The Little Bride

by Anna Solomon

  The third time through, they drank vodka to stay interested. Jacob performed voices for them, and sound effects. He pointed his gun at the ceiling when the characters pointed theirs. Max, in anticipation, would raise his hand and say, “Bang!” His sin with the chicken left him ashamed, but it was a broken shame that led to more. He ate more chicken, drank more vodka. Then he would pray, but silently, as far from the warmth of the stove as he could get, and Samuel would go stand next to him, and shut his eyes tight so that all the folds in his lids darkened into one, and sway. His swaying made him look pious, as his mother had meant him to be, but in fact it was simply the most visible aspect of his drunkenness. In general, the more Samuel drank, the more sober he appeared, the more troubled by his father’s defections and Jacob’s laughter and Minna’s quiet, steady mode of filling her tin cup. She had not been drunk before. She pretended to pray, too, more earnestly than she’d pretended before, bowing her head, murmuring softly, copying as best she could, and in the simple, unthinking motions of her mouth she discovered a simple sort of comfort. Once or twice she caught Samuel staring at her with murderous disbelief, but before she could shake her vision clear, he’d walked off into a corner. Even his anger was comforting when Minna was drunk. She felt free, for a time, of want.

  The corners were like other rooms some nights, set off by their distance from the lamp. They were drawn there, like cats seeking privacy. Then there were nights when the corners seemed made of solid matter, a darkness encroaching, pushing them toward the center, making them feel they might never get out. This was false—you could pull the string and the door would open, you could brace your skin against fresh air, savor the moments before the cold began to burn. Yet somehow you didn’t. You sat at the table, the bones in your legs taking on the shape of the bench, and finished your share of the drink. Jacob might read again, or not. They might argue. Argument was its own intoxication; argument saved the vodka. Why do you keep that rock? Samuel might say, pointing at Jacob’s iridescent crescent, which sat, curled into itself, in the center of the table. And Jacob might answer, It’s from the ocean. And Samuel, Don’t make things up. And Jacob, I’m not making it up. This whole country, all the grass, we’re at the bottom of an old ocean. And Minna, Really? And Samuel, Don’t believe his tales. Or another night, Samuel would begin, So you’ve got a gun. And you’ve got arrowheads. So whose side are you on. And Jacob would say, Both. And Samuel, That’s impossible. And Jacob, Whatever you say. Samuel, You have to choose. Jacob, Why do you care so much? Samuel, Why don’t you care more? And Max, head in his hands, We’re not on anyone’s side. Laughter from Jacob. But our own, is that right? Isn’t that what you were going to say next? And Samuel, Let him be. And Jacob, Sorry. Of course. You’re so good at just letting him be.

  Then it would be the end of the night: and then again: so many times, they went through this end, when the beds seemed too far to reach. They’d stopped undressing weeks go. The stove hissed, the last embers fell to ash. Then at last they found themselves under blankets, the day’s fire or the gun’s glint or the white snow flashing behind their eyelids. Max held Minna tenderly then, his hands cradling her belly, his toes in their thicker socks kneading the soles of her thinner stockings, working to warm her.

  MINNA had thought she’d known hunger. She thought she knew it in Odessa, and on the boat, and even here, not so long ago, when the potatoes ran out. But she understood now that those hungers had been an idea—like her child idea of the forest when the town was just behind the house, or her city idea of loneliness when there were people everywhere. Real hunger required denial, a trick—you could not believe in it or it would flood you. She tried concentrating on her bones. She counted her fingers and toes. She focused on the warmth between her legs. But all this vigilance delivered her nowhere, it only led to other parts of the body, the throbbing at the back of her skull, the swelling of her tongue in her mouth. She learned to concentrate on not concentrating, to let her mind spread out, puddlelike, far enough from the body that the body was forgotten. Or at least silenced. A calm fell over her limbs. She wondered if this was prayer. If prayer was nothing more than a giving in, like sickness—if you weren’t required to believe, only to stop struggling. The exercise grew familiar. The boys grew hair on their faces. And though Samuel’s was a full black beard, and Jacob’s a layer of fuzz like a playactor might draw on, the hair made them look alike, and like Max, and Minna gave in to their merging, their repetition, as she gave in to the repetition of hunger. She knew that she loved them, the beards, the bodies, the men themselves. She saw them out the corners of her eyes, she brushed them as she passed. They were her furniture. You could love anyone, she thought, if you needed to. And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe.

