The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  CHAYA WAS repelled by the spectacle of her respected elders reduced to gawking children, inept and unprepared. She could not forget the trolleyman cursing at the little crowd as they huddled on the fogbound deck. What must he have been saying in that language she knew not more than three words of, hello and thank you, assiduously practiced in her bunk. Go home? We don’t need your kind here? Whatever it was he shouted when he ruined the flag, at that moment were they cursed? How else could the end have been written at the very beginning?

  She was a girl from a gray and stony city. When she studied the Field of Zion’s buildings thrown up quickly, crookedly, by the light of their faith that such approximate carpentry would hold, and then the chicken coop when their birds spent too much time hiding—still she was glad they had not been turned back to Hamburg. Unpainted, gray as the sky, the buildings seemed to be riding an ocean of green. When the wind blew, and it did, viciously, without barrier, the long grasses danced like surf, swaying, bowing, miraculously recovering just to be leveled again. She was bewitched by a beauty she had never seen: the fat spread of rain drops on the doorstep, the sweet smell, better than warming dough, that rose from the damp ground. There was such a promise of peace here, and safety. Empty space without a shadow on it. She had never really seen the horizon before. Perhaps she could be happy here.

  But there was work to be done and bills to pay from the little they’d been given, a small packet alongside their train tickets. The buildings sometimes swayed in the wind; when the cold poked through the walls, over the sills, it whistled, a thin sound like an unattended kettle.

  Slowly, slowly, the ship began to list and take on water.

  Chaya began to feel it one worry at a time. The hens were either very dumb or very smart—they left their eggs, some but not all, in the low bushes outside their coop. Either the coop was all wrong—built badly, somehow, its sills already splintering—and they preferred to nest in the dead leaves on the ground, or they were being clever and having a good morning laugh. But when she came with her basket looking for the eggs, it wasn’t funny. Hollering at them didn’t help—not only do they not tend to be clever but one did not reason with chickens.

  The cows were bad milkers. There were two, called Eyn and Tsvey, One and Two, because in a muddle of tradition someone had insisted that giving them human names would insult the memory of a departed soul who happened to share that name. “Do you say Kaddish for a cow?” Zanvel, it was. Zanvel-the-hatter.

  The cow pond. Coated with scum like fat on soup, only this soup could not be skimmed. There was no clean water for a mikve, which tormented those who cared, the women monthly, the men before holidays and holy events. You were supposed to immerse yourself completely, over your head, your hair slicked, but if you did that in the cow pond you came up cobwebbed with green silt and mucous weed, reeking like foul breath. No honor to God or self in that.

  The dry rows of growing greens, stunted, crooked, choked. Nothing burgeoned, nothing spread, little flowered. Tomatoes hung riddled with worm holes, hard and pale pink; lettuce bolted before it could thrive. Onions went dead in the ground, their green flags browning from heat and lack of rain.

  Rusted tools (bought used: cheap, but a bad bargain). The wheels of the blue wagon did not match; every trip, sitting in the remnants of hay, clots of manure on her boots, she rattled so badly she came unstrung and quivered like an old woman the rest of the day. The horse, poor ratchedy horse, reorganized the flies with a frayed tail and watched her smooth her dress and try for dignity after a ride like that.

  And then there were the Others: Yenem. Some Chaya loved (Toibe with her kind, kind face, Uri the jokester); others were either too pious (Pesye and Zanvel, Mordechai who had no wife, Lazer and Itzhak who fasted Mondays and sometimes Thursdays and, famished, could not work) or simply meshuge, too crazy for this world. (Muttel spoke to no one, Bunya was a secret drinker, but not so secret that he didn’t tip over tables, fall asleep in the snow to be found by the bony old dog; weep, loom, cower.)

