Miriam's Secret

by Debby Waldman

  “You’ve never done this,” Cissy said. She smacked herself in the forehead with the palm of her hand. “I plumb forgot about that day. You thought you were so good, and you barely got off the ground.”

  A flush of heat spread across Miriam’s cheeks.

  “It’s all right,” Cissy assured her. “I was kind of praying you wouldn’t come up. I think that’s why you couldn’t, you know. Sometimes thinking something’s as powerful as doing something.”

  Miriam wasn’t sure if this was the most sensible thing she had ever heard or the silliest.

  Cissy continued. She sounded a bit like a schoolteacher. “Mind’s the most powerful thing there is. That’s what my mama used to say.”

  Miriam shook her head. She wanted to tell Cissy that the real reason she hadn’t been able to get up the ladder was she was scared. But maybe Cissy was right. Thinking something’s as powerful as doing something. The truth was, Miriam didn’t want to be scared anymore. She just wanted to climb that ladder, and she wanted to do it with grace and confidence.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Cissy said. “That way if you start to fall, you don’t have to worry, ’cause I got your back. And your feet too.”

  All the way up, Cissy encouraged Miriam. “Hold on a little tighter there, like that. That’s right.”

  “It hurts!” Miriam said as a fresh sliver dug into her palm. “How do you do this every day?”

  “It don’t hurt, really. You’re just not accustomed to it is all. Couple more times up and down and you won’t even think about it. It’s like you blink your eyes and just like that, you’re there. I promise.”

  Miriam wanted to believe Cissy was right, but it was hard to muster confidence when her arms were burning and her legs shaking. If she lost her balance, she would knock Cissy right off the ladder. She wasn’t sure she could keep climbing.

  “Go on,” Cissy urged.

  “Maybe I should go back down and try again after I rest,” Miriam suggested.

  “You’re already halfway up,” Cissy said. “Why would you go back down just to have to climb up all over again? You want to hang there another minute, that’s fine by me. But you ain’t going back down until you get all the way up.”

  Finally, balanced on the third rung from the top, Miriam found herself staring into the expanse of the loft.

  “There you go!” Cissy’s voice was triumphant. “You did it! Now you just climb up that last bit and flop onto your tummy and scooch. Go on.” Cissy laid a gentle hand on the back of Miriam’s legs, just above her knees. “Up and over. Just like that.”

  Miriam climbed the last rung and did as Cissy said. As she flopped onto the hay-covered floor, she started to giggle. “I feel like a snake. And I’m getting hay all over me.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Cissy said. “It comes off.” She pushed at the bottom of Miriam’s boots, urging her forward. “Now get out of the way already and make some room for me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Miriam pushed herself to her knees and took in her surroundings. Hay bales were stacked like enormous bricks, from the floor to the slanted rafters of the ceiling. Somewhere up here were windows—she had seen them from outside the barn, and they were clearly the source of what little light there was—but for now all she could see was hay.

  She turned to Cissy. “Where do you sleep?”

  Cissy pointed to the opposite end of the loft, toward the back of the barn.

  “Is that over the stall where the kittens are?” Miriam asked.

  Cissy nodded. “Joe sussed it out. He figured it was safest ’cause nobody ever goes to that end of the barn. Until you, that is.”

  “How do you even get over there?” Miriam didn’t see any path.

  “I got my ways,” Cissy said. “Every couple of days I make a new route. I can’t just have one path that I use all the time. Can’t afford to have anybody get suspicious. The men come up here a lot, you know.”

  Miriam was picking hay off her coat and dropping it onto the floor. But every time she removed some, more seemed to take its place. “Will you show me?”

  “Not if you keep cleaning yourself like that I won’t,” Cissy said.

  Her sharp tone took Miriam by surprise. “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are,” Cissy said. “But if you’re so worried about getting hay on that coat of yours, you ain’t going to want to be poking around up here. And that’s what you gotta do if you want to see where I live.”

  Miriam jammed her hands into her pockets. “I’ll stop!” she said. “And here.” She handed Cissy the parcels she’d forgotten about.

