In The Beginning

                                                               ‘In the Beginning’

                                                                   (Fiction)
                                                                      by

                                                              Gene L. Gillette

                                                      (Copyright Gene L. Gillette)


   “I just don’t know what the world’s coming to Lenny,” the older man said, wiping the
noonday sweat from his forehead. The young man he was addressing angled his chin
upward and read the sign above their storefront.


                                                         Katz & Son

                                                        We Still Care


    The younger man looked down from the sign and gazed out into the near empty
street. It seemed that nowadays Lenny and his Father stood out in front of their business-
-arguing-- more than they spent inside working. The talk was always about the same
thing. The way their profession was changing.



     It wasn’t the lack of product that kept them out in front of the store: God knows
there was plenty of product. Rather it was the way their competitors were
operating their businesses that was at the core of their heated discussions.


  Lenny stared silently out into the empty street. Perhaps the old man simply couldn’t
adjust to the changing conditions. After all, sixty years ago, when the old man started the
business, people had a certain ‘reverence’ for the merchandise. He chuckled out loud.

   The old man looked sharply at him. “What are you smirking about?”
Having had this conversation again and again, and getting nowhere, Lenny decided to
speak as bluntly as possible. “I was just thinking of the merchandise. Junk would be
more like it”.

  His father bristled beneath seventy-five years of rugged individualism. “Lenny, that
merchandise inside, as you so heartlessly called it is not junk and as God is my witness, it
never will be.”

   Lenny sighed heavily. “Dad, please! Times change. Our profession has changed.
What worked fifty years ago, doesn’t work today. We have to face facts. The shop is
down fifty percent from last year. We can’t go on like this and stay in business.”

   “Business?” the old man bristled, “business? We have more than a business, Lenny.
you of all people should know that. We provide a needed service and we do it with
dignity and God’s help.” Lenny looked awkwardly down at the sidewalk—beaten
back again by his father’s argument.


    As neither man could think of anything else to say, they stood in silence on the
sidewalk. Towering all about them, the cold impersonal world of glass and concrete
stretched skyward; reaching for a God who for most people no longer existed. Girder,
glass, steel and concrete; humanism was being crushed by the weight of it.

     Desperately wanting his son to understand, the senior Katz tried yet again to reason
with him. “My son let me ask you a question. Do you know the way our competitors are
running their businesses?”

    Lenny looked quizzically at his father. “Well, I know that most of them have
diversified”.

    “Ah hah”, replied the elder Katz. “Diversified you say? Diversified?”

    “Well yes, there’s no more land. The laws have been changed and people have
accepted the change. It’s the way things are done.”

    The point—the very point. The old man’s passion boiled to the surface. “ Change you
say? Change? When we die, we die? That’s it? Because people do things a certain way,
that makes it right?”


     Lenny thought for a long moment and then, desperately wanting his father to
understand, tried once again. “Dad, you’re talking about the dog kennels again. All the
other mortuaries have built them at the rear of their buildings. It’s an expedient way of
handling the merchandise.”


     The old man shot back. “No open ground--no cemeteries--change in attitude? Lenny,
Lenny--such an age” He looked down at the sidewalk with great weariness. If Lenny
didn’t understand—his own son. What chance did the old man have against the whole
new order of things? But no, he would not give up. There was a right way to do things—
God’s way. And he would try one last time to make Lenny understand.


    He looked up at Lenny and spoke with all the strength he could muster. “When your
Mother died, that was it? We could feed her body to the dogs? No Lenny. No! That’s not
the way it should be. Even though the soul, the spirit is gone, a reverence must be paid to
the body. God made the body as well as the spirit. That intricately made mechanism that
surpasses all the marvels in the universe. God’s greatest miracle. That body is precious—
we must respect that”.


     The older man had made his point. There was nothing more to say. He turned and
walked back into the shop. Lenny stood silently in the noonday sun, thinking of what his
father had said. Although he loved and respected his father, he knew that his father was
living in the past. In this age of science and technology the only place for mythology was
on the flicker screen. Men were no longer afraid of the unknown, because now the
unknown, through science and technology, would become the known. Science and
technology would answer all the fundamental questions of life. Religion was as dead as
the dinosaurs.



* * *



The basement of their shop was dark and quiet. A few yellow candles flickered with
the only light: The glow causing apparitional shapes to move about the walls. In the very
center of the room a single large candle illuminated an elderly woman. The old man stood
next to her, a heavy book in his hands.


    The woman was staring down at the dirt floor, tears running gently down her cheeks.
She raised her face and looked at the old man. She spoke softly, almost whispering. “I
want you to know Mr. Katz how much I appreciate what you’ve done. I just couldn’t take
him to one of those—“


       He stopped her by gently laying a hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Renkov, a business is
a business, that’s one thing. But Mrs. Renkov, for a business to mean something—to
genuinely mean something, it has to be run a certain way. A man has to care about the
merchandise.” He paused and looked down at the pile of freshly mounded earth at their
feet. “You know Mrs. Renkov, when I die I want to be buried just like Mr. Renkov. I
don’t want to be eaten by those hounds. Those Godless hounds.”


     She placed her hands on the book he was holding--the illegal Torah.. They
respectfully lowered their heads and repeated words remote from the world they lived in.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ”


     Their heartfelt words soaked into the cold basement walls and vanished--
evaporated as if they had never been spoken. Little did it matter--had these
compassionate words managed to escape into the outside world, it would have been for
naught. No one would have heard or understood them. This brave new world was much
too busy trying to escape the frightening reality of what their science and technology had
created.



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