by Anna Solomon
One day Otto and Liesl and Fritzi glided up on a sleigh, their eyes red with wind, bearing a tin of tea and the news out of Mitchell, and Minna felt proud opening her door to them. The stove was warm, but not extravagantly so. She made the tea hot but not too strong and laid the table with fresh milk. Everyone was polite. When Otto put his arm around Samuel’s shoulders to give him more pointers about the house, Max didn’t seem to notice that the gesture was that of a father toward a son, nor did he complain about the wrong-way door. He watched Liesl, who looked lovelier than ever and murmured admirations about the house. Minna watched Samuel. She could watch him frankly, and appear to be watching Otto. So she watched, and was happy for him, at how relaxed he looked with Otto’s arm around his shoulders, and she was sad for him, too, for all the rest of the time, when he refused to let anyone relieve him of his vigilance. Otto said the snow would melt, there was always a melt around this time, and then he and Fritzi would be back to finish the house. And though Fritzi’s eyes betrayed his contempt, nothing more passed between him and Max than the quick soldierly nod practiced by men who are not soldiers. The news was of weather and the recent declaration of statehood and a new dry-goods store opened by two sisters from Baltimore who’d never been west of the Potomac River and who carried, alongside their calicoes, bolts of silk from the Orient; and of an old squaw—this was what they called the Indian women—who’d heard a woman crying alone in a sod hut and delivered her baby. Everyone agreed that this was a strange but good thing, and that it might mean something, though they wouldn’t presume to say what. So much politeness. Minna had made it impossible, she liked to think, for it to be any other way. Her well-swept floor. The biscuits she’d rolled as soon as they’d arrived. Even when they left, when the steam from their horses’ nostrils was gone and the sleigh fell off the white horizon, she didn’t feel the wretchedness she’d felt leaving their house, or (in the memories she’d revised to make them simpler, and more memorable) every other house.
TWENTY-THREE
DECEMBER 1, the kerosene turned to sludge. Minna kept the dates now, on a chart pinned to the wall, to track her use of eggs and keep a tally of their whist games. But December 1 they would have remembered anyway—it was a day people would talk about for years across America’s vast middle when things were bad and they needed reminding how much worse they could be, or when things were good and they feared complacency. The day of ice. The day the air turned blue. The day your eyeballs froze. The day you had to cut the cow’s tongue from its trough. Minna closed the flue, but the stove ate through more coal than it usually did in a week. She set the lamps to warm by the stove, but by midafternoon feet had crowded them out: the men, socks cracking, worked to bend their toes. She hung their boots up above. The air smelled of feet, the coffee tasted of feet. The boys wanted to bring the cow inside the house, but the path was too slick, she would break a leg. They cut into the ice, trying to gain purchase, but at dusk you could hear their axes still ringing. They gave up and came inside, joining Max and Minna at the table, which she’d drawn close to the stove, which she’d let run low to save coal through the night. They ate quickly, not speaking. Then they went to bed without undressing, short two blankets, one of which the boys had thrown over the horse, the other across the chicken coop. Minna layered both beds in every piece of clothing they had: shirts and underclothes and trousers and dresses, even her wedding dress she laid out, a lilac spirit pinned to the top. The men were already buried, burrowing. She wanted to lie down, too, but in her mind, she called up Liesl. What else would Liesl do? Minna heated bricks meant to lay the foundation for the second room in the stove, wrapped them in rags, and put them at the foot of both beds. Then she swept the room one more time, as if for extra luck. After that, her boots were the only sound. There was no wind that night. It was too cold for wind. Yet they must have slept, because in the morning on every pillow was a frozen pool of breath.
