Free I Am the Clay by Chaim Potok

dragged the cart with the old man still on it across a length of craggy ground to the nearest cave.
    Fearful, they stood at the mouth of the cave staring into a darkness that would not open itself to their eyes. The dank fungus smell of sun-starved stones and earth brushed against their faces and filled their nostrils.
    Perhaps spirits live here, the woman thought. Will we disturb them?
    The boy had never before seen a cave. Its dark gaping mouth, a little wider than the cart and a few inches taller than the woman and set at the base of the towering granite wall, frightened him.
    They left the cart just inside the mouth of the cave,where it was sheltered from the tundra wind blowing across the valley, promising snow.
    The woman went behind a clump of bushes by the side of the cave to relieve herself. Then she called softly to the boy and the two of them gathered winter grass and brushwood and she lit a fire directly outside the mouth of the cave. She boiled snow into which she placed various kinds of winter grass and weeds. She offered the soup to the spirits of the cave. Then she turned to the boy.
    “Do not eat the grass,” she reminded him. “Drink only the soup.”
    The boy stared ravenously into the bowl but did as she ordered.
    She went to the cart and gently pulled down the top of the sleeping bag from the face of the old man. She was startled by the fever heat that rose from him. He stirred and moaned. His eyes glimmered darkly in the light of the fire. “Drink slowly,” she told him, but he could not keep down the food and after a while she left him and returned to the fire.
    She took some fresh brambles and lit their ends in the fire. Holding them over her head like a torch, she went past the cart into the cave. The boy came and stood beside her.
    The cave was about twelve feet deep, its granite walls black, fissured, craggy. Its curved ceiling rose from its mouth to a height of about ten feet at the far wall. A layer of frozen moisture covered the walls with a black glistening sheen. The floor of the cave was of hard clay. Over its center, where they now stood, hovered the noxious stench of stagnant pools and pestilential marshes. At the foot of the far wallwas another opening, about the height of the boy and twice his width. When the woman saw the second cave she began to tremble. Cave leading to cave to the very bowels of the world. Surely spirits live here. What will happen to us?
    She led the boy back to the mouth of the cave and tossed the burning brambles into the fire. She spread pads and quilts on the earth alongside the cart and motioned to the boy, who lay down beneath the quilts.
    The old man moaned loudly and called to her from the cart. She helped him down from the cart—how hot his gaunt flesh was!—and held him as he squatted near the brush outside the cave and turned her head away as foul-smelling waste poured from him. She led him back to the cart and piled quilts on him and he lay helpless and shivering.
    If he dies I will be left alone with the boy and we may both die. If he lives he will send the boy away.
    She felt pressing upon her all the vast mountain above the cave: a world freighted with cold malevolence. Squatting close to the fire, she gazed at the faces that appeared to her in the leaping flames. Father would smoke his pipe staring into the flames. The children never permitted to go near him when he sat that way. Especially the girls. Smoke in his narrow eyes and wispy beard. How he disliked the girls. A weight upon him, a dark shame. Five girls, one boy, from the first wife. After the fifth girl a second wife and three boys. Then my sisters sold off to an arranger of marriages, a fat perfumed lady in billowing skirts who came and went with a servant in a curtain of hushed voices. Outrageous to sell them! Mother would not let him sell me.
Stubborn woman!
he shouted at her. But I was not sold. Dancing leaping vaulting flames: faces of the dead.
    The boy lay beneath the quilts