Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  “Hess,” started Elliot. “The bonds . . .”

  “I will not pay a dime after being abused like this.”

  Elliot tried to gain Clark’s attention, but the man was intent on his cake. Tom sat with his hands on either side of his plate, breathing it in. Behind him, Myrle appeared in her nightgown.

  “Myrle,” said Margrit. “You’re to go to bed.”

  “But Mother . . .” The girl was shaking.

  Margrit drew Myrle under her arm. “Why not some cake? Will that settle you?”

  Myrle nodded and took a chair in the far corner. Margrit brought her a plate, but the girl would not eat. She sat with her eyes on her lap.

  “I suppose we are finished,” I said.

  Clark swallowed. “All right.”

  Elliot’s face was hot. “But he hasn’t paid.”

  Clark whispered in his ear.

  “All right.” Elliot cursed. “Another time, Hess. You could save us the trouble and pay in town yourself. See to it that you do. And the river . . .”

  The sound of laughter stopped him. At the far end of the table, Tom Elliot had picked up his fork with a piece of Myrle’s cake. He fed it to her, stabbed at the slice on her plate, and fed her another. The girl chewed, her eyes closed. A blush ran from her forehead to throat. As the boy brought her another bite, she laughed again.

  “Well,” said Lee.

  “What’s that?” Elliot said.

  We watched, not another word between us. Myrle was so very small sitting there, her face bright. She sat far too close to Tom in the near dark. The boy gave me a glance as he brought the fork again to her mouth. It scraped her tooth. Myrle leaned in.

  Elliot’s hand flew between them. Tom lurched to his feet, a hand to his jaw. Myrle cried out. Margrit took her in her arms and rushed her down the hall.

  “What was that for?” asked Tom.

  “You know what,” said Elliot.

  “Now, now,” said Clark. “We’re finished here.”

  They stood and I let out a breath. Margrit appeared in the door at the sound of our chairs. The cake on my daughter’s plate was crumbs. On the boy’s, it lay untouched. Clark picked up the piece between his fingers and slid it whole into his mouth. “A fine cake, Margrit. Very fine. Rhonda would say so herself. Apologies for keeping you. Those other men, the drink gets to them. They’ll be asleep on their feet by now.”

  Clark swept his tongue against the inside of his cheek. The three turned and headed out, Elliot pushing at his son. By the door, Ray saw them off. We were alone in the kitchen with Lee then, my wife gathering the plates. I reached out to stop her, but her hands snapped away.

  “Mother.”

  “Alles wird schlimmer.” She touched her fingers to my temple, my cheek. “More and more, Julius. When is it enough? You are all mad. All of you men.”

  She left the plates and went to our room. Behind her, the lock turned on its bolt.

  Lee and I sat at the table across from each other. His bulk took nearly the entire bench. Above us, Myrle sobbed, and Nan ran up the stairs to settle her. The room fell to silence.

  “It will be all right,” I said.

  Lee scuffed his boot on the floor.

  “We can handle them. It’s nothing we can’t.”

  He leaned forward, his voice little more than a whisper. “I heard them. They called you Prager. Prager is dead.”

  IV

  Lee enlisted the week after the next, and Governor Harding made his proclamation. Only English in our schools, in public conversations, on trains, telephones, in public or private meetings. Even in our churches. The loss of one’s native language, William L. Harding said, is a small sacrifice to make. I closed up the house and fixed locks on our doors. I would not be opening them to anyone soon. Outside by the river, Ray roamed the fields with our horses, intent more than ever on finishing the channel. I never could muster the energy to join him. I could not ask him to pocket his own. What was the answer, to press on or to change direction? Instead I kept close to my wife. She stayed to our bedroom now after breakfast and was to bed again soon after supper. As the days passed, she never left bed at all. She complained of headaches and fatigue, a fever that spiked in early mornings. I sat with her in her wakeful hours, and Nan took up the housework her mother left unfinished. When at last he came, the doctor closed the door and whispered to me in the hall. “I’ve got dozens already in this county alone.”

