The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  “Harry?” the African American man called abruptly, and both Ethel’s and Zippo’s heads jerked toward the buffalo. The same buffalo, Daniel noticed, the one farthest to the right with his nose in the grass and the broken tip of his horn jutting toward them like a shiv.

  But the man was talking to one of the kids. And the kid was lifting his red hood off his ears. He was maybe eight, blond-haired, with chipmunk cheeks that would have amused either of Daniel’s aunts for weeks on end if they could have gotten their pinching fingers on them. He wiped a hand across his tear-streaked face and waited.

  “Just walk this way, son,” the pinstripe man was saying. “Around the fence there. Come to us. Harry, lead them this way. All of you, now. Come on.”

  None of the children moved. In the center of the yard, the buffalo stamped. One of them knocked horns with its closest neighbor, though the gesture looked accidental to Daniel. More like two old men bumping into one another with walkers than rutting.

  Then the kid in the hood moved. The moment he did, the buffalo with the broken horn looked up, snorted loudly, and raked its foot along the grass. Instantly, rifles leapt to shoulders as the cops locked in, and the buffalo froze, sweeping its gaze once across the whole assembled mass before him. It chuffed again, pawed more frantically and tore a huge hunk of dirt out of the lawn.

  “Damn it,” spat a nearby radio.

  Harry—the kid, not the animal—burst into fresh tears. Half a dozen safety catches popped free on half a dozen guns. Daniel was so busy watching the police that he didn’t notice Aunt Zippo moving until she was halfway across the yard.

  “Jesus,” a policeman yelled. “Someone grab her!”

  But Aunt Zippo had already reached the herd, and as Daniel’s mouth dropped open, she disappeared amongst them.

  Even the children went silent. Around the old woman, the buffalo began to pant and paw nervously. One of them bumped her with its flank, and Daniel saw her stagger and get bumped by another and almost go down amidst their stamping feet. The one with the pointed half-horn had moved into the circle, now, and it was poking at Aunt Zippo with its head lowered and its front foot working furiously at the grass.

  For one more moment, the unreality held. Daniel stared at the animals snorting around his aunt, alternately ignoring her and then brandishing horns and banging themselves against her. The eeriest thing wasn’t their presence. It was their physicality. Their breath and their scraped, hairy sides and their deep-set, black-brown eyes and the way their skin seemed draped over their skulls rather than attached to it, as though they were already skeleton and hide, and there was something else, something not-buffalo, underneath there.

  His aunts’ faces, Daniel realized, looked the same way. Everyone’s did. His father’s. His wife’s. Hell, even his own face. Our features little more than cloaks life shrugs on while it camps inside us.

  Somewhere to his right, a walkie-talkie crackled. Rifles shifted, held. Ethel was just staring, her hands over her mouth. Daniel threw his arm around her shoulder, squeezed once.

  “I’ll get her,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” said his aunt.

  Then he was through the fence, flinging up his hand, screaming, “Wait. Don’t shoot.”

  “Hold fire!” someone shouted.

  Two guns exploded. Daniel ducked, whirled, waved a frantic hand, and broke into a run as the kids screeched and bolted for the blacktop. Over the tops of the nearest buffalo, Daniel could see his Aunt’s orange shawl, the back of her head with its thinning, blue-white hair like a cloud coming apart. The head disappeared as his aunt went down.

  “No!” Daniel screamed, and the buffalo broke as one into a plunging, sideways dash toward the far end of the schoolyard, away from the children and the blacktop and the mass of muzzles and threatening faces.

  All of them, that is, except the one with the horn. Harry. He

  had slid, with surprising grace, onto his front knees. Aunt Zippo was kneeling beside him. The buffalo seemed to hover there a moment, and then slipped the rest of the way to the grass.

  Aunt Zippo laid both her hands on the animal’s throat, under its mane. Its great, black hooves had splayed to either side of her, and blood bubbled from the holes in its gut and over Zippo’s gloves.

  “Ssh,” she was saying, in that hypnotic, even cadence she seemed to have been born with, or maybe just learned through too much practice. So many years of practice. “Ssh, Harry.” She never looked up, not once. She just kept whispering, over and over, until the buffalo died.

