Burning Girls

by Veronica Schanoes

  “I can’t imagine,” Ruthie said dryly, “why she wouldn’t have mentioned it to you.”

  “Such a man! A man to make small children scream and run away in the streets!”

  “He gives the children candy,” said Ruthie. “They like him.”

  “Yes, well, I imagine he gives Shayna candy as well.” I subsided. “But she will have some talking to do when she gets home tonight.“

  She did not come home until very late indeed, that night. She and Johnny Fein must have gone to a dance hall after the opera. I waited up and when Shayna came in, I launched into her. Ruthie tried to make herself not be there by curling up in a chair in the corner.

  “Girl! We did not come all the way to the New World so that you could get yourself killed by hanging on the arm of a shtarker like Johnny Fein! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Shayna gasped. “Witch!”

  I snorted. “You think I needed witchcraft? I saw you all right—I saw you at the opera house! You know, I looked for you to celebrate with us after work but you were already gone. I thought you were out with the girls—some girls!”

  “What do you care where I am?” she asked plaintively. “You’ve been happy without me, I could tell! I’ll do what I like!”

  “I guess I know now why you were really staying out so late!”

  “You know nothing about it!” Shayna yelled back, her shock and quailing gone. “Nothing! My Johnny is a hero! You should have seen how he was with that Cohen!”

  “So tell me. How was he? A brutal thug? Because that’s what he is at other times.”

  “Not a thug! You don’t know! You were over on the other side of the shop with that dirty atheist you call a friend–”

  “Ruth is sitting right here!” I shouted. “Don’t you dare call her names! If not for her advice I would have dragged you home the minute I saw you, and this is the thanks she gets!”

  “You be quiet and listen to me for once, Deborah!” Shayna dismissed my interruption. “There was that Matthew Cohen putting his hands all over me and calling me filthy names and nobody near who could help. But one day Johnny came in and told Cohen that was no way to treat a lady and offered me his arm to walk home. He’s been a perfect gentleman. You never noticed any of it from the first day to this, and now you want to tell me what to do?”

  I felt terrible. I had seen the way Matthew Cohen eyed Shayna, and I knew he thought he was such a big man—son of the owner and all, palling around with a brutal goniff like Johnny Fein. They both thought they were big men, real Americans, calling themselves “Johnny” and “Matthew” when everybody knew they had been born “Yakov” and “Moishe.” But I had not been paying enough attention to the danger Shayna was in. Even so, I was not going to let my guilt get in the way of a fight. “So Johnny Fein claims you and that turns him into a righteous man?” I said. “If you’re really this stupid you deserve to end up like the rest of his girls!”

  “What do you know about what I deserve? You’d rather see to every other woman in town than to me,” Shayna blasted back. “I’ve always come last for you! Your customers, Yeshua, Yetta, and now Ruth! You’re not Mama and if you weren’t so unnatural, you would see yourself how Johnny really is!” She gestured over at Ruthie, who was trying to make herself unseen. “And you have your friend,” Shayna said. “You leave me to mine.”

  “Unnatural?” I yelled back. “Fine! You won’t have the bother of my unnatural help ever again!”

  Shayna stormed out, slamming the door, and didn’t come home again until early the next morning. In general she stayed out later and later, and soon she didn’t come home nights at all. I barely saw her—just a glimpse in a crowd, really, at a dance hall, maybe. But she was still a tucker at Shlomo Cohen’s shop and that, I thought, should tell her something. If Johnny Fein really meant right by her, wouldn’t he have pulled her out of factory work by now and made an honest woman of her?

  “Your Johnny, the hero,” I said sharply to her one morning when she was still sleeping at home. “Why are you slaving over a sewing machine in that factory if he’s so righteous?”

  Shayna pressed her lips together and glared at me. “I like it there well enough,” she said. “I like the girls, the talking. And it’s good to make my own money. I suppose you’d miss it if I stopped paying my share of the rent!”

  “It’s not your own money that bought you that ring,” I told her, pointing at her finger wearing a golden ring with a real sapphire.

  She twisted the ring around and said, “Johnny says I shouldn’t talk to you so much, anyway. You don’t understand.” She walked out.

