Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “What if I asked you not to go?” He turned and put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes locked on hers, and he tried to burn his feelings into her irises, her corneas, so even if she left, she’d see him, a shadow that stretched over her.

  “I’d say you were asking a lot of me.”

  “But I thought there was something between us…” he groped for words. She had erased his entire vocabulary, and new words had yet to form. “A connection. The way we talk…you’re scared of what you’re feeling.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” She dropped her head, searching for her own. “But I know I want to go to New York and I want to study art history and work in a museum and I’ve always wanted these things and you just can’t sweep into my life, Calvin, and expect me to change everything.”

  “I’m not asking you to change anything. I want to be a part of your life, Kate. I’ll come to New York. I’ll find a job, anything.”

  “Calvin, you need to find your own place.” She smoothed the collar on his shirt. “I don’t want you to follow me. You started going to school before you knew me. You wanted to be an architect, remember? And rebuild all those beautiful churches? I don’t want to be the person who makes you stop that.”

  “If I rebuild anything, it’s going to be with my hands. I’m too dumb to be an architect.” He turned from her. “I’m sorry, Kate. You’re a smart girl, and I hope you’ll do something with your studies and not just wind up getting married to some rich guy.”

  “Calvin, you’re going to do great things with your life.” Kate smiled. “And I’m going to see you do them. It’s just that, right now, I need to go to school.”

  “I understand, Kate. You don’t have to apologize.”

  “You will write me, won’t you? I should love to get letters from you. And I will write you back, I promise.”

  “Sure, okay.” He shrugged. He would go to New York. He would find her and woo her. He did not know what else to do.

  “Oh, wait.” Her hands went to her neck, and when they came together in front of her, they held a medal of Saint Christopher on the chain. “I want you to have this.”

  He took the medal and turned it over.

  “Si en San Cristóbal confías, de accidente no morirás,” he read the inscription. “What does that mean?”

  “It means if you trust St. Christopher, you won’t die in an accident,” she answered. “I want you to be safe in your travels. For when we cross paths again.”

  “You really think we’re going to cross paths again?”

  “Of course,” she smiled. “I’m just going to school. We’re not banished from each other forever, two wandering souls. You have to give it back then.”

  “Why?”

  “It was my brother Stephen’s,” she explained. “He died.”

  “When?”

  “About a year before you came home. Of leukemia. For months, I dreamed that I would die so I could go visit him. I talked to him in those dreams, and I believed for a long time that those conversations were real.”

  “What made you stop dreaming?” Calvin pulled a cigarette out of the Pall Malls on the dashboard and pushed the cellophane pack toward her.

  “Well, it wasn’t real…that kind of stuff,” she shrugged as helither cigarette, then his own. “I mean, when people are dead, they’re dead.”

  “You don’t believe in miracles, or ghosts, or eternal life?”

  “I don’t even believe in God, necessarily,” she answered, exhaling. “Although that is strictly between you and me. My parents thought that sending me to boarding school would teach me how to knit a doily and drink tea and think thoughts becoming to a lady. And they would never have agreed to let me study in New York if they thought I didn’t think those things.”

  “So why are they paying for you to study in New York?”

  “Because I told them I’d join the circus,” she laughed. “I guess I’ve always been a little fragile since Stephen passed away, and I know they want to keep me happy, lest I break down and be hospitalized and become some spinster. Plus, I kind of hinted to them I’d absolutely settle down when I was finished. That I just wanted to be cultured, a good wife. Ohio is terribly isolated, you know, and I could find a good family to marry into in New York rather than stay here and risk being some backwards rube.”

  “Well, you’re a pretty girl; I’m sure you won’t have any trouble.”

  “Oh, geez, you probably think I’ve flipped my wig.” Kate touched his arm. “I never tell anyone things like this, honestly. I just knew…you’d understand. I’ve always known. That first night in class, you felt so out of place, and I’ve felt that way so much in my life. Not that I show it…but I completely understood how, to you, everything here after the war feels kind of phony.”

