The Little Bride (27 page)

She was alone, and glad of it.

She was selfish. They’d always said so.

She listened for voices, heard nothing, waited for panic to properly grip her. She drank a tin of coffee, then another, until she felt a buzz at her nape, and was able, finally, to focus. On the windowsills, for instance. They were fine sills. Fine windows the men had chosen, and paid for, and put up. Three more, meant for the second room, stood against the outside wall. So much had been provided her, planned, promised. And there were dangers—yes—focus. She had to remember the dangers. The eggs, for instance—the eggs were in the cellar. And most of the canned goods, too, and more flour, and all the potatoes. So. So they had to make it to the cellar and back, and to the barn, too, and to the chickens. And she had to keep the doorway clear so that they could return, and so that when they returned they would see that she’d hoped they would. Quick. She took up her fine new broom and opened the door. New snow pushed her back. She pushed harder, until she had to squint against the snow, the lost silence, the deafening search of her ears.

Where were they?! She began to sweep.

 

 

 

W
INTER, then. That early time was almost sweet. The snow would gain their shoulders, then the sky would break for a few days, the snow pour off the roof, there would be water to drink and wash with and the paths would stamp down almost to the ground. At midday they ate outside to feel the sun through their coats, ate with their eyes closed against the glare and got sleepy. Sometimes they napped then; even Samuel saw the limits of industry when the snow was high. Dark came early and a moon rose so close its bruises made shadows inside the house. The house felt like a house in those days, not just a room. The door string grew thick with the oil from their hands. Minna wove a small rug out of rags and laid it by the stove. She brought out her comb and a scrap of paper and hummed, through its teeth, a song she must once have been taught. Jacob instructed them in the intricacies of whist, and convinced Max to play, too, and Samuel offered up a square of felt and two dice. And because the way to the creek was never cleared, Max couldn’t bother her there, and neither did he bother her in their bed. He thought she was pregnant, she realized—for the pleasures she’d pretended before the snow came, for the high mood she was in now. He wouldn’t think to wonder if her mood might have something to do with his not touching her. She stopped anticipating his fingers, clenching for his approach. She forgot, almost, about Fritzi’s book. Sometimes she felt during that time like the men were her brothers, all three, forsaken along with her, and she their good sister, good as a gentile Sister, her face simple as an egg.
Snow
, Jacob said, and Minna found herself nodding, as though she knew the word already. The more English she learned, the more she felt this way: the more her tongue seemed to guide the language rather than the other way around.

One day Otto and Liesl and Fritzi glided up on a sleigh, their eyes red with wind, bearing a tin of tea and the news out of Mitchell, and Minna felt proud opening her door to them. The stove was warm, but not extravagantly so. She made the tea hot but not too strong and laid the table with fresh milk. Everyone was polite. When Otto put his arm around Samuel’s shoulders to give him more pointers about the house, Max didn’t seem to notice that the gesture was that of a father toward a son, nor did he complain about the wrong-way door. He watched Liesl, who looked lovelier than ever and murmured admirations about the house. Minna watched Samuel. She could watch him frankly, and appear to be watching Otto. So she watched, and was happy for him, at how relaxed he looked with Otto’s arm around his shoulders, and she was sad for him, too, for all the rest of the time, when he refused to let anyone relieve him of his vigilance. Otto said the snow would melt, there was always a melt around this time, and then he and Fritzi would be back to finish the house. And though Fritzi’s eyes betrayed his contempt, nothing more passed between him and Max than the quick soldierly nod practiced by men who are not soldiers. The news was of weather and the recent declaration of statehood and a new dry-goods store opened by two sisters from Baltimore who’d never been west of the Potomac River and who carried, alongside their calicoes, bolts of silk from the Orient; and of an old squaw—this was what they called the Indian women—who’d heard a woman crying alone in a sod hut and delivered her baby. Everyone agreed that this was a strange but good thing, and that it might mean something, though they wouldn’t presume to say what. So much politeness. Minna had made it impossible, she liked to think, for it to be any other way. Her well-swept floor. The biscuits she’d rolled as soon as they’d arrived. Even when they left, when the steam from their horses’ nostrils was gone and the sleigh fell off the white horizon, she didn’t feel the wretchedness she’d felt leaving their house, or (in the memories she’d revised to make them simpler, and more memorable) every other house.

