The Little Bride (29 page)

She had to be hallucinating. She didn’t even need vodka anymore. She went in and said, “There’s a forest of light outside,” and no one even went to see.

 

 

A
NOTHER night, Minna saw Liesl’s map in her mind. She saw the mountains, the river, the squares within squares—she saw, within the smallest within, their snow tunnels, intricate and deep and narrow, like a new set of roads, a separate country.

The bottom of an ocean, Jacob had said, and Minna could believe it.

S
HE thought of Liesl and Ruth. The sharp runners on their sleighs. The abundance in their cellars. Then she thought: What if the snow was gone at their houses? What if the runners were put to rest, the earth thawed, the kitchen gardens planted, pole beans and peas and radishes starting to root? She could see a froth of carrot greens. She could smell the wet dirt that collects in lettuces. It seemed possible, somehow, that this, theirs, was the only forgotten place: one hundred sixty acres of snow in the middle of spring. People would gawk, then go back to their planting.

 

 

T
HE last chicken that would die that winter died. They ate without fanfare, their stomachs cramping. Afterward, you could smell the meat emptied out into the snow. Their revelations were commonplace now. They hated the chickens for tempting Max into sin, which seemed to have led them here: too tired to read or play cards or even to argue, the vodka bottles empty and singing out on the snow shelf. This was wrong, she knew, but it was impossible not to think that Max’s weakness had led them to be forgotten. In bed one night she asked him: “Why did you eat the chicken?”

He didn’t answer right away. His hands did not quite touch her stomach but hovered slightly, cupping a mound of air, waiting for the baby to fill it. She thought of her father’s waiting, the shawls just so over the bedposts. She saw his bed, and then a woman beside it, the Christian woman whose face she could never see clearly, the one who’d thrown Minna’s stones back in the river. The woman stood by her father’s bed, spreading her arms wide to fold a sheet, and Minna wondered: What if the woman had come more frequently than Minna knew, and Minna’s father had not been alone in the way she remembered him to be? What if all her loyalty was based on a misunderstanding?

“Why did you?” Max whispered back.

“What?”

“Eat the chicken.”

She considered. She was wide-awake now, her empty stomach drumming beneath the dome of Max’s hands. His breath was sour and hot on her ear. If you knew what I’ve eaten, she thought. She said, “I never promised anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never promised.”

“You must have. They said.”

“I told a lie.”

She could feel, at the foot of the bed, the other bed. The other eyes trained on the dark. She felt an urge to speak Samuel’s name, and ask him to forgive her. She knew this was backward, knew it was Max she should apologize to, but she couldn’t help herself. From the time she’d met him, Samuel had made her want to explain herself. He’d seemed to want to know her, whereas all the other men only wanted her to know them. Yet what would she ask him to forgive her for? For lying to his father, or for marrying him? For being a girl in his house? Or for her fear of spring, in the deepest, most senseless caverns of her body she pretended against yet here it was: fear of warmth, thaw, the peeling off of layers. She could not begin again the same way.

Behind her, Max said, “I don’t know what to say.”

Minna started to cry. She was so hungry, and it was such a peculiar, lovely thing for him to say. It was as if he’d said, do what you want. She waited for his hands to leave the place around her belly, for him to roll away. But Max didn’t move.

“So why did
you
eat it?” she asked.

“I was hungry,” he said.

T
HE melt was sudden. A current of warmth came up off the horizon one morning and the snow walls started to sink and flow into the paths; by noon the slush was up to their shins. The snow was too much to go gently. If you stood still you could hear it crackle; if you stood long enough you could hear a hiss beneath the crackle. The hiss lasted for days as the snow shrank. Water poured off the roof and seeped through the windows. They dug channels around the house to keep it from flooding, then around the chicken coop, but they were weak and couldn’t dig fast enough and had to bring the remaining chickens inside the house. Empty sacks floated in the cellar. The cow and horse and mule stood in water, coats dull as clay, watching the people run back and forth along their paths, which one day showed a patch of matted grass. The snow was down to their waists. They could see the unfinished frame of the second room, the new windows leaning against it, fine and swollen. They could see the cottonwoods, and snow. The snow shone like an earthly sun; they had to cover their eyes. They didn’t see the sleigh until they heard runners cutting through the slush.

It was Fritzi who pulled the horses to a stop, and nodded. He looked as though he expected them to be standing there, expecting him. But of course they hadn’t. Not Fritzi. His eyes were streaked with rage. Minna felt her toes, in her wet boots. She thought, Otto’s dead.

Fritzi held out a sack for Samuel to take, then another. “I’ve brought food,” he said. It was clear from the hardness in his posture that he didn’t intend to climb down. Only Max didn’t seem to comprehend the situation. He said, “So the man dares to come now, and sends
you
instead? He won’t even show himself?”

Fritzi narrowed his eyes. You could see him trying to quiet himself, his free hand caressing his reins, his lips pressed together. You could feel his mother shushing in his ear. He said, “He was coming here. To bring you food.”

