The Little Bride

by Anna Solomon

  She did not think to offer the opposite to Liesl and Otto; one day she would look back and realize that she should have, but at the time she only thought how tranquil it was without Max at her back, and the crude, defenseless stirring that was his signal.

  Let the boys stay away. Then Minna could stay here, in clean, gently frayed grace, free from storm and starvation and filth and her own dangers. In polite company, one could forget one’s dangers. And maybe she could manage to get her hands on one of “those books” Max so reviled, which Fritzi carried around with him during the couple days he was home from the cattle drive. He read in corners, moody and slumped. These weren’t newspapers or magazines or prayer books, they were the kinds of books people read for pleasure, with soft, illustrated covers and titles Minna couldn’t read because they were in English, and because, when Fritzi caught her trying, he skulked off. Which made her want to scream. Did he think her a threat? Was there disapproval on her face? Fear? Suspicion? Had she begun to resemble Max, in the way spouses sometimes did, their features meeting in subtle, irretrievable assent?

  FROM the rubble they reclaimed the long wooden spoon, a blanket, Minna’s bedsheet with its familiar tear, several unbroken dishes, two forks. Minna’s pillow, flatter than it had ever been, even between Galina’s knees. Candlesticks so swollen with soil they looked like knotted lengths of muslin. The empty coffee tin now packed with dirt. Max’s tefillin were barely recognizable. These, Minna brushed off—she did not scrub. And she barely touched his prayer shawl, which had been separated from his prayer book and wedged into the frying pan. Whatever she did to these items, she guessed, Max would do over.

  She had seen his face collapse when Otto found the prayer book, and his efforts to compose himself as Otto shook it free of dirt and held it out. Max was shy, suddenly; you could see that he wanted to kiss the book, but privately, to kiss it more lovingly, perhaps, than he’d ever kissed a woman. Minna wondered if he’d kissed the Torah before allowing it to be destroyed. She was surprised to feel a tenderness in her throat. She was sorry for Max in a true way, without pity or annoyance—as if he were a stranger she would never have to meet or touch or feed.

  Then Max handed her the book, grabbed his shovel, and started digging again. But they had already stripped every layer: the grass, the roots, the sod, even the pitiful magazine wallpaper, now torn into clumps and shreds. They had reached the bottom of the pile that had been the house, that before it was a house had been a hill.

  There was something almost natural about the wreckage, though Minna would never say so.

  Max kept digging.

  “Motke,” she said gently, “you might stop. There’s nothing left.”

  But as soon as she’d spoken his name, her sympathy shrank to a nub; in her mouth was a bitter tang: what did he think he was doing—digging another mikvah? Enough with his laws and superstitions and forbiddings. She thought of the old kiddush cup Galina had once used as a chamber pot, and the way her neck curved as she tilted back her head to laugh. Her profanity was more comprehensible to Minna than Max’s devotion. So Max dug and Minna hated him. She wasn’t meant to miss Galina. She was meant to be a wife, to stop her missings, to stop, and stay. The taste in her mouth turned acrid, all the fury she’d been stocking up fell out. She shouted at Max’s back, “There’s nothing left! Do you understand ‘nothing’? Do you think yourself a rich man?” She shouted in Russian but still, she was shouting—let Otto hear—let Max hear him hear. “What do you think you’ll find. Gold? A Torah?” She snorted. Her life with Max would be this way, she realized: long stretches of containment, control, followed by eruption, like a new season. “Or have you buried some relic of your wife down there?” she went on. “A lock of hair, perhaps? Her jeweled hairpin? Her prized hand mirror with the rose painted on the back?” She seized his shoulder and yanked him back. “Max!”

  His calm, when he looked up, was maddening. Max, who was never calm, ignored Minna’s hysterical grip and held out an object. Encased in dirt it might have been a slightly misshapen cigar.

  He tapped it against his leg, spraying soil.

