The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  Bridget screams—she can’t help herself.

  Downstairs, Julie shouts in alarm.

  The ghost moves toward her again, one more revolting dead step. Her hands reach. Bridget sees that the closer the ghost comes, the clearer she is realized, as if she is fighting her way through a curtain or up from the bottom of a microscope’s lens. She is wearing some kind of dress, long white sleeves that are dirty with the earth of a grave. Her face is beautiful, sharply drawn—but her eyes, huge and black and angry, are terrifying. She has long dark hair and a high, fine collar. Her mouth—but Bridget cannot look at her mouth. Because it is opening. And there is nothing but hunger in there.

  Bridget screams again and backs out into the hallway, hitting the railing at the landing.

  The ghost pulls itself toward her, reaching for the door.

  They both hear Julie crying.

  Bridget lunges for the knob and slams the door shut, penning the ghost inside Julie’s room. She pauses, ear close enough to the door that her hair brushes the wood, and tries to hold her breath long enough to hear whatever may be happening inside—but almost instantly, propelled by the ferocious pounding of her heart, air rushes out hard from her nose and mouth. Pahhhh. And still nothing. There’s nothing.

  Something metal slides, shifts. She looks down and sees the doorknob beginning to turn.

  “No,” she whispers. She grabs the knob with both hands and tries to hold it still.

  A soft thudding against the door.

  No. No.

  The knob twists. Her hands are soaked in sweat; the knob slips between her palms. “No!”

  As terrified as she is, she is helplessly aware of the sounds of Julie’s cries and her toddling movements as Julie approaches the foot of the stairs. Looking over her shoulder as she clings to the doorknob and tries to still it, Bridget sees that Julie has cruised to the staircase and is, in her wobbly fashion, trying to climb the stairs toward her mother, her little hands on the third step, her plump feet on the step below, her face turned up toward Bridget’s, crying for real, tears on her round cheeks. “Julie, stay there! Don’t move!” The little girl shakes her head. No no no. “Julie, don’t you move! Stay where you are!”

  Bridget feels the tension on the other side of the doorknob slacken and release. Is she letting go?

  She looks around wildly for something to shove in front of the door—it opens inward from the hallway, but something big to block it? A chair? There’s nothing in the hallway. The bathroom hamper? What about the linen cabinet? It’s just cheap particleboard, but it’s full of stuff. Could she move it quickly enough?

  Julie is on the fourth stair.

  “Julie, goddamn it, stop exactly where you are!” Bridget screams (why, why, why, didn’t we put a fucking gate up there the second she started cruising?). The little girl, crying, reaches up for her mother, who sees her losing her balance as she rears back and lifts her arms over her head. “Julie, please, please!”

  Another horrible thump against the door, a dead body pushing itself up against a barrier, as if borne by a current of water.

  Julie falls. She lands back one step, on her thigh, one pudgy forearm hitting the stair above her bottom. She doesn’t hit her head, but the loss of altitude does startle her, and she begins to scream in earnest while starting up the steps again toward her mother, eyes practically squeezed shut with the intensity of her misery.

  “Julie, stop! Stop right there!” She has no choice. Bridget relinquishes her knuckle-cracking grip on the doorknob and flies down the steps, scooping up her baby girl near the bottom before she works her way any further toward danger. Julie buries her head in Bridget’s shoulder, grabbing a fistful of the hair at the back of Bridget’s neck, as she is wont to do, and working her little fingers through the strands as she weeps, inconsolable.

  Bridget, for her part, stands at the bottom of the stairs, holding her daughter tightly against her chest, watching the landing with a fear greater than any she’s felt yet. Her heart pounds and stammers. Her knees shake. She finds she has to sit down, just sit on the floor for a moment, and sinks into a cross-legged position with Julie’s legs and arms still wrapped around her.

