Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  “If it rains?”

  “We drown.”

  “And snakes?”

  She considered. Out of her trunk, she uncoiled a woolen rope intended to hang sheets. She laid the rope around our blankets. “To confuse the snakes.”

  That afternoon we built a shanty from discarded tree limbs and covered it with bark. The sun would in a week curl the bark. Yet for our first evenings, the shanty suited us. A proper house, I promised Margrit, with a wooden frame. It would be finer than the log cabins we had seen, only earth and grass to fill the cracks. Margrit gazed about the prairie. No tree stood larger than an old man.

  The animals we roped together behind the dugout where they ceased to whine. I scraped out a circle of dirt and lit twigs for a fire. What dried codfish we had was sweet, with meal to fill it. Our husks of corn buttered our chins. Around us, the fields stretched, the zikaden singing. Where we camped seemed the bottom of a bowl. So steady that wherever a man set his foot, it would remain. As would every wall he built. Every pole of a fence. When at last Margrit began to sing, it was a song I knew from my own mother. She had been born in the south of the country, where farming lands were little but gardens and German sons tried their hands at blacksmithing instead. Margrit stretched her legs to the fire and lifted her skirts. She rested my hand on the flesh of her knee. I felt every muscle of her thigh and the blood going there, alive as the good earth beneath us. She dropped her head against my shoulder.

  “Wo sich Fuchs und Hase gute Nacht sagen,” she said. Where the fox and hare say goodnight.

  Later we slept. Margrit buried her hand in mine and rested a foot across my ankle as if I might drift. Clouds to the east grew heavy. What stars appeared seemed distant. Owls screeched in the trees far along the river. Farther yet, the moan of a wolf. We had arrived. Now we but needed to show how we deserved this place. How everything it held would with faith and sweat be earned. Our sons never would vanish and leave their good shoes by the door. The silence seemed to promise this very thing. I felt none of the loneliness I had often known. Still as I closed my eyes, I sensed myself floating. Waters ran far beneath the earth at my spine. In the quiet, I heard nothing save for the river as it gushed and I felt all of it spinning. We might in any moment be drowned.

  II

  It was more than twenty years before the letter arrived. Since the day I left, I had every month or two written my parents. I gained no reply. I imagined my mother and father sitting in their kitchen. They stared at my words under a dim kerosene lamp. Were she alone, my mother might push her plate aside and search for a piece of paper to write. But my father would surely hold her arm.

  Selfishness, I had often heard him say. I am not rewarding it.

  Those were the years I walked our land morning and night. Our crops transformed from seed to harvest. Seed again. Farther off, farmers brought their wagons to stake the land. At home my wife birthed four daughters and two sons. The years were months. The marks of a pencil on the wall. One girl replaced another in the same hand-me-down dress. With every child, I feared for Margrit’s health. I swore I never would touch her again. It was the kind of thing that turned sleeping with a wife, as God saw fit, a terrible bloody business.

  “We are from this place,” Margrit told the children. “We are from nowhere else.”

  But then our youngest, Myrle. “We should not think to have another,” Margrit said. I held the girl to my shoulder, her breath on my neck. The child was so slight, so strange. Her every cry moved me to distraction. How desperately I worked to spare her pain. Must a man reach his last before his children become more to him than their endless demands?

  “Father, you have a letter,” my eldest said.

  It was a sweltering day in autumn. Nan stood at the stove, stirring a pot of soup. At the table Myrle clutched at her doll of buttons and rags. The other girls kicked their feet in their chairs, a pile of corn husks between them. The kitchen was in a state. The room was thick with steam, the sting of onions. The ceiling above the stove had gone black, the planks below caving beneath its stout iron weight. Our tabletops never were enough to feed so many at once. Still we were to host our neighbors for a picnic, as Margrit insisted. Their farms had quickly appeared on the horizon. Their children ran our fields as if ignorant of fences. I knew the men that owned these farms mostly by sight. An exchange of words about seeds or weather. That seemed enough. Now Margrit needed tablecloths, napkins.

