A Bad Man

5

For the first twelve years they fled the minion. They hid from it in Maine, in Vermont, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Indiana. Once his father had seen a film of ranchers in Montana, but they never got that far. At last they came to southern Illinois’ Little Egypt.

His father rebuilt his peddler’s wagon for a fifth time, nailing the old lumber with the old nails. “Test it, test it,” his father said, and Feldman climbed inside, stretching out on his back in the gentile sun, the goyish heat. His father stepped inside the long handles. “Old clothes,” he called, “rags, first-born Jews.” A woman stood on her porch and stared at them. “Go inside, lady,” Feldman’s father said, “it’s only a rehearsal. Out, kid.”

Feldman sprang from the wagon. “What a leap, what a jump,” his father said. “Soon I ride in the wagon, you get a good offer and you sell me.” He stooped and picked up the paintbrush and threw it to his son. “Paint for the hicks a sign. In English make a legend: ISIDORE FELDMAN AND SON.” His father watched him make the letters. “It’s very strange,” he said, “I have forgotten how to write English. But I can still read it, so no tricks.” When Feldman had finished, his father took the brush saying, “And now I will do the same in Hebrew on the other side. For the Talmudic scholars of southern Illinois.” His son climbed into the wagon and lay back against the planks with their faded, flaking legends, the thick Hebrew letters like the tips of ancient, heavy keys. “This afternoon it dries, and tomorrow it is opening day in America.”

His father was insane. For five years Feldman had been old enough to recognize this; for three years he had been old enough to toy with the idea of escaping; for two weeks he had been brave enough to try. But he had hesitated, and for a week he had realized with despair that he loved his father.

They had rented a house. It was like all the houses they had ever lived in. “Look at it,” his father said, climbing up on the porch. “White frame.” He touched the wood. “Steps. A railing. A swing. Here, when you’re old enough, you’ll court Americans in that swing. And screen doors. Look, look, Leo, at the screen doors. A far cry from the East Side. No screen doors on the East Side. Smell the flowers. I wish I knew their names. Get the American girls in the swing to tell you their names. That way, if they die, we will know what seeds to ask for. Good. Then it’s settled.”

While the paint was drying they walked in the town. His father showed him the feed store, the courthouse, the tavern. They went inside and Feldman’s father drank a beer and spoke with the bartender. “Neighbor,” his father said, “a Jew is a luxury that God affords Himself. He is not serious when He makes a Jew. He is only playing. Look, you got a wife?”

“Sure,” the man said uneasily.

“Tell her today you met Feldman and Son.” He leaned across the bar and winked. “If a Jew wants to get ahead,” he whispered, “he must get ahead of the other Jews. He must go where there are no Jews. A Jew is a novelty.” He turned to his son. “Tell the neighbor our word,” he said.

“Please, Papa,” Feldman said, embarrassed.

“In the first place, papa me no papas, pop me no pops. This is America. Dad me a dad. Father me a father. Now — the word.”

“Diaspora,” Feldman said.

“Louder, please.”

“Diaspora,” he said again.

“Diaspora, delicious.”

The bartender stared at them.

“Explain. Tell the fellow.”

“It means dispersion,” Feldman said.

“It says dispersion, and it means dispersion,” his father said. “I tell you, ours is a destiny of emergency. How do you like that? You see me sitting here fulfilling God’s will. I bring God’s will to the Midwest. I don’t lift a finger. I have dispersed. Soon the kid is older, he disperses. Scatter, He said.” He looked around the tavern significantly, and going to the front window, made an oval in the Venetian blinds for his face and peered out. “To the ends of the earth. Yes, Lord.” He rushed back to the bar. “Who owns the big store here?” he asked suddenly.

“That would be Peterson,” the bartender said.

“Peterson, perfect.”

The bartender started to move away, but Feldman’s father reached across the bar and held his elbow. “The jewelry store? Quickly.”

“Mr. Stitt.”

“Stitt, stupendous.”

“Come, Father,” Feldman said.

“There’s no shul, no Jew?” his father said.

“I don’t know none, mister.”

