“Don’t you dare. I love it,” Emil said. He handed her a blue porcelain teapot he found in the woods while he was clearing thistle. “I can fix the handle.”
So far Emil had found a washboard, the teapot, and a worn-out teddy bear, which the flood had brought from someone else’s home to the outskirts of theirs. The bear was missing its left eye, and though it was no longer fit for a child, Eveline sewed on a brown button in its place and set it on the bed. She would have been glad to return the items to their owners, but Emil only knew of one other family living in Evergreen on higher ground on the other side of the river. He’d left a note, but nobody had made the trip across.
“It’s lovely,” Eveline said about the teapot.
Emil touched the broken handle. “It reminds me of Germany.”
Emil came to America because he thought it would be a less complicated place than Germany. He grew up during the lean years after World War I, when Germany was paying reparations to the rest of the world and starving as a result. Before the war, Emil’s father was a naturalist and a taxidermist. After the war, instead of his father mounting the specimens he caught in the Black Forest and sending them on to the museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, his family ate them. Once, when there were no specimens left, his father went into the forest with a wagon and came back with a wild horse from the pack Emil ran after with his boyhood friends. When Emil and his sister, Gitte, wept bitterly, their father told them to go to America. Perhaps there, he said, they only ride horses.
Even when prewar food appeared on the table again, Emil was intent on going to America because he read about the business opportunities for foreigners in the Dakotas. He only ended up in Minnesota because he ran out of money for train fare and because he walked past the dress shop and saw Eveline twirling in front of the mirror inside. After that he was intent on marrying her and opening a small taxidermy shop to support them.
After he finished the day’s outdoor work, Emil would spread a cloth across the kitchen table and work late into the night, building a collection by which future customers could judge his craftsmanship. Emil preserved specimens the way his father and his father’s father had. He didn’t use the pernicious chemicals—arsenical soap and corrosive sublimate—many taxidermists in America used. Emil used cotton and beeswax.
Watching him work was like watching an artist. Every few minutes, he’d stand up, rub his chin, and sit back down with the magnifying glass to fix whatever displeased him. He’d say, “I’m an elephant when I need to be a gazelle.”
Eveline knew Emil was a fine taxidermist, but she wondered how he was going to find customers when only one other family lived in Evergreen.
“When hunters kill an animal here now, they have to take it all the way to Yellow Falls to get to a taxidermist,” Emil said. “Instead of doing that, they can bring the animal to me. I’ll preserve it and deliver it to them personally.”
“By boat?” Eveline said.
“Next spring I’m going to get the money for a truck from Jeremiah Burr.”
“What are you going to give him?” Eveline said.
“What everyone here seems to want,” Emil said. “A wall full of bucks’ heads.”
“What do people want in Germany?”
“Sons who stay put.”
When Emil had finally saved enough money for the trip across the ocean, his father wouldn’t come out of his study to say goodbye. That morning, the women in his family were the ones who dropped him at the train station in Hornberg. Just before he boarded, his mother gave him his father’s most cherished butterfly collection and suggested he use the butterflies to tip people along the way, which worked in Europe. But when Emil tried to give a porter a monarch butterfly in Grand Central Station, the porter crushed it in his hand.
Eveline fell in love with Emil precisely because of those butterflies. Other men left buckets of fish on her doorstep or dragged her out to the woods to watch them cut wood. Before they were married, Eveline would daydream about Emil’s smooth fingers brushing hers in the dress shop the day they met and how, despite her parents’ concern, she felt so certain his gentleness was meant for her and her alone.
Eveline looked at Emil’s fingers now, which bullet burs and thorns had scraped raw. A blood blister had taken over the tip of his thumb; the nail was starting to turn black.
“I should get back out there,” Emil said. “We’re going to get snow today.”
Eveline looked at the small pile of logs beside the stove. Even in warm weather, wood disappeared faster than Emil could cut it. “I can help you,” she said.
