LIFE OF AUGIE MARCH
1087
shaggy, meaty old man. Grandma bought a set of the Encyclopedia
Americana for 1892 from him and saw to it that Simon and I read
it; and he too, whenever he met us, asked, "How's the set?" believing,
I reckon, that it taught irreverence to religion. What made him an
atheist was a massacre of Jews in his town. From the cellar where he
was hidden, he saw a laborer pissing on the body of his wife's young
brother, just killed. "So don't talk to me about God," he said. But
it was he that talked about God, all the time. And while Mrs. Anticol
stayed pious, it was his idea of grand apostasy to drive to the reform–
synagogue on the high holidays and park his pink-eye nag among
the luxurious, whirl-wired touring cars of the rich Jews who bared
their heads inside as
if
they were attending a theater, a kind of abject–
ness in them that gave him grim entertainment to the end of his
life. He caught a cold in the rain and died of the pneumonia that
developed.
While Grandma, all the same, burned a candle on the anniver–
sary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when
she was baking, as a kind of offering, had incantations over baby–
teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had
nothing to do with the giant God of the creation who turned back
the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion,
at that. And while we're on that side, I'll mention the Poles-we
were just a handful amongst them in the neighborhood-and the
swollen, bleeding hearts on every kitchen wall, the pictures of saints,
baskets of death flowers tied in at the door, communions, Easters and
Christmases. And sometimes we were chased, stoned, bitten and beat
up for Christ-killers, all of us, even Georgie, articled, whether we
liked it or not, to this mysterious business. But I never had any
special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and
boisterous to take it to heart but looked at it as needing no more
special explanation than the stone and bat wars of the street-gangs
or the swarming on a fall evening of parish punks to rip up fences,
screech and bawl at girls and beat strangers of any foreign or tinged
look. And it could have been something occult in its way if it was in
my nature to fatigue myself with worry over it, for some of my
friends and playmates would turn up in the middle of these mobs to
trap you between houses from both ends of a passageway. Simon had
less truck with them. School absorbed him more and he had his
