Katerina's Wish (15 page)

“Where is Papa?” I asked, after glancing around and seeing no sign of him.

“He's gone to work,” Momma said.

“At the mine?”

“Of course at the mine.”

“But—” I stared, paralyzed with fear. How could he go back down that lift after all that had happened? “But he can't!”

“And what are we going to live on if he doesn't?” Momma said, but the lines of worry were deeply furrowed on her forehead. She was afraid but, as usual, the practical needs were foremost in her mind. “He has already lost three days' pay this week.”

“But he was trapped! The mine surely owes him something for all he's been through!”

“We have much to be thankful for; we must remember that,” Momma said, not looking up from her work. “Many families were not as fortunate as us.”

I remembered again Martina's Charlie, and I knew she was right. Still, all I could think about was how we had to get out of here so that Papa would never go through such a thing again. I vowed to myself that I would work extra hard in my garden so that we could buy our farm.

“Thank you, Trina,” Momma said.

I looked at her in surprise. I had no idea what she was thanking me for.

“You worked hard these past few days to look after everyone. I don't know how I would have gotten through it without you. I am proud of you.”

I hurried to dress after that, eager to work in my garden. I wanted to do the things that would earn the money to get us away from the mine.

I swept the kitchen and the porch, and as I did I remembered for the first time in days that I had a brooding hen. I put away the broom and took up my basket with rising excitement, hoping to see a nest full of cheeping chicks in the henhouse. It wasn't until I stepped out the back door and saw the gate swinging crookedly on torn hinges that I realized I hadn't heard Kuratko
crow that morning. I looked around, hopeful that the chickens were simply loose in the yard and garden, but they were not. There was no sign of life in the yard at all—but there were signs of death everywhere. Feathers littered the ground, and a smear of blood ran across the chicken coop wall near the door. I hurried through the open gate, searching the ground. The tracks of large dogs were everywhere in the yard among the chaos of feathers. The limp body of one of my hens lay in the corner of the yard, tossed against the fence and forgotten. Everyone in town had been at the mine; no one had been in the neighborhood to hear stray dogs in the chickens.

I remembered the brooding hen and hurried to the henhouse, hoping against hope. It was no use. The brood had hatched, but without their mother's care the bald hatchlings had all died in their nest.

I backed out of the henhouse, anger and grief stinging my eyes. Then I saw my garden. The battle of dogs and chickens had ranged beyond the broken gate. Row after row of vegetables were trampled flat. The bean trellis had been torn down and had uprooted most of the stalks when it toppled. The remains of bold little Kuratko were tangled in its strands of twine.

I looked for one long moment of de spair, then collapsed on the back step in tears. Every grief and fear of the past week tore from my throat in racking sobs. My mother found me there sometime later, still weeping uncontrollably.

“Trina, what on earth . . . ?” Then she stopped and looked around at the carnage. “Oh, Trina. I'm so sorry,” she said, her voice mixing sympathy with resignation. I knew that tone too well. She had to be thinking she had told me so.

“No, you're not!” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “You never wanted me to succeed!”

“What we want and what life gives us are seldom the same thing, Trina.”

A new burst of sobs kept me from answering. She stood silently beside me for a long moment before she said, “Hush now, Trina. We have work to do.”

I wanted to stop crying, but I couldn't. It was all too much.

“Hush now,” Momma said again. “How can you carry on like this for a few chickens? Men died in that mine and all you can think about are your silly chickens?”

“No, Momma! Don't you see, the chickens were to be our way out! So Papa would never have to go back into that mine.”

“It was a dream, Trina. You're crying for the loss of something you never had to start with.”

“And you don't believe in dreams,” I said bitterly. “You don't believe in anything but staying stuck here.”

Momma sighed heavily and sat down on the stoop beside me. “Trina, dreams aren't real. You can't eat them; you can't keep your papa safe with them. And believe me, you'll never feed your children with them. We only have what life has given us, and dreams . . .” She paused, fumbling for the words. “Dreams get you hurt, just like this one's hurt you. Just like your papa's dream put him in that horrible mine.”

