“Are you afraid to go home?” Hanna asked softly, stirring the porridge. She didn’t understand why Claas was silently insisting on taking both children south with him. It would be a wearisome trip; the roads in Wisconsin were little more than packed mud with sudden hills that tripped a wagon, with half-disguised holes big enough to swallow a spilled child. When she finally got up her nerve and asked Claas why he needed to take them along, he looked at her grim-faced, the weeks’ old letter, newly arrived, staring at them from the table. “My mother will be wantin’ to see her grandchildren.”
“But surely the funeral’s over by now.” She kneaded the dough without looking up, struggling to keep her voice soft, submissive. A voice more likely to persuade.
He slammed the door behind him and said no more about it, afraid to have his wife make a sound argument. They’d be gone two or three weeks, even with the best of weather. Could Claas care for the children alone on the road? Did he know Freddie was terrified of snakes, or Annie cried easily at a gruff voice? Would he remember to feed them at regular times, to listen to their prattle, to fuss over them now and then? He was a good man, she reminded herself—he would always put his children first.
She put down her spoon and squeezed Annie’s shoulder. “Opa’s funeral is already over, Annie. You won’t have to see…him.”
“I’ve seen dead people,” Annie said coolly. Then a pained look flooded her face. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mutti.” She hid her face with her hands. It had been her brother, Karl, Annie saw dead. Karl died in the night more than a year ago, already cold in his cradle when Annie got up at dawn to feed him, her screams rousing the rest of them.
“Sometimes it happens like this,” the doctor back in Chicago had said uneasily when Claas chased him down, looking Karl’s body over for some mark of disease.
Karl’s death brought them north. They packed up their possessions after Claas made a short trip to buy land. In a daze, she had not taken his mention of cheap land in Wisconsin seriously.
“Ask my father to go with you. Father has a good head for bargaining.” But Claas refused and set out alone.
With his dislike of foreigners, he probably took the first land the agent showed him, afraid to either bargain or say no. She had watched him buy feed and other supplies too often not to notice how he shied away from haggling, paying the top dollar when he needn’t. Last spring, she saw better land for sale a few miles from here, land sitting on a rise high above rocky pieces like theirs. Their property didn’t have a single tree save the walnut.
“More land for crops,” Claas said defensively, when she pointed it out. By July, he was cursing their shadeless yard.
“We can plant some trees in the fall,” she suggested, taking pity on him. “Mr. Hatcher will give us some cuttings.” He nodded in his abrupt way, his chin rising even as he turned away.
She put Annie’s cereal on the table. “You’ll see your cousins and both omas, Annie. Uncle Pit will give you a pony ride.” She would love to return to Chicago if only for a few days, but there had been the animals and Martha to care for. Plus Claas had never suggested such a thing. If all of them left, none would return. She could see fear in his eyes.
“I’m too big for ponies. Vati can take Freddie along.”
Annie acted like the matter was settled, taking on a look Hanna had seen often on her husband’s face. But Annie’s plan seemed the better one. Freddie was seven years old, big enough for the trip and anxious to go alone with his father. And she could use Annie’s help in Wisconsin. Martha’s birth had been a hard one, the midwife coming too late to do more than clean up the baby, shaking her head over the lost blood, helping Hanna bathe and change her gown, looking the baby over with practiced eyes.
The day Claas and the children left, Hanna, holding Martha in her arms, watched the wagon until it was out of sight.
“Mr. Hatcher will keep an eye on things,” Claas had promised, coming as near to a hug in front of the children as he ever did. He seemed less sure about his trip now; she could have called him back with tears.
It was warm two weeks ago; she hardly needed her shawl. She wondered now if Annie’s tearfulness, her stubborn attempts to change Claas’ mind, came from a premonition she would never see her sister again. Martha was the second sister Annie lost, the first dying at birth when Annie was three. Five children had been born in ten years and only two remained. Claas’ plan to take his children south had been the right one—but not for his reasons. If they lived, if they hadn’t taken the disease south with them, it would be because of his stubbornness.