  Minna had never shown Max her comb. It seemed an embarrassment; a reminder of the fantasies she’d allowed herself. Now, her cheeks burning, she wanted to snatch it from his hand. But he held it up to her with a pride she couldn’t concede to.

  If only Otto had found it; then she could take it. Then she wouldn’t have to say, as she was saying, “Oh. That. You might as well have left that buried.”

  THE “prized hand mirror” had been Roza’s. (Minna’s mother had had several mirrors, but this one—according to her father—had been her favorite.) Its handle was gold, or goldpainted. The painted rose was pink. The “jeweled hairpin” was her mother’s, too. Her father had kept them in the little table beside his bed, the mirror facedown, rose up, the hairpin just-so askance, its stones green and glittering when the sun slanted in. They couldn’t have been emeralds, they must have been glass. And in another drawer—how many drawers there had been—or was that simply the way one remembered childhood, as full of drawers?—in this other drawer was a small pile of hair. Not a lock, no, whoever left a whole lock, no, these were stray hairs pretending to be a lock, hairs he must have gathered one by one, from corners and pillows and windowsills, and combed together. And sometimes Minna opened the drawer to find them holding, in a long, frightening clump. But other times he’d neglected his combing and she found them wisping around like dust.

  OTTO’S last offer: not only flour and wood and nails and labor but the cow, the whole cow, which was bled and cleaned and hanging in his barn, which wasn’t even his to give, but he would pay the rancher and he would deliver it, quartered and salted, the whole cow he would deliver to Max.

  Silence.

  Minna, listening from the kitchen, poised with a chunk of sausage on its way to her mouth, had to admit that it was difficult to imagine a slaughter any less kosher. She did not blame Otto for not understanding this, but she didn’t blame Max, either, when he shouted, “He’s a Shabbos goy! A Shabbos goy who was never invited, who doesn’t even know the rules!” Another silence followed, electric with rage, then the sound of glass being smashed. A brief crackling riot led quickly to a tinkling. And it was over. Liesl had not stopped sweeping. Minna resumed the journey of the sausage to her mouth.

  THEN Leo’s wagon was rolling up and the boys were jumping down, running thrilled into the house, they’d gone to the farm, they’d imagined a cyclone, maybe Indians—they’d thought Minna and Max dead. The accident, retold by Max in a dry, dead voice he’d obviously been practicing for the occasion, finally achieved its full inanity, and the boys laughed and laughed. Then they turned incredulous, then impertinent, demanding to know what the family would do next. They had paid good money for coal. They’d gone to Mitchell and purchased coffee and flour and all manner of other goods, they’d worked hard and brought home a bounty and now there was no home?

  In their commotion, Jacob and Samuel looked like brothers; like true boys; they almost looked like stepsons. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Minna sat up in Liesl’s bed and saw them out the window, heading toward the barn, that their difference was clear again. There was Jacob, prancing slightly, stooping here and there to pick up a stone, all weaving and loose so that you knew he had to be smiling, and if it were only him, she might have run outside, and called. But there was Samuel, straight as a book’s spine, walking without seeming to walk at all. She couldn’t even see the soles of his boots lifting, though they must have, for already he was farther away, his hands in those fists he wore, his hair black in the first, pouring sun. He looked taller than Minna remembered him to be, and thinner; his shoulder blades were visible beneath his shirt.

  She squinted, wishing him gone, or at least changed—at least, when she widened her eyes again, he would only be a thin young man and she would look at him and think, there is my stepson who is good at mending the chickens’ roof. Instead she saw his face, though it was turned
away: his jaw, sharp as his shoulders, his dark eyes locked straight ahead. She’d been waiting, she knew, to see if those eyes would still be so hard when he returned.

  The backs of his knees caught the sun, one then the other. The back of his neck was brown against his white shirt.

  A new shirt, if she wasn’t mistaken.

  They had done well, her industrious stepsons. She should be pleased.

  But she wanted to kiss one of them.

  She wanted to disappear.

  If she walked off slowly enough, maybe no one would notice.

