The Lake of Dead Languages (19 page)

We stopped in the woods and Deirdre lit a joint. She handed it to Lucy who, much to my surprise, took a long, deep drag on it. She handed it to me and, still holding the smoke in, said in a tight voice, “Remember what
Domina
said about the Delphic oracle?” I remembered Helen Chambers’s lecture on the ancients’ use of hallucinogenic herbs.
So you condone drug use, Domina,
Deirdre had asked.
The ancients used it for sacred, not recreational, purposes,
our teacher had answered.

I took the joint and placed it, gingerly, to my lips. I wondered if I could just pretend to smoke it, but both Deirdre and Lucy were waiting to see the tip of the joint flame red. I inhaled and held the smoke in my lungs, the way Deirdre said you had to. I also remembered that she said most people didn’t get high their first time.

We smoked that joint until it was a tiny, burning nub, which Deirdre held delicately between her long fingernails. When I was sure it was all smoked down, Deirdre turned the roach around so that the lit side was in her mouth, and motioned for Lucy to come closer. Lucy, who was quite a bit shorter than Deirdre, tilted her face up to Deirdre’s, so close it seemed they might kiss, and Deirdre blew a long stream of smoke into Lucy’s open mouth. I was amazed at how well they did it. And then I realized it couldn’t have been the first time.

I didn’t think I was high, but the rest of the walk seemed bathed in a different light. The forest floor, covered with pine needles, glowed golden and seemed to roll up to meet my bare feet. The white trunks of the birch trees flicked by me like the blades of a fan slicing the shadows, spilling splashes of white into the darkness of the woods. It was as if a white figure flitted in between the trees beyond the path, but when I stopped
to look for it there was nothing in the dark and silent woods.

When we came to the Point, the domed rock we clambered over glittered as if studded with diamonds. I found myself lost in its rough, crystally texture as we climbed down to the limestone ledge and from there to the swimming beach. It was better than looking over the edge at the sheer drop down to the water.

It took me longer than the others to make the climb down. By the time I was on the beach they were already in the water. Deirdre’s pale silk kimono was draped over a rock and Lucy’s T-shirt lay crumpled at the edge of the water. I pulled the heavy flannel nightgown over my head and stood for a moment, shivering on the shore.

I could see them, a little ways out in the water, gold and white like the beautiful carp in Deirdre’s kimono. They had reached the third rock, which was the only one flat enough to climb up on, and Deirdre was pulling herself up, clumsily flopping on the rock. Lucy turned toward the shore and treaded water. When she saw me she raised her hand to wave and I saw her sink a little, her lips just touching the black surface of the lake. I remembered a line of poetry Miss Macintosh had read to us.
They’re not waving,
it went,
they’re drowning.
There was something in me that made me want to stand there and see how long Lucy would wave. How far she would sink.

But then I shook myself, dispersing the chill, and walked into the water. I plunged in to get the worst of the shock over with, and swam fast to warm up. I was a good swimmer. One of the strongest in the class, Miss Pike said, although, she would inevitably add, my form could use work.

I swam a little past the rock, showing off a bit. When I approached the far side of the rock, though, I found that the rock was sheer at this end, the water too deep to touch bottom. Lucy and Deirdre had to each take a hand to haul me up.

“Good work, Jane,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, Jane, you’re braver than I thought,” Deirdre said.

We sat on the rock for a few minutes looking out over the still, moonlit lake. I didn’t feel cold anymore. The climb and the swim had warmed me up. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel afraid either. The third rock was past the Point, and so we could have been seen from the windows of the mansion, but I imagined that if someone, say Helen Chambers who had an apartment on the top floor of the mansion, had looked out her window and seen us, three naked girls on a rock in the middle of the lake, she would have thought it was a vision. I imagined that we looked like the three graces in the painting by Botticelli Miss Beade had shown us.

As if responding to a prearranged signal, we all stood up. Lucy slid her arm over my shoulder and Deirdre, on my other side, slipped her arm over Lucy’s. I pulled my arms up to clasp theirs, but instead I kept lifting them—they felt weightless, as if pulled by the moon—until my hands were suspended over their heads. We hadn’t talked about what form our “prayer” to the Lake Goddess would take. “We’ll let the spirit of the moment move us,” Lucy had said. I had imagined it would be Lucy or Deirdre who would think of what to say. They were both better at that sort of thing. But now, with Lucy and Deirdre at my side, I felt stronger than I ever had before. My mother was wrong. Three was a magic number.

