Georg cursed the Jew as his pickup struck a pothole in the fading light. Ten years ago he would have spotted the hole in time. Twenty years ago the road would have been in better repair. And forty years ago the idea of his working for someone like Hyman Gottlieb would have seemed preposterous. Jews were moneylenders and small businessmen where Georg came from, not gentlemen farmers.
He had been up since 5:00 a.m. His day usually began an hour later, but he had to make an early trip into town for feed so as to be done with his chores by supper. He ate a quick meal, made sure his chickens and two milk cows were comfortable for the night, then started for the Jew's house.
"Call me," his wife Hilda had pleaded. She had spoken in English and he had replied in the same language. They used English more than their native dialect. It started with just a phrase or odd word. But the use of their adoptive language gradually expanded until now it was the unfamiliar expression from their native tongue which had to be given an American equivalent. Speaking English to the Jew was one thing -- a necessary lingua franca, since Georg knew no Yiddish and the Jew pretended ignorance of dialect -- but speaking English to his own wife seemed to Georg like a disease which had gradually claimed him over the years and now was too far gone to cure.
Hilda knew he couldn't call her. Gottlieb's wife unplugged the phone at dusk, even when her husband was away. Unplugging it was, in fact, the Jew's idea. No one of consequence would call in the evening, and Gottlieb and his wife had no children or relatives in this country, at least none Georg knew of. The fact that the telephone company only charged for outgoing calls didn't seem to matter.
The tobacco looked ready for harvesting. With any luck he would see his share before the year was out. Thanks to the Jew's crop and his own more modest planting, he was holding his own: a small but comfortable house, a growing bank account. He needed a new pickup, but the one he was driving could be patched together for another year or two. He was certainly better off than he had been five years ago, and living like a prince compared with what he had when he first arrived in this country. It was difficult even to recall that confused immigrant. His children told him he still spoke with an accent, but he couldn't hear it, and the only time he spoke dialect was when his son or daughter visited. For some reason English failed him then.
He even felt contempt for recent arrivals from the old country. Every year he hired one to help bring in his crop, using the Jew's machine which he rented to Georg after his own tobacco was cut and stored. Yet Georg had once been just as awkward and disoriented as any of those greenhorns. The day he landed, he and his wife and daughter (the boy arrived the next spring after two years in a DP camp) were packed into the back of a pickup with only bags of feed to cushion the rocky backroads. The driver dropped them off at a cabin in what seemed the middle of a forest. Inside they found a candle, two dirty mattresses, and a cellophane bag decorated with red, blue, and yellow polka dots. They hadn't eaten since breakfast, but it did not occur to any of them that the outlandish bag might contain food. When their sponsor -- an immigrant himself, though seeming as American to Georg then as Franklin Roosevelt -- arrived the next morning, he called them fools for going hungry. But even after he had opened the bag and exposed the slices of white fluff inside, Georg still could not believe it was kin to the rich dark loaves he had eaten in his homeland. Oddly enough, he was now addicted to that sweet, spongy substance.
The pickup began pulling hard to the left. He had put off rotating its rubber, knowing that, come winter, he would have to buy snow tires. He stopped as close as he dared to a deep ditch where the road's shoulder ought to have been.
The left-front, merely bald a few weeks ago but now showing brown fiber, was flat. The spare was in no better condition. He didn't see how he could get by with either of them, even if he reversed the front and rear wheels. He had hoped to avoid any major outlays until spring, when profits from the harvest would be safely in the bank. But now it looked as if he would have to dip into his savings, something he dreaded even more than he did the hellfire which the pastor of his old Sunday school used to warn his charges to fear worse than death. Sin, after all, could be expiated, but a withdrawal in a bankbook was a perpetual stigma of his improvidence.
He cursed the Jew again as he lifted the spare tire free of its moorings. If he had not been obliged to go on this foolish errand, he would not have gotten this flat, and so would not have realized how badly off the pickup's rubber was. He could have spent the evening at home with his old woman, watching their favorite TV show. As it was, he would see no television (the Jew's was broken), and would worry all night about the money he must withdraw to buy new tires.
He was too old for this kind of work -- up at dawn, with no rest until the sun set. At his age, back in the old country he would have been able to start taking it easy, delegating the heavy work to his son who would be happy to give his youth to the farm on the prospect of one day calling it his own. But that wasn't the American way. Here, it was every man for himself and to hell with the old folks. A man had to work until he dropped and give the best fruits of his labor to a damned Jew too cheap to keep his television in repair or use a telephone for anything but business -- the same Jew who, back home, would not have dared to address him without first doffing his hat and calling him "sir." If this was democracy, he would gladly exchange it for the more sensible life his ancestors had enjoyed.
The familiar gate was barely visible in the fading light. Gottlieb never swung it closed. Its weathered planks served no purpose but to mark the turnoff for the dirt track leading to the farmhouse surrounded by large tracts of tobacco, Gottlieb's and his neighbors'. To reach the house you had to risk life and axle on a winding road deeply rutted by the runoff from the raised fields on either side. If you chanced upon a vehicle coming in the opposite direction, you or the other driver had to back off to the main road or reverse all the way to the Jew's property a quarter mile in.
The house itself, a standard American two-story with aluminum siding, was newer than Georg's but was already deteriorated in a way his own older wood-frame never would be. The white metal siding looked imperishable, obscenely so, but he knew the roof leaked (Gottlieb paid his neighbor's boy a few dollars to do patchwork and kept a couple pails handy for when it rained), and the septic tank overflowed once a month. Inside, there was dirt everywhere, most of the furniture was broken, and from early spring to late fall the ceilings were spotted with thousands of black flies. Georg had never seen a flyswatter in the house, much less witnessed anyone using one.