D
ECEMBER 1, the kerosene turned to sludge. Minna kept the dates now, on a chart pinned to the wall, to track her use of eggs and keep a tally of their whist games. But December 1 they would have remembered anyway—it was a day people would talk about for years across America’s vast middle when things were bad and they needed reminding how much worse they could be, or when things were good and they feared complacency. The day of ice. The day the air turned blue. The day your eyeballs froze. The day you had to cut the cow’s tongue from its trough. Minna closed the flue, but the stove ate through more coal than it usually did in a week. She set the lamps to warm by the stove, but by midafternoon feet had crowded them out: the men, socks cracking, worked to bend their toes. She hung their boots up above. The air smelled of feet, the coffee tasted of feet. The boys wanted to bring the cow inside the house, but the path was too slick, she would break a leg. They cut into the ice, trying to gain purchase, but at dusk you could hear their axes still ringing. They gave up and came inside, joining Max and Minna at the table, which she’d drawn close to the stove, which she’d let run low to save coal through the night. They ate quickly, not speaking. Then they went to bed without undressing, short two blankets, one of which the boys had thrown over the horse, the other across the chicken coop. Minna layered both beds in every piece of clothing they had: shirts and underclothes and trousers and dresses, even her wedding dress she laid out, a lilac spirit pinned to the top. The men were already buried, burrowing. She wanted to lie down, too, but in her mind, she called up Liesl. What else would Liesl do? Minna heated bricks meant to lay the foundation for the second room in the stove, wrapped them in rags, and put them at the foot of both beds. Then she swept the room one more time, as if for extra luck. After that, her boots were the only sound. There was no wind that night. It was too cold for wind. Yet they must have slept, because in the morning on every pillow was a frozen pool of breath.

 

 

W
HAT followed? It was hard to say, exactly, even if you were there. Even if you tracked the days and nights—at some point along the way, you lost track of your tracking. An easing of the cold would appear, the air suddenly soft, the windows weeping. But it didn’t last long enough to melt the snow. Samuel tried to walk to Otto’s for a ride to town on the sleigh, but a new snow pushed him back. They tried to plow their way out, but neither their animals nor their plow were built for snow and the horse’s old tack was cracking and the mule sullenly bullied his way back to the barn. They kicked the mule, though they knew it wouldn’t help, kicked it for having so many legs, and knees, and backs of knees, so many surfaces to kick, and because it would never show injury or heartbreak. Jacob kicked hollering, and Samuel grunting, and Minna kicked when she hoped no one saw. Only Max didn’t kick the mule, Max with his faith, his inner minions, Max who appeared satisfied at last, now that they were truly cut off from the world. When he finished his prayers, he wore the flush of a rich man. Their food, he assured them, would see them through to the January thaw, just like last year. But last year was nothing like this, according to Jacob: the snow had never risen past their thighs; the kerosene hadn’t frozen for more than a couple days in a row. He said this to Minna more than to Max, a son’s appeal to one parent to set the other straight, that pitting and bribing Minna had only witnessed in other families. He wanted her to do something, but what could she do? In time, she would come to realize that he’d simply wanted her to say yes; to confirm—though she hadn’t been there—that he was right. Yes, last year was nothing like this. Yes, son—as Lina might have said—you are not mistaken. But just then she was too busy being amazed, all over again, by the absurdity of their situation. What difference did it make what happened last year? You could spend a lifetime trying to call up the heights and colors and temperatures and tastes that pitched you into danger, but as far as she could tell, memory didn’t save anyone. Last winter, this winter, next winter, the winter after that. Samuel offered no opinion on the matter. He’d grown sullen as the mule, obsessed with his own failures, so certain that he could have prevented their miscalculations—the poorly conceived door, the lack of a sleigh, the distance from house to cellar—that he could barely focus on anything else. He needed prompting when his turn came to milk. He threw his coat down on the stove and burned a hole in the sleeve. He forgot his gloves and came to supper with his fingertips black. Minna wished he would look at her, and find some comfort in her face. She wished he would stop punishing himself. It exposed him, finally, but in the most woeful way.

