The Little Bride (25 page)

Samuel spun toward her as if he’d forgotten that she was in the room, cutting an old shirt for rags. “There’s plenty of salt,” he said.

“But the lime—”

“We don’t have any lime.”

Minna shrugged. “Fine.”

“Where did you even get that idea?”

“Ruth. It’s fine. I’ll put them up in salt.”

“Fine.”

“Yes. There’s plenty of salt.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Anything else, sir?” she asked.

He looked directly, sourly, at her.

“For instance,” Minna said. “We could build a new chicken coop against the house. See if keeping them warmer makes a difference.”

“Yes.” A mild sneer passed over Samuel’s face. “If we had a house.”

“What is this?” asked Max.

“It’s a room. Don’t fool yourself.”

“Such a pessimist!”

“Me? You would call me the pessimist?” Samuel turned to face his father. From the side you could see how his hair had begun to dominate his face. It grew in front of his ears, and puffed forward from his brow. Yet this overgrowth couldn’t be neglect, exactly, for every week, without fail, using the ladle’s bulbous reflection to guide him, he shaved his chin and lip.
And what to make of that?
Minna would have liked to ask Ruth, if Ruth and she were friends—if Samuel were not her stepson. She would describe it: how his chin and lip were clean, bearing the sharp, mirrored angles of his face; how she couldn’t help wondering if he did this for her; how he looked trapped—like a carefully composed portrait framed in fur.

“And what,” he asked Max, his wilderness shaking slightly,

“what would you call yourself—a realist?”

“Consider,” said Max, and gave his most aggressive shrug.

Samuel folded his arms, visibly working to calm himself. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I find it confusing. We pray to a God—we atone, just last month we fasted and atoned—then in the same breath we say we’ll do it all again.”

“Yes. What could be more realistic? One prepares for the worst.”

“And then it happens.”

“Not necessarily.”

“But what if we were to prepare for the best? What harm could it do?”

“Pride.”

“So you would suggest—is this right—I’m sorry.” Samuel smiled painfully. “You would suggest that instead of working, I should pray?”

Max narrowed his eyes, in the way of his son. Samuel’s voice rose. “Does praying ever work?” he asked. “Could it maybe be argued that prayer is just a fussy form of pessimism? Do you think it’s possible, if you’d prayed a little less, that your wife might not have left you?”

Max touched a hand to his beard. Samuel covered his mouth. They stared at each other, full of shame, and a sorrow Minna might once have tried to mend in some sideways, upside-down way.

Instead she said, “When you two decide? About the eggs? Salt. Butchery. Tell me what you’d like done. I’ll be at the shed.”

On the coldest days, milking kept her warm. She’d used to hate her own sweat, to dread its scent of vinegar and work, but now she looked forward to it breaking as to a bath. She pulled fast, the cow warm against her face, hot in her hands. Just beyond the shed wall, in the spot where they had grand plans to build a privy, the ground was streaked with urine. Nothing soaked in anymore; everything ran. This seemed to be the way of
fall
here: no startling color, just a general hardening that took the soil, the grass, the sand in the creek. Most of the cottonwood leaves didn’t even bother unhinging, they simply turned brown and crisp and knocked each other when the branches shook. The wind was a new thing yet again: it gained intention; it curved and dipped and homed in. You might be standing outside by the west wall of the house, watching the men pack sod and frame the second room and debate which project deserved more urgency, when a gust of wind at your back would flatten a strip of grass in front of you, then spin around and whip your eyes to tears, then bounce off the wall and head for the trees, all the while never touching the men.

L
AST winter, in Galina’s house, she had kept a stash of Galina’s spent, soggy tea leaves and brewed a pot late each night, to make herself warm enough to sleep. She would stand in the pantry and drink it quietly, careful not to slurp, wary both of Galina, who sometimes prowled, and of her own future, in which she hoped a certain refinement would be required of her. But one night she went to retrieve her pocket of leaves and caught Rebeka there, with Minna’s leaves poured out into her palm and her palm held up to her face, her eyes wide with make-believe. They grew wider when she saw Minna in the doorway. She lowered her head. “I’m telling a fortune,” she whispered. Minna stood, waiting, for what she didn’t know. Then she told the girl that fortune-telling was a sham, that she was stupid to believe it, and stupid to waste the leaves, and wrong not to let Minna’s things alone. The girl cried. Of course. She was always crying. She was so slight, so almost-cold all the time. Minna wished now that she had been kinder to her more often. It was as if she’d thought kindness a thing like water; as if she’d only had so much and didn’t want to spend it on the wrong things. (But how were you supposed to know what the right things were?) If she could go back, she thought, she would let the girl tell her fortune. She would kneel down next to her on that old splintery floor and say, “Please, mine, too.” And then maybe Rebeka would tell Minna that she would cross an ocean and be wed to an old man and love his son and find herself standing in the wind, alone. And then she would have known.