  “Why such a fuss?”

  She squeezed my chin between finger and thumb. “I will wash them after for us to have curtains. Then you can close them all you want.”

  Nan stopped her spoon and drew the letter from her pocket. The blue envelope was mottled with stamps. “It’s from Europe, I think. The postmark says Hamburg.”

  “Germany?” asked Margrit.

  I turned the letter over. “My mother.” Though I was not so certain. The writing on the envelope was strange, as if my mother had stooped beneath a candle with her pen.

  Margrit sighed. “After so much time?”

  I shook my head. The bread was rising in the oven, the soup simmering. A large sour roast and spätzle crowded the stove. The house seemed to breathe with every boiling pot. Our Esther gave up helping and raced screaming in a pair of trousers down the hall. “I asked her to wear her green dress,” explained Nan. “You’d think I’d cut off her head.” Myrle let out a wail, her doll fallen to the floor. Agnes gathered the husks close so they might not be swept away from her. Soon the kitchen spun with one girl after another. I stood unmoving in fear of collision, the letter pressed to my stomach as if it had somehow unmade us. Of that land I had left, I could not think. Could not so much as remember its smell. Calm now under the arm of her mother, Myrle whimpered. Her hair clung to her cheeks in pale strands. I slipped the letter in my pocket and rested a hand on her crown, soft as silk as her hair was.

  “Go on now, Nan, take a rest,” said Margrit. “But first convince Esther to wear something decent.”

  Nan swept her apron over her head and hurried out.

  “And you, Julius,” said Margrit. “Make yourself some use and see to the tables. I asked Ray to set them, but he wasn’t too happy about it.”

  Outside, two tables waited in the shade of our yard, the new tablecloths fastened with pins. Ray had finished what his mother asked. Now he stood with Lee in the barn to see to the broken thresher. At the gate, Elliot and his wife hurried down the path with their son. Elliot dropped a platter on the table, and Mary scattered a handful of flowers. Their boy bounded off to the barn to join my own. In the distance, Mrs. Clark and her brood marched along the grassy lane. Like rabid animals, her trio of girls raced through the weeds. A house full of women. What it might make of a man. Mr. Clark could only but stumble along behind them, thin as a rake.

  “Awfully nice,” Mary let out. She fluffed her skirt, stretched a pale leg over the bench. Elliot watched her until she settled. She took a fair amount of time. “Awfully nice,” she said again. She jarred her husband with an elbow. His sour expression remained.

  “Look what those boys are doing,” she said. Our sons had carried the topmost sieve into the yard. Now they sat together in the grass with the contraption between them. “Regular old fixer-uppers.”

  I nodded. “I have given the thresher over to them.”

  “Just the two of them and so many girls,” said Mary.

  “Thank God for those.”

  “You know what I heard at the market the other day? This will be the warmest year on record, that’s what Mrs. Conners says.”

  “Has she?”

  “The Conners, they seem to know everything. Terrible things. What with that fuss in Europe. I never would have given much thought to the Germans, but Linda says they’re fighting for what rightfully isn’t theirs. Every­one’s for the Kaiser, she says. The Germans sure like their hops. That’s all I could answer her. As far as I’m concern
ed, I hope Wilson holds to his senses and keeps us out of it.”

  I opened my hands on our table. We are from nowhere else, Margrit had said. Behind us in the kitchen, my wife called out instructions to the girls. Elliot eyed me under the brim of his hat.

  “Our pastor says the Irish will never let us join the war,” said Mary. She lifted the hat from her husband’s head, clicked her tongue. “But Pastor Michaels is a pacifist. My grandmother was a Brit, Irish or not. That’s our side of it anyway.”

  The hat lay on the table between us. Elliot coughed into his fist. “You don’t . . .” Her eyes widened. “Do you still have family over there?”

  “No.” I winced. “Margrit and I left years ago.”

  “And you’re no drunkards,” said Mary. “You’re not marching about. You keep up your fences.”

  “We try.”

