“Is this the horse you made for my lalka?” She ran her fingers over the wood, so smooth and oiled, and moved the legs. When she moved one of the back legs upward, like she remembered him telling her, its stomach opened, revealing a hiding place. Antoniusz rubbed his fingers against his forehead until Ela was sure the skin would begin to tear.
“I do not know who you are,” Antoniusz said finally. “She has been dead for the year, almost. And her mother as well. Clearly you have heard the stories from someone, and you pretend to be her. Even down to the dress. Unless, of course, you are but a ghost, torturing me until the end of my days.”
“I’m not a ghost,” she answered. She looked at her hands, so small, even as her mind, her understanding, her memories, her sorrow, had grown. “I am Ela. I have been her forever.”
“I buried the girl myself after the fire. I shall prove you are an imposter.” He stood with surprising vigor, purpose. They got on his horse and rode to the bone house. The sun stabbed through the woods and Antoniusz knelt by the dirt behind it. The hole had healed over, a scab of earth with irregular borders, but still flat. Antoniusz bent and attacked it with his hands, digging and scattering dirt to all sides, his bottom lip low and dripping with sweat as he sank lower and lower into the earth. She went to the river to get him some water, and when she touched his back he ignored her, his shirt wet and sticking to his muscles, stringy like an old goat’s. She went inside the house and lay down on the straw bed, sleeping without dreams. When she woke, the sun lay low in the trees. Outside Antoniusz still knelt by the dirt. The hole was the size of her, a depth of several feet, and she looked at his hands, dry and cracked and covered with dirt and blood, and they both looked at the empty hole, Ela clutching her lalkas.
“She spoke the truth.” Antoniusz shook his head, and something in him looked so torn that her eyes hurt to look at him. He took a lalka from her and smoothed its hair, still dull with dirt. “And we did not heed it. I am so sorry, my child.”
“What do you mean?” She clutched her dolls tighter.
“She was tried as a witch, my dear, for burning the village.”
“But it was Bolek! I heard him tell my matka himself. I remember!”
“Of course, it was impossible to prove her innocence…but she implored me, while she was imprisoned, to get an herb, a tincture, from the house that she thought would protect her from the stake. She said to gather and hide you as well, that you had eaten the herb and would have survived. But when I came, you were dead. That I did see. So I buried you. But here you are, and I cannot believe it.”
He put his hands, smeared with dirt and blood, to his face and wept. Ela put her hand on his heaving back.
“Child, I have failed you. You and your matka both.” He leaned over, letting his arms fall into the grave. “And I am not fit to live on this earth.”
“But what about me?” She pulled at his shirt, feeling the strain of his weight, whatever he carried, against it. He leaned forward, as if to crawl all in the way in, before pushing himself out of the grave and sitting on his hauches.
“You are a little girl.” He turned and gathered her in his arms. “You are a little girl who needs a father.”
Ela lived with Antoniusz and his sister. They did not speak of the tinctures. Antoniusz insisted she not try to make them.
“Antoniusz, why do I grow no bigger?” Every few months she measured herself against a mark she’d made on the wall, just as her mother had made notches in an old oak by the bone house. But her line, made with a stub of coal, grew fatter, not taller.
“It is a mystery.” He stood with his hands on his hips, his brow furrowed. He did not look her in the eye.
“Why do you lie?” She put the lump back into the pocket of her smock. Although not height, time had given her bravery, suspicion, an adult’s ability to reason.
“I do not lie, child.” He put a hand, large and calloused and spotted, on her shoulder. He was becoming an old man, that was clear. “Your mother was a powerful woman, in her way, with her herbs. She may have done more than save your life.”
“But what?” She wanted to be as big as the other girls in town, the ones whose limbs became long and graceful like the necks of swans, whose lips filled like the flesh on cantaloupe slices.