  Oh, but I understood. I understood, and I’d seen this sort of thing before. It started with opera and new hats and dance halls and sparklers on your wrists and fingers, but that wasn’t how it ended.

  Weeks later Shayna came home wearing a scarf around her head, shadowing her face. A scarf of the highest quality, no question, but a scarf nonetheless, like she was a greenhorn.

  I have sharp eyes, though. I can see through shadows and scarves, and I could see the bruises she was covering.

  “What’s happened to you?” I asked, as if it wasn’t obvious.

  “Nothing,” she muttered, drawing the scarf tighter around her head.

  “That’s not nothing,” I said, jabbing a finger at the shiner over her right eye.

  “So I slipped,” she said. “You know how clumsy I am.”

  I snorted. “I know how clumsy you were when we were girls, but even then you never wound up with bruises on your face. Let me help you.”

  “I don’t want your help!” she said harshly, and turned away from me.

  “You must wait, my love,” said Ruthie, which was pretty rich talk coming from the girl who counseled violent revolution. “She’ll come back to you eventually.”

  She did.

  I had a nice piece of meat made for dinner, and I had enough for three or even four, when Shayna came in, her eyes red from crying.

  “Shayna maedele,” I said. “Baby girl, what has happened to you?”

  She waved her hands vaguely and sat down at the table, her head bent.

  “I’ve done a terrible thing, big sister.”

  “Nothing so terrible that I cannot solve it,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to give her the tongue-lashing she deserved. Ruthie ran to the kitchen we shared with the other tenants to make some coffee, leaving us alone.

  “I am through with Johnny Fein! Through!”

  “Good,” I said. “But tell me what has happened to you.”

  “What has happened to me? Better you should ask what I have done!”

  “I’m asking,” I said, coming to the end of my patience. “I can help, but I must know the ill.”

  “You think I am crying tears?” Shayna said. “These are not tears streaming from my eyes! This my heart’s blood for what I have done!”

  “Stop squawking and tell me what is happening,” I said sharply, but Shayna only drew breath to wail again.

  Ruthie came in with the coffee and intervened in what were clearly going to become hysterics. “Tell us,” she said quietly.

  Shayna told us.

  “I have meant to talk to you for a long time,” she said, “for weeks, but I haven’t had the nerve. Johnny is a man with a temper like a demon, and he does not like to be crossed. Better that I should wait for him to tire of me than bring down his wrath on us.”

  “I can take care of us,” I interjected.

  Shayna smiled wanly. “I’m sure you believe so, but even you cannot turn aside a bullet. A few days ago, I was working in the shop, waiting for Johnny to come pick me up. But he came in late, and he came in with Matthew Cohen.”

  “They’d been out drinking and gambling that afternoon—I could tell—and Johnny told me that as I was a sporting girl I’d want to know about a bet they made. But I didn’t! I didn’t!” she sobbed.

  “But we want to know,” Ruthie said gently. “You can tell us.”

  I w
as not half so calm inside as Ruthie appeared to be.

  “Johnny had been bragging, how pretty I was and how nimble with my fingers, and he’d bet one of his friends that I could turn out a hundred shirtwaists a day for three days. Me, by myself! No piecework—just me!”

  “Nonsense,” I snorted. “Nobody can do that!” Ruthie put her hand on my arm. I think it was meant to calm me but I felt it as a warning as well.

  “I know!” wailed Shayna. “I told him I could not, but he told me I’d better, for he and Cohen had wagered more money on it than my life was worth.”

  Shayna’s fingers were twisting her fine shawl like a dusting rag.

  “I worked my fingers raw all day, but the pile of pieces got no lower. I knew I could never get everything done by midnight. Oh, Deborah, how my foot ached from the treadle and how my hands shook. It was worse than our first days in that little sweatshop on Delancey. My eyes stung and my fingers were dead at the tips. I never even stopped to eat, and then I stuck my finger with the needle twice and started bleeding on the cloth. I put my head down to cry.”

  “Poor child,” murmured Ruthie.

  Silly goose, I thought, but did not say. She should have come to me long ago.

