Oliver grew silent, turning his face to the frosted window as though it were possible to see the landscape beyond, the muscles in his jaw working when Romeo offered the driver a drink. The cabbie was a red-haired Scotsman whose accent was so thick they could barely understand him. You people back there stop breathing, Romeo said with mock severity. Meaning that Oliver and Sara were the cause for the windows frosting up. He turned to offer Oliver the flask, and Oliver took it and put it into his coat pocket. Romeo was about to protest, but Claudette nudged him and he remained silent.
They arrived at Union Plains at noon, sunlight touching all the rooftops of the houses lined up along the few short streets, the red brick school standoffish and solitary-looking on the edge of town. The hotel had been shut down for the day, one of only a few times in its history, a sign in a window announcing that Oliver had gone fishing.
They came to a stop in front of the Vandal house. A freshly shovelled path led to the front door. Smoke poured from a stovepipe at the side of the house, evidence that the fire had been recently fed. Beside the door lay a pile of chopped wood. You can expect that from the people around here, Oliver told Sara as they approached the house, although the gesture had taken him by surprise. He wanted to believe that the good deed was recognition of his new status—a family man.
The walls of the main room streamed with rivulets of condensation that ran through the red stick figures, and Romeo’s pointed silence gave way at the sight of them. Holy cow, he said, being near to sober now.
Sara gasped, her eyes growing wide when she saw the Heintzman parked in the centre of the room.
It’s just a small thing, there’s more where that came from, Oliver was about to say, when he saw the other furniture. A new bedstead and a bureau, set against a wall.
Katy, Sara said, as though she couldn’t believe it. The bed had been made up with plump pillows, and the feather quilt she recognized from her grandmother’s bed. Katy and Kornelius had obviously brought the furniture, had chopped wood, fed the fire. A braided oval mat lay on the floor beside the bed, Annie’s handwork.
Oliver fell silent as he took in the room, a crocheted runner placed on top of the piano, a framed sampler hanging above the bed embroidered in German. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Sara read the sampler first in German and then in English. Little Annie, Katy, she said, her voice filling and almost spilling over.
Years later, Oliver would joke that, like insurance, their second wedding was a necessary evil in the event the first marriage fell apart. The second wedding was held a week after the Roman Catholic affair, and not in the Mennonite church, a square sturdy building built on a farmer’s field miles from nowhere, but in Katy and Kornelius’s parlour.
Sara was impatient for the weddings to be over, impatient to begin arranging the two-room house, just as she was for Annie to be finished with measuring the adjustments to be made to her dress, its hem requiring letting down in the front and easing out at the sides to accommodate the swell of her stomach. The second wedding was necessary; Katy insisted they must be joined together in front of believers, their pledge confirmed publicly and before God.
No guests, Sara said, and was surprised when Annie blushed and said, Some.
A few, Katy admitted. She’d invited several people they knew from the old country. It’s what Papa would have wanted, she said, as a means of stopping discussion.
Katy had been surprised and moved when, weeks earlier, Oliver had come calling to ask for Sara’s hand. Asking Katy and not Kornelius, his manner courtly and shy, his soft dark eyes steady on her face when he said, If Sara will have me, I’d be honoured. By the time he’d reached the end of the lane, she’d resolved to try to do all she could to make him feel welcome in the family.
Look at me, I’m showing, Sara protested. You think I want people staring at me?
That’s nothing to be ashamed of. You listen to me, Sara Vogt, Katy said quietly. In the old country there were girls younger than you. They were taken against their will, and so very brutally. Even so, some of them wouldn’t agree to their babies being cut out from them. A baby is not something to be ashamed of. A baby is a blessing.
Sara couldn’t argue about the baby being a blessing, and so she dropped her objections to the guests. She couldn’t argue against being blessed, although this wasn’t the kind of blessing she desired. This blessing was about to clamp onto her life for good. She was expected to feed it, to teach it how to be a person, to love it more than herself.
