The Little Bride (21 page)

When Minna tired, she went out to the hole and watched Max dig. He’d made quick progress downward, then decided it wasn’t wide enough and started outward again. The hole was, in fact, quite wide enough—so wide it could already fit four Minnas comfortably—but Minna did not mention this. She sat on the edge, swinging her feet, expressing quiet admiration as he laid bare dark and darker soil. She liked sitting like that, her heels thumping the earth, her only labor that of accompaniment. Max told her about a dream he’d been having—or rather suffering,
laydn
, as he put it: in this dream a rainstorm came in the night and flooded the house and Max didn’t wake up and so he drowned.

Each time he told it, Minna smiled. Whether she herself appeared in the dream, she didn’t ask. If she was there, if she died along with him, she guessed that Max felt guilty—and if she wasn’t, if she didn’t, perhaps guiltier. She smiled and said well, it didn’t sound very likely, and besides, even if a rain ever did come, the door made of crates would collapse before the cave could fill with water. And Max would look at her, the skin around his eyes flushed with his work, his eyes themselves wet—with the dream, perhaps, or maybe just the cooler air, which moved more freely now, gathering itself into little frenzies and whipping the skin. He looked, she thought, mildly disappointed—as if he hoped, each time he told her the dream, that she would explain it to him. Yet he never looked offended, as she expected, at her scornful remarks about the house. The door did not concern him, just as everything else he was neglecting in order to dig the hole did not concern him. And Minna found that she didn’t judge him for this. She felt similarly about her whitewashing, whose purpose, after all—a lovelier cave?—was even less necessary than the
mikvah
. Together, she and Max seemed to have broken off from the question of necessity—as if, as long as the boys were gone, the coming winter was indefinitely suspended. In the distance, they watched cows lumbering toward the railhead at Mitchell, driven by one of Otto’s sons for a ranch owner out of Texas; in the sky, they watched birds arrowing southward, shoved sideways then straight again by errant gusts of wind. Yet Minna and Max shared no compulsion to join in these preparations.

Minna and Max. Odd, to feel the names coupled in her head. Bread and butter, broom and pan. Odder still that they should come together out of mutual apathy, or defiance, or whatever one wanted to call it. Minna completed her daily chores. She swept, and gathered sad-looking squashes from the garden, and baked challah every Friday as Max asked her to do; she even threw a precious fist of dough into the fire, as he also asked her to do. “To remember the burning of the Temple,” he said, when she first hesitated. There was relief, she discovered, in following the order of his order, his ongoing, forever repentance for letting the Russians tear into the Torah with their crowbars; there was a giving in that calmed her. But she didn’t think more than a few hours ahead, and she did not behave practically. On the first two Friday nights, she lit a pair of Shabbos candles they’d been given at the wedding, no matter that she should save them for an emergency, that the lantern shed adequate light, that kerosene was easier to come by than candles. On the third Shabbos, when the candles were shrunk to thumb-sized stumps, she melted their wax together in a tin, inserted a bit of a rag for a wick, and spent an indulgent amount of time holding the rag upright until the wax hardened again. Then she burned this candle, too, and Max made no comment.

Did he think, as she did, of Samuel? Did he feel an excitement, an almost petulance, at the idea of Samuel watching them as they failed to be useful in any real way? It wasn’t indolence, she would tell him. Look at the
mikvah
hole! Look at the neat, smooth wallpaper she’d made from his magazines! No, they weren’t indolent. They were simply unwilling to face the truly necessary task of preparing for their survival. For that would have required more than knowledge and skills and materials they didn’t possess. It would have required optimism, which required faith or else ignorance—depending on how one looked at it, depending on who one was. But Max, who was faithful and believed in God, did not seem capable of believing in the acres he stood upon. And Minna, who was talented enough at self-delusion, could not manufacture a vision of success in this vast, vastly exposed place. She couldn’t see how anything they did would counter the enormity of what there was to be done.