“Spirit of the Lake,” I said. “We come here in the spirit of friendship. We don’t ask for special protection.”

I saw Lucy nod. It was what
Domina
Chambers always told us.
The ancients believed they must first humble themselves before the gods. The greatest sin was hubris.

I knew then what form the prayer should take. “All we ask,” I said in a high, ringing voice that seemed to echo off the stone face of the Point, which towered above us, “is that whatever happens to one of us, let happen to all of us.”

W
E NEED A STAG-KING.”
D
EIRDRE HELD THE HAIRPIN
figurine we had recently dubbed a corniculum in her fingers and wriggled it in the light from the window. A minute before she had been dancing around the room to the Allman Brothers singing “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio, but then “Seasons in the Sun” came on and she switched it off.

Lucy looked up from Graves’s
The White Goddess
and nodded. “Like Cernunnos,” she said. “The horned one, the antlered king.”

“Like Actaeon,” Deirdre said.

“Actaeon was slaughtered by his own hounds,” I said. It was junior year. Deirdre had read an article in
Ms.
magazine about matriarchal cultures and goddess worship. She spent most of Latin class pestering
Domina
Chambers about “the patriarchal canon” she adhered to. “At the very least,” she told our teacher, “we should be doing Ovid’s
Art of Love
instead of boring old
Metamorphoses.”

I picked up my translation for the next day’s class and read aloud: “‘Now they are all around him, tearing deep their master’s flesh.’ His dogs ate him alive.”

Deirdre shrugged.
“Domina
Chambers said he got what he deserved for spying on Diana in her bath.”

“But it was an accident,” I told her. “Look, even Ovid says
so, ‘The fault was fortune’s and no guilt that day, for what guilt can it be to lose one’s way.’”

Lucy sighed. “Don’t be so literal, Jane. We’re not going to hunt some poor boy down and eat him.” Deirdre giggled and Lucy gave her a look that silenced her.

“It’s a symbolic rite of renewal. The goddess joins with the stag-king and the community is granted fertility and good fortune.”

“Yeah, the goddess and the stag-king get it on.”

“Well, are we going to take that part
literally?”

“I certainly hope so,” Deirdre said.

“Then who gets to be the goddess?” I asked.

Deirdre jingled the hairpins so that they sparkled in the sun and she wiggled her hips like one of the Balinese dancers on the tapestries that decorated her room. “Who do you think? Who around here
looks
like a fertility goddess?”

“The goddess is the lake,” Lucy said reprovingly. “The stag-king will swim in the lake, like a baptism, and that will appease the Lake Goddess.”

“Oh.” Deirdre looked disappointed. She tapped the hairpin that dangled from the “mouth” of the top hairpin so that it swung in a wide arc. “Is our stag-king also going to be symbolic or do we at least get a real boy?”

I saw Lucy considering. We both knew which boy Deirdre had in mind. Although Lucy and Deirdre had been friends, more or less, since that night sophomore year when we all swam in the lake, Lucy still hadn’t let Deirdre spend any time with Matt. She had met him the couple of times. Matt had come to Friday tea and the Founder’s Day picnic, but Lucy had always been careful to keep Deirdre from spending too much time with her brother.

“He’s adorable,” Deirdre had confided to me. “I see why you like him. Have you ever … you know … done anything with him?”

“He’s just a friend,” I said, “and my best friend’s brother. I don’t think of him that way.”

Deirdre eyed me skeptically. Just as she had a way of finding sexual meaning in the most innocuous Latin phrase, so she could inject sexual context into the most innocent friendship. Over the year we had been at Heart Lake she had posited illicit liaisons between the groundskeeper and Miss Buehl, Miss Buehl and Miss Pike, Miss Macintosh and Miss Pike, Miss Beade and three of the senior girls, and the class president and the captain of the swim team. She had taken it for granted from the beginning that I
had a thing
for Matt.

