Ma said later: “I don’t know what got into me, but I stood there just as if I didn’t have a brain in my head, just staring at that poor girl, Lord, what she must have thought of me.”
What the girl must have thought of Ma, no one knew. What Ma thought of the girl was this: Lord God Almighty, that is the skinniest, palest, strangest, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. But, Lord, so thin. The child must be near starving to death, and yet developed well beyond her years, God help her.
When Ma described the girl to others, she said she had long limbs that made her appear taller than she was, and long thick hair a strange wild cinnamon colour that fell down around her shoulders, face freckled, eyes the same odd reddish brown as her hair. The girl’s dress was askew at the hem about ankles so thin they looked as if they would snap should she take a step forward. Feet plunged into wear-beaten shoes heavy and brown and far too large. And so maybe because of the intensity of the girl’s stare or maybe because Ma herself was nervous and uncomfortable or simply for lack of anything else to say, she blurted, “Oh, my dear, are you wearing Leo’s shoes?”
Of course, she meant it to be helpful, meant to suggest that she might find her something more appropriate, but she realized later how stupid it was when the girl flushed up right from her dingy white collar to the roots of that cinnamon hair, so that she gave the odd impression of being all red and white, hot and scorching, as if something burned there.
Perhaps the girl would have replied then—Ma could see she had offended or at least embarrassed her—but, just at that moment, the mother appeared. Or, not quite appeared, for she did not join her daughter on the porch, but only peeked through the screen door at the girl’s back, her body mostly hidden by the doorframe, as though she did not wish to be seen. She was a big woman, even by ample standards, with her apron tied up over a large belly and her face round and white and full as the moon.
And so that the woman could believe she was not seen, Ma just smiled at the daughter and set the baking firmly on the step and said, “Tell your mother Hady Reis stopped by. Everybody around here calls me Ma. I’m the next farm over that way, should she need anything. Tell her I said to come for coffee sometime.”
And then she turned and left.
But she said later, “I could just feel them watching me walk away and, I swear, it was all I could do not to turn around and look back. Lord Almighty. But listen to me,” she said, waving one of her big hands dismissively. “I sound as superstitious as that old goose-ass Ludmila Baumgarten.”
Though there was no denying: it downright gave her the willies. It really did.
THREE
Even those who were not superstitious—like Ma—still were, if only a little. Ma Reis, too, would cross herself if she passed a cemetery after dark, though she did not believe, as some claimed, that if you looked into an open grave a loved one would be dead within the year. That was a bit much. But she was the first to agree that a red evening promised good weather, that a yellow streak at the horizon was the first sign of hail, and that if a pin was dangled by a thread over a pregnant woman’s belly, it could foretell the sex of the child.
And there was, of course, die Wetterregeln: if January stays mild, spring and summer will bear fruit; if February is cold and dry, August will be hot to fry; a dry March, a wet April and a cool May bring much wheat and much hay; first love and the month of May seldom pass without frost away; June, more dry than wet, means good wine in every vat; on St. Gall’s Day, in the barn the cow must stay; December with snow and chill promises grain on every hill; and, most important, people make the calendar, God makes the weather.
But die Wetterregeln was not superstition, as Ma was fond of pointing out, it was common sense.
Now, she didn’t go in for all that old country nonsense; and the braucha, well, she could take her or leave her. Ma liked to say that though the braucha might know a thing or two it was buried under a pile of old country horseshit. Which always reminded Ma that when she’d developed a rather stubborn and irritating wart on her hand as a young girl, her grandmother had tied a thread around the wart three times and advised her that, on the next night of a full moon, she bury the thread in the manure pile and say three Hail Marys over it. She did and, much to her amazement, the wart was gone within the week.
