Whisper Hollow

 
PART ONE
 

Myrthen’s mother and father had carried more hopes than means with them when they crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of January 1910. Rachel Engel was just sixteen when she left her home and family in Saxony, Germany, brave and willing and fiercely in love with Otto Bergmann, but nonetheless glancing over her shoulder all the way to the southern shore of the river Elbe, the gateway to the world.

Myrthen’s grandparents disapproved of Rachel’s choice for a mate, and so she and Otto, a twenty-nine-year-old miner with black cuticles and an uneasy cough, stole away in the middle of a star-filled night. She wore all the clothing she owned and packed everything else in her mother’s upholstery bag: a photograph of herself with her parents and younger sister, a silver creamer that her mother loved, a hairbrush, her Bible. In her arms she carried an unlikely treasure: a divided cutting of the myrtle tree she had been tending since she was a little girl, dampened and wrapped in muslin for protection from the cold. They traveled north to the Port of Hamburg and boarded the steamer
Scandia
with 804 other passengers. “We Germans are like this tree,” Otto said to Rachel three nights into the hard,
dirty twenty-four-day journey to New York. “No matter where we go, we will take root again.”

They were married on the ship by a Prussian Catholic priest, a Bavarian wheelwright and his wife as witnesses. The only bridal accoutrement Rachel wore was a simple wreath across her brow, woven from the thinnest myrtle branches off the cutting she’d brought. Their honeymoon was taken in the bowels of the ship, during a brief interlude of privacy in a cabin that rarely offered it. That night, as the hulking ship moved quickly over the ocean’s unknowable depths, Myrthen and her twin were conceived.

“Was bedeutet das?”
Rachel peered out into the window-framed dawn and wiped her hands on her apron. “ ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning’? Is that how it goes?” Otto coughed as he sat down to his breakfast of oatmeal and black coffee. “
Das ist richtig
,” he said. Then, a moment later, after wiping his long, prematurely gray mustache and beard with a threadbare but pressed cloth napkin: “That is correct. Your English is becoming so good, Rachel. I’m proud for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. It was nearly six years ago that they’d arrived in West Virginia, young Rachel still thinking the morning nausea was leftover seasickness from the journey across the Atlantic. Fueled by their unlikely passion, they’d hastily exchanged the Erzgebirge mountain range for the Appalachian; uranium mining for coal; the town of Niederschlema for the town of Verra. There were many similarities — the metallic cold of winter, the lush patina of foliage in the spring, the graduating blue of the eastward-looking slopes, the toil and promise that awaited underground. But once they slowed down long enough for their breathing to steady and their heat to subside, the differences were too numerous to count.

The local speech that sounded nothing like the English she’d studied at school in Germany was just one of them. She didn’t understand when a neighbor said she could hang up a line for her “warsh” or that the likelihood for rain was “chancy.” The idea that a man “hain’t good for nothing” was not quite as difficult to comprehend — though she didn’t believe it in her own case — as the idea that “he don’t know no better.” Even Whisper Hollow, the small valley across the creek from Verra where the Catholic church was situated, was pronounced in a way that suggested something irreconcilable; they called it “Whisper Holler.” She didn’t know if it was the lax and tense vowels and the strange conjugations that made her queasy, or the undeniable undercurrent and swell beneath her apron.

It took her longer than she would have liked to adjust to being in another country among so many other foreigners, being married, being pregnant, then becoming a mother. Her husband went to work for the Blackstone Coal Company, and they rented one of the small camp houses. On a rainy night that same year, Rachel gave birth to identical twin girls, Myrthen and Ruth.

Rachel had decided upon these two names early on, liking them equally well. “Ruth” was the name of Otto’s mother, the only person in either of their families who supported their marriage and emigration. “Myrthen” came from the title of a work by Rachel’s fellow Saxonian the composer Robert Schumann. She liked the story about his opus 25,
Myrthen
— he’d dedicated it to his wife on the occasion of their wedding. The name came from that, and from the myrtle branch she’d stolen from her mother’s garden and carried across the sea.