On the day of the second wedding, Kornelius arrived to fetch them earlier than expected and caught Oliver in his undershirt. Although his beard was such that he could go two days without shaving, he was less presentable than he’d hoped to be. Sara had melted snow on the stove and sponged his trousers, which were still damp when he put them on, and soon wrinkled. Throughout the journey to the farm Oliver felt a coolness in Kornelius, an unwillingness to meet his eye.
Sara was silent, the motion of the car sending her into Oliver’s side, grateful for his heat and solidity as she recalled the light of another November morning years ago, when she’d gone with her family across the compound of the estate—the last time she would ever be with them—feathers falling from the sky all around, like snow. Her ribs began to ache, and a band of muscles in her abdomen tightened as though to hold the baby more securely against the rocking motion of the car.
She wasn’t expecting to enjoy the second wedding any more than she had the first; neither did she imagine that it would turn out to be a celebration. She entered Katy’s house and was greeted by the sight of spruce garlands looped about parlour windows and the door. There were pans of fruitcakes cooling in the kitchen, bowls piled with sweet buns, platters of meat and cheese spread out on the table in preparation for a wedding meal. Her lips quivered as she took it in, becoming self-conscious as her sisters anxiously looked on.
We’ve invited only a few people, Katy assured Oliver, who, with an unease that was palpable, took in the chairs lined about the parlour walls, cups and saucers on a dining-room sideboard.
To his chagrin, as the guests arrived he noted that he was one of only a few to be wearing a suit and tie. He was introduced to men dressed in everyday kinds of clothing, plaid flannel shirts and twill trousers, the exception being several city dwellers, a man who later told him in broken English that he’d once been a photographer and now was a sheet-metal worker, another man was a grocer, the last, a teacher whose eyes passed across Oliver’s face too quickly to take him in when Sara introduced them. Peter Goosen, a friend from Winnipeg, she said, but the man had already turned to the room and begun to hold forth in German, as he did most of that afternoon, falling silent only when the minister spoke.
Oliver was equally surprised to find that the man of God was clothed the same as the others. He was a farmer turned preacher on Sundays, who’d agreed to marry them providing Oliver would allow Sara and their children to attend his Mennonite church. Oliver readily assented. The priest had elicited a similar promise from Sara.
Midway through the afternoon, Sara and Katy plopped their feet into the first boots they came upon at the back door and left the wedding guests to go to the barn. They half-ran across the barnyard, made awkward by the large footwear. They squatted in the warm and moist air over a gutter full of manure and straw between the horse stalls, their skirts hiked up and buttocks exposed.
Katy had left the barn door partly open for light. A mist of warm air escaped into the outdoors, and through it Sara saw Oliver come out of the house and cross the farmyard. He stopped to look in the direction of the lane leading from the farm to the road.
So, Oliver bought you a piano, Katy said.
Yes, Sara said. I’m not musical, she had protested, when Oliver had forced her to sit beside him on the bench while he attempted to show her the simple fingering of a melody called Chopsticks. They posed for Claudette as she took their picture, and then they went off to the hotel to consume the meal Claudette had taken care to bring in the c
loth bag.
Ja, ja, for sure, it’s nice to have a piano, Katy allowed, although she did not possess one. But usually we wait for such, yes?
Usually we do, Sara agreed. But she and Oliver were not Katy and Kornelius. Oliver was a far more generous man. She inhaled the steam rising from the hot puddle foaming between her feet, noticing again that since she had become pregnant, its odour had changed.
Oliver turned towards the barn, and although Sara knew he couldn’t possibly see her, something passed between them. Just as something had moved between them almost all of that long afternoon. When she went past the doorway of the room where the men visited, she felt his eyes rising, felt his question—what was expected of him? Later, he came to the doorway of the dining room where she sat with the women, transmitting his desire to leave. His presence was like a tap shutting off the flow of conversation. The women’s eyes moved between Oliver and Sara. What did he want and how would he phrase it? How would she respond? All of it would indicate whether or not Oliver was a hard man. Who would wind up wearing the pants in their household? Rumours abounded that Sara Vogt had fallen for someone wild and unpredictable. A handsome man who resembled a Turk. He had got into her blood, a man who was part Indian. When Oliver left the doorway without speaking, Sara knew that the women had decided he was soft, and that some envied her, while others did not.
