Under This Unbroken Sky

by Shandi Mitchell

  Teodor feels every bump and bruise. He feels his hands dry and crack, not from the sun, but from the dirt leaching the water from his skin. Dust to dust. Blisters harden into thick calluses, robbing his fingers of sensation. He no longer feels how hot the soup is in a cup. He can’t feel the softness of Maria’s skin, only his own roughness against her body. He feels the sun blaze into his neck, face, and forearms, his skin on fire, shocking him with pain at the slightest touch. His skin bubbles, peels, and itches, then finally turns a deep, rich brown, as if he has taken on the color of the earth.

  At midday, Ivan and Petro can be seen running toward them. Two small dark flecks far in the distance. Dancing in the heat waves, growing into flailing arms and legs, until finally arriving with lunch in hand. Ivan always wins the race to his father. Myron unhitches the horse and lets it graze. The men eat cold pyrohy and flatbread with lard and the last of the chokecherry jam, while the boys walk up and down the fresh furrows collecting worms, round stones, the occasional bone, and, once, an Indian arrowhead.

  Petro found the arrowhead. Ivan took it from him. Petro grabbed for it and then the boys were tumbling and rolling in the dust. When Petro started to cry and blood was dripping from Ivan’s nose, Teodor separated them by the scruff of the neck, took the arrowhead from Ivan’s clutched hand, and, in one smooth, swift movement, hurled it far into the bush. He didn’t say a word to the boys, just told Myron to hitch up the horse and slipped into the plow’s harness.

  The two boys watched the work start up again; his father didn’t say, Dopobachenia—until we see each other again. Ivan felt the urge to cry but punched Petro in the arm instead and raced home, not caring whether his cousin caught up.

  The first day, Teodor plows eighty feet. An acre is roughly two hundred and eight feet by two hundred and eight feet. It takes him four days to reach the end of the first row. When he finally pulls the plow around and starts the next furrow, Myron is ten rows ahead of him, clearing the rocks and roots. Two hundred and seven more turns to make. Teodor counts his steps as he did in prison, measuring down the distance. Myron only counts the turns. At the eightieth turn, Teodor begins closing the gap. By the one hundred and tenth turn, Myron is once again scrambling to stay ahead of his father. By the one hundred and fiftieth turn, they are working in syncopated pace. Two men and a horse crossing back and forth with the precision of a pendulum.

  When the day finally loses light, Teodor and Myron stumble home, unable to talk, their bodies one numb ache. They arrive blackened with the earth’s body. Her dirt ground so deep into their skin that only the whites of their eyes announce their arrival. They scrub her dust from their bodies outside at the metal tub that Maria fills with hot water as the sun sets. After the first plunge of their hands, the water mires into mud. It doesn’t matter how much they scrub, the dirt never releases itself from their pores. It clings under their nails, obliterates their fingerprints, and burrows deep into their ears. It cries from their tear ducts. When they blow their noses, white handkerchiefs turn black.

  Before Teodor collapses into bed, he pulls a chair outside for one last cigarette and to clean his boots. The boots have cracked and stretched from the sloughs of mud. Nicks and scuffs mar the surface. One shoelace has broken. The leather has molded to the shape of his feet like an ancient skin. Despite the grueling work, his boots have never inflicted any pain: not a blister, not a pinch, not even a chafe. They are good boots.

  With his penknife, he scrapes off the chunks of caked dirt from the soles, then uses an old horse brush to vigorously scrub the edges and stitching before carefully fishing out the dirt plugging the eyelets. He rubs them down with a scrap of burlap, wiping away the residue of dust. Then he greases them with dubbin, rubbing the fat deep into the leather until the skin glows. He laces the boots back up, straightens out the tongues, and finally sets them beside the stove to dry. He always faces the toes toward the door. Only then can he let himself sleep.

  That spring, Teodor and Myron break six acres.