  Why did nothing thrive in this place? Whom could she ask? She could not ask her mother and father because they had chosen this, or at least chosen the idea of it. She seethed at the casual way in which the men from HEAS, upstairs at Castle Garden—pink-skinned, clean-scrubbed Germans, who handled them with their fingertips like dirty laundry—had sent them forth no questions asked, with no support but that small wallet of cash and no instruction. She was not quite a child, not quite an adult when she’d heard someone say, Beginnings are more than beginnings, they make the next things happen the way they do. She was older now and she did not like the way those next things were happening.

  AS FOR her affinity with Asher: He was a born provocateur. Communal life created the flimsiest of separations, boundaries, borders. And it seemed that if anyone spoke so much as a word, Asher could hear it and, made irritable by discretion, retail it to anyone who would listen. He did not hesitate to invade a privacy: Pesye, round as a wheel of cheese, stock-still in her undergarments. (“Do you know the fat hangs down off her arms, it’s like candle drippings.”) Muttel at prayer alone, hiding out when the minyan needed a tenth man. Itzhak pinching the cows and secretly tormenting Shlepper, their pathetic horse.

  It was Asher’s curiosity that pulled him along; he wanted to know everything. One night he saw Rivke and Munya huddled in the shadows of the barn, very close together, face to face. Attached, in fact. They were mouth to mouth and he could hear them breathing. “Why are you doing that?” His small voice. They fell away from each other, and stared at him and ran behind the barn. He saw Batya beating her child with a mixing spoon, holding her by her hair and swinging her high and wide while the little girl shrieked. Again his voice, undaunted: “Stop! Stop! You are making her bleed!”

  When he saw these things, these and more—the secret hoard of extra food that Mordechai hid under his bedclothes, the way Reuven slept behind a hay bale instead of swinging his scythe—petty, they were, but he told them all to Chaya. “Ssshh,” she soothed. “Those are not things you ought to be seeing.”

  “But they’re true.” He could look quite petulant. He stared her down. “I saw them.”

  “They may be true but people do not want to hear them, Asher. Adults,” she amended. “Adults do not appreciate being talked to that way by a child.”

  “Do you want to hear the kind of hens we have?” He didn’t wait for an invitation. Listing the things he knew, miscellaneous, was as natural to him as running and wrestling were to the others. “Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, Araucanas, barred rocks, two langshans and one Australorp.” There were no words for these in Yiddish; they made an indecipherable sentence.

  “How do you know those?” She didn’t ask why he wanted to know them, which he probably couldn’t answer.

  “I listen. I like to listen.” He clapped his hands. Modesty was a far reach for Asher, as impossible as silence. For a boy his age, he still had the kind of little ears, far forward, that make babies irresistible. His skin was tender, and though his features were sweet and regular and promised a later lifetime of dangerously good looks, now his eyes were almost perfectly round and his hair stood up stiff as a whisk broom, the hair newborns lose in their first weeks. In his intensity, he did look the far side of peculiar.

  His mother still looked wary around him; she gave him a wide berth. Chaya watched him kick at the pebbles under his feet, watched him try to resolve to cease his judgments on everything he saw. But his conscience was his curse: She knew he would fail. “Oh, Asher. Ketzele.” Kitten. Or no, not kitten; rather, little cat, which is something different: the animal mature but miniature. She could not imagine what kind of adult he would make but she suspected he would not have it easy.

  3

  SMALL FIRES flared between the opposed houses: The Socialists, who observed no ritual, constrained themselves from jeering and contributed their bodies to be counted in the minyan. In return, the zealous religionists, not cheerfully, refrained from carrying on like prophe
ts in the town square of Sodom. For the most part, they left each other’s souls alone.

  But very early, Zanvel-the-hatter and Mordechai disappeared for a week, gone to Milwaukee to purchase a Torah, which they had laboriously located via a series of letters to names they had gleaned who-knows-how. They returned triumphant, the heavy, hand-lettered scroll swaddled in blankets so that it looked like a child protected from a snowstorm. Once back, they confronted the fury of the half of the Fields of Zion that had never been consulted about such a waste of the colony’s slim resources.

