Singing With All My Skin and Bone Page 5

  I stop at the door. I don’t even make it into the waiting room.

  I fiddle with the buttons on my coat. I check my phone for texts, voicemail. I look down the street at all those beautiful humming flying things. I feel a tug in the core of me where everything melts down into a hot lump and spins like a dynamo. I feel like I can’t deny everything. I feel like I don’t want to. I feel that the flesh is treacherous and doomed.

  I made this promise to myself and it takes me half an hour on a bus and five minutes of staring at a name plaque and a glass door to realize that I don’t want to keep it.

  I look back out at everyone and I consider what it could be like to step through those doors, sit in a softly lit room with tissues and a lot of pastel and unthreatening paintings on the wall and spill it all and look up and see the therapist nodding, nodding knowingly, mouthing the words me too.

  I don’t really think anyone can help any of us.

  *

  Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to stop worrying. You’re going to stop asking questions. You’re going to stop planning for tomorrow. You’re going to go out and get laid and stop wondering what might have been. You’re going to stop trying to fix anything. You’re going to stop assuming there’s anything to be fixed.

  You’re going to look out at all those drones and not wonder. You’re going to look out at all those people and you’re going to know. Even though no one is talking.

  Me too. Me too. Me too.

  Across the Seam

  So I might forget time, forget the world

  My native land

  My beloved land

  I might find again, as in a blessed dream

  - Petro Trokhanovskii, trans.

  It was not a battle because they were not aggressive, nor were they defensive because they had no weapons of any kind and were simply shot down like so many worthless objects, each of the licensed life-takers trying to outdo the others in butchery.

  - Inscription on monument erected at Lattimer, 1972.

  Lattimer, Pennsylvania

  1897

  In his dreams, Baba Yaga sets fire to the seam and dances with him as it burns.

  This is the last thing she does, after the rest of the show she puts on for him—a show, she has always given him to understand, that she does not organize for his entertainment but hers. That first night, cold and alone and curled against a stoop with black dust choking his nostrils and coating his throat, without even yet the hard bed at the boarding house to make sleep a less terrible thing, she had come to him in her chicken-legged dacha, waving her spoon and laughing as if he was the funniest thing she had ever seen.

  Well, look at this. All curled up like a cat—except no cat would ever put up with such cold. You’re a long way from home, little dochka.

  I’m not your daughter, he would have said, but one didn’t argue with Baba Yaga, not even in dreams, unless one wanted to find oneself up to the neck in a soup pot. Instead he kept silent, then, and looked at the knobby chicken knees of her house and not at her crouching on her porch like a hunched black bird, pointing at him with her spoon.

  The streets of the coal camp are muddy now and they were muddy then, only then the mud was half ice and somehow sucked and pulled even worse than when it was merely waterlogged. Men lost shoes. But the house of Baba Yaga seemed entirely unconcerned as it stood there.

  But of course, it was a dream.

  Don’t you turn your gaze away from me, dochka. Don’t sulk. I came a long way for you, and bad manners make a good supper. Look up at me, curtsy, and pay me a proper thank-you when you meet my eyes.

  It was as if the spoon had become a sword and pierced him through. She knew. Her eyes were like brittle knives when she laughed at him again. Every part of her is sharp. Every part of her might carve, slice, alter.

  So now he looks forward to his dreams.

  *

  Every day is much the same.

  Out of bed before the sun; cold coffee and bread so dry it crumbles in his mouth. The boarding house smells like unwashed socks and stale drink, but he no longer notices it. He has been in the camp two weeks but his overalls are already worn as if he’s had them for years and his boots badly need resoling. He covers his head with the hard shell of his helmet. He rubs the chin stubble that he’s come to hate, but as yet he doesn’t have enough company scrip to afford a good straight razor.

  He is sixteen years old.

  Iwan. Sometimes he’s sure the shafts are whispering his name under the growls and coarse laughter of the other men. It began his first time down and he hasn’t talked to anyone about it since then. Many days, he’s sure that he’s insane. When he sees the chicken-legged dacha in the center of the street. When the shafts speak to him. When he looks at the dresses of the boarding house’s proprietress, her neatly coifed hair under her scarf, her hands—somehow both rough and delicate—and feels a yearning that has nothing to do with wanting her the way a man should want a woman.

  He knows that he’s broken.

  Iwan, Baba Yaga murmurs to him as he staggers home under the weight of the coal dust and the low ceiling of the shaft, his back bent for so many hours that it is as though he carries the weight of the entire mountain on his shoulders. My little Iwanka. They don’t know who you really are. Let us discuss what might happen if they find out.

  *

  The low mountains of western Pennsylvania are greening now, coming out of a winter so brown and barren and long that he had wondered if it might end at all. A few times there had been snow—which at least was familiar—but there was much more ice than snow, cold rain that leached into the bones and settled there, and everywhere dead vegetation like the earth herself was dying. At first, looking at the mine, seeing the dark scar of it and the black hell inside, he had wondered if its poison was seeping outward and infecting everything.

  What have I come to, he had wondered then. God.

  He no longer believes that God cares about him.

