When I looked back, the house was gone.
I turned in circles, but the snow had thickened. My lantern grew faint, the wick low. How far I had walked, I could not say. In every direction, my light showed only a wall of white. My footprints were nearly covered, nothing that pointed one way or another. Crushing the bit of canvas in my pocket, I set out again, plunging to my thighs in the snow.
Surely I couldn’t be far from the house. Only a few dozen yards at best, and the barn would show itself or one of the fences and I could follow any one of them back. In the dark, even my hands were invisible. Was this what it felt like when they went? For suddenly I was sure the girls had gone alone, dress or not. They had found the strength to do it themselves—what with Esther leading the way. I saw her clearly as I hadn’t for months, pulling me along, her hand small and sharp and that fierce look she gave. Hurry, she said, as clear as the living, and when the wind tore up again there it was before us—an openness I had never known. The land was gone, the earth uncertain under my feet, and everything was possible at once. I could be forgotten, the oldest sister who would never be missed, and this was a release, the way sleep was a release, or that hour after the sun set, suppertime done, and I could sit with my darning and escape into myself while seeming every bit present. I could dream terrible dreams then, of my whole self vanishing while my knuckles cracked over one last trouser leg—and in that new place I could become boundless.
My toe struck the fence.
It was hours then or only minutes. I followed the fenceline with the barbs bloodying my fingers and soon wrenched the barn door open against the drifts. Under the rafters, my ears rushed with stillness, my lamp brighter now by half. The animals in their stalls shivered. In the far corner, the calf lay safe and near to sleep. She stared as I crouched next to her, her eyes shining—such a pretty thing, though Agnes worried she couldn’t be saved. We should shoot her before she starved, Ray had said. But Agnes wouldn’t allow for shooting, not with Lee gone. Lee, that soft heart. As I lay down, the calf shook her head, scared in the faint light and hardly ready for the living. I closed my eyes and let myself drift. A stream warmed my leg, as good as kettle water in the bath and a sudden softness in my hips. The calf nosed my shoulder, licking the snow off my chin. I took a scab of snow from my sleeve, held it to her lips to drink, and her tongue stung my skin.
I woke. The barn was still. The calf lay asleep in the far corner, its mouth wet. The rip of a hinge and the door flew open. I heard my name. It was then I was lifted up, a man’s breath in my ear. He labored and fell and righted himself, another voice calling my name and asking to carry me, but the man wouldn’t give in. Stumbling to the house, he grunted, nearly falling again as he held me fast. My cheek dropped against his shoulder, the smell of leather and tobacco. Soon I was awake enough to know it was Father who carried me, the way he hadn’t since I was a little girl. When I was young, he let me sit on his knee and rested the flat of his palm on my head, as if in protection. He wore an old leather hat, a triangular sort the color of moss, and he gave it to me whenever I complained of the sun. His hands were large, pocked at the knuckles, the whole of him wide as a barrel. Often he had carried me to my room at night when I dropped off to sleep in the parlor, if only to stay with my parents and their talk. Now he lowered me to my bed. Someone pushed a pillow behind my back. When I opened my eyes, he stood watching me, wild and gripping his chest.
“Mein Mädchen,” Father said, his face pinched. “You were found.” He ran his thumb across my cheek and slapped me with a full hand. “Never have us find you again.”
The room went quiet. My cheek stung. Around the bed my siblings watched like frightened children. Soon the room darkened and they hushed each other. I was falling asleep. I would sleep for several days more, hot as an oven and sweating through the sheets. The others came and went, tending to me. But it was Father who slumped always in the chair at my side, his head sagging. It was Father who said my name. I dreamt wonderful dreams then—of the girls returning home. Of Lee walking over the hill, not a limp in his step, and Mother taking hold of my hand. What a girl you are, she said. She opened the window and brought out her best skirt, fastening a belt around her waist. Your father says we have new sugar, she said. How about a cake? The girls ran to the kitchen to dip their fingers in the batter. Not so fast, Ray said. Not before dinner, I called out.
