The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “So you’re not going to turn us in?” Deirdre asked.

  Domina Chambers turned to Deirdre, looking surprised that she was still in the room.

  “I mean, it is against the rules,” Deirdre said.

  “Weren’t you paying attention when we read Antigone, Miss Hall? The same rules do not apply to everyone. When Antigone performed the burial rite for her brother, even though she was breaking Creon’s decree, was she wrong?”

  “No,” Lucy answered, “because she owed that to her brother.”

  “Exactly. Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked? The true tragic heroine is above the commonplace laws of the masses.”

  “I always figured Antigone didn’t have a chance,” Deirdre said. I could tell she was anxious to show Domina Chambers that she had gotten something from the play. “I mean, what with her mother being her grandmother and her father being her half-brother…”

  Domina Chambers waved her hand dismissively. “There’s far too much attention paid nowadays to the incest theme in the plays. The Greeks weren’t as squeamish about such matters as we are. After all, Antigone is betrothed to her first cousin, Haemon, and no one mentions that.”

  “Yeah, but Oedipus did put his eyes out when he realized he’d married his own mother.”

  “And killed his own father. The Greeks were very clear on what a child owed a parent. But incest… well, Zeus and Hera are, after all, brother and sister. And Sir James Frazer tells us in The Golden Bough that in countries where the royal blood was traced through women, the prince often married his sister to keep the crown from going to an outsider. Of course, when wrongful incest did occur it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice to the goddess Diana.”

  “Why Diana?” Lucy asked.

  “Because incest is supposed to cause a dearth… droughts and famine… so it makes sense to make atonement to the goddess of fertility.”

  “But I thought Diana was a virgin,” Deirdre interrupted. “How can a virgin be a goddess of fertility?”

  Domina Chambers waved her hand again as if Deirdre were an annoying insect. “You persist in thinking in black-and-white terms, Miss Hall. It’s a very simplistic way of seeing things. Diana is a goddess of nature, and hence, fertility. It was believed she shared the grove of Nemi with Virbius, the King of the Wood. Their sacred nuptials were celebrated each year to promote the fruitfulness of the earth. There’s your May Day rite. Not some silly circle dance around a gilded pole.”

  “So this King of the Wood,” Deirdre asked, “is he kind of like the stag-king? I mean, he wore horns?”

  “Yes,” Domina Chambers answered. “Diana Nemesis is associated with the deer. It’s likely that the stag-mummers of medieval May Day rites derived from this tradition.”

  I saw Deirdre and Lucy exchange a knowing look. Domina Chambers had just confirmed the way they had chosen to celebrate May Day. I wondered what our teacher would think if she knew just how literally her students were taking her lesson. But then, I wasn’t sure anymore if what Deirdre and Matt, and Lucy and Ward, had been doing in the icehouse and planned to do in the woods on May Day dawn would shock Domina Chambers. Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked? I had a pretty good idea of the things Domina Chambers would disapprove of: sloppy Latin translations, Lipton tea, synthetic fabrics. But sex with a masked stranger in the woods? I couldn’t tell.

  We finished our tea and sandwiches and scones. Domina Chambers played for us a recording of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring to get us in the mood, she said, for our May Day rite. She promised she wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone of our plans.

  “But if you’re caught,” she told us at the door as we were going, “you’re on your own. You must always accept responsibility for your actions, girls.”

  We all laughed and said we were ready to do just that.

  IT WAS ONLY FIFTY-FIVE DEGREES AT DAWN ON MAY DAY (according to the thermometer nailed to a tree outside Miss Buehl’s cottage), but at least the rain had stopped. The ground was still muddy, though, and the woods were damp and misty, so we decided that the best place to set up the Maypole was the swimming beach.

  “Otherwise it’ll be more like mud wrestling than Maypole dancing,” Deirdre said. “Not that I’m adverse to a little rolling in the mud.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Lucy told her. “We’ll have to split up after the Maypole dance.”

  The plan was for the three of us to carry the Maypole down to the swimming beach and perform the ceremonial circle dance around the Maypole in the middle of which we would be “surprised” by the three boys dressed as stag-mummers. We would then flee, being careful to go in three different directions. Since the boys would be masked, we decided it was only fair that we be disguised as well, so Deirdre attached hoods to the simple white shifts she had sewn for us.