  She could slip into the horizon, be gone; the courage to do it, a kind of poison, had to be in her.

  But to disappear was to confess. To disappear was to be known as you’d never be if you stayed.

  So maybe she would hide. Today, at least, she would hide under Liesl’s bed, and all her poison would drain away and she would rise pure, as if from the mikvah.

  Yet her feet, beneath the blanket, were so perfectly cool. The sheets were so soft. Her eyes were tired. Why hide under the bed when she could hide in it? She wouldn’t have many more nights here, now that the boys were back. The boys were back. Boys were back. Boys back. A most casual thing to say, to think, think it enough and that will be all it is; don’t look out the window; don’t think of his mouth; just lie back. The boys are back. Lie back. Cover your head. Touch nothing.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE new house would have two rooms, a pitched roof, a wood frame. Boards would be gathered from the collapsed shed, nails and hinges and other hardware purchased in Mitchell. Minna and Liesl would turn the mikvah hole into a proper cellar. For a new shed, which they would call a barn, Fritzi would bring more wood in the form of railroad ties, “borrowed” from the railroad company, and the men would not question his source because they would already be raising the walls.

  The house that would be. And then it was! They were raising the walls, and pitching the roof, and building a new table and new benches and beds. The ceiling was tall, the beds plenty wide. The old stove had been salvaged; Minna scrubbed it until it shone. She felt like a child who’d been given a gift, felt her chest ache with gratitude at the improvements, at the men’s constant motion. How astounding to think that the purpose of all their activity was to build something for her. Or in large part for her. And that it took so many of them, working so hard! Otto had “helped” them buy materials, and now he and Fritzi “helped” with the work, an agreement Samuel had brokered like a puppeteer so as to make all success his father’s, so that suddenly it had been Max saying thing like, There’s no sense arguing, the days are growing short, let’s get to work!

  And they had—they’d gotten to work, and kept on working, and soon Minna began to feel, in their midst, wearing one of two quality dresses that Liesl had gifted her, not like a child but like the mistress of a house. She and Liesl cut into the gentle bowl of the mikvah with spades and she was awestruck by the ordinariness of it all. They were like people all over the country, straightening walls, filling holes, testing joints, making tight.

  Then they were moving into the first room before the second had even been framed and she grew uneasy. She began to notice how many other things were not done, or half done, or perhaps not done well enough. There were plans to dig a well and build a washhouse, but not a single shovelful of earth had been turned over. The walls grew thick with sod but the wind grew colder just as fast. And the door latch, which Minna found exceedingly disappointing, was not a latch at all but a string, wound around a split railroad tie and set through a hole in the door, so that to open it you had to pull up, and to close it, to let the string drop back down. This was not on account of frugality, as it must have seemed to Otto and Liesl, nor of ignorance. According to Jacob, Max had carried with him to America, wrapped in felt, a crystal doorknob, left him by a wealthy cousin. For a time, this heavy, finely cut doorknob had graced the door of their cave—until, over Samuel’s protests, Max had traded it for Minna’s wedding ring. And now, to prove that he’d been right, and perhaps to admonish all of them, he was determined not to buy another doorknob. To do that, Minna supposed, would be to admit more than his foolishness with the ring—it would be to admit a certain foolishness with Minna. So she said nothing.

  This was fall, Jacob said, seeing that she was troubled, trying to cheer her. Also known—he deepened his voice—as autummmn. And this was fall, he explained soberly, before throwing himself facedown into the yellowing grass.

  A letter, delivered by Otto, who found her at the creek, doing the washing. She stared for a long moment at the script on the outside—Minna—wondering if Galina had somehow found her. Did she have regrets? Had the Russians come again? Did she simply want to know, as a person might, how her old maidservant was faring?

  Otto pushed the letter closer. She dried her hands and took it.