On the warmer days, you could hear the snow settling. The layers, rearranging themselves, creaked and sang and spread a vibration through the ground. Minna’s muscles quivered as if anticipating a slide, a crash, a breaking open, none of which happened, for there was no steep place to slide from—yet the possibility gave her energy, an urge for order, industry. She drove nails into the men’s boots for when the ice returned. She scheduled English lessons with Jacob. She pulled the rags up from between the floorboards, cleaned the house, then washed the rags and stuffed them back in. It was easy, in those milder periods, to cook and eat modestly, to feel the rationing as a form of loyalty. She kept them all on the delicate edge of hunger.

Then a snow would fall again, and the sky which had let down the snow would clear and freeze, and she would open the door and feel her eyelashes stand like the nails in the men’s boots and all reason and frugality would depart. She would serve a whole jar of beans at one meal, use egg in her bread, slather the bread thick with preserves.

She understood, then, in a buried way, how Max could have chosen himself over the Torah. How, once you found yourself straying, it was easier to stay on course than to go back.

Then again, the air would warm; her sense would return. This was the way of things, the back-and-forth, the backs always feeling longer than the forths. Eventually, the paths cut through snow taller than their heads. They went from the house to the chickens to the barn to the privy hole to the cellar to the coal bin to the house and that was all, just walls of snow and the driest air you could imagine, so dry you might walk with a fistful of snow in your mouth, breathing through your nose the ghost scents of urine on hay and human waste in snow and coal smoke frying the air. If you looked up, you could see the sky, often whiter than the snow. The boys tried climbing each other’s shoulders onto the shelf above. Sometimes they made it to the roof and dug the windows free; but the snow was fragile and fickle and quickly collapsed, taking them with it. Minna had it in her mind to weave a pair of snow shoes—she could see the line in her mind on the map, a little arrow pointing toward Liesl’s—but Samuel wouldn’t let her use the wood that was meant for the second room, and she had no twine. She would have to wait for Otto to come again. They were all waiting for that. Even Max, who never admitted it—you could catch him searching the sky sometimes, could tell from the way he bit his lip that he wasn’t looking for God, or even for the
shochet
, but for a German.

 

 

S
OMETIMES Minna found herself thinking about the time when the boys were gone. She thought of the candlelight and the milk glue and the lost hours, the thumping of her heels through the long afternoons as Max dug. She thought of it as an Era. There was a heedlessness to those days, an almost charm, which she may or may not have felt at the time, but which now she allowed herself to envy and miss. And because she did not berate herself for this allowance, because she didn’t force herself to go back through, sifting and pinning, to determine the facts, she guessed that she must be growing older.

 

 

T
WO chickens died. This was after the eggs were gone and Minna had given up her tracking, after the time the boys guessed must be January, after the thaw did not come. For weeks they’d been eating flat bread for breakfast, potatoes and milk at noon, corn mush at night, so that every meal was the day before and the day after and further confused the passing of time. They only knew that it was one day and two chickens, discovered by Jacob. They heard him shout, then he came careening into the house gripping the birds by their legs. He gave a giant, licklipping grin before he stopped himself. Regret, recalculation: Max: he shouldn’t have shouted, shouldn’t have brought them in here, he should have stuffed them into the snow and come back for them at night. You could see Samuel thinking the same thing, slitting furious eyes at his brother. Minna stood over the stove, stirring cornmeal into water. She had been thinking, before Jacob burst in, whether to leave it as porridge, or if she should let it cool, slice it, fry it as cakes. Cakes would require butter, which they were running out of.