  Nothing happens. Bridget watches, listens, rocks her little girl. The ghost does not descend. Perhaps she’s exactly where she wants to be.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rebecca Hirschfelder’s little boy, Matthew, was born at the end of the summer growing season, a blessing in a number of ways, not the least being that Frau came to stay with the Hirschfelders during that busiest of times. In the way of most of the Germans who farmed here, John Hirschfelder planted every cash crop his land could sustain and reckoned on no fewer than eight months of growing weather. The corn harvest, the threshing and binding of the oats, and the winter wheat planting all collided in early autumn—but thanks to Frau, during their short, sunlit evening suppers and noon dinners, John and the hired men were now eating better than they had in more than a year.

  Dr. Mueller, who had attended the boy’s birth with the help of a midwife from town, had left Frau and the hired girl, Dusana, rigid instructions about how and when their help would be required since, given the new mother’s physical state, the baby’s changing and bathing must fall primarily to them. Two weeks after the newborn’s arrival, Rebecca was still bleeding and much reduced, weaker by far than she’d been when she first moved to the farmhouse the previous summer, and confined to bed when she was ready, more than ready, to be out of it. She stayed put only out of deference to her father. She hadn’t liked the sorrowful way he looked at her, nestled with her boy among the bedclothes, the two of them each about as helpless as the other.

  The bed itself, which Rebecca had always hated, was no help. She sank too far into the mattress and pillows, and the infant was too small, her arms too tired, her breasts too sore. One afternoon in September, finding herself, as usual, unable to find a comfortable position to nurse the boy, Rebecca sat up against the headboard and propped the infant in the crook of her arm, with a pile of sagging pillows in her lap to support his tiny body. The boy wasn’t heavy, but holding him this way meant she couldn’t lie back herself, as she would dearly have liked to do. The fall afternoon glowed outside the bedroom window, throwing outrageous light across the room, across the bed, and across the two of them swaddled and immobilized. Rebecca and her boy.

  His small mouth—that wasn’t the source of the pain, the midwife had told her. It was the milk coming down, not him, that caused the sensation of burning shears raking across the tip of her breast. She just had to wait for it to be over—count to ten and it would end, and she could breathe again.

  One, two, three.

  She wondered if John would come to visit them this afternoon—or wait until she was asleep again.

  Four, five, six.

  The side of his darling face. The plump, pretty cheek.

  Seven. Eight.

  Let me out. Let me out of this bed, this room.

  Nine. Ten.

  Almost always at its worst before it improved.

  There.

  Rebecca allowed her eyes to close, but the glow of the room was still visible as a rosy pressure on her eyelids. And the sweet, warm boy in his clean white wrappings, half-asleep and half-nursing, was there, always there, new and utterly unknown, and yet someone she felt she’d known and understood her entire life.

  The bedroom door opened and in came Dusana. Rebecca recognized the girl’s self-conscious tread without needing to open her eyes. Dusana emitted her usual snort upon finding Rebecca sitting up, holding the boy—Dusana generally snorted with derision whenever she was unsure what to do, and Rebecca had become familiar with the sound. She supposed that part of her breast must be showing. Dusana was only fifteen.

  “He’s all right. He doesn’t need to be changed yet. He’s been sleeping and just woke up,” Rebecca murmured, again without opening her
eyes. “In about twenty minutes, however, I expect we’ll need your help.”

  “I be here, Mrs. Hirschfelder.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I let you sleep now. You should sleep. Try to sleep while he eat.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “My sister could lie down while her little girl eat. Could you try?”

  “I’ll try again soon. I promise. I know you’re right, that would be more comfortable.” Dusana was forever recommending the sensible course, the best way, and Rebecca, for reasons she herself didn’t quite understand, was always resisting until she couldn’t anymore. Ever since she’d moved into John’s farmhouse and assumed her part in directing their hired folks, this was the way it had stood between her and Dusana.

  “Cozy. Very cozy they always look.” Dusana’s waxed boots scuffed closer to the bed. “Sweet baby boy,” she said warmly.

  “You’re a good girl and a good help to me, Dusana.” It wasn’t so hard to admit. There was no need to be so prideful, was there?

  “You rest, Mrs. Hirschfelder. Everything is taken care.”

  Everything had taken care. Rebecca herself had taken care, more than she warranted. She realized she was very tired indeed.

  “What is Frau doing? Where is she?”