  “Do you really? Do you really understand anything about the war, about what happened to me?” He turned to face her. He let the chain slide from his hand onto the seat between them before scooping it up. “Now, I’m sorry, Kate—I didn’t mean it like that. Sometimes I’m a little touchy about what happened…in Germany.”

  “Take me home, okay?” She stared through the windshield as the streets put distance between what they were before, what they were to become.

  “Kate, please write.” At her house, he grabbed her arm before she climbed from the truck. “I want you to understand me. And I want to understand you.”

  She picked up the chain between them and studied it before affixing it to Calvin’s neck.

  “I’ll see you in a few months. I promise. Write me back.” She kissed him and leapt out, heading toward the light of the porch before he could respond.

  He did not know if he could wait those few months. He needed something, something that would tie things up, make him feel complete again. He wrote Stanley Polensky a letter at his Baltimore address, and when he did not hear from him he wrote to Green, from their unit. Green thought that Polensky had gone to Montana with some of the others to get jobs at the National Park Service. He remembered the Pole talking about it during the war. He had loved the big ponderosa pines out in the Hürtgen, the smell and look of them, even as Johnson could never imagine them again without thinking of diarrhea, of blood, of bone-hurting cold. But Polensky saw the good in everything, and now that Kate had taken what was left of his heart, Johnson needed a little bit of that goodness. He also needed to tell Stanley a few things—first, that he was his friend and brother. That he would die for him. And that only he would understand the strange tale of the Hürtgen forest. Maybe he, man of medallions and lamps, would know what it all meant, if anyone could.

  1894

  Seasons opened and closed their eyes, batting leaves from trees, crumbling the stones of the bone house, lining the skin of the villagers. Children once her age had their own children, and their own grandchildren, and sometimes their own great-grandchildren. But she did not grow any bigger; her head got no closer to the ceiling of the bone hut, and she needn’t not stoop to enter.

  She picked burnette saxifrage, white, fan-shaped, from the far end of the woods, where she had gone with her mother long ago. They grew in regular grass and not in a circle blackened by the lightning. They did not look as radiant as the one she had hidden in the bone house, that had survived the fire and the ages, nestled in the skeleton hand of Bolek. But she dried them and boiled water and tried to make the tinctures she had made with her mother. She caught rabbits and mice and cut their bellies, their limbs. She buried them in the grave behind the bone house when they bled to death, variations of the tincture lathered over their wounds. She cut herself, jagged lines as wide as her arm, her thigh, and watched the blood drain for a minute before the edges of her skin began to draw together, the blood disappearing. When she awoke, the signs of her mutilation had dispersed like the morning fog, her skin shiny and taut in the sun.

  “Do you think I should try a little more Chaga mushroom?” She asked her lalka, the raven-haired one her mother had given her, as she boiled potatoes to make vodka. It w
as named Barbara. “A little less amber?”

  Barbara never spoke; her face, depending on the light through the roof or Ela’s emotional weather, revealed a wry smile, a cooing sympathy. Sometimes at night it seemed to leer at her; others, she seemed remote, her eyes, her smile, reserved for someone or something else. Those days, Barbara wound up across the room, her legs flailing in the air, her face on the stone floor her own mother had made years before, pressing the largest and flattest rocks she’d found into the earth.

  “What do you think of the little girl down the hill?” She tossed a potato, eyed and hard, in the air while looking out the entrance of the bone house. Several years ago, a family built a small stone-and-wood cottage down the hill and tried to farm rye. Most of the lots had been parceled and halved and quartered over the years, and those peasants who were not so lucky tried with little luck on the rocky, nutrient-less land in the widening perimeter of miles outside Reszel. The father had left several months before, and the expressions on the mother and daughter’s faces had gradually changed, like the slow but irrevocable wear on a rock formation, from hopeful pride and excitement to confusion to the beginning dampness of despair, before the deluge. The broken, the hopeful, were the most desperate. The loneliest. The little girl became aware of Ela. Ela caught her staring up at the bone house from the valley below. “Do you think she likes us?”

