The Firstborn Son(Barry) Shortly before noon two black girls approached Morris Weinstein’s booth at the holiday craft fair. The prettier of the two stood with her head crooked to one side staring at a dark walnut jewelry box. Her mouth assuming a pinched expression, the hazel eyes narrowed to tiny slits.

“What you lookin’ at?” The other girl was short with a broad fleshy nose and a surly edge to both her tone and features. “All this guy’s crap is ridiculously overpriced.” Intent that Morris be made aware of her opinion, she didn’t bother lowering her voice.

When there was no immediate response, she added, “I’m gonna check out the jewelry.” The girl promptly wandered off.

The crass remark didn’t bother Morris in the least. He sold several cherry dovetail boxes, to a woman who was giving them as gifts – one to a niece graduating college, the other as a wedding present. A burled, black walnut men’s valet was bought a half hour later along with a flurry of smaller keepsake boxes. The elderly man with the wispy gray hair – what little was left of it – and stooped shoulders had already made back the cost of his table plus a comfortable profit.

“This one,” the black girl with the muddled expression spoke tentatively as she waved a taut index finger at a trinket box with mortice and tenon joints plus a delicate, mosaic-like marquetry pattern decorating the lid, “the front is shorter than the back.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And you trimmed away additional wood on either side.” She ran an ebony finger along the curved ridge on the right side of the carcass. “But there’s a third angle and I can’t figure where it’s coming from.”

Morris smiled in mild disbelief. In all the years he had been hawking his wares, no one ever discerned the subtle detailing. “Here, near the front,” he tapped the chocolaty wood shot through with flecks of orange and bronze highlights, “where the two angles converge… it creates a visual effect, the illusion of a third angle.”

“Where the wood flairs,” the girl noted.

“Yes, that’s right… it’s an aesthetic nuance.”

At a booth diagonally across from where they were situated the sister with the brazen mouth was trying on a pair of earrings. The girl ran the palm of her hand over the textured wood. “It’s smooth as glass.”

“Everything’s polished with Danish oil and beeswax,” Morris explained, “but before putting a drop of oil on the bare wood, it’s sanded to two-thousand grit. Most woodworkers stop at around six hundred, but the extra sanding closes up the pores so the light has nowhere to hide and gets reflected back at the viewer.”

Morris smiled wistfully. He didn’t mind talking to the black girl. She was pleasant company and bright as hell. “Chatoyancy… it’s a French word. The wood sparkles like as cat’s eye.”

At the next booth over the girl’s sister had moved on to bracelets and silver pendants. “My name’s Selena Smithers,” She spoke softly. “I just graduated high school and am looking for -”

“And I need a part-time helper,” Morris didn’t wait to hear her out, “someone to assist with finishing, joinery, gluing up the rough carcasses and keeping the workspace relatively tidy.” With a touch of dry humor he added, “Along with jewelry boxes we manufacture a ton of sawdust.”

* * * * *

Morris and his wife, Sadie, lived in a modest cape covered with well-worn, cedar shingles on the north side of the city. The basement had been converted into a woodworking shop, where the larger tools – table and band saws, planer, jointer, drill press, belt sander and dust collector – were pushed up against the far walls. When a machine was needed, the elderly man dragged it out to the center of the room, returning it to its designated place once work was completed. The arrangement seemed a bit odd and cumbersome to Selena, but little time was lost in the process and the man was simply making the most efficient use of the cramped space.

A myriad of smaller, woodworking hand tools – chisels, handsaws, screwdrivers, rubber mallets and carbide-tipped router bits – hung from wall hooks. The chisels were vintage, gnarled and badly stained, but blades kept razor sharp with an ebony, Arkansas stone.

“The young girl who accompanied you to the craft fair….” Morris ventured.

“That was my sister, Tabia.”

“Tabia,” he repeated. “Such a pretty name!”

“It’s from the Swahili and means talented.”

“And what are your sister’s special talents?”

Selena smiled opaquely. “Unfortunately, my sister has no hobbies or special interests. None whatsoever.”

