by Josh Weil
Not long. At first, I think it is some lightning bug, flicking on and off, on and off, the only speck of light in the dark. But when it appears again it is right outside the walls—a quick glimpse of fire between the slats, flickering, disappearing, flaring again—and I know it is her coming around to the door.
There is the moan of wood, the groan of the wheel on its track. There: her lantern held up as if to light me. But it shows her. From the rain her nightdress clings to her body. Beneath it, her breasts hang heavy as if they, too, have soaked up the wet. Her belly is huge: the fabric sticks to it so that the lamplight gleams off the point pushed up by the press of her navel.
I rise to meet her. “Esther,” I say.
She looks as if she is about to say my name, but instead she turns her face to the dynamo on the ground. “Is that it?” she says. “It looks heavy. You didn’t rent the wagon just to bring it out to me?”
“The wagon,” I tell her, “is not rented. I own it.”
“Oh?”
I cannot hide my smile. “And the mule.”
“But only this spring,” she says, “you had barely enough to buy a cart.”
“That,” I tell her, “was before farmers’ wives began paying me to bring them dynamos.” And I walk in my wet boots across the muddied hay to the one I have brought for her. I know she follows because the lantern light comes behind me as if dragged by my shadow. The cows jostle and shove to get out of our way, pushing against the wall until they surround us in a circle. The heavy scent of their wet coats, their warm shit. The sounds of their shifting. From the darkness the lantern draws their large and wondering eyes.
Down I crouch on one side of the dynamo. Standing on the other, she reaches into her stretched-out housecoat, and for a moment I imagine her drawing from it a newborn child, bloody and bawling. But it is only a blanket wrapped around what I know must be the bulb. Lowering herself to squat, she sets her lantern on the barn floor, and hands to me the Edison lamp.
“Good,” I tell her, tell her to watch while I connect the generator, so later she can do it on her own. Slowly, I uncoil the cord, I separate the wires, I twist them together, all of it slowly, to let her eyes take in each part of each movement of my hands. But when I look at her, her eyes are on my face. I feel, just below my skin, the blood tingling.
“Are there so many?” she asks.
“Dynamos?”
“Farmer’s wives,” she says, “who want them.”
By the time I have finished shaking my head—a silent no—my fingers are touching her lips, though I can’t imagine reaching to her like that, or that she would let me. But there they are. And—is it possible?—there is the moist softness of her lips touching the ends of my fingers, untouching them again.
“I borrowed the money,” I say.
“Debt?” Her lips make the word against my fingertips.
“To move ahead,” I tell her. “Sometimes it is necessary—”
“From what?”
She draws her lips away. I draw my hand back.
“Sometimes it is necessary,” I say again, “to take such a risk.”
“Towards what?”
“The future,” I tell her. “From the past.”
“What about the present?” she says. “Isn’t it the present that counts?”
“Nein,” I say, but before I can say more, she leans forward, across the generator, putting down both her hands to steady her against the awkward swinging of her belly’s weight, and kisses me. Her breath is sour from sleep. I close my lips around it, and hold it in my mouth, letting it roll over my tongue like smoke.
Maybe she thinks I am not kissing her back, because she takes her lips away, moves her face away again. She says, “Are you sure?”
“Ja,” I say, and her eyebrows rise, her eyes seem to laugh. I go on, “Because the present is like the dawn, or the dusk—” But before I can explain, her laughter leaves her eyes and finds its sound and comes out on her breath. The cows startle, mill about. In the quiet after, there is only her smile in the oil lamp’s glow as she says, “Make the light. Go on, you strange man. Show me how the electricity makes it work.”
And so? I place my hands on the handles. I begin to crank.
