The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  It was absolute as death.

  Gregory slipped his arm delicately around her waist. “Chaya?” He said her name softly as if he were waking her. “Do you have any idea—”

  For that he received only a look from her. Why does crisis make us stupid?

  She walked slowly forward, the way she would in a real dream, not in the fantasy she had so indulged on the train, elbow on the windowsill, leaning smiling against her hand. The Commons door was open wide; blowing leaves had scattered their way across the floor like fallen birds. No tables, no chairs. No woodstove. The crockery was gone, both thick and thin. Everything had vanished, and, except for the leaves that must have gotten in later, some good wife had swept one last time with punishing rigor. After her abandonment, Mrs. Gottlieb had sunk into her long sleep and Chaya could feel just such a torpor rising in her chest, softening her legs at the knee. There was no place to sit herself down, though, unless it was the floor. Nothing remained onto which she could sink, close to the ground like a mourner on a box sitting shiva, grieving.

  “What should I have expected?” Her husk of a voice. “Even if they had wanted to tell us—Asher—” She looked at both her boys. It was her fault, her pride. She had waited to bring them her perfect life. She had not thought of them enough, and when she did, it was without pity. “Even if they forgave us, how would they know where to find us?”

  “Were we hiding?” Asher asked, turning his eyes up to hers. His innocence was a punishment.

  She had to think about that. “No, not really. But the city—you know how it covers you up.” Snow in your tracks. Grass on your grave. When she left them, she was flying free, and because she could have flown back to the nest at any moment, she never doubted she could wait until she was ready. She had never thought escape could work both ways.

  But they had left not so much as a shred of paper, a stick stuck through a message, a map incised in the barn wall—not any hint at all, in case she came looking. Now she was an orphan.

  CHAYA WALKED off to the right of the long unplanted rows, through milkweed and spiny, tangled grasses, far out into the field. Asher ran beside her, quiet as an animal, and Gregory followed at a distance that betokened respect. The rusted gate of the little graveyard hung crooked, from one hinge. How could they have left their dead, few though they were? She had trouble moving the gate and when Gregory stepped forward to help, its single rusted hinge crumbled so that he was left holding it, its grillwork yellow-green with lichen.

  Her panic had subsided in the long walk from the barnyard, but it returned as she scanned the stones. Infant Sorele’s grave was overwhelmed with weeds and—“Oh!” Chaya breathed. Beside it, a newer one! On a flat, gray stone, hand-cut, her brother’s name——and the year of his death without a month or day. Last year. It was not possible. It could not be, her scampering, mischievous, chattering little brother beneath the soil. But the dirt was more freshly turned than it was on the old graves, she could see that. Ruined flower petals, orange and yellow, were faintly visible in the dirt (though the pious ones would never adorn a burial with anything live. It was one of the arguments between factions, but always the antagonists pulled back because no one would argue hard in the face of a fresh death). She sank to the ground and cried for her brother—next to her Asher, Beryle had been her favorite, the one with the most spirit and the sweetest mouth. Everything about him was slightly awry, from the cowlick that stood straight up like a cock’s comb to the space between his teeth to his big puppy feet that forever got in each other’s way. Could he have sickened or—more likely, given his temperament—might he have perished in an accident? He was the child who would leap from the highest rock, stay longest in the pond, dangle from the rafters in the barn. When would this have happened? told her nothing. How could she not have felt such a cataclysm a hundred miles away? And where, oh where, in their grief, had they gone? How could they have left him here, so alone?

  Now, rising, she saw that the single row of graves had multiplied. There was the beginning of a second row, two small anonymous stones, just large rocks from the field—for infants. And there—ah, no, another with no stone, but clearly a tamped-down, recently filled-in mound. Who? Who? She reviewed their faces, which were suddenly too dear to be borne; saw the shapes their bodies made, their vulnerable bodies. Her mother, her father might be here, too freshly dead to be marked, or so fragilely marked that their names had blown away or been seized by an animal. There were foxes in this field. There were deer, raccoons, every kind of life sweeping across the hill and through the graveyard, fence or no fence. She stared at the dirt, which gave no sign. Zanvel, Itzhak, Fraydl, Uri, Pesye, anyone at all.