  “What is it?”

  “The flu. Mary Elliot has been sick more than two weeks. The whole house, but she’s the worst of it.”

  “Is there nothing my wife might take?”

  “Only rest.”

  “She is not as ill as that, surely.”

  The man chewed his lip. “They say it’s the boys who brought it home. Tom Elliot and the others.”

  “Tom was in my house.”

  “He was in many houses. Mary Elliot will die by the end of the week, if not sooner. I’d keep your children away.”

  I opened the door to our room. Inside, Margrit sat propped on pillows, her eyes closed and her ankles crossed. Her chin rested on her shoulder, a blood-­spotted towel in her hand. Agnes lay at her side with her drawing paper. Closer still, Myrle had curled herself up, a braid of her mother’s hair wound about her finger. At the end of the bed, Esther raised her voice and waved her arms as she read: “On whom,” Stephen said, “do you intend to seek revenge?”

  “Esther, please. You will tire your mother. You will tire your sisters.”

  “But they like it.”

  “That is hardly material for someone so ill.”

  “It’s from our primer.”

  “Esther,” I spat. The girl stiffened. Margrit tapped her finger on Esther’s stockinged foot. When my wife looked at me, her eyes were stones. It was about Esther she worried. Esther she never wanted to restrain. Let her go, her look said. I could only repeat the thought for them all: Let her go. Let her go.

  “Girls, you need not keep to your mother like squirrels.” I dropped my voice. “She’s not well.”

  Myrle tightened her finger on her mother’s hair. Agnes never stopped her pencil. Only Esther watched me, waiting.

  “Very well.” I sighed and backed out.

  Over the next days, Margrit slept late in the afternoons with few hours of waking. That bloody towel she held always in her hand. With the girls at school, I had her in the mornings to myself, only to leave her when her eyes closed and only as far as the other side of the wall. There I brooded at the dining room table. My eldest brought me a plate of scrappling and toast, a cup of coffee no larger than my thumb. I had little appetite. Still I liked to watch Nan lay a place and sit across from me in her housedress and apron, her hair pinned. Often she twisted the ring on her finger until her knuckle bled. Oh, what would this girl become? She had wanted to be her mother and now she so nearly was. I gazed out the window. The girls were leaving for school. Esther and Myrle walked arm in arm, Agnes trailing. When I turned, Nan had dropped her head. My daughter sat with me only out of duty, I knew, an empty hour when she might have gone to town or finished her sewing.

  “Lee sent a letter.” Nan took out an envelope. The envelope was stained, torn at the edges. As with the others, it was so heavily stamped the scrawl across the front barely was visible. Nan read:

  Dear Family,

  We don’t get much time to think of home, but if there’s a minute extra, we write. We have marched a great deal. The farms in France aren’t a bit like ours. The land is divvied into patches no larger than an acre, every inch plowed. This makes for hard walking what with the hedgerows, and we move like turtles. Yesterday we hit open land. I took a bath and washed my clothes in a mountain stream and it was some cold. Had horse meat for dinner. Thought that was a strange meal, but I didn’t tell. Corporal thinks I’m fine at chopping wood. We do so for as many
as seven days when out of the trenches, and the others are slow. Corporal thinks I’m slow in other ways, but he doesn’t say how. He calls me Hush. The boys do the same. I don’t know what to make of that. This morning, an aeroplane battled in the air. Interesting to see, though the others say they’ve seen it by the dozens. The woods are so thick here the planes were soon out of sight. Had a sick spell a short time ago but it didn’t stick. Well, Corporal is calling for us now so I must finish this. Tell Mother not to worry. I haven’t seen a German yet.

  Yours,

  Lee

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “It’s Lee.”

  “Has your mother seen it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Best not, I suppose. Best not tell the boy about your mother either.”