He parked the truck on the baked clay where the front lawn ought to have been. His own house was surrounded by lush grass and patches of seasonal flowers which his wife tended as lovingly as she did her plates and linen -- crocus and daffodils in spring, roses throughout summer, chrysanthemum and marigold at this time of year. But there wasn't even a green weed to grace Gottlieb's barren homestead. It might have belonged to some hillbilly on welfare. It was shocking that a landsman, even a Jew, should live in such circumstances. God knew he had the means to do better.
There was no light showing as he inserted his key in the back-door lock (the front door was bolted shut). He knew where everything should be in the big kitchen, but he took his time, careful not to bark a shin or trip over the cat's dish. If he ever did take a header while doing the Jew's bidding he could expect no compensation for his injury -- Gottlieb insured nothing but his farm machinery. If the house burned down Gottlieb would present himself at Georg's door as if he were kin claiming a birthright. And Georg knew he would have no choice but to take him in.
His knee struck a misplaced chair. Edna doubtless heard it and was now beside herself, imagining some killer-rapist had broken in.
"It's me!" he shouted.
She didn't answer, probably buried under a mountain of quilts in the double bed she and the Jew shared. Even on the hottest of nights she slept beneath two blankets and, when winter came, appropriated every coat and sweater in the house. She would rather be chopped to pieces by a homicidal maniac than expose herself to the night air. Gottlieb, of course, would not turn on the furnace until there was a clear danger of the pipes freezing.
It would serve her right, Georg decided as he lumbered up the creaky stairs, if he really was a crazed killer instead of just her husband's obedient employee. She was so frail, so tenuously attached to life, always suffering from one complaint or another. She never lifted a finger except to make herself a cup of chamomile tea. She was a dry twig ready to snap and be thrown into the fire.
"Is that you?" she hissed from the bedroom where a dim lamp cast a sickly light through the half-open doorway.
"Yes, yes," he replied, thinking what a fool she was. He could be anybody -- Fuller Brush man, meter reader, chainsaw murderer. He felt the same disgust mixed with pity that he felt for a sick animal he was about to destroy. But Edna Gottlieb was not even his chattel: she was the Jew's responsibility. His own plump Hilda was home watching their favorite television show or baking a crumbcake for his breakfast. What was he doing here with this dessicated hag? Why had he ever agreed to take on this, the most disagreeable of his chores?
"Take off your shoes," she croaked as he approached the bed, her blue-white brow barely visible above the mound of bedclothes. Strands of gray hair lay on the sallow pillow like stubble in a barren field. He took off his heavy boots and pushed them under the bed. "The door is locked? You locked the door?"
"Yes, Edna."
He lay down on the bed, having no need for the threadbare blanket she had left for him. He would sleep in his clothes so as to be on his way more quickly in the morning. The Jew would not return till after noon. Georg did not know where he had gone, nor did he care.
In the dark he could just make out a chest of drawers and, near the gray window, a rocking chair. Edna's breathing had already become deep and regular, with a little puff at the start of each exhale. Soon she would have her first nightmare. She would moan like a sick animal, awaken suddenly, and reach out to make sure he was there. Then she would sigh, pull the mound of covers higher on her neck, and go back to sleep. He knew her sleeping habits as well as he did his own Hilda's, who never stirred from the time she laid her head on the pillow until she awoke bright and refreshed the next morning.
What was it she dreamed? All he really knew about her was that, like himself, she and Gottlieb had been Displaced Persons. The Jew once mentioned a family business in the old country, but Georg could not remember if they had been grain dealers or moneylenders. One thing the Jew could not have been was a farmer. Only Christians held land, and Protestant and Catholic regarded each another with as much suspicion as they did Jews. Even cattle took on their owners' religious identity. There was a time when he himself believed he could distinguish a Catholic cow from a Protestant cow.
He had a long day ahead of him and needed his sleep. He wanted to shake her awake but was afraid she might report him.
"'itte," she gasped, breathing hard as if she were running away from something. Then, more clearly, "Bitte, bitte," like a child pleading not to be punished. He pressed his hands over his ears until all he could hear was the roar of his own deafness. What was he doing here? he asked himself again. Why was he being punished for crimes he never committed?
He uncovered his ears. There was no sound.
"Edna?"
He reached out to touch her, but his hand sank into a mountain of soft blanket. It was as if her old bones had immaterialized, or as if they had never been solid to begin with, a walking, breathing specter of those wasted corpses that troubled his sleep. An old but familiar terror began to stir in him, the fear he used to feel as a boy when he walked past a graveyard. And just as they did when there was only the unpredictable dead to beleaguer him, his legs wanted to run, to carry him away from this house of misery and bad dreams.
He heard a low whimpering, then the sounds of more serious weeping -- not a spoiled child's self-indulgent tears but the half-stifled sobs of ancient, hopeless bereavement. The Edna he knew was capable of whining with self-pity over an imaginary ache, but the woman beside him was grieving for something greater than a muscle spasm or a nightmare.
The dark room began to blur as if a part of his own interior landscape matched precisely the shape and cause of the misery beside him.
It was like trying to get his arm around a snowdrift. At first she didn't seem to notice his embrace. Then her breath suddenly caught short.
"Yah, yah," he grumbled, just as he used to when one of his children woke from a bad dream. "Yah, yah, yah."
She hesitated, sniffing as if trying to identify him by smell. Satisfied, she gave a long, uneven sigh and pulled the covers up around her ears. He removed his arm, feeling suddenly foolish. She might even have mistaken his intentions.
For a few moments there was no sound. Then, insubstantial as the darkness, the voice of a very old child whispered . . . "Danke."