  Gregory, supporting her on their way back to the road, could say nothing. None of this was his. Though it had been hers she had defaulted on it, and now, bankrupt, she was owed nothing. No explanation; not even a name.

  “Back in town,” he finally said, “people will know where they have gone.” But they had been such a lonely outpost, would anyone have known them well enough to have heard their plans? He could never understand how solitary they were. He could not begin to imagine their otherness.

  There was no carriage to take them back down. Asher offered to run ahead and find someone with a wagon. Chaya watched him calculating, that little catch in his eyes when he was looking inside his own limitless head. If he came upon a horse and carriage anywhere along the way, or a hay wagon, he would talk someone into bringing him up here with it. If there was no one in sight, she was sure he would simply annex it as his own and learn, quickly, how to curb the horse.

  But before she could restrain him in the tone she knew he hated, he was gone, jackrabbit raising a fog of dust. He would have a long way to go before he found a farm.

  Asher had not returned by the time they arrived on Christa’s Main Street, peppered with dirt, their feet burning with pain. He was leaning nonchalantly against the window of the newspaper office, having finished polling every shopkeeper and a friendly man at the post office window as well. “They told me where the school is. I went over there, too, but no one was there. Is that where I would have studied?”

  Chaya was nearly prostrate with thirst and exhaustion. “Yes, I suppose you would have, if we had stayed. You could have taught there, probably, as well as the teacher!”

  The stark thing Asher had learned was: Debts. What little the Fields of Zion had had they sold, months ago, at auction, but the debts had hardly been touched when the sun went down. They didn’t own that farm, as the man at the post office knew, so they could not sell it to recover as much as a dollar. And then—so many farms ended this way—they had simply disappeared. Possibly, the man at the livery stable said, they had not really snuck away. Only they kept so much to themselves, people never did see that much of them except when they came into town to market, where they had creditors but not friends. But they might not have run away at all, just cleared out, finished—that depended on how you looked at it. No one had any idea where they went, or if they stayed together or scattered. Such removals were not uncommon these days.

  Asher had left Doreen’s Mercantile for last, because Chaya might like to see it again. He sniffed around, trying to remember if it was, indeed, the place where he had discovered the convenience of gently removing and secreting what he wanted. The woman behind the counter must have assumed they were creditors. So that is how much I have changed, Chaya thought, numb. Was it her dress, her hat, her carriage? Two years in the city and she had become anonymous!

  The proprietress was wearing a blue taffeta with ornate black frogs sealing up the front, considerably too dressy for her situation, which advertised that she had airs and thought she deserved them. She leaned a bosom shaped like a goosedown pillow across her counter and said, chiefly to Gregory, “It would be like Jews to run away from the money they owed.”

  He widened his eyes, about to object, but she went on without pause and with considerable relish. Those people thought they were too good for the English
language. She had heard that they bred with each other, sisters and brothers, fathers and daughters. Many strange things happened up there, and then they had some diphtheria that probably came from a sick cow or something dirty they should have cleaned up, and some thought there was the chance they had passed it on in the milk they sold. Doreen, personally, was glad they were gone.

  Chaya took a moment to ask herself if she had heard correctly. “I am—I was—one of those people you have just insulted. Good people.” She said this with deadly calm, her face flooded with blood. Gregory laid a restraining hand on her arm, which she looked at as if it belonged to a stranger. “Your lies are stupid and dangerous.” Her mouth had filled, somehow, with sand. “If the others on this street have the kind of vile imagination you do, I can see how they would not have found friends to help them in their need.”

  Her words seemed to come from a stranger as well, she who had so hated the farm, who had so dismissed Christa as a place for victims of no ambition. But she could hardly see, now, through her rage, which became a veil that mottled everything, light and dark, before her.

