Tie My Bones to Her Back (2 page)

A bright blue morning, frost glitter in the trees, roosters singing all through the valley. Woodsmoke rose in a ruler-straight line from Wielands’ chimney half a mile down the road. She noticed that their own rooster was silent, the hens as well. None of the usual
Jammer
that greeted her arrival with a sack of cracked corn and barley.

There were few eggs in the henhouse, just over a dozen. She went across to the barn to tell her father. Perhaps there’d been another fox around during the night. She found Vati hanging from a noose tied to a rafter. His handsome face was dark with constricted blood. A dreadful stink. She saw that he had
beschmutzt
himself. It was dripping from the cuffs of his overalls onto the toes of his boots. His tongue stuck out, dark blue. His eyes bulged. Jenny yelled toward the house for her mother. Mutti came on the run, barefoot over the frosty ground, her yellow-white hair flapping. She stood breathless at the barn door. Jenny pointed. Her mother stared but did not scream.

Jenny dragged a ladder from the side of the barn, propped it against the rafter, and climbed up to her father. She used the blade of a scythe to saw through the rope. He thumped in the mud. She pulled down his overalls to clean his bottom and his legs, using fresh hay from a new bale.

In the bib pocket of his overalls she found a notice from the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank advising Herr Emil Dousmann that full payment of the outstanding amount of his mortgage, $938.55 in toto, was due on the twelfth of October 1873, and that if said payment was not forthcoming by said date, the bank would have no choice but to take over the farm. Below this cold, formal statement, the bank’s president, Herr Jochen Sauerweiz, had written in pencil: “Sorry, Emil, but business is business, and it’s bad everywhere right now.” The Sauerweizes and Jenny’s parents had come to America on the same ship from the Old Country.

Today is the twelfth, she thought.
Sakrament!
He hadn’t been happy for a long time now. No music in weeks from his fiddle. Too sad; I should have known.

Jenny felt like weeping, but thought of her mother. I’d only get her crying along with me. Mutti is too
zartfilhlend,
too sensitive, too soft for this land. She cries at nothing—wind ruffling the water on the stock pond, cold light on the hills at sunset, a kitten suckling on its purring mother. I suppose it reminds her of her innocent childhood in Germany. She never left Deutschland behind. Oh
ja,
she cries plenty when Vati plays his fiddle . . .

Mutti had gone back into the house. Jenny went to comfort her. She found her mother on the floor of the kitchen, her mouth leaking blood. The bottle of carbolic acid stood on the kitchen counter, still uncapped. Jenny screwed the cap back on, its threads crusty on the brown glass. Skull-and-crossbones on the red-lettered label. Jenny knelt beside her mother and tried to wipe away the slippery foam, but it just kept bubbling from her nose and mouth. She was not breathing. She was dead.
Selbst-mord.
An ugly word: suicide . . .

Panic thumped Jenny’s heart clear up to her eardrums. Her mind leaped away from the horror. My apron’s all bloody and stinking, she thought, suddenly short of breath. And my dress, too—filthy! And what’s that?—the bread’s risen too far! Mutti forgot to put the pans in the oven. Jenny sprang upon the offending loaves and punched them flat.

Outside, the frost was melting under a cheerful sun, dripping from the roof and the trees, black splats in the barnyard dirt, and now finally the rooster was singing as if there were no tomorrow.

I must get word to Otto . . .

After she had cleaned up, Jenny walked over to the Wielands’ place. She found Herr Wieland mucking out the cow stalls. Andres Wieland was a tall, big-bellied peasant from Hesse with an uhlan’s mustache brindled by tobacco juice, merry blue eyes, and a wart on his right nostril that looked like dried snot. She told him what had happened.

“Du lieber”
he said, the smile of greeting frozen at her words. “How? Why? You poor child . . .”

Then she saw the initial shock in his eyes replaced by a look of calculation. All that land now, right next door. Those fine cows . . .

He said he would send his wife to help.