  It took hours, after that, for the truck to come, and for the animal wranglers to wrestle the surviving bison into it. By the time Daniel and his aunts got back to Ethel’s, it was too late to drive home, and he was too shaken, anyway. Ethel ordered pineapple pizza, which Daniel barely touched but which his aunts devoured. Ethel burst into tears once, and Zippo sat beside her and said, “I know. I know.”

  “How many times?” Ethel sobbed, swiping at her cheeks and smearing pizza grease there.

  Producing yet another of her magic tissues, Zippo wiped the grease away. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit.”

  “You know, I still miss him the most. Harry.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t love him the most. He pretty much slept and worked and built Herm’s trains with him and wouldn’t let us eat donuts enough. But I miss him the most.”

  “He was the first,” Zippo said.

  “Don’t eat that last pineapple,” Ethel said, and snatched the final pizza slice from the box. Abruptly, she looked up at Daniel, held the slice toward him. “Unless you want it, honey.”

  Daniel shook his head, closed his eyes, saw skeleton-flashes of white light, like the projected shadows of a CAT Scan. When he opened his eyes, his aunts were holding hands.

  Zippo went home, and Ethel set him up in her son Herm’s old room with the train bedspread still draped over the bed. Daniel read a Dick Francis novel until well after midnight because he didn’t think he could sleep, nodded off with the book on his chest, and woke up weeping.

  He didn’t think he’d called out, but his Aunt was at the door within seconds anyway, in a pink nightgown that had to have been at least thirty years old, and with what looked like a matching bonnet on her head. She didn’t ssh him—that was Zippo’s purview—but she asked several times if he wanted a bagel, and she clucked a lot, and in the end she sat on the edge of the bed and patted his hand, over and over.

  “How do you do it, Aunt Ethel?” Daniel asked, through tears he couldn’t seem to stop. “How do you survive the love you outlive?”

  Aunt Ethel just patted his hand, glanced around the room, out toward the hallway, still lined with photos of the families she’d created or joined, the children she’d borne and the families they’d formed. The hallway was also where she’d moved the pictures of the men she and her sister had buried, after replacing them in the living room with the buffalo.

  “I know what Mack would have said,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “‘Did you hear the one about the rabbi and the stripper?’”

  That just made Daniel sob harder. When he’d gotten control of himself again, he looked at his aunt. “What about you, Aunt Ethel?”

  “Me?” She shrugged. “Mostly, Hon, I think I just keep deciding I want to.”

  It was a long while before the tears stopped completely and Daniel felt ready to lie back on his pillow. Ethel brought him warm milk, and he actually drank it. And it was after two when he awoke the second time, to the sound of the porch door swinging open.

  Instantly, he was bolt upright. “Aunt Ethel?” he called. Grabbing his pants off the chair, he hurried down the darkened hallway, through the living room onto the screened-in porch. The side-yard lights were on, flooding the tiny yard.

  Ethel was by the screen. Fifteen yards away, right where the grass disappeared into the stand of pines that marked the edge of her property, the cheetah crouched on its haunches, its tail whapping
at the dirt. In life, even more than in its photo, the thing looked ancient, its yellow eyes rheumy, its fur discolored or missing entirely. It also had its disconcertingly tiny head cocked, its mouth open, and one front paw crossed over the other. There was something almost cocky in the pose. Composed, at the very least. Like a gentleman caller.

  “Oh my God,” Daniel mumbled. “How on earth did it…”

  “Mack’s home,” his aunt said, and glanced just once over her shoulder at Daniel.

  “What?” But he was thinking of the buffalo on the wall. The ones Ethel and Zippo both insisted they hadn’t named, just called by name. “Aunt Ethel, that isn’t…”

  Smiling, she stepped out the door.

  It was those next, fleeting moments Daniel would remember, years later, at Lisa’s three-years-clean checkup, and again at her five years, when the doctors told her she didn’t need to come back every six months anymore, she just had to stay vigilant, always. Or at least, it was those moments he would focus on. Not what came afterward. From then on, when he let himself think about this night, he would picture his aunt’s bare, gnarled feet in the grass. Her lumbering gait as she approached the cheetah, which hunched, coiled, its purr—or growl—audible even from the house. The pink bonnet on her head, the yellow overcoat on her shoulders, and the swing of her hand off her hip that told him she was dancing.