Morris pursed his lower lip. “That’s a bit harsh! Perhaps the girl’s a late bloomer and simply hasn’t come into her own just yet.” Having said that, Morris led her over to a table where a hodgepodge of unfinished boxes was stacked. He handed Selena a small electric palm sander sporting a five-inch, round disc. “Flick the switch and place the tool on that rough-sawn board.”

When Selena flipped the switch, the motor thrummed and quickly revved to a rich bass tone, but the disc remained motionless. Only when she set it down on the wood did it spin in a furious blur, kicking up a relentless cloud of satiny dust. As the tool glided leisurely across the board, all the tooth marks, blemishes and imperfections evaporated, faded away to nothing.

“The tool you’re holding is a random orbital sander, and we use it as final preparation before hand sanding.” Morris gestured with a flick of his head toward a heap of sandpaper cut in tidy, three-inch squares.

“Once you finish the sanding, we’ll move on to hinges, decorative trays and trim.” The elderly man showed Selena a rather thick pair of table saw blades that stacked together creating a rather formidable wedge. “You’ll be using these dado blades to cut grooves in the small tray and lid frames, but I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let’s just focus on the sanding for now.”

* * * * *

Tabia wandered into her sister’s bedroom and plopped down on the bed. “Wanna go to the mall?”

“I got to work today.” Selena replied.

Her sister scrunched up her nose. “But it’s Saturday.”

“Yes I know, but there was a rush of orders midweek and we’re replenishing inventory.”

“How much does the Jew pay you?” Tabia took great pleasure referring to Morris as ‘the Jew’, which to her way of thinking was another term for devil incarnate. “What’s your hourly wage?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” Selena deflected the question. “We have a different arrangement.”

“A different arrangement.” Tabia’s eyes brightened as she repeated the words. “I knew that sleazy bastard was taking advantage of you!” “And how exactly do you define a different arrangement?” Tabia spit the phrase out like a vulgar epithet.

“Sixty forty… Morris takes sixty percent of whatever money we earn. I get the rest.”

Rolling over on her backside, Tabia blew out her cheeks making a disparaging sound. “That’s generous!”

Selena glanced impassively at her sister. “We brought in well over five hundred dollars Monday through Wednesday and we still got the rest of the weekend to contend with. Sixty-forty… you do the math.”

After a brief silence Tabia muttered, “Guess I’ll just go hang out at the mall.”

Salina gawked at her in disbelief. “You can’t do that! You’re persona non grata at the Mall.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Since your shoplifting escapade, you’re not supposed to go anywhere near the mall.”

“That wasn’t shoplifting,” Tabia blustered, “just reparations gone wrong.”

Six months earlier, following on the heels of a Nor’easter that left three feet of snow and a pileup of eighteen wheelers on the interstate, Tabia was picked up for pilfering merchandize from a cosmetic boutique at the local mall. The store caught her on videotape pocketing fistfuls of mascara, lipsticks, exotic creams and rejuvenating ointments. When her parents arrived at the police station, Tabia was a total wreck both physically and mentally. Her eyes were blotchy, swollen half-shut from emotional hysterics. Tired of her unrelenting histrionics the police were only too happy to see her backside heading out into the street.

The store refused to press charges, but the complaint and criminal report would remain on file at the local police station; in the event of a similar mishap, the case would be referred to judicial court.

Not that Tabia cared – not one speck. A day later she was bragging with shameless bravura about the incident!

Selena had begun to realize in recent years that her sister possessed no moral center. Ends justified means and something was wrong only if you were stupid enough to get caught. In Tabia’s dimwitted universe enlightened self-interest served as her preferred, if grotesquely ineffectual, moral compass.

* * * * *

Three weeks passed. The basement of the Weinstein’s home was beginning to feel like a refuge, a peaceful sanctuary. Selena had read a book about Carthusian monks, who, once they entered the monastery, were almost completely cut off from families. They were allowed to meet with relatives only two days each year, and after taking the vow of silence allowed brief conversations once a week in the courtyard.

Nothing quite that spartanly severe took place in the basement of the Weinstein home, but the twosome could go hours without speaking a solitary word. And yet Morris was always in bright spirits and generous with his skillful knowledge.