  ONE night she was peeing. She was listening to the snow melt under her and smelling how her pee smelled of nothing and feeling, in her squat, the bones in her upper legs press against the bones in her lower legs. She might not have looked up at all. But she did, and to the north, above the wall of snow, she saw lights filling the sky. Her first thought was lanterns—Otto—he’d come at last. But she heard nothing. The lights grew no closer. They shot toward the ceiling of the sky, white and pink and almost red in places. She was hallucinating. She had to be. That or God had come for them. He’d warmed the earth everywhere but here, and now remembered them.

  She had to be hallucinating. She didn’t even need vodka anymore. She went in and said, “There’s a forest of light outside,” and no one even went to see.

  ANOTHER night, Minna saw Liesl’s map in her mind. She saw the mountains, the river, the squares within squares—she saw, within the smallest within, their snow tunnels, intricate and deep and narrow, like a new set of roads, a separate country.

  The bottom of an ocean, Jacob had said, and Minna could believe it.

  SHE thought of Liesl and Ruth. The sharp runners on their sleighs. The abundance in their cellars. Then she thought: What if the snow was gone at their houses? What if the runners were put to rest, the earth thawed, the kitchen gardens planted, pole beans and peas and radishes starting to root? She could see a froth of carrot greens. She could smell the wet dirt that collects in lettuces. It seemed possible, somehow, that this, theirs, was the only forgotten place: one hundred sixty acres of snow in the middle of spring. People would gawk, then go back to their planting.

  THE last chicken that would die that winter died. They ate without fanfare, their stomachs cramping. Afterward, you could smell the meat emptied out into the snow. Their revelations were commonplace now. They hated the chickens for tempting Max into sin, which seemed to have led them here: too tired to read or play cards or even to argue, the vodka bottles empty and singing out on the snow shelf. This was wrong, she knew, but it was impossible not to think that Max’s weakness had led them to be forgotten. In bed one night she asked him: “Why did you eat the chicken?”

  He didn’t answer right away. His hands did not quite touch her stomach but hovered slightly, cupping a mound of air, waiting for the baby to fill it. She thought of her father’s waiting, the shawls just so over the bedposts. She saw his bed, and then a woman beside it, the Christian woman whose face she could never see clearly, the one who’d thrown Minna’s stones back in the river. The woman stood by her father’s bed, spreading her arms wide to fold a sheet, and Minna wondered: What if the woman had come more frequently than Minna knew, and Minna’s father had not been alone in the way she remembered him to be? What if all her loyalty was based on a misunderstanding?

  “Why did you?” Max whispered back.

  “What?”

  “Eat the chicken.”

  She considered. She was wide-awake now, her empty stomach drumming beneath the dome of Max’s hands. His breath was sour and hot on her ear. If you knew what I’ve eaten, she thought. She said, “I never promised anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never promised.” />
  “You must have. They said.”

  “I told a lie.”

  She could feel, at the foot of the bed, the other bed. The other eyes trained on the dark. She felt an urge to speak Samuel’s name, and ask him to forgive her. She knew this was backward, knew it was Max she should apologize to, but she couldn’t help herself. From the time she’d met him, Samuel had made her want to explain herself. He’d seemed to want to know her, whereas all the other men only wanted her to know them. Yet what would she ask him to forgive her for? For lying to his father, or for marrying him? For being a girl in his house? Or for her fear of spring, in the deepest, most senseless caverns of her body she pretended against yet here it was: fear of warmth, thaw, the peeling off of layers. She could not begin again the same way.

  Behind her, Max said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  Minna started to cry. She was so hungry, and it was such a peculiar, lovely thing for him to say. It was as if he’d said, do what you want. She waited for his hands to leave the place around her belly, for him to roll away. But Max didn’t move.

