Katerina's Wish

by Jeannie Mobley

  “That’s not enough for a feast either,” Aneshka said.

  “They’re not to eat,” I told her. “They are for planting a garden behind the house. We can grow fresh vegetables and we won’t have to spend our money at the store.”

  “That’s a fine idea, Trina,” Papa said, smiling.

  “Indeed it is!” said Old Jan. “Fresh vegetables for your table will be very nice to have.”

  “And, we’ll save money,” I pointed out again.

  “And that means Holena and I can have new dresses for school!” said Aneshka, finally growing excited. “I want yellow calico with blue flowers! What do you want, Holena?”

  As my sisters prattled on about new dresses, I glanced at my mother. To my surprise, she was frowning at me, and my heart sank a little.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Put those away and come help me get supper now. Everyone is hungry.”

  I did as she said, confused. I had thought she would be happy and proud that I had made the trade. In the kitchen I chopped vegetables while she cleaned the fish. When they were all bubbling together in the pot, I asked her again what was wrong.

  “Trina, I asked you to stay with your sisters. I need to be able to count on your help.”

  Her words surprised and stung me. Didn’t she realize I was trying to help with the fish and the seeds? Couldn’t she see the opportunity here? “Mark was watching them,” I said. “I thought you’d be pleased. Aren’t you glad to have the fish?”

  She sighed, wiping her hands on her apron. Her brow drew down and her lips tightened. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Trina.”

  “It was safe, Momma. Really.”

  She shook her head, and I knew I had mistaken her meaning. “I know it was safe. But a garden, Trina? What do you know about growing a garden?”

  “I know I have to—”

  “It’s another dream that won’t work out!” she said. “And now you’ve got your sisters and your father all excited. And you’re already dreaming of the money we’ll save and what we’ll do with it. But the seeds won’t sprout or the crop will be eaten by locusts, and then what?”

  “But they might—”

  “Then more disappointment! More heartbreak!” she burst out.

  I stared at her. How could she be so upset over such a simple plan? She couldn’t really believe that we would break our hearts over something so small.

  “It’s only a garden, Momma,” I said quietly.

  Momma took a deep breath and returned to her usual resolute expression. “You should have done as you were told and stayed with your sisters. Now set the table.”

  The matter was closed. She left the kitchen and I obediently set the table, biting back my disappointment.

  Momma said nothing more about it for the remainder of the evening, but Papa and Old Jan couldn’t stop planning. Old Jan had a shovel I could use to turn the soil, and Papa had a plan for where we should lay out the garden. Aneshka was telling Holena of all the lovely bolts of fabric she’d seen at the store, and the new dresses we would all have. Momma only sat in silence and chewed hard on her food.

  “Will you have a garden too?” Holena asked Old Jan. “It was Mark’s fishing pole, so half the seeds should be yours.”

  Old Jan patted her head affectionately. “I had once thought of planting a garden, but I can’t till the soil with only one leg. But you’ve given me an idea. Excuse me for a moment.”

  He rose from the crowded table and thumped out of the house and up the road. When he returned, he had a bulging paper envelope. He handed it to me with a smile.

  Gently I poured the contents out onto the table. A variety of seeds spilled out.

  Old Jan leaned over the pile and began sorting them with his finger. “I was saving these when I thought I might plant a garden. I have squash here, and cucumbers. These are tomatoes, and this—” he paused as he picked up a fuzzy gray pod, and his expression softened. “This I brought with me from the old country. My wife always had poppies by the front door.”

  “Then we will plant them by your door here,” I said.

  “And yours,” he said, smiling. He cracked the pod open with his gnarled fingers and showed me the hundreds of tiny black seeds inside. “There are plenty to go around.”

  “We’re going to have a big garden, aren’t we?” Aneshka said.

  Momma stood abruptly and began gathering our empty bowls. “And who’s going to weed and water and tend this garden? That’s what I want to know. Lord knows, we have little enough time for our chores as it is now.”

