I shrug.
– Well, that’s it, looks like I’m screwed. Testimony like that, how can I not be lying?
Axler’s fingers are white on the handle of the knife when he waves it at me.
– He’s lying. He killed Chaim.
He waves it at Lydia.
– And she killed Selig. She killed Selig.
Lydia straightens.
– Hold on, hold on. I admit I fired indiscriminately and can’t account for every round, but I didn’t stab anyone. I’m certainly not prepared to accept the blame for a death I can’t say for certain I had any involvement in.
Stretch goes red faced.
– Will someone please shut that cunt’s mouth before I go crazy?
Lydia comes off the bench.
She careens across the aisle and throws her shoulder into Stretch and knocks him to the floor and grabs him by his bound ankles and lifts him and swings him high in an arc over her head and brings him down and his skull shatters three of the large white tiles that cover the floor, sending a spiderweb of cracks across them and gouts of blood and shards of bone through the air.
She falls to her knees and drops his ankles and watches him jerk twice and stiffen and we all smell his bowels go and the blood stops pumping and the one eye that still has a socket to hold it in rolls around and stops and glasses over.
Lydia looks at the dead midget, looks up at us all.
– I told him I’d kill him if he talked like that again.
Harm goes berserk.
Vendetta goes berserk too, but all she does is grab her dad and howl and shake. Harm wants to make Lydia dead. And she makes a living doing the nail act with her sister. And the rest of the crowd is trying to get her down without killing her.
Fucking fiasco.
I do the smart thing and roll off my pew and squirm under it and watch. Lydia just sits on the floor and stares at Vendetta with her dead father in her arms.
Harm gets close, but Axler’s boys keep wrestling her down. They have to break a few bones to do it, Rebbe Moishe all the time telling them to be gentle.
When they try to get Stretch from Vendetta’s embrace, she bites someone’s thumb off. They get smart and let her hold the dead guy and just lift them both from the floor and carry them out to wherever they took Harm and Rachel. Axler’s place, I guess.
And in the middle of all this, Axler comes for me.
Knife out, chaos behind him, he reaches under the pew and pulls me out and I twist my wrists and the straps hold and I kick my legs and the straps hold and he pulls my hair and stretches my throat and when his father hauls him off me and throws him to the other side of the temple he takes hair and scalp with him.
And soon after that, it’s pretty quiet. The girls are gone with the escort of boys, which leaves me bound on the floor, and the Rebbe sighing deep, and his son dragging himself to his feet and looking for his knife, and Lydia, still staring at the door where they took the dead father and his crazed daughters.
Lydia looks at Moishe.
– I did warn him.
He crouches next to her.
– Yes, you did. No one said otherwise.
– I’ve never done anything like that before.
– Of course not, why would you have? He tasked you. You are wounded and exhausted and in danger and he tasked you.
– I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve killed before. But in self defense. I. I’ve never. In anger. I’ve never done that before.
– You were raised well, then. You said your father kept Seder? You were raised in a proper house? He was Jewish? Yes?
She looks at the cracked tiles.
– What? Yes. Jewish. All that nonsense. All of us. Yeah, yeah, but California Jewish is different from New York Jewish.
– Shht. Nonsense. There is only Jewish. Look at us, yes? I came from Poland. Do you believe this? It is true. Deep in the dark holds of ships. Smuggled out. From Poland. Over the sea. Are we different from New York Jews? Perverse as we are, are we not Jewish? Yes, we are. Your father raised you Jewish, you are Jewish. And your mother?
– Yeah, like I said, all Jewish. Bat mitzvah, the whole thing. Till I was old enough to think for myself.
– Well, they must have raised you well and loving. You’ve been blessed. In this our life, only to have killed in self defense. Never until now in anger. Never from greed or hunger. That I could say the same.
He stands, he stands and takes a step and puts himself in the path of his son, who has recovered his knife and has crossed the temple and is coming for me.
– Axler.
– Move, Papa.
– Boy.
– Move.
Axler sweeps his arm at his father to knock him aside.
And the Rebbe grabs his son’s wrist and twists it and cranks it down and behind his back and pushes it up and kicks him once behind each knee and Axler goes down and throws his free hand out to catch himself and the knife flies from his fingers and his father forces the arm high and his son bends until his forehead touches the ground, his face rubbed in the pooled blood of his uncle.
– Boy, you have done enough. Enough. And is there no length you will not go to cover your sins? Laying hands on your father? Your Rebbe? Piling bodies on bodies to hide the ones beneath? Invoke the safety of the tribe to excuse your shame? Shht.
He releases the arm and straightens. But Axler stays as he is.
– My son.
He walks to the fallen knife and picks it up.
– My pride and joy.
He comes to me with the knife.
– Do you know how many older brothers he had, this one?
He slips the blade between the straps on my ankles and parts them.
– Six. Six boys older. And perhaps wiser, yes? How could they not have been?
He slips the blade between the straps on my wrists and parts them.
– But only this one survives. When he reached the age when I could pass the blood of Gibeah, only he had the strength for it. Of seven, only this one of my sons.
He tucks the knife in his belt, crosses to Lydia, puts a hand under her arm, helps her to her feet, leads her to a pew and seats her.
– It’s not carried in birth, the blood of Gibeah. Even though his mother and I both have it, our children were born without it. The act of love, it will not carry this warrior’s blood.
He finds a handkerchief in his trouser pocket and wipes spots of Stretch’s blood from Lydia’s hands.
– But the ones who have the strength, they take the blood young. After the bris, of course.
He tucks the handkerchief away and looks at me as I sit up on the floor.
– Imagine, if we put the blood in them before the bris? The mohel’s dismay.
He smiles with half his face.
He gets up again, goes to his son, rests a hand on his back.
– Get up, Axler. Get up. There is shame in what you have done, but there is also pride. You are my son, yes?
