The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  “Are you?” Rebecca’s eyes, a gray that her many would-be beaux swore reminded them of everything from storm clouds to silverware, turned back to the road out ahead of the horse’s ears. She was afraid. Or, even if she wasn’t afraid, she sensed in herself all the physical symptoms of being afraid—the shortness of breath, the lightness of head, the quickened clumsiness of perception, which all, perhaps, amounted to the same thing, regardless. “You don’t seem much changed.”

  “I don’t?” John had to laugh. It wasn’t a happy sound.

  “All right, you do.” Rebecca sighed. “I don’t know why I said that.” But she did know why she’d said it—she was determined not to let John Hirschfelder say anything she would have to agree with. She felt she had to stop him from asking her anything, any question at all, that she might say yes to. “I just mean to say that I think of you the same way as ever,” she said relentlessly.

  John cleared his throat, but she was too uncomfortable at the thought of causing him pain to look at him. Instead Rebecca blinked down at her gloved hands, holding leather reins, which were, really, among the strangest things on earth, when you thought about them for a minute—that these rough straps had been made by some human hand for this purpose exactly: to connect her to an animal, to let her express her wishes to an animal without their being able to communicate in any other real way.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being untruthful. You’re different. Everybody knows it. I know it, too,” she added quietly. But John had already decided to speak.

  “Well, the honest fact is I think I’m frightened, Beck.” John was now the one whose gaze had turned out toward some distant point across the fields. His admission had been sudden, and it aroused an unfamiliar sensation in them both. Is this what it’s like. Is this what it would be like, us two. In an instant she saw the two of them at the kitchen table at his house, in the morning, at breakfast. She saw herself passing him something, some little thing. She saw him reach for it, his brown hands. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage.”

  “Manage what?”

  “Everything. There’s too much . . . land. I sometimes think I’m killing myself at it,” he said, and he meant it as a joke, but of course one didn’t say such a thing as a joke, particularly if it were true.

  She was alarmed but tried not to show it. “Oh. I—I know so little about farming,” Rebecca said, lamely. “You know—we’ve always lived in town, my father and me. Everything I know about farms I know from listening to—to you,” she rushed on. “You seem to know everything, you always make it sound so easy. You practically ran the place even before . . . your parents’ passing—I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bring it up that way. But I believe you can do it. If anyone can do it, you can.”

  The funny thing was, of course, she meant it. For all his fears he was considered the most capable of the young men in their community, and he probably knew it, and if he didn’t, well, there, she’d told him. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder and his easy, competent, surprising— Goddamn it. This was his way; this was how he got to her when she didn’t mean to let him think she could be got to.

  She’d be a terrible farmwife, and she knew it even then, even that night in the buggy, on the road between the fields.

  She would be the first to admit it: She didn’t know how to do anything. Her father, the town doctor, had raised her himself, with the help of his poor spinster cousin Fräulein Adeline, whom Rebecca had always half respectfully, half irreverently called Frau and who oversaw all the cooking and washing and housekeeping and made sure the Doctor had coffee at three o’clock. Frau kept house pretty well, but she hadn’t made it her especial priority to teach Rebecca how to do it. Oh, Rebecca could sew, at least she could do that. The thought of marriage made her miserable, even shy—she, who cared so little about what people thought. She supposed she’d have to do it eventually, get married. She supposed she could do worse than to marry someone who loved her well enough to overlook the fact that he’d have to survive on cornmeal cake and boiled potatoes.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Rebecca blurted.

  “I know. I know, Beck. I want to, though. You know I do,” John said tiredly. Her heart ached with pity for him then. The air was purple, and the fields stretched out to either side of them like long hounds under a tent of sky, and her childhood friend sat next to her on a wagon bench, weary and worried and still grieving for his mother, and longing for her, for Rebecca Mueller of all people, without much hope. How could she be so cruel, she wondered, not to love him back. How could she be so foolish, when half the women in town would dearly love to take her place, take his hand, here in the dust and clatter where no one but the two of them existed or cared. You stupid girl. You know what you have to do.