She dug a waist-deep hole; she couldn’t throw the dirt up after that. Claas would want to move the baby to a proper location next spring anyway. The toolbox was almost too big for her to handle and, in fact, it slid into the hole in the end, nearly losing its lid. She didn’t even read a Bible verse over Martha; there would be time later. Afterward, she threw herself on the bed and slept for hours, a strange sleep with dreams from someone else’s head. Dreams where wild animals chewed on children’s toes and women wearing black dresses with huge silver buttons spun like tornadoes.
Later still, she dragged everything the baby touched outside and set it ablaze; clothes, the cradle, the blanket she had bought a few weeks earlier from the Winnebago Indian who came to her door—every last thing.
It was the closest she’d ever stood to an Indian, and when she told Claas about it, he forbade her to open the door to one again.
“What did you give him in exchange?” Claas asked, looking around for missing goods.
“Oh, this and that,” she said, shrugging. “Nothing we’ll miss.”
Claas was easily persuaded, knowing how well she held on to a penny. In truth, she gave the Indian more than the blanket’s worth to hurry him on. She’d piled jellies, the last of the summer squash, eggs, and a live chicken into his arms, nearly pushing him out the door. An Indian in her house!
Her father had put her to sleep in childhood with tales of Indians and their strange ways. In one of his favorite stories, a group of Indians insisted on coming into a recent widow’s house each night, parading around with her sons on their shoulders, draping her quilts over their heads, firing bullets into her shallow fireplace so they bounced off the walls.
“On the fifth night, the widow fired a bullet into the chief’s head as soon as he walked through the door,” her father finished, still laughing years later when the story had grown stale. Suddenly, his eyes would narrow and he’d hiss at her. “Never make the mistake of thinking they’re just like us. They’d cut your throat and take your scalp home for their children to play with without so much as flinching.”
It always ended with her father grabbing her chin or arm too roughly—with her mother saying, “Enough, Hermann!”
The morning after, Hanna often found a bruise on her arm or chin. She tried to cover them when she could for her mother’s sake. And when she married, she married a man as unlike her father as she could find. Too little like him, she sometimes thought.
The Winnebago, tall and elegant, had stood at the doorway politely, holding the beautiful woven blanket out to her. She wondered how they made such rich blue and yellow dyes. Once in her hands, she put her face to it before she realized what she was doing. It was soft and coarse at the same time, smelling mostly of horse. Before she pulled the door closed, she glimpsed other garments made of animal skins hanging over his nag’s back. Maybe next time she’d trade for a warm coat for Claas. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be a mouse.
A circle of stones outside held the fire in. How quickly it was over. Soon there was no trace of baby things other than the milk leaking from her breasts and the tamped dirt in the house. She wet down the remaining embers, trickling water over them so the fire wouldn’t flare up. Claas taught her these things in their first weeks here, before the house was built.
It was nearly dark now and the sky had an odd cast to
it. She hurried inside where, in the last light, she found a rash had begun to form on her arms. Although common sense denied it, she tried to tell herself it was from handling the baby’s things or tending the fire, from anything other than pox.
The pox had taken the baby quickly; Hanna heard it was often this way with infants, their bodies kept perfect for God. Until now, no one she knew here had died from pox. Her family turned against vaccination though after her mother’s sister died from an inoculation in Bavaria. And her father’s cousin came down with smallpox years after he had cut his own skin, rubbing in the toxin saved from a friend’s light case.
“If God means you to have pox, you will, and Jenner be damned,” Hermann Grueber told his family, “neither my hand not the government’s will intercede.” He was a man “agin” more things than “for” them, hating the government, the organized church, anything foreign, his neighbors if they tried to tell him how to live his life.
Claas though, had been vaccinated in Illinois two years ago. He was sick for a few days afterward, proving Mr. Grueber’s point.