  “It won’t be a chore, it will be a garden,” Holena said.

  “Your mother’s right—it will be more work,” Old Jan said. “I can’t till the soil, but I can do other things. I can weed and harvest. I can build trellises for your beans. I’ll help out all I can, so it won’t be a burden.”

  “And it will be worth it, Ivana, you will see,” Papa said.

  Momma only tightened her mouth and set the dishes on the counter.

  As I washed the dishes that evening, I thought about the garden and all the plans that had been made at the table as we feasted on fresh fish and plum dumplings. I was excited to get started, proud to be helping my family, and determined to overcome my mother’s disapproval. We’d soon have a thriving garden and fresh vegetables, and she’d see that it had been the right thing to do. After all, what harm could possibly come from planting a garden?

  Chapter 5

  ON MONDAY EVENING, after the washing was done and supper was eaten, I took Old Jan’s spade out behind the house and began turning the hard, rocky soil. Old Jan offered advice. Aneshka and Holena picked out the biggest rocks and arranged them in neat borders on the edge of the plot. Momma did not help, but she sat at the back door with her mending and watched our progress. I could see fear in her eyes when she did not know I was looking. It only pushed me to work harder. When she saw our hopes turning into success, she would be pleased. I fell into bed exhausted that night, but happy.

  When we had finished planting the patch behind the house, we turned a bit of soil by the front porch steps and planted some of the poppy seeds. The rest we took to Old Jan’s house and planted along the porch there, while he instructed us on their placement. He wanted them to be just as his wife had had them in the Old Country. We had just finished planting them when Karel and Mark emerged.

  “They won’t grow,” Karel said. “The seeds are too old. It’s been four years since we left Bohemia.”

  Mark shrugged. “Who knows, it’s worth a try.”

  “A lot of trouble for nothing, if you ask me,” Karel said.

  “Anything worth having is worth the trouble of getting it, isn’t it, Trina,” Old Jan said.

  I agreed it was, although privately I had to think about my papa and his farm. He had come to America willing to work the coal to get it, but it wasn’t enough. There was no promise that hard work got you anywhere—it could just as easily come to nothing. Still, we had to try. So I pretended I agreed with Old Jan.

  After the planting was done, we waited. Old Jan came by to pull weeds. On hot days I hauled buckets of water from the creek and he spread them along the rows. Every morning Holena rushed out into the backyard to check for growth, though both Old Jan and I told her it would take time. At last, a week later, she was rewarded with the discovery of thick sprouts in the bean row, pushing their bowed heads up through the soil. Holena came dashing into the kitchen before she had even eaten breakfast. We followed her to the garden, where she showed us her discovery. Aneshka, after some scrutiny, reported the first sign of grassy corn sprouts as well.

  I secretly glanced at Momma as my sisters padded barefoot along the rows, squealing with delight at each new discovery. Her face had softened and she was almost smiling, but then she saw me looking her way and her expression tightened again.

  “I am glad things are sprouting, Trina, but don’t get your hopes up that anything will come of it.”
/>   “I know it may not, Momma. But maybe it will. Old Jan says that anything worth having is worth working for.”

  “So it is,” she said. “And we have plenty of work to do today, so enough nonsense. Go start heating the irons and I’ll get the clothes from the line.”

  When the ironing was done that afternoon, Momma took the majority of our laundry earnings from the can on the shelf and sent me to the store for meat, as she did every Tuesday. Since the day Mr. Torentino had sold his plums, I had hated this chore. Mr. Johnson still gave me his usual salesman smile, but his eyes were hard. The previous week I had sent Aneshka in to make our purchases while I waited outside, but Mr. Johnson had tempted her into spending all the change on sweets, and I had gotten a scolding for it. So today I was by myself, with strict instructions to buy only what was on the list.