  “From Ruth,” he said, and smiled. He was nervous, Minna realized. She had never seen Otto nervous. Every day he showed up to work on a house whose owner either ignored or insulted him and he went politely about his business, doing much of the building himself and teaching Samuel along the way, yet now he looked like a child about to commit a small crime. He glanced back at the house, leaned in toward Minna, then pulled another object from his shirt and slid it beneath the letter in her hands.

  “I am sorry for Fritzi’s mistake,” he said, looking emphatically at her hands, in which she was holding, she realized, one of Fritzi’s paperback books. “I can bring you one at a time. He won’t notice they’re gone.”

  Minna looked at her washing. The creek was so low now she’d had to dig a little pool and dam it with stones, but even so, the water didn’t cover all the clothes: there was a dry corner of a shirt she could wrap the book in.

  “It’s English,” said Otto, his voice cracking: apologetic and encouraging at once.

  “I know. Thank you.”

  NINETEEN

  MINNA had not received a letter since she was nine or ten, when her aunts wrote to send their regrets, they would not be coming to make Pesach that year. But that letter was not intended for her. She’d opened it though she knew it would make her father angry, then tried and failed to seal it back up, then, when he came home and saw, she’d said without thinking, but I read better than you—which was true but not good, or good but only if one didn’t speak of it, or good if spoken about but only if they pretended she was her little brother, which was growing more difficult all the time. Just as Max had brought his sons to a place where they would grow strong, then mistrusted their strength, her father had sent her to the boys’ school, then regretted it. When she said I read better than you, he slapped her. Then he asked her forgiveness but she was already pouring his coffee, so he punished himself by not drinking it. Though that last part, she might have wrong. It might have been that he drank his coffee, and punished himself by asking Minna to read the letter aloud.

  RUTH’S letter was in Yiddish, thankfully. Minna would have expected her to write it in English, just to prove something, to taunt.

  Tayere Minna,

  I wish to express my condolences to you and your little family. Your recent misfortune is certainly undeserved. I understand that you will have a new house built, sturdier and of course more hygienic, and I hope that you soon come to feel misfortune turning into opportunity. Then you may truly call yourself American.

  I also wish to send my regrets that we will not be able to join your little family for Rosh Hashanah. Preparations for winter must be made, and the girls and I have begun our canning.

  And you? Do you expect a child?

  I hope you do not think me impolite for asking. On the plains, one mustn’t hide anything. It only leads to trouble.

  But on to my real purpose (for does not a True Friend have a better purpose than to plaplen?): Along with a new stove (a gift from Leo—the latest model from Sioux Falls) and an excellent tool with which to beat eggs, I have obtained a book (borrowed, I admit, but I intend to keep it all winter) CHOCK-FULL
of the latest housekeeping advice. As often as I can, I will send you TIDBITS, those I think you will find most useful given your unique situation.

  (I’ve translated all, of course, and hope I have done the author justice.)

  Therefore, I will not continue to delay:

  1. “In the city, I believe, it is better to exchange ashes and grease for soap; but in the country, I am certain, it is good economy to make one’s own soap. The great difficulty in making soap ‘come’ originates in want of judgment about the strength of the lye. One rule may be safely trusted—if your lye will bear up an egg, or a potato, so that you can see a piece of the surface as big as a ninepence, it is just strong enough.”

  2. “Count towels, sheets, spoons, &c. occasionally; that those who use them may not become careless.”

  3. Sore Nipples—Put twenty grains of sugar of lead into a vial with one gill of rose water; shake it up thoroughly; wet a piece of soft linen with this preparation, and put it on; renew this as often as the linen becomes dry. Before nursing, wash this off with something soothing; rose water is very good; but the best thing is quince seed warmed in a little cold tea until the liquid becomes quite gelatinous. This application is alike healing and pleasant.”

  4. “Wash the eyes thoroughly in cold water each morning.”

  5. “When green peas have become old and yellow, they may be made tender and green by sprinkling in a pinch or two of pearlash, while they are boiling.”

  6. “Squashes should never be kept down cellar when it is possible to prevent it. Dampness injures them.”