“Know none, nice.” He stood up. At the door he turned to all of them in the tavern. Huge men in faded overalls looked down at him from enormous stools. “Farmers, townsmen—friends: I am your new neighbor, Isidore Feldman, the peddler. In the last phase of the Diaspora. I have come to the end of the trail in your cornfields. I can go no further. Here I hope to do business when the pushcart dries. I have scouted the community and can see that there is a crying need for a ragman. The old-clothes industry is not so hot here either. Never mind, we will grow together. Tell the wife. Meanwhile, look for me in the street!”

Going home, his father, elated, taught him the calls as they walked along. “Not ‘rags,’ not ‘old clothes.’ What are you, an announcer on the radio? You’re in a street! Say ’regs, all cloze.’ Shout it. Sing it. I want to hear steerage, Ellis Island in that throat. I’ll give you the pitch. Ready, begin: Rugs, oil cloths! Wait, stop the music. Greenhorn, you’re supposed to be a greenhorn! What, you never saw the Statue of Liberty through the fringes of a prayer shawl?”

He hadn’t and neither had his father.

“All right, from the top. Rocks, ill clots. Better, beautiful, very nice, you have a flair.”

“Rex, wild clits,” Feldman sang out. A hick stared at him from behind a lawn mower. He could smell preserves in the air.

“Terrific,” Feldman’s father shouted, “‘wild clits’ is very good. We’ll make our way. I feel it. I know it’s a depression, once I built a railroad, made it run. I know this is Illinois, America. I know the rubble is not the destruction of the second temple, but just today’s ashes. Never mind! We are traveling Jews in the latest phase of the new Diaspora. We will be terrific.”

He stopped and pulled his son close to him. “Listen, if anything happens you’ll need wisdom. I can’t help you. Father’s a fathead. Dad’s a dope. But in lieu of wisdom—cunning. These are bad times — bad, dreckish, phooey! But bad times make a bullish market for cunning. I’m no Red. From me you don’t hear ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ From me you hear ‘from them to me.’ I know the world. I know it. I fight it one day at a time. This is your father speaking. This is advice.

“Rogues, wooled clouds,” he roared down the American street.

So they sold and sold. “It’s the big sellout,” his father said. “What did you sell today?” he would ask people he met in the street. “Trade, traffic, barter, exchange, deal, peddle, purvey,” he called ecstatically to the house fronts.

They’d go into Woolworth’s — Woolworth’s was one of his father’s chief suppliers; “My wholesaler,” he’d say — and his father would gasp at the abundances there, the tiers of goods, the full shelves, the boxes on high platforms lining the walls. “Commodities,” he’d sigh. “Things. Thing City.” Staring like a stricken poet at an ideal beauty. “Some operation you’ve got here,” he said to the girl who sold the clusters of chocolate peanuts. He stared passionately at the penny weighing machine, the Foot-Eze machine. “Nothing for something,” he groaned jealously.

He turned to his son. “The beggars. Ah, the beggars and cripples. The men who sit armless and stumpless on a spread-out sheet of newspaper with the pencils in their caps. They have it made. They do. Take the nickel and keep the pencil! Delicious, delightful! The freaks stashed in cages, getting gelt for a gape. My son, my son, forgive me your health, your arms and your legs, your size and strong breathing, your unblemished skin. I chain you forever to invoice and lading, to rate of exchange, to wholesale, to cost.” He’d wink. “Sell seconds,” he’d say, “irregulars. Sell damaged and smoke-stained and fire-torn things. Sell the marred and impaired, the defective and soiled. Sell remnants, remainders, the used and the odd lot. Sell broken sets. That’s where the money is.”

He would pick up a pair of ladies’ panties from the lingerie counter. “Look, look at the craftsmanship,” he’d say distastefully, plunging his big hand inside and splaying his fingers in the silky seat, “the crotchmanship.” He’d snap the elastic. “No sag, no give,” he’d say to the startled salesgirl. “Give me give, the second-rate. Schlock, give me. They’re doing some wonderful things in Japan.

“Because,” he’d say, explaining, “where’s the contest in sound merchandise? You sell a sound piece of merchandise, what’s the big deal? Demand has nothing to do with good business, not good business. Need, who needs it? In England — come closer, miss, you’ll enjoy this — they have a slang term for selling. ‘Flogging,’ they call it. Flogging, fantastic. But that’s it, that’s it exactly. Beating, whipping. Every sale a scourge. Sell me envelopes.”

