The Little Bride (13 page)

 

 

 

L
ATE one morning, she was cooking dinner and, as an indulgence, a way of rewarding herself, letting her mind drift to Ilya, when Jacob ran in, grabbed the spoon from her hand, and dragged her outside.

“
Stone boat
,” he said, pointing toward the field where Samuel was leading the mule as it pulled another load of rocks. “That sled is called a
stone boat.
You know
stone
, you know
boat—
you understand? It’s funny, no?
Stone boat?
It sounds like a boat made of stones, but really it’s a boat to carry stones!”

“Like
wood stove
,” Minna said. “It’s not that funny.”

“Oh, come on.” Jacob elbowed her softly. “Not even a little bit?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why did you bring me out here?”

Jacob smiled. “Well. Since you asked. I was—I am—I worry you’ve forgotten what I said—about having an adventure.”

“But this
isn’t
an adventure.”

“You could pretend it is. If you were happier. You’re too unhappy.”

Minna stood silent.

“I’m afraid you’ll run away,” Jacob said.

This was true—Minna could see it in his lower lip. She might have found it touching, if she wasn’t so irritated. “Where would I even go?” she asked. “How would I get there?”

“Exactly! You can’t leave.”

“I don’t get the sense that your father or brother would mind.”

He shook his head. “He’s going to marry you—I promise.”

“He barely seems to know I’m here.”

“He’s just waiting.”

“For what?”

Jacob gave her a desperate look, his lips twisted into his teeth.

“They’re not divorced,” she said, realizing.

“She dropped a Get at the Mitchell post office. No stamp, no postmark—not a clue where she was heading. Now he just has to sign it. He’s going to! He’s just waiting.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“He doesn’t want me.”

“No! He—I’ll talk to him.”

“Please don’t.”

“I will!”

“Jacob.”

He pumped his arms, as if to run.

“What about Samuel?”

“What about him?”

Minna dragged a foot in the dirt. She wished she could take her question back. “What makes you think he wants me to stay.”

Jacob studied her for a minute. “He hasn’t said anything about wanting you to leave,” he said. Then he smiled brightly, wiggled his fingers—ta ta!—and took off for the fields.

 

 

 

I
N the days that followed, Max must have signed the Get, for he began to show Minna signs of affection. A pat of her hand, a poke at her hair. At first Minna thought the gestures merely polite. He’d been terrified, she realized, the night of her arrival, the first time he’d taken her hand. And yet he kept on reaching, trying to prove something, she supposed, to his sons, to her, to himself. That he was young enough? American enough? He was trying too hard. She hated watching him tremble as he pinched her arm before bed, hated watching his mouth move silently—praying, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be struck down for contact with a woman who was not yet his wife. There were men, she knew, who feared that sort of thing. Moses had probably been one, before he’d found himself trapped on a boat with women and girls in need of carrying. In Beltsy, once, Minna had followed her father into the men’s section of the synagogue and found herself promptly hauled out by the elbow, led into the dingy, lace-curtained women’s room in back, and ordered to pray to God to forgive her. Minna had forgotten how to pray—they only went to
shul
twice a year, once on Yom Kippur and once, as today, on the anniversary of her mother’s leaving—and so she cried instead. She couldn’t see through the holes in the lace to find her father. She was angry at him for not having stopped her from following him, and sorry for him, too, that he was so lost in his misery he couldn’t remember the rules, like other adults, and that he had a child who could not pray. Minna cried until the woman next to her grabbed her hand, and leaned down to explain, in a friendly hush:
The man’s body? Contains his mind. The woman’s? Only a body. We are body bodies. Yes? Understand?

Minna had not understood. But she remembered. And over the years she’d seen how her body became a body body. Each swell of flesh, each darkening, each sudden hair that appeared fullblown, like a black moth from a chrysalis, made her more powerful and doomed. This was what made Max shake, she knew. To him, Minna was dangerous simply because she was she, and he was he. One day, apparently, he would take off his clothes. He was already doing it, in his mind. He would take off his clothes and reach for her and so on and so forth—and here was where Minna’s mind left her, just like the woman at
shul
said, because to think clearly about the so on and so forth would be enough to make her gag.