  Shayna looked at Ruthie, not at me, as if she could read my mind, and went on. “After a few minutes, I picked myself up, ready to try again, when—such a sight, oh, God! Out of the pile of cloth next to me a terrible old woman came. She had long gray hair that hung in rattails and her nails curved out in claws. She was hunched over, covered in warts, and reeked like rotten meat in the sun. Her skirt was held up with a frayed rope and coming out from under it I could see the tip of a tail. Her eyes glittered like broken glass. Oh, I was terrified—my blood froze and I gasped for air!

  “But I remembered what you said, Deborah, about sometimes God’s host taking ugly forms to test us, so I did not show my horror.”

  “What I said?” I interrupted her tale. “That was no angel of God’s, that was a demon!”

  “I didn’t know!” wailed Shayna.

  “Be quiet,” said Ruthie to me.

  So Shayna resumed. Her breathing had become less ragged as she fell into the rhythm of the story. “‘Tut, tut, Shayna maedele,’ said the woman. ‘Why do you cry?’

  “So I told her my sorrows, and how soon the clock would reach midnight and how Johnny’s face would darken when he saw how little I was able to make, nowhere near a hundred, and how I didn’t know what he would do.

  “‘Dry up your tears,’ said the old woman. ‘I can sew up those pieces no problem, and all I need from you is your pretty ring.’

  “It was the ring Johnny bought for me, with the sapphire,” explained Shayna. “I love that ring; it made me feel like a movie star to walk down the street on Johnny’s arm with that ring on my hand, but I figured that a ring does no good to a corpse, so I took it off and gave it to the old woman.”

  Taking her out from under Johnny’s protection, such as it was, I thought to myself.

  Shayna was lost in memory. “Oh, you should have seen that old woman sew! Her hands and feet and tail were a blur. When she stopped, there was the pile of shirtwaists done and dusted, and she vanished into thin air just as Johnny and Matthew came in. They were thrilled to find that I’d won their stupid bet, and I thought that once they had sobered up the next morning, they would see what a foolish bet they’d made and that everything would go back to normal. But the next morning I came in to find a pile of cloth higher than my head. I worked my fingers raw and until my eyes were burning and bloodshot, but by eleven o’clock I had more than half the pile to go. I stood up to stretch out the cricks in my neck and back, and when I sat back down, I was face to face with the ugly little woman. Again, she asked what my trouble was, and again, I told her.

  “‘Don’t you worry about a thing, Shayna maedele! I can sew these pieces for you, no problem, and all I ask from you is that pretty locket around your neck.’”

  Again, “Shayna maedele,” I thought to myself. A familiar address, like the demon knew her—and then I realized it did.

  “But it was Bubbe’s locket!” continued Shayna. “I didn’t want to give it up, especially since Mama had given it to me, but what could I do? I figured that Bubbe wouldn’t begrudge me a finished task, and I took off the locket and gave it to the gray-haired woman.”

  Taking her out from under Bubbe’s protection, I thought. If this was the same lilit as the one that had plagued us in the Old Country, it didn’t want rings or lockets, not really. I went cold and ran my eyes over Shayna’s figure. She looked as trim as ever.

  “Again the old woman set to work, and when she was done, the entire stack of shirtwaists was sewn up perfectly. On the stroke of midnight, she vanished, and Johnny and Matthew stumbled in and I really thought that this time it would be enough for them, that surely they wouldn’t go through with a third night!

  “But the third night,” Shayna said, her hysterics rising again, “the third night, the old woman didn’t asked for my hat or my locket, but for my first-born baby! And what could I do but say yes, and now I’ve lost my first-born before I’ve even borne him!”

  How did it find us? I thought frantically. I knew it had been spying on us in Bialystok, or how could it have known to tell Bubbe that we were in danger, but how could it have followed us to this New World? Ruthie said America was free of those old fears, but she was wrong. “Are you carrying?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” Shayna cried. “I want free of Johnny and his wagers.” She buried her head in her hands and wailed.