“That’s the stationery counter. Aisle four.”

“You hear, Leo? A stationary counter. Wonderful, wonderful. Not like with us with the wheels on the wagon, the rolling Diaspora. What a thing it is to be a gentile! A goy, gorgeous!”

He leaned across the counter and took the girl’s hands in his own. He moved with her like this to the break in the counter and pulled her toward him gently. They were like sedate figures in an old dance.

“It’s not my department,” the girl objected.

“You drive a hard bargain,” his father said. “It’s a pleasure to do business with you.”

“No, really — listen—”

“Envelopes, forty. One pack, wide white. Here’s the quarter. It’s a flog. Now, please, beat me a box pencils.”

Then, incredibly, he would sell the envelopes. One at a time. He would go into the office of the farm agent. “Have you written Mother this week?” he might ask, and sell him an envelope for two cents.

“What have you got for us today, Isidore?” an old man would call from the bench at the courthouse. His father sold him an envelope.

He lived by sufferance, his son saw. His father saw too. “They owe me,” he explained. “Fuck them.”

Little children suffered him. He would stride up to them in their games in the schoolyard. Perhaps he would intercept the ball, running after it clumsily, knees high, awry, hugging it ineptly. Holding it high. “Want to buy a ball?” he shouted. The children laughed. “What did you sell today?” Leering awfully, asking Helen, a girl in his son’s class, eleven and breasted, eleven and haired. The children roared and touched each other.

“What have you got for us today, Isidore?” a child yelled. It was what the old men called.

He tossed the ball aside, pushing it as a girl would, and reached into his pocket. “White,” he whispered, pulling a crayon from the pocket, holding it out to them, a waxy wand. “White!”

“I’ll tell you about white. White,” he’d say, his loose, enormous lids heavy, slack wrappings for his eyes, “is the first thing. White is light, great God’s let was, void’s null. You can’t go wrong with white. You wouldn’t be sorry you took white. Ask your teacher, you don’t believe me. It reflects to the eye all the colors in the solar spectrum. How do you like that? This is the solar spectrum I’m talking about, not your small-time local stuff. You take the white — the blue, yellow, red and green go with it. Some white! A nickel for the rainbow, I’m closing it out.”

“What could you do with it?” a boy asked.

“Color an elephant and sell it,” his father said. “Put up a flag. Tell a lie. Ah, kid, you know too much. You’ve seen the truth. It’s the color of excuse and burden. I’ve got a nerve. You’re too young. Why should I saddle you with white? But have you got a big brother maybe? Nah, nah, it’s a grownup’s color. Buy better brown. Go green, green’s grand. You want green? Here—” He stuck his hand into his pocket and without looking pulled out a green crayon. The boy gasped and moved back. “No? Still thinking about the white? Naughty kid, you grow up too fast today. White-hot for white, are you? All right, you win, I said white for sale and I meant white for sale. White sale here. All right, who wants it?”

A boy offered three cents, another four. A child said a nickel. He sold it to a girl for six.

“Done,” he said, and took the money and reached back into his pocket. His eyes were closed. “Purple,” he said.