Inside the blown glass globe something stirs to life. Not a movement, not anything we can even see, but a feeling, a life, that just a second ago in the barn did not exist. Now, it is there, and with each crank I give the handles, it is growing. Even when the curled wire inside the bulb begins to glow it feels as if that is not the thing itself, but just the part that we can sense with our eyes. I glance across at her. Her eyes are on it, wide, unblinking. And as it brightens and brightens I watch her pupils dwindle and dwindle until it seems they must entirely disappear and leave her eyes only the blue-green irises filled with the yellow blinding light. She raises them to me. They are gleaming with tears. From the light? It cannot be from sadness: she is smiling. Smiling in such a way so that I see in her face, stronger than ever before, her daughter. She leans forward and lifts the glass of the lantern she had brought and blows the flame out. The brightness of the electric bulb seems to leap another notch. And in it, her smile leaps, too.
“Faster,” she says, and even her voice sounds like a little girl.
I speed up my cranking. The bulb glows even brighter.
“Faster,” she says again, and, struggling to her feet, she stands above me, above the glowing lamp, her skirts lit and the bulge of her belly lit, and her top in its shadow, and above that her face, lit from below, smiling that strange kinde’s smile. Then she begins to clap.
The sound shakes through the barn, panics the cows, knocks about the rafters, startles the birds that flutter in the far reaches of the light—clap, clap, clap—slow as if it comes from my own cranking hands. Until she begins to speed it up—clap, clap, clap—and I speed up to try to match her.
My arms are already beginning to burn by the time she starts to dance. I have seen the steps before—at Amish weddings, at celebrations when the boys come home from their year away from the farm—but never like this: her belly thrusting and swinging, her hips jerking with its strange sway, her breasts flung this way then that. She dances with the unguarded joy of a kinde, but with all of her woman’s body to make it known, and, watching her, I begin to sing:
Bay mir bistu sheyn,
Bay mir hostu heyn,
Bay mir bistu eyner oyf der velt.
To me, you are lovely,
To me, you are charming,
To me, you are the only one in the world.
I do not know where the old words come from: I have not heard them since I was a boy, in the kitchen with my breuder playing the flute he carved, me clacking with spoons, while our mamme, dancing from woodstove to basin to chopping block, kicked out her feet, threw back her head, and sang.
Bay mir bistu sheyn,
Bay mir hostu heyn,
Bay mir bistu tayerer fun gelt.
To me, you are lovely,
To me, you are charming,
To me, you are more precious than money.
Only when my arms are shaking, when my shoulders feel as if they will begin to glow like the wires in the bulb, only when my breath is too shallow to get out the sound, do I stop. The handles roll forward a moment on their own. Her clapping echoes, echoes. Her body slows. In the quickly fading glow of the bulb I stand to go to her, but she is already lowering herself to me and we meet strangely crouched beside the lamp, balanced for a moment, it seems, by our mouths together. Then the light is gone and we are toppling to the ground.
In the dark, close to my face, she whispers, “Why like the dusk or dawn?”
“Because,” I say into her mouth, “the present is always about to change.” Against her neck, I say, “Even every second, it is actually already changing.” Into the soft skin between her breasts, I tell her, “But the difference, the beauty, the beautiful difference is that we get to choose.” I whisper into her neck, my hands lifting her skirt. “Whether i
t becomes darker”—her hands unclasping my belt—“or more light.”
Maybe it is the word that makes us notice, maybe it is the way her belly blocks my hips from reaching hers, or the fact that when her hand reaches down and holds me, I am not ready, but, whatever it is, her other hand reaches to my flasch and touches it and we both stare: it is glowing. Around us is the quiet of the milling cows, and the last fluttering in the rafters of the birds, and on the roof the drumming of the rain.
With her free hand, she gives the flasch a little push. From her chest to mine it knocks. In the faint green glow, her lips look like they will say something, they look like they will say my name, and I think even for a moment I hear them say it. But I don’t; they don’t. Instead, they say, “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
“Nein,” she says, “I mean I want to know what is your name.”
But I have hidden my face in her breasts. I back my hips away from her hand. Her hand lets me go. I want to think that my breath simply feels excited against her skin. I want to think that what she feels between my face and her breasts is just the wetness of our sweat. But when her hand touches the back of my head, it is not a lover’s touch. It is not even a woman’s. It is a parent’s, the way she might put her fingers in the hair of her young son, and I press my nose into her flesh, press my wet cheeks into her, and I am glad for the loudness of the rain.