  So she held the reins with one hand and with the other reached over and clasped John Hirschfelder’s hand with her gloved fingers and squeezed hard, harder than was strictly romantic. Too hard. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder, with his beautiful face and his strong back and his good heart. The poor man.

  * * *

  Why do women marry, anyway. To make a house? To have babies? It was a question she couldn’t answer yet herself. Unless it was to build a life with the one person who seemed to understand you even a little bit. She wasn’t sure she loved John, but she knew she admired him. And he wasn’t afraid of her, old Dr. Mueller’s daughter with the odd temperament, the pride and the vagueness and the sharp gray eyes, and—as she was forced to admit—the confounding ignorance about how to do most of the things women were supposed to know how to do.

  They were to be married in the Lutheran church in town, and in the short weeks before the wedding that spring Rebecca took steps to avail herself of some little understanding of what might be expected of her as a farmwife. She consulted Frau, who managed in the amount of time they had left under the same roof to teach her how to tend the stove and bake a loaf of bread, which at least gave Rebecca some confidence that she and John wouldn’t starve. Also she got a few lessons in cooking and laundering, which went as poorly as she thought they would—not because the principles themselves were especially difficult but because laundering was as backbreakingly boring as Rebecca had always suspected it to be, and because the kitchen in the Doctor’s house was infamously smelly and hot and unventilated. Rebecca began to grasp with some disappointment that she probably could run a farmhouse, after all. Not well enough to please her own pride but well enough that she might not kill her husband or his hired men through her own negligence or ignorance.

  Frau taught her as much as she could about managing a kitchen garden, which was considerable. Frau had accepted the humiliations that life had forced on her as a foreign spinster—and an ugly one at that—who spoke little English and lived on the charity of a distant widower cousin, and she compensated for the long hours of boredom and halfhearted work and scripture reading by becoming a remarkable gardener. (Or it might have had nothing to do with Frau’s ugliness and unmarriedness. It might have just been in her all along to grow a lovely, abundant garden, given the opportunity and the leisure.)

  Still, it was difficult for Frau, an instinctive expert in pruning and soil moisture, to take a long-enough step back from her own intense interest in her growing things to be able to explain to a newcomer just what she was doing or how she did it. The hours were beautiful, anyway. They spent quite a few of those May afternoons in the kitchen garden, Frau talking mostly in German, Rebecca half-comprehending and meditative, pinching bright-green leaves and breathing in the scent of the sweet earth and its good promises.

  “I wish I were as good at something as you are at this,” Rebecca said one afternoon a few days before she was to be married to John Hirschfelder. The bees were drowsing around in the grass, and Rebecca was trailing Frau through the vegetable beds.

  Frau turned on her the warm, indulgent expression she’d worn half her life
. Frau was the Doctor’s favorite aunt’s only daughter; her true name was Adeline. She said, charmingly, in English, “Oh, your mother wasn’t good at anything, either.”

  “Except making men fall in love with her,” Rebecca answered, eyes shaded.

  “Ja, except for that.” Frau laughed and then coughed. Frau had known her mother, who had died shortly after Rebecca’s birth. Rebecca understood that her mother had been instrumental in convincing the Doctor to take Adeline in, and that the two of them, despite their inability to communicate in the same language, had been merry conspirators against the Doctor’s dourness and pipe smoking. Rebecca’s mother had been of Italian descent, beautiful, strong willed, and all the other things that one said about long-dead, romantic mothers. Frau loved nothing more than making Rebecca unhappy with stories about her. “Well, they say you’re good enough at that, too,” Frau allowed.

