“Hello, Pieter,” he answered. “Good to see you.”
“Andrew come with you?”
“No, trek was enough for one man.”
“Yeah. Tell him I’ll come down once the snow stops and we’ll go hunting.”
Heinrich poured the beer and waited for Wilhelm to speak.
“Didn’t expect the cold to set in so quick,” he finally said. “Can’t get the car or wagon up the lane. Why I came to see you. To ask a favor.” He weakened with the words. Never remembered asking a favor from anyone.
Heinrich perked, waited to be of assistance.
“I need a ride to town. Need to load up on food for the winter.”
Heinrich laughed, waved him off. “That’s all you come to ask? But of course.” He waved it off as silliness again. “We’ll go tomorrow in the vagon. Car too much trouble in the snow. We’ll load you up and the boys will help carry. Fritz is all muscle and can carry the whole load on his shoulders, I t’ink!”
Heinrich pulled a cigarette from a dented case and offered one to Wilhelm, who declined. The man smoked easily, his worn and wrinkled face still young despite years of hard labor. Wilhelm glanced at the house, at the comfortable furnishings. Heinrich followed his gaze slowly. “Need more than just a ride, ja?” he asked.
Wilhelm rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m short for spring. Winter’s going to drain us.” The words constricted his throat, his voice low and deep. “Was thinking about going to Morton for a bridge loan. Just enough to cover the seed and new hay.”
His neighbor took out his cigarette, stuck out his tongue like the tobacco had leaked out and soured it. He shook his head roughly. “No, Vilhelm. You don’t do business vith dat man. No.”
“I know. Heard people talking. But it’s a short loan. Six months at most until the sows are ready to be sold and chicks can lay.” The bank wasn’t an option. The manager knew there was nothing left in the account, would never loan to a German, regardless. Campbell had cut off credit at the store. Between the bank and the general store, they had him in a choke hold and knew it, enjoyed watching him squirm.
“Frank Morton.” Mr. Mueller said the name as a conviction, leaned forward and bore with the intensity of a giant. “Dat man no good. No heart.” He thumped his chest.
“Don’t see I have much choice. Besides, he’s been kind to Eveline.” The words brought a heat to his hands that he didn’t expect. “His wife and sister-in-law have been good to us,” he corrected.
Heinrich stared at the carpeting between their feet. “I have some seed, Vilhelm. It not much but could give you an acre. From that, you vould have enough seed next year. It would be a hard year vithout, but a man goes through many hard years. Take the seed and make do. Work in town if you have to, but don’t go to Frank.”
“I won’t take your seed, Heinrich.” The man started to insist and Wilhelm held up a hand. “I won’t take it.” His chest puffed with decision. “I’ll think about what you said.”
Heinrich patted his shoulder sadly and stood. He cleared the air with a clap of his hands. “Now, you come and eat vith us, get warm and drunk, before your walk.”
Wilhelm ate with the family. He drank so much beer that the faces blurred and the voices slurred into one. He ate homemade blood sausage and spaetzle and roasted chicken and he ate until his pants cut into his waist. And he laughed. Forgot that he knew how to laugh. Laughed at the stories and the German songs that spewed out of Heinrich like soap from a washtub.
When Wilhelm left, the full moon, brightened as a lighthouse lamp, dyed the snow blue and sparkled. He was drunk and did not feel the cold, his footsteps uneven and curved from side to side so it looked like several men left footprints instead of one. And he walked with unbuttoned coat, sang at the top of his lungs the German songs that he didn’t even know the words to, and he felt alive with food and drink and didn’t care how long it would take to get home, didn’t even care if there was a home to get back to.
But he did get home and Eveline waited at the door in her night coat, her limbs stuttering in cold and anger. But Wilhelm, still happy with stout, stumbled toward his wife, who seemed so beautiful, and he puckered to kiss her sweet lips.
She slapped him hard and square across the cheek. “Do you know what time it is?” she screamed. “Been scared to death that you froze out there and here you come staggering in drunk and smelling of beer and gravy!”
