The Blood Lie (12 page)

“Going to try to sleep?” Mrs. Durham asked.

“No, I just—I have to get something upstairs. I'll be back.” She was gone for only a minute. “All right, Ma,” she said when she returned, holding a small paper bag. “I made something for your birthday, but I think you should have it now. Here, it's for good luck.” She set the bag in front of her mother and sat down beside her.

“For me? For my…? Oughtn't we wait?”

“No, Ma. Do it now. Go on.”

Mrs. Durham picked up the paper bag, uncurled the folded top, and withdrew a handmade bracelet strung with red beads. She ran her fingers over the polished pieces of glass as if they were her rosary. Red was Daisy's favorite color, the color of her Raggedy Ann doll's hair, the color of her woolen scarf—the one she didn't bring with her when she left the house today. Red was the color of her dead husband's hunting jacket. The color of the poppies that grew wild on the edge of Paradise Woods. The color of blood.

“It's beautiful,” she said at last. “So elegant.”

“And the thing is, it's good luck—look.” Emaline reached over and flipped around the largest bead. On its back, she'd glued a golden speck. “It's a mustard seed. We learned about it in
Sunday school. ‘If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed—' ”

“ ‘—nothing shall be impossible unto you,' ” Mrs. Durham finished. “The Book of Matthew?”

“That's right. Now put it on.”

So she did. She'd do anything for some good luck.

The vicious cries stabbed Jack's ears. “Get'im, fellows!” someone yelled. Another man called out, “They're bloodthirsty perverts, all of'em!” Then the others shouted all at once.

Jack stepped out of the closet, moving almost without thinking. Hugging the wall, he inched toward the sanctuary and reached his hand around the doorframe. When he found the switch plate, he flipped it off and every light went out.

The temple blackened, and the shouts exploded into a hellish uproar. Jack pulled the
shofar
from his waistband and sounded a long, piercing blast into the darkness—one long, urgent note that said,
Now it's your turn to be afraid.

Blinded men and boys were pushing, shoving, swearing.
Run, Rabbi Abrams
, Jack silently pleaded.
Hide
.
Do something, anything. Now!

There was nothing more Jack could do. The darkness would either protect the rabbi or it wouldn't. He crept back into the closet, angry tears stinging his cheeks, feeling as small as a five-year-old hiding in the coat closet after Hebrew school—and much more helpless.

“Everyone hold it!” Victor hollered above the bedlam, flashlight in hand. “Everybody out, now! Out!”

“Go on,” Victor ordered again. “Get yourselves home, all of you.” He lit a path through the sanctuary and across the
foyer, and the crowd filed out slowly.
Like kids being dragged out of a carnival before all the fun is over
. As the last straggler exited, the trooper stood in the doorway and announced, “I'm issuing a curfew till daybreak. That's for all of you. Until the sun's up, clear?”

“But I got animals to feed,” one man said.

“And I gotta be at the plant at six,” another added.

Victor shrugged. “You shoulda been asleep long ago, then. The curfew stands.”

More grumbling. The gang didn't disperse until Victor threatened to extend the curfew until 8 a.m.

The temple door slammed shut, and the flashlight beam swept past Jack again. Then the trooper found the light switch. “Hey, where'd you go?” he asked from the back of the sanctuary.

Nothing.

“Mr. Abrams, they're gone.”

Silence. Then the sound of something being pushed against carpeting. “I am here,” came the rabbi's voice. “I took cover behind my lectern.”

“Lookit, just let me take a look around, and I'll give you a ride home after.”

“Please be quick about it,” the rabbi said.

He thinks it's all over. Rabbi Abrams thinks this is the beginning and the end of the whole ordeal.
Jack wanted to run to him and blurt out the whole story, but he had to get out of the temple before Victor got to the closet. So, while the trooper poked around the Torah scrolls and peered under the benches, he slipped outside and hoped he'd make it home before anyone realized he was gone.

It was 4:30 a.m. when the knock came. Emaline, Lydie and Mrs. Durham had retreated to the living room, where they nestled under the quilts and sank into the bottomless sofa cushions. They weren't asleep, but the harsh thump of knuckles against wood seemed to wake them just the same, and they jumped up in a tangle of blankets and dread. Anyone coming at this hour had to be bringing news.

They weren't sure they wanted to know what it was, and they hesitated. The knock came again, harder this time.

Emaline went to the door and opened it slowly. She fully expected to see the trooper, but it was George Lingstrom who stood there instead, flushed, vaguely smiling, with his not quite blond, not quite brown hair shielding his blue eyes.

“George?” Emaline said. “Why George, I thought—come in.”

“I saw your light on, so I figured you were up,” he said. When Emaline didn't reply, he continued, “I hope that's okay.”