At night, she studied the herb she had taken from the skeleton’s hand, remembering a potion, a lightning strike. Perhaps in time, the clouds in these events would clear, revealing the whole sky. She hid it in the stomach of her wooden horse so that Antoniusz would not take it and erase the last bits of her memory. She already was forbidden to travel home to the bone house, to the woods where the herb might still grow. At night, she lay awake and prayed to her mother to give her the strength to go home and find the truth that eluded her. She also prayed, squeezing the coal for luck, to grow, to grow so much her feet pressed against the wall of the room in which they slept, or at least long enough to reach the end of the bed. But each month, each year, the line of coal opposite the bed grew darker, fatter, never higher.
Antoniusz knew about the herb Ela kept in the wooden horse, but he pretended not to. Barbara would have wanted him to take the herb to be with Ela forever, but he could not bring himself to consider it, not when he had failed her. And yet, it would have been the only fitting punishment, to live forever with the knowledge he had let her die. There would have been a way to get her the herb from the bone house to the castle prison, where they had kept her before the burning, wait for her to arise from the ashes like a phoenix, if he had only believed her.
Like a veil over everyday life, the scene from that night replayed itself, the soldiers chaining Barbara, drunk with starvation and sleeplessness, to the stake, piling the faggots to mid-calf. The crowd leered and decreed vengeance for their loved ones, so many lost in flames almost a year before. He had been ashamed for feeling faint. Even after so many men had calloused his eyes to death, the sight of Barbara was a knife through the ropes holding his knees to his body and he fell to the dirt, feeling the sparks from the faggots catch his cheeks like the devil’s tears. He closed his eyes when her screams began, crawling toward the sound, feeling the fire wash him in greater waves, hotter, in his face, and he felt convinced that he would climb into the faggots and burn with her.
But hands grabbed him, not of God, but of men; they held him back and someone covered his ears and when he opened them, Barbara, mouth open like the brightest angel in heaven, full of song, was screaming.
They tied him to the bed at his sister’s house for seven days. He moved against the ropes and chafed his body but he could not escape, the ropes, her face, the scream. He peed and shat himself and cursed and cried. After four days, he drank a little broth, a little tea. By the seventh day, they removed the ropes but he could not move, could not walk. The fire burned lazily around the edge of his eyes, the smell of hair and flesh. Barbara’s face blurred in corners but disappeared when he tried to look directly. His sister wrapped him in clean clothes and he drank the broth, a little milk, a little stewed carrots. He began to crawl. His sister found him some balsa wood, a piece as big as his head, and left it on the table. He stared at it for days until the balsa wood became other things—a soldier, a ship, a catapult. He crawled to the table, running his hands over the wood and Barbara’s face, still in the cottage, receded a bit more. His sister gave him a knife, and he buried it in the balsa wood, ripping half away, and then little pieces, shavings like faggots.
He owed Ela this truth, his complicity in her mother’s death, and he decided to wait until she grew older to tell her. But she did not grow in body, ever, even as his sister died of consumption one winter and his leg became weaker, the strength of only a twig. But he did not speak of the herb, nor did she.
He waited still. They grew potatoes and bought a cow. They lived many more years alone, and Ela cooked and mended Antoniusz’s clothes and cut his hair, white and oily and thinning. When she suggested making a tincture to calm the fires in his leg, to build his strength, he
left home and did not return for three days, white and blotched and stinking of vodka when she found him in a tavern in Reszel. She did not mention the tinctures again. But he began to whittle less and less, and sometimes he merely ran his fingers over the figurines he had already carved, as if conceding that his best work had already been done.
When Antoniusz was ready to go, he took no chances. He took the horse, now old and as broken as he, and rode it north to the Baltic Sea, where Ela could not find him, press the herb upon him, make him live forever with a kindling leg and an ashen heart. At the docks, he sliced the horse across the neck and tied himself to its leg. Then, with his wavering strength he rolled it off the docks. They plunged together into the sea, and after a splash, a bubbling, he died, too.
She waited many years for Antoniusz to come back, even when it was impossible for him to be alive because the earth would have asked for his old bones, and she no longer had a father, either. But Ela was still a little girl, even as her mind had begun to weave all manner of thoughts, complex and layered, rich, and desires, deep in her chest and loins, and she did not get older. One day, she packed the wooden horse with the herb and a few other trinkets and went back to the bone house. It had not changed, except for a slight weathering by the seasons, and she had not, either. It was one small comfort.