WHAT followed? It was hard to say, exactly, even if you were there. Even if you tracked the days and nights—at some point along the way, you lost track of your tracking. An easing of the cold would appear, the air suddenly soft, the windows weeping. But it didn’t last long enough to melt the snow. Samuel tried to walk to Otto’s for a ride to town on the sleigh, but a new snow pushed him back. They tried to plow their way out, but neither their animals nor their plow were built for snow and the horse’s old tack was cracking and the mule sullenly bullied his way back to the barn. They kicked the mule, though they knew it wouldn’t help, kicked it for having so many legs, and knees, and backs of knees, so many surfaces to kick, and because it would never show injury or heartbreak. Jacob kicked hollering, and Samuel grunting, and Minna kicked when she hoped no one saw. Only Max didn’t kick the mule, Max with his faith, his inner minions, Max who appeared satisfied at last, now that they were truly cut off from the world. When he finished his prayers, he wore the flush of a rich man. Their food, he assured them, would see them through to the January thaw, just like last year. But last year was nothing like this, according to Jacob: the snow had never risen past their thighs; the kerosene hadn’t frozen for more than a couple days in a row. He said this to Minna more than to Max, a son’s appeal to one parent to set the other straight, that pitting and bribing Minna had only witnessed in other families. He wanted her to do something, but what could she do? In time, she would come to realize that he’d simply wanted her to say yes; to confirm—though she hadn’t been there—that he was right. Yes, last year was nothing like this. Yes, son—as Lina might have said—you are not mistaken. But just then she was too busy being amazed, all over again, by the absurdity of their situation. What difference did it make what happened last year? You could spend a lifetime trying to call up the heights and colors and temperatures and tastes that pitched you into danger, but as far as she could tell, memory didn’t save anyone. Last winter, this winter, next winter, the winter after that. Samuel offered no opinion on the matter. He’d grown sullen as the mule, obsessed with his own failures, so certain that he could have prevented their miscalculations—the poorly conceived door, the lack of a sleigh, the distance from house to cellar—that he could barely focus on anything else. He needed prompting when his turn came to milk. He threw his coat down on the stove and burned a hole in the sleeve. He forgot his gloves and came to supper with his fingertips black. Minna wished he would look at her, and find some comfort in her face. She wished he would stop punishing himself. It exposed him, finally, but in the most woeful way.
On the warmer days, you could hear the snow settling. The layers, rearranging themselves, creaked and sang and spread a vibration through the ground. Minna’s muscles quivered as if anticipating a slide, a crash, a breaking open, none of which happened, for there was no steep place to slide from—yet the possibility gave her energy, an urge for order, industry. She drove nails into the men’s boots for when the ice returned. She scheduled English lessons with Jacob. She pulled the rags up from between the floorboards, cleaned the house, then washed the rags and stuffed them back in. It was easy, in those milder periods, to cook and eat modestly, to feel the rationing as a form of loyalty. She kept them all on the delicate edge of hunger.
Then a snow would fall again, and the sky which had let down the snow would clear and freeze, and she would open the door and feel her eyelashes stand like the nails in the men’s boots and all reason and frugality would depart. She would serve a whole jar of beans at one meal, use egg in her bread, slather the bread thick with preserves.
She understood, then, in a buried way, how Max could have chosen himself over the Torah. How, once you found yourself straying, it was easier to stay on course than to go back.
Then again, the air would warm; her sense would return. This was the way of things, the back-and-forth, the backs always feeling longer than the forths. Eventually, the paths cut through snow taller than their heads. They went from the house to the chickens to the barn to the privy hole to the cellar to the coal bin to the house and that was all, ju
st walls of snow and the driest air you could imagine, so dry you might walk with a fistful of snow in your mouth, breathing through your nose the ghost scents of urine on hay and human waste in snow and coal smoke frying the air. If you looked up, you could see the sky, often whiter than the snow. The boys tried climbing each other’s shoulders onto the shelf above. Sometimes they made it to the roof and dug the windows free; but the snow was fragile and fickle and quickly collapsed, taking them with it. Minna had it in her mind to weave a pair of snow shoes—she could see the line in her mind on the map, a little arrow pointing toward Liesl’s—but Samuel wouldn’t let her use the wood that was meant for the second room, and she had no twine. She would have to wait for Otto to come again. They were all waiting for that. Even Max, who never admitted it—you could catch him searching the sky sometimes, could tell from the way he bit his lip that he wasn’t looking for God, or even for the shochet, but for a German.