So Minna papered with what remained of Samuel’s magazines, and Max dug, and they witnessed the rest of the world move toward autumn. By late afternoons, the sky took on a crystalline pallor. Dark came early. The morning breeze grew teeth. They did not speak of these changes, or of the fact that they’d begun using the boys’ blankets on top of their own. Minna didn’t tell Max that two of the chickens had stopped laying, or that sometimes she thought she glimpsed Indians out the corners of her eyes, far-off shadows that disappeared before she could turn her head. She didn’t tell him that she’d stopped lying naked on her back in the creek. Who knew what Max didn’t tell Minna. The walls gained more paper, the hole gained more hole, but sometimes it seemed to Minna that if they’d woken up and found their work undone—the walls bare, the hole filled—if they had to start all over, neither would complain.

 

 

T
HE house fell in on a fine day in what must have been late September. Clouds had filled the sky that morning, splitting the sun into needles. The air was neither cold nor warm. Everything felt balanced, fair. Max had stopped digging to tell his dream. Minna was wearing her quiet smile. She liked the part where Max woke up already drowning, for the way it changed a little every time. Today he said his mouth and nose had filled with water, and the water tasted like chicken broth, so he couldn’t stop swallowing it.

Minna’s boots thunked against the sides of the hole. And maybe that, Max would later allege, when he blamed everyone except his God for the accident, maybe that forever thunking of Minna’s boots was what kept them from hearing the cow that Otto’s son was meant to be driving. But Max was wrong, because the cow, as it climbed the hill, didn’t make a sound. It moved at its heavy, munching, bovine pace, hip joints sliding, sloping up toward its discovery: a private island of grass. It made no sound until its hooves fell through the earth—the roof—and even then Minna and Max didn’t know what had happened, for the cow gave a cry more like a child than a half-ton beast. Minna had that thought, of a child. She recalled the sickening wails of her brother. Then the cry changed, and rose, and instead of peaking once and then descending into a moo or moan, it went on rising, its pitch tightening, growing decidedly not child, not human: it was a noise so appalling and intimate, it took Minna a few breaths before she could bring herself to look.

Only the cow’s neck and head were visible atop the wreckage, writhing as it shrieked. There was no accord between its movements and its noise—it seemed to fight itself, jerking now, bellowing then. Minna looked back at Max, who stood frozen, his shock lending his eyes a certain clarity, almost a translucence, so that they looked not brown but yellow, catlike, almost lovely. Then he looked back at her, and in his forehead was that familiar wish for her to fix things. She jumped up and began running toward the cow’s head, and the shrieks, and Otto’s son, who was riding up so slowly from the other side, his horse stepping so lazily that they reached the collapsed house at the same time. Minna gasped for breath. The man was Otto in his strawcolored hair and big ears and in his thin, exacting mouth, but he had none of his father’s warmth, or poise; he slumped in the saddle and wore the horse’s laziness in his eyes, a woeful indifference that passed over Minna and moved on to the cow. He frowned at the cow with disapproval, as if to say,
There you go again.
Behind Minna, Max began to shout.

“Rope! No rope?
Cowboy
with no rope? Where is your rope? Where are your eyes? What is in your head?”

Max had stopped several paces back. He wouldn’t come closer, Minna thought, unless Otto’s son dismounted, and Otto’s son wouldn’t dismount until Max stopped shouting. “Rope!” he went on.
“Shtrik! Shtrik!”
until the word made nonsense, until Minna turned and shouted back: “Motke! Stop!” And almost embarrassingly quickly, Max’s tirade came to an end. She was sorry, for she knew that he was right. She even knew the particular rope that might have stopped the cow; she’d slept in it. But what difference did that make now? The cow’s neck twisted frantically, its head slammed the earth. Minna looked up at Otto’s son and saw behind his frown the amused despair of one accustomed to being wrong. To shout at such a person was to shout at a rock. “Can’t you do something?” she asked.