He sobered now, the cold blasting, the songs and the waiting lips and the warmth of a cozy fire and friendly stories slapped away by her cold fingers. The dead twins screeched in his ears.
* * *
The next morning, Eveline shoveled pancakes onto her husband’s plate. They were pale and broken. Hardly an egg had been laid this week and she mixed the batter with only one. Wilhelm’s eyes were bloodshot and she knew his head throbbed with the hangover from the Muellers’ hospitality. While she poured his coffee, she subtly inspected his cheek to see if a mark showed from where she had slapped him.
She regretted her temper. She had never acted out violently and she didn’t understand how she could have hit her husband. The guilt, hot and terrible, nearly too fierce to utter an apology. She didn’t know why she had been so angry. All she knew was that she was left in this cold home eating stale bread and listening to Will and Edgar whine while Wilhelm perched warm and fed at the Muellers’.
And then she realized why she had struck him. Because this was the life she had chosen for them. This was the life she had begged for, a life that at times seemed to slowly squeeze the life out of them all. And she panicked that her husband wouldn’t come back, either by choice or by accident, and she would be left in this freezer on her own. It was her fear that had hit him and the regret stung sharply.
“Do you want Andrew to go with you?” she asked timidly. “To town?”
Wilhelm shook his head, finished the last of his bland breakfast and pushed the plate away. She wanted to hold him, tell him she was sorry—sorry for everything. But she took his plate and turned away without another word, didn’t even say good-bye as he picked up his coat and headed out to meet the Muellers’ wagon on the main road.
* * *
Lily shimmied into the creases of the old sofa, the cushions long bleached from sun and wear, frayed and bald along the rounded arms. Claire made bread in the kitchen, the punching of the dough in a steady beat, a slight pitter-patter like a child’s feet playing hopscotch. Frank stayed in his office all morning.
The hour had been late when Wilhelm Kiser knocked on the door, swaying and loud and asking to see Frank. The men had met briefly, just long enough to sign papers. And Lily’s heart sank then, fell in sympathy for Will and Edgar, for Mrs. Kiser—for no one came to Frank unless in desperate straits.
Andrew. The pain fluttered to the pit of her stomach, the missing sticking to the walls of the closed house, the absence of him leaving her lost in each listless day. She pushed his smooth, strong features from her thoughts and dug through the tangled yarn basket next to the sofa.
Lily pulled a clump of rose-tinted wool, dyed long ago with beet juice, and found her knitting needles in the bottom. In quick, harsh loops, she started the scarf, the tools clicking, clicking, clicking.
Frank’s footsteps clomped upstairs on the floorboards, pacing. The oven in the kitchen clattered metallically as Claire rearranged pots and bread pans above the fires. The snow carried softly outside the window, hung upon the skeletons of the bushes in lines of new white. And through it all, Lily’s fingers found the knots and fell into the design of her knitting absently and without observation. Until she paused. She looked at the yarn, the tiny baby sock that had taken shape between the pointed x of the needles.
She rubbed the little sock, the smooth bumps along the heel. For a moment, the dream flowed again, trickled to the man of blue eyes and gentle tones, to the farmhouse that she could clean and cook in and to the great apple tree that she had once climbed and where she had found the man she loved.
Fran
k’s boots stomped down the stairs and Lily buried the small bootie under the mounds of hand-spun wool.
Winter in the Kiser farmhouse morphed into a world unto its own that lasted years or centuries between the slow seconds. They spent Christmas with the Muellers. But for that day, life outside the frozen home did not exist, as they pulled themselves within the walls and hibernated.
In the evenings, Wilhelm read the Pittsburg Press, the news drafted in black-and-white English clarity—Americans were good; Germans were evil. Andrew and Eveline didn’t read the newspaper. The headlines were enough to add to the weariness, the photos of tanks and cartoons of sabers through the Kaiser and his Huns. They all saw the listed lines of the deceased—the doughboys hot to enlist only to return to American soil in burnt and shattered pieces. But the adults did not speak of these notices, of the stories of feral bloodshed, and when Will and Edgar were present the paper was turned over or folded to reveal innocuous advertisements for Maytag washers and Hawthorne bicycles. The young boys did not need to know of this war. Not yet.