  SUMMER

  BILYI BORSHCH (WHITE BORSHCH)

  3–4 beets with tops

  1 carrot, thinly sliced

  1 celery stalk, chopped

  7 cups chicken broth, vegetable stock, or water

  4 fresh mushrooms

  2 tablespoons lard or chicken fat

  2 medium onions, chopped

  2 cloves garlic (crushed)

  2 tablespoons flour

  2 cups shredded cabbage

  1 tablespoon fresh parsley

  2 tablespoons fresh chopped dill

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 cup buttermilk

  1 cup sour cream

  2 small new potatoes per person

  Peel and shred vegetables. Wash beets and tops well, then shred beets and chop greens. Place beets, carrot, and celery in large pot with 4 cups broth. Boil until soft. Wipe mushrooms with a damp towel, slice thin and cook in lard. Add onion and garlic to mushrooms. Stir in flour to make a paste, add a little broth, bring to a boil, then add to soup. Add cabbage, parsley, dill, salt, and remaining stock. Simmer until vegetables are soft. Mix buttermilk and sour cream, add to soup. Do not boil; the borshch may curdle. Taste. Sprinkle with dill and garlic mashed with salt. Cook and serve potatoes separately.

  1

  THE FIRST MEAL FROM THE GARDEN IS ON TUESDAY, June 14. Maria is up at five. The fire is stoked and hot before Teodor and Myron leave for the fields. The door of the shack is opened wide to vent the heat. Ivan, Petro, and Katya are told to stay outside and after their chores are free to play. They are given strict orders to be back at least an hour before supper so they can wash up and dress for the meal. The children are certain it isn’t a holiday but feel they need to be on their best behavior just in case. Once their chores are finished, they stay close to home, spying on the activities. Dania and Sofia are recruited for kitchen staff.

  Anna and Lesya are next door preparing the house for guests. The house hasn’t been cleaned in six months, but Anna insists that everyone sit at her table tonight. She now frenziedly attacks the corners, walls, and shelves. Bedding and clothing are hung outside to air. The straw mattresses are shoved through the doorway and beaten with a willow stick, fluffed and shaken, before being hauled back inside. The table, chairs, and stove are scrubbed. Every plate, mug, spoon, and knife washed. The window wiped. The floor swept.

  Lesya, who can’t remember her mama ever cleaning, hops around the house feeling such joy she thinks her heart might burst. In the last few weeks, Anna hasn’t been staying in bed all day. She gets up early and walks the properties, skirting the bush, her eyes scanning the ground as though she is looking for something. Sometimes she disappears into the bush and Lesya’s stomach gets tight, but she always returns. Often her path takes her along the low stone wall where she sits watching the woods. When she returns from these walks, her eyes are bright and she seems happy.

  Anna opens the pine trunk and extracts an embroidered tablecloth and the porcelain pitcher adorned with painted roses—Anna’s own mother’s pitcher—and entrusts Lesya to carry it to the table. Lesya clutches it to her chest as if holding her own beating heart and tries to walk tall and gracefully with hardly a limp, so her mother will see there is nothing wrong with her after all.

  Petro hides his excitement, plays the game, knowing the surprise. He knows what great event is upon them. He knows his father must be coming home.

  MARIA HAS PLANNED THE MENU: WHITE BORSHCH, THE last jar of jellied chicken, three potatoes per person, a pickled cabbage salad, and, for dessert, halushky with wild strawberries and syrup. By noon, the temperature outside is seventy-three degrees; inside the shack is at least ten degrees warmer.

  The morning is set aside for making the dumplings. The flour is sifted with the last few precious grains of salt. Dania stirs as Maria adds milk and water to create a light dough. Maria forms the soft elastic mixture into a ball and covers it to rise. Sofia returns with a pail of wild strawberries. Taking her mother’s warning seri
ously, she has guiltily only eaten half a dozen in the field. When she finishes hulling them, Maria sprinkles them with sugar. Sofia covertly dips her finger into the bowl, stealing a taste of the precious sweetness. The risen dough is placed on the floured table, cut in half and rolled into a rectangle. Then, using a small Mason jar as a cookie cutter, Maria carefully punches out round disks.

  Dania heats the sugared strawberries on the stove, her fingertips light on the wooden spoon: to sense the thickening sauce. Maria supervises the final consistency and pulls them just as they begin to boil. Once cooled, she drops dollops of fruit in the center of the cutouts and shapes them into balls. The girls plop the halushky into rolling water, ten at a time, and wait for them to float back to the top, perfectly cooked. Maria sets them on her best plate. She sacrifices one halushka to be sampled between the three, then sets the plate on the highest shelf to prevent temptation.