Her fingers stroke my hair, the backs of my ears, softly, back and forth. “Hey, hey,” she says, cooing. “Tell me. Tell me what she was like.”
“She,” I say into her chest.
“Ja,” she says. “Tell me.”
“She had eyes,” I tell her, “that were like lying on your back in the forest. Like lying on your back and looking up at all the leaves. And then, a breeze. And through them, the sky.”
By the time I lift my face from her flesh, unstick my cheek from her breast, unpeel myself from her, the flasch has lost the last of its glow. I slide off her into the muddy hay. We lie there, listening to the rain. Only when I sense her moving, that she is about to rise, do I speak. “My name,” I tell her, into the dark, “is Shimel.”
“Shimel,” the dark tells me back.
“Shimel,” my mamme said, “we must.”
I was seventeen. She was … She was … Can it be, she was not much older than I am now? My tatte, forty? My breuder? Two years younger, always two years younger, as he will always be, until either he or I is dead. Unless he is already.
“We must, Shimel,” my tatte said.
My breuder said nothing. Usually he was the one full of talk so late at night. Midnight, it must have been, because that time of summer the sky over Petroplavilsk stayed lit by the low strange sun almost all the way through the night. And, yet, I remember clear as I remember the heat of the tea glass burning the skin of my fingertips, the feverish clicking of my mamme’s needles as she tried to knit from fox-hair yarn a hat to keep me warm, the ceaseless shaking of my breuder’s leg, the worse trembling of my tatte’s beard, just as clear as that I remember how, outside the windows of our home, it was dark. The panes, though, refused to let it in, refused so long as the lantern on the table between us was lit, so long as the window glass shivered with its flickering, refused just as I refuse to forget the eyes of my mamme, the fierceness of her short-legged waddling walk, the downy dark hint of sideburns I would feel on her cheek when she pressed the side of her face to mine. My tatte’s beard grew high on his cheeks, and low on his throat, all the way down into his shirt, where it tangled with the hair of his chest, and he would bush it up with the backs of his hands and huff like a bear to make us laugh. His red lower lip was always cracked. His skin was splotchy, smelled of the chemicals of his trade. He had wanted me to follow him into it. He had wanted my breuder not to have to. My breuder, whose nose was like mine but straighter, whose mouth was as big lipped and chapped as our tatte’s, whose eyes were like our mamme’s but with the leaves brown like fall and the sky a wet gray, my breuder whose name was Yankel.
“Yankel,” our tatte told him, “go and get your papers.”
My breuder who sat there with his fists on his thighs, his leg shaking, shaking. My breuder whose name, whose papers, whose whole being I took.
Fifteen years ago. Nine since the last letter I got. Four since the last one I sent. Such a long time now since I have known I will never see any of them again.
Oh, but such a beautiful world! Such a beautiful country. When next I return to the Hartzler farm the sun is a red flame on a wick so low that the road is wavery, oiled with its sheen, and to either side the walls of corn make a chimney glass of the sky. The fields are wizening, the ears drying on the stalks, the leaves already papery and brown. All across the land they are lit by that sun, glowing orange like embers blown upon by the day’s last breath. Ahead, my mule’s ears glow just the same. And down in the farmyard the barn is painted hot. Starlings explode above it, a flurry of sparks.
She does not know I’m coming. Or didn’t. But there is the barking of the dogs; there, a small figure hurrying across the yard, grain bucket flashing among the flashing backs of the scurrying ducks, chicken, geese; there, the flare of the front door opening into the sun, the clap of it shutting. Will she wonder what I have brought? Will she guess? Would she even know what a battery is? Rattling down towards the house in my wagon I think, tonight, after I chase the children, after Ura hounds me about my mustache, after supper and dark, tonight we will go out to my wagon as if to see my wares. And I will show her. What is it for? she’ll ask. For when I’m gone, I’ll tell her. For when I cannot crank the generator for her. So she does not have to. So she can go out to the barn any midnight that she wants, connect the lamp. It holds the current, I’ll say. In this, she’ll wonder. It stores the light?
