Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

  This house was not in the plantation style, it was a plantation. Miriam had never seen one but she knew. She turned to Dora, who would not look at her—and Miriam understood why. A herd of cows could live back here. She squeezed her eyes shut—she saw her Tsvi and for one terrible instant longed for the day when she would meet him in death.

  Shmuel helped her down. He and his wife and his brother and his wife and all their children ran joyfully onto the property. The children slid along the railing of the porch. The men stood on the curb with a proprietary air and exchanged a few words. The women, their skirts hemmed above their ankles, paused in the shade to admire the azalea bushes, which were at the height of their beauty, loaded with pink and white blooms. Miriam stood in a patch of dirt. She walked over to the front steps and sat, facing the street, where she could not see the yard. A horse-drawn carriage passed, then another, and the moss bearding the oaks on either side of the street swayed in the breeze.

  “Let’s all go see the yard and then we can go inside,” Shmuel called out, and Moishe seconded this, as was his way. “Come on, Ma,” Shmuel said and Miriam indicated they should go on ahead.

  “You don’t want to see the yard?” Shmuel asked.

  Miriam shook her head.

  “All right, don’t see it.” Shmuel sat down alongside her. Moishe caught his brother’s eye and Shmuel said, “Go on, we’ll catch up.”

  And so here they were, mother and son, Jews, sitting on the steps of a plantation house. Somewhere. She had not left a trail of breadcrumbs; if they left her here alone, she would never be able to find her way back home.

  “It’s a beautiful house, isn’t it?” he tried.

  She shrugged.

  He stopped trying. “I thought you’d be proud of me.”

  And she was, of course she was.

  “You don’t really think we’re going to bring a cow out here, do you?”

  He seemed to have made up his mind.

  “I don’t know what you want that cow for anyway.” He scratched one side of his head and then the other—a nervous habit. “How many customers do you have left anyway, two? People have milk delivered from the dairy now, a milkman in a cap, not a lady with a cow. It’s 1927, Ma, not the Dark Ages.” He leaned backward and gestured to the magnificence of the house. “Does this look like you need to work like a peasant woman?”

  Goodbye to the cow—he had made this point again and again. Who was he trying to convince?

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, though it was not so hot—the murderous heat was, if they were lucky, still another month away.

  “If you still had that kid to help you out, that would be one thing,” Shmuel said. “But even he could see the way the wind was blowing.”

  It was true she had had a helper once, to keep the lot clean and shelter the cow in winter—then one day he was gone.

  “You aren’t in Nur anymore,” her son pointed out. “Though frankly you act like you are. Moe agrees with me on this and he doesn’t think it’s too healthy. And why you’d want to pretend you were living in a shtetl full of Jew-haters who killed your own husband—”

  He was angry at his father’s death, though why he should take it out on her she didn’t understand.

  “And don’t look at me that way, Ma. I am not going to feel guilty for giving you the life of a queen in the greatest country on earth. Just because I don’t want my children growing up socialists with a cow in their backyard, this is not something to be ashamed of!”

  The children had been pulled out of the Workman’s Circle School, where Yiddish was taught but not Hebrew, after her insecure daughters-in-law overheard someone in a store saying it was a school for godless low-class socialists and then laughing, obviously at them.

  “Daddy!” Little Izzy appeared and Shmuel opened his arms. “Come play in the backyard with us.”

  Shmuel turned to his mother triumphantly, then lifted his son over his head and went down the steps.

  Ever since she was told they were moving she had been thinking vaguely about what arrangements she could make with her cow. Some houses in their current neighborhood had yards, which would have been ideal. Even if the yard was modest, she was sure her sons would eventually see the benefits of keeping the cow there, despite their stated hostility to the idea. They were doing well in their business, but she did not think they were rich enough to move into the downtown, where some of the German Jews had moved in alongside the descendants of generations of Savannah gentiles. Still, she considered this possibility as well. The walled gardens, the narrow lanes—a cow would not have been happy in the downtown and this she might have been able to accept. But there, on that Thirty-seventh Street plantation, there!

  In Nur her family had once sold a calf, and its mother would not stop crying. It was unbearable—they finally had to sell the mother too. Miriam’s cow, in its humble and quiet way, was making its own demands. It was producing less and less milk, as if to alert her to the poorness of its lot. Maybe it knew she had so few customers. If questioned her cow could be no more wrong than her son—she still had three customers, not two, as Shmuel had tauntingly claimed. She did not know how she would get her cow to its new home, but she knew this was where it belonged.

  And so the first order of business was to let her customers know she would no longer be able to make deliveries. Perhaps in the wilderness to which her sons were moving there were people who wanted fresh milk. All she knew was that it would be impossible to schlep bottles to the old neighborhood, where all three customers lived. It would be hard on them. She would let them know today so they could make other arrangements.