  So now green life is creeping back into the mountains, but in his dreams, perhaps to torture him, Baba Yaga sits him behind her on her spoon and they fly across the ocean and back to the rolling green hills of hory nashi—our mountains, dear and distant—and his heart aches as if it wants to burst from his chest and bury itself in the soil of his birth.

  You have to remember, Baba Yaga says, no mocking laughter in her voice now, where you came from. Such things can sustain you when nothing else does.

  He shakes his head, in his dream, in his sleep, on his flat boarding house pillow, his thin blanket gathered around his shoulders. I have nothing now. Not even this. Why are you showing this to me?

  Baba Yaga does a little jig, more to prove a point than out of any personal glee. She lowers her spoon and scoops up the earth, pours it into his outstretched hands. It is nothing like the coal. Iwanka, you are soft and deep like this here. And you can be hard like the mountain into which you dig. You must be both in order to survive.

  *

  On the worst nights he dreams of the ship pulling into the harbor, the great statue lifting her torch over everything, the cold look in her eyes. Everyone else leaned over the deck and chattered, excited, and he thought of little birds flitting through his dense forests. She was welcoming to them, or they thought she was. But he looked up at her and he saw no welcome at all, and began to wonder if he had made a mistake.

  The same coldness in the man with his many papers spread out in front of him.

  Name? Place of origin? Are you literate? Where are you going? Is anyone meeting you there? He had stumbled through it in broken English, the little he had managed to scrape together in the passage. Iwan Charansky. Austria-Hungary. No. Lattimer.

  No.

  I am alone.

  It was like confession. He hung his head and felt his cheeks burn.

  *

  The warmth of the stove in the early mornings. The lowing of the cattle, the soft jangle of their bells as he takes them to the fields. The sun
rising over the mountains. Fresh paskha and pirohi with cheese. His father fixing prosfora and seed inside his pouch as he goes to plow the field, without which a good harvest will not be assured. Candlelit gilt and wood in the church, the knowing eyes of the saints in the ikonostas. Trying on his mother’s best dress alone in the house, the terror of being caught. A scatter of grain in the sunlight like little beads of gold. Ice silvering the trees.

  Screams. Fire—fire to consume a family that to others were always strangers, fire to consume the worrisome and the unwanted. Fire to consume the world.

  Baba Yaga hands him this fire, like a fist, like a little burning heart in his cupped palms, and he understands that he has carried it with him from the green hills and across the ocean, and it is part of him now.

  The seam, dochka. Give it to the seam.

  This place is almost ready to burn.

  *

  Nights in the boarding house are becoming more interesting. Louder, more people, squeezing together in Big Mary’s kitchen, listening to her talk. Sometimes he stands in the doorway and listens too. What’s done to them. What might be done. Mary is offering fragments of another world, holes through which to glimpse it, like gold nestled in the coal. Something he has never imagined, let alone seen. Big Mary offers exhortations to the promise of America, to the rights of men, and the men nod and bang their mugs on the table and cry agreement. Some. Others sit silently, their arms folded, and he can tell that they have yet to be convinced. But they’re listening.

  Behind him, he can feel Baba Yaga folding the spindles of her fingers and grinning. She whispers, This is also my dochka. She knows me, even if she doesn’t call me by name. Look at her: wouldn’t she make a tasty stew? But her spirit is too big for my pot, and I have other uses for her. She is also carrying the fire. My fire.

  You should watch her. You are sisters, you and she. Even if she can never know.

  More and more, Baba Yaga is coming to him in his waking hours.

  This should perhaps frighten him more than it does.

  *

  Every night, now, the seam burns. The whole mountain runs with flame like a river. He watches it, and it seems to him that there are figures in the flames, bright and beautiful. They are not in pain. They are dancing, and they are holding out arms of cinder and glowing coal and beckoning to him to dance with them.

  His mother is there. His father. Their faces are alight with pride as they behold their only son. Only now they see him for what he truly is, and there is no blame and no shame and not a hint of rejection. They love him as he is. Iwanka, his mother sings, her fingers like sparks as she whirls through the dying trees. I have a lovely little dress for you, and look, I made for you this scarf. Look how bright it is.

  If anyone touches you after this, to harm you, they will burn, and not with us.

  He wakes up with tears scalding his cheeks. They smoke and steam.

  *

  Goddamn hunkies.

  When at last he has enough scrip saved to buy a razor, the man in the company store overcharges him. He expects it, would have even borne it as yet another in a long line of harsh treatments, except that the amount the man is demanding is more than he has. He’s been borrowing a razor from one of the other men in the boarding house, but it’s too blunt and it hurts him, and the shave it gives is nowhere clean enough. It’s a small thing, and he doesn’t even know why it should be so important to him, except that he does.

  Baba Yaga is teaching him to face hard truths. He’s not the quickest of learners when it comes to things like that but he does learn.

  Goddamn hunkies, the man growls when Iwan tries, stuttering through the words, to explain, to try to convince the man to take what he has as sufficient for the blade. You come here, think you don’t have to speak the language, think you’re special. Owed special treatment. You won’t get it from me, you little rat. Give me the price of it or get the hell out of the store.

