Comrades
a novel by Earl Coleman

Chapter 1

There was never a doubt in Joel's seven-year old mind that his father was a Mohawk Indian. A Mohawk who had been rescued and adopted by Grandpa Shlomo Levy and Grandma Lena just as he said.

Although he knew it by heart of course, Joel loved to hear the story in his father's baritone. When his friends and even his mother expressed their doubts that his father was really a Mohawk, Joel was troubled, but never shaken in his own certainty. He knew the whole thing backward and forward.

In return for the gift of being rescued and for the shelter of his new home, his father had accepted the faith of Grandpa and Grandma and the white man's names they gave him, Samuel and Elijah.

At five his father had become separated from his real mother and father and his tribe as they migrated in their hundreds, ponies loaded, to their winter hunting grounds. He had been near death when he was rescued by Grandpa Levy.

It took all his Indian cunning, during the time he was lost, to survive in the dense woods of the Upper Bronx. Survival was the first lesson you learned even as a papoose in the cradle board on your mother's back.

For months he had nourished himself with roots dug from the ground and berries plucked from bushes whose names he could no longer remember, just as by now he had even forgotten his own Mohawk name. He had snared rabbits and speared silvery fish as they darted up the Hudson, thrusting at them through the glistening water with a sharpened limb. Of course he knew how to start a blaze even in the rain, but he wolfed down his catch raw when he had no time to create fire.

His father would squint up at the ceiling when he tried to describe his real mother as though he was struggling toward a recollection of a slim and beautiful young woman with straight black hair and coppery skin. Then he would shake his head nostalgically, his black eyes downcast, his full lips parted, and he would try to capture the memory of his real father who he described as having marvelous muscles, quite naked except for his loin cloth.

Samuel Elijah himself had kinky hair, thick and sandy, eyes dark as secret pools in a wood, an indentation of puckered skin on his left cheek. He was slender, even skinny, often sad as he confided this story to Joel who half-sat, half-lay on his cot, caught between the exquisite wonder in the pit of his stomach, and the lump in his throat that squeezed tears into his brown eyes, his small hand holding to his father's muscled leg for affirmation that Samuel Elijah had indeed survived.

Joel would swallow hard to ease his parched throat and wait achingly for the next amazement. There was no beginning and no end to this tale which, unlike Black Beauty, did not unfold in a straight line. No, each day for all of his seven years, Joel had been learning this story of his father's life, living it. He did not hear this story, so much as ingest it. The nutrients flowed through his body to the very ends of the hairs on his stalklike neck.

When he outgrew his slatted crib and slept on a cot his father's story grew with him. And along with the continually expanding adventure came the most riveting and wondrous detail: the sound the tiny ant made as it scurried past your ear while you lay curled asleep on your blanket on the forest floor; the way the snow sifted its white magic on the timberland for days, burying the fallen leaves, but leaving places where the icy water still ran if you had the skill to track it. Porcupines could shoot their own quills at enemies. Snakes rolled themselves down hills like hoops.

"What kind of Mohawk? A shmohawk," Mikey's father had barked at Mikey (who repeated it to Joel) but Mikey's father claimed to be a Sephardic Jew from Spain but couldn't speak any Spanish, just Yiddish and English. His name was Toledo which he said was a city in Spain near Madrid.

Joel and Mikey often shared a sandwich for lunch in the pandemonium of the schoolyard, an enormous concrete space of prodigious energy and motion, a turbulent ocean of whirling arms and legs, quicksilver flashing white blouses, masses of screaming kids.

Mikey's real name was Murray, although his parents called him Moishe, but friends have names for each other. Joel and Mikey were best friends. They would press their slender fingers firmly into opposite halves of the thick rye bread sandwich of sliced egg and lettuce and pull it apart gently so that the egg didn't fall out. Mikey chewed slowly now because he had just lost his two front baby teeth. They hunched over their checkerboard every schoolday at lunch, sitting on a small concrete step, out of the way of the action around them, and studied the red and black pieces while they ate Joel's mother's sandwich out of the white, waxy paper.

Two older boys nearby with a dozen gawking kids around them sat on the concrete, matching baseball cards. As they played they were singing, "Shave and a haircut, two bits. Who got married? Hoot Gibs. Who did he marry? Pearl White. How's the baby? All right." There was a great collapse of a Johnny on the Pony line not ten yards away and a commotion of sprawling bodies, but it had no effect on Joel and Mikey who moved their pieces solemnly, chewing on their shared sandwich, Joel frowning down at the pieces, tongue clenched between his teeth, concentrating.