  Her silence had lasted so long that speaking was no longer an option. Not-speaking had become a medium to her, like water to a fish; emerging into the upperworld of speech seemed like death. But there was no need to speak. With her sons she needed only to tilt her head or scratch an itch—no, she needed to do nothing at all to hear a response she did not want to hear. Accusations and recriminations, denials and threats—it saddened her that life weighed so heavily on Shmuel’s heart that a blink of an eye from his own mother could release all this. Life did not weigh so heavily on Miriam; her transactions in the world were pleasant and smooth. You do not need to speak to have your chicken plucked; you hand it to the woman whose job it is to do this all day long. You smile, you nod, you shake your head. You point to a fish, lift a bunch of greens off the pile. They knew her in City Market. The merchants who weren’t Jewish never had heard her say much more than hello or good day. If they were Jewish, they seemed to understand when she no longer spoke Yiddish; they had a lot of silences in their own lives as well, forgetting was general in America, a condition of existence. And there was this truth: people liked to talk, and once they found someone to wordlessly listen, they didn’t complain!

  As for her customers, she saw them around the neighborhood, but as their milkmaid she never saw them at all and so had no occasion to speak. She swooped down upon their stoops at dawn. She left them their bottles of milk with the wonderful yellowish cream on top, sealed tightly against waiting birds and squirrels. Then into the half-light she hurried away.

  She did not speak and could not write, not even in Yiddish. She sat in the kitchen and considered her dilemma. Dora was out with the children. Miriam drank her tea and looked at the newspaper. She liked the drawings of elegant elongated women. Today half a page was taken up with a single advertisement. There was writing at the top and bottom, but in the middle was a very realistic drawing of the storefront of Cohen’s Fine Millinery and Apparel. It was a shame, he had been put out of business by another Jew, Abe Tenenbaum, whose emporium kept adding and expanding departments, a very modern Ladies Hats being the latest. When Miriam passed Meyer Cohen’s shop in its last days and seen the bargain-hunters hunched like vultures over the bins, she realized with some guilt that the hat on her head came from Tenenbaum’s. Meyer had closed his doors yesterday. This was no advertisement for a sale. From the days
when Dora used to read the paper to her, she knew what it was.

  She found a drawing of a smiling and garlanded cow’s head on the very next page.

  When Shankman looked up from his desk it was with such a smile that Miriam’s insides flooded with warmth. “Miriam, maideleh, zit zit!” he said, rising and moving his own cushioned metal chair from behind the desk and taking a plain wooden chair for himself.

  She laughed at this gallantry, at an old lady being called a little girl. They sat next to each other and smiled into each other’s eyes. She had not seen him in a long time. Shankman looked even younger than before. His face had a healthy ruddy color and his scalp glowed. But there were tufts of dirty hair growing out of his ears that made her feel such a tenderness toward him. She wished his wife would do something about those ears—they were in her hands now, without hair on his head he apparently no longer saw a barber.

  They were sitting in his office at the Workman’s Circle. She was never entirely certain what he did there, though she was sure he still went to greet the trains and boats. He loved doing this. God had obviously called him for this purpose. He had been there when her boat came in. He came up and introduced himself before she could even find her sons. He was from a village in Poland not far from Nur. How fortunate for her that her first conversation in America was with this kind man! She sat now and listened to him speak. He did not expect her to reply. He understood, and she wondered if he felt some continuing responsibility for the Jews he greeted, if he felt some responsibility for her.

  She listened to what he said and did not say. Did he indulge her because he thought she was mad? Yes, of course—but madness is a vast country, its topography so varied, its states so unalike. Did he think she had forgotten how to speak because she had been unsuccessful at forgetting the other thing? Her husband, along with every other member of the rabbi’s study group, dragged through the streets—but this is not what killed him, at least not directly. He had lived for two more years, during which time they sent the children away and planned their own escape—his spirit had not been broken, he pictured the future, and this was not death but life. He had died suddenly in his sleep, in her arms, who knew of what? She knew only that he had not died one second before the last breath left his body—every second of his life he had lived! She would have liked to tell Shankman this. She would have liked to tell him she hardly thought about this thing her bitter sons must constantly have thought about, the memory of which they had devoted their lives to erasing. She thought a hundred times more of the taste of her husband’s thick golden-furred forearm as she ran her tongue up and down it.

  Miriam reached into her bag and retrieved two things: a pint of freshly made sour cream and her notice. With flour paste she had glued the cow’s head over the picture of the store. She had managed only to get two other copies of the newspaper and so she could not let Shankman have this, but it was good enough, he would be able to see.

  He stuck a finger into the sour cream and plunged it into his mouth, his eyes narrowing in rapture. “Batamt!” he exclaimed. Delicious. Then he looked at the clipping and asked, “What’s this?” He read aloud in English: “‘To our valued customers. The pleasure has been ours serving you for 24 years. Alas, all good things must come to an end and now we must close our doors. We thank each and every one of you from the bottom of our hearts.’ Then what’s this here, a picture of a cow?”

  He laughed but Miriam could see the concern in his eyes. She laughed too, to show she found her handicraft funny.

  He looked her in the eye, expecting something. If he had been a customer of hers, he would have understood. She pointed to the sour cream and then the cow, and she pressed a hand to her heart.