Then it was summer. It was late afternoon. Myrle was walking across the meadow in her bare feet, her fingers sweeping the grass. Her white-blond hair was dark and wet against her neck. On her back, the blue crepe. The fabric was soft and slim around her waist, the fit only just loose enough at her chest and hips. I couldn’t help but think how fine the dress was, how my needle had done that—and the way she walked in it, a pale spirit. Where’s she going? I asked my sisters. Agnes shrugged. To see a friend, Esther sung out. It was the last time I would see Myrle wear that dress. I would love if she could wear it again. I would bleach it clean, take my needle to the tears and hide them in new pleats—but Myrle was too far off now across the meadow to call back.
“Nan, Nan.”
I woke. The room seemed clear to me again. A man sat close to the bed. I knew his voice before I knew him.
“Carl.” I smiled at him and he drew his hand over my forehead.
“You’re awake.”
“I guess.”
“They were worried about you. Agnes thought I might be a help.”
Agnes sat on the other side of the bed. Her cheeks were raw, her hair twisted in a bun.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“They’re in town.”
I tried to sit up, but Carl pressed a hand to my shoulder.
“Why ever for?” I asked.
Agnes stuttered and it was Carl who took my hand. He nodded to Agnes and she bit her lip.
“They found a girl,” he said.
“The girls came home?”
Carl shook his head. “A girl in the river. They don’t know who she is. The others have gone to find out.”
Part II: The River
JON JULIUS
I
In the year 1892 I was a young man of little more than thirty, stealing passage from an old German woman who expired on the docks before she was boarded. She had blue cheeks in the time I discovered her. Her woolens were so thickly bound about her throat and chest I never could hope to save her, long past saving as she was. Her hand rested stiffly on her stomach. Her ticket wavered from the tips of her fingers as if offering it up. I touched her wrist and felt it cold, gazed back at the foreign village where I was friendless and sure to starve, and slipped that ticket from her grasp. God forgive the young their desperateness. Now nearly as old, I would pay for such unhappy luck. Yet little had I known of its opposite even then.
In the weeks as they passed, I stayed secreted on that ship, securing room for myself in the lower berths. I was a farm boy with a rent in his trousers. I reeked of pigs. If spied on the decks, I feared I would in an instant be pitched overboard, a trespasser no matter what ticket I held. In the evenings when the skies closed and the storms fell, I sweated in my bunk. The air was so very dense with smoke and stench my head itched. They offered us a mattress stowed with seaweed. A life preserver for a pillow. A tin pail for meals of herring and soup. My stomach turned. The lamps on such rocky waters were too dangerous to light. I tucked my knees to evade the rats. Still the ocean swells plagued my sleep. I stood in the mornings so sickened, I doubted I had opened my eyes.
In the daytimes, I dared walk the decks to escape the hordes below. When I grew tired, my legs unsure, I hid behind the vents and surveyed the horizon for land. One week more. One dreaded week. The engines of the ship bore on. On the upper level, a woman perched her child on the rail, gripping only his waist. The child was small, barely two years old. He was calm as he looked out. The woman cooed to him under her hat. She had a lovely pale face, little you
nger than myself. A ribbon bound a nest of hair off her neck. The hair was a fiery red, her cheek the whiter against it, and I felt a stirring when the wind lifted her skirt from her ankles. Now and again, she closed her eyes. Her fingers loosened from the waist of that jumper. The child was oblivious. He leaned forward in the arms of his mother, reaching for the sea.
When must we learn to fear? And if not from our parents, from whom?
I missed the land my father worked. I missed the house where my mother had me born. Sitting on deck on those dull waters, I missed my boots on the soil. In the dark of the evenings, I imagined that old woman as she snatched her ticket back. This voyage had taken from me something I never would have dreamed. My assurance there was a place for me. The steadiness of my limbs. Home. The idea alone is not solid enough to carry with us. Yet without it, on what can we stand? If I reached the far side, I prayed the new world proved steady. I might place my feet on the ground, build a life worth these many miles. Once I achieved that, I vowed I would leave the good earth never again.
