Chaim Garfield sat at the kitchen table with half the paper. He hadn’t seen one since the holiday started, or heard the TV or radio. He was hungry, and before the formal cold meal to break the fast of Yom Kippur he had half a bagel smeared with butter and cream cheese and a glass of sweet wine. There would be guests soon, people from his shul who visited him every year at the end of the holiday, and his wife and daughters were arranging platters of cold fish and cheeses and hard-­boiled eggs. One of his sons-­in-­law was across the table from him with the news section, the other had turned on the TV in the small bedroom, and his granddaughter was asleep in her portable crib in the big bedroom. The women talked quietly, the TV noise was only a murmur, and he chewed his bagel and looked out at the river, feeling, as he always did when this holiday was over, a great sense of peace. The feeling bemused him. He’d atoned for sins he hadn’t committed in the name of a God he didn’t like, and he couldn’t understand why the experience gave him peace. He shook his head at his reflection in the window. No one noticed. His son-­in-­law finished the first section of the paper and they traded. The murder of the five boys was on a back page and he read the story.

He wondered how Jacob Levy would feel reading the same story. Maybe he was a vengeful man and the murders satisfied him. But then Garfield thought about the mothers of the dead boys and he tried to weigh the two sets of grief against each other, the mothers’ for their dead sons, and Levy’s for his. He knew he’d never be able to take sides and if he didn’t stop trying he’d wind up feeling so lousy he’d have to go to sleep. Then he noticed the word clay in the story. It reminded him of something and he made himself think about that so he could stop thinking about Jacob Levy and the five mothers. He finished his bagel, had another glass of wine, and tried to think what it reminded him of, but couldn’t. He read the story again. The article said the clay might have been used to express contempt, or as part of some esoteric ritual. Neither made sense to Garfield.

“Did you read the story about the five boys in Brooklyn?” he asked his son-­in-­law.

“Yeah . . . some mess.”

“Dave . . . does the mud or clay remind you of something?”

“How do you mean?”

Garfield shook his head. “I don’t know. Just something . . .”

Dave Schermer shook his head. “Sorry, Pop. I can’t help. Don’t worry, it’ll come to you.”