  “So why did you eat it?” she asked.

  “I was hungry,” he said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE melt was sudden. A current of warmth came up off the horizon one morning and the snow walls started to sink and flow into the paths; by noon the slush was up to their shins. The snow was too much to go gently. If you stood still you could hear it crackle; if you stood long enough you could hear a hiss beneath the crackle. The hiss lasted for days as the snow shrank. Water poured off the roof and seeped through the windows. They dug channels around the house to keep it from flooding, then around the chicken coop, but they were weak and couldn’t dig fast enough and had to bring the remaining chickens inside the house. Empty sacks floated in the cellar. The cow and horse and mule stood in water, coats dull as clay, watching the people run back and forth along their paths, which one day showed a patch of matted grass. The snow was down to their waists. They could see the unfinished frame of the second room, the new windows leaning against it, fine and swollen. They could see the cottonwoods, and snow. The snow shone like an earthly sun; they had to cover their eyes. They didn’t see the sleigh until they heard runners cutting through the slush.

  It was Fritzi who pulled the horses to a stop, and nodded. He looked as though he expected them to be standing there, expecting him. But of course they hadn’t. Not Fritzi. His eyes were streaked with rage. Minna felt her toes, in her wet boots. She thought, Otto’s dead.

  Fritzi held out a sack for Samuel to take, then another. “I’ve brought food,” he said. It was clear from the hardness in his posture that he didn’t intend to climb down. Only Max didn’t seem to comprehend the situation. He said, “So the man dares to come now, and sends you instead? He won’t even show himself?”

  Fritzi narrowed his eyes. You could see him trying to quiet himself, his free hand caressing his reins, his lips pressed together. You could feel his mother shushing in his ear. He said, “He was coming here. To bring you food.”

  Max’s mouth was open. He closed it. Minna hadn’t noticed how much of his beard had fallen out, or how the top of his chin was red with teeth marks. Samuel and Jacob stood silently, boys again, heads bowed.

  “Where’s your mother?” she asked Fritzi.

  “At home.”

  For an instant Minna had thought Liesl dead, too. But she had only chosen not to come. She didn’t want to see Minna now, or perhaps ever again.

  “Please tell her we are so sorry,” she said.

  Fritzi smiled in a hateful way.

  “Please thank her for the food.”

  The smile held. Fritzi seemed to wait just so he could watch them resist themselves—they would pounce on the bags, you could feel it, the moment he left. Then he left.

  A WEEK later, when the road was clear enough for the boys to get to town, the stores were empty of food. They returned with a hand sack of flour a man had given them, and new tack for the horse, which the sisters from Baltimore had sold them, on credit and at a discount.

  “You looked so desperate?” Max asked angrily. For a second, Minna thought he might turn the sack upside down. “They thought you were looking for charity?”

  Neither of the boys answered right away. They appraised their father as if he were a foreigner, or as if to remind him that in fact he was. They’d spoken little of Otto—his death saddened them more than their father could bear—but his loss was everywhere. Samuel had shaved his beard and looked clean, and impatient. Jacob had kept his boy-fur but his thinness was not good for him; his flesh had hidden his likeness to Max, his sunken eyes and nervous mouth. His mockery held no playfulness now. He said, “We were.”

  Leo and Ruth, they said, had nothing to spare. They’d gone there on their way home, thinking to promise more work in exchange for food, but the children looked like little grown-ups and Ruth did not welcome them. She was upstairs sleeping, Leo said. The baby had been born dead. Leo said not to tell anyone, especially not Minna. Ruth would be so ashamed. He shouldn’t have told them either, he said. But so he had.

  “Poor Ruth,” Minna said. And she felt this. She was sorry for Ruth, and sorry for Leo, who’d betrayed his wife’s secret. Minna had misjudged him, perhaps. She’d thought him haughty, especially around Max, but now she could see that he was afraid. He was afraid of Max, just as she’d been afraid of Rebeka. Weak people made you see yourself in them.

  But Max and the boys didn’t seem to hear her. Or they’d stopped trusting what she said.