  The battle lines were drawn: How dare the “godless” work on the Days of Awe? Shabbos was bad enough, but the most profound of ceremonial days? “Do the cows stop giving milk?” Father demanded. “Do the hens refrain from laying in honor of the day?” The children stood at the door when their screaming parents confronted one another, fully expecting them to fall upon each other like dogs.

  BUT, TOO, there were joyous days. The Commons had seen one marriage—the couple Asher had discovered behind the barn, Rivke the very young daughter and Munya the son of cousins, had arrived indifferent to each other but had discovered an affinity during the blank days and nights of their first Wisconsin winter. Almost at once Rivke was blooming with a bellyful of child.

  And there was a good bit of dancing in the Commons, single sex and not, Mordechai wielding a tolerable violin. High spirits drove the dancers, women flattered by the temporary attention of their husbands, even if they could not touch; children lifted and swung, shrieking. Melodies swelled with longing and loss, sweet songs floated into the chill goyishe Wisconsin air, crying out to those left behind across the ocean.

  4

  THE FATHERS of some of the children chose to teach them Torah and Talmud and leave the learning of English to chance. Somewhere along the way, between There and Here, they had lost heart and were not so eager now to transform their children into Amerikaners. Might they not, if they mixed with the local stock at the schoolhouse, be taught forbidden subjects like Christmas and hymn-singing? Might they be offered a bite off the haunch of a pig at lunchtime? A guzzle of milk after the poisonous meat? So the children stayed moored out there on that dusty road with starving animals and scrappy harvests, bored when they were not working, bored when they were, taught in whatever stray idle moment occurred, neither There nor Here.

  The adults needed someone, though, who could be a courier to the world, someone to interpret, to speak for them, and in spite of her sober silence—or perhaps because it made her seem scholarly, a girl of moderating temperament, double-sighted—they consulted and considered and finally chose Chaya. She was so often the conciliator between antagonists, they were convinced she would be the best one to walk with a foot in each language, each life.

  For as long as it took her to drink down her new language and, nourished, make new bone with it—English her stepmother tongue—she walked the very long way into town and into the whitewashed schoolhouse. There she sat at a desk too small for her, her knees pushed tight up against rough boards, so that she could learn what the littlest ones were learning, those shapes and sounds, those capitals of the world, those numbers. “Kah-ya? What kind of name is that?” asked a girl smaller than she, who stood with one shoulder cocked like a dare. They had said hello to her the day she first appeared but when she told them her name they laughed.

  “It’s Chy-a,” she said, exaggerating the throat scratch. “Ch,” that gargle, “not Kuh.” She tried looking straight at the girl who was half her size, to protect her pride.

  “Uch, you sound like you’re going to spit!” Her own ch passable, still the girl made a disgusted face.

  Chaya stood eyes wide, lips parted. Yes, like that, like uch, she wanted to say but could not. Boys fought with their fists; girls mocked. She swallowed her defense.

  Impatient, they turned their backs and left her standing in her pool of silence. Something stubborn—dignity, for which she had no word—kept her from approaching them again. There was a German boy in the school as well, but he and the other boys didn’t worry his chs. They shared wordless pleasures without difficulty, threw rocks at birds, squashed frogs and grasshoppers, chased the girls around the lilac bush that stood in the middle of the scuffed-up yard.

  She had not expected it to be easy. Could someone be born lonely, Chaya wondered. The possibility did not leave her feeling bereft; she looked at it, rather, with a consoling dispassion. Like so much else, it was simply a question she had no one to ask.

  Like her brother, she had been an infant early full of words; she could still make herself remember what it felt like to learn them—those hummed mm’s behind a closed mouth, the ticklish glottals and fricatives, ssh like a wind brushing forward from the back of her throat. Endless experiment, a sensual feast for herself alone. It was an ecstasy to blow and click and suck in, then try the sounds in dozens of shapes and then, after a while, know they formed words she could use to make herself understood.

