“See the braucha,” Stolanus had said, thinking more could be, must be, done—other precautions, a tea maybe or some herbs, he’d heard onions.
“What about onions?” she’d wanted to know.
But he wasn’t certain, maybe it wasn’t onions after all, but garlic—anyway what did he know, he just thought maybe, surely, the braucha would have something, prayers, an incantation, what could it hurt?
“She has ways,” he had said. “Maybe something she could give you.”
“What, some potion?” she had said, stubbornly. “String garlic around my neck?”
Helen did not want to see the braucha, with her Bolshevik charms and potions and prayers, in her ugly sod hut, it was as bad as a cave, and her rotting teeth, that stink of garlic. All that superstition and black magic. Brauching. It was obscene. For God’s sake, did they not have a doctor here? Did they not have a priest? Brauchas, they were for the old country. Baba Yaga, that’s what Helen called her, though Stolanus did not like it, the same old argument.
“Have some respect, she’s an elder.”
“An elder witch, and a Russian, too.”
“Yah, part Russian, but also part German. Her mother from Franzeld, too, just like your own.”
“Nothing like my own. My mother was not Russian.”
“So? And what of that?”
“What do you mean, so? How can you say it? They are all dogs. And murderers.”
“And what about the Germans, eh? What about the Lusitania? Belgium? Verdun? We are not innocent, either. All this blood.”
Always the same. And always she took it too far, she could not help herself.
“Yah,” she would mutter, “like your father.”
Personally, she’d had nothing against him, her father-in-law. Only that she didn’t think much of his stance against the war. A deserter from the Russian army, Pius had slipped across the border into Rumania, cutting himself off from his parents and brothers and sisters, marrying and coming first to America, then to Canada with his young family, finding, God knows how, where others—Weisers and Hechs and Reises and countless neighbours from Kleinliebenthal, his former village in Russia—had settled. Stolanus did not like to think of his father as a coward, did not like to hear him called that. But that’s just what he was, as far as Helen could tell. And because of it, because his father was a coward, Stolanus heard little about his family back in the old country, especially now that Old Pius was dead. Though that was just as well. Better to cut those ties. They did no good, just dragged you down. Things had grown worse back there, far worse, and what could they—she and Stolanus and the others who had come over—do about it? Sit around and feel sorry? Feel guilty that they prospered in the new country while back home everything crumbled? No. Hadn’t she left her own family behind as well? Things were terrible there, yes, but what good to dwell on it, to look backward? And now, since the war, there were no more letters, and so it was easier still to forget.
Oh, some still sat around moaning about it, their beloved Russland, the villages there, Kleinliebenthal, Franzfeld, Mariantal, Josephstal. For her part, Helen was glad to be gone from there, was proud to be here. She was a German. A German Canadian. Some others, she often thought, would do well to follow her example, but they were always crying and moaning about the homeland. “Russia is not the homeland,” she always said to Stolanus afterwards. “We are Germans, not? If they want to mourn, mourn for Baden, or Alsace. That is the homeland.”
And now, worse shame, some were calling themselves Russian. That’s what they put on their children’s birth certificates. So the children born before the war were all German and the ones born after were all Russian. To protect them, the parents said, so they will not be hated here, will not be judged. Stupid. Her baby would be German, just like his brother. And she would not be ashamed. She would teach them to be proud, here in this new country with Russia and all its hardships and demons far behind them. She would not sit and cry with the rest of them about how good the old country was, how beautiful, how easy life there. If it was so easy, why had they left? She often wanted to say, You don’t like it here? So go back. They are killing Germans there, that’s how good it is. They are lining us up and shooting us like dogs. That is what she would have liked to say, but she did not.
Things were hard here, too. In some ways harder, but only in some. Here they had good machinery for the seeding and the harvest. In the old country they did it on foot, with hoes or scythes, breaking their backs in the sun. And now Stolanus was talking about a grain truck. If the crops got in without mishap, he had promised to buy a car, a real motorcar, as early as that fall. Yes, a good many things were better here. But the big thing was, they were free. And if Isabel Martin and Mae Smith and Iris Bell and those others looked down their noses and said the Germans should be deported if they weren’t so good at cleaning houses, they were certainly no worse than the Russians. And anyway, no matter where you go there will always be someone to hate you. So, what of it? You work hard and soon you have more than those who mock you, and that is your reward. Here they would work hard and grow rich and fat. Already they were ahead of some others, the ones whose crops were never as bountiful.