Emil put his heavy wool coat on. He kissed her forehead. At the door, he smiled as if she’d said something funny. “I didn’t marry you so you could wield an ax.”
“Why did you?” Eveline said, but Emil was already gone.
Eveline set the lunch dishes in the basin and gathered Emil’s wool socks, which needed mending. There was supper to think about and laundry to scrub against the washboard. Floors to wash, too. Eveline was amused now by all the nights she’d stayed up before she was married thinking about how freeing it would be when she and Emil finally had a place of their own. She didn’t think about chores then or the silence she’d complete them in. Most days now, she went hours without speaking, when in Yellow Falls she’d scarcely caught a moment to herself, let alone a silent one.
Today was no different. The snow came home before Emil did, clinging to the silvery birch branches, the brown eaves of the cabin, and the red birdhouse. It softened Evergreen’s sharp lines and the sparrow’s hearty trill. Eveline wrapped herself in one of the left-behind quilts and sat on the porch talking to the sparrow, whom she’d named Fortuna.
Tuna.
“Why didn’t you fly south like all of the other birds?”
Tuna hopped from the birdhouse perch to the porch railing, stretching her white throat toward the falling snow so much like a child that Eveline half expected an eager tongue to spring forth from her beak to gather the flakes and savor them as they melted.
Eveline wondered what had happened to all the Yellow Falls girls who got married and moved south to Minneapolis and sometimes as far as Chicago, places that seemed like they were part of another world now. On a map, hundreds of rural miles separated her from them, but this distinction seemed more pressing than inches on a map: in Eveline’s world girls talked to birds, and in the other one they talked to one another.
Were the girls lonesome for the Northwoods? Its forests? Its meadows? Its star-filled sky? Perhaps they all had closets full of pretty party dresses that kept them from missing the mud and the sand, the angles of the river and the anglers who fished it.
Tuna hopped from the porch railing back to the perch of her birdhouse.
“I feel the same way,” Eveline said, unwilling to admit she was lonely.
3
Eveline spent the winter of her pregnancy reading Emil’s taxidermy manuals, the only bound pages for mile after boundless mile. Of everything she packed that hurried September morning in Yellow Falls, books weren’t something she’d considered stuffing into her suitcase, which meant she was stuck reading about dead animals now.
“Soon you’ll be able to preserve me,” Emil said when he came in from chopping wood on the first big snow day—two feet!—in November. He was growing a beard, which collected snow when he was chopping wood and, along with his foggy safety glasses, made him look a little like an owl until the snow melted.
“Just birds,” Eveline said, even though she’d been secretly drawing pictures of babies when she was certain Emil was deep in the woods.
No woman in Yellow Falls, and probably anywhere, talked about what it felt like to be pregnant other than to say it was the Lord’s miracle, so Eveline didn’t know to expect the cramping and expanding, the tenderness of her breasts and hips. For the tenderness, she draped warm cloths over whatever parts were sore. She didn’t know what to do about the expansion of her hips and breasts, except to take out the seams of
her clothes and hope Emil didn’t mind when they undressed beneath the sheets. The cramps were the worst; they caused her such indigestion Eveline didn’t know how she’d survive their indignity. Often, while Emil slept soundly, she’d escape to the outhouse to spare them both.
And then December came, and Eveline and the baby reached sudden equilibrium. As the baby grew, the cramps and tenderness disappeared, and the expansion seemed more purposeful, since it confined itself to her stomach. The queasiness disappeared, too, which could have been because the cabin finally stopped smelling of rot and smelled instead of the applewood Emil cut for her. On the nights he preserved specimens, the cabin smelled of oil of cedar, too, which mixed with the smells of supper.
Cooking was difficult without a proper layout and running water. Eveline had to heat blocks of snow on the woodstove at the beginning of the meal and more at the end to clean the dishes. The pantry contained only a few items anymore—salt, flour, rice, dried beans, and bouillon—which made supper predictable: beef-flavored rice and beans. Occasionally, Emil would get a rabbit or a squirrel between chopping wood and bringing it to the cabin.
