The Little Bride (12 page)

 

 

B
ACK in the dark of the cave, she could barely see. She sipped from the smallest bucket, hoping it was the clean one, and when the water tasted of nothing worse than wood, she gulped it down. She sat on one of the boxes until her vision returned, then covered her eyes with her hands. Her hands smelled familiar. Blood pounded in her neck.
Breathe.
She calmed herself in the urgent, giddy way one does when the only other choice is panic. Then she spread one finger at a time, revealing the room in stripes so narrow she could almost pretend that it wasn’t real. Line of board. Slice of blackened iron. There was a clean edge of light. Half a candlestick, curves like knuckles. A scrap of white—

Minna was up, moving toward it, her fingers on the fringe before she realized that it was just the corner of a folded prayer shawl
.
She stepped back, embarrassed. What had she imagined it might be? A note from her predecessor, offering advice? A piece of lace? Proof, simply, that another woman had existed here? Ridiculous, the very thought—Max’s wife had lasted only two days, barely long enough to see the “house” dug let alone to leave behind a souvenir—yet Minna couldn’t stop herself. She looked under the pillow on the bed, lifted up the blankets in the hole. She peered behind the stove. In one corner was a box with a few shirts, all men’s, all threadbare, the pockets ripping loose. She felt the edge of the table, the undersides—there was no drawer. She opened a sack and found potatoes, opened another and found an inch of flour. In a small tin there were coffee beans; next to the coffee beans was a small stack of magazines which looked to be primers on farming. Under the shawl were two stacks of dishes and tins, a prayer book, a pair of leather boxes—Max’s
tefillin—
and a possibly dead cricket. Minna laid a finger on its back, easily crushed it, then pulled down the prayer book, which she gripped by the cover and shook. When nothing came loose, she shook harder. Finally a sheaf of paper dropped out and she knelt down to look. But it was only a section of the book, broken off by her assault. She tried to shove it back into place, then realized she was grinding the whole book into the dirt. She yanked it up and the pages fell out again. In the synagogue, she remembered, when a book so much as touched a bench, the women cradled and kissed it. But in Minna’s rush to pick up the pages, she tore one, and in the seconds that followed, which felt like hours, as the letters grew blacker and more accusing, she decided it would be easier to bury the page than fix it. She started to dig. That the floor was dirt suddenly seemed a blessing.

If you were careful,
her father said,
you could make a decent seamstress. That would keep you. That would be a decent way to live.

Minna grew aware of herself, scratching like a rat. A shadow had tilted into the room: tall, but not Max. Taller than Max, and with longer arms. But these arms weren’t skinny, and they ended in fists. Minna squinted, trying to make out his eyes, then realized she must look mad. She grabbed the prayer book off the ground and opened it as if to read. He might leave, she thought, and pretend he hadn’t seen her. He might laugh, like Jacob would. But he did neither. He stepped closer and squatted down, and now his face came into view: long and sharp-jawed and rough with black stubble. He was better-looking than Jacob, yes, even handsome, yet somehow difficult to look at. Hard. Or maybe Minna couldn’t look at him because he was looking at her as through a nearly gone piece of soap—as if he was seeing fear and sin and bone all splayed out, and this confusion that he’d caused in her fingers and toes, a tingling close to pain.

She closed the book. “Don’t just watch me, then.”

His hand reached toward her—warm from its fist. “Samuel,” he said.

“Yes.” She slipped free. “I deduced that.”

“Are you all right?”

Minna stood. She felt dangerously tempted to answer him honestly. A sudden longing to talk and talk. But the grass, she would say, but the light, but this was not what I expected. But what did she expect?

She dusted off the book with her skirt, turning so he couldn’t see her face. “You won’t . . .” She stopped.

