The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  Asher looked them over with care. “Did I ever meet up with any of you at City Hall last winter?” Had he ever put anything valuable in their hands and waved away a thank you?

  “Ah, last winter we was busy down here. Coldest bastard winter in the history of man—woops, there I go again. What a mouth on me!—but we had work. Remember the Barracks? You could get warm in there. Three squares, too.” Donlan wasn’t as looming as he looked at first. His shoulders leaned in; he stooped around himself like someone protecting his chest and middle. He might have been keeping warm. His skin was ruddy with the wind, and the tip of his nose was wet. Everyone’s was, dripping, icing their mustaches.

  MOST OF the men Asher met came from some other place—Chicago meant work—and now they were like dogs that had found a place without too many fleas to lie down in, and didn’t think it was worth leaving for uncertain destinations. When they spoke about their families they got a soft, unfocused look in their eye that was different from their ordinary stony one, or the one that flamed with fury.

  Didn’t they know that the children they were describing no longer looked like the ones they remembered? They’d have grown out of who they used to be, just the way Asher had. What if some were sick, or worse? If somebody died back in Wisconsin or Indiana or Pennsylvania—a few somebodies—like his own brother Beryle, how would they hear the news? The Wooded Isle or the snowy lawn beside the Electricity Building was no address. Donlan talked about his boy, Joe V., who could do anything with his hands, making things, fixing things. “He’s a little genius, he is.” He forced a small sound through his teeth, a cross between hopelessness and impatience. His face, when he spoke of his son, was lit with pleasure and doused with a dark suspicion, all at the same time. Asher tried to imagine his own father talking about him somewhere, his genius son who could do nothing with his hands but everything with his head. Who would he be telling that to? And where would that be?

  “I can’t go home to him, though,” Donlan was saying. “If I ain’t got work, why should I be another hungry mouth? Last I heard they was at her folks in Ohio and the whole lot was half starved.”

  “Joe V. too?”

  Donlan threw a rock into the distance, nothing to hit. “Him too.” He winced at something sharp. “Horses out there keep on dying, nothing in the feed bag, you notice that? Men all along the highway, stone cold, not a thing in their feed bag neither. I seen one of them. A couple.” He did not look at Asher when he said this.

  A man named Waldo, who had a wooden leg like a pirate in a book he loved called Peg-Leg, said, “I helped burn up one of them. Ground was too hard to bury him, we drug him off the road and made a pyre and we lit a match and wished him a quick ride to heaven.” He wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. The cold was making it bleed; he held his nostrils together with his dirty fingers. Waldo was the same one who told Asher how to cook horse meat and not think about where it came from. “Anyways,” he reassured them, “the old boy’s dead already, so he don’t know. It wasn’t disrespectful.”

  “But the man at the side of the road that you burned up—you wouldn’t eat him.”

  Waldo shook his head, insulted. “Don’t you know the difference between a horse and a man? We ain’t cannibals yet, boy.” He sniffed. “I’d rather eat tree bark.”

  Another man, Marco, who always seemed to be shouting, instructed him in the best way to rob gardens when the time was ripe. Asher wished he could tell him he knew more about robbery than anyone here had ever dreamed of, but he zipped his mouth like a purse and was proud of his control. Bakitis, who wore a tattered scarf that he told Asher was a shred of the Greek flag, muttered something about blood. They seethed and teemed, sat, stood, paced, all the time planning—imagining without plans—vengeance. Fire, mostly. That was the easiest to accomplish and the most satisfying to think of, eating up profits, worrying the vultures at the insurance companies. Maybe even gorging on the bastards who were starving them. “That fire before, in ’71, that wasn’t nothing compared to what we could do if we picked our targets.”

  “We could burn out Pullman,” Marco yelled, no secret. “How come nobody’s gone down there and done that? That hotel he named for that fat daughter of his? Flash—shoosh! There goes Florence!” He rubbed his hands together, warming them on the thought.

  Donlan sneered. “They got guards, Mac. You don’t just traipse in and set fire to the draperies and walk away.”