  Mr. Torentino’s wagon was just rumbling away from the store. I waited a few minutes before I entered, in case they had had another argument. I didn’t want to do anything to offend Mr. Johnson again. Inside, he was stacking canned goods on the shelf behind the counter. I waited in silence for him to finish and notice me. When he did, he glared at me for a moment before pasting on his salesman smile. I knew my week’s absence had done nothing to soften him.

  Clenching my money nervously, I told him what I wanted. Without comment he set the goods on the counter in front of me. He totaled the amount and I handed him my money.

  “Well,” he said, looking at the cash in his hand, “you have three cents extra here. That will get you a piece of licorice, three lemon drops, or a stick of horehound.” He gestured toward the jars of candy lined up on the counter. “What will it be?”

  I swallowed hard and spoke. “I’d like my change, please, sir.”

  His salesman smile remained on his face, but stiffened. “It’s just a few pennies, and I bet you’ve worked hard all day. You deserve a treat.”

  “No, thank you, sir. I’d like my change, please,” I repeated, holding out my hand.

  “What’s the matter—you were happy enough to spend your money on Torentino’s plums. Isn’t my stock good enough for you?”

  I did not know what to say to that, so I just waited silently for my change. With a shake of his head, he opened the cash register drawer, dropped my money inside, and took out the pennies he owed me.

  My money safely in my pocket, I quickly gathered my purchases. “Thank you,” I said, and hurried toward the door.

  Mr. Johnson had already turned back to his shelves, but I heard him mutter something about “tightfisted Greeks.” I could have kept walking, but I did not. I straightened my shoulders and raised my chin a little.

  “Czechy,” I said.

  “Hmm?” he said, turning from his work. He didn’t know I had heard him.

  “We are Czechy,” I said. “Not Greek.”

  He waved an impatient hand and went back to his work. “Bohunks, huh? You all look the same to me,” he said. “Just like sheep.”

  My cheeks were flushed as I left the store, but I vowed to keep it to myself at home. My father would be angered by the insult, and my mother would scold me for talking back to Mr. Johnson. And since there was nowhere else for us to buy the things we needed, we couldn’t afford to offend him.

  When I arrived at our house, Holena was sitting on the front steps, her chin on her knees, staring at the place where we had planted the poppies. I followed her gaze, expecting to see sprouts breaking through the ground, but there was nothing there.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “Why haven’t the poppies sprouted, Trina?”

  “Maybe they just need a little longer,” I said.

  “Do you think Karel was right?”

  “I don’t know. We will have to wait and see.”

  Over the next few days, I went out to the garden in the back each morning to see the progress, but Holena went to look for the poppies. I knew they hadn’t sprouted by the look on her face when she sat down at the table for her breakfast.

  “I don’t know why you’re in a bother about them,” Aneshka said. “They’re only flowers. We can’t eat them.”

  “None of it may come to anything, anyway,” Momma reminded us all as she set our usual bowls of porridge on the table.

  “But it might,” I said. “And then maybe we won’t have to spend so much money at the store and we can save a little.”

  Momma shook her head. “We’ll still have to buy all the same things as we do now. Unless you can grow meat or coffee or flour in that garden of yours.”

  Despite myself, my heart sank. She was right; we couldn’t live on the kinds of vegetables growing in my garden. There were just too many things that we needed that weren’t in my little garden.

  Momma looked at my face, and hers softened a little. “It’s a good thing you are doing, Trina, and I am sure our meals will be better if anything comes to fruit. But you have to be realistic.”

  I nodded and ate, then started my chores, still thinking about what she had said. Our biggest weekly expense at the store was meat. After wash day and Papa’s payday, we had enough money for fresh meat from the store, and we certainly couldn’t go without—at least, Papa couldn’t. As hard as he worked, he needed something to sustain him. And Momma was right that I couldn’t grow meat. I didn’t have a cow or a pig, and even if I did, we had no way to feed it or to keep the meat if we butchered it. But I could fish. If I could bring fish home from time to time, even just once a week, I could save us a little money—maybe two or three dollars a week. And that could be one hundred dollars or more in a year!