And they would have more children, her and Stolanus. A big family. They would bury no more children, children not yet even children (except for little Katerina, who she would not think of, could not). No, the rest were not even babies, only blood.
This was her home now. She had soaked this earth with her blood. German blood.
But no more. She would be especially careful. The threshing crew would eat cold meals now and then if they must. She would not be a fool, like Rosalia Eichert, like Esther Hech, like Marian Weiser and Ma Reis, and the others, getting up before dawn just to be the first to hang out their washing Monday morning. And Ludmila Baumgarten, the worst of them, she was not fooling anyone, they all knew she hung it in the dark Sunday night, the Lord’s Day, just to look as if she was first Monday morning. It was stupid. Helen would not compete with them. And she would not feel guilty about it, though she knew what they would say.
“Only one little one at home and she can’t even bring a hot meal to the field?”
“Can’t even bake a ham, boil some potatoes?”
“What does it take to boil potatoes?”
“That’s nothing, I heard Stolanus sometimes does his own cooking.”
“No. Not really.”
“Yes, really, do you think I would lie about it?”
“Ach, for shame. If my husband … well.”
“That’s how it is, caught by a pretty face.”
“Pretty? That skinny thing?”
“I wouldn’t call her pretty.”
“Well, better than some.”
“I’d like to know who.”
“Oh, enough already, she didn’t mean you.”
“I never said she meant me.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Anyway, I wouldn’t say pretty.”
“Well, she must be something, not? She must have caught him somehow, not with her cooking, that’s for sure.”
And they would laugh, while the older women shook their heads and said, “In my day a woman worked. We were not so soft back then.”
But she did not care what they said. Let them talk. If it wasn’t the meals, they would find something else to wag their tongues at.
She looked again at the basket. It was a small meal, and that was enough. The men would not starve. They would not even be very hungry, would not eat much anyway, in this heat. The hired man—hired boy, she always said to herself, for they were all boys now, since the war—ate like a sparrow. So there was only the Schneider brothers to worry about. And they were bachelors so they would be happy with whatever they got. She added another loaf of bread and a jar of chokecherry jam to the basket, then stepped from the porch into the overwhelming evening, the final hard blast of heat that came before sunset, the hot, soft earth as she crossed the field, stubble scratching dryl
y at her ankles, the scorched hum of grasshoppers. One zinged up against her cheek with a sting, then another, catching in her hair, but she could not hit them away, her arms full of the basket and the water jug. She did not like them, but she was not afraid of them, either, in spite of what the women said about her, just because at a ball game once she had flipped one off her dress with a little jump, hardly a jump at all, and only because it had startled her. She had seen the smirks on the other women’s faces. Well, what did she care what they thought, anyway?
As Helen neared the threshing crew, Stolanus saw her. He did not wave or even nod, just continued, bending with the shovel and heaving. They would not stop simply because supper had arrived. She would stand and wait with the food until they were finished loading; then, when they planted their shovels in the grain and climbed down from the wagon box, she would dish up their plates and fill the cups and pass them around. Then she would sit and watch while they crouched in the shade and ate silently, shovelling the food into their mouths in huge bites, but without haste, efficiently, not out of hunger but only necessity, not even tasting it, so what did it matter that it was not an elaborate meal? It was the women who cared, who made such a fuss. To impress each other, outdo each other. The men did not even notice what they ate.
She set the basket in the shade of the wagon, then went around to the front end and peeked at her son who lay sleeping there beneath the box, his face pink and swelled with the August sun, a dusting of earth over his eyelids and his lips, parted slightly in sleep, his cheeks smeared with dirt and sweat, his hair so blond with summer. He had her mother’s colouring. Northern German. The rest of them were southerners, Alsatians, the dark ones, the gypsies. The ones who had emigrated to the Black Sea steppes. Then again to America, to Canada. Still moving, some of them. And this one now, where would he go?