L
IESL came a final time. She was sorry, but there was still much to do, she had to finish her own canning, and hang meat, and fill the feather beds and pillows, but not to worry, Otto would keep coming, he would show Samuel all he needed and see the house through. This was the most Liesl had ever said to Minna at one time, and Minna felt a rush of confusion, and regret, for Liesl’s words spilled out in a jumble and red splotches of excitement crept up her neck. Minna said, please, not to worry, she could finish leveling and tamping the cellar shelves herself.

Liesl smiled. She’d come holding a scroll, which she knelt down now to roll out. She walked on her knees to the spot where the sun hit the cellar floor, and gestured for Minna to join her.

“Here. Look.”

It was a map.

Minna lived, it appeared, in a near-perfect rectangle, broken only once in the lower-right corner where a big river jagged and curled and made the corner hang like a sack of stones. The Missoury, Liesl said, which split the rectangle in two: this eastern section sliced into a grid, the section to the west mostly open, with fewer squares, and no railroads yet. The mountains were here; Liesl pointed. Then, dragging her finger back to the right: Pierre, Mitchell, Sioux Falls. And this is our land. And this is your land. Liesl looked at her then, boldly. All this—she swept her hand across the map—is Dakota Territory. Soon they’ll split it here—finger to the middle—and make it a state. South Dakota. Yes? Minna nodded. And where is Ruth and Leo’s? Liesl pointed at a square to the north. What about Milwaukee? She pointed at a sack of flour. And Chicago? Another sack. What about NewYork? Liesl giggled. Over in the house, she said. Then she rolled the map back up and said, “See. So now you know.”

But in the days that followed, Minna wondered what she did know. She’d already known she was somewhere. Now she had more sense, she supposed, of where this somewhere was in relation to other people’s somewheres. But the grid was misleading—the lines looked like roads, but weren’t. And how would she travel, and what was she even thinking, and what did Liesl mean looking at her like that? Did she mean to say,
There are other ways to live, you could be like me, I’ve known Otto since I was a girl, there are other ways to find a husband than through the mail?
Did she expect Minna to show up at her door one day? Did she think her so flimsy that she would leave just because she knew the way?

Minna formed a new resolve to prefer her own house. She would embrace the improvements, and follow Ruth’s advice. She would make her own soap, and be reasonable with the food stores, and figure out how to make pearlash to sprinkle on the old beans. She would make but try not to eat preserves, and count the seven spoons twice a day. She would waste nothing, and work without complaint, and pray with more apparent feeling. Perhaps, if she washed her eyes each morning as Ruth’s book commanded, she would be happier with what she saw. She would look at Max and be glad he was her husband.

It seemed a promising plan. To think of herself as an alternative, surrogate self, made up of other women, and of her house as a surrogate house, made of other women’s houses—just thinking it made her feel less poisonous and clumsy. Her hands would be more gentle, her eyes more scrupulous, her appetite smaller. She’d learned as a girl how you could imitate someone’s walk and know something of her arrogance, or shyness, or ugliness—now it was the same, but the effect stronger: she could become these women, possess their artistry, and eventually their satisfaction.

All this promise was enough to make Minna feel that it would be acceptable, once conditions were right, for her to keep, as her one decadence, the pleasure of Fritzi’s books. Jacob would teach her the English alphabet, and how the letters went together, and at the end of the day, in the second room, when they thought she was asleep, she would read. And Samuel, if she asked nicely, Samuel, her other stepson, would build a set of drawers, one of which would be for Minna’s underclothes—for she would have more, in this new life, than she could wear at one time—and hidden beneath these underclothes she would keep, one at a time, her books.

Which were only stories, in the end. And made-up stories, at that. Made-up stories she didn’t even know how to read.

And so her only remaining vice would be hidden, and made up, and she would have to learn to enjoy it.