  “Ah, your beautiful black cow, I remember her,” he said. “How is she doing?”

  She shrugged.

  Then a look of understanding. “They tell me you’re moving.”

  She nodded. He knew everything that went on in the Jewish community, he would be able to fix anything.

  “To a fancy place practically in the country,” he continued. “Kein ahora, those boys of yours must be doing all right.”

  She looked longingly at the drawing of the cow, which did not completely cover the drawing of the hat shop. A cow’s head, decorated, prepared maybe for some pagan sacrifice, appeared to have been left in the middle of a street.

  “You want me to look after your cow?”

  No, no, she wouldn’t presume such a thing.

  “You’re selling her?”

  She shook her head.

  “So who is going to look after your cow?”

  She pointed to herself.

  “Aha, you need to move your cow!” he exclaimed.

  She didn’t understand why more people didn’t conserve their breath by going the route of silence.

  Die ganster veldt ist ein feldt. All the world’s a field—this was what Tsvi had said when reassuring her their children would be safe in America, that they would thrive there. Miriam rolled her eyes. A silly old expression repeated so often that it barely meant anything anymore—how could this possibly have helped a woman about to send her own children away? She interrogated him. Would they have Jew-haters in America like Nur? she asked. Undoubtedly! he merrily replied. And so why were they doing this? she demanded. Because, he said, they have something in America that they don’t have here, and that’s hope. And so what did his expression mean? Would America look like Nur? He laughed and said parts of it probably did. He said they and their children and grandchildren would walk through forests and pick flowers in fields and sit on the banks of a river in the shadow of a mill, and it would all be familiar, even to the little ones who had never been to Nur, familiar but also brand-new. They would keep goats and chickens and meditate on Torah near the stillness of cows, and they would feel God’s presence wherever they went.

  And so in Tsvi’s mouth the old words had been given new life.

  Miriam was on her way now to see her cow. She had come straight from Shankman’s office. The sun shone through the pines; the birds sang and her heart sang too. Shankman would arrange things and he would do it fast—they were moving in a week’s time. If Shankman did feel some responsibility for her, for her success in the new world, she hoped he felt no responsibility for her craziness. He was a good man, a mensch, and she was indebted to him for everything that had gone right here. So much of it had. And once they got the cow to the plantation, there would be some tsuris, some trouble, at first, but eventually the cow would become part of the landscape, as cows do.

  The sandy path ended at the last little house, and there in the lot she saw her cow was gone. Then into the silence of the sky rose the first sound that had come out of her mouth since anyone could remember. Memory was short and silence was long, but apparently it did not last forever. Her wordless cry filled the empty spaces of the world. People emerged from their houses to witness the spectacle of a mute madwoman raging at nothing. But they kept their distance. Mothers clutched their children’s hands, dogs whined.

  Miriam shook her fist at the sky, at her fool of a husband, who had obviously known nothing about America. Round and round she went, blue spots and red spots danced before her eyes in the glare—and now someone was coming from between the houses. It was Shmuel, someone must have sent for him. He seized her by the arms and held her until she stopped moving, though her head still spun. She could smell his breath, see the sweat glistening in the big pores of his nose. She gulped down the hot humid air and coughed it right back up.

  “You won’t talk,” he said. “It would have been no use trying to have a conversation with you.”

  “Slaughterer!” she cried, struggling out of his grip and slapping his cheek.

  His mouth dropped open. “You speak English.”

  “Butcher!”

  “Ma,” he said, holding up his hands.

  “Thief!”

  “It was Dora’s idea,” he said weakly, his eyes filling with tears. “We had to do somethi
ng, we’re moving next week.”

  Of course her daughter-in-law didn’t want her kids growing up around a cow, a goose, chickens . . . she didn’t want them growing up around a crazy old woman, a mute, a newspaper cutter, a slaughterer at heart! Her son the slaughterer was only taking after her.

  “I am in a terrible position!” he cried.

  “My cow, what you do with it?” she demanded.

  “My God, you speak English,” he said, shaking his head.

  Apparently, this was something he couldn’t get past. But Miriam had had much greater surprises in her life of late. Why should anything surprise her in a world so in need of repair that a hundred times a day she saw opportunities to fix it?

  “Where is my cow!”

  “We sold it back to the farm where you bought it,” he said, dry-eyed and quiet. “They came today and took it away.”

  She had been wrong about so many things. Her son still recognized her voice, even speaking a foreign tongue. She was breathing softly now. She released herself from his grip and sank into the dirt, hugging her skirts against her ankles. Sand gnats flew at her face and she brushed them away. Her neighbors’ eyes were on her but she started to feel quite calm.

  Sitting in her son’s shadow, she looked up. “Your papa did not want this.”

  She had not meant to say this, it just came out, and now it was she holding up her hands to ward off a blow. She had remembered too late—there were risks involved in speaking. Shmuel was always angry, he could not talk about his father without screaming at her. And so when the blow did not come she prepared herself, as best she could, for the lashes she would receive from her son’s tongue. She put down her hands and waited.

  The Cantor’s Miracles