The Little Bride

by Anna Solomon

  Willy clapped, to get their attention. “Stragglers of the Whippersnapper Circus at your service,” he said. “Not Barnum, I’ll admit, but you don’t look particularly famous yourselves!” They were bound for Mitchell, he said, where they’d meet the rest of the band. They needed a place to rest the night, and Jacob had told them yes, of course, stay here!

  “We’ve little food,” Samuel said, and Willy said they carried their own. If they could only wash in the creek, they would be grateful.

  “Yes!” Jacob cried. “Yes! And perhaps we’ll come see the circus! Perhaps you’ll admit us free of charge! Where are you headed after Mitchell?”

  “As far as the roads will take us, I suppose!”

  Jacob pulled spoons out of his pocket and began to play. Willy whistled along. So much noise so suddenly, Minna’s ears began to hurt. Max stumbled out in his nightshirt. He looked at the scene with disbelief, then anger. “I’m not crazy,” he said to Willy, as if he knew him as someone else, and could see through his disguise.

  “Come back to bed,” Minna said, taking Max’s arm. “You’re shivering.”

  She tugged him gently, but Max had spotted the three-eyed man. He slapped Minna’s hand away, then pulled her to him, grabbing her hair in one hand and covering her eyes with the other, so that her head was squeezed between his sweating palms. “Don’t look!” he cried. “The child!” And Minna, unable to see and smelling fever on Max’s skin, remembered not only the village dwarf, with the egg in his neck, but his mother, an average woman who was blamed for the dwarf’s being a dwarf because she’d looked on another dwarf as she carried him. Minna remembered her confusion, as a child. The woman was old by then, and people ignored her, and patted her poor son on the head, and went to shul. It was as bewildering as the circus posters, the penny-farthing, the entire spectacle behind Max’s hands. She wrestled free of him—not gently—not trying to seem weaker than she was—until they stood facing each other, their breath coming fast, and Minna said, “I’m not with child,” loudly enough so that even the freak would hear.

  CLOSE to dawn, she woke to gunshots. One. Two. She ran outside, but there was only a poster on the ground, and in the distance, the uppermost reaches of the penny-farthing rolling away. A third shot rang out.

  “Cowards.” Samuel stood in the doorway behind her, hastily buttoning his trousers beneath his night shirt. You could hear the excitement in his breath, his desire to fight somebody, his disappointment at finding only Minna there.

  “What do you mean cowards?” she asked.

  Samuel shrugged. He’d woken from some dream, she guessed, where he was a hero.

  “They were only getting an early start,” she said.

  “But why the shots?”

  “To say good-bye.”

  “Or they stole something.”

  “Don’t be like your father. There’s nothing to steal.”

  Samuel said nothing. In the gray, blooming light, his bare feet glowed. The ground was cold. She was alert. She wondered, if she kissed him, what would happen. She wished she had a blanket to cover her shoulders, to calm her. She should go inside. But the gunshots were in her stomach still, beating like warm wings.

  “They were amateurs anyway,” said Samuel.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They were.”

  “Fine.”

  “You just don’t remember the real world.”

  Minna looked at his face. It was blue-shadowed, almost soft. In Minna’s life, she’d rarely talked just to talk, the way she and Samuel seemed to be doing now, without any clear purpose other than to make words out loud and see how they landed. It was pleasant, and silly, and also very serious, for you could not admit that anything you said might in fact mean something.

  “What if this is real?” she asked.

  Samuel crossed his arms, and looked back at the house. She guessed that he was thinking of Max, alone in bed, out of his mind. She guessed she should be thinking of Max, too. When Max came back from his fever, she decided, she would stop letting herself think these thoughts, like how Samuel was tall but she could find a way around his shoulders, or how, if he turned back right now and took her hand and kissed her, then it wouldn’t be her fault.

  He half turned, and took her hand. His had been in his armpit, and was warm. Minna felt a sudden panic. Of course it would be her fault. Whatever happened would be her fault. In Beltsy there had been a girl named Libi, who had breasts like a grown woman, which made the boys silent and the girls mean, until one day she cornered the rabbi’s son behind the shul and made him touch them. After that the girls were still mean, but the boys followed her and Libi was called a nafke.Then the Russians came, and took Libi’s brothers away, and that was blamed on Libi, too.

  Samuel drew her to him. He wrapped his arms around her. She could hear his blood, in his chest. She leaned into him. But what if Max should wake and call for her, and run outside?

  “Samuel,” she whispered.

  He rested his head on hers. His arms were warm, and heavy. The sum weight of his embrace surprised her; it seemed to demand that she hold him back. She did. She waited. When Samuel finally spoke, it was into her hair.

  “Jacob,” he said. “They took Jacob.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled away—embarrassed, disbelieving. Cool air crept into the space between them. They stood, watching the imprint of the wagon in their minds, until the instant the first birds called out of the near grass and the pink sun rimmed up above the far grass, which was the same instant, as if the birds and the sun knew how to be together far more easily than any people. And when it was light, they went inside, and saw that it was true.