I am an old man now. I sleep in my slippers because my feet grow cold. I know men who sleep far deeper than I. I know women who visit them in churchyards. Yet I cannot truly sleep in any sense of the word. The room is dark. I tug at my blanket. What a waste of time the evening is for the old. All those many hours between sunset and sunbreak. When I close my eyes, the swells of that sea always are with me. The never-ending tide of the river against its banks. How often I tried to keep the waters under my thumb. How much they have from us stolen. If the old woman and her ticket laid a curse, I have seen it play itself out, once and again. Why might a man lock the doors of his house? Why can he never forget the trespasses against him? He makes his confession. Yet confessing never erases the act. Try as I might, the language is wrong. The sentences slip. My ease with the old tongue is fading, and I am left only with this English. Its many contradictions. Its twenty ways of saying one thing.
Years ago when I stood on the deck of that ship, the sea reflected the sun. It lit my face from beneath. I believed I might go blind from the light. Even now I blink when I think of it. Me, only thirty-three and ignorant of everything save for what I could grow with my own hands. Born as I was a farmer. Raised in the northern German lands of wheat. The rest of my life, I learned little I would find important. About war, perhaps. About children and the duties of family. Yet these were not light. I could not make of them that.
When at last they released me from that prison Ellis Island, I wandered the streets of the city for a place to lay my head. With difficulty, I found boarding and determined to use it well. For two days I slept. Still I believed myself drifting on that ocean. On the third, a noise stirred me. A man stood next to my cot. His knees pressed into my mattress. I shared the room with a dozen others, and we had avoided so much as a glance. This man was short, powerfully built. He wore nothing save a stained undershirt, his naked arms and legs masked with hair. His breath more than stank. He watched me until certain I was alert, cleared his throat and puckered his lips. I turned my face. He let out a low guttural noise then, insulting me in some foreign language. In my innocence, I shook my head. Without another word he hurried to the toilet. From that room I heard worse from the man. His stomach seemed to drop out of him whole, leaving him gasping. When at last I sat up, I felt dizzy. Disjointed from my sleep. A spot of wet stained the blanket that lay across my chest. It was no larger than my thumb and just as harmless-seeming. Yet I remembered that man clearing his throat and understood such a spot never came from me.
Sleep on, Julius. Sleep on. The man had shared his pains as punishment. But for what crime? Come morning I would make my escape and discover the land they promised.
Early the next day, I packed my meager belongings and wandered the streets. I had often heard about the land in the west. New York seemed to promise little of such openness. How was it that its people settled on top of one another, never to fear trampling? In the afternoon, the streets shimmered with heat. I found only a bench in a park to give me rest. A church bell called once and again. I counted the bills that lined my wallet, wishing there were more.
Already I worried about my decision to leave home. To think I had wanted but a small bit of soil. Something not carved out by my father or his father before him. Yet almost every acre in my country had already been claimed. The thought of my father once he discovered my absence troubled me further still. The morning I went, I planned to leave hours of road behind me, long before my parents stood from their beds. I took a loaf of bread. A knife with which to cut it and keep for my protection. The cows I milked. The milk I poured in a jug for my mother. My bed I straightened, my church shoes placed at the door for one cousin to have or another. I had no heart to write a note. The cows would tell enough. The story, it would circle the village. How the son made well what was needed of him. How he had started in the darker hours to finish it. I imagined my father lifting his hat in the barn to find the cows asleep. Their stomachs would be full, their pails heavy with milk. I imagined my mother happening upon my bed and lifting the sheet. At its touch, warm or cold, she might guess the hour I had gone.
