The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  “But—”

  “But lucky there are easier things.” Easier sings, Dietrich said, which made Asher smile: Songs were the last things that would survive his vengeance. No one would be singing when he was done. “Nitroglycerin. Gun-cotton, this you have heard about? Fulminating mercury is not so easy to find.” He swept his eyes from Asher’s head to his scuffed boots as if he were weighing him. “For you we need foolproof. We need something it wouldn’t set you on fire, hmm?” He ran his fingers through the pale wilderness of his beard, considering. Amazing that nothing crawled out of it. “Yes, all right. This you can do, no danger. Herr Most would give his approval, A-1.”

  Asher was surprised—all it came to was a Mason jar stuffed with flannel (so easy to find) for a wick, and a nasty brew of kerosene and something rank, a white powder he could buy from a gardener whose name Dietrich wrote out for him. “Stinks,” Dietrich told him, “but who cares, you got a man’s work you got to do, is never pretty, am I right?”

  Just that, a phosphorous match and, unbottled, his fury. Now, could he throw hard enough with his thin, weak, untried arm? If he stood too close, he could be caught up in flame. Too far and he would make a pretty mess outside, under the window. His men might have helped, and happily, but he would not ask. This was his own to do.

  “Good luck, little man,” Dietrich said to him and patted him on his tailbone. “Remember, a good revolutionary stays quiet”—he put a gnarled finger to his lips—“even if all goes well. Taking credit will only help if you got an army behind you that can come in and sweep up the results, yah? And you don’t got an army.” He had never asked why Asher wanted to destroy a boiler works and Asher was relieved that he didn’t have to say.

  His fire, wild, flaring, had finally banked. His resolve was steady now, hot and glowing like ashes. Ashes, ashes, Asher! He had been named, he understood it now, just for this night. Once Chaya told him a story the pious ones on the farm believed: that we are born knowing everything (all of Torah, that was, because to them Torah was everything) but why could it not mean everything that would ever happen? An angel touches us just above the mouth, in that little runnel hollowed from nose to lip, and as we grow we forget it all. I must have known this once, he thought, walking fast through the night, before the Angel of Forgetfulness touched me. I am remembering that this had to be.

  HE WENT to see the factory (STILLMAN STEAM BOILER WORKS + BOILERS. STACKS, COOLERS, DRYERS, LARD TANKS AND PRESSES) on a cold, clear day; ran most of the way, across the river and far to the west. It was huge; long and wide and dark as a dead thing.

  Was it, he wondered, the protection of this building and the money he threshed out of it or something bigger, something more like spite or plain mean-heartedness that made men like Ned Stillman hate poor people so, and mock anyone who fought for them? Which came first? Among the Ists, the Capitalists were guilty of ruining lives, you could hardly be let in the door on Division if you didn’t believe that, but he wasn’t sure he understood why they wanted so much more than they needed, why they were devoted to piling up dollars and houses and jewels and . . . where did it end? Was it for the Good of Mankind, as they liked to say, what Ned Stillman insisted was Natural Law, or what that writer Darwin called the survival of the fittest? Did they deserve to survive? Would it matter if Ned Stillman perished with his factory? Once upon a time (so many stories he had loved began so) he’d have asked Chaya what she thought about this but now, now, she lived in the enemy’s camp. She had not meant to abandon him, he knew that, but here he was, disrespected, underestimated. Yah, Dietrich had said. Believe what you believe: Abandoned.

  The workers were gone, he saw no light inside, no stirrings outside, neither horses nor carriages. Silence. Full darkness. Distant, some kind of bass-voiced horn on the water, and once, so vague he might have imagined it, a rumbling train. The longer Asher stood listening, the deeper the feeling that he was alone and nothing lay before him but a huge lifeless assemblage of bricks and chimneys, spouts and windows, dozens and dozens of windows reflecting back nothing.