Andrew strained under the confines of the house and the strength in his shoulders and thighs weakened. They ached, as only the muscles of the young do, for action and movement, for physical labor and exertion. When the body lay idle, the thoughts grew strong, as if all the physical movements dwarfed into mental movements and pounded within his skull. The missing of many things clung to him as the black ashes clung to the bricks of the fireplaces.
His right arm scolded his former left one, lamented on the imbalance and the inadequacy of being able to do half of what it used to. And the missing left one argued back. Said that the right had no right to complain, that it was useful and alive—that it did not sting and burn and throb in an infinite display of mockery. And then Andrew would curse himself, ignore the rival sides. But upon their quieting, the missing and longing would set in. The missing of his parents, of the laughter around an old, worn table at breakfast and dinner, of a tiny house whose timber and warmth proclaimed a safety that had eclipsed the poverty. There were thoughts of a young woman also, and these thoughts made him heat from the hips and made him want to climb the walls and dunk his head in a bucket of snow. But then he remembered that she had stood by and defended men who made slurs, who took their side over his own, and so he squashed the wanting and shoveled snow and carried firewood and cleaned the frozen cow stalls until he was too tired to think or feel.
At night, Andrew turned his focus to old passions—reading veterinary texts and plotting a better future, the words of his father replaying, reminding him to take care of his family. But he had two families now, the attachment to this home growing stronger in equal measure with the burdens to help them. And so he studied; he wrote letters to his mother full of promises for a better life. And he tried not to believe that the tasks were as useless as a bird without wings.
Over the frigid months, the house sighed with waiting, with the cold that shuddered from the wind and the sour moods under its rooflines. Outside, under the weight of blowing wind and thick flakes, the great apple tree drooped, the old bark moaning as its branches divided and hung as a canopy over the hidden roots. Tips of wizened limbs jutted closer to the house, picked like fingers at the peeling paint, the nails tapping, tapping, tapping like a bored child at a school desk.
And so winter carried into 1918 with a steady and unrelenting weariness—a heavy, dull cold that settles into the limbs and numbs the appendages and wonders if warmth will ever be known again.
PART 4
The military masters of Germany . . .
filled our unsuspecting communities
with vicious spies and conspirators.
—President Woodrow Wilson
CHAPTER 34
In April 1918, the thaw came quickly and without notice, started in the night and raised temperatures so robustly that by morning the earth heated from the inside out.
Steam rose across the hills, thickened into fog along the valleys and pulled high on the sun’s strings to the heavens. The robins and bluebirds appeared from the smoking landscape, chatted loud enough to make up for their winter absence. Mourning doves darted in chase between the whitening birch trees. Red-winged blackbirds clung to the old reeds and cattails along the thawing creek, their weight bouncing the spindly stalks up and down like a greased well pump.
Between the brambles, the black raspberry prickers glowed purple and the grapevines twisted brown with barky texture. Forsythia budded green with a promise of yellow and the pussy willows grew furry pods soft as rabbit paws. Striped crocus erupted in sunspots between clusters of daffodils. The land bloomed; the land sang and spread its aroma of birth and renewal.
Andrew Houghton emerged from the house, smelled the nimble scents of warm snow melting into musty loam. He leaned his neck back, his skin soaking in the natural warmth, the first heat uninspired by a coal stove or a burning log in more months than he could count. And within the balminess, the cells of his body ignited and the rush of energy made weary limbs suddenly alive and young and drunk on spirit. Coatless, he stepped off the footpath and sank six inches into the ground. “What the . . .” Using his left leg as a brace against the stone, he sucked his buried foot from the soupy mud and squinted at the melting, oozing, grassless landscape.