He himself would go into town to report the tragedy. He would wire a telegram to Jenny’s older brother to return quickly home.

Otto Dousmann was in Kansas, near Fort Dodge, hunting buffalo. A wire might reach him care of the Fort. Or perhaps through the railroad, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe—they now had a station at Dodge City.

The Wieland boys, Friedl and Willi, were still out in the pasture with the cows. Frau Wieland drove Jenny back home in her buggy; she wept silently all the way. Vroni Wieland had been Minnie Dousmann’s closest friend in America. They often helped one another with their housework, singing songs from the Old Country as they cooked or cleaned or ironed or beat carpets or washed windows or waxed one another’s floors, even out in the garden chopping weeds. “Du Bist Wie Eine Blume,” “Der Schwartze Zigeuner,” “Am Brunnen Vor dem Tore”—they had sweet voices, Frau Wieland a husky alto, Frau Dousmann a soprano. Jenny had loved to hear them harmonize, their chubby wet red faces streaming with tears and sweat, their eyes laughing as they cried and rolled out strudel dough, the tears turning the flour on their cheeks into white runnels that ended in little lumps of salty pastry dough that almost cooked from the heat of their homesickness.

Those were warm lovely evenings in the kitchen, with the cold black American night wrapping itself around the house, the mothers with their sweet voices, cheeks wet with tearshine. The men came back from barn or field, clumping mud off their boots on the back stoop, and sometimes there was the bang of a shotgun off in the distance as Willi or Friedl or Otto, when he still lived at home, shot plump prairie chickens, and later the birds coming brown and hot and gleaming with fat from the oven, with bread and apple and onion stuffing, and potatoes and red cabbage, strudel with
Schlagsahne
—what the Americans called whipped cream—from our own sleek cows after, and then Vati playing his violin . . .

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, after Frau Wieland had returned home, Jenny prayed for Otto’s swift return. He’s a soldier, she thought, familiar with death and decisions. He’ll know what to do. But she had to make some decisions of her own, she knew. Frau Wieland had been kind, offering to take Jenny into her household “like a daughter of my own.” The Wielands had had a daughter once, named Hannelore, but she had died at the age of eight. They had buried her at the foot of a big red oak at the top of the hill behind their house. The sun set in winter directly behind that oak, and every evening Frau Wieland watched it go down and wept a little. Jenny had seen her tears often.

Herr Wieland had always wanted this farm. A frugal, penny-pinching man, he had plenty of money now and he might very well buy it from the bank for the price of the outstanding mortgage.

But I don’t want to live with the Wielands, she thought. Even if Otto had enough money to pay off the bank, she knew she couldn’t keep up the farm all by herself. Yet her father had worked so hard to build it. He was an educated man, not an
echt Bauer
—a true farmer, like Andres Wieland. Emil Dousmann had grown up in Kassel and attended the Technische Hochschule there. His own father was a draper, a member of the Bürger-stand—the bourgeoisie—but Emil Dousmann had joined the Socialist Party. After the ‘48 revolution failed, he and his wife came to America. At first he had worked as a printer in New York, played violin with the Liederkranz, and written for socialist newspapers in Milwaukee. His dream, Vati had always said, was to build on his own acreage and farm “scientifically,” following the precepts of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander von Humboldt. With the money saved from his newspaper work, he’d bought this land near Heldendorf, west of Milwaukee, and made it into a small but productive farm. He had borrowed money from the bank only to improve his herd and his orchards, and to send his daughter to the Heldendorf Academy.

Otto never attended the academy. He went off instead to fight in the war with the 2nd Wisconsin Regiment of the Iron Brigade. Wounded twice, at Antietam and Chancellorsville, he came home a sergeant. Jenny didn’t recognize him when he returned. He was pale from the hospital, his pallor accentuated by his big black mustache and the black slouch hat of the Iron Brigade, and he walked with a limp. But he smiled and slapped her hard on the shoulder, and then she knew him as of old.

