Girl in Hyacinth Blue (9 page)

Morningshine

Saskia opened the back shutters and looked out the upstairs south window early the second morning after the flood. Their farmhouse was an is land apart from the world. Vapors of varying gray made the neighboring four farmhouses indistinct, yet there was a shine on the water like the polished pewter of her mother's kitchen back home. Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so, she thought. But it wasn't so. And the cow would have to stay upstairs with them until it was so, however long that was, stay upstairs messing the floor and taking up half the room.

She leaned on the sill and peered across the wa ter to the bare elm tree, so small and new it was only a few twigs above the water, to see if their chickens were in it. Maybe Stijn would find them today. She felt the loss of Pookje the most. She was the beauty, with those chestnut feathers soft as baby's hair under her throat. And how she always rose so dainty-like and proud to show the perfect egg she produced. Then Saskia felt ashamed. Oth ers had lost more than a few hens.

She and Stijn had hardly lost anything. The day of the flood she'd made dozens of trips upstairs car rying furniture and food, while the cow's big brown eyes followed her each trip. She tried to make a game of it for the children, and even went down into the cold water to feel around and rescue a few more things after the flood came. By the end of the day her legs ached and her arms hung limp as rags. She had thought Stijn would be pleased that she had gotten so much upstairs, but when he came in through the window after working on the Dam sterdiep Dike for two days straight, he took one look at the clutter, and her grandmother's spinning wheel atop hurriedly stacked peat blocks, and said, "Do we need all this?"

She'd forgiven him. He was exhausted and pre occupied.

Now, out the south window, she noticed some thing dark floating on the water a long way away, turning as if by its own will, first one way and then another.

"Stijn," she said. "Would you look at that, now?" She felt his warm hand on her shoulder as he looked out with her. She had of late—and she knew this annoyed him—milked every chance touch or meaningless encounter for its loving possibility, and so she paused in speaking, so he wouldn't take his hand away. "Isn't that Boschwijk's mare floating there?"

She turned to see him squint, to see those dear, new lines fan out from his eyes.

"It is, surely." He reached for his reefer and climbed out the north window on the other side of the house where he'd tied up his skiff.

Marta and Piet slipped out of bed and clamored over the linen chest to the sill beside their mother. "See," Marta said in her superior, know-everything voice of four years, "horses can too swim."

"That horse isn't swimming. That horse is just tall enough to poke his head up," Piet said.

Saskia gave them both a piece of cheese. There was no more bread. She'd have to learn how to bake in the little peat brazier.

"Saskia!" Stijn's voice rattled an alarm through her.

She squeezed between the cow and a sack of grain to the opposite window. From the rowboat, Stijn handed up to her something flat wrapped in a blanket. She leaned far out the window. It wasn't heavy but it slipped from her grasp beneath the blanket and fell into the muddy water. Stijn lunged for it, rocking the boat, grabbed it, disentangled the blanket and handed up again a painting. She brought it safely over the sill and stared at a beautiful girl looking out a window.

"What is it, Mama?" Marta said.

"My God!" she heard Stijn say. "Saskia!"

She leaned far over the sill and he stood up in the boat and handed her, more carefully, a baby in a basket, then seized the oars.

"A baby! Someone put a baby in our boat," Saskia said.

"A baby. A baby!" Piet echoed. He was five, just at that age where he mimicked everything he heard, and where everything in the world made him laugh.

She unwrapped the blanket, and the baby be came smaller and smaller. It was so young, its face was still rose-colored and puckered. When she got to the sad-colored shawl, dull blue woven with gray-green, her hands shook and she stopped, for she knew the shawl had to be the mother's.

"Who, Mama?" Marta asked.

"I don't know. Poor thing, so cold."

"St. Nicholas!" Piet said. "St. Nicholas put it there." Both children rolled on the floor in laugh ter.

She lighted a peat block in the brazier to heat water, and prepared to feed and wash the baby. She began to unwrap the shawl and found a wilted cab bage leaf. She smiled.

"What's that for?" Marta said, so close beside her she could hardly move.

"Oh, it's just an old superstition. Good luck for the baby."

"Can we keep it? Can we keep it, Mama?"

"The cabbage leaf?" Piet said.