“How is this better?” her father said, shaking his fist. Claas’ employer, a paper mill owner on South Stubb Street, made his workers line up for vaccinations.
“I would have given him notice,” Mr. Grueber told his son-in-law even before he got sick. “Is this the freedom America brags about?”
Ashamed of being bedridden, Claas decided his family would wait for a different batch of serum. Only Claas’ mother took advantage of Mr. Tyler’s offer to vaccinate his worker’s families, and when Claas got sick, she came to care for him, shooing Hanna away. They moved north before another outbreak, thinking that the pox couldn’t find them here.
Hanna’s rash spread quickly, seeking out the places where it hurt most: the soles of her feet, her palms, her face, neck and back. She looked frantically at her hands where pustules seemed to form while she watched, still not believing she could be so quickly overtaken by this disease that blew into their lives through some mysterious doorway. Someone had told her if the pustules connected you would die. With little else to do and still in a fugue from Martha’s death, she watched the pox marks chase across her body as she thought about Claas and the children. They must be on the road home by now.
Outside, nature was in revolt too. There was nothing in their yard to bend or blow, but the wind’s bawl convinced her of its force. Hanna began to look for something strong to write on. What little paper she had was flimsy, sure to tear away from the door in seconds. Finally, in desperation, she ripped the back cover from Annie’s primer and printed in large, black letters:
POX Quarantine-Keep Out
Taking nails from the cupboard and a hammer from the spilled tools, she nailed the sign onto the door. The door flew open before she was finished, crashing into the sod wall, the wind tugging insistently at the hinges. The wind tore at her too, ripping her hair loose from its knot, whipping her skirt up around her waist. Her shawl lashed around her as tightly as a noose as she fought with the door, leaning into it finally to push the bolt across, tears of frustration frozen on her cheeks.
When she checked later, the sign was gone. She found another book cover, Freddie’s this time, and made her sign again. Now she pounded eight of Claas’ precious nails in. The pain from hammering with oozing hands nearly overwhelmed her. She wished Claas kept a bottle of whiskey like her father did. It would help her to sleep if nothing else. But surprisingly, she fell into a dreamless sleep seconds after she lay down. Only her parched throat woke her. The pox was a pattern of oozing, rank sores on her face, and when she tried to drink, the pain was excruciating. Her throat was covered with pox, the poison running down her gullet in a thick, choking flow. When she coughed, blood speckled her sputum.
Outside, the world was a dizzying white and the second sign was gone. Any minute now, Claas, Annie and Freddie would return, coming in the door full of tales about their trip to Chicago, shaking snow from their coats, stamping cold feet, bragging about what they had seen on their trip. Maybe the snowfall would delay them for a day, but not much longer. Claas would be eager to get home, the children even more so. The days missed with her mother and sister would trouble Annie especially. She’d agitate her father to come home, anxious to play with her new sister.
Hanna’s heart nearly stopped. Claas and the children would never see Martha again. She should have waited a day or two before burying the baby; the cold would have preserved the body and they could have shared the rite. Now she lay four feet deep in their kitchen. Under their feet. Should she tell them this? Would the children insist on bringing the baby out of the box for a last look? With her rising fever, it was hard to think clearly. Perhaps she could make Annie and Freddie believe Martha was under the walnut tree with their kitten, Gingerbread. Claas could move her once the ground thawed in April. How would he react to her decision to bury his child under the hearth? Would it mean another breach between them? Days of slammed doors and red eyes.
Hanna put up her final sign the next morning, using the last piece of strong paper she could find—the back cover of the Bible, a thick German edition sent to them on their marriage from relatives in Wuntenberg. Sixteen nails, driven in with a fevered strength, held her sign in place this time. When she looked again, forcing the door open against the stubborn wind, she saw the nails had held, but the sign was mostly ripped away.