They lived on what his father earned from the sales. Maybe fifteen dollars came into the house in a week, and although it was the Depression his son felt poor. Perhaps he would have felt poor no matter what his father earned, for all he needed to remind him of their strange penury was one sight of his father at his card table in what would normally be the parlor. (A card table and chairs in the American Home; they had brought the Diaspora into the front room.) It was the counting house of a madman. On the table, on the chairs, on the floor — there were only the card table and two chairs for furniture — were the queer, changed products and by-products, the neo-junk his father dealt in. There were stamped lead soldiers, reheated on the kitchen stove and bent into positions of agony, decapitated, arms torn from the lead sides, the torsos and heads and limbs in mass cigar-box graves. His father would sell these as “a limited edition, a special series from the losing side” (“An educational toy,” he explained to the children. “What, you think it’s all victories and parades and boys home on furlough? This is why they give medals. A head is two cents, an arm a penny. It’s supply and demand”). There were four identical decks of Bicycle cards into which his father had inserted extra aces, kings, queens. These he carried in an inside pocket of his coat and took with him into the pool hall for soft interviews with the high school boys (“Everybody needs a head start in life. You, fool, how would you keep up otherwise?”). There were single sheets torn from calendars (“April,” he called in February, “just out. Get your April here”). There were collections of pressed flowers, leaves (“The kids need this stuff for school”). There was a shapeless heap of dull rags, a great disreputable mound of the permanently soiled and scarred, of slips that might have been pulled from corpses in auto wrecks, of shorts that could have come from dying men, sheets ripped from fatal childbeds, straps pulled from brassieres — the mutilated and abused and dishonored. Shards from things of the self, the rags of rage they seemed. Or as if they grew there, in the room, use’s crop. “Stuff, stuff,” his father said, climbing the rags, wading into them as one might wade into a mound of autumn’s felled debris. “Someday you’ll wear a suit from this.” There were old magazines, chapters from books, broken pencils, bladders from ruined pens, eraser ends in small piles, cork scraped from the inside of bottle caps, ballistical shapes of tinfoil, the worn straps from watches, wires, strings, ropes, broken glass — things’ nubbins.

“Splinters,” his father said, “there’s a fortune in splinters.” “Where’s the fortune in splinters already?” his father said. Looking at the collection, the card table, the two chairs, the room which for all its clutter seemed barren. “Look alive there. Your father, the merchant prince, is talking. What, you think I’ll live forever? We’re in a crisis situation, I tell you. I have brought the Diaspora this far and no further. Though I’ll tell you the truth, even now things fly outward, my arms and my heart, pulling to scatter. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. There are horses inside me and they are stampeding. Run, run for the doctor. Get cowboys with ropes. Talk to me. Talk!”

“What do you want me to say?” his son asked.

“Yielder, head bower, say what you mean.”

The boy didn’t know what he meant.

“It’s not moving, it’s not moving,” his father moaned. “Business is terrible. Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Nevertheless, business is terrible. It stinks, business.” He brushed a pile of canceled stamps from the table. “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility. To date, however, he has failed to move the unsalable thing. The bottom has dropped out of his market look out below.”

They lived like this for three years.

For three years he was on the verge of fleeing his father. What prevented him now was not love (love goes, he thought) so much as an illusion that the Diaspora had brought him to an end of the earth, an edge of the world. For all that there were telephone poles about him, newspapers, machines, cars, neon in the windows of the taverns, he seemed to live in a world that might have been charted on an old map, the spiky spines of serpents rising like waves from wine-dark seas, personified zephyrs mump-cheeked and fierce — a distant Praetorianed land, unamiable and harsh. There might have been monkeys in its trees, burning bushes in its summers. He lived in a constant fear of miracles that could go against him. The wide waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi that he had seen meld from a bluff just below Cairo, Illinois, would have turned red in an instant had he entered them, split once and drowned him had he taken flight. There was the turtle death beyond, he vaguely felt, and so, like one who has come safely through danger to a given clearing, he feared to go on or to retrace his steps. He was content to stay still.

Content but embarrassed.

His father was famous now, and they seemed to live under the special dispensation of their neighbors. “I would make them eat the Jew,” he would confide defiantly.

Like anyone famous, however, they lived like captives. (He didn’t really mean “they” surprisingly, he was untouched — a captive’s captive.) It must have been a task even for his father to have always to come up to the mark of his madness. Once he bored them he was through. It was what had happened in Vermont, in Maine, elsewhere. Once he repeated himself — not the pattern; the pattern was immune, classic — it would be over. “There’s a fortune in eccentricity, a fortune. I’m alive,” his father said in honest wonder, weird pride. “It’s no joke, it costs to live. Consumers, we’re consumers. Hence our mortality. I consume, therefore I am.” He would smile. “I hate them,” he’d say. “They don’t buy enough. Read Shylock. What a wisdom! That was some Diaspora they had there in Venice.”