1945
Stanley’s mother had been dead for two months when he finally got the telegram. They had passed through the Harz Mountains, happy green lumps against the spring sky, into Czechoslovakia, when he requested to go home on furlough. But then the war ended, and Stanley went home for good. When he docked at Locust Point in Baltimore, he smelled the factory smoke belching out over the harbor and thought of the stories of Dachau and Auschwitz. He imagined the Domino Sugar plant, or the American Can Company, a three-story warehouse on Boston Street where his mother Safine had worked as a child, packed full of hair, charred flesh. A room full of watches, jewelry. A room full of skulls. It was the smell, though, that remained with him, deep in his nostrils, of human rot. He had smoked cigarette after cigarette by the boat rail until he couldn’t smell anything.
The buildings in Fells Point had bowed with age but were not broken, not like the piles of bricks and dust that demarcated most of Europe. At 919 South Ann Street, his mother’s pansies, pink and yellow, still perched in their windowsill pots, unaware of history’s realignment, and the marble steps out front still gleamed like bone.
“She go in her sleep. Is likely her heart.” Linus, his father, blotted his eyes with his handkerchief. His cheeks, still damp, had settled down his face above the corners of his lips, where his beard began. He was frailer than when Stanley had left, although that was to be expected. Still, Linus’s white hair, his yellow and blue eyes, the dried spit on the corner of his lip unnerved him. Her death had rotted him worse than any pint of whiskey.
“How was the funeral?” he asked. In the kitchen, he made coffee and placed the mug with the unbroken handle into Linus’s hands, whose fingers, crippled with gumball knuckles, half closed around it. He lifted the mug and pushed it into his beard where, eventually, it found his lips.
“Beautiful service—Henry and Thomas and Cass pallbearers.”
All of Stanley’s brothers and sisters had moved out while Stanley had been overseas. Henry, Thomas, and Cass worked at the steel mill in the county, over on the Patapsco River. Their jobs and their ages had kept them out of the war. In letters, his mother had updated Stanley about Julia’s wedding, Kathryn going into the convent, Thomas’ baby, but none of them had written to him personally.
“You ask Thomas for work, he could prolly get you job.” Linus leaned back in the wooden chair. It grunted under his weight as he packed his pipe. His suspenders, he grabbed close together in the front. As each place on his waistband frayed, thinned, Linus had moved the clips little by little to newer spots, until they too became frayed. Now the suspenders were dangerously close to touching.
“I’m not asking Thomas for a job.” Stanley lit a cigarette. The brothers had gotten rich, according to his mother, working double shifts at the mill, making the steel for warships and planes. They seemed to forget that it was his own hide, freezing in the trenches, that had paid them to do so.
“What Thomas done to you?” Linus lit his pipe, sucking at it with little-girl breaths until it glowed.
“Nothing, that’s exactly what Thomas has ever done for me.” Stanley sat across from Linus and reached into his duffel bag for his comb. He felt what was left of the charred herb in the front pocket. He thought of Johnson. He had thought of him on the ship home—the man underneath his bunk had not snored like him. He thought of Johnson in the woods, lying there every day, farther behind. Further dead. He slid the herb into the front pocket of his pants, feeling the pulse of blood in his fingers. He hoped he would see his brother Thomas after all. He needed an excuse to fight.
He went up to his parents’ room. It was as he remembered, the Bible on the end table, the white blankets tucked tight on the mattress, the crucifix above the bed. The afternoon light cut a line across the bed. He opened the closet, pulled out a dress and brought it to his nose. The smell of garlic made him cry. He ran his hands across the other dresses on the hangers, wondered why Linus had not gotten rid of them. Perhaps Linus would give them to his daughters. Perhaps they would use the fabrics, thin and dated, to make Linus shirts.
Stanley shrugged off his boots and lay on the bed, closed his eyes. Below. Linus coughed and tapped his pipe. It was quiet, and Stanley fell asleep. He dreamed about Johnson. He was alive, coming toward him with a mouthful of herb. His eyes were bleeding. Snow was everywhere. Black spikes of trees shot from the ground. Johnson was shouting something, holding his rifle at his waist. Before he reached Stanley, he turned into a Kraut. Stanley pulled his revolver out and shot him. The Kraut stopped and looked at him in surprise. I’m sorry, Stanley said. He dropped the gun in the snow, put up his hands. The Kraut sat down on the earth and lay back, his face to the sky, arms behind him like a sunbather. Mudder. The Kraut, the boy, Johnson, wept.