  Heart smashing against his ribs, he scraped at the edges of one of the windows carefully with the sharp edge of a rock that cut like a diamond. He didn’t want the glass falling noisily out. It gave quietly, obediently, cascading down in little bits like a waterfall. Shook the bottle, full to the brim with the vile concoction, knew it was bubbling, it hissed a little, but he couldn’t see the bubbles in the dark. Pulled out the cork, struck the match a few times till it flared, dropped in the small flame, waited till it caught, and pushed the plug back down, tight. His arm was so thin, so unmuscled he was ashamed. He stood tiptoe just outside, right in the pool of shattered glass. Drew in one long, stern, punishing breath, no regret, no forgiveness. Pulled his hand back, wrist cocked, and cast his rage as hard as ever he could into the unlit machine room.

  Fled, then. His back was to Stillman Steam Boiler Works when it hit but the huge orange light broke above him, throbbing. He heard the concussion—gorgeous!—and even felt its heat leap out like a slap of congratulation between his shoulder blades. He turned, finally, and the sight of the fire behind the windows was beyond words. He breathed that punishing breath out—done, Ned Stillman! Dietrich would be proud of him. He stayed crouched, letting his pulse slow. The dancing light was better than any show. It banked and flared, seemed to die down and then leaped up and out where there was no more window. When, finally, he rose and took off into the blackness toward the street, he heard a scuffling and saw jagged shadows coming toward him fast. He stumbled on the curb, scrambled up and got to his feet just as the arms of a policeman closed around him tight and held him, squirming, biting, kicking, shouting, caught.

  43

  SHE WAS preparing for bed when Gregory brought the news. She was standing before her mirror thinking that it reminded her, though it was far more elaborate, of the mirror that her mother kept above the single chest they owned in Zhitomir. Its curve was that of a pair of human shoulders, sloping but graceful. She was brushing her hair, slowly, slowly, up, out, down, while her mind wandered afield.

  Then, from the doorway, Gregory called out “Chaya, Chaya, come quickly. Your brother has done it this time!”

  “‘Done it’? Done what?”

  Her husband’s face was startlingly flushed.

  “Gregory?”

  “He’s set off something—a bomb, or some device—in my brother’s factory. He has maimed a guard, and possibly he’s killed the woman who was cleaning the rooms.” She had never seen Gregory at a loss for what to do with his hands. Now all he could do with them was pump them up and down like an agitated child.

  She wanted to sink to the floor, a helpless lady fluttering to the carpet in her soft white nightgown, but of course she could not. And there was the baby to protect, to clutch at, to shield. Very deliberately, to keep herself steady, she placed her hairbrush on the cluttered vanity. “What,” she asked in a measured way, “are you telling me?” The measure was a sign that she had gone numb. She had not taken a breath since he had called her name.

  “Pray she doesn’t die, for Asher’s sake,” Gregory said, not sympathetically but punitively. Had anyone ever uttered words so unnecessary? Instead of praying, she pictured Asher calling to her, shouting her name.

  OF COURSE she demanded to see him. Gregory told her to wait for an attorney to accompany her but she could not pace, doing nothing, while he searched (or planned to search, in the morning) for the perfect defender. While he was tending to all that, calmly making a list of potential saviors, she tried to sit still but when that became impossible, she dressed and slipped out of the house and, on foot, headed into the purple hour just as dawn was breaking. By the time she arrived at Harrison Street, the sun was full on the stone face of the stationhouse.

  In a room crowded with indifferent faces, men in uniform, men in vests and suits, a few of them confronted her, interrupted her, found she had gone thoroughly—conveniently—blank about the details of her brother’s life. Ther
e was whispering, papers were filled out, some were stamped, and she was suddenly being spoken to harshly.

  “You are his guardian.” A man with the eyebrow of a gray caterpillar said this as if he were informing her of something she didn’t know. She could see that his job was to provoke.

  “My brother—I am his guardian, yes.”

  “Your husband, Mr. Stillman?” The official looked skeptically at her, most likely surprised to see her here without him.

  She had to think for a moment; the marriage was still so new. It was difficult to imagine that she shared responsibility for Asher with her husband. “Yes, of course. Officially, yes. He is Asher’s guardian as well.” Guardian-in-law—there was no such thing but there should be.