It was not hate, but something darker. Contempt. But not for him. For him there were, even at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, pinches, hugs, squeezes. They slept together in the same bed (“It cuts coal costs. It develops the heart”). Awakened in the declining night with a rough kiss (“Come, chicken, cluck cluck cluck. If you cannot tell me, hold me”). Whispers, declarations, manifestoes in the just unhearing ear. Bedtime stories: “Your mother was a gentile and one of my best customers. I laid her in my first wagon by pots and by pans and you were born and she died. You think I hate you, you think so? You think I hate you, you took away my shicksa and a good customer? Nah, nah, treasure, I love you. She would have slowed down the Diaspora. We had a truck, and she couldn’t read the road maps. Wake up, I’ll tell you the meaning of life. Can you hear me? Are you listening? This is rich.” (At first he was terrified, but gradually he accommodated to madness, so that madness made no difference and words were like melodies, all speech as meaningless as tunes. He lied, even today. He said what he wanted, whatever occurred to him. Talk is cheap, talk is cheap.) “Get what there is and turn it over quick. Dump and dump, mark down and close out. Have specials, my dear. The thing in life is to sell, but if no one will buy, listen, listen, give it away! Flee the minion. Be naked. Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock. Be in a position to lose nothing by it when the bombs fall. But what oh what shall be done with the unsalable thing?”

Madness made no difference. It was like living by the railroad tracks. After a while you didn’t hear the trains. His father’s status there, a harmless, astonishing madman, provided him with a curious immunity. As the boy became indifferent to his father, so the town became indifferent to the boy, each making an accommodation to what did not matter. It was not, however, that madness made sense to him. It was just that since he’d grown up with madness, nothing made sense. (His father might even be right about things; he was probably right). He had been raised by wolves, he saw; a growl was a high enough rhetoric. But he could not be made himself. Perhaps he did not have the energy for obsession. He had lived so close to another’s passion, his own would have been redundant. “You have a locked heart,” his father told him. Perhaps, perhaps he did. But now if he failed to abandon him (“When do you go?” his father sometimes asked. “When do you embark, entrain, enbus? When do you have the shoes resoled for the long voyage out? And what’s to be done with the unsalable thing?”), it was not a sudden reloving, and it was no longer fear. The seas had long since been scraped of their dragons; no turtle death lay waiting for him. The Diaspora had been disposed of, and the tricky double sense that he lived a somehow old-timey life in a strange world. It was his world; he was, by having served his time in it, its naturalized citizen. He had never seen a tenement, a subway, a tall building. As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father. What was strange about there being a cannon on the courthouse lawn, or a sheriff who wore a star on his shirt? What was strange about anything? Life was these things too. Life was anything, anything at all. Things were of a piece.

He went to a county fair and ate a hot dog. (Nothing strange there, he thought.) He chewed cotton candy. He looked at pigs, stared at cows. He came into a hall of 4-H exhibits. Joan Stizek had hooked a rug; Helen Prish had sewn a dress; Mary Stellamancy had put up tomatoes. He knew these girls. They said, “How are you, Leo?” when they saw him. (Nothing strange there.)

He went outside and walked up the Midway. A man in a booth called him over. “Drop the ring over the block and take home a prize,” he said. He showed him how easy it was. “Three tosses for a dime.”

“The blocks are magnets,” he said. “There are tiny magnets in the rings. You control the fields by pressing a button under the counter. I couldn’t win. There’s nothing strange.”

“Beat it, kid,” the man said. “Get out of here.”

“I am my papa’s son,” he said.

A woman extended three darts. “Bust two balloons and win a prize.”

“Insufficient volume of air. The darts glance off harmlessly. My father told me,” he said.

“I’ll guess your birthday,” a man said.

“It’s fifteen cents. You miss and give a prize worth five. Dad warned me.”

“Odds or evens,” a man said, snapping two fingers from a fist.

He hesitated. “It’s a trick,” he said, and walked away.

A sign said: LIVE! NAKED ARTIST’S MODEL! He handed fifty cents to a man in a wide felt hat and went inside a tent. A woman sat naked in a chair.

“Three times around the chair at an eight-foot distance at a reasonable pace. No stalling,” a man standing inside the entrance said. “You get to give her one direction for a pose. Where’s your pencil? Nobody goes around the chair without a pencil.”

“I haven’t got one,” he said.

“Here,” the man said. “I rent pencils. Give a dime.”

“Nobody said anything about a pencil,” he said. “It’s a gyp.”

