The Hired Girl(48)

I was reading in bed and that’s not forbidden. Mrs. Rosenbach said I might read after my work was done. And Malka gives me a candle every night — she never fusses, no matter how quickly I use them up — oh, dear! I will never find another job like this one, where no one is sparing of candles! But it isn’t forbidden to read — I was even reading the book Mrs. Rosenbach gave me, which of course I ruined. My bad luck overflows even onto the books I read.

It was a good book, too. It turns out that Daniel Deronda is about Jews. At the beginning of the book, Daniel thinks he’s an ordinary person, but I peeked at the end, and it turns out he’s a Jew. But he doesn’t mind one bit! Being Jewish means he can marry a beautiful Jewish girl named Mirah, who is noble like Rebecca but also small and delicate and pure like a child. I wish I were small and delicate and pure.

I was very caught up in the story, and I came to a part where the print was smudged. I took the chamberstick off the table by my bed and held it close to the page. Having the light near at hand made the page brighter, and I kept reading — but then my hair caught fire.

I knew I was in mortal danger. But I also knew what to do, because it isn’t the first time my hair’s caught fire. If you’ve had long braids all your life, well, every now and then your braid swings around and passes too close to the fire from the range. When that happens, you have to keep your wits about you and put out the fire as fast as ever you can.

Which I did. I threw down the book and flung myself off the bed onto the linoleum and slapped at the flames. And I seized the edge of the quilt and pressed it against my hair to extinguish the last sparks. Then I saw the book lying on the floor — I threw it down in such a way that the binding tore, but who can blame me? If your hair’s on fire, you don’t put in a bookmark and set the book down carefully. All the same, I felt a pang of remorse.

Afterward, I felt my hair, and I’d lost a little on the right side. The burned edges were crisp and harsh feeling, but nobody will know once my hair is up. The palms of my hands smarted, but they weren’t blistered. It could have been so much worse. Then — just in the nick of time! — I remembered the candle I’d been reading by and — oh, horrors! — I’d dropped it when I leaped out of bed — and the bedclothes had caught fire!

I yelled and leaped onto the bed, on my hands and knees. I smothered the flames with the quilt — I used the whole quilt and I pounded it with my fists — and I guess I made a lot of noise, yelling and thumping, but I got the fire out. But then Malka came in, carrying her candle.

Well, she took one look at me and shrieked. I guess she could smell the burned hair — it’s one of the worst smells in the world, and one of the strongest. I don’t know whether you’d call it pungent or acrid, but it might be both. She shrieked and fled, forgetting her bunion and not limping a bit. When she came back, she had a great jug of water — it turns out she is deathly afraid of fire and keeps a jug of water in her room — and she dashed it at me, soaking me and the bedclothes and what was left of Daniel Deronda. All the time, she was talking frantically in Yiddish and saying barook-ha-shem, which I think is maybe a phrase to ward off the devil, because she seems to say it whenever a disaster has been averted.

I guess I was too excited to think very clearly because the water was awfully cold. And I couldn’t understand her, but I knew she was scolding me, and then she switched to English and I heard her say something about me burning the whole family alive in their beds. I thought that was unfair, and I told her it was an accident, and for heaven’s sake, whoever caught her hair on fire on purpose? I held up the hank of hair that was singed, and she came forward to look, but she stopped and gasped and pointed to the crucifix over my bed. (I hung it up after church on Sunday, because I mean to be a real Catholic from now on.)

She carried on as if my crucifix was a ghost. She told me to take it down right away. She said it was bad enough I’d tried to burn the house down, but she wasn’t having that on the wall. And I said it was my room and that Jesus was my Lord and my God, and I wasn’t taking Him down. And she said it wasn’t my room, it was a room in a good Jewish house, and did I know how many Jews had been persecuted and tortured and murdered because of that Sign? And she started talking about mobs of Christians massacring Jews and burning synagogues — which I’m sure can’t be true; it might have been true in Ivanhoe’s time, but real Christians, especially Catholics, wouldn’t do such things. She darted forward as if she meant to reach up and take Ma’s crucifix off the wall, and I stood on the bed to stop her. That’s when Mrs. Rosenbach came in.