  Barbara smiled affirmatively from the bed, where she lay next to the blonde-haired lalka. This one had no name, no story. It merely smiled and backed up Barbara.

  “I will wait a little longer.” Ela came back to the boiling pot and dropped the potato in it. “We must let her come to us.”

  “You’re not a witch.” A month later, the little girl stood by the opening of the bone house. “My matka says, when they burned the witch, they burned her daughter, too.”

  “I am not a witch,” Ela agreed. She had seen the girl’s mother often in the village, while buying cabbage and oxen bone, things the villagers gave to her for free, along with milk and honey and lamb’s meat, if she promised to stay away, not to bewitch them.

  “I think you are lying.” The girl half-skipped around the bone house, her curiosity buoying her bravery. She had played a little closer to the bone house each day, throwing rocks up the hill and drawing pictures in the loose hillside with sticks, returning home when her mother called her back. “She said a witch lived in the bone house, that I shouldn’t come here. Are you a Baba Yaga?”

  Ela smiled. The girl, four or five, was too young to be scared of her, to understand the things she represented, by her continued vitality, to the older villagers—death, brittle bones, tepid health. But these things were natural and did not have their source in Ela. They were a conclusion to a story, an end to a beginning, a night to morning. Things Ela could only dream of.

  “I have a lalka.” Ela cut to the fat of the girl’s heart. “Would you like to see her?”

  “Are you sure you’re not a Baba Yaga?” The girl stared at the doll resting in Ela’s arms. Ela imagined the girl had been told stories about Baba Yagas, witches who turned themselves into young, beautiful princesses and lured men to their huts. They lured children, too, and ate them, packing the bones in the mud and stone of their houses. She had heard such stories herself from her own mother. But the promise of a doll, to love and hold even for a few minutes, to a girl who wrapped cloth and hay around sticks and pretended to nurse them, would be too tempting, Ela figured. She had all the time in the world to find out.

  “I’d better not.” The girl moved her right foot backward toward the hill, then her left. Then her right again.

  “What’s your name?” Ela asked. She brought the doll to her cheek. “I’m Ela.”

  The girl retreated farther, feeling for the incline of the hill with her feet.

  “Come back tomorrow.” Ela smiled still. “Maybe I will find you your own lalka.”

  She left the lalka, the second one, blonde and almost as new as when her mother had bought it, by the clothesline of the girl’s little stone cottage. From the hill, she watched the girl’s mother come out and beat a quilt that hung from a rope tied between the cottage and a tree. It was hard not to see, a heap of white and gold, like a fallen angel, at the base of the hill. She could make out legs and arms and fingers. And the little girl who peered out the window at it could see them, too.

  If the girl’s matka glanced to her right, she would see it. But like most of the villagers, who traded with her for tinctures, always giving her, out of fear, more for them that she’d asked, she knew the girl’s mother would ignore her, pretend she did not exist, and if all else failed, bargain to keep Ela from cursing or bedeviling her.

  Ela never saw her look, but when she finished beating the quilt, she walked over to the hill, picked up the doll, and threw it back toward the bone house as hard as she could. The girl’s eyes followed its trajectory before they disappeared into the darkness of the cottage.

  The moon sat high, the sky purple, full of hot breath. Ela rested at the top of the hill, feeling the faint breeze pull the strands of hair from her wet forehead. With surprise, she watched the little girl steal from the cottage and scramble up the hill, her eyes greedy and shiny, full of doll cheeks and hearts.

  “You came.” Ela’s shoulders went up; she smiled. “Come.”

  The girl’s eyes went toward the bone house, and her mouth opened, hungry for the doll, but Ela took her hand. Together, they entered the edge of the forest.

  “Do you hear the wood owl at night?” Ela asked, and the girl nodded, afraid to breathe. “I will show you where he lives.”

  They wound through the dark trunks and thick undergrowth. The girl became less scared. The crickets talked to the frogs, who talked to the owl. They were as busy as the village on trading day, when the girl and her mother took their cattails and milk and other meager crops and tried to get for them a few cups of flour, a bowl of oxen tail.