One day, he got a wild turkey, and how gloriously rich that meal was!
“Where did you find it?” she said when Emil brought the turkey inside. He’d already plucked all of the feathers, which made the turkey look like a newborn. Emil set a pot of water on the woodstove while Eveline coddled the turkey in her arms.
“The edge of the edge of the forest,” Emil said.
“How smart you are!” Eveline said.
“How lucky,” said Emil. “He let me take him.”
“Let?” Eveline said.
“He leaped right into my arms,” Emil said, taking the turkey out of Eveline’s and placing it in the pot of boiling water.
While the turkey cooked, Eveline set the table. Normally, she didn’t like the earthy smell of fat rendering out of animals, but just then the layer of yellow fat that bubbled at the top of the pot smelled like happiness.
The next day, Eveline turned the leftovers into soup. She couldn’t wait to start a garden in the spring, to grow carrots, celery, potatoes, and a patch of herbs. Living in the woods had narrowed her longings; what happiness thyme (and the baby) would bring. Eveline took the most neutral of her cotton dresses and pulled them apart in order to make clothes for the baby, who nudged the project along when in the past she might have set down her needle and thread. In between sewing, she’d drink a cup of broth and read.
All but one of Emil’s manuals were written in German, and though she was learning the language slowly from Emil (and from his German-to-English dictionary), the words on the page rarely came together in any sensible way. The sketches were what brought the words she did know to life. Eveline practiced tracing specimens in her journal and if she’d captured a likeness particularly well, Emil encouraged her to hang it on the wall, which was becoming crowded with grouse, foxes, deer, fish, and birds.
“You have a gift for drawing sparrows,” Emil said.
“Only Tuna,” Eveline said.
Each day the weather allowed her to, Eveline sat bundled in the rocking chair watching Tuna. At first, she drew Tuna in stationary positions, but as she got better, she drew her on updrafts. If she misplaced a shadow or shaded one too heavily, she began again.
Only one manual, the English one, showed sketches of the birds in their natural habitats, without accompanying sketches of horsehair nooses and thumbs on sternums—the means, their authors suggested, to put them to eternal sleep. Emil always asked of himself three questions when deciding whether or not to turn birds into specimens, since they would become part of his personal collection and wouldn’t be for sale.
1. Is it rare or endangered?
2. Is it likely to find a mate?
3. Will it stay put in its chosen habitat if left intact?
If Emil could answer yes to any question, he’d walk away from whatever bird he was interested in preserving because he was a naturalist before he was a taxidermist.
That winter, however, Emil was mostly a woodcutter, and Eveline was mostly alone, which gave her too much time to worry about giving birth. Plenty of women had babies at home, but Eveline only knew of one woman who’d given birth in a cabin in the woods, and that woman, Lulu Runk, who’d been normal by Yellow Falls standards, now wore a coat made of coonskins and talked to people only she could see when she came to town for supplies. “Ain’t no life in trees,” she’d say, dragging her grubby child up and down Main Street by his sleeve. “No, sir, it ain’t no life.”
Emil was worried, too. “I think you should have the baby in Yellow Falls,” he said on a blustery night in January as the wind rattled the windows. “It’s too dangerous here. Besides, I think you’ll need your mother. We can go back in March when the ice breaks up.”
“Him,” Eveline said, greatly relieved. “I see him in my dreams. He looks like you.”
“Poor child,” Emil said.
“Handsome child,” Eveline said.
Emil was building a crib and a changing table made out of the maple tree he cut down when he first learned she was pregnant back in September. Emil said maple trees were lucky, according to a myth from the old country.
Though Eveline wasn’t superstitious, she asked Emil to tell her the story. According to him, there once was a beautiful girl who lived with her family in the Black Forest. One late-fall night, while the girl’s family slept in the cabin, the moon awakened the girl in the bed she shared with her little sister, drawing her to his bluish light. The girl went to the front door, dressed in only her nightclothes and slippers, her limbs long and graceful in the doorway, her hair trailing down her back like red silk.