Marta gave him a little shove. "Can we keep the baby?"

With trembling hands, Saskia lifted from a fold in the shawl a paper, some sort of art document. On the back, printed in big letters, were the words, "Sell the painting. Feed the child."

"Father in Heaven!" she murmured. The black letters swam like eels before her eyes. To think a mother could write that. She lifted away a wet rag. A boy. A little Moses boy with blue eyes and a few wisps of blond hair. A boy, if she could keep him alive. She put a pot of milk on a grate over the burning peat. She searched in the linen chest for di aper cloths and cleaned and fed him by the time Stijn came back.

"It was Boschwijk's mare," he said. "Dumbest horse I've ever seen. I got it roped and rowed it to his barn, but the damned thing wouldn't go up the ramp, so Boschwijk's boy and I had to hoist him from the block and tackle in a sling. Now I missed the punt to the sea dike and will have to row."

"We've been given a charge, Stijn."

"That baby?" He looked down at him, not without kindness, but briefly.

"It's a boy." She knew that would make him more acceptable.

"Mighty skinny. Probably won't live more'n a week."

She showed him the paper. "The only name it gives is who made the painting." He turned it over. There followed a silence so long she wondered if they would ever speak again. "A charge from Heaven," she whispered.

"Aye, and the means to carry it out too. Take it to Groningen next market day."

"The baby?" She shot him an apprehensive look, for there was an orphanage there.

"The painting." Stijn wrapped up a hunk of cheese and a slab of salt pork and climbed out the window into his boat.

The boy was a perfect baby. The shape of his cheeks and the point of his chin seemed to her to form an open tulip. All day she sat feeding him drip by drip, her finger in his mouth, and the milk pour ing down her finger. She kissed the bottoms of his feet and kept him warm and couldn't keep from touching him. Every so often he flung his arms open wide, as if to embrace her and the children and the cow and the whole world. They'd have to make inquiries, but in the meantime, God had charged her to keep this boy alive.

Every few hours Marta asked, "What are we go ing to do, Mama?" And Piet echoed, "What are we going to do?" Most times, she just smiled at them without an answer.

Stijn came home discouraged. Nothing would drain until they repaired the sea dikes. Then the drainage mills could begin working, and when the water got to the crown of the Damsterdiep Dike, then they'd go to work on that. "They're con scripting from as far inland as Woldijk. Those men are given lodgings in Delfzijl, but from here we'll have to punt every day."

She stretched up to kiss him on the cheek.

"Don't touch me. I'm filthy."

She had seen that, but it didn't matter. She drew back.

"It'll be a miracle if we'll get a spring planting," he said.

"We will. I know we will." She put her hand on his arm and felt the muscle tighten. He had a ten dency to see the worst, and it was her job to keep him hopeful. "The baby took milk five times today."

He looked at the basket where she'd laid him. "What kind of mother would leave a baby in a flood?" He took off his outer clothes and sat on the edge of the high cabinet bed built into the wall. Piet, in the children's bed underneath, tugged at his pantleg. Stijn moved his leg out of reach.

"One who had no choice."

"St. Nicholas left it," Piet said, and then Saskia remembered. A stranger in a skiff who asked for milk.

"Ssh, Piet. Go to sleep." She poured a basin of dirty dishwater out the window. "He's a good baby." Just then, when Stijn was looking at him, the baby flung his arms wide. "See? He likes you."

Over the next days Stijn was gone at first light and came home after dark, doodmoe, as her own fa ther used to say, dead tired. All he had energy for was to eat and say a few sentences about the work. She was afraid to bring up the question of naming the baby, for that would seem to make him theirs. Once, when changing him, she called him Jantje, little Jan, after the name on the paper, and Piet and Marta took it up in the daytimes, but at night they didn't.