“No.” Samuel rose from his squat. Again he reached his hand toward her. Minna mistrusted him suddenly—not that he wouldn’t keep her secret but that he would keep it out of kindness. His curls stood in jagged chunks around his head, yet somehow they didn’t look silly; they seemed to be watching her, like his eyes, for another misstep. Which might include, she thought, her taking his hand again. Then he was saying, “What?You want to keep it?” and Minna realized that he was looking at the book. He only wanted her to give him the book. She felt relief as she handed it back, then a stab of injury as she watched him place it on the shelf. His movements were efficient, his back straight. She couldn’t tell if he cared about the book itself, and the words within, or just the fact that she’d been desecrating it. When he turned again, his expression was as illegible as at first.

“Is there anything you need?” he asked.

She wanted to cry.

“To prepare dinner I mean.” He spoke gently. “Is there anything you need. I’ve been the cook, up until now.”

Minna straightened. It was simple, she told herself. A simple question. All he wanted was a simple answer. She brushed her dirty hands against each other, set them on her hips, and swallowed. “What do I cook?”

“That’s easy,” Samuel said. “There are few options. A pancake out of potatoes, a pancake out of flour. There’s butter made last week, in the well”—he pointed at a board on the floor—“and milk from this morning. If there are extra eggs, eggs.”

“And meat?” she asked.

“We’re waiting a shipment. The nearest kosher butcher is at Sioux Falls. He’ll come through in a couple weeks. Maybe.”

“What I ate last night, that was the last?”

“Only the best, for the bride.”

Minna inspected his face carefully, trying to find a hint of venom, but he had nothing of Jacob’s soft cheeks or Max’s nervous eyes, only a self-sufficiency that was beginning to anger her. And the word
bride
from that perfectly symmetrical mouth. She no longer wanted to cry, she wanted to hit him, this older boy who would be her stepson, who seemed decent, almost gracious, yet also calculating, who made her feel nervous as a hare. She was not used to wanting a person to like her.

She worked to keep her voice steady. “When do you eat?”

“When there’s food ready.”

“I’ll call for you, then.”

“You might try shouting.” For an instant Samuel looked possibly, vaguely, amused. Then he turned to go.

“I can shout,” Minna blurted.

Samuel grabbed the top of the door frame and stopped. He kept his back to her—an affected pose, she thought, meant to make him look like a man. She chose to ignore the fact that it succeeded. “Is there a rake?” she asked.

“A species of one. What for?”

“The ruined wheat. I thought I’d use it to make a fire that didn’t stink of shit.”

“Ah. You’re blunt. And you can shout. Yet you haven’t asked what happened to the field.”

“I didn’t think it mattered. It’s done.”

Samuel released the door frame, let his arms fall to his sides, and breathed out a long, weary sigh—the kind of man’s sigh Minna couldn’t help but feel she’d caused.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Samuel stepped out into the sun. “The rake’s behind the chicken house. But remember,” he said, turning to face her, and she saw a crack now in his facade, the way the deepest cracks appear only in the brightest light. She saw, for an instant, how utterly unhappy he was. Then he smiled—her first glimpse of his strong, white teeth—and said brightly, “When the wheat won’t make fire, it’s not your fault.”

F
OR a week, Minna devoted herself to finding a technique for burning the wheat. The stems were bent or broken but not snapped, so before she could rake, she had to cut. She found an ax behind the chicken coop, a dull single-bit but sufficient (
like this!
she heard her father say, his arms raised:
chop!)
, and after milking—which was more difficult than she remembered it ever being with her father’s goat—and washing and mending and pressing and weeding and a quick pull of potatoes from the garden, she spent the better part of the mornings hacking away on her knees.

If Samuel hadn’t predicted her failure, she might have given up on the whole idea. But he’d been so sure of himself, almost snide:
When the wheat won’t make fire . . .
and so in the afternoons, after serving dinner, she started up again, trying to make bundles of the cut wheat. The key was tightness, for which she needed twine, and the closest thing to twine was grass. But the grass was insistent on being grass. It snapped, mocking her, lying in her lap half the length it was before, then half again, then again, until only shards remained. It was sharp, and cut through her calluses. Her neck went stiff from looking down.

