Widow Sullivan came and drove her small buggy by herself, holding the reins with her aged and gnarled hands. The Muellers attended with their brood of children and grandchildren. So many Muellers joined the Kisers at the church that a stranger would mistakenly think them quite fortunate in friends. Old man Stevens and Bernice were there, childless and holding each other’s cracked hands. The Mortons were there as well, Frank’s customary cowboy hat left at home and his thick hair combed neatly behind his ears. Between the Mortons and the Muellers the Kisers formed a wedge, and the eyes of one family did not meet those of the other. And when the tiny babies were finally blessed with humble words, they were brought back to the Kiser farm to be buried beneath the apple tree.
The mourners gathered in the Kisers’ dining room, ate the food brought by the neighbors and spoke idly about the cold and lamented about the harsh winter expected.
But Eveline couldn’t feel. As the chatter rose and fell, words exchanged, she couldn’t feel any of it. Her fingers held the silver serving spoon as she scooped corn onto a plate and yet the silver did not seem to exist against her skin.
Frank Morton approached, put his hand lightly against her forearm, and this she felt. In fact, the heat was such a contrast from the numbness that she withdrew her arm quickly, as if she had been burned. She rubbed the spot absently.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Lily would still be happy to help you out with the house. Don’t need to pay her. She’d be happy to do it.”
Eveline folded her arms at her waist and acknowledged Frank’s offer. “I’d like that very much. Lily is welcome anytime.” At that moment, she wanted him to wrap his arms around her, press her head against his broad chest and stroke her back. She wanted him to tell her about the time he visited Holland, wanted him to paint a picture that would bring happier memories, wanted his touch to spread fire to the parts that had grown dead.
Instead, Frank turned to the woman who approached meekly from behind. “I know this isn’t the best time for introductions, but I want you to meet my wife, Claire.” He put his hand on the woman’s slight back and nudged her forward.
The woman rattled slightly with nerves. “I-I-I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kiser.”
The words fell hollow and empty upon her ears and Eveline hated her. Claire was weak and shy and didn’t deserve the man at her side, Eveline thought. “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Morton,” she answered coldly. “We’re glad to have you.”
That evening, the neighbors left one by one save for Lily and Claire. Lily tucked in Will and Edgar upstairs. Wilhelm talked to Heinrich Mueller outside. Andrew was nowhere to be found.
Claire worked in the kitchen cleaning off plates and wrapping up the leftover meats and casseroles, her movements quieter than a mouse.
Eveline was exhausted, stuck in sludge, wanted the woman to leave. “No need for you to stay, Mrs. Morton.” Her skin prickled just being near her. “Wilhelm will drive you home.”
“No, I’ll stay,” she stated plainly. “And please, call me Claire.”
The woman invaded Eveline’s space, her kitchen, irritated like ants on the skin.
Claire bustled for activity, twisted her hands. “I’ll make us some tea,” Claire offered, her voice high and nervous. She filled the teakettle and set it upon the iron stove, her movements jittery.
Eveline followed the woman’s figure as she went through her cupboards and found the tea, sugar and cups. Eveline’s back twitched, her shoulders hunching around her ears. Just leave. The woman placed the hot tea in front of her.
Claire pulled up a chair and stirred her own cup, her eyes hypnotized by the circling spoon.
Drink your damn tea and leave me in peace. A gnawing grated inside, the animosity making her sweat. The kitchen and Frank’s wife trapped and stoked her.
Claire took a reserved sip of her hot drink, then rested the cup on her lap. “Seeing y-y-young ones—” She stopped, pursed her lips as she tried to tame her tongue. She began again, slowly this time. “Seeing young ones dying just isn’t right.” Her eyes flitted back and forth in their sockets as if she were reading a sad story in the newspaper.
The heat pulsed through Eveline’s neck. How dare you. She balled her fists, thought she might overturn the table just to get away from the woman and her empty words of condolence.