Oliver had spotted the half-open barn door and looked as though he was going to come investigate. Sara was about to call to him when Kornelius appeared. He quickly bridged the distance between himself and Oliver. The two men spoke briefly and disappeared from view.
Katy crooked her head and peered at Sara in the sepia light of the barn, a shy smile pulling at her mouth. What did she want? What? While the barn was warmer than the privy, its odours held no attraction, nor did the thumping and snorting presence of the large draft animals.
So, little sister, tell me. What do you think about all the fuss that’s made over relations between a man and a woman, eh? Katy spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, as though they were still in the room filled with women, and not shaking their haunches over a gutter to free the last droplets of urine before hitching up their undergarments.
Katy didn’t wait for Sara to reply. In her opinion, she said, intimate relations between a husband and wife weren’t what she had thought they would be. They’re not all that much, she admitted, with a wry bit of laughter.
Sara was startled to silence, recalling the noises behind the curtain of Katy and Kornelius’s room. The gasping and calling out that had left her wondering if sex was painful, only to discover that not having sex was painful. She had a gnawing hunger to be filled with Oliver. To feel him moving inside her, his swelling, just before it was finished. To be lost for moments and then return, thinking that she’d been on a long journey inside of herself. Now that she was expecting, Oliver tried to remember himself. He’d be gentle, until she pulled him into her hard, her heels jammed against his buttocks.
Did Katy really want Sara’s opinion, or did she want Sara to agree and in this way perpetuate the notion of a woman’s tepid desire for sex? In the same way Katy had presided over her children’s growing up, she had presided over Sara’s and Annie’s childhood. She had smelled their breath for signs of illness, watched for evidence of unseemly character traits such as a quick temper, pigheadedness, a need to stretch a story into something larger than it was. Sara had awakened to the presence of Katy hovering over the bed, listening to her breathe. It was an almost impossible feat, a triumph, when Sara managed to conceal the onset of menstruation for close to a year, to become a woman without her sister knowing exactly when.
She decided that Katy hoped for a revelation. For something she might hold up to her own experience.
Oliver’s member is so very large, she said.
Katy’s eyes widened and grew uneasy with a question.
In comparison to Kornelius, Sara said. She realized immediately that Katy wondered how she would know there might be different sizes. Once she’d seen Kornelius after a swim in the dugout pond, she quickly explained. His cut-off trousers had not concealed a thing. He might as well have been naked.
He was likely cold from the water, ja? Katy asked. When Sara appeared not to understand what she meant, Katy burst into laughter. As she rose from her squat, her white thighs gleamed. Even if that’s so, it seems to do the same work, ja?
Oliver followed Kornelius across the farmyard, noticing once again that his legs were short for his body and his gait bow-legged, though he seemed tall and his shoulders and back were muscular. They went towards a small building on a path beaten into the snow. It turned out to be a woodworking shop, tools hanging along one wall, blond curls of wood scattered across a work table that held a plank that appeared to be freshly planed.
Oliver was surprised when Kornelius reached into the rafters and took down a bottle.
Plum brandy, he said, and offered it to Oliver.
Suit yourself, but I don’t take a drink in the afternoon, Oliver replied, believing this was a test to measure his thirst for liquor.
I do, Kornelius said abruptly. He drank, wiped his mouth and put the bottle back. Then he went over to the work table and ran a hand across the smooth plank.
Oliver noted that several fingernails on Kornelius’s hands were blackened with pooling blood, and that reddish blond hair, like fur, covered his knuckles. There weren’t many people Oliver didn’t take to, but this man might be one. He thought of Romeo and his refusal to attend the second wedding. Have you any idea whose land this shed is sitting on? Oliver was about to say, when Kornelius interrupted his thoughts.
You likely don’t know that Sara’s parents were murdered, do you?