  “What’s this?” Cissy asked.

  “Lunch. Meatloaf and roasted parsnips.”

  Cissy’s face softened. “That’s awful nice of you.” When she went to open one, the other package tumbled out of her hands. Miriam reached out and caught it before it hit the floor. Cissy held out her hand to take it, but Miriam put it back into her pocket.

  “I’ll give it to you when we get to your—” Miriam thought for a moment. She had no idea what she was about to see, but it certainly wasn’t an apartment, which was the only other place she had visited friends. “Your room?”

  “Ain’t much of a room,” Cissy said, with a laugh that sounded more like a snort. She held the meatloaf up to her nose. “Smells good!” She broke off a piece and put it into her mouth. “This is the first I’ve eaten all day. Sometimes Joe gets too busy, or he can’t sneak away, and I have to wait. It sure was nice of you to think of me.”

  The meatloaf was gone in seconds. Cissy wiped her hands on the waxed paper, then folded it neatly. She was about to place it in her shirt pocket when Miriam reached out.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “It will be easier for me to throw it away.”

  “Thank you,” Cissy said. “Okay, let’s go. You’ve waited long enough to see my quarters.”

  Cissy began moving hay bales out of the way, stacking them to create an opening barely big enough for one person to stand. “You go,” she said, motioning for Miriam to move in front of her. She replaced the bales so it looked as if nothing had been moved. Then she squeezed ahead of Miriam.

  “They ain’t so close together as they look from the top of the ladder,” she explained as she moved more bales. She continued repeating the process—move bales, motion for Miriam to move in front, replace the bales, squeeze past. Pretty soon Miriam had no idea which end of the barn was which, or where she was.

  “How do you know where to go?” she asked.

  Cissy had been working so hard that her face glistened with sweat. But instead of looking weary, she wore a mischievous grin. “Twine,” she said.

  “Twine?”

  “Like string, but stronger.” Cissy reached down and felt around underneath the bale she had just replaced. She pulled out a piece of thin brown cord and handed it to Miriam. “The men use it to tie the hay bales.” She pointed, and Miriam noticed for the first time how the bales were held together. The twine was almost the same color as the hay, so it had been easy to miss.

  Miriam handed the twine back to Cissy, who replaced it under the bale nearest to them.

  “Do you know the story of the minotaur and the maze?”

  Miriam shook her head.

  “It’s a myth,” Cissy said as she continued working, Miriam following close behind. “My daddy knew loads of them. He was a good storyteller.” Cissy’s voice had grown quiet and sad. Miriam worried she might be about to cry. But then she took a deep breath and went on. “The story is about a boy who got sent into a maze. He was called Theseus.” She looked over her shoulder at Miriam. “Ain’t that peculiar?”

  “It is,” Miriam agreed.

  “Anyhow, a king sent Theseus into the maze, and he was going to get eaten by a monster. The king’s daughter didn’t want that to happen, so she snuck him a ball of twine to use as a clue to get out. Theseus killed the monster, and then he used the twine to find his way back out again. I figured if it worke
d for Theseus, it’d work for me.”

  She stopped, removed three more bales and motioned for Miriam to squeeze past her again. Miriam expected to see another stack of hay, so she was surprised to discover that they had reached their destination, a cramped, narrow clearing in the bales. The space was so small that when Miriam spread her arms to the sides, her fingers brushed against hay.

  In the middle of the clearing, taking up nearly all the space on the floor, was a worn brown blanket. Beneath the blanket was a faded sheet, and beneath that, more hay that Cissy had shaped to resemble a mattress. It looked almost like a real bed. The blanket was dotted with holes, its edges ragged. A shirt stuffed with hay served as a pillow.

  “That’s Joe’s shirt,” Cissy said matter-of-factly when she noticed Miriam staring. “It’s nice having something of him here. Makes it less lonely.”

  Miriam remembered the first morning she had woken up in the farmhouse, how sad she had felt being so far from home and unsure when she might see Mama and Papa again. That thought had made her roll over and cry into her pillow.

