The Little Bride (14 page)

He’d called the plant Weeper. Minna had heard others call such plants Spiders. Brides.

She ripped roots and watched the earth fall open. If the grass was particularly stubborn, she squatted, tucked her skirt between her legs, and levered her elbow against her thigh. One afternoon, she pulled so hard, and the roots broke so suddenly, she hit herself in the face with her fist. Her eyes watered—she touched the bone in her nose.

“Making progress, I see.”

It was Samuel, behind her.

It was as if he only noticed her when she was on the ground, on her knees, going slightly crazy.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“I’m serious.” His voice was unusually cheerful. “I’ve never seen a human being work so efficiently as a plow.”

Minna tucked a loose clump of hair behind her ear, and turned. Samuel smiled. He walked closer.

“What is it you’re trying to do, exactly?”

“Make a twine—to tie the wheat.”

“And let me guess. The grass keeps breaking.”

“How observant,” Minna said.

Samuel lowered himself into a squat next to her. “What if I told you I had a possible solution?”

“I would ask why you didn’t tell me sooner.”

Samuel raised a hand to his jaw. He rubbed it a few times, as if to check when he’d last shaved (two days ago—Minna knew), then he looked at Minna’s pile of grass, grabbed two fistfuls, and, deftly, between his last two fingers, picked up a third, smaller bunch.

“It may be, if you tried something like this—”

“I’m not your father,” Minna said. “Just show me what to do.”

Samuel kept his eyes on his hands. “Don’t assume you know anything about my father,” he said quietly. Then he crossed two fistfuls of grass, and brought the third, from his left hand, between them. He pulled from the right, then the left again, right, then left. With his thumbs he tucked the bunches through the middle; with his forefingers he pulled them tight. His knuckles were dark from the sun. He worked fast, but not sloppily. Soon each bundle of grass behaved as a single strand, weaving around the others.

“See?” he said.

Minna had never seen a boy, or man, make a braid. She thought it an oddly delicate thing for him to do, and yet he seemed, doing it, nothing like a woman. He handled the braid less like a chore than like another person—as if he were giving it a lesson in how to dress, or stand up straight.

“It’s not difficult,” he said, holding the half-finished braid out to her. “You just need enough grass to cancel out the weak points.” Then, as if urging a child: “You try.”

Minna couldn’t decide how to respond. She knew, of course, how to make a braid. It was the one thing she remembered her mother teaching her: first, how to keep her hair out of her eyes, to make herself respectable, and then later, how to braid rags into rugs, and string into fringe. Applying the idea to grass was simple, obvious. That she hadn’t thought of it herself irritated her. Samuel’s condescension—
you try
—irritated her more. Then there was his admonishment, still in her ears:
Don’t assume you know anything about my father.
There were eighteen years of shared history she would never be let into. But she sensed that this was not the point; that what Samuel meant to tell her was that she would never know Max, that he would keep himself from her, and that his sons would protect his right to do so—that this, perhaps, was another of her purposes here: to bind the three of them together, against her. Minna thought she ought to feel indignant. But she was distracted by the sensation of Samuel’s eyes on her hands. She took the braid and unraveled it and liked the surprise this caused, in his body—a slight shift in posture, a discomfort she witnessed out the corner of her eyes. She began again, careful to follow the creases he’d made, then, as she grew more confident, to choose slightly shorter distances between them, making the braid tighter and stronger than his had been.

She reached the end, and gave it back.

“That’s it,” Samuel said, a bit less enthusiastically than before.

Minna smiled. “Now what?”

“Now . . .” He furrowed his brow.

“Can you think of nothing?” She lowered her voice to mimic his. “It may be . . . that we ought to tie it off.”

Samuel smiled ruefully. Then, looking straight at her, he grabbed a blade of grass, tore the root off with his teeth, and used the root to tie a knot at one end of the braid.

Minna held out her hands. “I surrender,” she said. But Samuel’s playfulness quickly vanished. He’d seen the raw, red cuts that crisscrossed her palms.

Before she could hide them, he’d caught her by the wrists.

“What happened?” he asked, running his thumbs over her skin, which had taken on, she knew, the grated aspect of a washboard. She tried to free herself, but his grip was firm.

“The grass did this to you?”

Minna swallowed. She was humiliated, not only that he’d seen her wounds, and knew what stupidity had caused them, but that she felt so grateful for his touch—the pads of his thumbs studying her palms.

“You should soak them in the creek,” he said.

“Fine.”

“Water will help,” he said.

“Fine.”

She disengaged her hands from his. Her eye felt swollen where she’d hit herself before. It would bruise, she was certain; it might be turning blue already. Samuel looked stricken.

“You know,” he said, “you could forget about the grass. Give up on burning the wheat, feed it to the animals.” Then, seeing her anger: “Or keep on with it. Who knows, maybe once they’re dry enough the braids will burn all on their own. And if that doesn’t work, there are always the trees . . .”

“Fine. You’ve helped enough.” Minna was looking at his boots; specifically, at the holes his feet had worn into the leather, and the shapes the holes added up to. She had seen his feet, outside the boots; they were large, with high arches and a broad knuckle and squat toes, the kind of feet women like her aunts would shun. Peasant feet. Farmer feet. Well. Minna liked them. She liked them more than she thought one could, or should, like a pair of feet. She felt her tongue, dry as wool—the strange air—Samuel’s gaze. She felt regret—her distance from other feelings she’d meant to have.

