In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (14 page)

The Yearning Heifer

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I
n those days I could find great bargains in the small advertisements in my Yiddish press newspaper. I was in need of them because I earned less than twelve dollars a week—my royalties for a weekly column of “facts” gleaned from magazines. For example: a turtle can live five hundred years; a Harvard professor published a dictionary of the language spoken by chimpanzees; Columbus was not trying to discover a route to the Indies but to find the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

It was during the summer of 1938. I lived in a furnished room on the fourth floor of a walk-up building. My window faced a blank wall. This particular advertisement read: “A room on a farm with food, ten dollars weekly.” After having broken with my girl friend Dosha “forever,” I had no reason to spend the summer in New York. I packed a large valise with my meager belongings, many pencils as well as the books and magazines from which I extracted my information, and took the Catskill Mountain bus to Mountaindale. From there I was supposed to phone the farm. My valise would not close and I had bound it together with many shoelaces which I had purchased from blind beggars. I took the 8
A.M
. bus and arrived in the village at three o’clock in the afternoon. In the local stationery store I tried to make the phone call but could not get connected and lost three dimes. The first time I got the wrong number; the second time the phone began to whistle and kept on whistling for minutes. The third time I may have gotten the right number but no one answered. The dimes did not come back. I decided to take a taxi.

When I showed the driver the address, he knitted his brows and shook his head. After a while he said, “I think I know where it is.” And he immediately began to drive with angry speed over the narrow road full of ditches and holes. According to the advertisement, the farm was situated five miles from the village, but he kept on driving for half an hour and it became clear to me that he was lost. There was no one to ask. I had never imagined that New York State had such uninhabited areas. Here and there we passed a burned-down house, a silo which appeared unused for many years. A hotel with boarded windows emerged from nowhere and vanished like a phantom. The grass and brambles grew wild. Bevies of crows flew around croaking. The taxi meter ticked loudly and with feverish rapidity. Every few seconds I touched the trouser pocket where I kept my money. I wanted to tell the driver that I could not afford to drive around without an aim over heather and through deserts, but I knew that he would scold me. He might even drop me off in the middle of the wilderness. He kept on grumbling and every few minutes I heard him say, “Sonofabitch.”

When, after long twisting and turning, the taxi did arrive at the correct address, I knew that I had made a bad mistake. There was no sign of a farm, just an old ruined wooden house. I paid four dollars and seventy cents for the trip and I tipped him thirty cents. The driver cast a murderous look at me. I barely had time to remove my valise before he started up and shot away with suicidal speed. No one came out to meet me. I heard a cow bellowing. As a rule, a cow bellows a few times and then becomes silent, but this cow bellowed without ceasing and in the tone of a creature which has fallen into an insufferable trap. I opened a door into a room with an iron stove, an unmade bed with dirty linen, a torn sofa. Against a peeling wall stood sacks of hay and feed. On the table were a few reddish eggs with hen’s dirt still stuck to them. From another room came a darkskinned girl with a long nose, a fleshy mouth, and angry black eyes beneath thick brows. A faint black fuzz grew on her upper lip. Her hair was cut short. If she hadn’t been wearing a shabby skirt, I would have taken her for a man.

“What do you want?” she asked me in a harsh voice.

I showed her the advertisement. She gave a single glance at the newspaper and said, “My father is crazy. We don’t have any rooms and board, and not for this price either.”

“What is the price?”

“We don’t need any boarders. There is no one to cook for them.”

“Why does the cow keep on screaming?” I asked.

The girl appraised me from head to foot. “That is none of your business.”

A woman entered who could have been fifty-five, sixty, or sixty-five years old. She was small, broad, one shoulder higher than the other, with a huge bosom which reached to her belly. She wore tattered men’s slippers, her head was wrapped in a kerchief. Below her uneven skirt I could see legs with varicose veins. Even though it was a hot summer day she had a torn sweater on. Her slanted eyes were those of a Tartar. She gazed at me with sly satisfaction as if my coming there was the result of a practical joke. “From the paper, huh, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell my husband to make a fool of himself instead of others. We don’t need boarders. We need them like a hole in the head.”

“I told him the same thing,” the girl added.

“I am sorry but I got here with a taxi and it has gone back to the village. Perhaps I could stay for one night?”

“One night, huh? We have for you neither a bed nor linen. Nothing,” the woman said. “If you like, I will call you another taxi. My husband is not in his right mind and he does everything for spite. He dragged us out here. He wanted to be a farmer. There is no store or hotel here for miles and I don’t have the strength to cook for you. We ourselves eat out of tin cans.”

The cow did not stop bellowing, and although the girl had just given me a nasty answer, I could not restrain myself and I asked, “What’s the matter with the cow?”

The woman winked at the girl. “She needs a bull.”

At that moment the farmer came in, as small and broad-boned as his wife, in patched overalls, a jacket which reminded me of Poland, and a cap pushed back on his head. His sunburned cheeks sprouted white stubble. His nose was veined. He had a loose double chin. He brought in with him the smells of cow dung, fresh milk from the udder, and newly dug earth. In one hand he held a spade and, in the other, a stick. His eyes under bushy brows were yellow. When he saw me he asked, “From the paper, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you call? I would have come with my horse and buggy to meet you.”

“Sam, don’t make a fool of the young man,” his wife interrupted. “There’s no linen for him, no one to cook for him, and what are ten dollars a week? It would cost us more.”

“This leave to me,” the farmer answered. “I have advertised, not you, and I am responsible. Young man”—he raised his voice—“I am the boss, not they. It’s my house, my ground. Everything you see here belongs to me. You should have written a card first or phoned, but since you are here, you are a welcome guest.”

