The Barn-- It Burned
A short story
An account in the history of East Nassau by Author David Alter & co-author, Lynette, reveals one of many secrets only available to New England patriots of this Yankee settlement because he was one of "them." It is one of 65 stories revealed in Intrepidations & Funny Busines, the book of David, in his semi autobiography. The scene is a sleepy hollow village along the Vermont, Massachusetts and New York lines where the author was reared, a time when bigotry was prime and the Ku Klux Klan reigned. There were no blacks in East Nassau, but Jewish families were plentiful and farmed the lands. Enter Isidore, Isaac,Benjamin Alter.
And across State Route 66 from the Dutch-built Alter home of the 1790s, next to Finkel's country general store lived Henry, the township assessor, now long gone. So is David's father, Isidore (Izzie) Isaac Benjamin Alter, his protagonist. He died in August 1974 sometime in his 90s.
Henry paused in his garden one day to nod recognition of a lad who once told him to go "bleep" a grasshopper. Henry didn't think too much of David, that Jew boy across the street. "Young whippersnapper!"
It is not that I wish to speak ill of the dead, Henry, but we are what we leave behind and we cannot rewrite history. So perhaps Papa and Henry won't fret at my revealing this part of it:
Henry was what David's father liked to identify as a rooster-like mench (person). He was a four-foot, six-inch needler half the size of a grown corn stalk.
"Di hund du bist nicht gazunt," Papa told him in German one day (the dog is not healthy.) The encounter took place in front of the general store.
David's Papa, with a whipsaw mind that could be unleashed appropriately, often sparred with Henry. Papa was sure that Henry was an untersamitt (anti-Semite). "He's hiding somewhere a hood and white sheet maybe in the kluxer hall," said Papa.
Papa couldn't peek into the old abandoned Odd Fellows (kluxer) Hall because, like today's (no shoes, no shirts, no service), Jews weren't permitted
It was in those hard times of the 30s that Izzie and Tillie fell behind in the mortgage and real estate tax payments, little more than $40 per month on an emergency loan of $500.
"You want my house, Heinrick?" asked Papa of Henry, who had said he would get it one day.
"Be my-un, darn tootin, when we close, (foreclose) Itsky," croaked Henry, finger in Papa s face.
Papa Izzie peered at Henry like a fox eyeing a chicken in its coop: "You should live so long," Papa winked.
Some time later, before Henry's anticipated foreclosure, David's Papa (allegedly) was back in New York City hand-sewing Gladstone bags (suitcases) and his prediction came to light.
The barn loft had been filled with freshly cut hay that summer. At about midnight, the sky lit up as the structure that had housed a garage up front, a hay loft above it and a barn stable for cattle below with four milk-producing cows--a Guernsey, Jersey and two Holsteins--caught fire.
The cows were in the pasture, the chickens in the coop, fortunately because they sometimes spent time nesting in the warm barn. Papa was nowhere to be seen.. Cause of the fire was determined to be spontaneous combustion. And later, after the fire insurance paid off, so was the mortgage company (paid off) and the taxes laid to rest.
"How grows the garden, Heinrick?" Papa needled.
Rooster, face red as a jaybird's a** in pokeberry time, didn't crow.
"May you grow there (with your foreclosure) like an onion, Heinrick, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air," Papa suggested, quoting an old Yiddish humorist.
And the two never again spoke.
Copies of David Alter's book, Intrepidations & Funny Business, may be obtained by mailing him at owlbeara@comcast.netIt will be available at a book signing May 16 at Barnes & Noble in Boulder.