  “Frau?” Dusana asked, puzzled.

  “I’m sorry. Miss Nussbaum. My aunt Adeline. Is she still in the kitchen?”

  “Jo,” Dusana said stoutly. “She here, in the kitchen. She making pies for the men.”

  Rebecca smiled in a thin way. I will not open my eyes.

  “She making enough to feed eight times the men.”

  “That’s the way she is.” Between feeding the men, preserving the last of the summer produce, and laying waste to Rebecca’s sewing basket, Frau had informed Rebecca that she was already prepared to do the winter planting of the farmhouse’s kitchen garden. All that remained was the digging, which could wait until the weather had cooled a bit. Rebecca wondered sometimes just how long Frau expected her to stay here, bed-bound in her hot little aerie.

  Dusana sniffed to signal her disapproval of Frau’s generosity toward the hired men, and this, too, was a sound Rebecca knew well. Rebecca shifted her arm under the baby’s head, and he squeaked his own disapproval and then latched back onto Rebecca with a hungry hawmph.

  “You rest. I come back.”

  Nursing the boy always had the effect of making her feel hungry and tired—not a drowsy, sleepy kind of tired but the kind of fatigue that comes in a wave after a day’s long work. Rebecca was acquainted with the sensation. She’d never worked so hard in her life as she had in the past year. She’d never known what work was at all, she would admit, until she came to live on the farm and lost her husband’s goodwill at the same time.

  Not that he hadn’t helped her, even in his coldness. She’d given him no other choice: He had to help her. Without reproach or comment he’d done a good deal of work that would otherwise have been hers, if only she weren’t so incompetent and lost. Somehow, despite everything else he had to do, her husband managed to see that the cows were milked and the chickens fed each morning and night. Because he rose so early—earlier than she or Dusana could ever manage, although they kept long hours themselves—he got the stove warm every morning for her before daylight, and at some point each week, she could hardly imagine when, he freshened the tinderbox and organized the woodpile. She supposed that her husband’s mother must have taught him to do these things when he was a little boy tasked with helping her around the house.

  John disappeared to town some days and came back with soap, coffee, coal, thread, before Rebecca even realized they would soon run low. When one of her washboards broke, he replaced it with a better one. He, not she, had directed Dusana in planting last winter’s vegetables, although Rebecca had failed to supplement with much pickle or preserve, and by February they had all discovered just how much salt pork and potato they could eat.

  The one thing Rebecca could do well, almost from the beginning, was bake bread of all kinds, although her piecrusts were still starchy and burned. Although she tried to adhere to the principled schedules suggested by that old friend Practical Housekeeping, it was March before she and Dusana could contrive to get all the washing done on Monday in time to iron on Tuesday; indeed, one bleakly chill January week, the washing wasn’t ironed and finished until Saturday afternoon. That had been a low moment.

  It wasn’t the work that Rebecca hated. What she hated was being bad at it.

  Her failures were often less ones of execution than of an inability to see around corners: losing some meat in the cold cellar for lack of proper salting, losing potatoes in March because they’d never been looked into and were spoiled by moisture, running out of hot water at inconvenient points in the washing, never reaching the bottom of the sewing workbasket and wearing out socks and stockings as a result. Every day demanded that she be more strategic, more organized, more energetic. Every day she and John grew thinner and thinner.

  For all that, truth be told, the work was enjoyable in its peculiar way. She had come to think of the farm as a sequence of basic math problems, just little math problems, like tangles of string, tucked into the corners of every room and divoted into the earth itself on every inch of every acre, and she liked it when she could solve a problem. She liked knowing that without her efforts, joined with John’s and the Heinrich boys’ and even little Dusana’s, the farm would cease to run properly. They all had their parts to play in turning the wheel.