  By midday, Maria is in the garden selecting vegetables. Sofia and Dania follow behind, ready to carry the prized bounty. Each vegetable has its own distinctive greenery, still pert and fresh from the early summer rains, vibrant from the rich feed, not yet battered and bruised by summer storms. The rows contain successive generations, each a few weeks older than the next. Small plants, just learning to stand, look up to the larger ones whose stems and leaves are already maturing. Some burst with blossoms, others fan luxuriantly, others climb trellises twisting and spiraling around themselves, some sprawl lazily, basking in the sun.

  Maria pulls the carrot first. She feels along the base of the tops, gauging the thickness of the root below. Finding the right one, she wraps her fingers around the greens and gently tugs. The earth loosens its hold and out comes a straight, vivid orange root startling against the brown earth. Still young, it barely spans her palm. Not a single insect mark tarnishes its beauty. She brings the carrot to her nose and inhales the newborn scent. She fights the urge to take a bite, swallows down the saliva that fills her mouth. She hands the carrot to Dania and proceeds down the row. She checks the ingredients off in her head. As she plucks each one from the earth, she whispers, “Diakuiu.”

  Back in the kitchen, the girls are restricted to peeling and shredding duties. Maria is in charge of the borshch. She adds the vegetables to the simmering chicken stock, monitors them so they won’t become too soft, lifts them from the heat if the fire is too hot. She fries the mushrooms Dania gathered down by the well, adds just enough flour to create a paste but not so much that it would mask their delicate taste. She spoons the mushrooms into the borshch. The most crucial part is adding the buttermilk and sour cream. The girls gather around as Maria drops in thick dollops. The fire, now a low glow, emits a gentle heat. The cream smooths and blends beautifully into the stock.

  Maria adds another clove of garlic and a last pinch of salt. Only then does she feel the wetness of her dress clinging to her body, her hair limp around her face, the crick in her back and the ache in her legs. She wonders if her face is as flushed as her daughters’ faces. She fills the spoon with the rich broth, blows on it, and holds it out to Dania, who takes a sip, then to Sofia, who does the same, and then Maria brings it to her own lips. She holds the broth in her mouth, assessing the complexity of the flavors before swallowing. Her tongue runs across her lips. She looks to her girls and nods, and they nod back.

  JUST BEFORE HER GUESTS ARRIVE, ANNA DRESSES. LESYA tightens Anna’s corset. “Tighter,” she says. Lesya pulls the strings more but can see they are already cutting into her mother’s flesh. “Tighter.” Lesya wraps the strings around her fists and pulls. Anna exhales as the corset constricts around her belly and cuts into her ribs. “Tighter,” she gasps and Lesya pulls harder. Anna presses her hand to her flattened belly. “Enough.”

  ANNA MEETS HER GUESTS AT THE DOOR, LIKE A LADY. She ushers the family to the table. Maria is relieved to see the room tidy and clean. Even the window has been washed. She notices that every trace of Stefan has been removed. Anna looks radiant as she caters to her brother, insisting that he sit at the head of the table. She keeps up a constant chatter, making everyone laugh, until they have eased into the comfortable role of guests.

  The two families sit around Anna’s table dressed in their best clothes, hair combed, fingernails scrubbed, blooming wolf willow in a Mason jar vase, the delicate porcelain pitcher glistening with condensation, and the table laden with glorious food—they could be mistaken for a well-to-do English family. Anna squeezes Teodor’s hand: “This is for you.”

  Maria bows her head. The children follow, placing their hands together in prayer. “Dorohyi Bozhe…” Maria gives thanks and asks that her family, both her families, be watched over and protected, and given the strength and courage needed to build this new life. She asks for this food to be blessed, and for the garden to be blessed, and the cow and the horse and the fields and this house.

  Teodor and Anna do not bow their heads. Teodor stares at the heaping bowl of steaming potatoes. Anna watches a fat housefly traverse the lip of her mother’s pitcher. She leans into the corset rib digging into her side. Petro squeezes his eyes tight, expecting his father to be there when he opens them. The others give themselves to the intoxicating aromas. Maria says, “Amin’.” The children echo, “Amen.”

