The pied horse that pulled them out of town was a careful walker. He took his time like an old man picking his way. Chaya and Gregory were quiet, holding on to each other’s hands. Everything about them was secret now. Turned to each other, they kept him out. Asher stayed busy looking for something familiar, anything. Erased, those years—or he would remember when they were in the farmyard, because that was where Chaya said he had lived most of his time.
Then came a fence, uneven, collapsing in places, fallen into tall weeds, and a break in the fence, and the horse took the opening and pulled them in. Gregory pulled bills from his pocket—he had a silver mazuma clip!—and paid the cabman, who looked him up and down as if he were one of the savages at the Fair. Then he shook the reins with a little shout, neatly turned his horse and vanished.
25
CHAYA KEPT her eyes closed through most of the trip, though she was much too agitated to sleep. She was trying to remember the girl who had accidentally stolen her brother and escaped the Fields of Zion. When she’d told Asher that she was marrying Gregory he only looked at her in silence and blinked as if the words were not sound but a light that shocked his eyes. She tried to reassure him that her love for him would not, would never change but, he said, with a weariness that alarmed her, “You are going over to them, Chai. You hate them and they hate you. You know it.”
“But Gregory is one of us, Ash. He is giving over his life to the same people we are!” She knew Asher had been spending time with his down-and-outers, coming home late from their incessant meetings, which he said little about. She was not sure that, so occupied with saving the world, he understood that men and women shared something beyond the economic, even the social. He was a little slow where that was concerned, hadn’t quite awakened yet to the convex and concave fit of bodies, and of sympathies that went nameless. When she saw the way he turned away from her without a single word of congratulation, she thought, You have lost him now. You have surely lost your first and deepest love. But she vowed that they, together, she and Gregory, would bring him around.
Dreaming, she kept herself busy from Dearborn Station until they arrived in Christa. It was as though everything had already happened.
They would be met by the children, who would shriek with delight when it came clear who it was, returned. She could call up the smell exactly: sour, ashy, burnt-over, raw earth, and something green that she pulled up and tasted without danger. Sorrel, clover. Mrs. Gottlieb made sorrel soup; she said it grew all over where she was a girl. And Gregory standing back modestly, watching them, showing a helpless little smile. They would be speaking Yiddish.
Then, out of the distance, with a high cry, her mother would come rushing forward and smother Asher against her. (Chaya, gracious, would allow him the first embrace.) The size of her mother would be so familiar, her long legs, her large feet. She looked strong. Her eyes, a goyishe blue, would be more tired than they had been before. She had no smell but sweat and yeast, a little bit of yeast: probably she had been baking. Children would pile on him—Dvorele, Yakov, Binyomin, Masha, bony, short-haired boys and her sisters in faded spriggy skirts, with high-pitched voices. They’d grind against Asher, screaming his name, reaching for him. One brother—Beryle, probably, who had always been the liveliest—would punch him in the arm in greeting. Asher, they would be surprised to learn, was used to being famous. Many crowds had surrounded him before, imagine!—the cigar women, the Sunday partygoers, the hungry who had no homes except, on the coldest nights, City Hall, and the fairgoers, of course, the ones who paid actual money to converse with him!—but none of them touched him. She knew he did not like to be touched by strangers and would wish they were not pawing him now. But he would work hard at saying nothing, shaking no one off. It took self-control he didn’t know he had. She would be proud of him. Her boy.
Their father, Mama might say, was in town buying feed. Asher’s hesitation met some small hesitation from her—she seemed happy to have him—them—there, but she had a kind of reserve behind her smile. She still looked afraid of Asher. It pricked Chaya; always had. It was cold water and not a warm bath. Not what you expected of a mother.
Then Chaya would introduce Gregory, in a language Gregory could only nod at. She would gesture to him, to Asher, to the farmyard. She saw Mama look at Gregory with her head slanted, the way she had seen Mrs. Gottlieb evaluate something, a mop or a dress she was thinking of buying from a pushcart on the street, figuring out whether it was as good a deal as she was being told. Did she have no English at all?
Enough to say, “Thank you, is good, yes,” and then cover her eyes, embarrassed, like a girl. When she took down her hands, she would begin, shyly, to beam at Gregory, the smile moving every part of her face.
CHAYA WAS prepared for the Fields of Zion to be as worn and colorless as she remembered: unpainted buildings, missing slats on the sides of the coop through which she could see a deep darkness, a scrabbled dooryard humped with clots of dried grass. But all that would be suddenly irrelevant, the fabric of her life, like a torn seam, cauterized by the heat of her return. The people moving across the yard would be warm, real, and clamorous. The women who had come out of the kitchen would stand in a ragged ring around her, as if they were too dazzled to come closer. Fraydl would hold her apron to her face, to stifle her emotion.
The brim of her hat tight against the plush of the train seat, Chaya saw it behind her eyes and it gave her such pleasure she tightened her hands into fists, impatient: how she would go to her mother like a child, relieved to be held against her as she had never been before. Her mother, that cool woman, crooning Chayele, meyne tokhter, Chayele, wet-cheeked, rocking with her. She was not angry, she was not about to scold. The winters fell away, Chaya’s abused, tobacco-stained fingers, the silence of Mrs. Gottlieb’s long sleep, the search for her brother. She kept her eyes clenched against everything but this rocking.