“I am sorry, but your wife and your daughter—”

The farmer didn’t let me finish. “What they say is not worth more than the dirt under my nails [he showed me a hand with muddy fingers]. I will clean up your room. I will make your bed, cook your food, and provide you with everything. If you receive mail I will bring it to you from the village. I go there every second or third day.”

“Meanwhile, perhaps I can sleep here tonight? I’m tired from the trip and—”

“Feel at home. They have nothing to say.” The farmer pointed at his family. I had already realized that I had fallen into a quarrelsome house and I did not intend to be the victim. The farmer continued, “Come, I will show you your room.”

“Sam, the young man won’t stay here,” his wife said.

“He will stay here, eat here, and be satisfied,” the farmer replied, “and if you don’t like it, go back to Orchard Street together with your daughter. Parasites, pigs,
paskudas
!”

The farmer put the spade and the stick into a corner, grabbed my valise, and went outside. My room had a separate entrance with its own flight of stairs. I saw a huge field overgrown with weeds. Near the house was a well and an outhouse like in a Polish shtetl. A bedraggled horse was nibbling on some grass. Farther away there was a stable, and from it came the plaintive cry of the animal, which had not stopped in all this time. I said to the farmer, “If your cow is in heat, why doesn’t she get what she needs?”

“Who told you that she’s in heat? It is a heifer and I just bought her. She was taken from a stable where there were thirty other cows and she misses them. She most probably has a mother or a sister there.”

“I’ve never seen an animal that yearns so much for her kin,” I said.

“There are all kinds of animals, but she will quiet down. She’s not going to yell forever.”

2

The steps leading into my room squeaked. One held on to a thick rope instead of a banister. The room smelled of rotting wood and bedbug spray. A stained, lumpy mattress with the filling sticking out of the holes was on the bed. It wasn’t especially hot outside but inside the room the heat immediately began to hammer at my head and I became wet with perspiration. Well, one night here will not kill me, I comforted myself. The farmer set my valise down and went to bring linen. He brought a pillow in a torn pillowcase, a coarse sheet with rusty spots, and a cotton-filled blanket without a cover. He said to me, “It’s warm now, but the moment the sun sets, it will be deliciously cool. Later on you will have to cover yourself.”

“It will be all right.”

“Are you from New York?” he asked me.

“Yes, New York.”

“I can tell from your accent that you were born in Poland. What part do you come from?”

I mentioned the name of my village and Sam told me he came from a neighboring village. He said, “I’m not really a farmer. This is our second summer here in the country. Since I came from Poland I was a presser in New York. I pulled and pushed the heavy iron so long that I got a rupture. I always longed for fresh air and, how do you call it—Mother Earth—fresh vegetables, a fresh egg, green grass. I began to look for something in the newspapers and here I found a wild bargain. I bought it from the same man who sold me the heifer. He lives about three miles from here. A fine man, even though he’s a Gentile. His name is Parker, John Parker. He gave me a mortgage and made everything easy for me, but the house is old and the earth is full of rocks. He did not, God forbid, fool me. He told me everything beforehand. To clean up the stones would take twenty years. And I’m not a young man any more. I’m already over seventy.”

“You don’t look it,” I complimented him.

“It’s the good air, the work. I worked hard in New York, but only here I started to work for real. There we have a union, it should live long, and it did not allow the bosses to make us slaves like the Jews in Egypt. When I arrived in America, the sweatshops were still in existence, but later on things got easier. I worked my eight hours and took the subway home. Here I toil eighteen hours a day and, believe me, if I did not get the pension from the union I could not make ends meet. But it’s all right. What do we need here? We have our own tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers. We have a cow, a horse, a few chickens. The air itself makes you healthy. But how is it written in Rashi? Jacob wanted to enjoy peace but the misfortune with Joseph would not allow it. Yes, I studied once; until I was seventeen I sat in the study house and learned. Why do I tell you this? My wife, Bessie, hates the country. She misses the bargains on Orchard Street and her cronies with whom she could babble and play cards. She’s waging war on me. And what a war! She went on strike. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t bake, she doesn’t clean the house. She refuses to budge and I do everything—milk the cow, dig in the garden, clean the outhouse. I should not tell you, but she refuses to be a wife. She wants me to move back to New York. But what will I do in New York? We have given up the rent-controlled apartment and gotten rid of the furniture. Here we have something like a home—”

“How about your daughter?”

“My Sylvia takes after her mother. She’s already over thirty and she should have gotten married, but she never wanted to become anything. We tried to send her to college and she refused to study. She took all kinds of jobs but she never stuck with them. She has quite a good head, but no
sitzfleisch
. She tires of everything. She went out with all kinds of men and it always ended in nothing. The moment she meets one, she immediately begins to find fault with him. One is this way, the other one is that way. For the past eight months she’s been with us on the farm, and if you think she helps me much, you are mistaken. She plays cards with her mother. That’s all she does. You will not believe me, but my wife still has not unpacked her things. She has, God only knows, how many dresses and skirts, and everything is packed away like after a fire. My daughter, too, has a lot of rags but hers are also in her trunk. All this is to spite me. So I decided, Let some people move in here and I will have someone to talk to. We have two other rooms to rent. I’m not trying to get rich by offering a room and three meals a day for ten dollars weekly. I won’t become a Rockefeller. What is your business? Are you a teacher or something?”

After some hesitation I decided to tell him the truth, that I write for a Yiddish newspaper as a free-lancer. The man’s eyes immediately lit up.

“What is your name? What do you write there?”

“
A Bundle of Facts
.”

The farmer spread out his arms and stamped his feet. “You are the writer of
A Bundle of Facts
?”