*

In the hush of the dimly-lit dining room Joel would do his homework (Spencerian penmanship) sitting ramrod-straight at the polished oak table with his Graham cracker on a plate and his glass of milk beside him, the pink rubber grip of his pen pressed firmly in his fingertips, the open bottle of Parker's blue ink before him. His mother stopped her work at the tin clothes basin in the kitchen sometimes to watch him silently from the doorway and then to sit beside him unobtrusively and nod her head while he lettered ever so carefully, clenched tongue between lips.

She was a small, slim woman with her dark hair piled up in a bun, held in place by huge amber pins. At bedtime when she let her hair down it fell almost to the floor. She kissed his cheek when he had completed his page and tilted his chin toward her to stare at him with a kind of wonder in her warm hazel eyes as she smoothed back his curls.

Sometimes, as today, he stopped his work and they spoke about his father. "Your papa really wouldn't know a teepee from a peepee. Only from his ten million books. His father is Shlomo Levy, not Rain-in-the-Face." Her words were often tart like that but her voice was soft and low-pitched.

Joel never argued back. His heart knew. His father certainly looked like an Indian: swarthy, with a beaked nose. Joel reassured himself often that his father would never leave them to return to his own People because being an Indian had been put behind him, first when he agreed to be adopted and later when he had become Rachel's husband and then Joel's father.

Joel felt himself part Mohawk every time he won a race in the schoolyard, every time he played one-o-cat and he was the hitter, waving his sawed-off broomstick, and the sun came down hot from the blue sky to seek his face. Others, even his mother, didn't inhabit his father's story. He did, even while he licked the Graham cracker crumbs from the corner of his mouth and gulped the last of his milk.

He considered the Jewish part of himself quite often. Being Jewish meant lighting candles and going to shul on holidays where crowds of people made noise in a language he didn't understand. When he was with Mikey on one of the tenement-lined streets coming back from school and surrounded by kids shouting at them "Jew. Kike. Christ-killer," he found that being Jewish was confusing and frightening, but he always stood his ground, fists balled. Even though he was small for his age he fought so hard and with such ferocity that he was left alone, even by the bigger kids.

He was puzzled, lying on his cot in the dark, because so many kids hated him for being Jewish even though his father was a Mohawk! He never had a doubt about what he had to do. His father had agreed to be Jewish. He would too. His father had done what was right. And Joel would recount the story to himself once more.

Grandpa Levy had rescued his father when he was fainting away of starvation, his traps broken and his knife to make fish-spears lost and he lay fallen in a shallow ditch in the upper Bronx in a pouring rain. Along came Grandpa Levy who fed him and clothed him, and then gave him the name of a judge, Samuel, and the name of the Prophet and Stranger, Elijah, he who is awaited at Passover with a seat, a plate, and a glass of red wine.

When Elijah saw for himself the strong medicine of the white man he was already deeply in the debt of this kind Shlomo Levy, who had rescued him. Although in his heart he retained his true Mohawk identity, he had accepted being Jewish out of gratitude and love and agreed to go to cheder along with other little Jewish boys.

Tight as he closed his eyes Joel continued to be puzzled about what it meant for his father to be Jewish although he never had a question about what it meant to be Indian. All his father's stories told him that. Respectful. Open to wonder. One with Nature. For some grown-up reason his father had made him promise solemnly that he would never speak about his own or his father's Indian heritage when they were with Grandpa or Grandma Levy or other relatives, except for his mama of course.

Joel himself had not attended cheder. His father had taken him once to "look it over" because "Grandma Lieberman wants us to." What they saw was a derelict basement lit by two bare bulbs. Kids with black yarmulkehs on their heads bent over battered desks while a stern old black-jacketed man with yellow-streaked snowy whiskers, wearing a black felt hat, stood over them, a wicked magician, his breath sour, holding a long pointed stick like a wand in his knobby fingers. Joel hated it on sight and his father never made him go back even though Elijah himself had been bar mitzvahed.

*

Elijah (he rarely called himself Samuel because it was too formal, too self-important, preferring the Stranger, the Unseen Guest) was a gambler, which he freely acknowledged. Indians had always been gamblers, he would tell Joel. Look how they had gambled on the white man returning friendship for friendship.

It was a time of great stress. Elijah had recovered at last from his influenza. He had been recuperating and jobless for months before he got hired at Rivkind Furriers. When he set off to work now at five every morning, there was a force of desire in his eyes to provide well for his family but each evening he returned defeated by the knowledge that they didn't quite make do no matter how hard he worked, and his shoulders sagged as he sat silently staring out the window watching the Model Ts go by, waiting for his friends, supper over and the table cleared, desperation and resolve in his eyes.

