The Quarry

The Quarry

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you. —Yitzhak "Antek" Zuckerman, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it. —Charlotte Delbo The Quarry I The forbidden quarry was no more than a brisk two- or three-mile walk beyond the dusty apple orchard in back of the local chapter of the Monroe County Elks Club. Although our mothers warned us not to, my friends and I ate the mealy green and yellow apples off the ground and then chucked the wormy cores at blue jays and magpies and mangy dogs. A hand-painted billboard, nailed crookedly to a telephone pole across the pitted asphalt road from Ditenhafer's Ice & Dairy, announced to travelers that they had just entered the limestone and applesauce capital of the world. (The Empire State Building, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, for decades the tallest building in the world, was fashioned from pearly limestone cut and blasted in this part of the state.) A week before Halloween, the Elks would sell tart apple cider and chunky apple butter in Mason jars and apple dumplings from a bunch of knotty pine roadside picnic tables spreadwith newspapers. There were always chattering, frilly-sleeved church ladies in gold and blue straw hats with bright red ribbons on them walking about, rolling out piecrusts, pulling berries from thorny currant bushes, smearing orange and lemon marmalade on buttermilk biscuits, or 154 THE QUARRY ladling hot bubbling rhubarb out of squat iron vats on corn fritters and buckwheat cakes. The yellow jackets and carpenter bees and bluebottle flies were vexing if the weather had remained both dry and warm since the middle of September, and frequently a child, idling barefoot in the sword grass or pulling at the loose railroad ties that vanished into a thick stand of copper beeches, got nipped on his heels or the soles of his feet. Lazy brown Jersey cows, milked by the Ditenhafers, grazed in the dilapidated, scrubby fairgrounds nearby, and you could just see, poking out of the lavish poplar hills north of town, the thin white spires of the rebuilt Calvary Baptist Church. Public records in the library indicated that New Brooklyn Township , the county seat, was first laid out in 1879, its simple design a joint capitalist venture by miners and bankers and the Illinois Central . Disenchanted sodbusters from the Ozarks crowded in to work the quarries. Sharecroppersfrom Alabama and Mississippi, on their way to enormous smelting factories and blast furnaces in Gary and Hammond, remained to cut stone. In the twenties there was a growing market in the country for construction limestone, and New Brooklyn's population more than doubled in ten years. Legend had it that the town took its name from the birthplace of its first elected mayor, a fat wily Dutchman with a thick walrus mustache, though I've never found any public documents that either confirm or deny that. The Elks Club itself was quartered in a big house of whitewashed brick, with gables and dormers and pegged-maple floors. It had been a bequest from a childless circuit court judge in South Bend who had grown up in it. The judge, who'd died a few years back after coming down with diphtheria, had played the defensive line for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame. My proletarian father had always loathed bourgeois affiliations like country clubs and fraternal orders . He said that they were intended to exclude certain members of society (it didn't take a genius to know he was talking about us), that they were perfect for gossipy and intolerant people, peoplefixated on hearsay and slander and conformity and petty suspicions. His own philosophy was no doubt forged by his father, an immi- THE QUARRY 155 grant from Bohemia who labored fifteen hours a day on an iron ore boat that docked in all the Great Lakes. Papa first settled in Michigan City, near a rendering mill, in a cramped frame house enveloped by a screen of soot and smoking horseflesh. My father told me that during the suffocating summers the hazy sky over the chemical plants and petroleum refinerieswas saturated with a greasy green dust. He said that my grandparents would sit in their blue bathrobes each evening after supper and swing in the burlap hammock hung in airless shade between two withered plum trees, talking in whispers about their relatives and friends left behind...