He looked down at her, but his eyes had retreated. She wondered what he was seeing, whether it was the cow, or his boss in Texas, or his father; if he was more afraid right now than he was sorry or ashamed. Otto was the kind of man, she thought, who faced the world with so much goodwill, so much plain, determined beneficence, that he might beat an ill-behaved son badly; even—or perhaps especially—a grown son. That was the way of things, people: each contained its own cure. The beating would be violent, she thought. But then, too, tonight would be cold without a roof. The clouds were denser now, and taller, like pilings.

“Do something,” she said, and pulled on the man’s leg, and though it surprised her, the rough canvas pant, the thin hot knee within, the fact that she was touching—yanking—a strange man’s leg, she found, too, that it was remarkably easy. She thought of the dry indifference with which the woman in the basement had touched all those parts of Minna’s body. And here Minna had one of the man’s knees in her grip and there was no peril in it, no explosion, nothing of what she used to imagine happened when one person touched another person—what she imagined, that was, before the basement; before Galina’s knee; before Max. Perhaps the more you’d been touched, the less you suffered it. She began to shake the man’s leg.

“Do something!”

He was down from his horse before she knew she’d let him go, clambering up the ruined earth, reaching into his pocket, drawing a knife. Minna winced, but couldn’t look away. She felt as though she’d witnessed the cow’s death before. She had seen this moment, and the moment that would follow. Later she would realize she was confusing things, that it was the bird’s neck in her hands, and the woman’s putrid body falling into the ocean, it was these other mercy killings she remembered. But right then, as the man’s elbow swung back and the knife shot forward and the cow went silent, Minna felt no revulsion, only relief. Max cried out and she ignored him.

O
TTO’S house. Otto’s bed. Otto’s wife, Liesl, for a bedmate. The bed was smaller than Leo and Ruth’s, but the sheets were softer. The sheets were like the house itself, full of a clean, gently frayed grace. Otto and Liesl had a way of being well off that was apparent only if you looked slightly askance at it, with an eye for use. Their house was not two stories like Leo and Ruth’s; instead the rooms spread quietly out the back, each one tilting slightly off the last at a sort of knuckle, so that you could see the stages of its growth.

It would take confidence, Minna thought, to build so gradually. It would take thinking that you wouldn’t be chased or have to go chasing anything for a long time.

She smoothed her hands over the sheets. A delight, a shame, sleeping beside a woman. Yet Liesl, it could be argued, if one should need to make such an argument, seemed less a woman than a form of light. Her skin was pink, her cheeks unblemished, the bones around her eyes like ivory. Her hair grew from a widow’s peak unlike any Minna had seen, so low and blond and graciously pointed that it appeared as a sort of jewelry. Even Max, who’d come into the house bawling, threatening to sleep in the barn rather than endure the hospitality of
farbrekhers
, was soothed by Liesl’s presence. He’d fallen into silence as she floated past; the day seemed to overtake him; he let himself be fed. Not “their” meat, but their turnips and their black bread and their sweet, cinnamon-scented pudding.

Liesl smelled of water and soap, a freshness Minna associated with clothes taken off a line but not yet ironed. Otto and Liesl, Minna thought, might be so confident that they saw no need to iron. She pushed the back of her head deep into the pillow, which was tall and plump, its seams visibly sewn and resewn countless times, and pictured Liesl, surrounded by goose feathers, her pink fingers sifting through for only the finest. A woman would have time to take such care if she didn’t have to iron. And why should anyone iron in Sodokota? Max had Minna press his shirts with the kettle, but what for? The grass? The stones? God, she supposed. Max had it all wrong. And Ruth and Leo, too, with their tall house and their bought-new wagon. It was embarrassing, really, if you looked at Otto and Liesl. Real Americans tried hard at working, perhaps, but not at being. To try at that was to confess a vast, simmering doubt.