And then, too, years later, after she and Art had come over, when her own youngest was sick with the colic and she was at her wits’ end with his ceaseless wailing, the braucha had come at her mother-in-law’s insistence and put some fresh cow manure (very fresh, as she recalled), a little peppermint oil and some sugar into a cloth and tied it up and gave it to the baby to suckle. Then, taking him behind the open kitchen door, the braucha had muttered something—verses or prayers—so softly that Ma could not hear and she was struck with a sudden unease that quickly became horror and, just as she was moving to snatch her son away, the child gasped, coughed a little and quieted. The braucha handed the infant back, rather roughly Ma had thought at the time, and collecting her sack of payment from the table, left without saying anything to Ma at all. The crying spells had never returned. So who was she to quibble with the nonsense faiths of others? Still, she preferred to keep her feet firmly planted in earthly things, as she said, even if sometimes her head and her heart wandered elsewhere.
And, of course, there was the case of Charles Hatfield. Hatfield, the rainmaker, who was only a man and like all other men, yet was something more, belonged somehow to the heavens, too, to that wondrous accumulation of swelling thunderheads on the horizon of a drought year, thunderheads bearing only inches of rain, it was true, but rain nevertheless. Four inches of rain. Four inches—only enough to overfill a teacup—to make an ordinary man a worker of miracles. Ma remembered very well how all the talk that summer before last had been about Hatfield, the great rain-making wizard out of California, who had erected (for a hefty fee) a cauldron high up on the edge of Chappice Lake, eighty miles west near Medicine Hat, for the paid but nevertheless unenviable task of bringing rain. And, amazingly, he had. To the anxious, to the dry, to the dust-weary; that June, unexpectedly, unbelievably, he had. It rained; beautiful, soft, soaking showers. Even the Sand Hills greened and blossomed.
Then those who had hoped rejoiced, and those who had scorned said nothing, took the rain and were thankful anyway, for it fell over the land of the hopeful and the land of the scornful in equal measure.
Some said, “We should charge them, too,” (meaning those who had not paid). “Where’s their dollar? Maybe next time I won’t pay neither, and take the rain just the same, how would that be?” But still they were thankful. All but Leo Krauss, who said, “I will take my rain from God or not at all. I will not reap what is sown by sorcery and black magic.”
And so he had let his small fields grow green with weeds, green and useless with piety, though others said it was not piety but just laziness, and if anyone could make God an excuse for laziness and sloth, it would be Leo Krauss. So there was no harvest at Krausses’ that year, not even of potatoes, and when they were hungry, his children, Henry and Magdalen, starved from eating last year’s rancid lard straight from the tin, and their clothes could not bear any more mending, while all around them everything greened and prospered, all the women in new lacy hats and the boys with gleaming pocket knives and the girls in bright pretty dresses, as if they were flowers that had just bloomed, still, Leo told them, “You will not worship false idols,” though they had not mentioned worship, they only wanted to eat.
After Hatfield, there had been no more rain and then no snow, not much to speak of, a thin crust that melted and refroze so often it no longer resembled snow but dirty ice, brownish, spare. Then it was spring again, dry, continuing on through the summer, into fall. Early the next spring, there was talk: would they hire him again? At Knochenfeld, after Mass, they said: “We should hire him ourselves maybe.” And others argued, “What for, when they will do it in Medicine Hat or Swift Current or somewhere where there is more money and we get the rain f
or free?” But that was not right. It was stealing. “Stealing?” some asked. “Could you steal rain? Could you steal air to breathe?”
So they asked Father Rieger, and Father Rieger wiped at his nose with a parched hanky and said through his yellowed teeth (yellower still because of the hanky which the parish ladies took turns keeping whiter than white), “Pray. Pray for rain. Say ten Hail Marys. Say ten Our Fathers. Say an Act of Contrition. Pray.”
So they prayed. They said ten Hail Marys. They said twenty Our Fathers. They said so many Acts of Contrition they ran out of things to be sorry for. And no rain came.
Then it was June, the hot, furrowed land dry and brown as the hand of God.