  Rebecca snorted, patted Frau’s shoulder, and went up to the house to try to find a cool, dark place to sit and think. Of these there were many: The Doctor, her father, had one prevailing philosophy when it came to equipping a house, and that was to furnish every available corner with a place to sit and read a newspaper. Rebecca pulled herself through the kitchen door and made her way, blinking like a fish at the transition from the bright afternoon to the dim murk of the house, to a chair she favored in the dining room, where just that morning she’d laid a thick old copy of Practical Housekeeping, which had probably been given to her mother when she had married. It read like a good joke. A practical joke. One that Rebecca was going to be relying on to keep her and her good-natured husband alive. Not for the first time, Rebecca reminded herself that she wasn’t a prairie forty-eighter who had to learn to survive a harsh winter in the Dakota Territory. She had only to learn to live in a farmhouse without an icebox, for heaven’s sake.

  In the warm dimness of the room Rebecca gathered the book into her lap and sat down, feeling the weight of it on her thighs. She reached into her bodice and pulled out her reading glasses, which the Doctor had insisted upon, to save her eyes.

  And suddenly there he was, looming overhead.

  “Your John is coming here for dinner?” the Doctor demanded. Rebecca looked up at him. Typically her father’s sudden appearances and disappearances had an invigorating effect on her, although she suspected they were calculated to surprise. Swoop, here I am in my chair under the lamp, frowning at a newspaper. Zop, I am gone to my office to see patients and I may not return for dinner. Whish, here I am standing over you in the doorway between the parlor and the dining room as you sit down to read and be alone—nothing escapes me, and especially not my freedom to do as I wish; I am an old man. The Doctor’s summer suit was pressed and fresh; he held his watch in his hand. Live forever, Rebecca thought suddenly, and almost managed a smile up at his unamused face.

  “Papa, how should I know? He has a lot to do on the farm now. He’ll come to dinner if he can.”

  At this rejoinder the Doctor looked at her approvingly, which nevertheless reminded her that she ought to have smoothed her hair and washed her face before she sat down. “I like it better when he comes here. You and Frau bore me.”

  Rebecca snorted again and balanced her glasses on her nose. “I might be more diverting if I knew how to break a field or build a chicken coop?

  “You might!” the Doctor almost bellowed in his glee at the thought. “Ja, you might!”

  For all his intelligence the Doctor had raised her unthinkingly. She’d gone to the village school, and at night in the parlor she’d read the newspaper with him, or novels, but if her father had ever considered sending her to college, he’d never mentioned anything about it, and she wasn’t the type who would beg for such a thing. Her mother’s family was all dead or in New Orleans or back in Italy. In a more adventurous version of her own life, Rebecca imagined, she might have traveled abroad to know her mother’s family better, but she didn’t believe herself to be a particularly adventurous person.

  She was modern enough—she’d been up to Austin, of course, and to San Antonio and Galveston, like many of the other girls her age. Trips to the cities reinforced for girls like her just how country they were, but still, the modern way of thinking found them all, even out here in the hill country. Some girls Rebecca knew wondered “what they’d do with their lives,” what it was that would make them happy the way they believed they deserved to be. One thing—every man, woman, and child gets one thing: It is the thing you must seek out and sacrifice for, the thing that will make you happy. Perhaps for one girl it’s mothering babies; for one girl it’s an ambition for the stage; for another girl it’s marrying well; for another girl it’s an education and a large life in a strange city. But one thing only, one key. To desire more than one thing, to pursue more than one thing in the name of your life’s happiness, was unseemly and greedy.

  Rebecca still didn’t know what her one thing would be, and that above all was what caused these smothering moments of panic. She supposed she’d always believed she’d have more time to think about it; she hadn’t anticipated life rushing at her like this and demanding that she step into its cold, busy current before she’d even had a chance to take off her shoes.

  “I am endeavoring, you see, to be of use to you and Mr. Hirschfelder, too,” she said mildly, lifting the corner of her book and letting it drop again. Her father made an unflattering sound and moved toward the kitchen door, on his way to smoke on the back porch. As usual, her father had no remark to make on the subject of her moving out of the house. “Boring or not, you’ll miss me, mein Herr,” she warned his retreating back.