  “Mother told me not to.”

  “What else has your mother said?”

  Nan drew her shoulders together. “Do you want to write a note back?”

  I sighed. “They will be sending him home, I would think. They cannot keep a boy forever.”

  Nan made a sound in her throat and folded the letter away. “They can keep him as long as they like.”

  The toast had run cold. The scrappling tasted of nothing more than skin and fat. My youngest son had long outgrown me. I hoped he would outgrow me further still. Too soft a heart never made a man any good. I prayed my son knew the same. Prayed it turned him sensible instead. Through the open window, the whine of a saw in the Elliot yard.

  “Close it,” I said.

  A fog of sawdust broke from their barn. Soon the beating of hammers. Nan stood and shut the pane.

  “Have you heard from Carl?”

  She sat again. “Nothing.” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “Mother said I should think of the girls if I think of anyone. I should think of them as my own.”

  I dropped my chin into my hands. “Family is everything.”

  She looked at me as if wanting more. The girls already had a mother. And Nan, she was engaged to be married. The man was miles across the ocean and not heard from in months, yet she had that.

  “She thinks I might not have my own—children, I mean,” said Nan. “Why would she say that?”

  “Of course you will have children.”

  Nan covered her mouth. She took a breath before she spoke. “Mother said I mustn’t leave the girls alone.”

  “No.” The word came more as an echo than an answer. Outside, Elliot’s saw had started up with greater force, and a thought burned in my throat. I knew at once I must speak to Margrit, no matter her sleep. I must ask her what she meant.

  Nan closed her eyes. A sob escaped her. I looked to the window. When she spoke, her words were plain. “The note?”

  I pressed my hand to my forehead. A note to my son, with his mother in bed. What could I write?

  “Very well,” she said. On the other side of the wall, Margrit coughed and coughed again. My daughter scraped her chair across the floor and picked up my plate. Her hands had roughened, the skin chafing. She worked too hard. But I could not have her work less. She stumbled against a catch in the floor, swung out an arm for balance, and quickened her steps. When I looked again, her ring lay small and thin on the tablecloth between us.

  It was a week later when I lost Margrit for good. The flu, said the doctor. Yet I believed it far the worse. A fever that ran on ships. Ate slices of lemon cake at our kitchen table. I might as well have fed that fever to Margrit myself. With the Harding proclamation, we never could bury her in the churchyard with a German prayer. Never so much as inscribe hier ruht in gott on a stone. I was left with not a child who dared speak my native tongue. Nor a neighbor who might welcome it. Beneath a slab of slate, we laid her in a field where she might see the house, the river behind it. The girls stood with bouquets of lilies. As the eldest, Nan was the first to throw hers in the dirt. She had the children dressed in black, their faces clean. By rights, a year they should wear the same, but in this place I imagined they would forget.

  The winter became spring. Though the war had ended, Lee still had not returned. Our Agnes papered the house with drawings of her mother, all of them blurred. With the break in the weather, Nan stripped the linens from our beds. The stove was afire with boiling pots. The rooms puckered in the heat. Outside, just behind the smokehouse, my daughter starched and bleached the sheets. Shut the windows as I might, the children opened them again and leaned their faces out.

  I lie now in this bed, the churchyard nearer to me, awaiting a doctor, a shovel, a hymn. The room about me is vacant. In the closet, Margrit’s dresses draw moths. How often I hear the noise of that man from the boardinghouse. The sound of him losing himself in the toilet. The sound of his shame. My children are all that is left me, strangers every one. I am in the house I built on my own acres, more than thirty years in making. The blanket across my chest is white and laundered fresh by my eldest daughter, now grown. Have I escaped nothing? You are not a father, the man in the boardinghouse tells me. You are no better a man.