“The sign says ‘Artist’s Model,’ don’t it? How you going to draw her without a pencil?” He narrowed his eyes and made himself taller. “If you ain’t an artist what are you doing in here? Or are you some jerk pervert?”

Feldman’s son put his hand in his pocket. “Green,” he said, showing a crayon from the inventory. “I work in green crayon.”

“Where’s your paper?” the man said. “Paper’s a nickel.”

“I don’t have paper,” he admitted.

“Here, Rembrandt,” the man said. He held out a sheet of ringed, lined notebook paper.

“Are we related,” Feldman’s son asked, handing him a nickel.

He joined a sparse circle of men walking around the woman in a loose shuffle.

The man at the entrance flap called directions. “Speed it up there, New Overalls.”

“Hold your left tit and point your finger at the nipple,” a man in a brown jacket said.

“That’s your third trip, Yellow Shoes. Get out of the line,” called the man at the entrance. “Eight-foot distance, Green Crayon. I told you once.”

“Spread your legs.”

“Boy, oh boy, I got to keep watching you artists, don’t I, Bow Tie?” the man said. “You already said she should grab her behind with both hands. One pose, one pose. Put the pencil in the hat, Yellow Shoes. You just rented that.”

“Spread your legs,” Feldman’s son said. Nothing strange there, he thought.

“Keep it moving, keep it moving. You’re falling behind, Brown Jacket.”

He left the tent, still holding the unused sheet of notebook paper that had cost him a nickel.

There was an ox-pulling contest. He found a seat in the stands near the judge’s platform and stared at the beasts. Beneath him several disqualified teams of oxen had been unyoked and sprawled like Sphinxes, their legs and haunches disappearing into their bodies, lush and fat and opulent. He gazed at the behinds of standing animals, seeing their round ball-less patches, slitted like electric sockets. They leaned together in the great wooden yokes, patient, almost professional.

“The load is eight thousand-five hundred pounds,” the announcer said, drawling easily, familiarly, a vague first-name hint in his voice. “Joe Huncher’s matched yellows at the sled for a try, Joe leading. Willy Stoop making the hitch. Move those boys back there, William. Just a little more. A little more. You did it, William. Clean hitch.”

The man jumped aside as the oxen stamped jerkily backwards, moving at a sharp left angle to their hitch.

“Gee, gee there, you.” The leader slapped an ox across the poll with his hat. He beat against the beast’s muzzle. “Gee, you. Gee, gee.”

“Turn them, Joseph. Walk them around. Those lads are excited,” the announcer said.

The leader looked up toward the announcer and said something Feldman’s son couldn’t hear. The announcer’s easy laugh came over the loudspeaker. He laughed along with him. I’m a hick, he thought. I’m a hick too. I’m a Jewish hick. What’s so strange? He leaned back and brushed against a woman’s knee behind him. “‘Scuse me, Miz Johnson,” he said, not recognizing her.

“Hmph,” she said.

Spread your legs, he thought. Touch your right tit with your left instep.

The oxen were in line now and the farmer stepped back. “Gee-up,” he yelled, waving his hat at them. “Gee-UP!” The animals stepped forward powerfully, taking up the slack on their chain harness. They strained at the heavy sled, stumbling, their muscles jumping suddenly under their thick flesh. “Gee-UP! Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh!” The burdened sled nine feet forward in the dirt.

The crowd applauded, Feldman’s son clapping with them.

“Thataway, William, good work there, Joe,” he called. Hey, Willy, yo, Jo, he wanted to call aloud. Hey hey. Hi yo. Hee hee. Yo yo. Hey hi yo hee ho! Whoosh, boys. Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh.

“I thought I saw William spit there, Joe. No fair greasing the runners,” the announcer said.

Feldman’s son laughed.

“All right, folks,” the announcer said, “next up’s a pair of brown Swiss from the Stubb-Logan farm over county in Leeds. That’s George Stubb up front, Mr. Gumm at the hitch. You been feeding them roosters, George? They look to me like they did some growing since the last pull.”

At 9,500 pounds only Huncher and Stoop and the Leggings brothers were still in the contest. The matched yellows, his favorites because they were the crowd’s, were unable to move the sled even after three trys.