Max’s mouth was open. He closed it. Minna hadn’t noticed how much of his beard had fallen out, or how the top of his chin was red with teeth marks. Samuel and Jacob stood silently, boys again, heads bowed.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked Fritzi.

“At home.”

For an instant Minna had thought Liesl dead, too. But she had only chosen not to come. She didn’t want to see Minna now, or perhaps ever again.

“Please tell her we are so sorry,” she said.

Fritzi smiled in a hateful way.

“Please thank her for the food.”

The smile held. Fritzi seemed to wait just so he could watch them resist themselves—they would pounce on the bags, you could feel it, the moment he left. Then he left.

 

 

 

A
WEEK later, when the road was clear enough for the boys to get to town, the stores were empty of food. They returned with a hand sack of flour a man had given them, and new tack for the horse, which the sisters from Baltimore had sold them, on credit and at a discount.

“You looked so desperate?” Max asked angrily. For a second, Minna thought he might turn the sack upside down. “They thought you were looking for charity?”

Neither of the boys answered right away. They appraised their father as if he were a foreigner, or as if to remind him that in fact he was. They’d spoken little of Otto—his death saddened them more than their father could bear—but his loss was everywhere. Samuel had shaved his beard and looked clean, and impatient. Jacob had kept his boy-fur but his thinness was not good for him; his flesh had hidden his likeness to Max, his sunken eyes and nervous mouth. His mockery held no playfulness now. He said, “We were.”

Leo and Ruth, they said, had nothing to spare. They’d gone there on their way home, thinking to promise more work in exchange for food, but the children looked like little grown-ups and Ruth did not welcome them. She was upstairs sleeping, Leo said. The baby had been born dead. Leo said not to tell anyone, especially not Minna. Ruth would be so ashamed. He shouldn’t have told them either, he said. But so he had.

“Poor Ruth,” Minna said. And she felt this. She was sorry for Ruth, and sorry for Leo, who’d betrayed his wife’s secret. Minna had misjudged him, perhaps. She’d thought him haughty, especially around Max, but now she could see that he was afraid. He was afraid of Max, just as she’d been afraid of Rebeka. Weak people made you see yourself in them.

But Max and the boys didn’t seem to hear her. Or they’d stopped trusting what she said.

“We’ll go to the colony,” Samuel said. “They’ll help us.”

“What about Cincinnati?” asked Jacob. “They helped us.”

“I won’t go anywhere,” said Max.

“You’ll die,” Jacob said.

“Shut it,” said Samuel, and turned to Max. “You don’t have to come. We’ll go, then come back.”

“Are you crazy?” Jacob raised his arms. “I’m not coming back here. I won’t stay another week. We’ll all die.”

“It’s spring,” said Samuel.

“Yes. And then winter again. Have you noticed the way of things?”

“We’ll be prepared by then.”

“That’s what you said last year.”

“We are staying,” said Max. “If we leave, Fritzi won’t waste a second claiming this land.”

“Let him have it.”

“We are free here.”

“Is that what this is?” Jacob laughed, a great hiccup.

“We have rights to this land.”

“Rights to rocks, you mean? These plentiful rocks? Should we thank God for giving us so many rocks?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I was putting it in terms you’d understand.”

Max stared, his eyes small. Samuel set a hand on his shoulder but Max snarled and threw him off, startling them all.

“Leave me,” he said, to no one in particular.

“You’ll die,” Jacob said.

“Then I’ll die.”

 

 

 

H
E’D gone feverish, they realized. He shook the bed with his shivering that night and would not let Minna near him. The child, he cried, don’t hurt the child. When she did not correct him, his sons looked at her; then they brought their father rags she’d cooled in the creek, which ran fast now, higher and wider than its banks. Jacob sat next to him guiltily, playing spoons, but Max would not be distracted. He kept pointing at Minna and telling her to leave. She protested, but he hit her hands away. The house smelled of fever and feet and chicken shit. She left. She stood outside in the dark and breathed in the cooling of the day, the slush and mud, stars and moon, a few clouds. She had the garbled pent-up energy of the newly unhungry. She could walk to the creek. She could walk beyond it. But it was dark, and the ground was slush or mud or new streams. The barn was wet. There was nowhere to sleep, and nowhere to walk to. Somewhere not too far from here Otto had been dug out of the snow. From the vodka bottles came the drowsy buzz of the first flies. She thought of Ruth.

She waited for the house to quiet, then entered softly, but Max woke at her weight and pushed her out of the bed. Sleep with your sons, he said. And Minna felt the fever then, or she called it fever, though she had so rarely been sick, she named the heat through her limbs
fever. Kadokhes. Goryachka.
She thought it all the ways she knew to think it, until she almost believed it, then she took a blanket Max had thrown off and lay on the floor next to the stove, waiting for her chest to stop pounding.