He frequently displayed a rather wry sense of humor. One late afternoon when the workday was finished and the sky fading to dusky darkness he followed Selena out to her car. Handing her a small sliver of cherry, he remarked in an offhand manner, “I want you to make me a dozen.”

Selena stared at the object, an elegant seven-inch, curved handle that Morris installed on decorative trays included with the larger boxes. He stored the handles in a glass mason jar. Just the other day, Selena had noticed only one handle sticking out from the top of the jar. “I have to replenish the handles?”

“About a half-dozen or so.”

“But I don’t know how.”

“Why not?”

“You never showed me.”

“What if I got run over by a tractor trailer tomorrow? Just because I didn’t show you don’t mean you can’t analyze the basic design and figure things out.”

Selena studied the curved surface then flipped the wood upside down, noting a pair of tiny holes where eighth-inch dowels joined the handle to the wood base. Rocking the wood back and forth on the palm of her hand, Salina asked, “How can I locate ninety degrees on a curved surface?”

“That’s for you to discover,” Morris shot back. “It’s sort of like a Zen koan… one of those improbable, Japanese riddles.” “Woodworkers can’t make it through a solitary day without managing at least one impending disaster or insolvable problem.”

Selena turned the key in the ignition and the engine fired up. As she put the car in gear, Morris rapped harshly on the passenger side window. “What’s the cardinal rule in woodworking?”

“Safety first… Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Therein lies the answer to the riddle.” The elderly man abruptly turned away and sauntered back into the house.

* * * * *

“Get any sleep last night?” Morris asked with a smug grin the following day.

“Slept just fine,” Salina replied. “Give me five minutes and I’ll show you what I learned.” Removing the fine-cut blade from the table saw, she replaced it with one with fewer teeth and ripped a five foot length of cherry to an inch and a quarter thickness. Next, she wheeled the DeWalt planer out into the middle of the room and ran the wood through the machine until it was half its original size. At the workbench she laid the seven inch, cherry handle Morris presented her with the previous afternoon on top of the lengthy strip and with a stubby pencil outlined a series of handles leaving a small gap between each for waste.

“What about the eighth-inch dowel holes?” Morris challenged in a gravelly, no-nonsense tone.

“No problem.” Salina never bothered to look up from her work. “I’m going to mark each hole on the underside with the awl before cutting the curved surfaces on the band saw, and I’ll use a brad-tipped bit to drill mounting holes.”

Morris eyeballed the long strip. All necessary cuts had been penciled on the flat surface and she had already begun marking the placement of the dowel holes with a small tri-square. “Like you said,” Salina quipped, “Safety first. Don’t do anything stupid.” “That’s how I came up with the idea for cutting the individual pieces from a longer strip.”

A half hour later the five-foot slab of cherry had been reduced to eight sleek handles with sixteen pilot holes for mounting dowels. Each handle had been hand sanded to 600-grit, the sharp edges rounded over on the router table, sealed with a Minwax satin gloss finish and stored away upright in the glass mason jar.

Later in the morning a noticeably pregnant young woman not much older than Salina waddled downstairs. She spoke briefly words with Morris, kissed him on the cheek before leaving and trudged back upstairs. “Your daughter?” Salina asked.

Morris’ eyebrows arched at a precipitous angle. “Granddaughter accompanied by my future great-grandson.”

“The planer blade is getting a bit dull,” he said shifting gears.

“Yes, I noticed.”

“In the past, I used to take them to a professional sharpening service, but that proved a waste of time and money.” He handed the girl a screwdriver. “Remove the screws from the dust collector and we’ll dress the blade by hand.”

Salina loosened the screws and removed the plastic cover to reveal a set of metal bolts holding the foot long planer blade firmly in place. With the bolts removed Morris extracted the cutter and laid it on the workbench. “There are two of these spring-loaded beauties. We’ll sharpen this one first.”

Drizzling a rectangular sharpening stone with a light coating of machine oil, Morris held the bladed vertically over the wet surface. “The blade is angled at about thirty degrees,” he explained and lowered the metal until it seated flush on the flat surface of the stone causing the oil to bubble up from underneath.