  “Of course it will be obvious which one is Lucy,” Deirdre said, holding up the shift she had sewn for her. “She’s so small. Ward’ll pick her out in a minute, which is a good thing. We wouldn’t want Lucy ending up with her cousin after all.”

  “It’s a symbolic rite, Deir. You don’t have to really do anything. You’re scaring Jane.”

  Deirdre smiled at me. “Oh, I don’t think Jane’s scared. After all, since she and I are the same height, she might end up with Matt and I’ll end up with the cousin…”

  “He has a name—Roy.”

  “Roy,” Deirdre repeated. “Roy from Troy.”

  “Cold Spring,” Lucy corrected. “Our aunt Doris lives in Cold Spring.”

  “Whatever. He looked pretty cute, the little I saw of him. But maybe Jane has her eye on him after the night they spent together.…”

  “I told you: We just sat on the beach and watched the sun rise. Actually, I watched the sun rise. He slept.”

  “Wore him out, eh, Janie?”

  I blushed. Not because of Deirdre’s teasing, something I was well used to by then, but because I was remembering stroking the boy’s cheek… pretending he was Matt.

  IT WASN’T EASY CARRYING THE MAYPOLE DOWN THE STEPS to the swimming beach. Deirdre went first, then Lucy, and I brought up the rear, which meant I had the part of the pole decorated with flowers. They were cheap plastic flowers, spray-painted silver and gold by the drama department, and they scratched against my bare arms and blocked my view of the steps.

  “Take it easy,” I heard Deirdre hiss from below. “You’re going to skewer me with this damned pole and that’s not how I planned to spend the morning.”

  It was hard to believe it would be morning soon. We’d left the dorm at 4:30 so it must have been close to 5:00, but the sky was still pitch dark. Below us I could hear water lapping against the rocks, but not even a glint gave the lake away. Deirdre had looked up the phase of the moon and found it was a new moon.

  “I think that’s supposed to be bad luck,” she said, “but who knows?”

  I only knew I had reached the beach when moss-covered rock gave way to wet sand, and even then my bare feet were so numb I could hardly tell the difference.

  “Heave ho!” Deirdre called. “Raise high the roof beam, carpenter!”

  I heard Lucy’s small voice inquire if that were from Sappho while I pushed the pole into an upright position and felt it sink into the sand. Deirdre pushed it deeper into the sand and Lucy knelt at the base and mounded more sand around the pole.

  “We don’t want it to fall over,” Lucy said.

  “No, a wilting Maypole would definitely be unpropitious,” Deirdre agreed. “Plague and barrenness would certainly follow.”

  “Why do we want fertility anyway?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not like any of us want to get pregnant.”

  “Well, I’m on the Pill so it’s not bloody likely,” Deirdre said.

  “Really?” I asked. I wondered where Deirdre had managed to get a prescription for birth control pills.

  “She forgets to take them half the time,” Lucy said. “So she’s just messing up her hormones for nothing.”

  Usually I
would have been more disconcerted to realize that Lucy and Deirdre had such a store of confidences than at the news that Deirdre had access to birth control. But the subject had been bothering me lately.

  “I guess it’s not likely you’d get pregnant the first time…”

  “Jesus, Janie, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it. Look at you, you’re shaking like a leaf. Here, take a swig of this.”

  Deirdre had brought a wine flask made out of goatskin that she had bought at the army/navy store in Corinth.

  “What’s in it?” I asked, eyeing the greasy-looking sack suspiciously.

  “I pinched some cooking sherry from Mrs. Ames and added a few herbs.”

  I put my mouth around the grooved metal screwtop and tasted, first, copper, then sweet almond–flavored wine, and finally, as an aftertaste at the back of my throat, something bitter and grassy.

  “As Horace says: Nunc est bibendum,” Deirdre said, passing the flask to Lucy. “Now is the time for drinking.”