  The man took in a large snorting breath as though what he was about to say cost him mightily. “I am afraid you are going to have to spend some time with us, Mrs. Stillman”—the us sounded hospitable, as though he were offering her a companionable stay in his own house—“while we determine your culpability in this matter.”

  “My culpability?” She stumbled on the word, which she had never had occasion to say. She could see a bailiff already on his way to her side, the official having smiled viciously at her and then, unsmiling, nodded to him to do his duty. He had arms that strained at his uniform and a neck like a granite pillar.

  “To judge whether you are guilty of neglect—he is a minor, after all—or of—” He turned that smile upon her again, unwarranted, sudden as a splash of chilling water. Each time she saw his teeth and then they vanished. His smile was wolfish. “Or of complicity in his crime.”

  “Those are my only alternatives?” She felt herself standing taller to receive this sentence as if it were a blow. Was he saying that she could she be held responsible for having shaped her brother’s conscience?

  He swept his eyes up the front of her and slowly down again, assessing her in her brazenness. Her pregnancy was only modestly visible, and just as well. As for her dress, she was used to feeling shame at its inadequacy; since her marriage, she wore fetching outfits that did not feel like her own. But the judgment he was making, she knew, had more to do with her husband’s possible power, and that of his family, than of her own comeliness. It was a complicated business: Whom would he most, whom least, offend by taking into custody a possible conspirator in a crime that affected two brothers, the husband of the accused and the proposed victim? The senior Stillmans’ neighbors on Prairie Avenue were the kind after whom streets were named.

  But he was accustomed to such conflicts—half the criminals in the city sent weepers and mourners to petition on their behalf and he was schooled to ignore them in honor of the wronged parties. “Those are the only two at this moment, yes, missus. I am glad you understand.”

  Would he apologize and remind Chaya, for civility’s sake, that he had no choice? He would not. He nodded to the bailiff, who took her arm roughly as though to demonstrate the inseparability of Law and Force. She should have listened to Gregory and not sneaked out before the sky had brightened and he had roused an advocate to defend her and her Asher. An attorney would never have allowed her to be seized and hurried out the door, and thrown—nearly thrown—inside a pen whose door clanked with the solidity of falling rock.

  He loved her for her willfulness, Gregory said. For her zeal. And he despised his brother for his stone-hard heart. But truly, when he comprehended what Asher had done, and when he heard the hidden facts of Asher’s life and all she knew of it, acts of piracy he could never imagine, he and his comfortable history, he would never forgive her. She had hoped that, having once loved her, Gregory might have maintained a modicum of human concern for the two of them. The more hours that passed, the more naïve she felt. As if she were a fish too small or unattractive to keep, her good, honest, timid Gregory, irreparably a scion of his family, would surely throw her back.

  THE CELL’S stench rivaled that of the stockyards. Was it blood? Was it rotting meat? Was it, more likely, simply too many creatures corralled in a small space, breathing out hopelessness and venom? Their cologne had turned rancid; someone had vomited where the wall met the floor and made an orange cesspool with bubbles like fish eyes on its surface. The noise—chattering, laughter, and a barbaric shrieking probably intended to drive them all mad—was insupportable. Which was, she realized, the very point. Lockup was not a spa. They were, perhaps a dozen of them, held in a single pen.

  She swore to herself that she would not be hardened by her encounters with these hard women, that whatever sensitivities she had cultivated with effort would not be worn away by the incivility that surrounded her. Anyway, she had had her vision cleared by her work for Mrs. K-W—she was no virgin. Her cellmates, she imagined, were mostly prostitutes and thieves, and women who had betrayed a trust sufficient to register with the Law, and so she was sympathetic toward most: They were far more needy than she. But it was strange—because she was clean? Because she arrived well-dressed? Or because gossip and the intrusions of news reporters so quickly twigged to her arrival?—it was clear the women saw her as one of them rather than one of us and muttered at her and kept their distance. It would be far too complicated to instruct them that until quite recently her life had been as bare and pitiful as theirs, her fingernails just as caked with grime.

