An Undisturbed Peace (2 page)

Soon after, winter came. That year, it was hard and long in the foothills and the mountains beyond. Much of the route assigned to Abrahan was made impassable by snow and ice. If he could not sell, the rule was he must collect new stock before the thaw or make it if none was to be found. Sassaporta and Company provided only a handful of materials for his pack, things like gunpowder, cooking utensils of tin, and small tools made of iron. Each bondsman peddler of the Sassaporta brigade was expected to acquire what was needed to fill the rest of his pack, his saddlebags too if he had achieved the rank of mounted salesman. The most desired items were ribbons, lace, serving pieces of silver, scented soaps, whatever small luxuries could be easily stored and carried in significant number. But without thinking it through, Abrahan lost himself in the company workshop trying to carve a series of wooden boxes with birds' beaks for clasps. They made him feel closer to Marian, although the first few were a mess. He took counsel from the company carpenters. His construction of boxes steadily improved. But when Uncle Isadore discovered a store of useless products taking up space on his drying shelves, he boxed his nephew's ears and booted him out into the snow to knock on doors and barter for things the hill people on his route might actually want. Those isolated farmers and loggers desired manufactured things, European things, things they could not make for themselves or find on the barter table of every backwoods trading post.

Abrahan stood, brushed himself off. “
Mamzer
,” he muttered at his uncle's back. If his mother only knew, he thought. His mother idolized Isadore, her late husband's big brother, the brave one, the smart one, the one who'd ventured to America when he was twelve years old in service to an earlier generation of uncles and cousins. In those days, a smart young lad with a cultivated English accent could separate a country yokel from his coin in two heartbeats and a handshake. By his early twenties, Isadore had carved his own territory out of the Sassaporta Brothers empire headquartered in Savannah. He had all of North Carolina, a smidgen of Georgia, and parts of Tennessee under his sway. By the time he was forty, his work camp boasted more laborers and warehouse space than any two Sassaporta entrepreneurs put together. Now fifty, he planned to build the largest retail store in Greensborough, North Carolina, the big town ten miles away.

Back in the ghetto of London, Abrahan's mother had gone daily to Bevis Marks in Bethnal Green, where the men gathered for morning prayers. From her perch in the balcony, she davened with them in her ignorant manner without comprehension of the Hebrew she imitated, while in her pure heart she beseeched God that her son might find favor in the eyes of Isadore Sassaporta and win a future as brilliant and secure. God answered her prayers and at the age of eighteen, Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar found himself on a ship of passage, a foul, hideous vessel overstuffed with warring, hopeful émigrés. He was not entirely sure how he'd got there, except that his mother had made decisions for him. When he'd objected, she reminded him of the life in store for a fatherless Jewish son of London, where anti-Semites lurked around every corner waiting to thrash him, and opportunities were scarcer than a gentile's welcome.

“You're very clever,” she told him. “But you're idle. Your friends are rascals, every one. All you've learned in the East End is trickery and deceit, the poor man's games to a quick penny. Keep up with that lot and the docket and jailhouse will grab you before long. If I let that happen, your father of blessed memory will rise from the grave and berate me. Do not fear. The New World will liberate you, I promise.”

Reluctantly, he took his leave of her and, sadly, also of sweet Ariella Levy, the neighbor girl whose hand he'd once dared to hold. There followed weeks of suffocating squalor, loneliness, and storm-tossed seas.

When the ship landed, he stepped on unsteady legs into the harbor at Beaufort, North Carolina, and rejoiced. The sun was shining, the sea at his back sparkled, the buildings all around were well spaced. None of them reeked of age. He filled his lungs with fresh, pristine air, his eyes with a vision of all that was open and new. The taste of liberation filled his mouth. “Oh, Mother, how wise you are!” he wrote in a letter composed that very day. “You were right. I was tumbling down the road to dissipation and ruin. But here, in this fair place, I will learn new ways and save myself. I will find favor in the eyes of Ha-Shem. He will help me prosper and I will send for you within the year!” Such were his hopes and simple ambitions. Instead, he was soon locked in vilest servitude to Uncle Isadore, a harsh and demanding taskmaster who took a lion's share of the profits Abrahan won out of hard labor and cunning, leaving him pennies to spend in the company store. “You owe me your passage,” he'd tell his nephew when he complained, “and the roof over your head.”