  Part II

  Tales from the Rolling Dark

  Shomer

  “Melancholy can smile. Sorrow cannot. And smiling is the legacy of my tribe.”

  Friedrich Torberg, Tante Jolesch

  “So you’ll do it?” Aunt Jessica asked, holding Marty’s hand, as they stood in a ring around Uncle El’s body.

  “Of course I will,” Marty murmured. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from his uncle’s face. He’d never seen an unprepared corpse before, and what amazed him was how little like Uncle El the body already looked. His eyes had come open, right at the end, but crossed and out of alignment, like balloons that had drifted separately to the ceiling. His top lip, too, had slid sideways, and looked frozen halfway toward one of those twisted-mouth expressions Uncle El had used to crack up first his nephews, then his children.

  On the other side of the hospital bed, El’s son Leo glanced up at Marty. Through his tears, a wicked smile spread. El’s smile. “Want any of us to tell you what it is you’re doing first?”

  An hour later, over blintzes in the deli where El used to sneak Marty and then, in succession, the rest of his nieces and nephews and finally his own children off to midnight meals, Leo told him.

  “Shomer,” Marty repeated through a mouth full of sweet cheese and sour cream. Outside, the drizzle drifted down through the dark and shrouded passing cars, the bus stop across the street, a pedestrian hurrying up his row-house stoop, so that everything looked wavy, wrapped in plastic.

  “It means guard,” said Leo, who’d taken one bite of his blintz and then sat staring into his plate.

  “What am I guarding?”

  “Dad,” Leo said, and Marty stopped eating. “My dad.”

  Marty stared at his cousin, then at his cousin’s reflection superimposed in the dark window, wavering like everything else.

  “I hadn’t really heard of Shomers either,” Leo said. “The synagogue asked, and Mom thought it sounded nice.”

  The fact that Leo also hadn’t known about it was a little reassuring. Every time Marty came east, he left aware of yet another blessing or ritual he didn’t know, which made him feel yet again like a pretend Jew and, more surprisingly, made him care. But this word he’d never even heard.

  In the diner light, Leo looked more hollow-cheeked than usual, his dark, curly hair even greasier against his dress-shirt collar. Of course, at 24, already a featured Salon.com columnist, Leo could still claim the look as a style and mean it. Whereas Marty—now 35, with his freelance technical drawing accounts drying up in the recession and the gallery that had shown and occasionally even sold his paintings shuttering its doors, and with his last relationship long enough ago that his mother had started asking if there were any “cute baristas” at his local coffee shop—Marty’s ongoing inability to hit each belt loop or get a tie knot all the way up under his neck just gave him away. At least, that’s how it felt to Marty.

  “The synagogue has a guy they pay to do it,” Leo said. “Most synagogues do, did you know that?”

  “Don’t tell my mom,” said Marty. “She might ask about the salary. On my behalf.”

  Leo glanced up from his plate, his half-smile quick and grateful and his eyes full of tears again. For a moment, Marty felt like the cousin he’d always meant to be to El’s children, and hadn’t quite become, somehow. That cousin. Because El had certainly been that uncle. At least for a while.

  “Professional Shomer,” Leo said. “It’d be a conversation starter.”

  “What do you mean, guard your dad?”

  “His body. Someone’s supposed to sit with his body every second until it’s in the ground.”

  “Like, in the embalming room?”

  “Jews don’t embalm, moron.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Marty blushed and scooped up another forkful of blintz but didn’t lift it. “I knew that, actually.”

  “Remember Grandpa in his coffin? With all that makeup on him?”

  “The Grandpa Action-Figure,” said Marty, and this time, Leo smiled all the way.

  “I forgot about that.”