  But it is special treatment. It always has been. Hunky. Polack. Little rat. For a long time now he’s been used to it, but Big Mary is suggesting that he shouldn’t be, that he’s more than just some hunky rat crawling on his belly through the shafts. And there’s Baba Yaga, folding all the hunky rats into her arms, her hands black with the coal, giving them firesides and warm porridge with milk, chalky with powdered bones.

  There is something else that his saved scrip will buy. He stares at it for some long minutes the next time he goes to the company store to buy what little food he can. He stares at it for as long as he can, for as long as he thinks is safe, before he’s noticed. A pair of lady’s gloves, white and soft, very plain and, he knows, not fine. It seems strange to find them in a store that only stocks the necessities of the working people of Lattimer, but there they are, and to his weary eyes they seem to shine as if they were made of ivory. They are free of coal dust, pure, like the polished bones of someone long-dead. Of the stuff that Baba Yaga grinds for her porridge.

  Strange things are beautiful to him now.

  He wants to buy them. He wants them more than the razor. He imagines sliding his hands into them, the hair on his knuckles and the callouses on his palms and the black dust packed under his fingernails hidden by that elegant white. They would make his fingers look slender, he knows. Delicate. Before he turns away he reaches out and runs a fingertip along their backs.

  Hey, hunky. He pulls his hand back as if he’s been burned; his face is burning, his neck and ears, and he’s praying that the big man behind the counter won’t see. Buy something or get out. You here to browse like a fucking woman?

  Take me back to hory nashi, he whispers to Baba Yaga as he slinks out of the place, feeling her heat and her glee at his side. In the shadows of the town he could swear he sees a dacha shuffling, out of the way like any other house but for its legs. Take me back there and bury me in the ground with the ashes of my family.

  No, dochka, she laughs. Better for you, given that you’re mine. The things you want will be yours. They will have to be.

  *

  She tells him stories about ordeals, in the shafts, in the lukewarm water he uses for his quick baths, in the doorway of the boarding house kitchen. She tells him stories of walking on hot coals to prove one’s innocence, of burning women as witches and trusting to God to care for their souls if they proved free of the influence of the devil. They were all my daughters, Iwanka. They danced with me in the moonlight and the fire, as you do.

  I’m not a witch, he insists. But he lifts his blackened hands and, as if they are someone else’s, his own fingers trace ancient symbols across his arms, his face. He smears it over his lips, turning them dark and full. Baba Yaga nods in approval.

  Not a witch, no, maybe. But were they witches? I tell you truly, dochka, there have always been those of us who simply didn’t fit, and those ones tend to be of a kind. And you are my sweet little daughter, and you will never be one of them. The others.

  Why would you want to be?

  She places his burning hands against the seam and Lattimer fails its test in an orgy of flame.

  *

  It comes in the fall, with the rain and the cold wind. The trees are aflame, red and gold, and as the strike is called, as the marches begin, he marches with them but his gaze is locked on those burning branches, each one like the embodiment of God sent to give him a message. Big Mary cries out to them, her arms lifted, praising them as if they are her children and newly learned to stand on their own. There is word that the company will shortly send in the strike-breakers, but there is fearlessness on the sharp wind, at least for the moment, and they tell each other to be strong. Even him, no longer just a hunky rat but, for a short and precious time, a brother among brothers.

  He accepts this with certain reservations. Baba Yaga leads the march in her chicken-legged dacha, standing on the porch and waving her spoon like a general.

  What would his mother think of this? His father? If their spirits could travel from dust to dust, emerge from the mountain and see h
im now? Would they be proud? Would any of this surprise them? Their lost son, marching with the lost and demanding to be found again?

  Still more lost than any of them, though they can’t see it now?

  Does he still care?

  *

  Yet the actual moment, when it comes, isn’t in the rain or the cold wind but on a warm, sunny day in early September that still contains hints of dying summer, the last of the green before the fire begins to turn it to gray ash. It’s a big march—nearly three hundred of them, or so the rumor goes—and there is such a sense of quiet strength among them all that even Baba Yaga ceases her cackling, though he senses that this is not out of any particular respect so much as it is that she is waiting. That the world around them is holding its breath.

  That the ground is heating under their feet.

  There are fires far below, Baba Yaga whispered once, that have burned for hundreds of years. Longer. There is a single great fire beneath it all that has been burning since the birth of the world.

  When the sheriff issues the call to disperse, Iwan barely hears it. It’s a voice far removed, present but ultimately not very important, and at any rate no one is dispersing. From somewhere far away there’s a scuffle, the sound of feet scrabbling and the grunt of bodies hitting bodies, but this, too, seems unimportant. Everyone around him is standing, standing like stones.

  Then. “Give two or three shots!”

  Now a murmur. Now people turning to each other, alarmed, the quiet strength drifting away like ash. And as the shots ring out, he looks to Baba Yaga and sees her grin eating up her face. Grandmother Chaos, he thinks. Grandmother Fire. And the people scatter into madness.