*

Joel could hear the men when they gathered in the dining room only a few feet from his cot in the bedroom. They would talk in low voices about "organizing," about "the bosses," about "pay for slack time." But his father, his father seemed to know everything, could answer all their questions. They looked to him. Joel could tell he loved them. He shared with them what he knew; he shared himself with them. Joel understood only some of it. They were making plans to attack a powerful enemy. They were dreaming these plans right around their very dining table. In the room next to his. Making their secret plans. His father was the leader of the war party.

The words became familiar to him, "strike," "scab" (a word that sounded like torn skin), "sweatshop." And he would remember the time his mother had taken him to a room where the heat engulfed him like an iron fist, where his father and all the other men were gleaming with perspiration that ran down their faces and soaked their undershirts, their cheeks flushed, red as beet juice.

His heart pounded faster when he heard them and he wished he was older so that he could join them when they rode out. His mother always sat in the room with the men, but she rarely spoke. Sometimes she brought them seltzer or fruit in the good cut glass bowl. Their voices were deep, almost rough, sometimes loud. When Joel would go through to the bathroom to brush his teeth the room seemed packed with strong, serious braves, ready to leave the powwow to go into battle, sitting in white shirtsleeves, the smoke from their cigarettes sending a signal.

Meyer, a deep-chested man with a permanent grin, always wore a hat pushed to the back of his head, even in the house. Mottel, sallow, with sunken cheeks, chewed on a toothpick and coughed all night into a handkerchief. When they saw Joel they would reach out to pick him up, roughhouse him, turn him upside down, hand him over laughing, legs kicking, to the next man. Jake, with his pudgy fingers, drew pictures for him on butcher paper.

*

His mother had her own story to tell. Sometimes she would claim with a funny laugh that she had found Elijah among the bulrushes, but Joel knew she was joking. What came to Joel from her stories was that his mother Rachel loved his father. Elijah had always been a reader and thinker, she would say, a dreamer and a gambler, and had changed not at all even when Joel was born. She had loved Elijah from the minute they met on her seventeenth birthday on the Edgemere beach when he looked, she had to admit, like a bronzed Indian warrior, and here she was pushing thirty and she still loved him.

Even when she made fun she loved him. "So how smart could the Indians have been, Joel, if they sold Manhattan for $24? Not even for money. Beads. They sold all of Manhattan for beads. Some Indians, you understand, were lucky enough, after they sold their land or had it stolen from them, to be given reservations where now they have just found oil. Your father, the gambling Mohawk, doesn't have the money to buy us reservations in the Temple for Rosh Hashahnah. Not even beads. He's busy planning an uprising."

*

Elijah knew things. His books were everywhere, books about the French Revolution, religion, philosophy, Shakespeare's plays, volumes of Indian lore, the Bible, Kipling, the War of 1812, a red-covered book by Darwin. He even had books in the bathroom on the porcelain stand behind the white toilet bowl. In the kitchen Rachel, too, had books -- Doctor Holt on how to raise children and a shelf of cookbooks over the four-burner gas stove.

Rachel had taught Joel to read by the time he was three, but even now going on eight he still loved to be read to. His mother's low contralto quavered when she read aloud and she herself was so moved by the stories she read that often she and Joel cried together over the poor little match girl and Elsie Dinsmore and her unseeing and uncaring papa, Eliza crossing the ice. Samuel Elijah standing, sitting, liked to read aloud from Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer. Joel was certain that Samuel Elijah himself was the hero of every adventure. His voice, his expression, placed him there.

They had Victrola concerts for just the three of them, starting with arias from Madame Butterfly, then Caruso singing "Vesti la Giubba." And then "The Land of the Sky Blue Water" when Samuel Elijah would kiss Joel and stand blocking the window of their tiny apartment on the third floor of their tenement and stare out into the narrow nightstreet below. Joel could picture him sitting his warhorse at the edge of the mesa, head bowed, planning for the good of his Tribe.

*

Since this was summertime and there was no school, if Joel awakened before his parents he'd read Tom Sawyer, which he kept on a little night table next to his bed. On the undershelf was his library. There were the Boy Allies and the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift and Alice in Wonderland. But sometimes Joel would just lie still with his eyes closed and try to imagine what it would be like if he himself were a tribal Indian boy of seven summers.