He applauded as Joe Huncher led the team away. He leaned forward and cupping his hands shouted down at them: “That was near five tons on that sled there, Joseph. Hose those boys down now, William. Hose those boys down.” Stoop waved vaguely toward the unfamiliar voice, and Feldman’s son smiled. “A man works up a sweat doing that kind of pulling,” he said to his neighbor.

The Leggings brothers led their oxen, sleek and black as massive seals, toward the sled to make the hitch. They maneuvered them back carefully and one brother slapped the ring solidly onto the peg.

“Come,” the other brother commanded. “Come. Come. Come.” The two beasts struggled viciously forward. It seemed they would strangle themselves against the yoke. They stretched their necks; their bodies queerly lengthened. There was a moment of furious stasis when Feldman’s son thought that either the chain must break or the beasts themselves snap back against the sled, breaking their legs. Then he saw the thick wooden runners scrape briefly sideways, and the animals dragged the load five feet.

The announcer called the brothers up to collect their prize.

“Just a minute. Hold your oxes,” a voice called. It was his father, standing in front of the judge’s stand looking up. “Your Honor,” he called, “Your Honor.”

The crowd recognized him, laughing. The boy heard his father’s name repeated like a rumor up and down the grandstands.

“What is it?” the announcer asked over the loudspeaker.

“Your Honor,” Feldman said, “the contest ain’t over.”

“Of course it’s over. What do you mean it’s not over?”

It sounded like a routine. The son wondered if it was. “It’s part of the show,” he turned around and told the woman behind him. “It’s part of the show, Miz Johnson.”

“Now what’s the meaning of this interruption, Isidore?” the announcer asked.

Yeah, Izidore, what? the son thought. Vat iz diz?

“These Leggings brothers are waiting for their check,” said the announcer.

“It’s not fair,” Feldman shouted. “Anyway, the little one pushed from behind.” The crowd roared. “Let it stand, but give a man a chance, Your Honor.”

“What are you saying, Isidore? You mean you want to be in the contest too?”

His father flexed his arm, and the crowd laughed harder than before.”

“Do you folks think Isidore Feldman here should take his turn?” They cheered. “All right, Isidore, let’s see what you can do then,” the announcer said.

Feldman walked past the sled and looked at it for a moment but did not stop. “Cement,” he called roughly, pointing to the massive blocks chain-belted to the sled. “Cement for sale. Cash and carry.”

“Make your hitch there, Isidore,” the announcer called. He seemed annoyed. The son had an idea now it might not be an act.

Alarmingly, Feldman suddenly began to run. As he ran he shouted up to them, blowing out his phrases in gasps. “Wait, wait — while you’re here — I’ve got — something to show you.” He ran across the small stadium and pushed open a gate in the low wall. Feldman’s son recognized the wagon, piled incredibly high. His father placed himself inside the long wood handles and bent far forward, like one in a storm. A tarpaulin had been spread over the load, so that it looked like a mountain. He seemed heroic. The people gasped as the wheels began slowly to turn and the wagon, the mountain inside it, began to move. He came steadily forward. “Talk about strength,” he intoned as he came, “heavy as earth, terrible tons, see how I pull it, drag it along, I break all the records, an ant of a man, prudent as squirrel, thrifty as greed, they’ll be a winter, who’ll make me warm?”

He brought the wagon to rest a few feet from the grandstand and straightened up. He turned around, and grabbing one corner of the tarpaulin, pulled at it fiercely. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, shouting, “THE INVENTORY!”

“Things,” he called, “things here. Things as they are. Thingamabobs and thingamajigs, dinguses and whatsits. Whatdayacallits, whatchamacallits. Gadgets and gewgaws. Kits and caboodle. Stuff. Stuff here!” He stood beside the pile, studying it. “What’s to be done with the unsalable thing?” He pulled at his sleeve like one reaching into dishwater for a sunken spoon and slipped his hand with gingerly gentleness into the center of the pile. “Teakettle,” he said. He pulled out a teakettle.

