Sister Emily's Lightship by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page B

but if the Lord G-d was home and listening, there was no sign of it.
    The rabble broke through the gates and roamed freely along the streets. They pulled Jews out of their houses and measured them against a piece of lumber with a blood red line drawn halfway up. Any man found below the line was beaten, no matter his age. And all the while the rabble chanted “Little black imp!” and “Stealer of children!”
    By morning’s end the count was this: two concussions, three broken arms, many bruises and blackened eyes, a dislocated jaw, the butcher’s and baker’s shops set afire, and one woman raped. She was an old woman. The only one they could find. By pogrom standards it was minor stuff and the Jews of Ykaterin-islav were relieved. They knew, even if the goyim did not, that this sort of thing is easier done in the disguise of night.
    One man only was missing—Shmuel Zvi Bar Michael, the moneylender. He was the shortest and the ugliest and the blackest little man the crowd of sinners could find.
    Of course the rest of the Jews were too busy to look for him. The men were trying to save what they could of Gdalye the butcher’s shop and Avreml the baker’s house. The women were too busy binding up the heads of Reb Jakob and his son Lev, and the arms of the three men, one a ten-year-old boy, and the jaw of Moyshe the cobbler, and tending to the old woman. Besides Shana had been too guilt-ridden to press them into the search.
    It was not until the next day that she found his body—or the half of it that remained—in the soldiers’ trenches.
    At the funeral she tore her face with her fingernails and wept until her eyes were permanently reddened. Her hair turned white during the week she sat shiva. And it was thus that Granny Rumple was born of sorrow, shame, and guilt. At least that was my great-grandmother’s story. And while details in the middle of the tale had a tendency to change with each telling, the ending was always tragic.
    But the story, you say, is too familiar for belief? Belief! Is it less difficult to believe that a man distributed food to thousands using only a few loaves and fishes? Is it less difficult to believe the Red Sea opened in the middle to let a tribe of wandering desert dwellers through? Is it less difficult to believe that Elvis is alive and well and shopping at Safeway?
    Look at the story you know. Who is the moral center of it? Is it the miller who lies and his daughter who is complicitous in the lie? Is it the king who wants her for commercial purposes only? Or is it the dark, ugly little man with the unpronounceable name who promises to change flax into gold—and does exactly what he promises?
    Stories are told one way, history another. But for the Jews—despite their long association with the Lord G-d—the endings have always been the same.

Blood Sister
THE MYTH:
    Then Great Alta reached into the crevice of night and pulled up two light sisters with her left hand. She reached in again and pulled up two dark sisters with her right. The one pair, light and dark, she set facing one another, belly to belly and breast to breast. The other pair she set back against back so that their hairs intertwined but they knew one another not.
    â€œYe are all my daughters,” quoth Great Alta, “whether you look toward or away, whether you look far or near. You will not lose any love wherever your gaze should fall.”
    She touched their eyes with her right forefinger, their mouths with her left forefinger, and their hearts with her open palm, and thus were they made fully awake.
The Parable:
    As told by Mother Anda, great-great-grandaughter of Magna, last of the Sisters Arundale:
    Once there was a garden in which our mothers and fathers lived. It was a comfortable place where fruit grew without cultivation and water ran over twenty-one stones to become pure.
    But one of the fathers turned to his companions and said, “I want to see the