One day Joel stopped at a deserted lot near PS 49. A Victrola somewhere was playing "Yes, We Have No Bananas." He walked by this lot every day with Mikey on his way to school, just past the street where the candy store was, where they'd buy a penny bag of toffy to share. His mother never allowed him to stop and play in the lot, because of the "neighborhood" and the "riff-raff." On this day he stopped there anyway, confident he'd find what he was looking for. He went through weeds and garbage and discovered a long curved rough wooden stave from a barrel. He also found some dirty milk bottles and was able to lug home three of the bottles and the piece of wood. He brought the bottles to the corner grocery for the deposit and he spent the six cents on string and wax.

That evening Samuel Elijah found Joel trying to make a bow. Elijah held Joel very tightly and kissed him several times. Then they worked together in Joel's room, whittling and buffing and tying. When they were done Joel had a strung bow that shimmered with polish. Rachel wanted to know if Joel was now ready to join the other braves to mount a hunt to fill their bellies. But she laughed when she said it. He spooned up his chicken soup and matzoh balls with the bow next to him and that night stored it under his bed joining him to his father's tribe.

On weekends in this golden summer they often took the crowded El to the beach at Coney Island where millions of people lay on blankets or sheets and got red from the sun. He and his father would pick their way through the jumble of people and their newspapers and children's pails and shovels, card games, lovers embracing, mud pies, sand castles, thermos jugs and homemade umbrellas, over the gritty sand to the waves, his father brown as any brave, and then they would splash at each other, laughing, going only a little way into the frothy ocean since Elijah couldn't swim and Joel hadn't learned.

Rachel swam with something she called a breaststroke, and didn't like to splash with them. She went far out, past the ropes, until the water was over her head, her white rubber cap bobbing, her black bathing suit sheathing her, her legs kicking, her slim body, her head, submerging with an awesome, death-defying confidence, then thrusting up for a moment only to go down again, the two of them keeping a protective eye on her as they splashed each other close to shore. She would emerge beside them at last like a goddess made human, adjusting her pants leg, the water running down where the bathing suit ended above her thighs, her tight white cap seeming to enclose her face almost like a flower, with her slim nose and high cheekbones, her soft hazel eyes. Just as his father was forever dark as a Mohawk so his mother remained white and pink, breaststroking out beyond where her men could go.

There was a story she told of some evil thing called an "undertow" which had snatched her from the safety of her breaststroke when she was a girl and had carried her out to sea to be rescued there by a lifeguard, but in Joel's mind it was always his father, who, even though he couldn't swim, had somehow managed to quiet that whole ocean and that cruel undertow so that he himself could lift her in his swarthy hands to safety on the sandy beach.

*

"Company" was when members of the family visited. His father's friends and the other men who came to their house to talk and plan their war party were always there. They weren't company. Joel didn't like it when company was going to come, even though he knew he would be given a nickel by his Uncle Morris and even by Uncle Louis (after being whispered to by Aunt Yetta).

Company perplexed Joel. They would talk grown-up talk about furniture and houses and automobiles. In the middle of it they would ask him to read something out loud for them, shaking their heads in admiration and amazement when he did it. He might read from the Just So Stories or sing them a song and they would applaud when he was through and the women would kiss him and the men would ruffle his hair and he'd feel proud. But then they'd talk grown-up talk again about work and Prohibition and money and how were things for Sam in his job in the fur district and then Joel would just sit there, very quiet.

He was always aware of his father's pained silence when there was company. With friends or other men around him, his father talked and everyone listened respectfully. In company his father rarely said anything. When they had company his mother talked in a high voice, shiny as a hard, new coppery penny. Mostly company didn't talk to his father, but when they did there was a sound in their voices that made Joel feel sick inside his stomach. Once Uncle Izzy whispered to Grandma Lieberman that "maybe Sam hadn't found the way." But Joel knew that his father had always taken the Way. His father talked to him often about the Great Spirit and the Way of the People. Joel was sure that it was company that hadn't found the Way.

It was always the worst company when Grandpa and Grandma Lieberman came by themselves. His mother would be a whirlwind, making sure that everything was clean and in place because Grandma would find reasons to go into every room, even his.

The last time they visited the home of Grandma and Grandpa Lieberman on the Concourse his father had said nothing the whole time but sat at the window staring bitterly out at the broad street. That day, even his mother spoke angrily to his father. Grandpa Joseph asked, "When will things get better for you Sam?" and his father had said sadly, "When my ship comes in." Then they all laughed, even his mother, but it didn't sound like it was a laugh at all and Joel went into the kitchen to be alone.