“So you'd have us never try to make our lives better,” I said. “To have something more.”

“Believing I could have something more made me what I am today,” she said. “I could have been a tailor's wife, living in a comfortable cottage in Bohemia, but instead I married the man who filled my head with dreams. And look where it got me!”

I looked at her in surprise. For the briefest moment, I saw her not as the resilient mother I had always known, but as a
young, vulnerable dreamer herself. Her usual hard expression quickly returned when she saw me looking.

“But—you love Papa, don't you?” I asked.

“Of course. I love all of you. But these dreams! Dreams only crush the things you love!”

She turned her face away from me, and for the first time I understood. I ached from the loss of a few chickens and a garden. What pain must she feel from the weight of years of disappointments? No wonder she had warned me against this dream. I put my hand on her shoulder. She straightened, strong again.

“We have other things to keep us busy now, Trina. Put this behind you and look to all you still have. Papa still has a job, we still have our family and friends, and you have a handsome young man who wants to court you. That should be enough for anyone. To want more than what you need is a vanity.”

I wiped my eyes and nodded.

“Now, see if there is anything you can salvage in your garden.”

I took a basket to the vegetable patch and began searching through the trampled and wilted leaves. A few squash clung to the torn vines, and I picked those. The corn was all ruined, without a single ear having ever formed, and only about onefourth of the bean plants could be saved. The cucumbers at the very edge of the garden were the only crop that had been spared. The few surviving beanstalks might produce enough for a meal now and then, but my hopes of selling anything more were gone.

The disappointment was a steady ache in my chest that wouldn't go away, though I tried not to think of it. And I could see now that a few eggs and vegetables would never have earned us enough money to get out of here. The dream had clouded my
judgment. I had wanted far more than I could ever have. I told myself it was best that it should come apart now while it was still only a small thing. I thought again of Martina and others who had lost someone in the mine, and I felt ashamed.

I was putting the trellis back in place along the few bean plants when I noticed a bootprint in the soil. I had seen the tracks of the dogs everywhere, but this surprised me. Had someone been in my garden while we were at the mine? I couldn't imagine that anyone had taken any vegetables. Maybe someone had seen the dogs and tried to chase them off. Surely no one would steal anything at such a time—everyone in town was connected to the disaster; no one would be thinking of robbing a garden.

I looked again at the bootprint. A pawprint partially obscured it—it was from before the dogs had done their mischief. It must have been Old Jan's, I decided, from before the accident. I put the question out of my head and finished collecting vegetables.

When I finished, I had more than enough for a meal. I set aside a few, but most of them wouldn't keep. They were bruised and had been withering on the ground for too long. I looked again at the two chicken carcasses. They hadn't been chewed by the dogs, and were still fresh enough to use, and that gave me an idea. I wanted to make up for my foolishness, so with Momma's help, I plucked and cleaned the chickens and put them into a big kettle of soup with the trampled vegetables from the garden. When it was done, I put some into two pans and set out.

I went first to Martina's house. Charlie was laid out in the bedroom and a small group was gathered around him, sobbing or fidgeting uncomfortably with the hats they had removed
upon entering. Martina sat at the kitchen table, staring into a cup of tea, her face like marble.

I knocked at the open door and held up the soup pot. “For you,” I said.

She raised her eyes to mine. They glinted with a look of panic. I entered and set the pan of soup on the table beside her.

“What am I going to do?” she whispered. “The mine says I can only stay through the end of the month now that there's no worker living here. Where am I going to go?”

Rage rose in me again at the mine owners, but I bit it back. “What about your papa?” I said. Her family had been at the mine before she'd married.

She shook her head. “They've moved to the mine at Cokedale. They don't know about any of this yet. But there are seven kids in that house. I couldn't burden them by going back.”

“You'll think of something,” I said.