  MAX wept until his fever broke, then he wept again, with understanding. It was terrifying to see a man sob in such a way, on his knees beating the floor, on his back hugging his knees. There was an ecstasy, almost, to his weeping. His beard ran over with saliva and tears. Minna stared. She couldn’t help it. She wondered if he’d cried like this when Lina left. And if Minna left, would he do the same? How could you leave a man knowing it would make him do this? But how could you stay having seen it? She watched until he gave in to a quieter moaning, then she drew him a tin of water and knelt at his side.

  “Please. Motke.”

  Max drank, wiped his nose with his sleeve, looked up, and started to cry again. He wasn’t looking at Minna, but behind her, where Samuel stood with folded arms.

  “He’ll be back,” Samuel said nonchalantly. “He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know anything about anything.” You could hear that Samuel wanted to believe this, from the lazy way he dropped the words. But when he began to pace, his outrage was visible. “Those people won’t even want him. They’ll drag him along for a while, make him carry props, toss him off.”

  Max shook his head. “You wish you’d gone.”

  Samuel guffawed. “And be a circus act?”

  “You’re covetous.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” But he’d stopped pacing. “Don’t say stupid things.”

  “If I were Otto, he wouldn’t have left me.”

  “Perhaps.” Samuel looked away. In his face was a sudden satisfaction. “But then you’d be dead.”

  “I don’t understand,” Max cried. “Was he so miserable?”

  Neither Samuel nor Minna answered. Yes, she supposed, Jacob was so miserable. Now that he’d left, you could tell. He’d belonged here less than any of them, perhaps. He’d wanted to be happy.

  Max said to Samuel, “You’ll go away now, too.”

  “Yes. But only to the colony.”

  “You’ll leave me.”

  Samuel squinted. “Yes.” He spoke with the measured slowness of one beginning a long calculation. “But then I’ll return.”

  “If you had other plans, you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I’ll return.” Samuel’s voice was quiet, almost intimate, but he didn’t lower himself down next to Max. He shoved his hands into
his pockets, and composed his face into its blankest, hardest, most handsome expression. “I’m your son,” he said.

  “How do I know?”

  The question hung, unfurling itself.

  “I’ll go with him,” Minna said. “I’ll see that he returns.”

  Max looked at her. His eyes were bright from crying, his mouth open and soft. She wondered if he could see the heat bloom up her neck.

  “You won’t go anywhere,” he said. He took her hand. “The child.”

  “I told you,” Minna said, recognizing as she said it that in his fever he must have confused her confession with the circus, or the circus with her confession, that she could choose, again, to keep it from him. But she was exhausted, suddenly, by making him a fool. “There is no child,” she said.

  Max stared, his eyes so wide she could see veins in the corners. He swallowed, hard, and threw her hand into her lap.

  “I never said there was,” she said.

  “You never said there wasn’t.” His eyes filled again with tears. Minna looked away. Would it have been so bad, she thought, to endure him? Then he said, to the side of her head, “You pretended to pray. You pretended to respect me. You’re a liar,” and his naming turned her shame to courage. She felt Samuel, watching her. Yes, it would have been so bad. No, she did not want Max. She’d never been able to want, or think, or believe what she was meant to. Why had she imagined it could be another way?

  “If you want the truth,” she said, “in Odessa, they inspected me like a horse.”

  “Minna.”

  “Everywhere. They went everywhere.”

  “This is not necessary.”

  “You paid them, yes?”

  Silence.

  “And what money did you use? What food could you have bought instead? If you could do it again, would you choose the food, or the barren wife?”

  “Minna . . .”

  “They froze my fingertips.”

  “This is enough.”

  “I forgive them. I forgive you. You’re only people, doing what you must. It’s the most common thing to do.”

  “But—”

  “They wanted to know if I was brave, and if I could stand the cold. They tested my patience and my obedience and everything else you must have wanted.”

  “Minna.”

  “But see, Motke.” Minna turned her palms up. She stretched her fingers into a gesture of supplication, but they were pale, and looked naked. They were naked, she supposed. She folded them. “They never asked if I was honest.”

  Spring

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  NEAR the Missoury, the land changed. The ground rose into small hills and fell into steep valleys, and because the grass was shorter, and much of it still brown, the rippling slopes taken together looked like the hide of a great animal. The road followed the valleys for a time, where it was shaded and cold, then mounted hills for a view. But the river wasn’t visible until they were upon it, the pitching bluffs suddenly giving way to the wide flat of the water, which was brown with its spring running. They saw the railroad, ending like a broken stick. The town was Chamberlain, the street oddly quiet. It was Sunday, they realized.