  Chaya stood alone, facing the chipped brick of the wall, and worried about her brother, a child among felons. The men’s cells were in the basement, stony, stinking, roiled by shouts of protest, threats of vengeance more potent than those of the women—so she would hear in good time. “Pigged together like herrings in a barrel,” one of her cellmates said to no one in particular, bitterly grinning. Here in Chicago, and probably elsewhere, they had no special accommodations for boys—this was worth agitating for; the sort of thing at which Miss Jane Addams and her friends excelled—but at the moment only the discretion of the policeman who brought in a child, and then the judge or jury who would sentence him, could separate him from the foulest murderer in the cellblock. They did not care about his age, his motives, or his susceptibility to influence.

  Still, she would plead, Asher had a prodigious mind, even an unnatural one. His mental capacity—his intellectual accomplishments—should not be held against him; he was helpless in their grip. Prodigy or not, his crime might make it appear the boy possessed no moral sense of his own, as if it were his single missing part—but she knew that in Asher’s case “morality” would need defining. If he was a thief of extravagant daring, she planned to argue, he was a thief for the public good, never for his own advantage! He had preyed on property but property was not alive, like starving men. It could not be betrayed.

  But his life of petty thievery, she knew, she would never be sufficiently eloquent to explain if it ever came to light. As for the violence, she suspected that Gregory and his family would assume he was executing what he had learned at her knee. If he had come under pressure from the men whose meetings he had so zealously been attending, who would be held responsible? Her own commitments, of course, were under suspicion by Asher these days, but that was far too subtle to be spoken of. He was a sparrow and they would think him a predator: a hawk, an eagle. Was he an anarchist or just an angry boy?

  She pleaded to be allowed to see him, needed to hear him tell her how he had come to this. But, “Female inmates do not fraternize across that line, with our males,” she was told by the red-faced matron, twice her height and weight, who spoke to her like someone pinching her softest flesh between her fingers. “That line” was a different floor or two, but no matter.

  “Male! I’m speaking of my brother. And he’s a boy—a baby!” She could not bear to imagine what he was feeling, abandoned to a cellblock replete with—she had not the strength to imagine.

  “No baby gets in here,” the matron told her with great certainty, a nurse playing doctor. “They’re pimps and gangsters. Bur-ga-lers. Tramps. Your brother’s a felon, darlin’!” She leaned up against Chaya and dropped poison in her ear. “And felons
hang.”

  Chaya was not a fainting woman, but she made herself swoon, as slowly and gently as she could so as not to jar her child. She heard the other inmates’ voices rise around her like a gust of wind or a covey of birds scared up from a bush. When she fainted, she withdrew from their company. It was dark where she went; it was silent. Finally, gratefully, she was alone.

  THIS WAS not prison—it was jail, a short-time lockup, which is a sort of door that swings both ways. Mrs. K-W and Miss Addams, whose habit was reflection, not condemnation, might help her to understand in some orderly fashion what she was seeing. But Chaya could not discern on her own a system of oppression where all she understood was that—noisy, grabby, stepping on each other’s heels and setting up yowls at the offense—they frightened her. Had she applied her mentors’ methods, she could have seen that so many were here only as a rebuke and an inconvenience, based on the unsuccessful estimate that, say, a lady of ill repute would exchange her profession with that of a placid wife at home in her kitchen if only she were harassed a few times more often than her patience could bear. “I’m tired of spendin’ every damn weekend in this hole,” one woman complained, “like it’s gonna make me a saint! I seen that bailiff out on Wabash the other day, window-shoppin’ the girls like the rest of ’em.”

  They were not all coarse: A few, who dallied with the city’s most august figures at top-notch houses like Miss Carrie Watson’s, were accustomed to oysters and champagne, and wore—like Chaya—beautiful clothes they did not have to pay for. Who knows whom they had to have offended to have lost their protection and ended up in this place? When she spoke about the women who’d been lured to the cribs in the Levee, Mrs. K-W insisted on sympathy: These women lived by a hierarchy as rigid as the military’s, or that of the constabulary that watched over them. The girls who worked the street, she said, victims of bad weather and anonymous customers, were the drones; the expensive ladies who walked on thick carpet and took their time with their regular “visitors” were the queen bees. Even behind bars, and spitting mad to be here, you could hardly tell them from society wives.