“We will trade together,” he said seriously. He advanced to the railing at the foot of the stands, the small kettle swinging like a censer before him. “Diaspora,” he called. “America, Midwest, Bible Belt, corn country, county fairgrounds, grandstand. Last stop for the Diaspora, everyone off.” He recognized his son in the stands and winked hugely. “All right,” he said, “I just blew in on the trade winds, and I’m hot see, and dusty see, and I’m smelling of profit and smelling of loss, and it’s heady stuff, heady. I could probably use a shower and a good night’s sleep, but business is business and a deal is a deal.” He held out the kettle. “All right,” he said, “This from the East. All from the East, where commerce begins. Consumers, consumers, purchasers, folks. I bring the bazaar. I’ve spared no expense. Down from the mountains, over the deserts, up from the seas. On the hump of a camel, the back of an ass. All right. Here is the kettle, who drinks the tea?” He leaped over the low rail and rushed into the stands. “Buy,” he demanded, “buy, damnit, buy, I say!” He chose a farmer and thrust the kettle into the man’s hand. He waited. The man tried to give the kettle back, but Feldman’s father wouldn’t take it; he folded his arms and dodged, bobbing and weaving like a boxer. “Pay up,” he shouted, “a deal is a deal.” The man made one more attempt to give it back. “All sales final,” his father said. “Read your contract.” At last the man, embarrassed, dug into his overalls and gave him a coin. His father held it up for the crowd to see. “Object’s no money,” he said scornfully. Passing his son, he took the sheet of notebook paper the boy still held. He sold it, then returned to the wagon. “Come,” he said over his shoulder. “Come. Come. Come.” Several followed him.

Again and again Feldman dipped into his pile. He pulled things out, handling, caressing, rubbing value into everything he touched. He signaled them closer. “Come,” he called to those still in the stands. “Come. Come. Come.” One by one they left the stands to crowd round his wagon. In ten minutes only his son was still in the stands. His father climbed into the wagon and yelled to the announcer. “I win, Your Honor.” He indicated the large crowd beneath him that he had brought from the stands. He pointed suddenly to his son. “I can’t move that item,” he confessed.

He disappeared behind his inventory. “I’ve got the goods,” he shouted, “and that ain’t bad.” In half an hour the pile had diminished, and his father, still in the wagon, seemed to have grown taller. He waved to his son. “Are you learning anything?” he called to him over the heads of the crowd.

Gradually the people began to drift away. There were still two or three things unsold, and Feldman reached down and held a man’s arm. “Wait,” he roared, “where are you going? You think I’m through with you? This is winter I’m talking about. This is the cold, sad solstice. Just because the sun is shining over us now, you think it’s stuck up there? You take too much for granted. You buy something, you hear me?” He bent down and picked up a carved, heavy leg from an old dining-room table. “Here,” he said. “A wonderful club. For your enemies. You got enemies? No? Then build a table over it and invite your friends to supper.”

Finally there was nothing left to sell and the people had all gone. His father still stood in the wagon, tall, forlorn as a giant. The oxen passed beside him, led by their owners. “What’s to be done with the unsalable thing?” Feldman crooned.

His son, in the stands, stared at him without moving. “What is the unsalable thing?” he called.

“The unsalable thing? My God, don’t you know?”

“No.”

“No?”

“You never told me.”

They were shouting to each other.

“I didn’t?”

“Not once.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“I had to tell you? You couldn’t guess?”

“I never bothered.”

“Some son.”

“Well?”

“Well what? What well?”

“What is it?”

“What is what?”

“The unsalable thing.”

“It’s me,” he said.

A year later his father began to cough. The boy was always with him now on the wagon. During the choking, heavy seizures, brought on, it seemed, by the swelling, passionate spiels themselves, his son would take over the cries, shouting madder and madder things into the streets. The cough grew worse; it would begin as soon as he started to speak.

Feldman went to the doctor. “It’s cancer,” he told his son. “I’m dying.”

“Can he operate?”

His father shook his head. “It’s terminal.” He coughed.

“Terminal,” his son repeated the word.

“Sure,” his father said, coughing so that he could hardly be understood. “Last stop for the Diaspora. Everyone off.”

The boy went to the doctor and conferred with him.

Three months later, when the old man died, his son got in touch with the doctor. They argued some more, but it was no use. The doctor, on behalf of the tiny hospital, could offer him only fifteen dollars for the body.