 

 

 

A
T night, while Minna washed the dishes, the men studied and prayed. Or Max studied and prayed. Samuel appeared to study but looked conflicted about the praying; one minute his eyes would be closed, his lips moving, then suddenly he’d be staring at the door, as if the mule and rocks and ruined wheat had gripped his thoughts. Jacob usually propped his chin in his hand and tried to pretend that he wasn’t dozing.

There was only one lamp, which Minna insisted they use. She didn’t mind scrubbing in the half dark of her own shadow, listening to her hands slip in and out of the bucket. There was no running water, as she’d imagined, nor a sink—not even a stone one, as she’d allowed in her worst version of her future life. But one had to adapt—Minna knew how to adapt. The bucket was strong, at least, and had no holes, and held water. If the air outside defied her existence, the water reaffirmed it: a finger plunged; a noise was made; water moved aside. Her grass cuts stung.

Only when she got into bed and pretended to sleep did the men begin to talk.

“The flour is almost gone.” Max, in his offhanded way, as if commenting on the taste of the coffee. Which was also almost gone.

“We ought to make hay.” Samuel. “Put up feed for the winter then sell the rest and buy flour.”

“Mm.” Max.

“It may be time to stop clearing rocks.”

“We can’t stop. Where will we plant, in the spring?”

“Where we planted last spring. It would have been enough . . .” An edge of exasperation in Samuel’s voice. A quieting. A sharp inhale from Max.

“Why bother?” Jacob yawned. “Why bother repeating yourselves?”

Over the course of a few nights, Minna put together the story of the ruined field: while Jacob had been off “fetching” her, the wheat came ready for harvest, followed by a perfect day, hot and dry. But it was the Sabbath, and Max refused to work or to let Samuel work, and that night a hailstorm came and crushed the wheat.

Which surprised Minna—not the hail, but Max’s refusal. She could have guessed that he would be observant, based on the questions they’d asked at the Look—but she’d assumed those were formalities, asked to every girl. In New York, when Jacob said
kosher
, Minna had made the word small, a token sort of
kashrus
, like how her mother had kept house, separating meat and dairy but halfheartedly, as one might separate quarreling children. She hadn’t imagined that they would have to forgo eating any meat until a
shoykhet
arrived with his special knives, or that the two stacks of plates—one
milkhik
, one
fleyshik
—would not be allowed to touch each other. She hadn’t expected Max to don the
tefillin
every morning. She’d assumed, she realized, that Max’s observance would be like her father’s—full of desertion and guilt, not of diligence and prayer. She’d never known anyone, not closely, who so strictly followed the laws.

No one told the story of the Shabbos hail directly, of course. Jacob hadn’t been there. Max was ashamed, and also unrepentant. Samuel tried to hide his frustration by approaching the issue sideways:

“It may be that we’ve cleared all we can handle for the time being.”

“It may be worth considering that we’ve saved no seeds for spring.”

“It may be time to start putting up hay.”

Samuel spoke to his father like people spoke to the old: trying to correct and redirect him without his knowing. Which wound up being more insulting, it seemed to Minna, than Jacob’s flagrant disobedience. Jacob was honest, at least. One night, Max was delivering a quiet lecture on the importance of keeping their fundamental goals in sight—freedom, self-reliance, a new Zion for a new age—and Jacob didn’t even wait for him to finish before asking, “Who needs Zion? We have America.”

“We are Jews,” said Max.

“Ah. So we’ll starve, even in America!”

“Do you imagine, in Eretz Yisrael, that they work on holy days?”

It was Samuel who answered this without pause, as if he’d rehearsed for just such a question. “Perhaps one should stop imagining Palestine and start imagining South Dakota. One hundred sixty acres in South Dakota in need of a barn. A well. A new wagon. Two oxen would be cheaper to feed than the one mule. One could even imagine what might be accomplished if one was to put aside one’s pride for a moment and accept a small contribution from the Baron’s Aid Society.” Samuel didn’t emphasize
one
; it floated, a clandestine accusation. “We’re not alone, after all. That’s a false idea. And we’re not original. One might want to believe we are, but why, if one also wants to believe that we’re building a new Israel? Who ever heard of one man—”

“Sender.” Max’s authoritative voice, which was too despondent to sound truly authoritative. “Sender, that’s enough.”