“Yes, yes, we've been up all night,” Emaline said. “Do you have news, George? Do you have anything to tell us?” She didn't invite him to sit down. She didn't think of it. George must have something important to say, she figured, or why would he be here at this hour?

George brushed back his hair. “I guess I really just wanted to stop by. See how you're doing. Find out what I can do.”

“Well, you might as well come in and sit down,” Mrs. Durham said, motioning him to the love seat.

Emaline returned to her spot between her mother and
Lydie. “Honestly, George, if you really want to help, you could go to the woods and search for Daisy.”

George sat up straighter. He seemed confused. “The woods? But…” He glanced at Lydie and Mrs. Durham. “The woods?”

“Yes, George, the woods,” Emaline said. “That's where Daisy got lost. In the woods right in back of the house. You didn't know?”

George's lips wavered, as if he couldn't decide whether to smile or frown. “You said lost, but you mean…you mean kidnapped, right?”

This made Mrs. Durham's eyes fill, and she covered them with her hand. Lydie was about to say something, but Emaline spoke first. “What are you talking about, George?”

“The Jews, Emaline. Jack Pool. Everyone knows it—I figured you did too. Jack snatched her so they could…could…”

“Could what?” Emaline asked.

“Maybe I shouldn't say.”

Mrs. Durham lowered her hand. “Don't listen to him,” she whispered.

“No, I want to hear it. You think Jack took her so they could what?”

George looked to Mrs. Durham for help, but she offered none. “So they could bake her blood in their holiday bread.”

Emaline's mouth fell open. “Jack? People think Jack…?”

“A bunch of us went to their church a while ago,” George rushed on. “We were trying to get their preacher. You know, get him to tell us where they've got Daisy. But, well, it didn't go the way we planned.”

“What was your plan?” she asked.

“Well, I was gonna…we were…”

“You were going to hurt him.”

“Not necessarily. Not if he'fessed up right away. Not if Daisy was still all right.”

Emaline stood up. “Please go home.”

“Em—”

“I'll see you out,” she said, heading to the door, but George didn't get up. “Please,” Emaline said. Her voice was determined even as it quavered.

Finally, George got up and went to the door, his face a grey shade of disappointment. “I was only trying to lend a hand. I thought I was helping you.”

“Just go,” she said faintly.

He stepped out onto the porch and then turned around to face her. “Em, I—”

Emaline closed the door. She stood there with her hand on the knob for a long time after his boot steps faded away. Then she turned the bolt and returned to the sofa, where she sank to the very bottom of the cushions.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1928

It was 5 a.m. and Rabbi Abrams was home at last. He sat down at his kitchen table to rewrite his sermon. He lined up his fountain pen, ink bottle and legal pad, uncertain what to do with them. Everything was different now. He'd have to tell everyone what happened at the temple, and he'd have to do it in a meaningful way, a useful way, a way that would foster hope, not panic. But how?

He picked up the pen and stared at the blank sheet. Somehow the lines on the paper didn't look right. “I must be tired,” he mumbled. He blinked several times and stared harder. The lines were quivering. He blinked again. Now the lines were fluttering like threads in the wind. No, not like threads—like ripples of water. Like sewer water.

Suddenly he was fourteen and in Lithuania, back in the Jewish ghetto of Troky, standing on a street corner. That was all he could do at first—stand there and wonder what all the shouting on the next street was about. Only when he heard the first death wail did he understand. He bolted home, praying that there was a home to go to.

With guns and torches, the raiders flooded the Jewish quarter and smashed the men's skulls, raped and drove nails through the heads of the women and children, burned down homes and stores, piled the dead in the streets, and then shot them full of bullets for good measure. Almost no one survived except for Louis' family. For two days they huddled underground in the freezing, filthy sewer waters beneath Troky, listening to the fire blasts overhead, eating and drinking nothing, seeing no other life, only sewer rats.

When the noise finally stopped, Louis, his parents and his two sisters crawled out of the sewer. As soon as he saw what
had happened outside, he wanted to crawl back in. Babies lay slit like fish in their mother's arms. Men, flayed or burned crisp, made grotesque statues propped against fences and walls. Girls lay naked with pools of blood caught between their legs.

There was no point bothering to check on their cottage; everything was destroyed. But when his nose numbed to the rotting flesh, young Louis did stumble around the
shtetl
for a while, saying silent good-byes to the friends and neighbors who were now corpses.

At one point, Louis saw a child's hand reaching out from a wreckage of clapboards, unable to break free. He bent down and found a small girl hunched under the pile of wood.

“It's all right. They're gone now,” he whispered to her. He took her hand, thin and cold. But the hand was all he got. It had been severed just above the wrist, and the blood oozed onto his foot. He fell on his knees and vomited.