  The thought sent a tingle up my spine. One hundred dollars was an awful lot of money. I thought about it until I was finished with the last of my chores. When my sisters went outside to play, I went along, with one of Papa’s old newspapers. I sat down on the porch steps and flipped through it, looking for the pages of advertisements. I knew they were in there, because when we had first arrived in America, Papa had used what little English he had to translate them for us each night—ads for land and farms here in America. I wasn’t sure if he still read them or not, but he never read them out loud anymore.

  I found the page and flattened it on my lap. A long list of ads in small print offered everything from horses and buggies to the services of laundresses and dress makers. Mixed in were the ads I wanted to read. Most of them were for established farms. My favorites were the ones that had fruit trees. I liked the idea of acres of apples or cherries or plums, so I looked for those first, and I found one right off that sounded perfect. A black border highlighted the ad. Inside the border, large block letters declared LAND! LAND! LAND! and below that ORCHARDS! PLENTY OF WATER! MOUNTAIN VIEWS! I could see it in my mind—at least, until I read the price: $2,500.00! I could never save that kind of money! Still, we didn’t need mountain views; we just wanted a farm of our own. I read on, refusing to let my hope collapse, but just as the passing months had worn away at my father’s dream, reading these ads wore away at mine, too. Even undeveloped land was selling for two or three hundred dollars, and it would cost much more to turn it into a farm. I couldn’t see that we would get out of the coal camp with a penny less than five hundred dollars. Catching fish for one meal a week wouldn’t be enough—but if there were other things I could do to save us money, maybe it was a start.

  What we needed was a better source of meat—someone who could provide it at a better price than the company store. I remembered the farm where I had traded for seeds, and I had an idea, but I didn’t share it with anyone. If my plans didn’t work out, it would disappoint my sisters.

  The next time I went to the store was on Saturday, after Papa got paid. As usual, there was a bit of change from my purchases, but I didn’t return it to the can behind the stove when I got home. I felt guilty and wondered if I was stealing, but I planned to use it to help my family, so I did not see how I could be. After all, when Aneshka had bought candy with the change, she had not been stealing.

  That afternoo
n, I asked Momma’s permission to go fishing again, and she agreed. She had enjoyed the fish as much as the rest of us. I walked to Old Jan’s house, where he sat on the front porch whittling. I borrowed the fishing pole, promising to bring fish for his supper as well as ours. Then I set off over the ridge.

  As before, I caught fish in the stream, and as before I worked my way upstream, but this time I was not surprised to find the farm. This time, I had been looking for it. I left my string of fish and my pole in the bushes and walked to the cluster of buildings, carefully stepping in the space between the rows of young corn in the fields.

  The buildings were bigger than they had appeared from across the field and for a moment my courage failed me. The structure was not just a single house, but many. The low adobe buildings formed three sides of a rectangle around an open courtyard. Each flat-roofed building had several doors, all facing into the courtyard, all painted a cheerful, bright blue. The open courtyard was bare dirt and busy with children playing. Their mothers kept a watchful eye from their shaded doorsteps where they worked.

  A chorus of barking dogs announced my arrival, and several mongrels ran toward me. I froze until one of the older women came off the porch and called to them. They retreated, wagging their tales, and I let out my breath.

  “Hello,” I called to her. “Do you speak English?”

  She shook her head, then with a quick word in Spanish, she sent a boy running to the cluster of low barns and buildings behind the houses. She smiled at me, and I felt my nerves relax a little. It was a warm smile that formed deep crinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if she had been smiling for most of her life. I smiled back and gave a little curtsy, which only widened her smile.

  I took the money from my pocket, and gesturing as I spoke, I said, “I was wondering if I could buy—”

  The woman held up a hand and gestured for me to wait, so I closed my hand around the money and stopped speaking. A moment later the boy returned from the barn with three men and several older boys. One of the adult men said something in Spanish to the others, and I recognized him as the man I had met in the fields. I hoped he was telling the others that he recognized me, but I couldn’t be sure.