“Here, you try.” Removing the planer blade from the stone, he handed it to Salina. When the blade lay flat against the stone, she could feel the suction, the smooth metal holding tight against the gritty cutting surface. “Now skate the blade back and forth at a diagonal to sharpen without lifting or lowering.”

Salina could feel the metal skimming the edge of the stone as though she was ice skating across a frozen pond. After less than a minute she pulled the planer blade away from the stone and Morris gingerly ran a thumb over the greasy surface. “You could shave with a blade this sharp!” They sharpened the second blade and reassembled the machine.

As meticulous and attentive to detail as Morris was with the woodworking, personal grooming was another matter. He could go days without shaving, trimming his bushy nose hair or brushing woodchips from his clothing. One day the elderly man appeared with a piece of rubbery black tape plastered across his eyeglasses.

“What’s the matter with your glasses?” Salina asked.

“Frame broke.” He removed the glasses and held them up so she could see. “I stretched a piece of electrical tape over the bridge and cut it away around the lens with an exacto knife.”

“Pretty clever,” she replied, “but wouldn’t it make better sense to buy a new pair?”

“Of course and that’s what I plan to do as soon as I get a spare moment.” But, of course, one thing led to another and Morris never visited the eye doctor.

* * * * * *

Six months passed during which Salina had acquired a veneration bordering on reverence for hardwoods. She never grew tired of cutting, joining or polishing the raw material into things of austere beauty. Sometimes Morris purchased rough-cut slabs of lumber, where bits of bark still clung to the boards like brownish scabs. Only when the wood was properly cleaned and polished could they admire the delicate figuring and tonal richness.

One night Salinas’ mother stuck her head in the bedroom doorway. “How was your day at work?”

“Good… it’s always good.”

Mrs. Smithers, a slender woman with a thoughtful, easygoing manner, approached and kissed her daughter on the cheek.. The middle-aged woman gestured with a raised finger. “Is that one of your creations on the bedside table?”

“A cherry keepsake box.”

Lifting the box, her mother brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “The wood is inlaid.”

“No, it’s marquetry,” Salina corrected.

The pattern her mother was admiring featured a pastel-pink madrone burl from Canada along with eggshell-white sassafras. Marquetry was an intricate – at times, somewhat chaotic – technique that Morris developed through trial and error over several years. Mrs. Smithers placed the box back on the bedside table. “Your father is watching the evening news and will be in to say goodnight shortly.” She wandered off.

Salina’s parents were pleased that their daughter had found work so easily but harbored no illusions that it would become a lifelong career. Woodworking was not a serious profession for women - at least that was what her father blithely let slip on several occasions. It was fine as a transition to more lucrative occupations like teaching, medicine or a career in business. Of late, her parents had been urging Salina to apply to community college.

An hour later the door opened. Tabia sauntered into the room and threw herself down on the bed. “There’s a Black Lives Matter rally at the community center Thursday night. You wanna go?”

“What are they protesting?”

“I dunno… some shooting in Oregon. Or was it Detroit?” Tabia’s mind seldom settled on any one topic for more than a heartbeat.

“It’s important to know the issues before committing to something that serious.”

Tabia shrugged before rolling over on her backside and staring humorlessly at the stuccoed ceiling. “This woodworking crapola… it ain’t gonna work.” Salina sighed and waited for the inevitable. “You ain’t never gonna cobble together enough money to buy all those tools the Jew got squirreled away in his fancy-schmancy basement.”

“There’s nothing terribly fancy about Mr. Weinstein’s workshop, but, yes, the tools are rather pricey.”

Salina blew out her cheeks in frustration. Just the other day she priced a Ryobi ten-inch table saw at Home Depot. The tool ran upwards of six hundred dollars! A band saw was in the four hundred dollar range. Both tools were necessities and yet she would be out over a thousand dollars on her first purchases! It was a lose-lose proposition.

“No self-respecting black woman,” Tabia suddenly lowered her voice to a toxic drawl, “would put up with that Jew’s abuse!” “He’s just using you like a modern-day sharecropper… tenant farmer. As long as you can’t afford your own tools, you’ll always be his Uncle Tom nigger.”

When there was no immediate response, Tabia rolled off the bed and shuffled toward the door.” “I gotta get ready for bed.”