  She looks at the faces hungrily turned to her and says, “Ïzhte.” A swarm of hands descend on the offerings. She notices that Petro’s eyes are still closed.

  2

  THE FAMILY WAKES AT SIX TO READY THEMSELVES for their Sunday church pilgrimage. Freshly laundered clothes, laid out the night before, are donned. Shoes are polished and hair is washed. The youngest are given baths. The oldest sponge themselves behind the privacy of the burlap screen. A tentative knock at six-thirty announces the arrival of Lesya and Petro. Myron helps the smaller boys grease back their cowlicks. Katya’s unruly curls are braided and coiled. Sofia covertly dabs wild rose petal water, a concoction she brewed in a liniment bottle, behind her ears.

  Myron squeezes into his only dress shirt. It binds across his chest and shoulders, broadened from weeks of fieldwork. His fingers fumble with the tiny collar button and he grimaces as it tightens around his throat. If it wasn’t for Irene, who sits in the second pew to the right of the altar, whose bare ankle Myron glimpsed when she knelt to pray six Sundays past, he would have found an excuse to stay home with his father. He squeezes the button through the hole and it snaps off. The curse that spits past his lips is greeted by a swipe across the ear by Maria, who blames Teodor for these new words. Dania offers to sew it back on and retreats to a corner, grateful for the reprieve from the eight other bodies tripping over one another in the shack’s confines.

  Ivan’s rump is smacked once for kneeling in his clean pants on the dirt floor to retrieve a daddy-long-legs scurrying under the bed. Assigned to sit on the bed and not move, he sidles off when the spider reappears and grinds it into the floor with his recently polished shoes. When he insists that he is still hungry, Maria makes him remove his shirt and drapes a towel over his lap while he eats another half-bowl of oatmeal. She makes Petro wash behind his ears again, though he claims he already did, and gives him a pair of Ivan’s suspenders to hold up his droopy trousers. Noticing Lesya’s bare legs, she orders Sofia to loan her a pair of her stockings. Sofia selects her oldest pair, not ever wanting them returned.

  Dania wears one of Maria’s dowry sorochky, a straight cotton chemise with traditional embroidered red motifs on the sleeves, the front, and along the bottom hem. She doesn’t care that it is too large in the waist and bosom. Its shapeless form gives her comfort in its anonymity.

  Despite the season, Sofia dons a black skirt and white sweater trimmed with a rabbit fur collar given to her by her classmate Ruth, whose father owns the bank. Her parents consider themselves tolerant Christians and they look for opportunities to teach their only child lessons of charity and compassion. They proudly watched as Ruth passed the bundle to Sofia, who was asked to wait on the back porch. Sofia darned the hole at the right shoulder as best she c
ould, and if her hair hangs just right, no one can notice it. The stain on the skirt isn’t obvious either, so long as she stretches the sweater past her hips.

  When Sofia pulls back the burlap curtain and makes her entrance, Lesya gasps at her beauty. Maria gasps too, at the sight of the too-tight sweater hugging her daughter’s budding breasts, and makes her change into something more respectable. Ignoring Sofia’s sobs, Maria selects the blouse with roses embroidered down the arms, which she made for her three Christmases ago. It took seven weeks of hand-stitching, squinting beside the kerosene lamp after the children had gone to bed, to complete. The strain on her eyes gave her headaches and the precision of the stitches cramped her fingers. Sofia’s protests that the blouse is too small and none of the other girls wear blouses like this are silenced when Maria questions the appropriateness of the skirt’s length and whether the shoe’s small heel, also a charitable present one size too large, is too high. Teodor intervenes and Sofia decides half a stylish wardrobe is better than none.

  Katya’s dress is one of Sofia’s castoffs and hangs almost to her ankles. Maria tucks in the waist and adds a ribbon to cinch in the extra material, but the shoulders and collar still droop over her small frame. No matter how much she feeds this child, she doesn’t gain weight. Maria pushes away the pang of guilt and promises to add more cream to Katya’s oatmeal in the morning. As she takes in the seams, Katya refuses to put down the limp bouquet of daisies, milkweed, blazing prairie fire, brown-eyed Susans, and wild oats she has collected for the baby Jesus.