A loud knock against the table. Jacob. “Enough with the Yiddish! Call him Sam
.”
He knocked again. “Sammy! Call me Jake, and call him Sammy! And call her Willamina, while you’re at it. Or Minnie. Minnie!Yes!”

Minnie.
Minna wondered sometimes if her younger brother, if he’d lived, would have been like Jacob—a diverter, a squelcher of all earnestness. It was as if Samuel had been born into one colander and Jacob into one far below that, and all the lightness that ran off Samuel landed on Jacob. Another night he announced, “Here’s a joke. We need a joke. Otto told me this one. Why didn’t Jesus want money like all the other Jews?”

Silence.

Finally Samuel, muttering: “Go on, then.”

“Because his hands were nailed to the cross.”

“That is meant to be funny?” Max, outraged.

“I knew you wouldn’t get it.”

“Otto is an anti-Semite.”

A groan from Jacob. “He didn’t mean it like that.”

“How else can it be meant?”

“He could mean it both ways.” This was Samuel, of course. Who rarely made a statement, Minna was beginning to realize, that could only be interpreted one way. Even performing simple tasks, he seemed to hedge: as he patched the chickens’ roof, or sorted rocks from potatoes, his hands moved with a thick, tempered strength, and yet his eyes seemed to watch them mistrustfully. He wanted to be everything to everyone, model yeoman to his neighbors, studious son to his father. The Jewish American who wasn’t Jewish, the American Jew who wasn’t American. “Otto could be joking and serious at the same time,” he continued. “He could mean well and mean badly. He may not know which it is himself.”

“He knows.” Max sniffed. “When I stayed for supper that one night? I think he fed me pigs’ feet.”

“That may be all they had.”

“But he said it was chicken.”

“Maybe it
was
chicken.”

“It wasn’t chicken.”

“You didn’t sound so sure”—Jacob again—“a minute ago. What does it matter now anyway?You haven’t grown hooves.”

Minna smashed her face into her pillow, stifling a laugh, but a piece of straw went up her nose, tickling, and she couldn’t hold it in. She coughed as cover. The men shifted slightly on their crates.

She wondered what kind of looks they gave each other. Surprise? Warning? Tenderness?

It often happened this way. Their sudden silence. An uneasy peace. Which might help explain, she thought, why she was brought here. So that just when a mean, true argument was imminent, they might remember her, and stop.

 

 

 

M
INNA continued pulling up grass in big fistfuls.
Wheatgrass, Indian grass, switchgrass, big bluestem
: one day she would decide to learn the names of her torture and be disappointed when she found them nowhere near as precise as how she’d identified them then:
sharpest grass
,
shiniest grass, curly grass, hardest-to-pull grass.
She pulled all of it up from the roots, giving in to the slices in her palms, watching the dry soil break into dust, which reminded her of an ancient tin of cocoa powder in Galina’s pantry that she had sometimes dipped a finger into, after wetting it in her mouth. Minna missed the pantry: the cool air, the cold brass latches, the knowing, as she strayed off task, exactly what her task entailed, and to whom she answered. The men did not know, or seem to care, what she was doing. There were long moments in which she barely knew herself. She lost the idea of the twine, failed to recall the wheat.

Wheatgrass, Indian grass, switchgrass, big bluestem. The roots, as they ripped, made a crack, which added a small, murderous thrill to the moment. Minna felt little guilt. She remembered, from Beltsy, longer, slower ways for plants to suffer: trees eaten by moths, or pole beans by deer; carrots and potatoes gone to flower and fungus. Her father’s long, tangled ivy, which sat on a stool in the hall just outside her mother’s shop. The plant had been her mother’s, and so had turned for her father into her mother, and he refused to trim it, or even arrange it, so that the vines unfurled in a great sprawl across the floor. They climbed up one wall, covered the window, twisted around the legs of a chair which was never again moved. When her father remembered his watering, the leaves shone. But in its dying seasons, the plant curled and hardened; whole lengths of vine looked like they’d been fried in schmaltz; the house filled with a diseased scent. A few times, Minna had filled a pot with water and approached. But she couldn’t see how to get to it without stepping on it, which would break the brittle ropes, which her father would surely notice. Which would ruin him, she thought: he needed the plant to need him, just as he needed to neglect it.