  A steamboat driver said he had nothing better to do and carried them across for a penny, talking about the railroad problem and the dividing-the-territory problem and the government problem, all the problems facing a steamboat man such as himself, and all the while he talked he asked nothing of Samuel or Minna, not where they were from or where they were going, so they were silent, and in the silence Minna felt a shift, a complicity, for they could have interrupted him, and announced themselves as themselves; they could have insisted that he hear their names, witness their titles, deliver them bound on the west docks as they’d been on the east. But neither of them did. Minna looked to Samuel but he stayed intent on the steamboat man, nodding as if he were a student of steamboats. On either side of his mouth, though, in the grooves there, which had grown deeper through the winter but no less impressive in their symmetry, no less something a man would choose to have if given the choice, here she saw, she was almost certain, the twitches of a smile. She leaned out over the gunwale and looked down at the water, which gurgled and spat as if at a low simmer, and she imagined the snow and rocks and sticks and parts of houses and animals and people and everything else the melt had sloughed off the land. The sun was on the back of her neck and she felt a kind of glory then, a gratitude, in being there on a vessel so outsized for their small purpose, in the press of her ribs against the gunwale and the thrum of the engine down her legs, in the frothed wake the boat sent as they left behind the town and the people in their churches who would know nothing of this crossing.

  THE grass was shorter on the other side and the hills taller, and for a while they felt no sun and Minna was cold and chastened. She thought of her mother, that last morning, for it had been morning, just before sunrise, Minna’s aunts had made a point of telling Minna this, again and again, as if to warn her even of beginnings. The sky must have been the color of ink, Minna’s mother wearing only her dress, carrying nothing. Had she stopped, on the Out Bridge? Minna had kept herself from her mother’s leaving; she’d left it unquarried, an accident. But had she used the back door with the whining hinge, or the front door that scraped the porch? It was spring. What had her heart sounded like when her feet started walking? Did she think of herself as a woman leaving a husband, or as a mother leaving children, or as a wife leaving a house? Did she run at any point? And on the Out Bridge, had she stopped, in her dress, carrying nothing, the moon still waiting for the sun? Did she imagine turning back, slipping through the window again, closing it against the dew? She might be in the bed when the man woke and the infant started its howling again and the girl—Minna—what did the girl demand of her?

  Or maybe the woman only stopped on the Out Bridge because she was cold and regretted not taking a shawl. And why hadn’t she? Had her heart been so loud she’d forgotten? Did she think herself bound for a place where all would be provided her? Or did she want, at least a little bit, to suffer?

  Then it was warm again. The hills spread out wide, like fat, soft fists punching the skin of the earth; the road took a straighter course up and down the broad summits. There were flowers, blue and orange and purple and white, on tall stems that reminded Minna of straw, and lack of rain, and made her think of the dampness in the woods behind her father’s house, the snowdrops and fiddleheads deep in the undergrowth. You had to kneel to smell their thick, sweet scent. You would be wet all over. The tall, dry flowers here looked scentless, but they were beautiful, too. Minna could feel Liesl’s map laid out beneath them: the end of the grid, the opening out, the lack of claims. “This is Indian country,” Samuel said, as one might say, without thought, that is grass, or those are clouds. But they saw no Indians. If they existed, Minna thought, if they were out there beyond and beneath her line of sight, then perhaps they were far more civilized than anyone suspected. If civility was Jews shaving beards and women smiling and children wearing shoes, if it was the ability to disguise oneself, what greater civility could there be than not to appear at all?

  Late in the day, Samuel stopped the wagon at the top of a hill. Down below were the colony’s sod roofs, and fields. In a large fenced pasture, animals passed each other, too distant to make out sheep from goats.

  “That’s it?” Minna asked.

  “That’s it,” Samuel said.

  They looked.

  “Maybe we should wait until morning,” he said. And when Minna said nothing, he turned the horse and mule around, drove them back a quarter mile or so, and tied up in the shelter of a small butte.

  Samuel broke the last of their bread and passed Minna half. They’d spoken little the whole trip, not when they stopped seeing circus posters in the road, nor during the long days as they drove; not through the two nights they’d already spent in the back of the wagon, still as logs, a full body space between them.

  They ate, watching the sun dip b
elow the horizon, then the after-colors—red, orange, green—as they spread through the sky. Minna thought of the circus; of Jacob; she thought she had been too quick, when she first arrived, to detest the Sodokota sun. It was extraordinary, really, once it had disappeared.

  The colors faded. Minna laid out the folded blankets in the back—his, then hers—their openings facing away. They drank water; they lay down. The sky was still light. The hawk was still circling. One star appeared, then another.

  “I won’t abandon him,” Samuel said suddenly. “I’ll go back.”

  Minna rolled her head slightly, to examine his profile. It was the same as always: straight brow, straight nose, strong chin—tinted blue, in the darkness. The charge in his voice caught her off guard; she was unsure if he was defending himself, or accusing her. He had no right to accuse her of what she hadn’t yet decided herself. Would she return to Max? The question was like a face she couldn’t bring herself to look at. What did she intend, this girl lying so straight next to her stepson that she must look, to the hawk, like a young, blameless, fallen tree? The bread had been stale. Her teeth ached. She had a choice. Which Minna used to think was the same as freedom: given choice, you were free to choose, and then you made—you knew how to make—the right choice. But she was coming to think that there were certain things you could only do if you did not quite know that you were doing them, choices you could make only by pretending you didn’t comprehend them. Her mother, for instance, on the Out Bridge, starting to walk again: her mother must have told herself, I’m only going for a walk.