He wondered there what kind of ship it was and imagined it to be like the ship in Swiss Family Robinson. He hoped that nothing happened to it out there on the water by itself with the undertow waiting to pick it up and dash it against the rocks before his father could get there in time to save it.

*

They had taken a trolley car this Sunday to the Bronx Park Zoo and Joel had crackerjacks, some of which he fed to the llamas, and found a lead soldier in the bottom of the box. He had a collection of almost fifty khaki doughboys. He shared a bag of peanuts with the monkeys. They visited the bird house with its damp forest smells and piercing calls.

"These smaller birds, Joel, are kept here together because none of them are trying to eat the others. Hawks and eagles they have in separate cages. You'd think these little birds would all be happy. They are taken care of, enough food, space, sunlight. Not true. They want."

He took Joel's hand in his and motioned with his free one.

"See that little phoebe on the top branch and the other one flying over right now. The bigger one wants to sit on that top branch. Here with a whole forest of shrubs to sit on, the bigger phoebe wants to sit on that very branch. The littler one gives up place and goes to the ground -- see? The bigger one sits on top. You might ask -- what's on top? Nothing special. It's the top. Fighting over crumbs and sitting on top. Even birds."

They wandered to a grassy spot near the lion house and lay side by side on the ground looking up at the September sun. Joel took his father's hand, his eyes held tight shut in happiness.

"There is an Indian feast time," his father said, "which some tribes called the potlach. In the tribe whoever gives away the most is respected the most. You give away your horses to people in your family and your friends but to others also. Everyone gives food to old people and the sick, the ones who can't get food for themselves. Making a single pair of moccasins takes months but women give the moccasins they've worked on to women who need them. To give to members of your tribe brings great honor.

"Before the white man came Indians had the whole land to hunt, to fish and to gather fruits and nuts and vegetables. They shared what they had with the Pilgrims when they came.

"But the white man took, kept, gave nothing, shared nothing. "

He paused.

"So, on a day like this Joel, when the sun shines on us, it is a world of beauty. But it is also a world of great greed. That is the Mystery."

Joel felt bound up in it, the sun, his father's voice, the whole blue sky. It filled him.

*

They staggered into the house, Meyer hatless. His father and Meyer were half-carrying, half-dragging Mottel, wracked with coughing, unable to walk on his strangely angled left foot. The other man Joel had never seen before. Joel still had the taste of tooth powder in his mouth. The men were bleeding, hurt, wild eyes full of energy and desperation. His father's nose looked as though it had been crushed. Crusted blood streaked his face. The gash over his right eye was milk white and purply red. His jacket was ripped half down his back and there were splatters and ink blots of blood spread over his white shirt and his hands. The stranger had smears of blood on his forehead and bruises about his face. His black eyes seemed to burn. His battered cheeks were shadowed with stubble; his face hard as stone.

"Oh, my God," Rachel gasped and ran toward the kitchen, ran back to look at his father, and then ran again to the kitchen to heat water. "Joel," she called, "get the rags from the closet." He hurried, heart pounding, brought them to her and stood in awe as they propped Mottel up in a chair still coughing, his left leg stuck straight out, his sunken face ashen, his lips drawn back in pain exposing his yellow teeth.

"Bastards. Cossacks," the dark man was muttering, addressing no one, chanting to himself.

"Help me off with his shoe, Joel," his father gasped. Joel unlaced Mottel's left shoe and they pulled it off his bare foot as gently as they could. Mottel's head was thrown back and he was moaning, coughing and retching at once. The little vomit there was dribbled yellow onto his shirt. Rachel rushed in, careful to put her one pot of cold water and one pot of warm water on the floor without spilling. She held his father's head in her hands, her eyes half-closed, suffering with his pain. She fingered the gash, moaning, putting her arms around him, but his eyes were anguished, distant. "Help Mottel, Rachel. The cop hit him on the knee with his nightstick. We need a knife." She ran in and came back with a sharp kitchen knife. Elijah, his mouth half open as if to cry out, inserted the point in the cloth at thigh level and drew it down to split the pants leg, exposing the white knobby knee. Rachel soaked a rag in the cold water and wrapped it around the knee, then made a cold compress of a napkin which she draped on Mottel's bruised forehead while he twisted his neck, coughing as though his chest would burst.

She washed Elijah's face gently with the warm water and helped him peel off his shirt. His undershirt seemed dyed in blood. She helped him pull it over his head. Where his skinny body wasn't bleeding it had been badly bruised. About the etched ribs and bony spine were huge purple, black and blue splotches. Joel used the warm water, too, reaching up to wash his father's chest to dissolve the caked blood, careful not to press too hard.

