Brother Fish (33 page)

When a month before his twelfth birthday his voice broke and his name appeared on the dreaded orphans' indenture list, his days as a praying man were over. Jimmy had a forgiving nature, particularly if he thought a genuine mistake had been made. On the other hand, if a deliberate effort to bring him undone was attempted or he became aware of malice towards himself or a friend, he became an implacable enemy. He was also no respecter of persons and the Lord was no longer his friend and saviour. As far as he was concerned the Lord had deliberately let him down, and in his book that meant they had nothing more to say to each other.

‘Brother Fish, I'm outta der an' goin' who-know-where, man! It Jesus's fault. I'm twelve years old an' croakin' like a big ole frog. All dat prayin' to Him ain't done me no good what-so-ever. He don't have no time to do no lis-nin' to no orphan nigger! I wore out da knees o' mah britches prayin', man!' He looked up, appealing to me. ‘Whaffor I done that? I ain't never got mah voice back neither!' He saw me grinning. ‘Ain't no joke, Brother Fish. Frank Sinatra done got his voice back. Bing Crosby he got his voice back. Sure, dey white folk, natcherly Jesus love dem. Satchmo, he bin raspin' an' croakin', he don't get no voice back! He black, Jesus don't love him. Ray Charles he got his voice back but da Lord He done take his eyes away. He blind now, dat da payment for his voice.'

As far as I knew Ray Charles had always been blind, but I refrained from saying so. ‘What about Nat King Cole?' I asked.

‘Ha! Dat mah point! Dat mah exact point!' He sang a few bars of ‘Mona Lisa' in what wasn't a bad imitation of the butter-smooth crooner. ‘Dat not a voice for a black guy, man! Dat a cockamamie white-man voice, dat a voice to shame a black man! Dat a faggot voice. Jesus done punish him
special
.'

I'd learned that there wasn't much point in arguing with Jimmy. Anyway, most of the time he was secretly laughing at himself. The orphanage placed Jimmy with a tomato farmer in New Jersey, a Lutheran family named Kraus who'd migrated from Germany in 1920. The Kraus family were so stereotypically German that they were almost comic-book material. The father, Otto, parted his hair in the centre and wore a waxed moustache turned up at the ends. His twin sons, Fritz and Henrik, were tall, blue-eyed and alarmingly blond with all the predictable mannerisms inherited from their Aryan forefathers. Had they been born in the Fatherland, Adolf Hitler would have rejoiced in their racial perfection. They were respectful, polite, stood to attention in front of their elders, and were obedient and unimaginative, while being neither clever nor excessively dull.

Father and sons worked hard and kept a model fifty-acre farm with the fields planted in perfect rows. The beech trees lining the evenly gravelled and raked driveway leading to the well-kept farmhouse were equally distanced and perfectly aligned, all of them the same size and shape. If an errant bough should disrupt their symmetry it would be quickly lopped to conform. The Kraus farm was a consistent winner in the New York State 4-H competition for working farms on fifty acres or less, and had made the national finals on two separate occasions. Their tomatoes had earned a host of blue ribbons at various agricultural shows and these ribbons hung in line along one wall of the packing shed spaced precisely three inches apart, the red, the blue and the green each in their own section.

The two barns and packing shed were freshly painted, the roof tomato red with ‘kra us tomatoes ' painted in large white letters that could be seen by motorists travelling along the nearby highway and by the aeroplanes flying out of Newark Airfield. The walls were the colour of freshly churned butter. The outlines of each of the farm tools were painted on one of the inside walls of the main barn, and each piece of equipment was hung accordingly. The John Deere tractor was hosed down, refuelled and checked after each day's work and parked, always in precisely the same location between two white painted lines on the barn floor. The ploughs and harrows were freshly painted at the end of each summer. The packing shed was in perfect order, the conveyor belts oiled and running at their optimum efficiency and the soft pine timber for the tomato cases stacked and sorted according to size.