  “Why the hell not? You got matches, ain’t you?”

  “Because they’re expecting you is why. You think they can’t figure out the likes of you? You want to go to jail, that sounds like a good plan. Least that would keep you warm.”

  Asher listened, heard desperation, asked himself what good his books or all that back-and-forth debating on Division Street could do a hungry man whose children were withering out of his sight. Or in it. His hunger at Mrs. Gottlieb’s was never this bad. He had a roof. He had a table piled with his booty: Shakespeare, Sophocles. George Herbert and John Donne who said, “No man is an island.” Revolution you could close between covers.

  Unseen. Invisible. Lost. They were lost, the Shadows. Abandoned. No, not both of them. Chaya, traitor that she was, seemed to be found. Mrs. Ceil Stillman behind her door with her whistling fool.

  He stared into the fire they had made. Hemmed into a narrow space, it shot above the rim of the metal refuse can. Refuse. Re-fuse. Why was it called that? It held all the things people refused? Nothing but flame now, hot sparks rising into the snow-gray air. It wouldn’t do enough good to find objects the men could pawn. What besides jewelry could he deliver into their hands that would help them when what they really wanted was work? Robin Hood was failing at his undoable duty.

  But it was all he could think of. “I could go to some—” He didn’t want to say parties to these men, it felt immoral. “I know some places I could go and get some—” This was not something to discuss. His old booty bag had hung too long on his bedpost; it was time to fill it. He was surprised that more of them had not become thieves. “I steal from them.” He tried to sound ordinary, not too proud. No preening.

  “That’s good,” Donlan said, “but it don’t change nothing.”

  Asher blushed, feeling small, as if copping jewelry was for children.

  “You’re up against big-time thieves, Jehoshaphat, not hot little hands.” The city’s elected officials were clean-hands robbers, Donlan muttered, they never had to touch a single object that cast a shadow. They signed papers, they shook hands, they talked about the price of wheat and silver, about international trade and something called tariffs and they let neighborhood bosses alone. There was such a thing as an alderman—Asher puzzled: an alder was a tree—and that’s who let the garbage rise and the houses fall and all they showed to their districts was their lard-fat naked rear. None of it seemed real to him but apparently a lot of money changed hands without actually filling anyone’s palm with weight or heft. It was exactly what Asher heard at his meetings, the one thing all the Ists agreed on: The bastards did it legal. Donlan rubbed his hands together to work up some warm. “Saloon we go to when we got a couple a coins? They get shook down all the time, no escape if they want to keep their business.” Victims hung by their heels, being bounced until coins fell out of their pockets—Asher imagined it—and men in uniform doing the shaking.

  “What if—” He was thinking fast. Not even thinking. Feeling welled up in him, a heavy wave. “Batter my heart,” he had read and his heart was battered now. “What if I could get some jobs—a dozen, maybe—at a factory I know. Could you do—just heavy work, like you did here?”

  Donlan widened his eyes. “You know somebody—”

  “I think I do. I do. But he’s a hard”—he tried it—“bastard.” The word made him feel taller. “But maybe I can shame him into doing a decent thing one time. He’s sort of in my family.”

  Marco called out, “Why the hell not, kid. You got a little opening, drive a ramrod right through it.” Whatever a ram
rod was.

  33

  GREGORY’S SISTER Lallie sent a note to Chaya inviting her on a shopping expedition. This form of indoors hunting and gathering, it appeared, was an approved profession for a young woman of marriageable age who had not yet bowed her head beneath the yoke of housekeeping or—this would without a doubt be her sister-in-law’s future—of keeping her own servants. Servants, Lallie had informed her, were as demanding of attention as any other occupation and for this pleasure one earned nothing but, rather, paid, and dearly.