Rachel turned to Meyer, washing his face, his hands. "How Sam? How could they know?" she asked distractedly, turning her head toward Elijah as she soothed Meyer's angry skin. "The police? Who knew except us, Sam, and our friends?"

"Someone. Some one of us," Elijah's voice was strained, still low but trembling. "They waited only until we started the meeting." He sat and buried his head in his hands, oblivious to his own skinny body, mottled with blood and bruises. Joel had never heard such unsteadiness in his father's voice. "The cops broke in and started hitting. Everybody. Anybody. Hitting. Hitting." He inhaled sharply as a sob and shook his head. "I don't know how we got out. Even how bad the others are hurt. I had to leave them behind. I couldn't save them." He looked over at her piteously, his eyes close to tears. "So I left them, Rachel. You hear? I left them. I organized it. I couldn't save them." He closed his eyes. "They could be dead from being at this meeting. I told them to come. From listening to me they could be dead, Rachel. From listening to me." He sobbed without crying.

The stranger waved Rachel off when she went to wash his face. He continued to mutter, "First the Black Hundreds. Now the Irish cops." Then in a loud voice. "We will beat them. They will never break us." His voice thundered through their small apartment.

Elijah rubbed his eyes and massaged his face with his hands. "Joel," he said, trying to take charge again, "change Mottel's compress. Rachel -- how is the knee?" Rachel probed the white kneecap gently with the tips of her long, slim fingers. "I feel nothing broken, Sam. Just swelling. Thank you Joel. You put it on. That's good. Help me Joel with this blanket to make him warm." She turned to Elijah whose eyes were tightly closed. "The heat isn't turned on yet, Sam. You should be wearing something, you had the influenza only months ago." She went to fetch him a robe and helped his bruised, skinny body into it. She put her arms around him. "Oy, Sam. You said, you said, you'd be careful. My poor Sam. So dangerous! Someone told? Somebody we had here? In our house?"

"Rachel," Elijah said, his voice dropped to a spiritless whisper, "it could be anyone. Anyone Rachel. Maybe more than one." His eyes squinted as he turned his head toward the window as if searching for the answer. "I called this meeting. You hear? I picked the place. I'm responsible for the whole thing and I don't have an answer; I can't say who told, how many....the traitors who informed on us. You understand what I'm saying Rachel?" She cradled him in her arms. "Every man at that meeting I know personally and still I can't say. What was I doing, Rachel? What do I know? What right do I have? My fault, Rachel. I failed them. All my fault. My comrades. I failed them."

"No, Sam, no," Meyer said, grabbing him by the arm. "How could you know, Sam? How you?"

"I called the meeting, Meyer," Elijah's voice was low and husky. "Who else but me is responsible to know? I called the meeting."

*

Joel missed most the sound of the men, just the sound of them being there in the evening, his father speaking to them, explaining to them. Now, his face still marked from the raid three days before, Elijah sat hunched at the window, looking even skinnier, smaller. Sometimes Rachel went to him to put a hand on his shoulder. Then he would put his head down and close his lids gently as if remembering something, and then he'd squeeze his eyes shut.

After he'd come home from work and they were eating supper at the round oak table he'd push his plate away and look at them deeply as if he were memorizing them, his dark secret eyes no longer inviting them to join him on his adventures, but looking at them, measuring them, examining their faces carefully as if to see if they'd been wounded too.

Joel's heart would race as usual when he heard his father's evening steps approach their door, even though Elijah's pace seemed slower now. When his father picked him up to kiss him the embrace was brief and speechlessly violent and then was gone. It seemed to Joel that somehow his father had lost his strength, like Samson. Joel watched as Rachel hovered about Elijah, put her face against his, asked with her eyes if she could do something, but his father would shake his head and sit at the window. He seemed wrapped in the blanket of his pain.

*

"And so to all of us who loved him, the passing of Samuel Elijah Levy has left us with deep sorrow in our hearts as we seek God's purpose . . ." Mourners throughout the packed chapel wept, cried out, chanted prayers. Meyer Cohen with his broad face puffed from weeping, his arm about Gertrude pulling her cheek into his shoulder, tilted his bulbous nose upward at the wooden ceiling of the chapel, his lips and eyes set truculently, daring God to state His purpose. Renewed weeping broke out.

Joel's fingers clutched his mother's hand tightly. He stared uncomprehendingly at the old rabbi whose palms gripped the lectern. Joel's heart raced with a thumping that was almost audible, his mind whirling, too bewildered for tears. "Vyisgadall, vyiskadosh . . ." the men in the audience joined in the chant as the women wept, some sobbing in great gasps, in gusts of weeping, some soundless, despite the tears that wet their cheeks.