“When we were leaving the craft fair and I told you that Mr. Weinstein offered me a job, you didn’t know what to make of such an outlandish proposition.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“At first you acted as though it was a farce, a bad joke being played out at my expense. But when you realized I actually had a knack for woodworking, your attitude changed. You, who never showed a passion for much of anything on planet earth, were jealous of my newfound success and wanted me to fail.”

“That’s a pile of horseshit!” Tabia fumed indignantly.

“You never wished me well.” Salina flung the words at Tabia’s backside as her sister slammed the bedroom door with thunderous fury.

* * * * *

Woodworking was not a serious profession for women.

Morris placed two unusual creations on the workbench one day and asked, “What do these boxes share in common?”

Salina studied the boxes. One featured miter joints and decorative splines, the lower portion cut away in graceful, sweeping arches on all four sides to form sculpted legs. The body was bowed in the middle to complement the slender, contoured bottom. The second box, a mass of undulating curves, had been shaped on a band saw from a four inch-thick slab of cherry, which Morris glued up earlier in the week.

“What do they share in common?” Salina repeated the question. “I haven’t a clue.”

“They were designed by well-established, female woodworkers.” “Alma Villalobos, Claire Baldwin, Jen Woodhouse, Ashley Nielsen… they’re all famous female woodworkers.”

“You copied their designs?”

“I borrowed some basic ideas,” Morris parried the question, “then altered them to suit my own creative whim.”

“We just had a box returned from a customer in the Midwest,” Morris said shifting gears. The merchandize was sitting on the workbench in the original cardboard box that had been haphazardly taped back in place. “Did you want to open it?”

“I guess so.” Salina began unraveling the brown wrapping paper and pulled the box free of the packaging. “It’s smashed to smithereens,” she mumbled. The jewelry box that had left the shop in pristine condition looked as though someone had crushed it with a sledge hammer, the gorgeous walnut heartwood mangled beyond recognition or repair. “My, god, what a disaster!”

Morris studied the broken wood dispassionately. “Yes, that’s quite a mess.” He handed her a brief, handwritten note sandwich in with the splintered debris.

The box fell apart at the joints.
There wasn’t hardly a drop of glue.
Very sloppy workmanship!!!!

“But it didn’t fall apart at the joints,” Salina insisted. “All four joints held rock solid.”

“We get one or two of these every year,” Morris said. “Crazy people doing equally crazy things to their purchases.”

“So what do we do?”

“We refund their money and never sell them anything again.” He chuckled as though at some private joke. “Every crafter has a rich collection of stories about nutty customers. It goes with the territory.”

* * * * *

Friday morning Salina arrived a half hour late for work. “Sorry,” she mumbled feebly. “My sister got arrested last night, and I had to go with my father to the police station to get her released from jail.”

“What did she do?”

“Black Lives Matter demonstrated at city hall. Tabia claims she had nothing better to do and went to see what was happening. Things got ugly what with the obscene language, smashing windows and looting of a liquor store and beauty salon.”

“Yes, it was in the news,” Morris observed.

“Tabia didn’t do anything bad. She just got caught up in all the craziness.”

“Morris wheeled the band saw into the center of the room. Opening the metal housing, he checked to make sure that the quarter-inch blade was properly centered on the rubber wheel tires. “They’re anarchists…the whole miserable lot of them!” He spoke dispassionately. “Chaos and destruction… that’s their calling card.”

“I figured that out early on,” Salina confirmed, “but my sister’s a silly chicken and needs to grow up.”

“Morris picked up a bracelet box inlaid with birdseye maple sandwiched between thin strips of African Makorè that Salina recently completed. The deep burgundy hues of the African wood meshed nicely with the buttery earth tones – tan, gold and creamy white – of the maple. “You will never see a Black Lives Matter fanatic working in a woodshop.” Only now was his voice flecked with a gossamer hint of bitterness. “They’re far too busy breaking things and tearing our country to bits and pieces.”