  “See, you are not as alone at night as you think,” Ela smiled. “There is always someone awake.”

  “Where is your matka?” The girl asked, and Ela did not answer. She bowed her head so low the girl held out her hand, afraid she would trip on a stone or a root. What was at first affected, a ploy to fool the little girl, became real as grief poured from a spot above her and filled the bend in her neck, her eyes. She was talking to an actual person, albeit a girl, who did not think she was going to kill her. She realized she missed simple things, the sound of a voice in response, even a word, yes, no. A nod. The pressure, a light itch, from the fingers.

  In fact, the girl seemed to pity her. She squeezed Ela’s hand reassuringly. “I bet you could live with me and my matka. My name is Safine.”

  “That’s okay, Safine; no one wants me to live with them.” Ela shook her head, wiping her eyes. “My mother died. I have been alone for a long, long time. I am so lonely for company, but the villagers think I am a witch. They do not understand why I grow no bigger.”

  “I am big for my age, my matka says. Maybe you are small for yours?”

  “No.” Ela patted her shoulder. “I will tell you sometime. Tonight, let me enjoy the fact that I finally have company.”

  Every night, Safine stole away and saw Ela. Sometimes, they walked in the woods; other times, they lay on the grass in the moonlight, talking softly. Safine told her that she and her mother hoped to go to America soon to be reunited with their Ojciec, who had sailed months before to get work in a city called Baltimore. To work in the factories, Safine explained vaguely. To make us rich, she said surely. They were not able to harvest a big enough crop of rye on their land in Reszel; there was no other choice.

  One night, they even went inside the bone house. To a stranger, Ela supposed, it was small and dark and smelled sourly of herbs and vodka, but her quilts were soft and warm, full of colorful swaths she had gotten from the women in the village who by turns pitied and feared her. Ela watched Safine’s eyes sweep the house, looking for the angel-haired, nameless lalka, bite her
tongue not to ask about it.

  But Ela sensed her disappointment, and the next night, when Safine went to the hill, Ela waited, a doll in each arm. She held out the blonde doll, but Safine did not take it right away.

  “Where did you get such beautiful lalkas?” She asked. Her eyes said it all; it seemed too good to be true, something Matka had always warned her against. Only a Baba Yaya, Safine’s cloaked eyes reasoned, could produce such beautiful dolls.

  “My matka gave me them.” Ela’s arm dropped back to her body, the blonde lalka’s hair swinging toward the ground. “I have been waiting so long for a friend to play dolls with.”

  Ela pulled the wooden horse from under the bed and opened the secret compartment, revealing the herb. Despite its crumbled brown leaves, she felt a charge move down her fingers and into the air as she fondled it. She did not know why Safine would be the one; perhaps time and loneliness had left her impatient, careless. There would not be another opportunity. She breathed deeply and looked at her.

  “If you want the lalka, it’s yours,” Ela explained. With one hand she held up the lalka, and the other the burnette saxifrage. “But you must eat this herb. It will make you stay young and beautiful. Your hands will not curl like your matka’s; your face will not line, and your lips scowl. You will experience a long, prosperous life.”

  “Tomorrow night, may I take it?” Safine answered, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “I do not feel so well tonight.”

  “Do not fear this.” Ela put her hands on Safine’s shoulders and sought out her eyes. “I would never harm you.”

  “I know.” Safine nodded, and bent over so Ela would not see the quiver of her lip. “But I must get home tonight because I feel very tired. I shall take it tomorrow, when I feel better. I promise.”

  “Please, trust me.” Ela smiled. She drew the lalka and herb behind her back, out of sight. “It’s all right.”

  “Why do you not grow any bigger?” Safine looked up at Ela the next night, sitting in the tree next to their cottage. She swung her bare feet in the air, not meeting her eyes. Safine hit the bark of the tree with her hand. “How does the herb work? You must tell me, or I cannot be your friend.”