  Mary reddened, her breathing fast. “Oh you’re so much better than that!”

  Elliot coughed again. “What do you hear of prices?”

  “Well.” Mary pressed a hand to her cheek. “That’s my signal. I’d be a better help in the kitchen. Besides, Margrit’ll want to hear about the Parsons.” She bowed her head in a whisper. “That girl of theirs. With a child! Might well drive them out of town. That’s what Mrs. Conners says.” She stood and glanced back, fetched one of her flowers from the table to carry inside.

  Elliot watched her go.

  “Prices are two to one,” I offered him.

  “That all?”

  “If a man could raise more stock, it would be something. That land of ours on the river, a plow or reaper can never run near it. But I have heard of some who are straightening their waterways.”

  Elliot squinted at me.

  “To recover the land. A straighter channel, less flooding.”

  “Recover it,” he said. “I don’t have the hands to work what I have now.”

  “It could save us from falling behind the others.”

  He chewed at his cheek. “What you say we bring our wagons in together next trade. Keep them from underselling us.”

  I sighed at him. “Next time, then.”

  Elliot seemed relieved. He drummed his knuckles on the table and turned to watch the Clarks come. “House full of women.”

  “All that work with only the girls to help.”

  “Clark is sickly more than most,” he said. “He was sick something awful last year. Heart.”

  I shook my head. In the churchyard two miles distant, the Clarks owned a stone and five empty lots. Elliot sat a while, his face fallen. He seemed to stew on something dark and close in coming.

  “A good man,” said Elliot again. “And no sons. We have ourselves sons for more than threshing, don’t we? Should Wilson want them.”

  “Should Wilson not keep to his senses, you mean.”

  Elliot held up his glass as if to measure me through it.

  “A man must support his president,” I said.

  “Right.” His mouth softened, only just. “I suppose it’s eating time.”

  “Always is.”

  “These women, they like to keep themselves busy.”

  “My Margrit works herself to the bone.”

  “I can’t say I understand it, but it sure pleases Mary to have company. It pleases her a great deal.”

  The voices of Mrs. Clark and her brood carried over the fields. Our yard was soon filling with children. Mr. Clark could only but lift his hat and wave. A man such as him. He might well land in the grave from nothing more than a skip in his blood.

  Our kitchen door banged.

  “Ready!”

  In a frenzy, Esther raced out. She wore an old canvas sack cinched with a rope at her waist. Nan chased after her. Esther stopped and spun. She curtsied to Nan before running again. The Clark girls screamed, and I reached for my belt.

  But again the door to our kitchen opened. Margrit emerged with a tray of sausages. My wife had a flower in her hair. She smiled as she set the tray to the table. “Würstchen,” she said. “Würstchen,” Mary repeated after her. Her husband grunted. The children grew quiet. When at last my wife sat, her blue dress matched the flowers Mary had brought, their color a vision against her whiter skin. Once I had not known this woman. Now I knew her more than well. Across from her, our children crowded the single bench. How strange it was to see them lined up as they were, Myrle as always between them. They straightened the ribbons in her hair. Tucked a napkin to her collar. I felt the weight of that letter in my pocket. How loath I was to open it, with little reason I could explain. My children appeared so alike in every feature, their faces as sharp and fine as that of my parents. Once the meal came to its end, they surely would scatter. I could not so much as reach across the table to prevent it. But for now, my wife held them close, as if by a string.

  It was late in the day when Margrit and I sat in the quiet of our parlor. Outside, the last of the sun lit the grassy trail the Clarks had left in their wake. Only Nan stayed with us in her corner, yawning as she sewed.

  “Nan, dear,” said Margrit. “You should take a rest.”

  “I’m fine, Mother.”

  Nan sat a while longer but soon gathered her things. Margrit touched her arm before she went. “You did so well with helping. Didn’t she, Julius?”

  “Very well.”

  Nan blushed and gave her mother a kiss.

  I reached into a pocket for my handkerchief. I discovered the sharp corner of the envelope instead.

