Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  “But we want to know,” Ruthie said gently. “You can tell us.”

  I was not half so calm inside as Ruthie appeared to be.

  “Johnny had been bragging, how pretty I was and how nimble with my fingers, and he’d bet one of his friends that I could turn out a hundred shirtwaists a day for three days. Me, by myself! No piecework—just me!”

  “Nonsense,” I snorted. “Nobody can do that!” Ruthie put her hand on my arm. I think it was meant to calm me, but I felt it as a warning as well.

  “I know!” wailed Shayna. “I told him I could not, but he told me I’d better, for he and Cohen had wagered more money on it than my life was worth.”

  Shayna’s fingers were twisting her fine shawl like a dusting rag.

  “I worked my fingers raw all day, but the pile of pieces got no lower. I knew I could never get everything done by midnight. Oh, Deborah, how my foot ached from the treadle and how my hands shook. It was worse than our first days in that little sweatshop on Delancey. My eyes stung and my fingers were dead at the tips. I never even stopped to eat, and then I stuck my finger with the needle twice and started bleeding on the cloth. I put my head down to cry.”

  “Poor child,” murmured Ruthie.

  Silly goose, I thought, but did not say. She should have come to me long ago.

  Shayna looked at Ruthie, not at me, as if she could read my mind, and went on. “After a few minutes, I picked myself up, ready to try again, when—such a sight, oh, God! Out of the pile of cloth next to me a terrible old woman came. She had long gray hair that hung in rattails and her nails curved out in claws. She was hunched over, covered in warts, and reeked like rotten meat in the sun. Her skirt was held up with a frayed rope, and coming out from under it I could see the tip of a tail. Her eyes glittered like broken glass. Oh, I was terrified—my blood froze and I gasped for air!

  “But I remembered what you said, Deborah, about sometimes God’s host taking ugly forms to test us, so I did not show my horror.”

  “What I said?” I interrupted her tale. “That was no angel of God’s, that was a demon!”

  “I didn’t know!” wailed Shayna.

  “Be quiet,” said Ruthie to me.

  So Shayna resumed. Her breathing had become less ragged as she fell into the rhythm of the story. “‘Tut, tut, Shayna meydle,’ said the woman. ‘Why do you cry?’

  “So I told her my sorrows, and how soon the clock would reach midnight and how Johnny’s face would darken when he saw how little I was able to make, nowhere near a hundred, and how I didn’t know what he would do.

  “‘Dry up your tears,’ said the old woman. ‘I can sew up those pieces no problem, and all I need from you is your pretty ring.’

  “It was the ring Johnny bought for me, with the sapphire,” explained Shayna. “I love that ring; it made me feel like a movie star to walk down the street on Johnny’s arm with that ring on my hand, but I figured that a ring does no good to a corpse, so I took it off and gave it to the old woman.”

  Taking her out from under Johnny’s protection, such as it was, I thought to myself.

  Shayna was lost in memory. “Oh, you should have seen that old woman sew! Her hands and feet and tail were a blur. When she stopped, there was the pile of shirtwaists done and dusted, and she vanished into thin air just as Johnny and Matthew came in. They were thrilled to find that I’d won their stupid bet, and I thought that once they had sobered up the next morning, they would see what a foolish bet they’d made and that everything would go back to normal. But the next morning I came in to find a pile of cloth higher than my head. I worked my fingers raw and until my eyes were burning and bloodshot, but by eleven o’clock I had more than half the pile to go. I stood up to stretch out the cricks in my neck and back, and when I sat back down, I was face to face with the ugly little woman. Again, she asked what my trouble was, and again, I told her.

  “‘Don’t you worry about a thing, Shayna meydle! I can sew these pieces for you, no problem, and all I ask from you is that pretty locket around your neck.’”

  Again, “Shayna meydle,” I thought to myself. A familiar address, like the demon knew her—and then I realized it did.

  “But it was Bubbe’s locket!” continued Shayna. “I didn’t want to give it up, especially since Mama had given it to me, but what could I do? I figured that Bubbe wouldn’t begrudge me a finished task, and I took off the locket and gave it to the gray-haired woman.”