SOMETIMES Minna found herself thinking about the time when the boys were gone. She thought of the candlelight and the milk glue and the lost hours, the thumping of her heels through the long afternoons as Max dug. She thought of it as an Era. There was a heedlessness to those days, an almost charm, which she may or may not have felt at the time, but which now she allowed herself to envy and miss. And because she did not berate herself for this allowance, because she didn’t force herself to go back through, sifting and pinning, to determine the facts, she guessed that she must be growing older.
TWO chickens died. This was after the eggs were gone and Minna had given up her tracking, after the time the boys guessed must be January, after the thaw did not come. For weeks they’d been eating flat bread for breakfast, potatoes and milk at noon, corn mush at night, so that every meal was the day before and the day after and further confused the passing of time. They only knew that it was one day and two chickens, discovered by Jacob. They heard him shout, then he came careening into the house gripping the birds by their legs. He gave a giant, licklipping grin before he stopped himself. Regret, recalculation: Max: he shouldn’t have shouted, shouldn’t have brought them in here, he should have stuffed them into the snow and come back for them at night. You could see Samuel thinking the same thing, slitting furious eyes at his brother. Minna stood over the stove, stirring cornmeal into water. She had been thinking, before Jacob burst in, whether to leave it as porridge, or if she should let it cool, slice it, fry it as cakes. Cakes would require butter, which they were running out of.
But that was the thing about the backs of the forths: on the days when the cold stood behind the door like the open bones of a jaw and her eyelashes stood like nails and she did not believe it would ever end, rationing was impossible: an act of optimism; on these worst days it seemed as frivolous as putting on jewelry, or brushing one’s hair. So the butter would run out. So. So she’d use their precious milk to make more. She could smell her frugal ambitions fleeing, the other-women gone, her domestic artistry lapsing into greed. She could already taste the butter on the corn, the burned fatty crisp at the edges of the cakes. And carrots—they would eat carrots. She would open the last jar in the cellar.
And then Jacob was there, with the chickens, and she tasted leg, skin, breast. She didn’t wait for Max to act or speak. She cut off the heads, hung the birds outside to bleed, packed a pot with snow and brought it to a boil, then dipped them until their feathers came loose. Liesl had lent her enough dishes so that they would have two full sets, and now Minna dusted off the fleischig plates. Max said nothing—not when she returned with the naked, gutted chickens, not as she made a show of cutting out the deepest, most treacherous, least kosher veins, not while she boiled them. She set his plate before him and watched his eyes take it in, his lips move through his prayers, his hand pick up his fork. The boys huddled over their food, wincing. She’d run the stove hot all afternoon, to cook the chicken, and soften Max; the room was bone-dry at the table, moist with breath up the walls.
Max began to eat his corn cakes. He finished one, started in on the other, finished that. He ate his carrots, slowly. Minna prepared to speak in defense of the chicken. Would God waste the animal’s death? Would He prefer to see them suffer? And she’d bled it the best she could. There were exemptions—weren’t there? For women and children, at least, there were exemptions. And for the hungry, too? That means you, she would say. Motke, God couldn’t have meant for you to use your will in such a way.
Then Max finished the last of his carrots and stared at his plate and in his eyes was a look she’d known her whole life: a moroseness meant for her to see, a flagging that said, don’t make me a vagrant in my own home, please, sit with me, stay. That face—she couldn’t look at it anymore. She had nothing to say for herself. She began to eat. The boys ate. And when they finished, they ate what was left on Max’s plate.
TWENTY-FOUR
THEY ate the second chicken quickly, unapologetically, offering none to Max. The flour was low. The last potatoes smelled of rot and snow; she cooked them, sliced thin and fried in chicken fat the way Galina had liked them, and though Max wouldn’t eat these either, they were quickly gone. Minna rationed out of necessity now; she could see the bottoms of bags. She and the boys fought over who would milk the cow, with the understanding that the milker drank from the bucket before bringing it in. They fought over who had to feed the chickens. No one wanted to face the chickens: they felt guilty for having eaten them, and for wanting to eat more—and maybe, too, they each feared being the one to kill a third.