  Oh, I felt that wail in the pit of my soul. To have failed not only Yeshua but Shayna as well! The one with my inattention and the other with my arrogance. “But a mistake is a mistake,” I said. “Maybe I’m not above making them as well. And I can help with yours.” After a minute I added, “I can take care of Johnny.” Ruthie put Shayna to bed, but I sat up a long time, planning how.

  The next day I went out and dug up some clay from the street. I came home, molded it into the shape of a man, and named it. I took the silver knife and slashed open the sides of the doll where Johnny Fein’s pockets would be.

  With his money no longer flowing, Johnny Fein’s body turned up in the river, a week later, broken and twisted.

  Matthew Cohen, I hardly had to do anything about. Without Johnny to cheat and threaten for him, he started losing his bets, and no one else would cover him. He lost his money, all his family’s money, inside of a month. A broken man, too, he was. He ended up in the back room of a saloon with a bullet in his head, so I guess he finally welshed on the wrong man.

  Shayna, well—she wasn’t the same, but after Johnny had been dead for a while she picked up her head again and smiled a little at the world around her. She had not been with child after all, so that was one less worry for us. Ruthie and I made enough money between us that she didn’t have to go back to work for a while. She started seeing a kind young man, Solomon, a quiet fellow, so steadfast and calm. He worked behind the counter at his family’s appetizing shop, which was how they met. They were a good match and before their first trip to the movies, Shayna brought him home to meet me and Ruthie. He was very respectful. Shayna began spending more and more time with him, but just as often as they went out, she would bring him over, and the four of us would have dinner. Sol even came to me when his younger sister came down with the croup. After some months, Sol and Shayna were married in very small ceremony, just Ruthie and me and Sol’s family. After a month or so, the four of us moved into a small apartment over his family’s shop, next door to his parents and aunt and uncle. Shayna had long since left Cohen’s shop, and now she worked with Sol’s family at his store.

  One day, she came to me with her face drawn and tight, just like when we were little and she was in trouble.

  “Sister, sister,” she said. “I’ve got news—a little one coming.” She made the sign to ward off the evil eye.

  “Mazel tov, Shayna,” I told her.

  “
For another, maybe,” she answered. “But what will happen to my baby? That lilit will come take it away. Or will it end up like our baby brother?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I told her. “This is America. I won’t let that creature take your baby away. Don’t worry yourself anymore. I burned that contract once and I can take care of things again.”

  I knew the demon wouldn’t take Shayna’s baby while it was in the womb, but I took every care anyway. Not a stick of furniture or a scrap of clothing for the baby would I let Sol bring into the house before it was born. He had to keep everything in the store. I made up amulets and cast charms of protection over her just like I had done for Yeshua back in the Old Country. When Shayna started to feel pain I put the silver knife in her hands and chalked a circle, wide enough for her to walk around in, around her bed. I chalked every charm of protection that I knew on the door. Sol, I sent him to shul to pray for her and recite psalms. He went. A good man, Sol. Good enough to know when to do as he was told.

  While Shayna labored and suffered, I did what our bubbe had taught me. First I recited the prescribed benedictions. Then I picked up a new pen, an unopened bottle of ink, and the koshered deerskin parchment from Bubbe’s box. I wrote out the finest amulet ever made for a newborn—no rebbe could do better. I used every symbol of protection I’d ever seen and some I made up. Shayna whispered to me the name she was going to give her baby girl—by now we both knew it was going to be a girl—and I wrote it into the most elaborate, complex, and powerful prayer of protection I could, invoking every angel and every name of God I knew or imagined.

  “Beauty isn’t enough,” Shayna said hoarsely, between contractions.

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

  “My daughter will be a fighter.”

  So in the amulet, I wrote for the protection of Yael, daughter of Shayna.

  When Shayna, sobbing as though her heart would break, had pushed Yael out, I rolled up the deerskin, slipped it into a deerskin bag, and hung the bag around the baby’s neck. I peered into little Yael’s eyes and already saw the fighter she was, anybody could see that, and a true Hebrew name is true power, everybody knows that. So when Shayna sat nursing her for the first time, gazing happily at her daughter, I sat on the edge of the bed and said to her, “We must call her by her true name only if nobody else is near. Otherwise call her Alte, the old one.”