Now I can talk about the place with the long-handled shovels and the dirt. Take you there, just like I took the kid. In the end Didi threw me out of the house for it. She said I had no business taking the kid to a place like that. He was just out of diapers, it’s true, but he could walk a straight line, and I took him, because a chain of fathers is important. That’s what I believe, and in the way this chain goes I’m the kid’s father and Zev was mine. Didi always fought me about this. She said Zev was an animal. She didn’t want the kid within ten miles of him. Ever.
An animal? Harsh I’d say, although Zev did break a face or two, but never for money. Not the sort of person Didi wanted at her parties. She even wanted to keep him away from our wedding, maybe for fear of crushing the canapés.
What did Didi know about animals? She wasn’t born in the Tsar’s manure piles. She never wrestled a horse to get its shoes off. She was born with a silver filling in her mouth, right here. A dentist’s daughter who married down. Me – down – that’s who she married. A son of Zev, Zev who hardly ever spoke, certainly not in English. His tongue was tied even in Yiddish. He earned his keep breaking sidewalks with a steel pick. For Italian padrones, who called him their Jew cavallo, their Jew horse.
Zev used to make a fist and the kid would hang on it with both his hands, as though it were some kind of carnival ride. By then Zev’s beard was ash-gray, his skin candle-yellow, but the fist was still like a horse’s hoof. The kid could do this for hours, hanging on Zev’s fist and spinning through the air, making this crazy screeching sound. But not like any human. You could swear it was the screeching of a bird.
*******
The burial place was in a sea of tenements, but the look of it was straight out of the Tsar’s potato fields. The old beards knew only one way to get buried. Didi had never seen such a thing. Not a coffin as she knew it, carved and shiny-thick. But pine boards, raw and white and thin, loosely nailed together, slipping this way and that as Zev was carried to the hole and the tall mound of city dirt. You could see snatches of ash-beard or eye-pouch as the top board rattled around. The dirt was piled high and the hole was deep. It smelled of smoke and sewer steam, and there was only a single tall shovel. It stuck up from the dirt pile, waiting for us. We were supposed to go up, each of the men, one by one. I’d seen it before, one shoveler at a time, men working slow as a dirge, until the mound was gone and the hole was filled and nothing showed, only the beaten-down dirt. But on that day the first shovel-full brought a sound from the crowd that was like nothing I’d ever heard. A moan, I suppose, or a cry – there just is no word for it. So dreadful and deep it felt like it was coming from Zev too. Something in the hole had shifted – it must have been the earth below, moving - and the pine top-board was shaken way out of position. There was a crack a mile wide and the dirt fell right on the face and the beard, and all down the yellowed white shirt. The kid saw it and squirmed and tore at my eyes. But I held on, even when Didi tried to pull him away from me. I wouldn’t let go, I even missed my turn shoveling. I missed my turn and I was the son. The kid screamed as I carried him away, following the others past the stones, through the iron gate to the smashed sidewalk.
All those times I went back to the grave I went alone. Didi wouldn’t go. She begged me never to let the kid set foot in the place. She said he wasn’t the same kid, not after that day, and it was all my doing.
Now when I go to visit the burial place I can see them both, my two closest, now, then and forever. Zev I can see just by staring hard at the granite stone, at the Hebrew letters. The granite is no more than a fog to me. I can squint and see all I need to see.
The kid is there too. Alive, I guess you could say, and above ground. He won’t get the meds himself, so I bring them to him. Not to him directly, I give them to the two old keepers who sit in the shed of an office, with their prayer-books, shawls and skullcaps. They make him tea and a little soup. The kid has his own beard now, too, black as Zev’s once was. He stays on the smashed sidewalk, for the most part. They can’t budge him, not even the cops, who are kind of amused. The crate he’s found keeps out some of the wind and none of the cold. At least it’s wood, not cardboard. Thin slats of wood, whitish. It makes me think of the day with the pine and the dirt. After dark the two old beards close the gate. They tell me that’s when the kid pushes his face through the iron rails and makes this sound, a bird sound that lasts long into the night. It’s a soft sound, somewhere between a shriek and a whimper. No complaints from the neighbors – they don’t even hear it. Maybe Zev does.