  “I think our Nan has a beau,” said Margrit. “Julius, are you listening? It’s Carl McNulty.”

  “Carl,” I said. “The boy who lives alone with his mother?” I drew the envelope out and studied the stamps. Hamburg, two weeks since.

  “You’re afraid of that letter.”

  “No, no.” The envelope was thin as a leaf. The slightest tremor might turn it to dust. When I opened it, the German script came to me like an old scent.

  Dear Julius,

  Forgive me, but I only just found your address among your mother’s papers, and I am writing to you with news of your parents. I’m afraid they’ve passed. Your father had a stroke in the fields a month back, and it must have pained your mother something to find him. Yesterday morning, Samuel discovered her with her head on the table, just after breakfast. She had taken her bread out of the oven, at least, so it didn’t smoke the house. She was a good woman, your mother. Your father as well. He left the land and the house to us, what remains of it. I know your mother would have wanted otherwise. She often talked of you and your letters. Both are buried in Schubert’s field, a small service as it was the best we could manage.

  We will take care of the land and the house for as long as you wish, unless you can arrange a return. Travel here is ever the worse. Every boy has put on his boots for war, and the Kaiser would rather starve us than give way to France. We haven’t the feed to keep our cattle. Our potatoes look blacker this year than the last. A quiet place like this might not survive all the trouble. I dare say your parents might have escaped the worst of it, if you can find peace in that. You are better off where you are.

  Your cousin,

  Martha Hess

  “What is it, Julius?”

  I closed the letter in my lap. The room seemed to dim. Margrit clicked her needles. Outside, the cicadas droned and the Elliot pups yowled from their barn. Oh, the food we had wasted. The expense of those tablecloths. I imagined them hanging in the parlor as curtains, sown in patches. Now with the letter from my cousin, the last string had been clipped. I had nothing in the old country left to me. Little way to return. How often had I wished the same? “Schwierigkeit,” Martha had written. Trouble. The beginnings of a war. A thing so distant we could only but stand in the early dark and think of our milking. How could war be trouble any more than burying a mother and father? And only weeks from each other? I had been
absent to witness both. I might never have stepped foot in the place. Never been born.

  “Julius.” Margrit rested her fingers on mine.

  “Trouble in Germany,” I said.

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Out the window, my daughters ran in their bare feet from the river. In her belted sack, Esther looked dry as a bone. Myrle plodded behind, her dress soaked. Her skin showed pink underneath, her hair wet on her cheeks. She shivered. I thought to call out to her, but could not find my voice. When the curtain fell back, the sight vanished.

  “Julius.” Margrit crouched at my side. She had turned the letter so she might read it.

  I closed the page in my fist. “It’s over now. It’s gone.”

  Every day of that fall, I thought of little but Clark and his ailing heart, his five empty graves. I owned but a hundred and fifty acres, a decent lot of land for my sons. Yet others after us had bargained more. Every year at harvest, their wagons stood heavier with grain. Their horses strained. He left the land to us, wrote my cousin. I had never wanted the family acres. My own were far the closer and ever growing. Still, a good half dozen were wasted by their nearness to the river. A good half saved if I straightened the channel. Made that mud into something stronger to hold a seed, to drive the plow. The water lay like a boundary never to be trespassed. Yet I would trespass. Damn if Elliot helped or not.

  My sons and I were thick in the worst of it. Two days of mud with only the aid of our horses, the tractor at the end. The water ran four hands deep at the driest times of year. Yet when it was full, those banks lost inches. Now with the river low, we had only strength enough to build a wall of timber and stone to shore up our banks, keep the river on its course. When at last our efforts held, a shadow broke over us.

  “What’s this here?” said Elliot.

  I leaned against my shovel. On the far bank, Elliot was a gaunt figure. I washed the sweat from my face with the thick of my sleeve. “As I told you.”

  “You told me, eh?”

  “Straightening the channel. It will give the both of us more usable land. If you want to bring your boy to help, we can make the going faster. Your side of it anyway. We are working on ours now. Just a portion to start before the freeze.”