FOUR
Into that parched summer, as if the very foulness of the choked air summoned him, emerged Leo with his new wife and daughter: his daughter now—not by blood or affection, but by sheer misfortune—whom he dragged to church that first Sunday, dragged by her arm, though not roughly, it seemed, but dragged nevertheless, and Mary following behind like a patient cow, nothing written in her face, up the church steps and inside and to the pew where he had always sat, not bothering to genuflect as he usually did, and not to sit either, but just standing there, waiting, the girl beside him, not looking to the left or to the right, but just down at those awful brown shoes. It was then that some of the women noticed the dress she wore, it was familiar somehow. Why, it was Cecilia’s old wedding dress, the one sewed by Marian, was it not? (Though, as Ma Reis pointed out later, the girl certainly was in need of a dress, and why not that one as well as any other? Should it go to waste?)
When Father Rieger came in, Leo stepped out into the aisle, still holding the girl by the arm, and said, without preamble, “She needs a baptism.”
“For God’s sake,” Father Rieger hissed, “speak to me about it later.”
“What for, when we can do it now, and then it is done?”
Father Rieger insisted that Leo sit down, that they could discuss it later, and, giving the altar boys waiting before him a little shove, continued on.
But Leo called after him, “Do not put off until tomorrow what can be done today, Father.” Then he added, “That’s just laziness, not?”
Father turned back to Leo in a fury, speechless, the girl between them, standing calmly in the aisle in Cecilia’s wedding dress—who would have thought?—and those big ugly shoes, so skinny and lost-looking, and in spite of it all, pretty, too, beautiful even, strangely beautiful, everyone could see that, and maybe it was because of that, because she was beautiful, that they pitied her a little. And her mother, who was not beautiful, standing there with her rosary wrapped around her fist, hanging her head in humility or shame or hatred or piety, no one could tell which. They pitied her, too; they remembered Cecilia and they pitied both of them.
Mike Weiser stepped forward then (perhaps spurred by Marian’s fumings) and asked Father, if it was not too much of an inconvenience, because the girl was new (as if Father didn’t know), maybe they could make an exception and have it all done with.
Father said, “The Catholic Church makes no exceptions.”
“I didn’t ask for an exception,” Leo put in. “Just a baptism.”
Father turned and gave the altar boys another shove then, a bit harder this time, and they all three continued on, up to the altar, where Father proceeded to sprinkle—a little overzealously, some thought—the congregation with holy water. But Leo stood his ground there in the aisle with the girl beside him, and so finally Father said, “Take your seat, please,” and when Leo still did not move, they both just stood there staring at each other across the pulpit while the congregation shuffled and exchanged loaded glances. The silence went on so long that Ludmila Baumgarten turned nervously on her piano bench and began to play “The Little Brown Church” (“Always looking for an opportunity to sing,” Ma Reis said under her breath. “You’d think her ass was tied to that piano bench”), but no one was following her lead, and Father waved a hand at her peevishly, saying, “Ludmila, for God’s sake,” and then, to Leo, “I must ask you to leave.” To which Leo said, “The sin will be on your head, then,” and he led the two women down the aisle and out the door, Mike Weiser following after him.
“Leo,” he said, on the church steps, “what is this?”
“She needs a baptism.”
“All right,” Mike said, puzzled. “But let me talk to Father. Let it wait. Maybe he will do it next Sunday. Sunday is soon enough, not?”
“But,” Leo said, and he looked at the girl beside him as if surprised to find her there, attached to him by the arm, “what if something should happen to her? Then what? She will go to hell, not? If she is not baptized?”
Mike Weiser narrowed his eyes, frowning. “But, Leo,” he said, cautiously, “what could happen? Father will baptize her next week maybe. What could happen before then? She will be fine.” Though Mike was really thinking, What is it to you, Leo?
And Leo nodded a bit and studied the girl, as if trying to determine, just by looking, whether or not Mike was right, whether she would be fine.
“She’ll be all right,” Mike said again, “don’t worry. You can look out for her, not?”