When Oliver, stunned, failed to reply, Kornelius continued. Well, you should know, he said bluntly. Sara’s parents, four brothers and a sister. In the aftermath of the tsar’s abdication, near to three thousand Mennonite colonists lost their lives to violence, typhus and illness caused by malnutrition.
The Whites, the Reds, the Greens, Kornelius said, the front sometimes passed through our colonies twice a day, and there was nothing we could do to stop them from pillaging, from going off with our livestock and our young men. The muscles in his neck were taut, and his pulse jumped against his skin. Oliver turned away from the sight, the man’s anger making his own heartbeat rise. He’d heard of the Russian Revolution, the killing of the tsar and his family, but he knew little else.
The worst were the so-called Anarchists, Kornelius said, his voice brittle. That’s what they called themselves. But they were no more than roving bands of criminals, followers of a man called Nestor Makhno. Sometimes they took over our towns and stayed until there was nothing more to ruin or steal. But it was the wealthy Mennonites who were in for it, first. The estate owners, like the man Sara’s father worked for, they were the first to feel the brunt of the peasants’ vengeance.
Oliver’s scalp prickled with dread, and although he wanted to flee, the flat drone of Kornelius’s voice kept him rooted, his eyes going from tool to tool hanging on the wall.
I went to the Sudermann estate to sell the man some horses. I found their bodies strewn about on the ground beside the house, among feathers, Kornelius said.
The quilts, mattresses and pillows had been cut open and emptied from the second-storey windows of the Big House. The Mennonites’ feather bedding was a symbol of all they were perceived to be—privileged interlopers who bought up large tracts of land from Russian noblemen. That the land greened and prospered was another source of envy. Whether or not the Mennonites who employed the peasant people had treated them fairly and with kindness, as Sara’s father had done, or harshly, it didn’t matter. They all received the same treatment.
Kornelius paced about the small shed as he spoke, the story made more powerful by his dispassionate telling of it. Oliver couldn’t know that Kornelius had never told anyone the entire story until now.
Eleven people in all, Kornelius said, his voice wrenc
hed with pain. Seven from Sara’s family. They were axed down, beaten to death or shot when they tried to run away. The estate owner’s head was severed. And the girl, Margareta, Sara’s sister, she was brutally raped, this was very clear.
Oliver turned and saw Kornelius’s screwed-up features, his knuckles gouging at his eyes. My God, Kornelius said, and his chest heaved. Their eyes met, his quickly swerving away. I’ve butchered plenty of animals in my time, but I wasn’t prepared, he said.
Sara’s father wasn’t yet gone. He told me to look in the greenhouse. That was where Kornelius had found Katy and Sara, hiding in a hole their father had dug months earlier, when the lawlessness began. The baby, Annie, was crawling about the floor inside the house amid a rubble of broken glass, her knees and hands cut and bleeding.
Quiet filled the workshop, then a hurl of wind sent snow against the side of the building, the small window—a grainy, threatening sound that quickly receded. Weather drawing attention to itself for a moment.
They should not have been there, Kornelius said, with renewed bitterness. They would have been safer with their grandparents in town. But their father was too good-hearted. He had let himself be persuaded by the estate owner to return to work despite the troubles, in exchange for a small piece of land that he might eventually call his own.
Oliver floundered for appropriate-sounding words. What Kornelius said had happened in another world. Sara had once said that several of her family members had died during the revolution in Russia, but he hadn’t pressed her to say more. His parents were gone, and so were hers. They were both orphans, and that was that. He’d attributed Sara’s unpredictable flare-ups, her need for him, her constant question—Do you love me?—to the difficult business of learning new ways. Not to this.
Once again Kornelius reached for the bottle of brandy, and this time Oliver didn’t refuse. Beyond the window he saw Katy and Sara emerge from the barn, Katy suddenly twirling and swinging her arms in what looked to be a girlish dance. Kornelius came up behind him at the window, both of them watching as a boot went flying off Katy’s foot. She hopped like an awkward child through the snow to retrieve it, while Sara stood looking on, as though impatient with Katy to get over her silliness.
Children of the Day Page 20