The remnants of her youth had left Rachel's face. She laced her fingers in Joel's, her chin thrust forward under the veil, seeming to concentrate on the flame of the candle but in reality concentrating on nothing, moved deeply by the melancholy frailty of Joel's fingers. The sun shone through the stained glass windows.

Rachel and Joel, walking as though bodiless, joined the slow movement to the exit. The black-suited attendants escorted them to the waiting black limousine. Lou Rivkind, who owned Rivkind Furriers where Samuel Elijah had worked, had paid for the funeral services, the hearse, and for the rental of the limousine. Those who had arrived in private cars drove them now in the cortege, following the hearse. Elijah's parents rode in Jake's car.

Joel's first ride in an automobile had been only five weeks ago when they had all gone to Starlight Park in a taxi. This automobile was nothing like a taxi. It was shiny and important and the cushions were gray and the inside was very clean.

He was unused to the long pants that now chafed his knees. He never let go of Rachel's hand. Grandpa Joseph and Grandma Deborah rode with them in this car that they had all to themselves, but no one spoke during the ride to the cemetery which seemed to go on forever. Rachel was tight-lipped under the veil, unable or unwilling to look into the faces of her parents. When they arrived at the cemetery they all formed around the grave, a very large mass of people, the coffin, with his father in it, resting beside the open hole in the raw earth.

A man in black had shown his father to him in the casket when they were still inside the chapel. His father hadn't looked like his father at all. They had straightened his nose and he had no scars, not even the permanent scar on his left cheek. He was motionless. With his hands folded he seemed to be painted frozen, his eyes closed shut, asleep. He slept so soundly there was no sound, not even his normal low snore.

The shawled rabbi in his black hat stood before them in the bright, sun-filled afternoon, the ground strewn with gaudy autumn leaves. "This good man goes to his eternal rest. His bereaved family and friends will make their own journey without him, missing him as they go. May he find the peace and harmony that he strove for in his life."

Joel tried to take courage from the memory of the story of how resourceful his father had been when he was a lost five-year-old Indian boy, cold and hungry and alone. He was now a grown up, strong and wise. But even though the box was only soft pine Joel could not see how his father could get out. It was nailed shut. He could never get out. He would die. Joel was going to call out in protest but he didn't know what to say and was oppressed by the weight of all these people. There were so many he didn't recognize. These people were strangers. Some of them might be the enemies his father had been fighting. The enemies had shut his father up in a box so that he couldn't fight them back. They might have come to make certain the box was stuffed into the large hole that waited for it. Even as the tears began to form in his eyes he was looking into the faces around the grave for these enemies.

He clutched his mother's hand tighter and fought back the crying. He too could face the owls and the dark and the cold. When the box had been let down into the grave and it was his turn he threw dirt on the lid and walked away with the crumbly loam on his fingertips squeezed into his palm.

*

After he had brushed his teeth that night and was ready for bed his mother called to him. She was sitting on the davenport in the flicker of the yurzeit candle on the cupboard. He curled up in her arms and felt her softness and protection. Her tears silently wet his pajamas as his own tears spilled out against her neck. "Joel, Joel," she rocked him. "Mommy, I want him back, Mommy, I want my papa back." She cradled his sobbing mouth against her breast and stroked his curly hair. "I loved him so, Joel. Your good, beautiful father. I loved him, Joel." They wept together. "Mommy, I miss him. It hurts." Her tears fell onto his cheeks, "They never knew him, Joel. Never knew him -- so strong in his heart, Joel, so gentle, wanting only for us . . . for his friends . . . oh my good Sam...they would never let him . . ." They clung to each other until Joel drifted off to sleep and woke in his cot in the morning, his pajamas still damp.

He got out of bed and brushed his teeth while he ran a hot bath in the old white tub with the claw feet, making sure the rubber stopper was in tight. Then he got an orange from the oak icebox and sliced it in quarters, taking care he didn't cut his fingers, and then brought it to his parents' bedroom where his mother looked so small in a bed made for two people. He could see the valley in the mattress where his father had slept, his father in a box in the ground. He climbed onto the bed and kissed his mother's cheek, waking her up, her eyes all puffy. "I brought you an orange, mommy," he said, "and I ran you a bath." Rachel reached up and took him into her arms, cradling him, crying again.