  Taking her out from under Bubbe’s protection, I thought. If this was the same lilit as the one that had plagued us in the old country, it didn’t want rings or lockets, not really. I went cold and ran my eyes over Shayna’s figure. She looked as trim as ever.

  “Again the old woman set to work, and when she was done, the entire stack of shirtwaists was sewn up perfectly. On the stroke of midnight, she vanished, and Johnny and Matthew stumbled in and I really thought that this time it would be enough for them, that surely they wouldn’t go through with a third night!

  “But the third night,” Shayna said, her hysterics rising again, “the third night, the old woman didn’t ask for my hat or my locket, but for my firstborn baby! And what could I do but say yes, and now I’ve lost my firstborn before I’ve even borne him!”

  How did it find us? I thought frantically. I knew it had been spying on us in Bialystok, or how could it have known to tell Bubbe that we were in danger, but how could it have followed us to this New World? Ruthie said America was free of those old fears, but she was wrong. “Are you carrying?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” Shayna cried. “I want free of Johnny and his wagers.” She buried her head in her hands and wailed.

  Oh, I felt that wail in the pit of my soul. To have failed not only Yeshua but Shayna as well! The one with my inattention and the other with my arrogance. “But a mistake is a mistake,” I said. “Maybe I’m not above making them as well. And I can help with yours.” After a minute I added, “I can take care of Johnny.” Ruthie put Shayna to bed, but I sat up a long time, planning how.

  The next day I went out and dug up some clay from the street. I came home, molded it into the shape of a man, and named it. I took the silver knife and slashed open the sides of the doll where Johnny Fein’s pockets would be.

  With his money no longer flowing, Johnny Fein’s body turned up in the river, a week later, broken and twisted.

  Matthew Cohen, I hardly had to do anything about. Without Johnny to cheat and threaten for him, he started losing his bets, and no one else would cover him. He lost his money, all his family’s money, inside of a month. A broken man, too, he was. He ended up in the back room of a saloon with a bullet in his head, so I guess he finally tried to stiff the wrong bettor.

  Shayna, well—she wasn’t the same, but after Johnny had been dead for a while she picked up her head again and smiled a little at the world around her. She had not been with child after all, so that was one less worry for us. Ruthie and I made enough money between us that she didn’t have to go back to work for a while. Shayna started seeing a kind young man, Solomon, a quiet fellow, so steadfast and calm. He worked behind the counter at his family’s appetizing shop, which was how they met. They were a good match, and before their first trip to the movies, Shayna brought him home to meet me and Ruthie. He was very respectful. Shayna began spending more and more time with him, but just as often as they went out, she would bring him over, and the four of us would have dinner. Sol even came to me when his younger sister came down with the croup. After some months, Sol and Shayna were married in a very small ceremony, just Ruthie and me and Sol’s family. After a month or so, the four of us moved into a small apartment over his family’s shop, next door to his parents and aunt and uncle. Shayna had long since left Cohen’s shop, and now she worked with Sol’s family at his store.

  One day, she came to me with her face drawn and tight, just like when we were little and she was in trouble.

  “Sister, sister,” she said. “I’ve got news—a little one coming.” Sh
e made the sign to ward off the evil eye.

  “Mazel tov, Shayna,” I told her.

  “For another, maybe,” she answered. “But what will happen to my baby? That lilit will come take it away. Or will it end up like our baby brother?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I told her. “This is America. I won’t let that creature take your baby away. Don’t worry yourself anymore. I burned that contract once and I can take care of things again.”

  I knew the demon wouldn’t take Shayna’s baby while it was in the womb, but I took every care anyway. Not a stick of furniture or a scrap of clothing for the baby would I let Sol bring into the house before it was born. He had to keep everything in the store. I made up amulets and cast charms of protection over her just like I had done for Yeshua back in the old country. When Shayna started to feel pain I put the silver knife in her hands and chalked a circle, wide enough for her to walk around in, around her bed. I chalked every charm of protection that I knew on the door. Sol, I sent him to shul to pray for her and recite psalms. He went. A good man, Sol. Good enough to know when to do as he was told.