That fall he took her on hunting trips. They camped out up north in the big woods and slept under a canvas tent from the war that still smelled of old gunpowder and the red Rebel mud that had stained it. They ate rabbits and squirrels and deer meat fresh killed from the woods and speckled trout from cold black streams that smelled of iron. Those were good days, Jenny recalled now, without the sour stink of the dung heap behind the barn and the clamor of hens waiting to be fed, only the drumming of partridges in the pine woods, the ice like a mirror on the water kettle in the morning . . .

But Otto had contracted the wanderlust from too many years on the march. Like so many veterans, he could not stay at home. So he went West. Mutti had cried and pleaded, but Vati said he couldn’t blame Otto, for hadn’t he himself gone West at the same age? It’s in the blood, her father said, this chasing the setting sun. Mutti had cried even louder.

America is hard, Jenny thought.

It tried to kill my brother, and when it couldn’t kill him, it killed my father and mother instead. I’m sure it’ll try to kill me, too, sooner or later. May all bankers burn in hell. Especially Herr Jochen Sauerweiz of the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank.

2

O
TTO ARRIVED THREE
days later, in time for the funeral. Jenny walked into town to meet him at the railway station. He was tanned as dark as an Indian, with sunbursts of white wrinkle lines fanning outward from his grave blue eyes, and he did not look as large as she remembered him. He still wore the black slouch hat, dusty from the war—or perhaps merely from the train ride, she realized—but with the same bullet hole through its battered crown, not yet patched ten years after a Rebel minié ball had perforated it somewhere along the Rappahannock. He was thinner, too, and as he walked unsmiling toward her, she noticed flashes of gray in his mustache and at his temples. The limp, though, had vanished, except for a slight hunching of his left shoulder as his weight came down on the opposite foot. An almost imperceptible wince, perhaps habit now after all these years of pain, tensed his facial muscles as a spasm of toothache might have done.

“Na ja, du Hübsche,”
he said—Now then, pretty one. And smiled finally, a sad smile but a warm one, revealing a gap where a shell fragment had extracted his lower left molars, both top and bottom, in the cornfield near the Dunker Church at Antietam eleven years earlier. The exit wound had left a knot of scar tissue in the center of his left cheek. It was shaped, she suddenly realized, like a gnarled heart. The small piece of shrapnel must have entered through his open mouth, for there was no sign of an entry wound. He could not remember just how it had happened, there had been so much tumult in the cornfield that day.

“Ah, dear one, how did they die?”

“Selbstmord
,” she said. He winced again, and his eyes slipped out of focus for a moment.

“
Ach
, Christ, Hanna! How? Why?”

She told him as they walked uphill from the station to the Lutheran church on the ridge above town. The day was cool and bright, and overhead ragged wedges of geese flew south, their high, distant cries sounding festive. She spoke of the bank’s foreclosure, of rope and acid, her tone cold with the ugliness of it. He stopped to look down at the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank, a solid, solemn structure built of gray limestone from the local quarry, with heavy wrought-iron grillwork over its windows. A fortress of financial integrity. Not even Jesse James could rob this bank. It would turn him to stone before he set foot inside the door. Most of the buildings in Heldendorf were built of stone or brick, many of the larger homes as well. It looked foreign to him after the raw-plank architecture of the West, where sudden towns bled sap all summer long and warped the winter through.

“How much was left to pay on the mortgage?”

“Less than a
tausend
dollars—nine hundred and a bit.”

“I’ll pay it off.” He slapped the new carpetbag he had carried from the train. “When the wire arrived, my partner and I were in Dodge City selling a load of hides. Twenty-four hundred dollars’ worth.” He smiled.

She frowned. “Are you coming back? I’ll not work the place by myself.”

“No, but you could hire help. I’m sure there must be some strong young backs looking for work. Maybe two or three?”

“And how would I pay for their
Arbeit
, in buttermilk and manure? Vati couldn’t even meet the loan payments, with the price milk is bringing these days—even buttermilk. There’s no money anywhere.”