The twenty per cent aerated soil in the seedling trays resting on wire racks in the hothouses was correctly formulated. The ambient temperature and precise water-misting routine were designed to maintain the humidity and to produce seedlings of an even size. The young tomato plants stood at rigid attention, never yellowed or mysteriously wilted, and seemed to know that they were destined to produce future American Beauty tomatoes of the correct shape, preferred size and absolutely top quality.

Otto's sons, while thoroughly trained by their male parent in the way of their Teutonic forebears, were nevertheless proudly American and fanatical New York Yankee fans. Both had been offered baseball scholarships to Columbia but Otto Kraus, who wanted his boys to remain on the farm, had forbidden them to take the scholarships. In his opinion a college education wouldn't make them grow better tomatoes. He had recently purchased a further hundred acres adjoining his own and, when the time came for the two boys to marry, a home would be built for each that carried its own separate title for fifty acres. In Otto's mind there was no room for discussion – the future for his sons was settled, and it had never occurred to them to resist his will.

But storm clouds were beginning to gather. In 1940 they'd been required to register as aliens, meaning German-born American citizens. With the increasing likelihood of America entering the war, the American-born offspring of German, Italian and Japanese migrants were preparing to face the prospect of their parents being interned as enemy aliens. Furthermore, at the age of twenty, the twins would almost certainly be conscripted, which was another reason why Otto wasn't preparing the newly acquired acres. He had hatched a plan whereby the twins would volunteer for the armed forces in an attempt to prove, with two sons fighting for America, that he was a loyal American citizen, and so he might escape internment. If this failed he conceded that they would be forced to cease the production of tomatoes for the duration of the war, putting the farm into mothballs and leaving Frau Kraus to take care of things until they returned.

Frau Kraus was a solidly built woman of peasant stock. She had small, sharp blue eyes set into a face as expressionless as a scrubbed potato. Her cheeks were blushed with tiny surface veins and her top lip carried the suggestion of an errant moustache. The pinpoint brightness of her eyes in so plain a visage suggested a natural shrewdness, but if this was true she had little opportunity to exercise it because Otto made all the purchases and important farm and household decisions. She seldom smiled or spoke unless personally addressed, and the expression she assumed for everyday use was one of disapproval. Her mouth was turned downwards even in repose, as if she'd decided that her life had little chance of being enjoyable and was simply to be endured in silent protest. There seemed not to be the slightest suggestion of frivolity in her makeup. She spoke functional English in a heavy Bavarian accent, though she hadn't mastered the language to the point where she could understand the jokes on the radio or in the Sunday comic papers.

She was referred to as Frau Kraus by both her husband Otto and her twin sons. Moreover, because her Christian name was unpronounceable to the American families who attended the Lutheran church, they too called her ‘Fraukraus', joining the two words into a single Christian name. When required to adopt a more formal approach they referred to her as Mrs Otto.

Adding to Frau Kraus's peculiar plainness was the manner in which she wore her hair. It was a deep chestnut, with distinct white stripes running through it approximately the width of a pencil and evenly dispersed every four inches or so. The chestnut carried not a single white strand and the white not a wisp of chestnut. In effect, she had naturally striped hair. She wore it pulled back and up from her face and tied into a tight bun on top of her head. The evenly spaced stripes emanating from the centre of the bun wound around its burnished perimeter to disappear into its underside and then remerge as legs. This gave the appearance of a very large and dangerous looking spider clamped to the top of her head. Small children, seeing her for the first time, would often cry out or draw back clutching at their mother's skirt.