Stanley woke up. He walked into the bathroom. It was bare and clean like his mother’s room, and the simplicity, the sanctity of it, comforted him. He filled the sink with water, scrubbing his face, his hair, his teeth with soap. He plunged his face in the basin and caught the line of it in the mirror as he stood back up. He touched his cheeks, his ears. They seemed different, although they were the same size, shape, as he had always remembered them. But something was different. Had he come back a man? He had cried, cried like a baby those first few weeks at boot camp in Fort Benning, wondering why he ever enlisted. There were better ways to see the world, to be Tom Swift, to feed his curiosity of foreign lands. But now, the fear in him was dead, along with everything else. He simply didn’t care about anything anymore. Stanley Polenksy had left this house, left for the war, but he had not come back. And he could wait for him no longer. He walked down to the bar to get some whiskey.
He got a job shucking oysters south of Baltimore, at Locust Point, in 1946; at least that’s what the calendar in the foreman’s office said. Time did not feel as if it had restarted since he’d been back. It was low-paying, women’s work, but he would not go to Sparrows Point and work at Bethlehem Steel with his brothers. He stayed at home with Linus. In the evenings, he drank on Lancaster Street, where no women came, except the fat horse of a bartender whose armpits mooned with sweat while she dried draft glasses. Nobody talked to him. He didn’t shave every day. Sometimes the person in the mirror behind the bar looked like someone else, and he liked that. But sometimes he’d see Johnson, the German boy, in the faces of the other grimacing, sweating men around him, and he’d buy a pint of whiskey and take it home so he could drink in the dark of his room. Sometimes he’d put the radio on. The rye settled over him like a velvet cloth, along with the voice of Bing Crosby, blotting out most of the dead men, mostly Johnson. Johnson’s frowning face, choking on the herb. Stanley kept the rest of the crumbly mess in hi
s pocket but didn’t know why.
One night, he went to a bar over on Thames, in the grittier section of Fells Point. He would have never gone to such a place before the war, but he’d been tossed out of his usual bar, on Lancaster, the night before, because he pissed on a man in the bathroom. A mistake, he’d tried to explain. Sometimes he went places in his head, back to Germany, to Italy, and he’d smell the shell fire, the blood, tinny and sour, the diarrhea and beans. He’d see the shadows of men in trees, feel the zip of bullets by his ears. He went to these places but his body stayed in Baltimore and he didn’t always know what it was doing in the meantime. He had pissed on the man—he must have been at the next urinal—and then he had to fight him.
The man was older, a shriveled wharf rat, pickled and brined from the docks. His fingernails were yellow and curled, like his teeth. He lunged at Stanley, unsteady and smelling of piss. Stanley punched him once in the gut and folded him over. Then he let the men in the bar grab him by the cuff, push him to the ground outside, and kick his ribs until he curled into a ball. A mistake, he said as they went back inside. Don’t come back, they responded.
The bar on Thames Street was crowded. It smelled like underarms, like beer and rot. It smelled familiar. He bought a whiskey and made his way to the back. Two men were playing poker at a table. Russians, Stanley thought. Their eyes were sharp, dark like dogs; their spirits were clear, like vodka.
“You play?” One, with a face flat like a board, a nose broken down into a hook, looked up at him. In the army, when Stanley wasn’t firing his rifle, sleeping, or jerking off, he was playing poker.
“A little.” He waved his hand in the air. The Russian smiled.
“Take his place.” He nodded at a heavy form, passed out at on one end of the table, before pushing it onto the floor. The Russian kicked it for good measure, and Stanley heard it grunt. He felt for his Colt in the back of his pants. He picked it up in an alley shop off Green mount after the war. He had hated guns when he had one, all those years in Europe, and then after the war, he hated not having one.
Tide King Page 7