“If you have questions . . .” he began again.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

And he did.

 

 

 

T
HE trees were as real as any trees. Minna sat in their shade and floated her swollen fingers in the creek, like goyim sausages in brine. It felt fine.
Fine.
It could even have felt good, but the water was shallow, and a little too warm, and she found herself thinking, almost wistfully, of the glasses of ice, in the room, in the basement, in Odessa. Which was perverse, she knew—but not quite as bad as her other thoughts, of Samuel, who, as he’d stood to leave, had leaned forward, so close to Minna that his hair touched her cheek. He’d paused there, breathing on her neck. Or this is what seemed to have happened; as Minna revisited the events, their nature kept shifting. He’d had to lean forward, after all—hadn’t he? Based on the mechanics of standing up, he would have had to lean forward, yes. But did he have to draw so close? And the breath he’d left on her neck—had it been that, a breath, left for her, like a word, or had it simply been breath, on its way out, happening to pass by as her neck came into range?

People had to breathe, always.

Minna worked to cleanse her mind, to concentrate on the creek before her—but this only brought her around to another kind of longing: to escape, like the water: to change shape, run elsewhere, head east. It was promising, yet preposterous, to think that east still existed; that all over the world people were living in cities and towns, sleeping in real buildings and walking in real streets—Minna had seen them, from the train, not a hundred miles away!—that civilizations had been toiled over and built and perfected and yet here she was, trying to turn grass into fire. Which would burn fast, if Samuel was right. Which would provide heat, perhaps, for one-twentieth of the time it had taken to gather.

The trees
, he’d said. Just before the breath, which she would no longer allow herself to think on, he’d said,
the trees.
Yes. The trees could be cut down. She had thought of this already. They could be cut, and lit, as trees were. But then there would be no more trees, and no more of this shade, which felt almost shamefully good. There would be no place to rest from the sun except for the house that stank and was really a hill and contained these men who made her feel wrong in so many different ways. And how, in such a place, to tell time’s passing if not for the changing of trees? Had September already come and gone? Was it still summer?These were questions only an idiot would ask, a woman who couldn’t see straight let alone run a household. Yet she had no idea what seasons did here. Jacob had told her on the train about fires and blizzards, about cyclones that lifted horses off the ground and dropped them down miles away, but he did not explain any order to these events. All Minna knew was that since she’d been here, every day had been the same. Early and late, there was the low chirring of insects, and in the heat of the day, under the sky’s searing glare, a lower rumble as if thunder was coming except the rumble never built or broke, it just went on like a sound that had been going on always and would continue on long after you were gone. The only clouds came late, and these were noncommittal: long skinny wisps that dissolved by the time you looked up again, leaving only, always, the same sun. Other suns she’d known possessed some degree of mystery—they hid, then reappeared in a new place; they darkened to the color of a rose one day, and the next, went white. But here, as long as it was daytime, the sun was always visible, and the color of sun, and impossible to look at; you could barely gauge the hour without burning your eyes. Jacob had shown her the only timepiece they owned. He’d pointed to a slim bulge in Max’s vest pocket and taught her:
watch.
Which was different from, and the same as,
to watch.
He said that Max didn’t like anyone to use his watch, that he believed they should ignore such arbitrary measurements, that their work here was God’s and that God would make His rhythms known. Minna laughed and said that sounded unlikely, and Jacob laughed with her. But he didn’t offer to ask Max for the watch.

The men would go on with their digging, and their not mentioning any kind of wedding. Max wouldn’t notice her eye, even if it turned the color of a plum. Samuel wouldn’t speak to her again until he found her failing in some new way. No one would call her Minnie—not even Jacob. He’d tried it once and she’d protested, because she felt she had to. She’d expected him to ignore her, and say,
Yes, Minnie! Of course I won’t call you Minnie, Minnie!
But he’d surprised her by taking her seriously, and ever since she’d only been Minna.

If you were a bird, she thought, say a hawk, you might notice her. You might think, there is a girl making grass into fire. Or, there is a girl whose future stepson maybe—or maybe not—almost kissed her on the neck. You might take pity on her, for being able to see so far and yet know so little of what was around her. You might answer some basic questions. Like, what would one see, in this place, if one was a bird? Where were the other people? How far was the nearest town? Was there a doctor? Where did the Indians live? Did they have scalps, like Jacob said, strung up like flags? Did they have a name for Jews? How close was the butcher with his delivery of their meat? And beyond? How far was the closest city? Where could a woman buy a hat? Where were the skyscrapers, the streetcars, the confections? Where was America?

M
INNA’S veil was cut in the yard, next to the chickens. She sat on a crate while the woman doing the cutting stood behind her. Ruth, she was called, as one of Minna’s aunts had been, and perhaps still was. And it seemed to Minna that this Ruth had something of that
Rut
about her, an evasiveness so energetic as to be its own form of directness. When Ruth had said, offhandedly, that she would “cut” Minna’s veil, she did not mean, as Minna assumed, the first step of an elaborate tailoring process; she’d meant that Minna’s veil would be cut from a flour sack.