  Thinking of that now made her feel ashamed. She had nothing to cry about, not compared to Cissy. But Cissy seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable, even normal, to live in a cold, dark barn, never knowing when her brother would come to bring her food. Miriam didn’t see any reason for her to live like this, not when, just across the farmyard, there was a warm house with an empty bed.

  “You should come and live in the farmhouse with me,” Miriam announced.

  The smile disappeared from Cissy’s face. Her voice turned hard. “I told you, I can’t do that.”

  “But it’s so cold here, and dark. And there’s so much room in the farmhouse, and Bubby and Zayde are good people. You know that. You know about the mark.”

  Cissy shook her head so hard that bits of hay flew out of her hair. “I showed you where I live so you’d see I’m fine. I don’t need nothing. Though I appreciate that food you brought me. I thank you for that. But I don’t need you dragging me into the open. I just need you to be my friend. If you are going to be my friend, that means not telling about me. No one. You promised.”

  She reached out and took Miriam’s hand. For someone so slight, she had an awfully strong grip.

  SIXTEEN

  Those first few weeks after Miriam and Cissy became best friends, Miriam was haunted at night by the fear that she might let the secret slip. In one dream, she forgot that she was hiding food in her lap during dinner. When she stood, it slid off her dress and spattered all over the floor.

  In another, she and Cissy were laughing so hard in the hayloft that Cissy fell through the opening above the trough. Instead of landing in the stall, she wound up in the milking parlor, right next to the stool where Zayde sat as he milked Corky.

  The week before Passover, Miriam had the strangest dream of all. When she opened the door for Elijah at the seder, Cissy was there, in a brand-new white dress and shiny patent-leather shoes.

  “A brand-new dress and shoes?” Cissy said when Miriam described the dream to her. They sat cross-legged in the loft, playing with the kittens. “I ain’t had a new dress in forever.”

  Cissy was wearing the same thing she wore every day, the plaid flannel shirt that had belonged to her father and the black wool stockings that Joe had purchased for her at a five-and-dime store north of Maryland and south of New York State.

  Miriam looked down at her own dress. Mama had sewn it. She’d used thick, dark-green serge. “It matches your eyes,” Mama had said.

  “It’s different for you,” Cissy said, her voice softening. “You live in a house, so you should be dressing nicely. I live in a barn, and I ain’t got a sewing machine, but you don’t need no machine to turn a shirt into a dress. Just a little ingenuity.”

  “Engine-ooity?” Miriam asked.

  “That was one of my mama’s favorite words. It means cleverness. Pretty clever, turning a shirt into a dress, don’t you think?”

  Miriam had to admit that it was.

  “Now who’s this Elijah, and why were you opening the door for him anyway?” Cissy said, changing the subject. “Shouldn’t he come when dinner starts? Is he always late?”

  Miriam laughed. “He’s not a real person,” she said.

  Cissy narrowed her eyes and drew back, confused. “You invite fake people to your dinner, and you think they are going to show up?”

  “It’s part of the seder. That’s the name of the dinner we have on the first night of Passover. We open the door for Elijah and invite him in to drink a glass of wine. He’s a prophet—Elijah the Prophet.”

  “That Elijah?” Cissy said, as if Elijah were a friend she’d bumped into the day before. “From the Bible?”

  “You know who Elijah is?” Now it was Miriam’s turn to be confused.

  “’Course I do,” Cissy replied, and then she began to sing.

  Satan is a liar and a conjurer too.

  If you don’t watch out, he’ll conjure you.

  If I could, I surely would

  Stand on the rock where Moses stood.

  Elijah Rock, shout, shout,

  Elijah Rock, comin’ up Lord.

  The melody was sad and hopeful at the same time. But what was most surprising was Cissy’s voice. Miriam couldn’t believe something so powerful was coming out of someone who looked as if a strong wind could pick her up and blow her clear across a pasture.