  The woman in blue muttered something, not an apology, only the defense that she had not known to whom she was speaking. She took a large step backwards as if Chaya, wronged, might be dangerous. But Chaya was already stumbling over the threshold and out into the warm late afternoon which, as the sun began to pale, smelled wantonly of petunias. Such sweetness felt corrupt just then. She wanted to be alone, not to think but to wail. They could have gone anywhere—could even be in Chicago, for all anyone knew. Was it diphtheria that had killed Beryle and the others whose names were not recorded, that wretched choking disease that made children wish to die rather than suffocate?

  Was Gregory’s family, now, the only one she had? The questions were too exhausting. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  ASHER

  26

  THEY WERE on the train again. He listened to its clacking. Could you count the times they passed over a tie? Too, too many all the miles to Chicago—that would be like counting stars.

  Chaya woke up and took his hand and asked him what he remembered about Beryle.

  The farm was so distant—he thought of time as space. If he could see it, it was real. What Chaya remembered was invisible. And who. She was sad now because she let in too many old, done facts and they seemed to hurt her.

  “I don’t remember him at all. Or much else from then.”

  “Beryle was your brother,” she scolded. “Your little brother. How can you not feel—”

  “I can’t see him. Do you have a picture? What did he look like? I might recognize him.”

  His sister drew away from him, folding her skirts tight around her.

  “Everything is new,” he told her. “Everything real is right in front of me where I can touch it.”

  She sighed. “Asher, what do you see when you are reading? You love words so much, I think you love them more than you love people. What do they mean to you? You can’t touch them.”

  He had to think about that. He stared into his hand, at its folds and the lines that ran off in all directions. Today was so hot they were wet and shiny. Little rivers. “But they—they touch me. I like the way they feel in my mouth. They keep me busy. And they’re full of things that happen right where I can see them.”

  Chaya was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before.

  You can’t touch a lot of things, he thought. Music! Fire! He had learned a beautiful word the other day—what was he reading? Some poet whose name he’d forgotten. He had learned it just in time because that’s what they were: ineffable.

  “When I’m reading, they leap around in my mouth. The syllables.”

  “The syllables.” She was still not smiling. Did she know what a syllable was?

  “Just listen. It’s a part of a word. It makes a single sound. Sill-a-bull. That’s three syllables. When you say it, it feels so funny!” He could feel his tongue behind his teeth, alive, ready to move. His lips made shapes to contain what his voice wanted. But her face worried him.

  She sighed again. She was still too much of a sigher.

  He smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t it?”

  “CHAI,” HE said to her one morning before she left for work. “Would you do something for me?” He could see she was feeling the need to placate him—play and cater!—because he would not forgive her for Gregory.

  “Do what, darling?” She looked too eager; he knew she would do anything he asked.

  “Come to a meeting with me? Meet my men.”

  “Your men. You think of them as yours? I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I’d have to take an evening off work.”

  “Play sick. Tell him you’re contagious. What can he do to you? You’re about to quit.” You’re going to be a lady, he didn’t say. “Let Yanowitz find himself another slave.”

  She was thinking about it, eyes wide, trying to see what he meant. “Can I bring Gregory?”

  “No, you can’t bring Gregory! They would laugh him out of the room.” He would be shamed, bringing that fop (a new word, as harsh as it sounded.Fopppp).

  She did not look happy.

  “Are you afraid to do anything without him?”

  “I’ll see, Asher. I have to—”

  “Have to what? Do you need his permission?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I hardly recognize you these days, little brother, do you know that?” Tears balanced on her lashes but did not fall.

  “Do you know what ditto means? Ditto, ditto, big sister. The same to you.”