Some roof. Uncle Isadore's peddler barracks were even worse than the military ones on which they were modeled. Cold in winter, stifling in summer, they were dark, cramped, filthy longhouses with narrow barred windows. The men lodged there prayed for an early selling season if only to escape their confines. They were a motley crew with barely a common mother tongue among more than five of them at a time. They bunked in sections of the longhouses segregated by country of origin and insulted one another anonymously in the night. Most hated Jews but were afraid to voice their animosity within Abrahan's earshot, given it was widely known he was nephew to the boss. He knew their sentiments nonetheless. All in all, that first year of his servitude, Abrahan felt as if he'd never left the ship of passage. Many a time as he lay in his cot, a Babel of language swarming unwholesomely around him, he counted in his head the pittance of earnings that Uncle Isadore allowed him to keep. Abrahan dreamt of walking off his sales route to disappear, to find his own life without being beholden to anyone, especially that
mamzer
, Uncle Isadore, beloved of his poor deluded mother. There were stories of bonded peddlers attempting to quit the camp who were hunted down by men with dogs. Abrahan judged these to be tall tales meant to frighten Uncle Isadore's debtors into submission. If he could gather enough money, he would leave without a trace and never return. America was a big country and beyond her ever-expanding borders, there was frontier, a wild land overflowing with opportunity. Lately his dreams were colored by fantasies of a life with Marian of the foothills, of taking her with him wherever he decided to go. She would know every way there was to tame the wilderness, he figured, an invaluable asset to a tenderfoot like him, and he would be her grateful devoted love.

That winter, while amassing a stockpile of wares to sell in the spring, there was more than one item Abrahan tucked away for himself, things he might need for a new life with Marian. He remembered everything about her home, noting that she drew water from her backyard stream using a dried gourd, for example, and so he made sure he had an extra tin dipper and wooden pail among his wares. She kept goats for milk and cheese so he packed lengths of cheesecloth and a wide metal comb. When he assembled his wares, those he would sell and those he would give to Marian, there was, of course, far more than he could carry. He imagined himself tying the dipper and comb to his shoulders and wearing the pail on his head while clanking his way up and over hill and dale. He lobbied Uncle Isadore for a horse.

He managed to arrange a meeting with him in the barracks, during a rare pleasant day with the taste of an early spring in the air, a day no sane man would stay indoors. The barracks was a place Isadore Sassaporta rarely appeared, but Abrahan told him he'd amassed a store of treasure no other foot peddler had amassed before. It was something that must be seen to be believed.

Isadore Sassaporta entered the place with a scented handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth against the stench of men. His nephew had lit lanterns and placed them from end to end of the hallway so they could see through the dank dark. He closed the door behind them for privacy. Thanks to the lamplight, it was not difficult to find the place where Abrahan displayed his booty. Spread over and aside his cot, extending up and down the hallway, were the wares Abrahan had scavenged since being cuffed on the head and tossed in a snowbank. Aside from the pail, the dipper, and the comb, there was a bolt of velvet cloth, leather boots in both adult and child sizes, chain link, little boxes of spice seldom seen in that part of the world, wedding rings, and as many rare utilitarian items as there were luxuries. There was even a saddle and a whip. He failed to inform his uncle that much of it he'd gotten on consignment from peddlers too broken to travel, the old ones who lived in tents on the outskirts of town, desperate, hungry men. Let the old bugger think the profits will be whole, he reasoned.

“I've been with you a year now, Uncle,” he said. “I'll never repay you for my passage by peddling scraps in these poor hills. Look at all this I've got to sell! I need your permission to increase my territory and also I need a horse.”

From the glitter in his uncle's eyes above the scented cloth, he knew he had him. The old man clapped him on the back, celebrated their bond of blood, and agreed to give him a horse, although, he added, it would mean an additional fifty dollars of debt to his account. Abrahan rejoiced. With a horse, his expanded inventory, and tricks of the trade his newfound, tent-dwelling associates relayed to him over the course of their dealings, he could be out of debt within a season. His brilliant future in the frontier beckoned.

