The Little Bride (23 page)

Max kept digging.

“Motke,” she said gently, “you might stop. There’s nothing left.”

But as soon as she’d spoken his name, her sympathy shrank to a nub; in her mouth was a bitter tang: what did he think he was doing—digging another
mikvah
? Enough with his laws and superstitions and forbiddings. She thought of the old kiddush cup Galina had once used as a chamber pot, and the way her neck curved as she tilted back her head to laugh. Her profanity was more comprehensible to Minna than Max’s devotion. So Max dug and Minna hated him. She wasn’t meant to miss Galina. She was meant to be a wife, to stop her missings, to stop, and stay. The taste in her mouth turned acrid, all the fury she’d been stocking up fell out. She shouted at Max’s back, “There’s nothing left! Do you understand ‘nothing’? Do you think yourself a rich man?” She shouted in Russian but still, she was shouting—let Otto hear—let Max hear him hear. “What do you think you’ll find. Gold? A
Torah
?” She snorted. Her life with Max would be this way, she realized: long stretches of containment, control, followed by eruption, like a new season. “Or have you buried some relic of your wife down there?” she went on. “A lock of hair, perhaps? Her jeweled hairpin? Her prized hand mirror with the rose painted on the back?” She seized his shoulder and yanked him back. “Max!”

His calm, when he looked up, was maddening. Max, who was never calm, ignored Minna’s hysterical grip and held out an object. Encased in dirt it might have been a slightly misshapen cigar.

He tapped it against his leg, spraying soil.

Minna had never shown Max her comb. It seemed an embarrassment; a reminder of the fantasies she’d allowed herself. Now, her cheeks burning, she wanted to snatch it from his hand. But he held it up to her with a pride she couldn’t concede to.

If only Otto had found it; then she could take it. Then she wouldn’t have to say, as she was saying, “Oh. That. You might as well have left that buried.”

 

 

T
HE “prized hand mirror” had been Roza’s. (Minna’s mother had had several mirrors, but this one—according to her father—had been her favorite.) Its handle was gold, or goldpainted. The painted rose was pink. The “jeweled hairpin” was her mother’s, too. Her father had kept them in the little table beside his bed, the mirror facedown, rose up, the hairpin just-so askance, its stones green and glittering when the sun slanted in. They couldn’t have been emeralds, they must have been glass. And in another drawer—how many drawers there had been—or was that simply the way one remembered childhood, as full of drawers?—in this other drawer was a small pile of hair. Not a lock, no, whoever left a whole lock, no, these were stray hairs pretending to be a lock, hairs he must have gathered one by one, from corners and pillows and windowsills, and combed together. And sometimes Minna opened the drawer to find them holding, in a long, frightening clump. But other times he’d neglected his combing and she found them wisping around like dust.

 

O
TTO’S last offer: not only flour and wood and nails and labor but the cow, the whole cow, which was bled and cleaned and hanging in his barn, which wasn’t even his to give, but he would pay the rancher and he would deliver it, quartered and salted, the whole cow he would deliver to Max.

Silence.

Minna, listening from the kitchen, poised with a chunk of sausage on its way to her mouth, had to admit that it was difficult to imagine a slaughter any less kosher. She did not blame Otto for not understanding this, but she didn’t blame Max, either, when he shouted, “He’s a Shabbos goy! A Shabbos goy who was never invited, who doesn’t even know the rules!” Another silence followed, electric with rage, then the sound of glass being smashed. A brief crackling riot led quickly to a tinkling. And it was over. Liesl had not stopped sweeping. Minna resumed the journey of the sausage to her mouth.

 

 

T
HEN Leo’s wagon was rolling up and the boys were jumping down, running thrilled into the house, they’d gone to the farm, they’d imagined a cyclone, maybe Indians—they’d thought Minna and Max dead. The accident, retold by Max in a dry, dead voice he’d obviously been practicing for the occasion, finally achieved its full inanity, and the boys laughed and laughed. Then they turned incredulous, then impertinent, demanding to know what the family would do next. They had paid good money for coal. They’d gone to Mitchell and purchased coffee and flour and all manner of other goods, they’d worked hard and brought home a bounty and now there was no home?

In their commotion, Jacob and Samuel looked like brothers; like true boys; they almost looked like stepsons. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Minna sat up in Liesl’s bed and saw them out the window, heading toward the barn, that their difference was clear again. There was Jacob, prancing slightly, stooping here and there to pick up a stone, all weaving and loose so that you knew he had to be smiling, and if it were only him, she might have run outside, and called. But there was Samuel, straight as a book’s spine, walking without seeming to walk at all. She couldn’t even see the soles of his boots lifting, though they must have, for already he was farther away, his hands in those fists he wore, his hair black in the first, pouring sun. He looked taller than Minna remembered him to be, and thinner; his shoulder blades were visible beneath his shirt.

She squinted, wishing him gone, or at least changed—at least, when she widened her eyes again, he would only be a thin young man and she would look at him and think, there is my stepson who is good at mending the chickens’ roof. Instead she saw his face, though it was turned away: his jaw, sharp as his shoulders, his dark eyes locked straight ahead. She’d been waiting, she knew, to see if those eyes would still be so hard when he returned.