Just die, they thought—and yet they went on feeding them scraps they could not spare.
And for a time, too long a time, no more chickens died. They had enough coal to keep the house warm in the days and warmer than frozen through the nights, and yet they felt cold all the time, their stomachs barely lined with a watery paste of flour or cornmeal, or flour and cornmeal. There was always enough water to make it watery; water stood in your eyes, and fell again from the sky, deceptively light before it piled: when you drank, you could feel it slide through you: it found your emptiness, touched it everywhere, left it shivering.
They were rich only in dishes, which seemed to mock them now from their stacks.
Where was Otto? Max wanted to know. He was leaning against the east wall, head in his hands. He stood all day sometimes, saying it made him warmer, then he wound up tilted and slouching like this, until he was as good as lying down. “What?” he asked. “Has the big German with his big ideas decided we aren’t worth it after all?”
“Why should he help you?” Jacob asked.
“He left us. He built the door the wrong way.”
“He built us a door.”
“He did it on purpose.”
“And what’s to say it wasn’t my fault?” interrupted Samuel. “Who’s to say I don’t know how to build a door?”
“He can’t teach you everything,” Max scowled. “He hasn’t. He won’t.”
“If you wanted a benefactor,” Samuel said, “you might have asked the Baron.”
“O Barohhhn.” Jacob clasped his knuckles beneath his chin, which was sharp now, undone of its child fat. “O Barohhhn de Vintovich, please, save us.”
“He’s saved others,” said Samuel.
“You’d like to believe it,” Jacob said.
“You might believe something.”
“But I do.”
“Oh?”
“I believe in Americaaaah!” Jacob laughed.
Samuel closed his eyes. “The Baron is a man, at least.”
Max slapped a hand against the wall. “Enough,” he said. “I’m not a fool.”
WHEN the third chicken died, Jacob mmmed and ohhhed and belched. Samuel ate steadily, refusing to look at Max, who sat like a post before his plate of corn mush. Max closed his eyes and said his prayers, then he was reaching his fork for Jacob’s plate, stabbing a leg, delivering it in a long, wavering arc onto his own. He cut. He brought the meat to his mouth. He chewed, not looking up, holding his fork, which trembled. H
e swallowed. He cut again. If he would only look up, Minna thought, for she was suddenly sorry. The boys stiffened; they must have felt it, too—Max had been their holdout, their representative in faith. For the first time since winter began, Minna thought of Moses, from the boat. She thought how disappointed he would be. She thought, though this was foolish, though it rendered the world back there as dreamlike as the world here had become, the towns merged, strangers wed, she thought that perhaps Moses and Max had known each other. They might have been friends—brothers. Moses would be so angry at Max for giving in. Now they were all four of them eating treyf. And it had been so easy. Beyond the walls, the snow gave off a long yelp, shrinking back slightly from the heat.
THEY had wanted Max to eat the animal. Of course. They must have—it was only right: his eyes had gone dull like theirs; his skin was yellow. Still, his giving in was a disenchantment, the sort that occurs when you didn’t know you were enchanted. It was a revelation, and over the next few days, it led to others. Jacob brought out a pistol, which he said Fritzi had loaned him for the winter, to warn off Indians. Samuel dug five bottles of vodka out of the snow, saying they might as well, he’d bought them stupidly, impulsively—so stupid!—he should have bought more food. Minna brought out Fritzi’s book, and handed it to Jacob, who began to read.
The book was called Old Man Jones; or, The Maiden Daughter and the Stranger. It was a good story, the first time through. There was a wealthy ranch owner trying to save his bad son and marry off his good daughter, a poor-but-hardworking stranger who tried to help him do both, and a gang of cowboys who tried to stop him. There was town and there was country; there was a drunk and a shopkeeper and a schoolmarm and a maiden; there was drought and plague and violence and drowning and, of course, Indians. There were great adventures they were missing, apparently. Towns and countries far more story-worthy than the ones they knew. The only element missing from the book was a prairie fire, which they didn’t notice until the second reading.