Then she remembered Gregory. As if she had awakened from a stolen sleep, she would look frantically around for him and then find him. Would see—perfect, perfect!—how the children had seized his hands, the bigger ones fitted under his arms, and were dragging him from one side to the other of the dooryard, showing him the chickens who would not stay in their house at laying time, and who fled at their approach, introducing him to a horse she had never before seen, white as an albino, charmless but sturdy. The horse would have a brown tail that rotated lazily, like fingers skimming through water, first this way, then that, unhurried. The horse, barrel-bellied, would look at her calmly, as if he knew her and was not surprised to see her.
Asher, her dream-Asher, had disappeared. Always and forever the cat in him would render no explanations and beg no leave. He was most likely in the woods, exploring, or running through the cornfield. Discovering the pond, none of its purposes (swimming hole, mikve) visible just now.
Set free by her mother (who would be thicker than she remembered, but with a far lovelier face, the forthright face of an aging girl), Chaya would go to claim her fiancé. “Are you surviving all this enthusiasm? If you would like me to call them off—”
By now, sweating the way she only saw him sweat when they lay together, exhausted, in his bed. “It takes an effort to be friendly,” he would whisper, “when one can only grunt and smile. Don’t they go to school?”
“I don’t know. But I know nobody speaks any English out here. Only in town.” Seen up close, Gregory would seem, as he always did, to be made of some wholly different stuff than everything, everyone in the scruffy dooryard. He was so clean, so unblemished. His pores had never closed around this incessant floating layer of dust. His hands seemed impervious to dirt, doomed to stay clean even after Dvorele proudly thrust into them an egg, possibly leaking, and stuck all over with straw. His woolens did not chafe into wrinkles. His shoes were dulled, but it would only take a cloth to renew their gleam.
By now, her father would have returned with Zanvel and a wagonful of seed bags, and he would be so flustered at seeing her—who could ha
ve predicted it?—that he would give her a perfunctory greeting and quickly turn back to unload his cargo. She hoped he was so overcome with emotion that he could not let her see it, but his scowl was not promising.
She would go in search of Asher, futilely calling his name, and when she returns alone, she will strip Gregory to his shirtsleeves, collar undone, receiving the huge, shapeless sacks from her father, who counts aloud as he hands them off the wagon: “Finf. Zeks. Zibn.” She sees Gregory sling them over the shoulder of his striped shirt and carry them, straining, to the side of the barn, where he stacks them in a teetering pile. One sack slumps sideways to the ground and she watches him struggle to get a handhold on its shapeless girth. You are deeply good, my love. You are rich with effort. Now, who will be more impressed with your willingness, my family, or me, or your own sweet self?
The train had stopped at Sturgis. She opened her eyes to watch a family descend onto the platform, where they were greeted with embraces, the children swept up gaily by their grandparents. She closed her eyes again, to continue her dream, which she could do because she was not asleep.
WHEN, FINALLY, they sit down to supper, sadder than Mrs. Gottlieb’s worn and shabby rooms, what they will see is the cracked, unmatching china bought cheap, some delicate, from some downtown lady’s elegant dining room, some intended for farmers, thick as their workhorse, all of it crazed with use and permanently stained. She remembered bowls of whatever happened to be in season in the garden, which in some months was not quite sufficient, bolstered by bread, endless, boring, stomach-filling sourdough. “Dunk it,” their mothers had coaxed the children. “Take that gravy on it, you’ll like it. Here, push the bread around a little. You see?” They did dunk, but they could not make themselves like it.
But this was August and today the table would bloom—why not?—with squash and beans, vivid greens and the first young beets, with a few roasted chickens on the side, meager and still whole but golden and shiny as varnished wood. Colors would glow, textures make a carnival of contrasts—she could not remember such a bountiful spread, but why not create one? With luck and good weather, it could actually befall them.
Pesye, thrilled by his presence, would very likely put Gregory at the head of the table. “Shah, shah!” she’d scold, waving her hand at him when he protested, as if he were a disobedient child. The men would applaud. Chaya tried to suppress her cynicism about such large gestures of generosity from someone she knew to be small and suspicious. Would Pesye see in Gregory a benefactor for the farm, or merely—merely!—a handsome, gracious, mysterious suitor for one of their own, their prodigal returned with a glamorous catch? For all her pious chauvinism, perhaps not only a gentleman but a goy? Pesye’s eyes would still and forever be tiny as raisins in her doughy face. When she smiled they disappeared entirely, and she would smile more this day than Chaya remembered having seen in her lifetime.
But their English would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Always, the men managed better than the women because they were the ones abroad in the world, bartering, negotiating, selling what they did not keep. Through their attempted questions Gregory would nod and maintain a not-quite-convincing expression of interest and concern. When Zanvel arrived at the necessary moment, and asked him, “What is your line of work? What you are doing for a living?” he would take a long contemplative swallow of water. (Their water was gorgeous, Chaya had to admit: clean well water unlike anything the city could provide.) She waited, apprehensive.