The house was to Saskia a happy isle in the midst of flood. She did everything in the cramped space between sacks of groats and their downstairs chests and table, and of course, Katrina, the milk cow. Each day, Saskia put down fresh straw and laid the dung cakes on the sills and roof to dry. They'd use them later to reconstitute the soil. Then she and Piet, who suffered the confinement more than Marta, rowed across to the barn to stack the dried dung and replenish their supply of grain, potatoes and pickled meat, and to get hay for Katrina. Be cause they needed milk, the cow had to stay, but Stijn led their plow horse down from the loft on the earthen ramp into the floodwaters and, from the rowboat, guided him, swimming, to the canal where all the villagers' horses were hoisted on a barge to dry pasture inland. With a cast iron oven set on the brazier, she could make round buns in stead of the loaves she normally made in the big oven downstairs. She'd lugged the churn upstairs so she could make butter. They would survive. And so would Jantje. He kicked and wiggled and some times spit up, but his little voice grew stronger each day. His eyes looked up at her with gratitude, she imagined, that made her heart burst. In the evenings, her happiness, her reports of the events of the day, seemed only to aggravate Stijn.

This wasn't going to be a devastating flood like in the Bible. And it wasn't like the St. Elizabeth flood of three hundred years ago that swept away whole villages. She remembered a grim painting belonging to her grandmother that hung above the virginal at home. Groot Hollandsche Waard it was called, and it pictured a once populous village that had become a permanent lake. Spires of drowned churches protruded amidst reed beds and nests of wading birds. Underneath, there was a sober warn ing: "The Lord God brought humankind up from the vasty deep and made him wax mighty. Likewise, He hath power to consign the evil ones to the con suming deluge." As a child, she'd been fascinated by the painting, but later, when she learned to read, the saying appalled her. She didn't like to think of a God of wrath.

When a flood brings a baby and a thing of beauty, it was not the Apocalypse, nor even a win nowing of souls. It was only water lapping four feet deep.

One rare warm day, she put all three children into the boat, lowering the baby in his basket on a sling from the gable beam pulley, just so they could get outside. She breathed deeply and rowed very slowly to enjoy it longer. The motion of the water put Jantje to sleep. She rowed to the four other houses in the hamlet and asked at the windows if they had seen the stranger in a skiff come through again. Stranger? There's nothing but strangers coming through all the time now with so many men repairing the dikes, they said. She told them of the baby, and showed his sleeping, pink face. "It'll be a long sight before he'll dig a garden for ye," one woman said. Boswijk's wife, Alda, gave her some molasses. Back home, she dripped some into his mouth from a spoon every once in a while. Marta sat next to him by the hour, waving a cloth above his face to see if his eyes would follow it, and at the first sign that they did, Saskia celebrated by putting molasses in the dough to make sweet cakes for the children.

As for the painting, she had hung it on a clothes peg to get it out of the way. In the evenings she hung clothes in front of it, so Stijn might not be re minded, but in the day she uncovered it. Some times she propped it in the pale slant of light com ing in the south window. One morning clear and bright after a rain when they'd collected fresh water in the small roof cistern and buckets roped to the eaves, she washed off the painting, and oh, how it shone, more brilliant even than before. The russet of the girl's skirt glistened like maple leaves in au tumn sun. Pouring in the window, creamy yellow light the color of the inner petals of jonquils illumi nated the young girl's face and reflected points of light on her shiny fingernails. Morningshine, she called it, for her grandmother had told her that paintings had names.

"You'll be just like her someday," she told Marta as she braided her hair. She made up stories of the young woman in Groningen or Amsterdam or Utrecht, how she became famous for her sewing and people from all around would come to have a garment made by her.

If only she would be allowed to keep the paint ing too. She didn't have many beautiful things, didn't even have a china cupboard, only a floor chest covered with her grandmother's blue linen table scarf. Only one chair with a cushion. Only four painted plates tilted on the shelf, and a pewter measure. Nothing like the whitewashed kitchen stacked with Delftware in the big farmhouse where she grew up just outside of Westerbork, and Mother's long mahogany dining table and Grand mother's virginal in the front room and paintings on the walls and curtains of pale blue flax.

The girl in the painting had a blue smock. How glorious to drape oneself in blue—the blue of the sky, of Heaven, of the pretty little lake at Wester bork with the tiny blue brooklime that grew along the banks, the blue of hyacinths and Delftware and all fine things. To live and move and have her being in a flow of blue. She held Jantje up to the paint ing. "See, Jantje, how beautiful she is. Maybe this is your mother. See how young she looks? A fine lady in a fine home." If that was so, Jantje had to know that his mother wore blue. The shawl was not blue enough. Besides, it was old and torn. He needed the painting.