  At his death, their grandfather had weighed well over 350 pounds, and his prepared body had looked so little like him, the face so rosy-cheeked but devoid of even one of his thousand trademark expressions, that Marty’s father had said he looked like a G.I. Joe. And for the rest of the shiva week, as mourners brought soup and kugel and sat on Grandpa’s couches under the soaped-over mirrors and told Grandpa stories, the cousins had holed up in bedrooms or basement corners, imagining Grandpa Action Figure adventures. Grandpa Action Figure leaps from the fifteen foot upstairs balcony, creating a crater in the floor and a tsunami in Chesapeake Bay. Grandpa Action Figure climbs the Shot Tower. Grandpa Action Figure waits until all the mourners have left, and then comes home.

  “We’re not even supposed to have visitations like that, are we?” Marty asked. “Open coffins?”

  “Nope. I have no idea whose idea it was. My dad hated it.”

  Abruptly, Leo put his face in his hands. Leo didn’t generally leave even his laughter unguarded, and Marty wasn’t sure how to react. Raindrops rilled down the window. It was possible, Marty realized, that he would never eat another blintz. He’d never really liked them. Or, he’d only liked them sitting across from Uncle El, in Baltimore, in the middle of the night.

  “So where do we sit?” he finally asked. “Your dad and I?”

  “At the funeral home.” With a visible effort, Leo lifted his head, steadied himself. “It’s just because it’s Shabbat. The Shomer Pro was already on his way to Virginia for the weekend. He’ll be back tomorrow. And the Blank says he’ll come early in the morning and spell you.”

  “Robbie the Blank?”

  “You know any other Blanks we’re related to?”

  That jabbing tone was an inheritance from Uncle El. How old had Marty been before realizing he didn’t actually like it?

  “So I go to the funeral home once the body gets there, and I just sit?”

  “I think you’re technically supposed to recite Psalms. Obviously, you don’t have to do that. You just…guard him.”

  “From what? Embalming?”

  “I don’t know, Marty, I’ve never done it, alright? I’ve never heard of doing it. It’s just my dead dad, and apparently someone’s supposed to guard him, and immediate family aren’t allowed, and my mom thought of you. Do it or don’t.”

  Taken aback—again, by the nakedness of the emotion more than the emotion itself—Marty shifted in his seat, waved a hand in the air. “Of course I’ll do it, Leo. I already said I would. I’m honored.”

  “It’s a mitzvah, supposed
ly.”

  “I’d do it if it were a mortal sin.”

  “Thank you, Marty. Just guard him, okay? Stay awake. Be with him. Ferry my dad to the afterlife.”

  “Do we believe in the afterlife?”

  “Since when does Judaism require belief?”

  Ninety minutes later, armed with his sketchpad, a Tanakh, and a travel Boggle set—”You’ve got a pretty good shot at beating him, for once,” Leo said as he handed it over—Marty let his mother drive him to the Rosenberg Funeral Home. As he opened the passenger side door, she grabbed his hand and said, “My little brother is going in the ground. I’m glad you’re going to be with him.” And then, when Marty’d kissed her sopping cheek, “I bet someone in there could find you a razor and some shaving cream.”

  Marty held his mother’s hand. “They probably have really good tie tie-ers, too.”

  “That’s just morbid,” his mother said, smiled, sobbed, and left him in the rain.

  For just a moment, turning to the building, he thought there’d been a mistake. The Rosenberg Home was low and rectangular and long, flanked on both ends by poplar trees and fronted by a wide, circular driveway. Before the front doors, lined up single file, hearses sat silent, their back curtains drawn, reminding Marty disconcertingly of taxis cuing for airport passengers. So, a funeral home, alright. But a deserted one, judging from the utter lightlessness in there. And a Chinese one, if the character-covered, hand-painted signs in the black windows were any indication.

  Midnight dim sum? Marty thought vaguely, the weight of the day—of watching his uncle die, his cross-country trip, his mother’s tears and his cousins’ and his aunt’s—all settling over him. That would certainly be a proper way of performing Shomer—Shomering?—for Uncle El. Dazed, with chilly water droplets creeping into his collar and down his back, Marty moved up the steps, between the hearses. He half-expected to see drivers snoozing at the wheel, or poring over tomorrow’s Racing Form for Pimlico. But the hearses were empty. Reaching the front doors, he raised a hand to his eyes and squinted into the blackness. The new face appeared so fast that Marty mistook it at first for his reflection.