Week after week I trolled for work in that city, only to return to a different boardinghouse. I now had a room of my own with a lock. Still, my pockets had grown thin. My stomach suffered cramps. Outside in the hall, a washerwoman sang to herself as she scrubbed the floor. I opened my door to hear her better. “Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked, turning. Are you all right? Need you anything? “Nichts,” I answered. Her German held the thick lilting hum of the southern states, her s’s full between her teeth. Every word she spoke trailed from the roof of her mouth. At once I felt the home I had left restored to me. The woman wore hard wooden shoes. Her torso was narrow, her neck long. It rose to a faint line of hair, more white than blond and tied in a net. Without stopping her hands, she rinsed her rag in a bucket, wrung it, set it to the floor. Her singing never dropped a note. Despite the sorry house, she seemed to hold its very cleanliness on the tip of her thumb.
Mornings passed. I saw her many a time. Margrit was her name. An orphan. Her father gone to drink, her mother dead. At the age of twelve she had sold her family possessions to make the passage across. What little of Germany she knew remained in the language she spoke, her sense of work. She cared for that boardinghouse like her home.
“Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked.
“Nichts,” I answered again. Still I was growing more reluctant to close that door between us.
Inside the daylight hours, I continued my search for employment. Often I passed the same forlorn sheet of paper tacked to a post. An advertisement, in German no less. acres by the millions. lands for sale. It showed a crude drawing of a railway cutting between miles of grass. I brought it to the man at the boardinghouse desk. Margrit held the sheet close, a translator for us. I was to purchase my train ticket. Labor in the place day and night to fill my pocket. Offer my bid within thirty days. “My own brother did it, and my dad. But not me,” the man explained. “Nothing there but dust.” “Nur Staub,” Margrit said. But dust, I thought, it needs soil to run beneath it. More land than could fit inside a fence. Margrit rolled the paper neatly, warmed it in her hands. When she offered it back, it seemed a gift. When next I saw her, I had a different answer to her question.
“Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked. “Ja,” I said.
Margrit and I were a week later married. With my last dollars, I purchased our tickets west.
They say one countryside is like another. There are horses and cattle. The smell of dung. At home, my father owned a small farm of forty acres where we raised wheat and maize. Yet as soon as our train crossed into the western plains, I knew this land would be different. The maps showed a state bordered on both sides by rivers. The Mississippi on one. The Missouri the other. A mouthful both of them, wide as any plain. Iowa. The word gives nothing for the tongue to hold. Still when we arrived, it seemed w
holly settled, if only in the steadiness in its terrain. In Iowa, I held my hand level to the earth, my fingers splayed. If I squinted right, the very crevices in my skin disappeared into the dust. There was little difference between me and it.
Yes, this suits, I thought. It will a man and his family feed. It will bear a house on acres enough to build further still. With Margrit at my side, I believed this country held no trickery or grief. It was only as it seemed.
It was late in the summer when Margrit and I arrived on our stake of land. Our wagon was full. Our pockets drained. Bottomland, we had been promised. But I feared a rich soil swamped up to our britches. Only the spring before, we were told, the channels in the northeast had swallowed their banks. When the waters retreated, the soil was black as ink. Flat as an ironed sheet. Now the river stayed in its bed, a murky line that marked the border of our land. We had but a hundred and fifty acres, so far from the closest village we had earned twice our dollar. With the savings, we purchased a team of horses. A dairy cow and chickens. A plow and harrow for planting. At first only ten of our acres were broken in, the rest overrun with prairie grasses. An abandoned dugout stood in the southeast corner, so narrow it held no more than a cot. The door fell off at a touch, little better than a piece of canvas. The agent told us two brothers had run of the place. In the months before, the dugout had been found deserted. All that remained was a starveling dog tied to a post, a packet of tobacco hidden in the wall. Now both dog and tobacco were gone.
We ducked our heads. The roof was never so tall for a man to stand. Margrit reached for the ceiling. Her fingertips blackened. “Wie ein Grab,” she said and wiped her hand on her skirts. No better than a grave. She left our bedding outside. “I am not sleeping in it. Might be fine for dead brothers, but I am far from that.”
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