“How can I do that?”
“Well, why not?”
“She won’t come in the house.”
“What do you mean?”
Leo shrugged. “At first, she did, then she didn’t.”
“She must come in sometimes. Where does she sleep?”
“In the barn.”
“The barn? But why?” Looking at the girl now, too.
Then Mary spoke up. “That is where she wants to sleep. It is up to her. She is a big girl.”
Mike turned to the girl. “Is that true? You want to sleep in the barn?”
The girl just stared back at Mike, as if she had not heard.
“It’s the woman,” Mary said then, looking anxiously at Leo.
“What woman?”
“Enough of that,” Leo said. “Don’t talk so stupid.”
“What woman?” Mike said again.
“The one who comes at night—”
“Hold your tongue,” Leo warned.
Mary looked down at the floor and was silent.
“What is this, Leo?” Mike said.
“Ach,” Leo said, “some nonsense. Never mind. Some excuse she has, for sleeping in the barn.”
“Is there some reason?” Mike asked the girl.
The girl glanced over at Leo.
“You see?” Leo said. “I give them a good home, and they want the barn. For no good reason. It makes no sense.”
Mike watched the girl a moment, but she only gazed off now, out into the distance, as if whatever they spoke of could have nothing to do with her.
“I guess if she wants to, she wants to,” said Mike uncertainly. “What does it matter?”
“It matters that she has not been baptized.”
“Yah, but why the hurry?”
“If something should happen.”
“Nothing will happen.”
“But if it does.”
“What could happen?”
——
So the girl slept in the barn. Mike Weiser confirmed it. He took a ride out there that afternoon, just to check on them.
“I don’t know why,” he said afterwards. “I must have rocks in my head.” He said, sure enough, the girl was sitting out in the barn, on some blankets she had spread over a mattress of straw in the corner. Mike said that when she saw him come in, she quickly hid something behind her back and wiped her mouth on her hand. She was barefoot, though she still wore the old wedding dress, and those big shoes lay kicked beside her pallet.
Mike pretended he hadn’t seen anything, he said to her, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to trouble you, I just wanted to see if, well, if everything’s all right.”
But she just sat and stared at him and did not reply. Mike didn’t know what else to say, felt a little foolish that he’d come at all. What business was it of
his? So he nodded and tipped his hat to her and went out.
He said afterwards how he could smell chokecherry jam as soon as he walked into that barn, the whole place was rich and sweet with it, and her lips stained that deep bruised colour—she must have found some of Cecilia’s old preserves.
“I’m glad she did,” Mike said. “I don’t know what they are living on out there, but it isn’t food and it sure as hell isn’t love. I feel sorry for her. For that girl, and for the mother, too.”
That is what he said, but what he thought, what he admitted to no one, was this: God help me, I stood there in that barn looking at her and I felt sorry and ashamed all at the same time because all I could think was how damned pretty she was in Cecilia’s old wedding dress and how her lips would taste like chokecherry jam.
——
Mike Weiser wasn’t the only man around who felt ashamed of himself when he looked at her, at Elisabeth Brechert. There were prettier girls around, pleasanter girls, certainly cleaner girls. But there was just something about her, it was difficult to say what it was exactly, to admit it at all, even to themselves, something that made people—men for certain, maybe women, maybe even children—want to touch her, that cinnamon hair, or her lips, or that white, white skin, speckled over prettily like an egg. And, more than that, the way she seemed not to care. Not about that, not about anything. Other girls in the parish were jealous of her, of course, the way some can be when another girl bests them (especially one as lowly as she: a Krauss, for all intents and purposes), and that without even trying, the worst of insults. And the young men acted like she was nothing to them, acted as if she were beneath them, the way they do when they want something but don’t want the other fellows to know they want it. They all thought about her, you could see it in their faces when they looked at her, or pretended not to look at her. They all sneered at her or laughed at her or downright ignored her, all the young people, in spite of that something she had. Maybe because of it.
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