Prayers for the Living by Alan Cheuse

has to do with saving your father. Your father died like a goy and you’re helping to make him a Jew. Who knows where he is now, his soul, spinning around and around in the smoke, burning in Gehenna, because he died like a goy on the Sabbath, and praying, he is praying, you will help to make him leave his pain. Do you understand? And you go to Cincinnati, go to study with the goyish Jews, the Jews who aren’t Jews, and he’ll spin around another thousand years, because what’s time to him when he died the way he died? So you’ll go, and he’ll spin, and he’ll burn, and he’ll . . .”
    â€œYou’re crazy,” Manny told him, enjoying the full breath of their argument. “You don’t talk like a rabbi, you talk like a priest.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œYou heard me.” Manny stood up.
    â€œA what?”
    â€œYou heard me.”
    â€œGet out, you forsaken little bastard,” the old man said. “Out!” He stood up and waved a hand at the boy. “Out!”
    â€œI’m not a bastard,” Manny said, moving toward the door.
    â€œYour father died like a goy!” the old man said. “And you’re a stinking little bastard not worth my time.” And this man hurledhis miserable little body at Manny and struck him on the shoulder. “Out!”
    â€œDon’t do that to me!” Manny said. And he without thinking slapped the little old man on the side of the head and knocked him against his desk. Books flew everywhere, pencils, pads, pens, ink bottles went flying.
    Out the door, up the steps to the street, running back toward our building, Manny kept going. If at that hour I had been home already, and not still working my fingers to the bone at the shirt factory, I would have heard the downstairs door fly open and slam shut behind him, and I would have heard him pump his legs, pump, pump, pump his way up the stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, fifth, past our door, and up again, higher, to the sixth. And he’s climbing, not only climbing stairs, he’s climbing years, he’s going back in time and he’s going ahead in years, pump, pump, pump, pump go his legs, his heart, and he’s thinking, Papa! and he’s thinking, you worked! You worked so hard! And he’s thinking, how could he say that? that rotten old bastard, that slump! And he’s thinking, he’s helped me, helped me so much, but how could he say that? How? How? And he’s reached the top floor, and he’s wrenching open the door to the roof, and he’s thinking, what for? What for? Oh, Papa, Papa, and he’s feeling as though his heart has been drained of blood, now an empty shell, now an empty bottle, a cracked, shattered glass bottle of a heart, and he reaches into his pocket, and he feels the shard, and he stops short of the edge, looks down, breathing, breathing, and looks up, looks around at a sound, sees Arnie’s pigeon coop, hears the cooing and gurgling of the nesting birds, and he steps back from the edge, catches his breath, the brat, I would have said if I could have seen him then, the little brat, daring the air beyond the edge to lift him somewhere without pain, daring it, saying, I dare you, lift me, I’ll leap into your arms, you air! and finally, stepping back again, back again, and lifting his head to the horizon, seeing the spires of the greater city beyond the flat roofs of our neighborhood, looking east toward the river where our boat first docked,southeast toward that island, that pier in the bay, and west toward Cincinnati from where the call had come, and north again to the greater city, the towers, the spires. Hands in his pockets, fingers of one hand curled around the shard, breathing hard, still breathing hard, and the stink of the street rising up to his nostrils, the stink of the pigeons in his nose. A wind coming up from the river. Heat of the roof in the late afternoon sun. Sun sloping