But when I pull up at the gate, no children run out to meet me. Just the dogs, whining, yapping, making Reba shift and snort. I am standing up from the teamster’s seat, about to jump down and quiet them with scratches around the ears, when I hear through their noise the sounds from the house. Shouting. Ura’s voice breaking through the dog barks, Esther’s breaking through the boom and roar of his. Never have I heard such sounds from inside their home, never from him or her. It stops me in midrise. Crouched like that, my thighs begin to shake. Beneath all the shouting another new sound breaks: the wailing of the baby.
Then, sudden as shoving off a hood, everything is twice as loud. The door is open. The shouting, the cries spill out. With them she comes running. Out into the red blast of sunlight, the white of her bonnet flaring like a match head, her white apron a pile of kindling caught fire in the dark pit of her skirt, her shoes flashing as she stumbles down the steps and hits the ground and comes at a rush through the mad flapping birds, the bolting dogs, her hair loosed and her face red in the sun, redder even than her apron or her bonnet, burning up. Behind her, I catch a glimpse inside the house—one of the kindes crouched on the floor, arms covering his head; another pressed flat against a wall, a package held to her chest: the baby?—before the view is blocked by the shape of Ura bursting through.
“Go!” she shouts to me. “Go!”
But I see the redness now—it is blood, spread down from her nose, or up from her mouth, or anyway smeared over half her face—and how then can I sit back down and whip the mule away?
“Go!” she says, but I am already leaning towards her, my hand reaching for her shoulder. She tries to pull away but I catch the fabric of her sleeve and, clenching it, I feel with my other hand for the whip. “Go!” she is shouting, and then I am shouting it, too, and there is the crack of the whip marking the word, and the wagon jerks forward. Behind her, her husband charges across the yard, his beard a bush aflame, his big hands whipping in and out of the red light as he runs. Her hand is on mine, then—trying to unclamp my fingers from her sleeve? Trying to grasp onto them with her own? And I let go the fabric and grip her flesh instead, grip so hard I can feel the bones, and as she�
�s shouting, as he’s nearing, I lean back and haul on her arm with all the strength I have.
Still, surely, it would not be enough if she didn’t help. I could not with one arm lift her above the wheels onto the seat. But there are her shoes scrambling at the wood side, and her other hand must be clamped somewhere, because she doesn’t fall. She hangs, struggling, as I shout for the mule to go, as I struggle to pull her the rest of the way up, as Ura reaches the wagon. I do not know if he has a hold of it with one hand or both, or if he is trying to clamber up, or plant his boots and pit his legs against the mule’s, but the wagon jerks, there is a crack, and then the mule pounds forward again. When I look back, Ura is standing in the dirt path that leads down the hill to his farm, a shard of wood in his hand, bellowing at us something I do not hear. Could it be he is shouting “Go!”, that we are all shouting the same word, and all meaning something different? The only meaning that matters is the one the mule hears. Her hooves hammer the path, her sides beginning to heave as the wagon clatters and shakes its way up the hill.
By the time we are at the top, Esther has stopped shouting. She has stopped making any sound at all. Behind us, there is the fading barking of the dogs. Beneath us, the shuddering of the wagon, the slowing creak of its wheels. Before us, the drumming of the mule’s hooves, drumming and then clopping, and then just the steady tock, tock, tock of Reba’s slow walk on the road. The sun is down. The cornfields shiver, crackle. Dusk slowly fills the spaces between the stalks. We ride beside each other until the fields are full with it up almost to the flowers at the tips. There is the evening star. Sometime after it appears, she reaches behind her back and unties her apron. She eases it, gingerly, over her head. She folds it in her hand and presses it to her face. It covers her mouth so that her words when she speaks are muffled and I have to ask her to speak again.
“Where are you taking me?” she says.