*

Rachel sat on the couch with him after her bath. "Joel," she said, "your father left you a letter." Her eyes brimmed with tears. She bit her lip. "I'm going to give it to you now." She reached into her bathrobe pocket and handed him an envelope with JOEL printed on it. He had never received a letter before. The envelope was wrinkled from being in his mother's pocket. He took the letter to his room and sat with it on his bed, staring at it, at his name. He bent and pulled his bow from under the bed, the stringing taut, and put it next to him. Then he undid the flap and slipped the letter out.

His father had printed the words in pencil on a scrap of kraft paper torn from a bag. REMEMBER ME. BE STRONG. HELP YOUR MOTHER. And he had printed SAMUEL ELIJAH.

Rachel had found her letter on the morning she had awakened early to no one beside her. She had quickly risen and gone past Joel's room. She found Sam's body sprawled on the sill between the bathroom and the kitchen. She sucked in her breath, stifling a scream, and knelt beside him to feel his bruised face. It was stone cold. She looked wildly about the kitchen and saw the bottle of lye and the glass and the two letters on the white tin table. "No, no," she breathed and collapsed onto the hard kitchen chair, a scream rising in her which she never uttered. She called their doctor, whispering, sobbing into the phone.

It was hours and hours afterward that she read the letter. The doctor and the ambulance had left, and Grandpa Shlomo had come to take Joel, and the confusion of the filling out of papers was ended. She read the scrap of looseleaf paper through her blurry eyes, her tears falling onto the page.

"My dearest Rachel.

I'm sorry. I tried. I couldn't. The insurance policy is paid up. It will give you a start. I never could.

I wanted so much for you since the first minute I saw you. In the end I have failed you as I have failed my friends and comrades. In my life I have loved you alone my Rachel and our boy, our Joel." He had signed it "Your Sam."

*

"We are going to sit shiva," Rachel told him. "There will be many people, people who loved your father who will come to pay their last respects to him. They will all bring some food so it has to be put away in the icebox if it will spoil but the table should always have food on it if anyone is hungry. Yes Joel, my beautiful boy? You understand?" Joel nodded his head solemnly. Sitting shiva sounded so cold, like the cold of the crumbly dirt he had thrown onto the box, the cold he could still feel in his fingertips. "I want you to get dressed in your long pants and help people if they need help. I know you'll be my right hand, my Joel." Rachel kissed him on each cheek and on his forehead and touched his curls. She looked about and shook her head, talking out loud but to herself. "The house is clean and everything's in order. They'll start coming soon."

When people arrived in groups or individually, they spoke grown-up words to his mother at the door, embracing her, whispering to her, speaking in hushed voices. Everyone hugged him but no one paid attention to him except Grandpa Shlomo and Grandma Lena. Joel saw his mother flush when Grandma Deborah and Grandpa Joseph came to the door. After she had taken their package and hugged both of them she made herself busy with the others in their crowded, tiny apartment.

Joel had a feeling, a sense, that his father and mother were real and all the relatives were strangers. That the three of them were poor and that this family of strangers didn't approve of them in some way, of his father, of their house.

There were friends of his father's -- Mottel, with sunken cheeks, limping now, Meyer wearing a black felt hat, and many men he had never seen before. The friends were real. He remembered that when his father was with his friends they laughed and joked and talked, making their plans, filling up the room with the noise they made. His father was part of them as though they were all braves in the same tribe but he was the one who called the meeting! The friends looked stiff now and spoke in low voices to his mother, and one by one they stopped to say a word to him, some kneeling down, some picking him up and holding him. They smelled good, warm. Jake smelled like beer when he took him in his arms in a bear hug. He said into his ear "Your father was a good man and brave, Joel."

Grandpa Shlomo came over to him often just to stand beside him and hold his hand. The little rooms were so crowded and dark even with the candles lighted that sometimes he could see only the bottoms of dresses, shoes, trouser legs. Sometimes he heard the whispered word "suicide," but he didn't know what it meant and thought it might be a grownup word for "died." He understood that word. His father was in a pine box in the ground. He had seen it himself. No matter how much Indian knowledge his father had he could never push through the wood and dirt to climb out.

Someone whispered the word "departed". Now he couldn't let go of the word even when no one was saying it. "Departed." His father had departed, an Indian brave journeying the Way back to his People.

He looked up at Grandpa Shlomo, a sad old man with weeping eyes, looking at the people who had come to "pay their last respects." He squeezed Grandpa Shlomo's hand reassuringly.

His own eyes wanted to cry too, even though he held it back, because he had been sure that his father had stopped being an Indian and was going to stay with them, the three of them together, just the three of them singing around the Victrola. Now Elijah had departed.

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