seniors most of all when they fearlessly, it seemed to me, left the grounds of the Home and our exclusive (orphans only) public school, and went off to Roosevelt High where they were supposed to blend in with the normal kids who wore sporty clothes and glowed with good health. But we didn’t blend in. Kids from the Home were easy to spot, the smell of poverty and death clung stubbornly to our faded hand-me-downs.

High school was a few years away for me. I tried not to worry about it. Chick and I filled the water buckets and feed buckets. I felt at ease in the barn and outside in the fields. It was a chance to be away from the regimentation, away from the Colonel, the cane, the rabbi, the pommel horse, the supervisor, the monitor. Farm work was hard, but a chance to be free.

Sometimes I talked to Playboy when I was alone. I told him about the Colonel and we shook our heads and snorted about human nature. Who was Tom Anderson? Where did he come from? Was he ever a little boy? The other supervisors I understood, but the Colonel had a blank stare. No matter how often he struck, either spontaneously, or after much planning and marking off on rosters, I was taken by surprise. Even in his military uniform, even with his weapon at the ready posing as a crutch, still, I never expected swift action from the Colonel because he appeared indifferent. Even when his eyes popped like boiled raisins he seemed vague and distracted, which I learned was a particular kind of evil.

The wind blew cold, leaves rattled and fell. We raked them into piles and climbed into the trees and jumped onto the crispy heaps, then lit a bonfire in the fallow field and threw mickeys into the flames. Those who had gloves pulled the hot potatoes out when they were done, and we tossed them from hand to hand, poked the jackets open with a stick and let the steam pour out. Always too hungry to wait, we burned our mouths.

I couldn’t picture my father’s face anymore, but I could smell him, the toasty aroma of his ironed shirts like a mickey plucked from the flames. Up the hill on the farm, we could see down to Tuckahoe Road, and sometimes we stopped what we were doing to stare as roadsters sped around the curves to the Grassy Sprain Golf and Country Club. Why did I imagine my father there, hopping out of a Packard or a Marmon Speedster? He wouldn’t have been allowed in. He was a Jew like me. We tossed our mickeys from hand to hand.

He was somewhere, though, out in the world with the twenties roaring, flappers flapping, and swells flashing their C-notes, all while the roof leaked on the Oddfellows Orphan Home, and the wind shrieked through the cracks in the windowpanes, and the cold seeped into our bones and stayed there until April.