  But that was the old language. Now she had to move her mouth in a dozen new directions, suppress the sounds she had lived in. Pick out of the welter of noise vowels she had never heard before, a musical scale with intervals she could barely discern. Walking home from the schoolhouse she said them over and over again, sang them like a song no one could hear. Or no, they were a prayer and she was a convert who had to learn them, but her tongue would not cooperate. This not zis was the hardest. This, there, theirs. Not oy but O. O O, and O again. If only someone at home could listen and know when she got things wrong. Asher, pulling at her sleeve, begged, “Talk to me in that English, Chai, I want to talk it too,” and—she was not surprised—he learned it faster than she could bring him words.

  Her teacher, impressed with the speed of her learning, slipped books to Chaya on her way out the door: Jane Eyre, which was not easy to parse; Wuthering Heights, which inflamed her like a forbidden dream; romantic novels, ladies’ books in which strong-willed women broke themselves on the rack of society’s demands but justified their capitulation, all, all for love. They were always beautiful or, with love, became so; they were always good. She wished she could speak with someone about their fates, these heroines of Mrs. Humphry Ward, of Francis Marion Crawford, of Chester Bailey Fernald, whose major challenge was which man, among two opposing types, to marry.

  Her teacher, for all the generosity of the loan of her library, frightened her. Though many school mistresses were barely older than their charges, Miss Singlet was a very thin, straight-spined older lady—she seemed to have been compressed, as if in a vise, and the striped skirts she favored made her look even longer, like a candy cane. Unmarried, monocled, she did not appear to be the woman to interpret these passions for Chaya. Nor did her own mother, so work-worn, so respectful of her husband but voiceless.

  Then one day, Chaya made the mistake of reciting for her parents a poem she had learned in school. She thought that the English that now poured easily off her tongue would make them proud. “Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, / Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, / Seems nowhere to alight . . .” It was what they had wanted of her. Obliging them had been bliss, though it hadn’t been easy. It had simply strained her capacity for empathy to be isolated from both sets of companions, at home and in the little schoolhouse. She had won the oratorical competition with the poem and had been given a whole book of verse called Pillows to Dream On for a prize; she allowed herself to be dramatic as it hurried to its close, because it made her feel like someone other than herself: “Stone by stone, / Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work, / The frolic architecture of the snow.” Beaming, her mother applauded, her father banged his mug on the pine table, and she felt, perhaps for the first time, that her voice had carried forth into the world her true feelings.

  “That is a fine way,” Father said, looking hard at her, his frank face above his mustache red with pleasure, “to end your time at school. We were right to send you, of all the children.”

  She was confused.r />
  “Now that you have learned so much, you can help us when we need to speak in town. And you can come back to work here at home. Where we need you.”

  She argued, she wept. She was not competent at this work, she did not care about this work. It made no sense. Chaya loved her parents and felt for their difficulties—her mother breathed for them, she was their pulsing machine. She admired her father for the dignity of his commitments. He was a man who bled for others, who ought to have been given a chance to work for the well-being of strangers. But they were living someone else’s life, she was certain of that. Driven to improve their chances, they had chosen wrong, and were covered with the dust of failing farmers. They seemed to attract catastrophe—the rain that soaked the hay before they got it in, the calf that strangled in the womb and could not be pulled out until its poor mother expired, the wind—so harsh it could not be measured—that took down the chimney pipe and let the rain flood in and soak the quilts and bother the babies. Each, if you traced it back a few steps, was the result of their incompetence. And luck—luck was nothing but their enemy.

  By now, too, she had heard of other ventures all too much like this one, sent by HEAS to Dakota where they froze, to Louisiana where they flooded and died of yellow fever, only a few in New Jersey less than laughable. Even those had to hire themselves to the factories of New York. They tilled and planted and harvested after hours and how could they not have broken under the burden of their double work lives? So much optimism undone. So much energy wasted.

  “You are ready for the Academy,” her father told her, “but the Academy costs money we can’t spare.” He sipped weak tea, no sugar cube between his teeth because white sugar also cost money. “Do you think we enjoy the loads we lift? The bending, the carrying, the calluses on our hands? Why do you think you can exempt yourself?” He looked at her gravely. “We are doing this for each other.”