  Chaya, between Greek tragedies, had been reading what she could find in Gregory’s small library about socialism, and thinking gravely about her father and his blighted ideals. Where, in what slum of what city, was his spirit being ground down at this moment? Marshall Field’s block-square emporium seemed too much an altar to covetousness for her to want to worship at it, but she so much hoped to cultivate her new family that she agreed to come. If they were to be rudely “cut off” by Gregory’s father—an expression as violent as its intention—he had not made his threat real and so she had not been enjoined to exercise economy. Rather, Gregory was pleased that she was to spend the afternoon with his sister.

  Lallie, in any event, seemed, like a bubble, to float above sullying earthly concerns like the reorganization of capital or the desirability of the single tax. Her cheeks that seemed to stay perpetually pink, she had an endearing way of capturing her bottom lip with her top in mock embarrassment as if she were always doing things she hadn’t intended. Today’s invitation demonstrated her generosity: By including Chaya in her concentration on the niceties of personal decoration, she was granting her an honorary normalcy. Possibly Lallie hardly noticed the differences between them. Having dreamed, as a girl, of a wardrobe dense with ball gowns, Chaya thought those should have been her preoccupations but as Chaya-turned-Ceil, she had bought only enough new dresses and appurtenances to be appropriate to most occasions. She spent her vanity on little that was visible; she only wished not to stand out as inadequate or, worse, superior by refusing to engage. Still, she sensed that it was politic to allow herself to seem Gregory’s sister’s playmate.

  And so, prepared for her favorite sport, Lallie laid out the itinerary this day: new shoes of a kind—buckled like those of the Puritans—she had seen on a friend’s feet (though she fretted proudly that her own shoe size was so small there might be no such shoe to fit her), and perhaps a silk dressing gown to take with her on a weekend excursion to the Michigan home of a distant cousin (though this was not the season for silk). But practical things irritated her, and surely flannel would not make for an uplifting mood. She had in mind something in robin’s-egg blue. “Is there nothing you are in need of?” she demanded lightly of Chaya. The possibility seemed incomprehensible. “If it isn’t too impertinent to ask, are you assured that you have nightclothes elegant enough to make an enticing entrance when you—ah—” She sucked in that lip to suggest the naughtiness of the question—“retire?”

  Chaya could only smile at this implication, remembering Lallie’s brother’s short sojourn on Madison Street in those pathetic rooms furnished with Maxwell Street cast-offs. Were she to appear at their bedside in the sort of frippery favored by Lallie, all whipped-cream lace, loosely tied ribbons and exotic rippling color, his ardor would cool quicker than she could wink (if she were, like Lallie, a winker). For Gregory, flannel would do.

  The sisters-in-law debarked from their hack directly in front of Field’s, which commanded an entire square block, and entered its brightly lit aisles. Lallie could not know why Chaya stood still, breath held, face red, when she confronted a salesgirl leaning across her counter. Comfortably plump and girdled, the young woman had a defiant pompadour that rose from her forehead like a dark cliff, and a smile falsely ingratiating.

  Breath released, Chaya allowed herself the deep satisfaction, then, of someone who has crossed a divide. She had changed the balance, clad as she now was in her lovely nubbled blue woolen coat, its soft fur collar dyed to match, and her feather-heavy hat. How sad, how superficial, that they bought her the respect she had so painfully failed to elicit when she came a beggar for employment. Little do you know, she wished she could say to the salesgirl, that I am the poor woman for whom you had, and proudly showed, contempt, turning up your pert nose and gesturing me to spare you a sight so crude. You were one generation ahead of me, that was all.

  She would not allow herself to gloat but she saw it for what it was, another masquerade, the willing capitalist “consumer” at play. Humbled, embarrassed, she held her tongue and obliged her sister-in-law by acquiring two shirtwaists as giddy with lace as an antimacassar on an armchair, a dressing gown whose watery colors changed as she moved, and—to indulge Lallie’s lascivious fantasies that Chaya was certain concerned her own future romance more than Chaya and her brother’s—a very minimal black gown suspended from straps frail as spider web, in which to sleep or—they shared a knowing giggle—defer sleep. She handed over its price vowing never to wear it, as if that would absolve her.