  Lucy tilted her head back and took a long, deep swallow. Her hood fell back and in the dim light I could just make out her pale forehead and see that she had painted some kind of design there. But then her hood fell forward as she lowered the flask and the design was hidden in shadow before I could make it out.

  “Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus,” Lucy said in a husky voice I barely recognized. “Now is the time to beat the earth with a liberal foot.”

  “In other words: Now is the time for dancing.”

  Deirdre released the crepe paper ribbons that had been wrapped around the pole. They hung limply in the still, damp air. Although the sun still hadn’t appeared across the lake, the darkness had paled to a pearly gray. Looking out over the lake I still couldn’t tell where water and air met.

  Deirdre held up a limp ribbon and stomped the ground with one foot.

  “Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus!” she commanded, and Lucy, stomping her feet, took up the chant. We hadn’t rehearsed what to say as we danced around the Maypole. I also searched my head for some appropriate Latin and came up with nothing but the first declension.

  “Puella, puellae, puellae,” I shouted. I thought Lucy and Deirdre would make fun of my choice, but they took up the declension with me.

  “Puellam, puella, puella.”

  It sounded oddly right. Girl, girl, girl, we chanted as we half-skipped, half-danced around the pole, girl in all its grammatical permutations.

  Then, suddenly, Deirdre skidded to a stop, spraying sand up my legs. She held her hand up for silence. I listened, and heard, above the thud of my heart and the lap of the lake water, footsteps on the rocks. I thought they came from the steps, but when I peered into the gray mist in that direction I heard another sound behind me; again, footsteps on the rocks, but this time they came from the lake. Someone was on one of the sister rocks.

  Deirdre passed the flask around and we each took a long drink. I tasted, this time, the bitter grassy taste first and then the sweet and then the metal.

  Deirdre tossed the flask into the darkness outside our circle. “Puer, pueri, puero,” she whispered.

  “Puerum, puero, puer,” Lucy chanted.

  Boy, boy, boy.

  We began to dance again, but in the opposite direction, so that the ribbons we had wrapped around the pole now came undone. The damp crepe paper clung to my arms and brushed against my face, clammy as seaweed. Pieces came off and clung to my shift. I felt the wet strands tangling between my legs and when I tried to kick them away I lost my balance and fell.

  When I got to my hands and knees I was looking toward the lake. I saw, through the lightening mist, a figure balanced on the second stone. A figure with the head of a stag. I took a deep breath and told myself it was just a boy in a deer mask, but then the figure leaped off the rock and with one bound landed in the shallow water and I saw that he wasn’t wearing the brown felt mask Deirdre had sewn in art class. He was wearing the bleached skull of a tenpoint buck.

  I screamed and somehow scrambled to my feet.

  I heard Deirdre and Lucy scream, but their screams were theatrical.

  “Aiaiai,” Deirdre keened somewhere off to my left. To my right, Lucy made a whooping sound like a crane calling to its mate. I felt sure they hadn’t seen the boy with the skull. Still, that was all he was, surely, a boy with a skull mask. I was running up the steps, though, away from him. Only when I reached the top did I look back to see if he was still following me.

  He was four steps below me, his head bent down, watching his footing on the slippery rock. I saw that beneath the white skull he wore the brown felt mask, but at the nape of his neck I could see his hair: sandy brown hair that just then turned fiery red in a ray of light that skidded across the lake from the eastern shore. I noticed, too, his shirt, a hockey jersey with the name “Corinth Lions” emblazoned on the back. Matt’s team. Behind him I saw Deirdre run left into the woods, pursued by one of the masked boys. Lucy stood facing her masked partner and then she turned and walked into the water and started swimming. I didn’t stay to watch if Ward would swim after her. It was hard to imagine him braving that cold water, but maybe that was what she was counting on. By taking to the water, she’d issued him a challenge.

  I turned and ran across the path and into the woods. I skirted behind the lower school and the dorm and then headed west. I knew that once I got past the road there was a large tract of pathless woods, an old grove of giant hemlocks that Matt had once told me was one of the few patches of virgin forest in the area. I felt sure he would know I was heading there and that he’d know why. It was one of the few places where we were sure to be alone and, I knew, one of his favorite places. I wanted him to know that I knew it was him under the deer skull.