  “We’ll go to the colony,” Samuel said. “They’ll help us.”

  “What about Cincinnati?” asked Jacob. “They helped us.”

  “I won’t go anywhere,” said Max.

  “You’ll die,” Jacob said.

  “Shut it,” said Samuel, and turned to Max. “You don’t have to come. We’ll go, then come back.”

  “Are you crazy?” Jacob raised his arms. “I’m not coming back here. I won’t stay another week. We’ll all die.”

  “It’s spring,” said Samuel.

  “Yes. And then winter again. Have you noticed the way of things?”

  “We’ll be prepared by then.”

  “That’s what you said last year.”

  “We are staying,” said Max. “If we leave, Fritzi won’t waste a second claiming this land.”

  “Let him have it.”

  “We are free here.”

  “Is that what this is?” Jacob laughed, a great hiccup.

  “We have rights to this land.”

  “Rights to rocks, you mean? These plentiful rocks? Should we thank God for giving us so many rocks?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I was putting it in terms you’d understand.”

  Max stared, his eyes small. Samuel set a hand on his shoulder but Max snarled and threw him off, startling them all.

  “Leave me,” he said, to no one in particular.

  “You’ll die,” Jacob said.

  “Then I’ll die.”

  HE’D gone feverish, they realized. He shook the bed with his shivering that night and would not let Minna near him. The child, he cried, don’t hurt the child. When she did not correct him, his sons looked at her; then they brought their father rags she’d cooled in the creek, which ran fast now, higher and wider than its banks. Jacob sat next to him guiltily, playing spoons, but Max would not be distracted. He kept pointing at Minna and telling her to leave. She protested, but he hit her hands away. The house smelled of fever and feet and chicken shit. She left. She stood outside in the dark and breathed in the cooling of the day, the slush and mud, stars and moon, a few clouds. She had the garbled pent-up energy of the newly unhungry. She could walk to the creek. She could walk beyond it. But it was dark, and the ground was slush or mud or new streams. The barn was wet. There was nowhere to sleep, and nowhere to walk to. Somewhere not too far from here Otto had been dug out of the snow. From the vodka bottles came the drowsy bu
zz of the first flies. She thought of Ruth.

  She waited for the house to quiet, then entered softly, but Max woke at her weight and pushed her out of the bed. Sleep with your sons, he said. And Minna felt the fever then, or she called it fever, though she had so rarely been sick, she named the heat through her limbs fever. Kadokhes. Goryachka. She thought it all the ways she knew to think it, until she almost believed it, then she took a blanket Max had thrown off and lay on the floor next to the stove, waiting for her chest to stop pounding.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ON the second day of Max’s sickness, two wagons appeared across the prairie, and behind them, a thing so unrecognizable they might all have been struck by fever. As it came closer, they saw that it was an exceedingly tall penny-farthing, with a man riding on top, and that the wagons were papered with brightly colored posters—so much color, suddenly, that the ground seemed to tremble. Jacob ran to greet the front wagon and a man hopped down. By the time they reached the house, they were talking like old friends.

  “Wild Whippersnapper Willy,” said the man, doffing his hat with a great bow—“Howdeedoo”—and Jacob fell into such a huge, hysterical laughter that Minna and Samuel found themselves laughing, too. Willy laughed back at them, and though his was the kind of laugh that didn’t involve the eyes, it was professional and long-lasting and it satisfied. He wore trousers that ballooned at his knees and cinched tight at his ankles, and a black satin vest, and a white scarf, and the sad effort around his eyes, along with the vest, reminded Minna of the magician. With him were other performers: one very fat man, one dressed as a cowboy, two dressed as Indians, and one with three eyes. This man was impossible not to look at, for he stood no more than twenty feet away, doing nothing but being himself and looking back at them. He seemed unbothered, almost happy, as if nothing in fact was wrong with him, which struck Minna as wrong in itself until she realized that the longer you looked on him, the more normal he started to appear: the longer you stared, his three eyes were not what struck you as odd, but the fact that he only had one mouth, and two feet.