“I am—writing a book.” He would say this like a slightly guilty boy, uncertain whether he should be proud or ashamed. (Or was this only her skepticism at work?)
“A book! Like Tolstoy!” Chaya pictured her mother transfixed behind him, where she was dishing out a stew of summer squash and early turnips, smooth and sharp-smelling.
“Not—exactly.” Modestly. “I am trying—”
Oh dear. The color would pour upward from his collar to his hairline. His jacket was hanging on the back of his chair, a swathe of subtle, winy browns.
“I am trying to write about—how unfair it is that workers are so—” She, if asked, would say abused. “Oppressed.” That was a word they would recognize.
That was the word, in fact, or rather the idea, that would finally bring Father to respectful attention. He’d have been slouched, looking darkly at the two of them. He would have asked no questions, volunteered no answers, would only seem, whether jealously or simply disapprovingly, to be measuring the distance between the child he had loved and the woman who had returned a stranger.
Since she was painting the picture, she could, by force of her own need, happen to be turned to her father in his chair near the end of the table when Gregory lay the words labor and oppressed side by side in the same sentence, to see his expression relax like someone putting a painful burden down, like Gregory unscrewing his face as he lowered those heavy feed sacks to the grass. It was Gregory’s vocation—futile, she thought, another well-intentioned folly, all right, but pure in intention—that would impress Avrahm Shaderowsky, socialist manqué. He would not wink at Chaya, not being a winking man, but would widen his dark eyes a fraction as if to show her he had been light-struck—enlightened—and she would pause with her spoon halfway to her mouth. They’d have finished the squash and turnips and be on to a lovely custard, spun of the two things they always had in plenty, courtesy of the renegade chickens and the hard-working cows, and she would widen her eyes back at him, surprised, relieved. Content.
She had seen it and so—dear Lord, please, please!—so let it be.
IT WOULD not be easy to estimate the morale of the community, and to judge by the condition of the buildings, how the farmers—that still seemed an absurd word for them—were faring. Little would appear to have changed. Even though the garden was yielding and there might be a bit of stringy meat at the table, it was a good guess that they would not have become comfortable, let alone prosperous.
Shimmie, that terrible fate she had blessedly escaped, had probably stayed; had (wouldn’t this be logical?) set his colorless eyes on the next girl down the line, and wed her. Gittl would run forward to embrace Chaya when first she arrived, but her stomach, round as an apronful of tomatoes, would prevent her from coming very close. Shimmie, hairline already in retreat, leaving frail wisps which made him more ghostly still, would be one of those men who shadowed his wife, either because he was too smitten to leave her side or because he saw her pregnancy as a perilous state that rendered her helpless. She imagined herself behind one of those thin wooden walls in the tiny room they’d have been assigned. They would not have built the houses they had dreamed of. There would only be space for the baby-making bed and a trunk, perhaps, to hold what few valuables they owned between them, and a quilt or a featherbed for winter. The devout couples had the larger rooms, to accommodate two beds to make tolerable the weeks of the month when husband and wife were to stay separate.
She could not avoid the image of Shimmie’s head beside her on the pillow, and worse, his head the least of it. This was worth a sigh of relief: She replaced him with Gregory stretched, tan and taut, across his beautiful bed with its ornate headboard carved like a bower (another incongruous detail in his poor-man’s rooms), saw all the marvels of his body through which he patiently guided her, so perfect, so complex, so assertive, annihilating the guilt she should have felt for being there with him.
But enough. Good luck to her old friend Gittl (if Gittl it was) who whispered, blushing, that she thought she might be carrying twins. It was unseemly for Chaya to imagine how they had come to be, twined around each other in that thrusting globe of a stomach. Beside him on the scratchy plush train seat, she searched for Gregory’s hand, and the bone-strength of his fingers, squeezing hers, stirred her quite ignobly as if, right there on the Chicago and Northwestern, he had cradled her breast in his warm palm.
THE HACKMAN let them down in the grassless dooryard between the barn and the Commons and drove away. Chaya turned slowly, facing the buildings, fa
cing the garden, facing the rumpled road they had arrived on, waiting for the children she had called forth in her dream. She heard no voices. No horse, old or new, grazed beyond the fence. No chickens scuffled the ground between the weeds and flapped their feathers with the sound of a shuffled deck of cards.
A long silence. And longer still.
“Chai?” Asher asked finally, very quietly. He slipped his hand into hers. Gregory was standing, hands on his hips, lips slightly parted.
There was such an air of absence, of removal, that it felt the way it had once when a tornado passed only a few miles away: an airlessness that made it hard to breathe. It was not simply silence, as though they were occupied elsewhere. It was a hollowed-out stillness, an emptiness that still held the shape of what had vanished. Pale grass, thick unmoving grass, lay across the yard as if it had always grown there, clotted. Where there had been one, there was no path.
The Lake on Fire Page 22