A loud sob rose from the other room and Martina choked back one of her own. Her face was so white I thought she might faint. “They've been here all day,” she whispered. I looked past her to the woman keening at the bedside and the silent men that surrounded her like a queen's attendants.

“Who are they?”

“Charlie's mother and brothers. They arrived from Pueblo on the train this morning. She hates me. She didn't want Charlie to marry a foreigner. She won't let me near him.”

Martina clung to my hand now, as if I were the only solid thing in her world. I had only intended to pay my respects and be gone, but I couldn't leave her like this.

“Walk with me,” I said. “You need some fresh air.”

“And leave Charlie?” She glanced guiltily toward the back room.

Leave his mother,
I thought, but instead I only said, “You have to think of your own health, too.” I coaxed her to the front door and through it. She stepped out into the sunlight and blinked, like a dazed creature pulled from its burrow.

We walked slowly up the road, past my house and toward Old Jan's, where I intended to leave my second pot of soup. The fresh air did bring a little color to her pale face. When we reached Old Jan's, I paused.

“I have another errand here, Martina. Do you mind?”

She shook her head, so we walked to the front door. The door was open in the hot afternoon, but Old Jan was not sitting on the porch. I called in a greeting and he called back from the bedroom, inviting us in. I stepped inside, but Martina only hovered in the kitchen.

Mark was propped up in bed, though he was leaning far back to ease his chest. His face wore an expression of pain.

“How are you feeling?” I asked him, scrutinizing his face for any sign of fever. I was relieved to see none, but frightened by how pale he looked.

“Sore,” he admitted with a twitch of a grin. His voice was weak, but at least he had tried to smile.

“He's resting easy. That's the best thing for him now, ‘ Old Jan said.

“I brought you some soup,” I said. “I thought it might help.”

As they thanked me, Karel came in through the back door, carrying two buckets of water. I supposed that, like Papa, he was expected to return to work for his regular shift. He started to say something, then he caught sight of Martina, standing uncertainly near the kitchen door. A look of tender sadness came over his face and he set down his buckets.

“I am sorry about Charlie,” he said to her. “He was a good
man and a hard worker. He was near us there, waiting to get on the lift, to get home to you.” He shook his head regretfully.

I looked at Martina. Tears were welling from her eyes. Karel took a handkerchief from his pocket and carried it to her. They were speaking in hushed tones when I turned back to Mark.

“They are evicting her,” I said, trying to control the outrage in my voice. “And they're docking your pay for the time you were trapped in the mine. How could they!”

“They can do as they please,” Mark said.

“But it's wrong!”

Mark sighed, and I immediately regretted my anger. He didn't have the strength for it. I laid my hand softly on his.

“You should sleep,” I told him. “It will help you get your strength back.”

“I'd rather have a bowl of your soup,” he said, this time managing a small smile at me.

I filled a bowl and, sitting beside him, spooned soup carefully into his mouth.

“It is delicious,” he said. “Are the vegetables from your garden?”

I nodded. “It is all there will be, though.” I told him what had happened to my chickens and the garden, struggling to hold back my grief. It was silly to cry over such a small thing, and I could not explain that my tears were for something so much larger.

“There, there,” Old Jan said, patting my hand. “It's a blow to be sure, but we survived without it, and we will again. You can plant again next summer.”

He was right, of course, and so was my mother. Survival was the most we could expect in this world. I looked at Mark and knew that survival itself was a blessing.

Karel reappeared in the kitchen to collect the dinner bucket his father had prepared for him. “I'm off to work. Enjoy lying about while I'm laboring away,” he said to Mark with a grin.

“I should get back to Martina,” I said when Karel had gone. “And you should rest.”

“Thank you, Trina,” Mark said. He clasped my hand in thanks, but he did not let go when I tried to leave, so I turned back to him. “Trina, I'll be laid up here for a short while, but I'll heal fast. I'll be back on my feet before the next dance.” He squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Will you go with me?”