“Thank you for your sentiments, but I don’t especially feel like talking, Claire. Been a long day, as you can imagine. Besides, mothers lose their babies every day. It’s God’s will.” There was a jab in the tone, a stab at a God who had done nothing to protect her children. She put the hot tea to her lips gently even as her fingers squeezed the handle so hard, the cup nearly broke into shattered chunks.
Gently, Claire removed the tea from Eveline’s hands and put it down on the table. “You haven’t buried those babies yet.” The voice was nearly mute, but Eveline heard every word.
She wanted to spit at the face, at the eyes that hung with pity. “I just buried them,” she hissed. She wanted her tea back to hold, to keep her hands busy. “You were there.”
“They’re not buried.” Claire winced, shook her head long and low. “Not yet. Not until you’ve grieved for them.”
Things were rising from inside and it made her mad. So mad she wanted to kick over the chair, so mad she wanted to push Claire off her chair. So mad she wanted to bite someone, put her teeth into skin and pull like a rabid dog. The fury burned her face and she wanted to scream loud enough to break the windows. “I don’t need to cry or grieve for those babies,” she sneered. “You know why?” Her body shook in convulsions and she couldn’t think straight, let the words tumble out unconfined. “Because I was glad when they were gone! So, don’t preach to me about grieving over babies I never felt love for from the start.” The sobs broke and she snorted hot air from her nose.
Eveline stormed up, wanted to rip the woman’s hair out by the roots, call her a simpleminded idiot. “I did everything I could to make them drink and be healthy and they wouldn’t do it. They cried all the time. They were so weak and I knew I was losing them! I knew it!” She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe and she gasped for air. “Do you know what it’s like to hold your infants in your arms every waking minute knowing they are fading away? Do you have any idea what that feels like?” she accused roughly.
“Yes.” Claire’s eyes were wide with compassion, glistened with tears. “I do.”
Eveline’s crying slowed and her body dulled. She wrinkled the folds of her dress in her hands. She looked up at the woman’s face and saw it for the first time. And in Claire Morton she saw the mirror of her own grief, and it nearly knocked the wind from her lungs.
“I miss them,” Eveline gasped. Claire nodded, a lone tear dripping down her cheek and under her jaw. “Miss them so much it feels like I don’t have skin, that everything’s just open and raw.”
“I know.”
And the women sat at the table in the tired, creaking house. The tea grew cold in their silence even as a warmth, thick as an embrace, joined them as one.
* * *
Andrew didn’t turn his lamp on, just sat blanketed in the dark of his room. The house was noiseless, but he could still hear the distant, echoed cries of the babies, as if they lay embedded within the grains of the old clapboard.
He should have known better than to let the cows graze in the forest. The sickness could have killed them all. He thought of Edgar and Will, thought of what would have happened if all the cows had been poisoned; thought of the sure fate of his cousins had they been allowed to drink the same milk as their baby brothers. He pressed his stomach, thought of the little boys who galloped like horses and laughed to tears with his tickles, imagined them buried next to the twins, and he was cold and numb to his feet.
Andrew remembered carrying the twins back to the house the night Eveline had left them in the fields. They had nearly slipped from his arm and yet they did slip. And here he sat, in the dark, a body broken, unable to help anyone
, unable to save a life. His father. The twins. In the end, they all slipped away.
A knock tapped softly on his door but didn’t register between the tortured thoughts. Andrew heard the sound as one hears the wind shudder through the panes of a window or a bat flap in the attic crevices.
The door creaked and Lily entered, closed it behind her. His back was turned, but he knew it was she, felt the woman’s presence as water feels the ripples of a dropped stone.
She stepped across the floorboards toward him and the currents grew as if his senses only tuned to that soundless movement. The bed creaked and lowered as Lily sat next to him. Her body was the only substance alive. This woman. Everything else was dead and black and dismal. Yet her form, her form alone, pulsed while every other stagnated—a green leaf in a lifeless and burned forest.
Andrew heard her swallow, but she didn’t speak. But she breathed, and the life was enough—enough to know that one bit of the world was still alive. She turned to him, only a vibration of change. And then her head leaned on his shoulder. He closed his eyes.