I suppose she was right. Pressed between the pages of my
Tales from the Ballet
I kept the red maple leaf he had given me on that first walk home. It wasn’t a rose, but he had
pretended
it was when he gave it to me, so wasn’t it almost as if it were a rose? I’d saved other things, too. The pebbles he gave me when he was teaching me to skip stones on the lake, notes he’d written me in Latin class when we were still at Corinth High, and a skate key he’d dropped in the icehouse and thought was lost. I kept them with my journals under a loose board beneath my desk. Not even Lucy knew about my hiding place or the things I wrote in my journal about Matt.

“I think Lucy misses him,” I wrote in my journal. I’d used up the first notebook he’d given me and bought a new one that was just the same. I had sat a long time with the fountain pen poised over the lined paper before adding, “I miss him, too.”

Since we’d been at Heart Lake we’d seen less of him. I knew Lucy missed him terribly. For the whole first year she had slept in one of his old hockey jerseys, and sometimes at night, after she thought I was asleep, I heard her crying. If she hadn’t been afraid of Deirdre going after him I think she would have thought of some way of seeing him more. After all, he lived less than half a mile from the school—only a quarter mile from the far end of the lake—and he knew every inch of the woods surrounding Heart Lake.

“I bet Matt would be interested in the Cernunnos legend,” I said.

Both girls looked at me as if they had never heard of a
boy named Matt. I half expected Deirdre to say, “Matt who?”

Lucy sighed. “Actually, Mattie’s more interested in chemistry and physics these days.”

After Lucy and I had gotten the Iris Scholarship, Helen Chambers had given up on her experiment with public education, and Corinth High School had, in turn, given up on its Latin program. Matt seemed forlorn without Latin until he discovered physics.

“All he talks about these days is the temperature/density relationship in water and the molecular structure of ice. He’s keen on seeing the lake freeze.”

“Well,” Deirdre said, “he can watch for the lake to freeze and we can reenact the rite of the horned god. Hey, do you think that’s how we got the expression
horny?”

“We can’t make Matt swim in the lake,” Lucy said. “It’s already too cold.”

“They do it in Russia,” Deirdre said. “But yeah, it’s even getting too cold to hang out outside. If only we had some kind of shelter. The changing room at the swimming beach would be perfect, but they lock it up over the winter.”

“There’s the icehouse,” I said. “We could meet there.”

Lucy’s head jerked up. Belatedly I remembered that Matt and Lucy had made me promise not to tell anyone that they used the icehouse.

“What icehouse?” Deirdre asked. “It doesn’t sound too appealing.”

“It’s not,” Lucy said flatly. “It’s just a little hut on the other end of the lake where the Crevecoeurs used to store ice harvested from the lake. It’s a good twenty-minute walk away.”

“Is there anything in it?”

I shook my head no, but Lucy was nodding. “The county extension agent keeps her rowboat there, but she only comes once a week, on Tuesdays, to take water samples.”

I looked at Lucy in surprise. I hadn’t been to the icehouse
since we had all gone skating last winter. Apparently she and Matt had been there without me.

“A boat?” Deirdre said. “Cool. We could have our stag-king rite on the water. When can your brother meet us there?”

I
DON
’
T KNOW HOW MUCH
L
UCY TOLD
M
ATT ABOUT THE
horned god, but he was excited about what he called the first ice club. We met at the icehouse the last weekend in November.

Matt brought a Thermos of hot chocolate. Deirdre brought a joint. Lucy brought blankets. We sat in the hull of the extension agent’s rowboat using her life jackets for pillows. We’d decided it was too dangerous to take the boat out; someone might see us. Matt insisted that we keep the doors at the end of the hut open so we could look at the lake, even though it made the hut unbearably cold. It was beautiful though. Lying in the hull of the boat, looking out the doors, it seemed as if we were on the water. Across the lake we could see the stone wall of the Point jutting into the lake like the prow of a gigantic ocean liner bearing down on us. After a few hits, I felt as if we were gliding toward it.

“The lake has already begun the process of freezing,” Matt told us. “This first stage is called overturn. As water gets colder it gets denser, so it sinks and the warm water rises to the top.” Matt made circles in the air with his hands. “But—and this is the part that’s really amazing—if water continued getting denser as it froze the lake would freeze from the bottom up.”