  The sun was up now, streaming through the morning mist from behind me. I saw the first young hemlocks appear. As I ran, the hemlocks grew taller and the undergrowth thinned. The trees were spread out and evenly spaced like a colonnade. I was running through a wide avenue between the towering trees and their shadows, stretched out in front of me like a black pattern laid out on the gold forest floor. Echoing my own footsteps and the sound of my heart were the footsteps and ragged breath of the boy following me.

  I came to a clearing and slipped on the hemlock needles. I lay on my stomach panting until I felt a hand on my shoulder turning me over.

  We were both breathing so hard neither of us could talk. The deer skull mask was gone, but he still wore the brown felt mask Deirdre had made. My hood had fallen back.

  He stroked my arm and took my hand as if to pull me up, but I pulled him down. He half fell on me, but he moved one leg in between mine to keep his full weight off me. I moved underneath him and felt the heat of his skin beneath his clothes. I touched, with the back of my fingers, a strip of bare skin above the waistband of his jeans, stroking the red-gold hairs, and he moaned. He lowered himself on me and I moved down so that my shift bunched up underneath the small of my back. I could feel the small, flat needles against my bare skin and see the slanting sun streaming over his back as he came inside me.

  When we were done the sun was just above his shoulder and shining in my eyes, blinding me. I burrowed my face into his collarbone and felt the damp felt of the mask brush against my cheek. I could see the green thread Deirdre had used to stitch the seam and the small green heart she’d embroidered at the edge of the fabric. She’d used a different color for each mask. “So you’ll know your heart’s true love,” she had said. I was just about to ask him to take off his mask when I heard voices. I felt him stiffen. He got to his knees and snapped his jeans closed. I pulled my shift down and raised myself on my elbows to listen.

  “As you can see the undergrowth has become progressively thinner. This is because the fallen needles of the hemlock make a thick, acid mulch in which the seeds of most plants cannot germinate.”

  “Miss Buehl,” I whispered. “You have to get out of here.” He got to his feet and held his hand out for me, but I waved him away. “G
o!” I hissed. “I’ll distract them.”

  He seemed confused, for a second, about which way to go. The voices were approaching us from the north. I pointed south and said, “You can get back to the icehouse that way. Just make sure you make it off campus before they catch you.”

  Again he seemed to hesitate. It occurred to me he didn’t like leaving me so abruptly after what we had just done.

  “It’s all right, Matt,” I said, “we’ll talk later.”

  He must have been reassured, because he turned and left instantly. I watched him running through the woods and then lost sight of him behind one of the hemlock trunks just as a troop of lower school girls burst into the clearing. As soon as they saw me the girls began screaming. Miss Buehl rushed to my side and knelt down beside me.

  “My God, who did this to you? You’ve been butchered.”

  For a minute she really frightened me. What I had done with Matt had been painful and I knew there might be blood, but when I looked down at my shift I was shocked to see that it was bright red. My hands and arms, too, were stained and lurid in the morning sun. I felt faint and for a moment I think I did lose consciousness, but then I heard a familiar voice.

  “Die,” she said. I looked up and standing over me was Albie. She was holding a long strand of red crepe paper that she rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. “Look,” she said holding a crimson hand up in the sunlight, “Dye. It’s just dye.”

  Chapter Twenty

  MATT WAS CAUGHT JUST OUTSIDE THE ICEHOUSE BY the extension agent who had come to use her boat. So, Lucy explained to me, it wasn’t really my fault because even if Miss Buehl hadn’t come upon us in the hemlock grove he still might have run into the extension agent on his way home.

  It was kind of her to try to make me feel better, but we both knew she was lying. That first sight of me, in my torn and “bloody” shift, had sparked a hysteria not easily quelled even when the “blood” turned out to be crepe paper dye. Three of the lower school girls on Miss Buehl’s nature walk were so traumatized at the sight of me they had to be sent home. Not Albie though, because she had no home to go to. She sturdily related the whole story to anyone who would listen. To give her credit, she always ended by explaining I hadn’t been covered by blood after all, but somehow, the way she told it, the fact that I was covered with red dye came to sound even more lurid.