The backs of his knees caught the sun, one then the other. The back of his neck was brown against his white shirt.

A new shirt, if she wasn’t mistaken.

They had done well, her industrious stepsons. She should be pleased.

But she wanted to kiss one of them.

She wanted to disappear.

If she walked off slowly enough, maybe no one would notice.

She could slip into the horizon, be gone; the courage to do it, a kind of poison, had to be in her.

But to disappear was to confess. To disappear was to be known as you’d never be if you stayed.

So maybe she would hide. Today, at least, she would hide under Liesl’s bed, and all her poison would drain away and she would rise pure, as if from the
mikvah
.

Yet her feet, beneath the blanket, were so perfectly cool. The sheets were so soft. Her eyes were tired. Why hide under the bed when she could hide in it? She wouldn’t have many more nights here, now that the boys were back. The boys were back. Boys were back. Boys back. A most casual thing to say, to think, think it enough and that will be all it is; don’t look out the window; don’t think of his mouth; just lie back. The boys are back. Lie back. Cover your head. Touch nothing.

T
HE new house would have two rooms, a pitched roof, a wood frame. Boards would be gathered from the collapsed shed, nails and hinges and other hardware purchased in Mitchell. Minna and Liesl would turn the
mikvah
hole into a proper cellar. For a new shed, which they would call a barn, Fritzi would bring more wood in the form of railroad ties, “borrowed” from the railroad company, and the men would not question his source because they would already be raising the walls.

The house that would be. And then it was! They were raising the walls, and pitching the roof, and building a new table and new benches and beds. The ceiling was tall, the beds plenty wide. The old stove had been salvaged; Minna scrubbed it until it shone. She felt like a child who’d been given a gift, felt her chest ache with gratitude at the improvements, at the men’s constant motion. How astounding to think that the purpose of all their activity was to build something for
her
. Or in large part for her. And that it took so many of them, working so hard! Otto had “helped” them buy materials, and now he and Fritzi “helped” with the work, an agreement Samuel had brokered like a puppeteer so as to make all success his father’s, so that suddenly it had been Max saying thing like,
There’s no sense arguing, the days are growing short, let’s get to work!

And they had—they’d gotten to work, and kept on working, and soon Minna began to feel, in their midst, wearing one of two quality dresses that Liesl had gifted her, not like a child but like the mistress of a house. She and Liesl cut into the gentle bowl of the
mikvah
with spades and she was awestruck by the ordinariness of it all. They were like people all over the country, straightening walls, filling holes, testing joints, making tight.

Then they were moving into the first room before the second had even been framed and she grew uneasy. She began to notice how many other things were not done, or half done, or perhaps not done well enough. There were
plans
to dig a well and build a washhouse, but not a single shovelful of earth had been turned over. The walls grew thick with sod but the wind grew colder just as fast. And the door latch, which Minna found exceedingly disappointing, was not a latch at all but a string, wound around a split railroad tie and set through a hole in the door, so that to open it you had to pull up, and to close it, to let the string drop back down. This was not on account of frugality, as it must have seemed to Otto and Liesl, nor of ignorance. According to Jacob, Max had carried with him to America, wrapped in felt, a crystal doorknob, left him by a wealthy cousin. For a time, this heavy, finely cut doorknob had graced the door of their cave—until, over Samuel’s protests, Max had traded it for Minna’s wedding ring. And now, to prove that he’d been right, and perhaps to admonish all of them, he was determined not to buy another doorknob. To do that, Minna supposed, would be to admit more than his foolishness with the ring—it would be to admit a certain foolishness with Minna. So she said nothing.

This was
fall
, Jacob said, seeing that she was troubled, trying to cheer her. Also known—he deepened his voice—as
autummmn.
And this was
fall
, he explained soberly, before throwing himself facedown into the yellowing grass.

 

 

 

A
letter, delivered by Otto, who found her at the creek, doing the washing. She stared for a long moment at the script on the outside—
Minna—
wondering if Galina had somehow found her. Did she have regrets? Had the Russians come again? Did she simply want to know, as a person might, how her old maidservant was faring?

Otto pushed the letter closer. She dried her hands and took it.

“From Ruth,” he said, and smiled. He was nervous, Minna realized. She had never seen Otto nervous. Every day he showed up to work on a house whose owner either ignored or insulted him and he went politely about his business, doing much of the building himself and teaching Samuel along the way, yet now he looked like a child about to commit a small crime. He glanced back at the house, leaned in toward Minna, then pulled another object from his shirt and slid it beneath the letter in her hands.

“I am sorry for Fritzi’s mistake,” he said, looking emphatically at her hands, in which she was holding, she realized, one of Fritzi’s paperback books. “I can bring you one at a time. He won’t notice they’re gone.”

Minna looked at her washing. The creek was so low now she’d had to dig a little pool and dam it with stones, but even so, the water didn’t cover all the clothes: there was a dry corner of a shirt she could wrap the book in.

“It’s English,” said Otto, his voice cracking: apologetic and encouraging at once.

“I know. Thank you.”