  She fisted her hands as if she might raise them against him. “I will not go anywhere Gregory is not welcome, Ash. I’m sorry. He is giving—trying to give—his life to our struggle and I do not intend to banish him because he—”

  She hesitated long enough for him to take courage. “He what? What is he giving? You can smell his money on him, he’s like an actor playing a part, he’s—”

  “Enough, Asher. That is more than enough.” She turned away from him to finish buttoning the shirt she wore for work and finally those tears brimmed over and streaked the face he used to think beautiful.

  27

  SHE COULD not talk about Gregory with Gregory. She could not ask Sara what she meant when she said she loved her Joe. Mrs. Gottlieb saw nothing but salvation by bank account. Miss Addams was brave and brilliant but she was not truly Chaya’s friend, her equal. Her family was missing and her brother thought her a traitor. Ungrateful, self-pitying girl, what had she done to herself? In her confusion, furious at everyone, she stabbed at a tobacco leaf that was resisting her, muttering, “Stupid thing, what is wrong with you!” and, sloppy, sliced her thumb so deeply she watched the blood pour over her little table like spilled wine. Pain for a reason, that was better. Pain that made her cry out and call for help. She watched the women rush to find what she needed and was comforted. They thought she was brave, letting them bind her up without a whimper but it felt good to look away from her invisible misery for a few minutes of sanctioned pity.

  That evening, because she could not go to Yanowitz’s with her hand bound like a paw, Gregory took her to the opera, where she sat surrounded by the people she was going to live beside forever. The women smelled of too much perfume; for some reason they wanted to be taken for roses. The men seemed to her hulked in their seats. Down the row, one of them snored gently until his wife gave him a vicious poke.

  She put her head back and stared like a child. The round cornice at the front of the hall was a glory; it was lush and golden and for once she did not resist it. Listening as she had never done, she could feel her breathing slow and deepen. No words, or at least no words she could understand: The story was called Il Trovatore. A war was raging somewhere but there was time for soaring tributes to love unlike any she could imagine; there was a mourning mother and a gypsy witch, a fire and a glowing anvil to beat upon, and a chorus of dancers both lovely and absurd, w
ho padded around on the wooden stage with an indoor sound that was nothing like feet on soil. The words flowed right over her, incomprehensible, but the music made her hold her breath. She drifted and drifted.

  So, Chaya thought—Miss Addams was right: There was a space so far from ordinary life it could not be compared to anything else. It was beyond translation. As he had when they stood at the side of the lake watching the sun’s reflection swelling and breaking, Gregory took her hand and held it, delighted at her delight. She was not sure she liked it that he derived so much pleasure from watching her discoveries, as if he were a parent and she a child. But was that any reason she should deny herself a lifetime of music? Was there any reason for anything? She had never been drunk but she was drunk there in her seat, wholly irresponsible, allowing herself, once again, to be at peace.

  THEN BACK to earth: Gregory’s mother asked for an audience with her. That was not what he called it when he told her, and Chaya was sure Mrs. Stillman did not think of it that way, but she felt summoned, with no possible escape. “She wants to know you a bit, my sweet,” he said to her as placatingly as he could manage, though he surely knew the request would make her quail. “You know she is as diffident as you are.” Chaya—surely to goad him with her helplessness—stiffened her back and said, “What does diffident mean?”

  He appraised her coolly. “You don’t have to know what it means to imagine how difficult this is for her. I simply think she is a little bit like you. She is not demonstrative, like Ned. Or negative. Nor is she indifferent, like my father. I’m certain she will be as terrified as you but you—” He sighed, deflated. “This will be good for both of you even if it feels like medicine going down. You are going to be friends for a long time, you know. You might as well begin now.”

  They met on neutral territory, at a restaurant on State Street, neither in his mother’s neighborhood nor Chaya’s. Faith Stillman came toward her smiling, color high on her pale cheeks, and, mouth dry, Chaya nodded and followed her to their seats. It was, of course, a Sunday, because Chaya had no time for such pleasantries on a workday; there were families all around, noisy and full of motion. The room was as big as a cow barn, high-ceilinged, and every voice seemed to echo.