  Abruptly Cissy stopped singing. “What are you starin’ at?” she asked Miriam. “You think I don’t study the Good Book? I went to church, you know. Before I had to start hiding in here, I mean.”

  “Your voice,” Miriam said, barely getting the words out. “It’s beautiful.”

  Cissy shrugged, but she looked pleased. “Ain’t nothing special.”

  “It sure sounds special to me,” Miriam said.

  Cissy pretended to bow. “Well, thank you, ma’am,” she said. “I shall give you a front-row seat at my first concert.”

  “Where’d you learn that song?” Miriam asked.

  “Church, I guess,” Cissy replied. “Don’t you go to church?”

  Miriam shook her head. “Jewish people don’t go to church. We go to synagogue.”

  “That like a church?”

  “I don’t know,” Miriam replied. “I’ve never been to church. What do you do there?”

  “Sing. Pray. Read scripture.”

  “Scripture?”

  “The Bible.” Cissy sounded impatient. “God’s word.”

  “We read the Torah,” Miriam said. “It’s in Hebrew. But it’s God’s word too. So I guess it’s kind of the same. But Elijah is Jewish, so why do you sing about him?”

  “’Cause he’s in the Good Book,” Cissy said. “I told you. Now, I don’t know what religion he is, but I don’t think he’s going to be coming to your house for dinner. He’s been dead forever.”

  The way she said it made Miriam feel like a simpleton. For a moment she was mad at Cissy. She thought about stomping out of the barn and never coming back. Or, worse, threatening to spill the beans.

  Cissy could tell. “I mean, everybody’s got a right to believe what they want. Heck, my mama’s dead, and I talk to her. It ain’t up to me to be tellin’ you what’s wrong and right. But I still don’t get why you’d invite someone to dinner and then just give him a drink when there’s a whole meal in front of everybody else. ’Specially a dead someone.”

  “It’s not really inviting,” Miriam said, although now she was getting confused too. No one had ever challenged her to think about Elijah this way before. “It’s what we do—we open the door for him. And only once a year, at the seder. Seder means ‘order’ in Hebrew. At the dinner, everything happens in a special order, and we do all kinds of things that we don’t on other nights.” Miriam thought maybe she was talking too much, but Cissy looked interested.

  “Now tell me what else you do, besides inviting this Elijah in for a drink,” Cissy said, putting on her serious, I’m-ready-to-learn voi
ce.

  “We don’t eat bread, we eat—” Miriam was about to say matzah when Cissy suddenly put her index finger to her mouth and began shaking her head. Miriam heard what had made Cissy so worried—the unmistakable thud of footsteps.

  The girls had often heard the men coming and going on the main floor of the barn, and Cissy would always hide under the trough. No one ever came into the stall when they were playing, but Cissy would not take any chances. Never, though, in the times they had been in the loft, had they heard footsteps so close.

  Cissy leaned up against Miriam and put her mouth to her ear. When she began to whisper, her voice was reassuring. “He won’t be here long.” Her breath tickled Miriam’s ear. “They never are, but usually they come in the morning, before you do. They must have needed more hay or something. Soon as we hear the barn door close, you’ve got to get out. I don’t think they’ll come back, but you never do know.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Miriam slowly made her way back to the house. What would have happened, she wondered, if whoever had been up in the loft had stumbled upon her and Cissy? Not that any of the hired men were likely to find them. But there was always a danger that Joe might decide to surprise his sister. Miriam wasn’t sure if she could hide fast enough if that happened. And if Joe discovered that Cissy and Miriam had become friends, he might decide that the farm was no longer safe. Then he would pack up Cissy and take her away. Cissy had said as much.

  Having a friend to spend time with was so much better than having only kittens, but having a friend she couldn’t tell anybody about—that was the hardest thing ever.

  Bubby was waiting in the front hall. “You’re looking gloomy,” she said. “I’ve got news that will cheer you up.” She handed Miriam an envelope. Miriam recognized Mama’s handwriting immediately. “Your uncle and the babies are healthy enough to come to America. They should be home in just about a month!”