Behind her someone killed the engine on the threshing machine. The men climbed down, swiping at their faces with hankies. She took the food out of the basket and handed the plates around, feeling, as she did so, that out here the food did not seem so much after all. How was it that being out in the fields seemed to diminish everything that way? It was like looking the wrong way through a magnifying glass. And that leftover chicken, would there be enough after all? She frowned meaningfully at Stolanus, hoping he would understand and not eat much himself so there would be enough for the others. But he seemed not to notice, either her look or the small portion on his plate. And so they crouched there in the shade alongside the wagon, all in a row, the hired boy, as always, a little apart from the others and hunched over his plate, his black hair cropped so close above a permanently serious face, not looking at anyone, not speaking unless someone spoke to him first. He was shy, homesick maybe. Helen often wondered about his family. Poor, obviously. Some farm misfortune, or some other tragedy. The father dead, maybe. The kids sent out to work before they could even wash behind their ears. She had dished his plate up last, saving him a little extra chicken, he was so thin. His shirt far too short in the sleeves. When she did the washing Monday, she must remember to add a little to the cuffs. She tried to catch his eye as she handed him his plate, but he just ducked his head and accepted it as he accepted wordlessly all the little things she did for him. It was not much, but it mattered, she thought, it must matter, to know someone cared about you. Sad, she always thought, he looked very sad. “Ach,” Stolanus constantly said, “he’s fine.” But that was Stolanus.
When they were all dished up, she sat down in the shade and poured herself a cup of water.
“Did you hear?” Rochus Schneider was saying. “They will change the name in town.”
“Yah,” Stolanus said, “because Prussia changed to Triumph. Everything they do, we have to do, too.”
“They took a council vote. Sent a letter to some bigshot and the bigshot said, all right, change it if you want to change it. They’re holding a contest. To come up with a new name.”
Helen had already heard about that, or overheard, at the store the other day. Town council wanted a name “less suggestive,” which meant less German. She grimaced over her cup of water.
“Not only that,” Rochus said, “but the street names, too. That’s what council said.”
“Good, give them something to do with their time.”
“What do you think, Helen? What’s a good name for the town?”
“It has a good name,” she said.
“But if you had to choose.”
“London,” she said. “Then we can all wear top hats and drink tea from little china cups.”
“Ach, Helen,” Stolanus sighed.
But Isidore Schneider just laughed. “I’ll take some of that good German coffee just so long as there’s some of that kuchen there to go with it. And I’ll call it whatever you want.”
Helen poured everyone coffee and passed around the kuchen. After she put the coffeepot in the basket, she bent and reached a hand beneath the wagon, pressing her fingers against the boy’s flushed cheek. But he did not stir.
“Worn out,” Stolanus said quietly, from behind her. She nodded and rose and poured herself another cup of water.
“You should hear the names they’ve come up with,” Isidore said. “They had them in the paper. Tipperary.”
“Tipperary?”
“Lucky,” Rochus put in.
“And then all the ones you might expect: Wheatley, Wheatown, Wheatland, Wheatplain, Wheatville, Wheatking.”
“Wheat-in-the-arse.”
“That’s right,” Rochus said. “Isn’t that Scherler and Haegert and that bunch? I guess that’s what you get when you have a town council of Protestants: Wheat-in-the-arse.”
“Yah, that reminds me, did you hear one of the nuns up at the convent there broke her arm?” said Isidore. “Had to get it all wrapped up in a sling and everything. I guess she was walking down the street the other day and passed Squeaky Scherler and Ed Haegert coming out of Wing’s and they said to her, ‘Well, and what happened to you?’ ‘Oh,’ the nun said, ‘I fell in the bathtub.’ ‘Oh,’ Ed said, ‘that’s too bad.’ Then, after she walked away, he turned to Squeaky and said, ‘What’s a bathtub?’ And Squeaky said, ‘How should I know? I’m not Catholic.’”
“One of these days, you’ll tell that joke in the wrong company,” Rochus warned, glancing quickly at Lathias, who seemed not to be listening.
“Ach.” Isidore waved his hand good-naturedly. “If they can’t take a joke, they should stay home.”
Rochus squinted up at the sun and said, “We should haul that load in, not? We got another round or two before dark.”
“Yah,” Stolanus said, rising.