Wednesday morning when Salina came downstairs for breakfast, her mother and father were waiting for her. Mrs. Smithers face was ashen, her hands trembling. Her father didn’t look much better. “Mrs. Weinstein called a few minutes ago,” Mrs. Smithers said dully, stumbling gracelessly over her words. “Her husband had a heart attack last night and was rushed to the hospital.” After an uncomfortable pause she added, “Morris died in the emergency room.”

Salina went back to her room and lay down on the bed.

Since working for Morris Salina Smither’s life had assumed a comfortable routine and orderliness. Hours might pass working side by side without need for more than a handful of words mostly spoken in broken sentences and brusque, tightly clipped speech. Once, in his guttural, no-nonsense, plain spoken style, Morris said, “You must develop a reverence for the wood. It’s a gift from God. Don’t matter if you’re a pagan, pantheist or Tibetan Buddhist… you must grasp the flawless perfection.”

Monks in a religious order knew that when the chapel bells rang they attended Mass; they chanted devotional songs, weeded the monastery garden or sat in solace contemplating the cosmos. There was nothing quite so dramatically spiritual making small jewelry and keepsake boxes. A scruffy-looking Jewish man with bleary eyes, an unkempt appearance and terse sense of humor had dropped dead and upended Salina’s well-ordered universe. Now what?

The bedroom door opened tentatively. Tabia approached and stood alongside her sister. “I’m sorry about Mr. Weinstein.” Her face was moist and the girl’s voice trembled with timid regret. “I shouldn’t have said the horrible things about sharecroppers and Uncle Tom niggers.”

After a brief silence Salina said, “Thanks.”

* * * * *

The funeral took place the following week. Salina visited the cemetery and stood discreetly at a distance from the relatives and other mourners. The widow stood near the open grave hemmed in by the rabbi and a scattering of women. The only person that Salina recognized was the pregnant granddaughter, clutching a newborn infant to her breast.

Later that evening at the Weinstein home, the black girl sat mutely near the brick fireplace, while a cluster of Jewish men with prayer shawls and skullcaps intoned Hebrew prayers. Oblivious to everyone else in the room, one bearded fellow with wire-rimmed glasses rocked back and forth on his heels as he read at breakneck speed from a well-thumbed prayer book. The Jews seemed kindly, appreciative of Salina’s presence in their hour of grief, but nothing more. Twenty minutes later she drifted to the front door that had just cracked open to a deluge of new arrivals.

* * * * *

The following day, Tabia found her sister rocking on a backyard swing. “There’s an elderly white lady in the kitchen.” She cleared her throat and pawed the lawn with the toe of her sneaker. “I think it’s…” She never bothered finishing the thought.

In the kitchen Mrs. Weinstein sat in a straight-backed chair, staring at a pair of mottled hands resting in her lap. “I noticed you both at the cemetery and later at house but couldn’t get free to spend any time.”

“It wasn’t necessary,” Salina replied. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Tea would be nice.”

When the tea was brewed and poured, the older woman stirred a teaspoonful of sugar into the orangey brew. “A year or so after you came to work, my husband, may he rest in peace, stopped calling you by your regular name.” In no great hurry to continue her narrative, Mrs. Weinstein blew a cooling breath across the surface of the liquid and sipped twice. “Morris felt you had come into your own in ways he could never have imagined when you first stumbled across his booth at the craft fair, so there was no more Salina Smithers.”

Mrs. Weinstein ran a gnarled index finger around the rim of the porcelain cup. “He said that you were now the Ben Bachoor, the firstborn son, and would continue in that ancient tradition.”

“What tradition?” Salina pressed.

“According to Jewish religious teachings and the Law of Moses, a father's firstborn is entitled to a double portion of the family inheritance. Morris was adamant. He wanted you to have all his woodworking tools, heavy machinery, hardwoods, customers and contracts.” Reaching out across the table, she patted Salina on the wrist and repeated, “In Biblical tradition the firstborn son inherits the better part of his father’s belongings… all the sheep, goats, tents, weapons, pots and pans.”

“I wasn’t aware of any sheep or goats,” Salina said dryly after the initial shock ebbed away.

The older woman rose to her feet and placed the teacup and saucer in the sink. “I’m moving to live with my daughter in Florida; the house goes up for sale in a month or so. I can have all the tools and equipment shipped here if that’s something you truly desire.”

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