He loved her then. Beneath the grief, he loved her—the softness of the hair at his neck and under his jaw, the scent of her skin, a scent of the mingling of nature and flesh, of wind and air and life. Lily seeped into his bones, flowed into his blood. And he loved her. The warmth of her skin did not stop at his neck but spread across his flesh and deep into his marrow.
But Andrew did not want to love this woman. It was not a love from Cupid’s most tender arrow, but a thrusting spear. Lily would be another cut, another scar, another part of him that would not last—another piece that would slip from his floundering grip. She would enter his life, make him love her, and then she would disappear and the pain would be worse. He could not grieve again.
Andrew turned, let her hair tickle over his cheek. He opened his mouth to tell her to leave, but instead his lips grazed her temple, warm skin against the thin line between his lips. Her face rose and his closed kiss slid across her forehead to her sealed eyes and down her nose. In the quiet, her neck leaned back and her lips met his, traced the shape of each other, as the blind run fingers over Braille, until their lips parted and fell into the pattern of their kiss. And Andrew pulled from this kiss even as he fell into its depth; he loved her even as he cursed the longing and desire. He ran from her even as his hand slid up her back and etched the angles of her shoulder blades.
He didn’t want to love her.
Their lips were slow and tender, wrapped into the silence, and filled the cold room with warmth that tingled across each nerve. Lily slowly broke the kiss, pressed her forehead against his.
He didn’t want to love her.
She met his downcast eyes and slowly, tenderly, pulled his head to her neck and hugged him tightly until he wept.
CHAPTER 27
The mighty black steam engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad strained unnaturally when placed in reverse. Pistons worked on overdrive, the wheels grinding like gritted teeth as the beast forced backwards for shunting, coupling or switching tracks. And the men of the train would watch from the window as a world dripped by in withdrawal, listen to the engine moan and struggle. All the while, the smooth rails in front stretched endlessly, beaconed for full steam and speed.
Since the day of Andrew’s accident, Wilhelm’s life had skulked in retreat and he had swallowed it all. For a man must swallow many things. In fact, it is not the strength of his muscle or the reserve of his power but his ability to swallow that which is distasteful to him without making a face that truly makes him a man.
So much in a man’s world must be swallowed and endured. An overcooked and gristly piece of stew meat must be chewed to keep the wife from throwing a skillet at his head. Tears of grief over dying sons must be gulped and accepted as fate. And through life, a man gets quite good at swallowing until the throat stops moving and he chokes to death.
The rancid sighs of the old house unsettled Wilhelm, and when he couldn’t fight his way back to sleep he rose and dressed in the shadows. On the small nightstand next to the bed was the toy train that Pieter Mueller had crafted for Edgar. The former brakeman of the Pennsylvania Railroad smelled the pine, still fresh and the color of cream. He inspected the train, a relic that would be played with and then set upon a table to be forgotten. The railroad had been him—Wilhelm Kiser. The hefty brake housed in the caboose, his arm—an extension of his body and all he had worked for. Now he was as wooden and lifeless as this toy.
Wilhelm Kiser was born and raised a farmer—a few years in Germany, the rest in America. But the land had not been kind to the Kisers. To his father and mother, the land was no haven of bounty. And from his first memories, Wilhelm hated farming life—the digging, planting, the smell of animals, and the flies and the waking up before dawn. The land had been a curse and he had watched his parents disintegrate under the sun. He watched them wither behind the plow as a slave bends to the whip, and he grew to hate this land as a heartless master and couldn’t wait until he could flee to start fresh. And he did. Wilhelm worked himself up the railroad chain from loader to fireman assistant to fireman to brakeman. And he took comfort in that wooden chamber, for it was strong and moved fast and was all things masculine. If females were flowers and puffy clouds, a man was steel and smoke, and Wilhelm guzzled in the soot as if it were iron for the blood.