(But not too eagerly, Helen thought, so as not to look as if he had been waiting for one of the men to suggest it, not wanting to rush anyone. That was his way. Helen didn’t think much of it. If there was work to do, he should say so.)
“I’ll go,” Lathias said, setting his plate on the ground. “I’m finished.”
“Yah,” Stolanus said, “all right. I wouldn’t say no to another coffee.”
“That’s right, let us old ones rest a while. Leave the young ones work.”
Stolanus held his cup out toward Helen and she rose again with the pot and filled the men’s cups.
“I don’t know,” Isidore said, loud enough for Lathias to hear. “Is that such a good idea? Can he even run the horses yet?”
The men laughed again, and Lathias smiled, just a little, and nodded and climbed up onto the wagon seat, clucking the horses into motion, sending the wheels creaking forward.
Helen whirled, coffee sloshing down the front of her dress. “No,” she hollered, but the wagon was already moving.
EIGHT
Helen remembered this: there was blood on her hands. There was so much blood everywhere and she kept trying to wipe it away, to wipe it from her son’s eyes, saying, “He can’t see, he can’t see,” and wiping, wiping, so much of it, everywhere, and Stolanus yelling, “Get back, get back, for Christ’s sake,”
as he lifted that little body in his big arms and ran to the house, stumbling across the soft, hot field, the boy’s legs and arms bouncing with the motion, as though he struggled to get free.
And her just standing there in the field watching them go, feeling the sticky blood on her hands, opening and closing them, opening and closing, until Rochus Schneider (or maybe it was Isidore) took her by the arm and she stepped forward (didn’t she? she thought she had) and then collapsed, as if there were no legs beneath her at all, and Rochus saying, “Come on, come on,” and he ran, too, dragging her almost, through the field, and there was blood there, right there in the stubble and the dirt, and they ran over it, they followed his blood home.
——
For three days he lay as if dead. Then, at dawn of the third day, much to everyone’s disbelief, the boy opened his unbandaged eye, looked Helen in the face and said, “I did,” as clear as day. They would remark upon that later, they would speak of that—the clarity of that little meaningless phrase—over the dim light of supper tables, with a hushed and solemn air, as if there might at least have been some message for her, for Helen, a revelation or a prophecy or an accusation, something. They spoke of it in hushed tones, for it could just as easily have been one of their own, that is what they said to their children, “It could just as easily have been you,” though they were not believed, never believed in matters of love or tragedy, and at every table mothers made silent counts of heads, just to be sure, and they thought of the boy and crossed themselves and felt relieved, yes, God help them, relieved for themselves and for their children. And they spoke of it again the following morning, in the café and the grocery and the hardware. They listed the ones taken, swallowed by wells and dugouts and sloughs, frozen to death just steps from their front doors, thrown or trampled by livestock, struck by wagons and trains, or, less dramatically, by rheumatic fever, measles, influenza. They spoke of it all through that day and during the weeks to come, when they learned the boy would live after all, when they learned how the accident had thickened his tongue, confused his brain, and through those weeks their compassion and relief somehow turned to righteousness and judgment, for wasn’t it Helen, with only one little one, who refused to participate in any of the ladies’ functions because, or so she said, she had too much work at home, wasn’t it her? And they baked their bread and kuchen and buns to take to her, with lips pressed tight now in compassion, yes, for they were not cold-hearted, they would not wish ill upon anyone, certainly not, but wasn’t it Helen who turned up her nose at them all? Yes. And now she would have a hard row to hoe. The boy would never be the same. Head injuries, they were the worst, better to be dead. Did they not all remember old Martin Schlesser who had been kicked by a horse and how he would walk around town all day with his hand not down the front of his trousers, but, worse still, tucked inside his open zipper, even at the supper table, even in church? It was terrible for the ladies and the children, but worse still for him. Yes, better to be dead. But, no, they would not think it. And what about the hired man—that halfbreed, wasn’t he?—from God knows where, what did anybody really know about him after all? He was not still with them, surely, not with the boy marred that way, destroyed, for life, and him the cause of it? And what was it the boy had said when he’d finally awoke? I did? No, no, I will, I’m sure of it. And what was that supposed to mean? Some kind of threat? Head injuries, they were the worst, remember dirty old Martin Schlesser?
The Horseman's Graves Page 6