She imagined what she must look like from the outer fields, all morning beating the earth, all afternoon bent like an old woman over her lap.

But if the men noticed, they said nothing. Just like they said nothing to her about anything else, really, apart from the weather (the sky went on cloudless) and the food (her latkes
,
in particular, they praised). When Samuel and Max walked out into the field, Jacob would hang back and toss English words at her—
rock, sun, water, grass
—then make her say them back, and laugh. He let her hold a glittering, rainbow-colored, crescent-shaped rock that reminded her of a mollusk, or snail, and a sharpened piece of flint he claimed to have been given by an Indian when he was wandering he wouldn’t say where. But around his father and brother he was newly shy with her. Max spoke to Minna softly but said little, his softness not a symptom of warmth so much as distraction, the same distraction that seemed to overtake him in the fields. Max, she observed, didn’t dig with his sons so much as he traveled along with them, his shovel often nothing but a place for his hands to rest as he stared at the sky, until the boys moved on and he followed, more docile than the horse. Samuel viewed her out the corners of his eyes, except when they had to exchange necessary information, in which case he looked at her for the shortest possible time. Once, finding her in the yard on the verge of tears, the cow having just kicked over the measly two or three cups of milk it had taken Minna twenty minutes to pull, he gave her a curt glance, tied the animal’s hind legs with a strap of leather, said, “Better to hobble her,” and walked away again.

Minna wanted to shout at his back,
I know! I know!
But she didn’t know much of anything, she realized. She’d sold her father’s goat as soon as she could. She’d only half listened to her aunts’ housekeeping advice. She’d never even completed her numbers lessons in school, which meant that she probably would have made a lousy bookkeeper, too. Even her father’s ax—as soon as she could chop a log in two swings, he’d taken it away.

But Samuel had disappeared around the house.

It was as if there had been a collective decision to pretend that Minna had always been here. Or maybe it was Max’s decision: maybe he’d directed his sons not to ask too many questions, thinking questions impolite. Max was exceptionally concerned with politeness, a concern which struck Minna as farcical, given its context. The men washed themselves in the same bucket she used to wash the dishes. The outhouse was made of crates, and stood only a few feet from the cave. There was little, within a few days, that Minna didn’t know of their habits and smells and noises. And yet no one had asked where she was born, or whether she had siblings or parents or any family at all, or what she had done with her life up until now.

These weren’t questions Minna ever thought she wanted to be asked. Yet it seemed possible, here, that her forgetting would finally overwhelm her remembering, that her past would evaporate into the gaping sky and leave her only with the present. Which was the gaping sky. Which were these strangers who refused introductions, as if they refused the notion that they were strangers. As if that might make them less strange.

Most frustrating, there was no talk of a wedding. Jacob had said
stepmother
, Samuel had said
bride
, but Minna had not been informed of any plan. She knew that engagement was not marriage. She had endured a brief engagement once before, soon after her father died, when her aunts betrothed her to a tailor’s son, a short boy with eyes that were always moist. But when her aunts left, the boy’s family sent the
shadkhen
to tell Minna that there would be no wedding. They had agreed to it only to please the indomitable aunts, but Minna was unsuitable, the orphan of a harlot and of the miner who couldn’t make her stay.

She had been glad not to be getting married, but troubled, too, for she’d been rejected by a boy who looked like he was always crying. It was not as simple, she discovered, as wanting or not wanting. There were things you wanted only because they would mean that you were wanted. And now with Max, it was the same. That she didn’t care for him, that she could barely imagine caring for him, that she caught herself, frequently, staring at his older son, barely mattered. She had brought herself here, across an ocean, for the purpose of marrying Max; if he decided she wasn’t what he wanted, she couldn’t claim indifference. She couldn’t return. There was nowhere to return to.