  And from the very first night she’d loved the place itself. The smart little white farmhouse, poised on the merest rise with a view down a sloping orchard to the barnyards and the fields beyond, possessed in all its well-organized particulars a sweet correctness, the very spirit of John’s wise, doomed little mother, who had had a hand in every detail of the house where she knew she’d live out the rest of her life, if God allowed it. It was John’s mother’s dream house, and even with the little wiry math problems tucked around the place, everything about it pleased Rebecca: the bright square rooms, the wide windows admitting the fresh air that wound its way through the house, the cool porches—even the built-in shelves, which seemed to be spaced at exactly the right height. Rebecca wasn’t so ungrateful as to overlook the abundant evidence of the woman who had come before her, with the expertise and the desire to improve not just her own life but also those lives she touched, even these years after her death. It overstated nothing to say that Rebecca was simply trying not to spoil her mother-in-law’s hard work, and it was this thought that often chucked her under the chin. The farmhouse was the engine that turned the fields, after all, and ever since her first glimpse of them, Rebecca had loved, without needing to know why, the immense, waving green-blue yellow of the acres they owned.

  She’d always been the sort who relished a challenge, and transforming herself from a nearsighted, indolent bluestocking into a rough-thumbed, fireside-sewing, washtub-stirring farmhouse wife was nothing if not a challenge. There was something reminiscent of her dreamy page-turning days, too, in the march to the horizon that was farm housekeeping.

  She still couldn’t make a cake.

  She was getting better.

  She would conquer it. She knew she would.

  If they would just let her get out of this damned bed.

  She’d grown in the past year, even as she’d lost some of her fleshiness. She really thought sometimes, when she looked at her own arms, newly curved with musculature, that she had never seen them looking so well. As long as she didn’t look at her hands. Well, those were ruined, even though she tried to remember to wear gloves whenever it was practical. Laundry was what did it. One couldn’t wear gloves and do the wash.

  Her legs, though still skinny, were wiry-strong like a colt’s. She sometimes thought she could run the entire length of the farm’s south pasture, just for fun. Someday she might even do
it.

  And her breasts had returned, as full and white as they once had been, only now with milk. She was a funny-looking scarecrow of a mother, all right. What a sight she must be. A sturdy, straightened stick, with bizarre relics of womanliness clinging to it like charms from a totem—her swinging black hair, her gray eyes beneath their delicate fringe of lashes, her aching breasts. Rebecca took in a deep breath and gently repositioned the boy. The pain began afresh, on the other side. She counted.

  The hours drifted away, and when they came back, someone else was in the room with her, a wide, warm body blocking the low golden glare through the west window. At the same moment Rebecca became aware that Matthew’s little body was no longer nuzzled into her side. She stretched out luxuriously in the bed, muscles aching and thanking her at once.

  “Your mother is comfortable now, Liebchen.” Frau’s voice moved slowly back and forth before the window. Rebecca would not open her eyes, no, she would not. Not when the bed was all hers at last, and she could roll fully onto her side and stretch her legs out in front of her, making herself an L against the sheets, which were blessedly cooler and fresher on the other side of the bed. “We won’t disturb her, no. We’ll let her stretch herself and rest herself, won’t we. Sweet sleeping elf. We love our mama. We want her to be well. Don’t we.”

  Dusana’s heavy boots skidded in and stopped short at the doorway. Rebecca pressed her face into the pillow.

  “You hold him? Oh, let me see the little face. Oh, he’s sleeping. Look at the . . .”

  “The eyelashes. Yes. Long like a calf’s.”

  Dusana snorted.

  “You’ll change the waters, please. There’s a good girl.”

  Dusana obeyed Frau immediately, her thick-soled tread moving toward the washstand on the other side of the bed. Frau and Dusana were well matched. You could almost say the two of them were allies, although Rebecca hesitated to think of them that way since the only force they had to unite against was her.

  But Aunt Adeline always seemed to strike the right tone, including the girl but not to the point of intimacy. Dusana, Frau seemed to have grasped instantly, was looking for employers, not a family. Family she had plenty of. What the girl wanted was instruction, importance, tasks that meant something. Not that she didn’t appreciate a little friendliness, of course. And yet too much friendliness, too much praise, made her uneasy, in Rebecca’s experience. Aunt Adeline had always managed the servants in Dr. Mueller’s household—there had been men and women to help with the laundry, the animals, the cleaning.