Six days a week Frau Kraus wore shapeless floral dresses of the same design with the hemline down to her ankles, then an identical all-black version for Sunday church services. Her Sabbath attire was set off by a small straw hat, also black, which covered her spider bun and was decorated with two artificial cherries with two additional stems sticking up where cherries had once been attached. The small hat made the spider-like effect even more pronounced – the hat now became the giant insect's body with the two cherries acting as its protruding eyes and the empty stems as antennae. She always wore men's boots, a good pair for church and a not-so-good pair for work. Her black church boots were carefully polished and when not in use stored in muslin bags, while her heavy industrial steel-capped work boots were kept at the kitchen door and forbidden entry to the house. While indoors, she wore two sheepskin pads about twelve inches in diameter, woolly side to the floor and with two elastic bands sewn into the flip side of the pads into which she would fit her rather large flat feet. With a feather duster in hand she would then move about the house much as a figure skater might do on a winter pond, the polishing footwear designed to keep the wooden floors throughout the house gleaming, and the duster to swipe at any speck of dust that might be seen on the furniture. If Otto was indoors she would put the first movement of a Wagner symphony, his favourite, on the gramophone to conceal her heavy panting as she worked up a sweat at polishing. She would polish as if her life depended on it and would only rest when her legs couldn't continue and she was forced to catch her breath by bending over with her hands on her knees.

At home Frau Kraus wore a heavily starched white cotton apron that crackled when she bent over. She couldn't tolerate the presence of even the tiniest speck of dirt and would change her apron the moment a small spot appeared on its snowy surface. At any given time two large iron buckets in the washhouse adjacent to her kitchen carried a dozen discarded aprons soaking in bleach ready to be consigned to the belly of her Maytag. All that she found good in America (which admittedly wasn't much) was summed up by this wonderful washing machine prepared to work around the clock to indulge her obsession with cleanliness. While the remainder of her family's washing was strung out on an extensive three-strand washing line every Monday morning, on the remaining days of the week, with the exception of the Sabbath, the line was crowded with aprons.

It would never have occurred to Frau Kraus to ask herself if she was happy. Her work precluded such an unnecessary state of being. Cleaning was her happiness, America her cross to bear. Her house with its heavy Germanic furniture was immaculate. Work was what life was composed of and there wasn't much she could do about it. She prepared four meals three times each day, kept a well-stocked kitchen garden going, a dozen chickens for eggs, a neat pond for an equal number of ducks and geese fattened for Christmas sale to German families who'd place their orders in January, as well as a turkey run that supplied three dozen plump birds of a specific weight to a Lower Manhattan restaurant for Thanksgiving. Finally, she had a small orchid house where she raised a dozen or so orchids ready for sale to a Brooklyn florist. She deliberately kept her farmyard endeavour small, knowing that if she expanded with more ducks, turkeys, eggs and orchids, Otto would demand the rewards. The money she made went on brooms, buckets and mops and every manner of cleaning aid that soaked, scrubbed, wiped, polished, waxed, brushed or bleached.

All her livestock was contained within a small, neat field adjacent to the house, which was ploughed in early spring and sown with rye grass and clover. It contained a small barn that acted as a milking shed, hayloft and winter shelter for the resident Jersey cow she milked daily for household milk and to make freshly churned butter, and a nanny goat she kept for cheese. Neither the cow nor the goat enjoyed a name and if a child should ask, Frau Kraus would point to one and then the other and pronounce, ‘This ist Cow; this ist Goat.' Her work routine entailed at least a dozen changes of apron during the day and a final change just moments before she sat down to supper.

Washed and wearing a fresh shirt, denim overalls and slippers, Otto, at the head of the dining-room table, and the boys, seated on either side, sat waiting silently for Frau Kraus to join them. The food – meat, potatoes and vegetables from her garden piled high on their plates – would have been placed on the table moments before they entered the dining room and Frau Kraus would have returned to the kitchen. A stein of lager beer sat to the side of each plate. The men would wait until she emerged again from the kitchen when Otto, together with the boys, would look up and raise their beer steins as she reached her chair at the opposite end of the table, and Otto would say, ‘
Danke, meine saubere Frau.
'

It was a toast that contained not the slightest element of gratitude, nor, for that matter, did it seem intended as a compliment. ‘Thank you, my clean wife' were simply the words that, over the years, had come to mean the evening meal was about to commence. Frau Kraus would answer with an impatient grunt all but lost in the crackling sound of her starched apron as, stiff-backed, she seated herself at the opposite end of the table. Otto, having taken a sip from his stein and placed it down with a loud smack of his lips, now proceeded to deliver a mumbling thanks to God in his native tongue for what they were about to receive.