  Lallie was not satisfied with the shoes on display, which she deemed too practical, fit only for a housewife, so onward they were to forge, to the Boston Store. They hailed a hack directly in front of Field’s and had just begun their trip when they heard a commotion a few blocks north on State Street. A dark shape was approaching with what seemed the inevitability of an ocean wave. It was wider than the street, and before it all traffic, all pedestrian movement, fled to the clotted sidewalk. With an oath from the driver, their carriage pressed itself against the curbstone.

  “Oh, the strikers!” Lallie whispered, as if the word were too shameful to say full voice. “Or, I should say, the men without employment. I suppose they aren’t strikers if they have no work to stay away from! What do they expect we can do for them?” She looked mildly exasperated. Chaya stared at the mass as it came closer, straining after their words. It was difficult to make out what the men were chanting, but the very size and solidity of the march were astounding. It was a black cloud that rolled across the day, obliterating all else for her. Police on their glowing, monumental horses walked behind and beside them, as threatening as the marchers themselves, over whom they towered. The way they flanked the chanting men they seemed to be shutting a door on them, separating them from their spectators, containing their force with a larger force barely contained. The legs of their mounts moved like pistons. The horses, like their riders, were nervous, primed for action.

  Chaya stood shamefaced before them, the large bills Gregory had put in her hand this morning burning in her purse with an unholy light. The men carried signs that said FOOD! They said WE WANT WORK! They had not striven to be clever. Fists thrust upward, they thronged forward earnestly, though not in step. Someone carried a flag. No one smiled.

  “Come, Chaya,” Lallie prodded. “Watching them is no help to anyone, it is only meant to depress us. We have work to do, too.” She pushed open the door and they were taken into the buttered golden light, from which they would emerge in a few hours scented, themselves, with an inescapable fragrance that marked them as surely as the men and the horses were marked with their respective odors. She had never in her life felt so shamed, and more so for her silence.

  Home, what she would remember of her day with Lallie was the dark shadow of the buildings through which the men had marched. Joe Slivka, a worn and battered neighbor of Mrs. Gottlieb’s, had told her, once, how cattle poured through the chute at the stockyards where he worked up to his ankles in blood. Noisy and ragged they went, shoulder to haunch, on their way to death. And here were ranks and ranks of two-footed cattle, feeling, thinking—organized, brave and hopeful, really, not willing to be cattle—but just as doomed. Who owned the buildings they marched between? Who owned the mayor? The Stock Exchange that had failed? The banks that foreclosed on debts without mercy? Who owned the Nineteenth Ward, her Ward, where it seemed as difficult to remove the garbage as it was to stop the wind over the lake? Whatever their names, she kn
ew she had stood at the Stillmans’ table between their corseted, silk-clad wives, hesitating between a lemon tart and a napoleon.

  What was the good of it, finally, this sitting in a warm and friendly room speaking of Oedipus and Othello, whose troubles seemed quaint beside the stench and contagion that pressed against their walls? Speaking of their pain was not easy, those two self-blinded old men, but yet it was not difficult enough. Conscience was a throbbing nerve; Miss Addams suffered it but would not yield. When Chaya plucked at it like the string of a mandolin—Mrs. Gottlieb’s Nachman had left his instrument, which Asher had loved to finger—a deep note emerged, vibrating a music that felt red to her, dark red, the color of Joe Slivka’s blood-sodden boots. Marrying Gregory had assuaged nothing.

  One of the inhabitants of Hull-House, who had been away but had just reappeared, was a woman named Florence Kelley. They sometimes referred to her as Mrs. Wischnewetsky, a name that apparently attached to a regrettable marital lapse she had recently overcome, with the encumbrance of three of Wischnewetsky’s children as a reminder. The three young ones, two boys and a girl, though they were neither obstreperous nor disrespectful, could not live with their mother at Hull-House, where some lines of prohibition, though not many, were drawn; instead, they boarded in one of the green suburbs. They visited their mother often, but were not welcome to stay. By whatever cost-accounting system she used, their mother found their absence a necessary cost to pay in order to pursue her work.