  While Shayna labored and suffered, I did what our bubbe had taught me. First I recited the prescribed benedictions. Then I picked up a new pen, an unopened bottle of ink, and the koshered deerskin parchment from Bubbe’s box. I wrote out the finest amulet ever made for a newborn—no rabbi could do better. I used every symbol of protection I’d ever seen and some I made up. Shayna whispered to me the name she was going to give her baby girl—by now we both knew it was going to be a girl—and I wrote it into the most elaborate, complex, and powerful prayer of protection I could, invoking every angel and every name of God I knew or imagined.

  “Beauty isn’t enough,” Shayna said hoarsely, between contractions.

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

  “My daughter will be a fighter.”

  So in the amulet, I wrote for the protection of Yael, daughter of Shayna.

  When Shayna, sobbing as though her heart would break, had pushed Yael out, I rolled up the deerskin, slipped it into a deerskin bag, and hung the bag around the baby’s neck. I peered into little Yael’s eyes and already saw the fighter she was, anybody could see that, and a true Hebrew name is true power, everybody knows that. So when Shayna sat nursing her for the first time, gazing happily at her daughter, I sat on the edge of the bed and said to her, “We must call her by her true name only if nobody else is near. Otherwise call her Alte, the old one.”

  I hoped we could fool the lilit. Even if we slipped up, though, I had confidence in my magnificent amulet.

  Shayna insisted on singing to the baby, and Yael seemed soothed by her songs, but the rest of us! Such a caterwauling would scare off my customers, I was sure. Still, it’s not good to argue with a new mother—it might sour her milk—so I held my peace and tried to get used to the horrible sentimental songs. She liked one in particular, “Ev’ry Little Movement,” and would rock the baby while humming, “Every little movement has a meaning all its own. Every thought and feeling by some posture can be shown.…” A more insipid song I’ve never heard.

  * * *

  Seven months passed before our old troubles from the Cohens’ shop came back to haunt us.

  It was a Sunday; Sol and Shayna were at the store and Ruthie and I were home. Yael started screaming, angry and frightened in one sound. We ran to her and found a bent old woman with a naked rat’s tail leaning over her crib and tickling her under her fat chin. She was as ugly and shriveled as Shayna had said, and covered in bristly fur, but I knew her at once. Her eyes were the fiery pits I remembered. I knew we had no time to lose. I darted in front of Yael and spat out all the names of God I could think of:

  “By El, Eloe, Sabbaoth, Ramathel, Eyel, Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Eloyim, I command you to be gone and let this child be!”

  But the lilit just picked up Yael, who screamed and kicked out at the old woman’s warty skin with all her strength. I steeled myself and again commanded the demon to be gone, this time calling out the forty-two-letter name of God, as dangerous to those who speak it as to those it is spoken against. But the demon only grinned more broadly.

  “Your prattling means nothing to me, witch,” she said. “Not even God will break a signed contract.” She shoved what I recognized as a deerskin parchment filled with writing in my face. It was a duplicate of the one I had burned a few years ago in Bialystok. But there was one difference—below our bubbe’s signature I saw my sister’s. I grabbed Ruthie’s arm and pulled her close.

  The demon shot claws out of her gnarled fingers and shredded my perfect amulet. “I claim what is mine, the child Yael, daughter of Shayna, and depart, for not all the names of the heavenly host will break this contract.”

  Yael was screaming her lungs out and flailing at the demon with her tiny hands balled up into fists. I realized how useless it had been to try fighting this creature by hiding the baby’s name and calling her “Alte,” by chanting the names of God.

  And then I realized how to defeat the monster.

  “Ruthie,” I whispered. “I need time. I can save her, but I need time. A week.”

  Ruthie was no dummy. She fell on her knees and burst into stage tears. “By the mercy in heaven and earth, by Adonai and all his angels, Uriel and Zadkiel, and I don’t know the others, not like Deborah does, but I beg for the mercy shown in the past. As the Lord God spared the Jewish babies over the eight days of Pesach from his righteous wrath, I beg you to grant us eight days to say good-bye to our baby, to prepare her for a motherless life.”