Wilhelm placed the toy train back upon the tiny table. The day neared dawn and the first curves of frost lined the windows, promising a frigid fall morning. The black of this hour always seemed unnatural when the beds still held warmth. Nothing was right to this time of day; a body had no right to be out of blankets and out of slumber. Even the birds and the mammals knew this period existed for rest, perhaps more important than the minutes of midnight. But here he walked, taking the pail to the goddamn barn to sit on a cold goddamn stool to squeeze at a cow’s goddamn teats. And he felt the hand choking his neck, made it hard to swallow, made all that was digested want to come back up.
Wilhelm headed out to the barn, past the enormous apple tree that seemed to judder as he passed. He looked up into the bare boughs, a few old apples still clinging to the limbs, and he gazed at the tree, the strength of its girth. And emotion bubbled—emotion akin to reverence and jealousy as this creature of bark and leaves cradled his dead sons amid its mighty roots.
Wilhelm entered the dark barn and lit the lantern, sat down on the icy stool and bent his back. He took the warm teat in his grip, the cow flinching from his ice-cold hands. But he didn’t care. Just a goddamn cow. And he pulled and squirted, pulled and squirted, the metallic splatter of milk rhythmic in the pail. And here he sat—in reverse.
He squeezed harder and faster. The years of the railroad a lost dream that had broken up the fabric of his existence in rural Pennsylvania—a small reprieve—a gap of freedom that was quickly sewn shut again in the quilting of the farm life that seemed to be his destiny. And as he sat on the cold goddamn three-legged stool he felt worn as the old rotted wood.
Wilhelm caught his stretched reflection in the silver milk pail, saw his father’s eyes staring back, quivered with the debilitating pull of a life gone backwards, of repeating a history so hard fought to erase. But here Wilhelm sat. His father was back, his son his living ghost, and Wilhelm swallowed the image even as the truth lodged solid in his throat.
His mind drifted to his father again—a stubborn, stoic German, blood born from a whole line of other stubborn, stoic Germans. He had been nothing but practical. When the house or a table or a wall needed painting, Wilhelm’s old man took all the paint cans from the shed and mixed the paint together, leaving everything they owned in a dull painted gray. Wilhelm always remembered that. Remembered how the gray seeped into his mother until she wasn’t pretty anymore, just dull and muted without color.
When Wilhelm moved to Pittsburgh, he vowed not to turn his wife gray. He went against his grain and allowed Eveline the finer possessions, the thick rugs and feather comforters, the bone china and scented oil
s from France. But money hadn’t been an issue then. It was now and he suffered the weight of his accounts also going in reverse, of a family to feed and a land to tame.
He glanced at the new Fordson tractor parked behind the cows. For this much land, rocky and clay-packed land, he couldn’t take a chance with a used model. But now the purchase draped with frivolity. From savings Wilhelm had budgeted enough money to last a year and a half. Now he’d be lucky if it lasted through winter. And this, like so much else, he would ingest, keep to himself. He would not share the financial concerns with Eveline. Women didn’t understand money, didn’t understand what it took to care for a family, he thought. Their life centered around children and food and cleaning. And yet they complained. A life of simplicity and comfort and they still complained.
Well, his wife had her precious farm now. And yes, the corn and hay would grow. The hens would lay. The cows would bring milk. The pigs would breed and be sold to the butcher. The garden would feed the family. But Wilhelm had grown up a farmer and he knew these things took time and conditions must be right. Wilhelm Kiser knew the toll and work involved for every kernel of growth.
When the cow was dry, Wilhelm moved the stool to the next bovine, began again and tried not to let this life choke him.
* * *
Eveline flipped the potato pancakes with the spatula, the cakes browning quickly in the oil until they contracted and rounded like smashed, rotting zinnias. Wilhelm slammed the door of the porch and set the pails of milk near the pantry.
“Can’t you close that door without slamming it every time,” she snapped.
“Case you couldn’t tell, my hands were full,” he snapped back.
Eveline huffed, lifted each pancake, let the oil drip back onto the cast iron and piled them on the plate. Her husband would be whining about not having side meat with breakfast and she waited, itched for a fight. Eveline wiped her brow with the back of her hand. She was tired, irritated. It was all she could do to grate the potatoes and onions.
Beneath the Apple Leaves Page 16