There was no doubt in his mind that Marian would accept his gifts and proposals. He was in a mad state of desire. When he thought of her, he compared her to the valiant heroines of his people, to Queen Esther, to Deborah and Jael. He murmured sadly to himself when he measured her against his mother, a simple, distracted woman who had foolishly sold him to Uncle Isadore, thinking it would make him rich.
Mother,
he said to her from across the great sea,
whenever we are settled and established, I'll work to send for you.
While he thought of that great occasion, of reuniting with his mother in the golden frontier, he imagined Marian at his side, as loving to his mother as Ruth to Naomi.

Four weeks before the traditional start of selling season—a season that varied according to patterns of weather, but one that usually began just after Purim—Uncle Isadore's stable master sent a boy to fetch Abrahan for the purpose of introducing him to his mount and providing whatever instruction in the care of equines and the art of riding was required. The winds were high that day and the sky was full of clouds. The trees about were winter bare. Their branches swung and dipped in the wind. In at least two, hundreds of crows mourned their dead. Their clamor was alarming. Men left their lodgings to stare at them and then the sky. Everything about the day announced fateful signs of things to come. Abrahan barely noticed. He trod through the muddy thoroughfares of Uncle Isadore's camp town of two hundred souls in a state of delirious anticipation imagining the noble steed that awaited him and the dashing sight the two of them would make galloping up to the cabin door of Marian of the foothills. He knew little of horses beyond the fantasies of a city-born youth. For Abrahan, horses meant wealth. Horses meant manly achievement. Horses meant the ability to flee. But the closest he'd been to an actual equine experience was when he'd ridden in the cab of a carriage on the occasion of his father's death. The burial society had seen fit to grant his family such a conveyance for the funeral due to the man's outstanding piety. At the time Abrahan was seven years old. What little he remembered was shrouded in his mother's grief and his own. He recalled the horse seemed to share in their loss. To this day, what he knew of the rules of horsemanship was limited to keep out of their way, pet them only if they're tied up, and keep your fingers away from their mouths. All other intimacies with horses belonged to a different class of men entirely, that of brawny, gentile men. But now, a miracle! Thanks to the motivation of his love, the reason of his uncle, and the rewards of his ingenuity, he was about to transcend class and attain the elevated status of horseman. In this dreamy state, he traversed the camp town oblivious to the crows, the beggars, whores, and hawkers who called out to him.

The stables were situated near the center of the camp town, which also accommodated a company store, a warehouse and workrooms, a bathhouse that doubled as infirmary, and an ill-used house of worship. It changed denomination three times on Sunday and served as synagogue—if a structure without Torah scrolls can be called such—on Friday night for those few members of Uncle Isadore's crew who had not yet abandoned their vows of spiritual fidelity to mothers in Germany, England, Ireland, and France. From Monday to Thursday, the worship house served as town hall, meeting place, and jail. All of the central buildings were two-storied and fashioned of whatever scraps of milled lumber were at hand when the decision to build them had been made. They stood on stilts against surrounding waterways swollen to flood by melted snow at the spring thaw and by thunderstorm in summer. They were better than shanties but not much and their haphazard construction lent them a cockeyed look. While Uncle Isadore kept a residence in the camp town for occasional use, he and his managers lived most of the time ten miles away in fine houses in Greensborough, conveniently located upwind from the new Mount Hecla textile mill. They had little interest in improving life for their peddlers as long as their stock kept dry.

By contrast, the stables were palatial, which made sense given the treasure that was horseflesh. The primary barn was raised from the ground by stone ramps and the walls were of stone also. Its aisles were paved with brick. There were airtight shutters on the stall windows. The doors were thick as the span of a man's hand. The water troughs were scrubbed and cleaned more often than the pool at the bathhouse. In the back were numerous paddocks and exercise rings, along with a separate stone building that housed the stable master, his crew, wagons, and tack. Approaching the compound with awe, Abrahan felt he had entered a world separate from the dreary grit of the camp town.