Sobbing again, the tears burning her face and throat, she made her way to the shed, noticing the black path from last summer’s fire was blanketed in white: winter blotting out the scars of summer. Would summer’s green hide wounds too? She had yearned to see the black gone, but now missed what had marked a road away from here. Something to follow should her days grow too hard.
In the shed, Hortense looked half-dead, lacking even the energy to nuzzle Hanna’s hand. She took the milk in now-practiced pulls, Hortense shuddering with relief. A year ago, she had never so much as put a hand on a cow. Her hands were bleeding again and only the chickens, dancing around her feet, oblivious to the cold and as noisy as ever, kept her spirits from collapse.
Outside again, the snow had finally stopped, leaving only a paltry coating of white for all its bluster. It would melt away within hours with nothing to show for it. There was little time left. Claas and the children were making their way home even as she stood shivering in the shed, even as her temperature rose and the pox tormented her.
Claus would never think to mind a barred door. He would kick it down and bring the children in with him. Her last living children. That was the kind of man he was—for better or worse. She’d known this about him for the outset, liking it until she saw what it was to live with. Stubborn. Silent. Just imagining him forcing his way inside the house with Annie and Freddie behind him angered her. She could be stubborn too. She could do what she had to do to stop him.
Picking up a burlap bag from the shelf, she stuffed handfuls of hay into it, pushing Hortense into a corner so she could steal every piece from her stall, moving the protesting chickens out of the way with her feet. Putting her illness aside, summoning the strength from somewhere, she made several trips back and forth with bundles of wood. Inside, she fashioned a ring like the ones made of stone outside: a ring filled with hay and kindling, then with anything she could find to burn, quilts, clothing, bedclothes, When the ring was complete, she soaked it with lard oil—oil they used to light a single lamp at night—pouring it as generously as barreled rainwater on her summer squash and tomatoes. Finally, she spilled a trail of oil from the stoked fire to the circle of hay.
Looking over her handiwork like it was a new quilt laid out for basting, she stepped into the circle’s center broom in hand, prepared to light the trail of oil from the fire. The disease would end with her; nothing would be left in this place to sicken their children. As Hanna lifted her broom to the flame, she heard the sound of wagon wheels. She stretched her broom toward the fire, realizing her reach wa
s not long enough, and she fought back tears. Outside, the wagon had stopped, and a moment later, Claas was at the door. He was shouting something, but his voice was lost in the wind. Were the children with him, only steps behind? She couldn’t spare the time to look. Stepping closer to the stove, she raised her broom again. Claas was pounding on the door now. Was it Annie’s voice she heard? Be strong, she willed herself.
And then he was at the window, holding the last of her signs in his hands, rapping on the glass. He must have found the sign on the road.
”Go away, Claas,” she screamed through the door. “Martha’s dead and I’ll be soon too.” She didn’t know if he could hear her; her voice turned indistinct when she raised it. Where were the children?
The door splintered suddenly as the head of an ax sliced through. She was sobbing again, too weak now to even stand her ground. There was no way to stop her stubborn husband.
“Keep them away from me,” she sobbed. “Why must you…be you?” Then he was in the room, standing in front of her, his beard dripping pieces of ice, his face scarlet, his eyes full of tears. Out of breath, he grabbed her to him. She pushed him away.
“Are you mad coming in here now you’ve seen the sign? Take the children and go. It’s not too late.”
“They’re back in Chicago,” he panted, dropping his hands to his sides. “They’ve had it too, Hanna.”
“They have?” She was sobbing even harder. “Why didn’t you stay with them?”
“My mother is with them.” He reached for her and she stepped away again. Could he carry the disease even though he’d had it? “No, no, you don’t understand, Hanna. They’re getting better already.” He put a hand to her cheek and she allowed it. “They’ll be recovered in a week.”
“They’ll recover?” She couldn’t believe it. Would she recover too? “How do you know?”
I Bring Sorrow_And Other Stories of Transgression Page 5