  When John next came to visit—it was that evening after all—Rebecca told him what her father had said that afternoon, just to make him laugh, which she loved to do. “I have to wonder what the good Doctor’s reaction was when you asked him permission to marry me,” she teased.

  They had gone to the backyard for some fresh air after dinner and found the night loud with insects, and heat lightning scattering the breezes, and the small-leaved bushes clustered around the house trembling.

  John walked close enough to her that his sleeve brushed hers. “He said, ‘Gott im Himmel, you?’”

  Rebecca halted midstep. When she saw that he wasn’t making a joke, she cackled with laughter. John smiled on—he was used to this sort of outburst from her, she thought. Still, she sensed she wasn’t behaving quite correctly toward her fiancé, and wiping her eyes, she said, “I’m sorry, John. I think we owe you an apology. He’s just a rude old thing.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mind. I don’t know but that I had the same thought myself at the time.”

  “Don’t say that,” Rebecca said warmly, and she smiled up at him and then her breath caught. His brightness was back. She never knew what to do with it. “He just loves to make a man’s knees knock if he can,” she hurried on. John, meanwhile, had slipped an arm carefully around her waist. Her heart struggled. She was painfully aware that the fabric at the small of her back where her shirtwaist and her belt met was damp: The day had been hot, and the air in the dining room stifling. Don’t touch me there, she wanted to plead as a favor—she didn’t want either of them to be embarrassed. Oh, not there, I’m not at my best at the small of my back. Her neck was damp, too, the curls at her nape sticking and clinging; her palms were clammy with nervousness. There was no part of her, it seemed, that was at its best. She felt light-headed. John’s hand was gentle. It didn’t feel as if he were guiding her or pressing—that is, he didn’t make it feel that way. His arm was about her waist because he longed to touch her, and that was all.

  “Is this all right?” John said in a low voice. Rebecca nodded, her throat dry.

  In four days they would be married.

  She knew, naturally, what that would mean. She wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t just gardening and cooking that she’d have to learn. Marriage was an entire vocabulary she didn’t know yet. A married woman was a wise thing, a
n experienced thing, a careful thing. A married woman has crossed an invisible bridge.

  So she forced herself to turn in toward John Hirschfelder, there in the humid, flashing night on the grass, her whole body tense like an arrow just shot. Something coursed through the tree branches overhead, and she realized it was only the wind, not a ghost, not her soul, not a tribe of witches. Her lips parted, and she took in the disturbance of the breeze with a little click in her throat. She closed her eyes and then forced herself to reopen them.

  Rebecca was known as a tall woman, with a slim figure, but John stood several inches taller than she. John was well formed and well built, but like her he was thin, still thinner than most men in town. I’ll feed you, she found herself thinking in that moment, looking up at his brightness, breathing the gentle heat of his breath. I’ll nourish you, it can’t be so hard. His face had never been so close to hers, and she found that she liked it; she liked to see his broad cheek and his dark lashes, she liked to see his strong mouth, with lips that curved up on one side and down on the other, and she liked the straight dark hair that fell over his forehead. “You’re looking at me strangely,” he said to her.

  “Am I?” she whispered. Her lips were tingling as if someone were tickling the roof of her mouth.

  “Like you’re an animal who wants to eat me.” John grinned. He was joking, of course. His sense of humor, famous, irrepressible, even when she wished he’d be serious. “I recognize that look. I shot a mountain lion once for giving me that look, on a hunting trip with my father.” But he did not move away from her; he stayed close, where she could study his face, his brightness—the term she’d begun to attach to a phenomenon she’d noticed early in their engagement and kept noticing, even when it made her unhappy. When she looked at John sometimes, in the mornings or evenings, it was like looking at a gem underwater. Parts of his face would seem to glint at her, like a mermaid’s hair glimmers to a drowning sailor, and she saw now where it originated: around the eyes, yes, but also at the corners of his mouth, sometimes—yes, just there. And his arm, still around her waist, and she, still so close to him, but she could step closer, couldn’t she? Yes, to be sure.