  I would never have tried such a stunt—for one thing, Ruthie was mangling the story of Pesach—but how could a demon resist comparing itself to God? That is the very root of a demon’s evil. It fluffed up its hideous fur, looking like a large, horrible spider. “In the name of Adonai, Uriel, Zadkiel, and all the heavenly host, I am no less merciful than your God. Take your eight days. Say your good-byes and make the child ready.”

  And then she was gone.

  I paced back and forth all day, wearing a hole in the carpet until Shayna came home from work. I went downstairs to talk to Sol twice, but each time I stopped outside the door to the store and went back up without even putting my head in. It wasn’t my place to tell Sol about Shayna’s previous troubles—that was between husband and wife. But when Shayna did get home, I let her know in no uncertain terms that we had big trouble, and keeping it from Yael’s father would not be right. I told her what had happened. She blanched and turned on me.

  “You said the amulet would keep Alte safe!”

  “Well, you never said you made a covenant with this creature! You never said you signed a contract!”

  “How should I have said such a thing?” she cried. “Bad enough, a shonde, to have done it. But to say it? I grow tired of your scorn, Deborah.” She pushed herself away from the table, and in the same tired voice said, “We’d better start packing. A week’s head start is a good one; we should be able to get pretty far.”

  I gaped at her. “Goyishe kopf—what have you got for brains, girl, kasha? Maybe you think you’re dealing with a little dybbuk? No such luck—you’ve got hold of the Devil’s own right hand here. There’s no running away from that thing. You are just going to have to be brave.”

  “Me?” she asked.

  “I can help you, tell you how to hold on to Yael, but do it for you? No. That I cannot do. She’s not mine to hold on to, and I signed no contract. You will have to face this demon yourself.”

  “Face a demon? I’m supposed to face a demon?”

  I fought the urge to shake her and demand she be the woman our mama would be proud to own as her daughter. “Maybe you’d rather give up Yael?”

  Now Shayna looked as if she wanted to hit me. But she swallowed her temper, as I had swallowed mine. “Of course I wouldn’t.” She sounded stronger by the minute. “But how do I fight a demon?”

  A person can get tired of looking after her little sister. So guilty I’d felt, ever si
nce Johnny Fein had hurt Shayna, that I hadn’t asked her for anything since, like she was a baby herself. But she wasn’t, she was a grown woman. And a person can get tired of being looked after, as well, of being the little sister. I suppose that’s why Shayna went with Johnny—to get away from me and out from under my gaze. I am bossy, or so they tell me. I looked at Yael again and she looked at me. I remembered Yeshua peering up at me from the cradle of my arms.

  “Let’s find out,” I said.

  Together Shayna and I spoke to Solomon. I told him that the best thing he could do would be to stand ready when the time came, holding the baby, and if Shayna failed or if I was wrong, run as fast as he could for shul with his daughter. It would never work, of course. The demon would catch him before he made it out the door, but what could I tell him? That he was about as useful as a groom at a wedding? Ruthie we told the truth, and to her credit, she believed. She determined quietly that if Shayna and I failed—and if we failed, we would die for our treachery—she would grab the creature’s tail and follow her wherever she took the baby. Never would she give up.

  I did what I had to do. For six days I fasted, and on the seventh I went to the mikvah, bathed, and returned home. I ate matzoh with honey, prepared by Shayna, and plain fish. I lit a candle and set it on the table next to a clay bowl full of good wine. I kept a pen, ink, and paper nearby. I swallowed a mouthful of sweet wine and then I began to chant:

  “I conjure you by the Lord who created heaven and earth to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes what is false; I conjure you by the staff with which Moses divided the sea to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes that which is false; I conjure you by the heavenly host, the hands of God, Akriel, Gabriel, Hatach, Duma, Raphael, Zafniel, Nahabiel, Inias, Kaziel…”

  While I chanted I watched the wine intently. If I had stopped chanting even for one moment, the spell would cease, so I listed every magical name I knew, every name I could imagine, every feat of every great Jewish hero and heroine as the wine bubbled, frothed, churned, and finally smoothed out as still as glass. Then letters began to appear, as though they were being slowly etched into the surface of the wine. Without breaking my chant, I groped for paper and pen and copied the letters exactly. When no more letters appeared and the wine was still again, I finally brought the chant to an end, and the wine became plain wine once more.