Chapter 19 #2
The tears ran freely now and he let them run and didn’t touch them. “They came that same night. To our house. A mob of them, men we knew, men I’d grown up alongside, men whose children I’d thrown stones in the river with as a boy.
“They broke in the door and they dragged the whole of us out into the street, my mother, my two sisters, my father, me, and they beat us in the road, and they put their hands on my mother and on my sisters, and they told us we were finished in that town, that we’d be gone by morning or we’d be dead by it. And my father—”
The voice went out from under him, and he stopped, and brought it back from wherever it had gone. “My father had spent every day of thirty years being careful so that this exact thing would never come to his door.
“And here it was at his door regardless, despite all the care, and he stood in the road and watched grown men put their hands on his wife and his daughters, and something in him that had held thirty years just let go all at once. Gave way.
He pulled out a knife he carried and he put it into one of them.
Into one of the neighbors. And that was the end of all of us, every one, because that was the one thing you couldn’t do, you couldn’t draw blood on one of them, and when he did it they stopped beating us for sport and fell on us in earnest, and they killed him there in the road, and they killed my mother, and they killed both my sisters, with their hands and their boots and their clubs and whatever lay nearest to a man’s reach. ”
She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said into a thing like that, and she had sense enough and respect enough not to go reaching for words to lay over it where no words would hold any weight.
“One of them put a club across the back of my head,” Abe said. “A homemade thing, a table leg with a nail driven through the end of it. I found it after, in the road, and I knew it for what had hit me by the blood and hair on the nail of it.
It put me down and it laid my scalp open, and a scalp bleeds the way you’d not believe a thing could bleed, a great sheeting flood of it, all down over my face and my neck and into the dirt, and they looked at the boy lying in the road drowned in his own blood and they took me for dead along with the rest and they went on to the next house and the next family. And I wasn’t dead.”
He wiped his face then, once, finally, with the flat of his hand, smearing the soot and the wet together.
“I came back up out of the dark of it sometime in the small hours with my whole family lying around me in the road gone cold, every one of them, my mother and my father and my two sisters, and the one of us still drawing breath was the one who’d brought it down on all their heads.
I went to America after that, because there was nothing left for me in that town but their graves, and nothing left in the whole of Europe but more of the same, rising up everywhere a man cared to look in those years.
“And I’ve carried it twelve years, this single thing I came to understand far too late to be any use to a soul. That my father was no coward. That the hiding was never the weakness I took it for.
The hiding was a man keeping his family alive by the only means a world that wanted them dead had left him, and the one weak and foolish and prideful thing in the whole of that story was a young man so in love with the cleanness of his own conscience that he walked into a synagogue to feel like a man for one single evening, and bought that one evening with the lives of every person who loved him. ”
The coals had burned down low in the south. The night insects had come up loud all around the dark ranch, sawing away, indifferent, and somewhere out in the corral a horse shifted and blew.
“So when you sit there and tell me I couldn’t have known,” Abe said, and his voice had come back level again, scraped clean, “I’ll tell you that I knew the whole shape of this thing twelve years ago, knew it written out in my own family’s blood in a street in Russia.
I knew, as well as a man can know anything, that to reach hard for a thing you want in a world full of men who’ll kill to keep their secrets is to get the innocent ones around you killed in your place.
I knew it down to the ground. And I rode into this county and I did it anyway, all over again, here, tonight, to your town and your old people and your friend. So no. Do me the kindness of not telling me I couldn’t have known. The not-knowing is the one mercy I haven’t got coming.”
She didn’t answer him with words. She reached across the small dark space between the two chairs and laid her hand over his where it lay on the arm of the chair, the soot and the dried blood of the night gritting under her palm, and she left it there.