  Do you know that the most beautiful word in my language, the word that forgives all actions and desires, becomes its opposite when mistaken for English? Bitte. The t’s are soft and the e at the end opens in an exhale. In German the word means please, as in please forgive me. I have heard no better word for pleading. Yet in English, the word sounds closer to bitter, a sour taste. The German word asks for absolution. The English only carries blame. How can a man trust a language that turns pleading into a kind of hate?

  That spring, we suffered days of rain. It melted the last of the snow. The river overflowed its banks. It wrenched hold of fence posts and sent them drifting. The work on the channel was gone, our acres a brilliant sheet of ruin. Ray tried his best, but a boy alone can only save so much. Whenever I looked out, a heavy-set woman waited by our fences. Ray spoke to her with little kindness. Still week after week, she stood until he took off his hat, wiped his hands on a trouser leg. At the end of a month, he set out earlier to his work to wait for her at the fence. When later the boy brought Patricia home as his bride, I was not the only one to believe he had raised her out of the dirt.

  Outside, the sheets hung on the line. On the porch, Myrle sat alone. The girl wore little but a cotton dress, one nearly sweated through, and not a shoe on her feet. Since the death of her mother, her hair draped her forehead, a sound like a cat rising from her. I remember my parents scolding me. Keep your face dry. Cold water on the cheeks. There is sorrow. Tiefer Trauer. And the sorrow that is silent. Stille Trauer. What better than silence could I teach?

  I stepped out to join her. “I have a story about your mother.”

  Myrle wiped her face.

  I lowered myself to the bench. I thought to rest my hand on the crown of her head, as always I had. The ashen hair of her youth never had darkened. But a man must not treat his grown daughter like a doll.

  “I can tell you when first I met her. I was boarded in a house where she was the washerwoman, and your mother was always singing. The house was decrepit, but still she sang. She wore her hair in a bun, tied in a net high off her neck.” I cupped my palms behind my head to show her. Myrle gazed at my knees. “When I asked her to marry me, she stayed on the floor. I reached for her shoulders to help her to her feet, took the rag to finish the floor for her. When she saw how clean I made it, she took my chin in her hands. Ja, she said.”

  Myrle scrubbed her feet against the wooden planks.

  “Yes,” I said. “She answered yes. You heard me?”

  My daughter nodded.

  “You are the only one with the color of her hair.” I reached out to touch her, but dropped my head to my hands instead. This daughter, so alike in looks and manner to her mother.

  Myrle took a strand of her hair and wrapped it about her finger. “What would have happened if Mother hadn’t been a washerwoman? If you had met at home? Would you
still have left?”

  The question was strange to me. I shook my head.

  “I don’t know either,” she said.

  Together, we sat looking out as if from the deck of a great ship. The sun had in the late afternoon fallen low and flared against the fields. Our acres were drowned. The year next, I was certain we would suffer a fine crop out of this. What a terrible burden it is to keep a child safe, to hold to her in all your weariness, lest she jump. Julius, my wife had said. A man can’t keep his children in a fist. But can you blame him for wielding hammer and nail for the few who remained? In the distance, the Elliot dogs had grown in number. The bitch must have borne a litter. They chased each other, barking the high keening of the young. Whenever the dogs started again, Myrle’s face quickened. But when at last their shadows faded, her chin fell.

  “Tom Elliot told me he almost died,” she said.

  “When have you and Tom been talking?”

  “He told me Lee might die too.”

  I gripped her arm. A cry from her. “Stay away from that boy.” When I released her, she rubbed at my fingerprints on her skin, her eyes filling. I tried to take her arm again, gently this time, but she held it close. I softened my voice. “You do not know what men want.”

  “Myrle!” Esther swooped through the door and gripped her sister’s hands. I reached out to keep the girl with me, but both my daughters were off. They ran together down the steps and through the yard, their feet heavy with mud. I eyed the sky for a downpour, though the clouds appeared listless. The red of her skin stayed with me. My fingertips throbbed. My daughters could so easily be swept away by a torrent, something I never could save them from.