Andrew rubbed his forehead and chuckled incredulously. The screen door slammed and Wilhelm mirrored Andrew’s entrance with a full grin to the bright sky until his nephew placed a hand of warning to the man’s chest and pointed to the flowing ground. Wilhelm scratched the stubble at his chin, the light shining it silver, and he shook his head, a resigned laugh coming from the throat. “Ah, Christ.” He shook his head again and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll be damned.”
But mud or no mud, the hard, deep, black winter was over and with each inch of rising sun the lips curved upward and the nostrils widened and they paused in their work just to relish the glory of the turned season.
The apple tree shook off the last ridges of snow, and with a sigh and flicker the limbs outstretched and unbent, took woody claws off the house and quieted the unending tapping. Eveline tied the clothesline to the heavy trunk and patted the bark, noticed for the first time the word “Lily” etched into the side. And she peeked at Andrew heading to the lane and wondered with a tickle if he had carved the word.
Wilhelm and Andrew stepped discriminatingly from exposed rock to old wood just to keep from sinking into the black, sliding land. The snow melted in pools, overflowed into the grassless dirt, cut eddies and lines like plow marks through chocolate. The dip in the drive filled with rushing black water, the sludge piling into dams forcing the water to cut into the gravel, widening the gap to an impassable river.
Andrew pushed back his cloth cap and put his hand to his bent knee in assessment. “We could rebuild the lane a hundred times over, but the water’s going to come through. No stopping Mother Nature.”
Wilhelm nodded. “We’ll build a bridge. The only way. Think the Muellers would give us a hand?”
“I’ll speak to Pieter.”
The sun warmed their backs as they stood shoulder to shoulder overlooking the expanse of weather-beaten land, but there was hope and the mud did not appear a curse but a symbol of movement, a sliding away of all that was old and rotting and cold.
* * *
Lily did not mind the walk. The spring sudden and light, making her want to live under the sun and put the dreary days of gray and frost behind forever. Small gnats and a few new flies buzzed around her neck, but she paid them no mind, let them tickle her skin until they moved on to find the cows, horses and pigs newly released from the barns.
She swung the empty basket back and forth near her hip, her arms now unstrained from carrying the food she had dropped off with Mrs. Sullivan. Nice old woman, Lily thought. With her daughter away so much, Lily was happy bringing the woman food now and then. She liked being near the widow, the way the house always smelled of cinnamon and seemed to be filled with sunshine even on cloudy days. She
was a woman who when she hugged you she hugged you. Squeezed you so tight that her warm nature and kind spirit soaked into the skin and you didn’t want her to let go. Lily wondered what it must have been like for the Sullivan children to grow up in that kind of home. Wondered what it would feel like to be hugged like that since birth, made to feel that you were the very thing that kept the Earth aligned in the universe. If she ever had children, she’d hug them every day, just like that. Lily smiled then. Every day, she thought. They’d know they were the sprouting angel wings in her eyes.
Lily passed the lane to the Kisers’, kept her eyes focused on the line of thin maples skirting the other side of the road. A few miles more and she passed the Mueller farm, the smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, the small outcroppings of red buildings bright, nearly crimson in the sunbeams. Her heart grew heavy. Seemed like every farm held a family, told stories around the hearth, kept one another warm even on the coldest days. She had Claire, a woman too trapped in her past and anxiety to expel any comfort.
In the quiet of the road, the horse coming from the south could be heard well before it crested the hill. She moved to the right. When the brown horse came into view, she recognized the man perched on top and grimaced. Dan Simpson.
Dan did more and more odd jobs for Frank. Mr. Simpson, Dan’s father, was a clerk at the bank, had connections with everyone in town and played cards with Frank each week. The three of them made her mouth dry, tasteless and craving to spit.
With the heightening pitch of approaching hooves, Lily’s body constricted protectively, her elbows locking to her sides. She wanted to turn around, beat a pace back to the Sullivan house, but it was too late. Dan had seen her and stopped the horse, dismounted and walked toward her with that smug look upon his face.
Beneath the Apple Leaves Page 21