Little girl, late night, the moon sang in a voice more lovely than any the girl had heard. You belong with me. The moon urged her outside, past the chickens and horses and outbuildings, farther and farther into the woods. Falling snow laid siege to her neck and face, but the girl didn’t feel the cold flakes on her skin until she’d been walking a long while and the moon disappeared behind the clouds, and she realized she was alone in the dark.
Mama, she cried, for sense and fear took hold of her. She was too far away from the cabin now for the wind to carry her voice home. The girl huddled against the trunk of nearby tree for warmth and tried with all her heart to stay awake.
In the end, she couldn’t stay awake or keep herself warm in the cold and fell first into troubled sleep and then sleep eternal. When the moon came down to make her his bride, just before morning banished him out of the sky, he found a small tree in the place the girl had been huddling. The tree had leaves as red as the dawn and sap as sweet as sugar.
“Why was she lucky?” Eveline asked Emil when he stopped talking.
“Because she became immortal,” Emil said.
Eveline pointed to the frame of the crib. “But you cut her down.”
That story was the only indication their lives wouldn’t keep ticking along with the quiet sureness of a clock through the winter. On a windy afternoon in February, two months before Eveline was due, Emil was out cutting wood, and Eveline was reading the English taxidermy manual again. At first, she attributed the feeling in her stomach, like the tightening of a belt, to the manual’s subject matter.
Here, then, rests the shell of the poor hawk, ready to receive from your judgment the size, the shape, the features, and expression it had ere death and your dissecting brought it to its present still and formless state. The cold hand of death stamps deep its mark upon the prostrate victim.
After the belt loosened, Eveline gathered her mittens, hat, and coat for a trip to the outhouse. Maybe the beans she’d eaten for breakfast were causing the pains, she reasoned, since she’d never been in labor before. When she thought of giving birth, she imagined a quick, grueling pain that ended with her holding her little boy an hour or two later.
Huxley, they’d decided. After Emil’s grandfather who died in the Black Forest during the war but not because o
f it. Hux.
In her most recent dreams, Hux had beautiful, saucer-shaped brown eyes and red cupid lips. He had Emil’s gentleness, his even heart.
Eveline walked to the outhouse through the snow and wind, the thrust of both at her back, thinking about the pain in her stomach, which had dulled to nothing as quickly as it had surged, and about what kind of parents she and Emil would be. As an only child, she had all the attention she desired from her parents, but not so much as to turn her into a Murray—four sisters from Yellow Falls who shared the same first word: mine.
Eveline didn’t worry about spoiling Hux in Evergreen because even the smallest comfort had to be earned here. If you were cold, you cut wood. If you were hungry, you made food. If you were lonely, you drew birds (and babies).
Eveline pried open the outhouse door, which had frozen shut since she was out there last. For light and ventilation, Emil had carved a half-moon and the North Star into the back wall of the outhouse, which he’d fashioned from a white pine killed by blister root. The growth rings were stained black and purple and patterned the wood slats like bruises.
The belt tightened around Eveline’s stomach again. Her legs buckled, and she thrust her hand through the half-moon because it was the only thing that would keep her from falling over. The pain radiated from her stomach to her lower back. When a burst of warm liquid soaked her underclothes, Eveline knew for the first time that what she was feeling wasn’t indigestion or taxidermy disgust.
If her mother had been with her, she would have rubbed peppermint oil on her lower back to numb the pain and lavender oil beneath her nose to calm her nerves. She would have told her about contractions and how to breathe through them and keep her body relaxed so that the contractions and the pain they produced could pass through her as if through an open door. In the end, when nothing else soothed her, she would have sent Emil and Eveline’s father out to Harvey Small’s and put Eveline in the bathtub and let her scream herself hoarse. But her mother wasn’t with her and Eveline didn’t know the liquid between her legs meant her water had broken; she thought it was blood or part of the baby or both.
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