Shandi Mitchell Read online

  They took the three horses and slipped away under the cover of dark. Teodor in the lead with Sofia, followed by Dania and Myron, and Maria bringing up the rear with Katya. They travelled only at night, following the bush, avoiding the villages and blocked roads. If the horses’ ears pricked west, Teodor went east before veering back. In daylight, they slept hidden under leaves and branches. They spoke only in whispers. She told the children it was a game to see how well they could hide. When they ran out of their few spoiled potatoes, they ate grass and berries. When one of the horses lay down, unable to go farther, Teodor whispered in its ear as he slit its throat and then they ate it.

  When Maria wanted to stop, Teodor made them keep going. His belief never faltered. They would make it. He didn’t allow for any other option. With every step, Maria expected the bay of tracking dogs; with every shadow, someone to betray them; with every bend, soldiers waiting; and with each crack of a snapping twig, a volley of shots. But no one came. She had her miracle. But it wasn’t her conviction that had carried them; it was Teodor’s. She would have lain down.

  Five days later, they were safe in Halychyna, in Lviv. Teodor sold the horses for a few coins. Enough to pay for a forged exit document and third-class rail to the port in Hamburg. They told everyone they met what was happening to their country. People shook their heads and looked away. Some offered them bread.

  Teodor found the government people who wanted Ukrainians to come to their country. The Canadian representatives smiled, gave them food, and arranged their passage. One even spoke Ukrainian. The men wrote their names in logbooks and beside Teodor’s name wrote Farmer.

  They didn’t want to talk about what was happening in Ukraïna either. They didn’t want to hear about Stalin and that there was no drought; that soldiers were cutting down fields and confiscating seed; that people were eating horses until there were no more horses; eating dogs until there were no more dogs; eating rats, because there were always plenty of rats. They didn’t want to hear that. They wanted to talk about Canada having the healthiest climate in the world and farms for everyone. They wanted to get them on the boat.

  Maria was only to bring practical items but had managed to carry her wedding linen. She used it to bundle their other belongings: two pots and a pan, a few utensils, a goose-down quilt, her mother’s hand-woven wool blanket, sewing supplies, tonics, medicine, seeds, two sets of clothes for each child, a hairbrush, six skeins of wool, and the family crucifix and Bible that she had retrieved from under the outhouse floorboards. The only other sentimental item she had smuggled in was a handkerchief filled with the rich, black earth of her homeland.

  They were crammed into the lower deck of the ship with two hundred others. They pushed their way to a stack of crates beneath a hatch, which in the days to come would provide their only fresh air. They clung to their heap of possessions. The children—too weak, too overwhelmed—never wandered. She made them eat the foul-tasting stew ladled from the massive kettles into their dinner pails. She held the chamber pot for them to throw up in. She wiped their faces and sponged their bodies with her skirt. She held them up to the hatch until her arms went numb. She told them stories and sang lullabies, coaxing them to sleep, to forget.

  When the ship arrived at the pier in Halifax, she had to open the handkerchief at customs. The officers laughed at her pile of dirt, but they let her pass. She carried it on the train across the country, two thousand miles. And when the tracks ended, she carried it on the wagon across the prairies and north into the bush. And when the wagon ran out of trail, she carried it on foot. Even when she had to leave behind clothes and a pot, she didn’t put down the handkerchief. When the children were hanging from her waist and wrapped around her neck, she held on to that bundle. And when they finally staggered over the last hill and came to their squat of land, buried in trees and rocks, she fell to her knees, kissed the ground, and mingled her precious soil with this new land.

  That was at their old home. Their first home in Canada. It’s where they built their house, broke the land. Where Ivan was conceived on a still, warm April night. Teodor had led her to a patch where he had cleared the land of scrub and roots. This was where he would build their cabin. He had marked its frame with logs. He took her hand and guided her through the stick drawing. Here’s the kitchen, here’s the children’s rooms, here’s the pantry, here’s the stove, here’s the windows—see, they look out over the fields. In what was to be their bedroom he had laid out the wedding linen. Blue-white under the full moon. They made love there, immersed in stars. She had never been able to scrub the grass stains from the precious cloth. That was the last place her family had called home.

  “Teodor, the water is ready,” Maria calls softly out the door.

  The man who walks through the door is old. His body moves stiffly, his shoulders hunched over. His gait is almost a side-to-side shuffle. The feeble light of the kerosene lamp cloaks him in shadows. He seems hesitant to remove his clothes in front of her.

  Maria pulls a chair up close to the steaming water. “Sit,” she urges him, as if he is a small child. Teodor sits heavily on the rickety chair, exhausted by the effort. He leans over and tries to untie the broken string that acts as a shoelace. His fingers fumble with the knot, his hands tremble. Maria kneels down before him. “Let me help.”

  He doesn’t protest. He is beyond dignity. He leans back and looks straight ahead, his hands limp in his lap. He looks past her, past the split boards of the wall, beyond the night. He doesn’t blink. The binder twine snaps as Maria tugs at the knot. Gently, she loosens the stiff leather that sticks to his bare feet and ankles. Ever so carefully, she slips the workboots off. He doesn’t flinch. Maria tries not to gag and refrains from covering her nose. His feet are caked in black. Sores ooze where the oversized leather tongues have rubbed mercilessly, and on the back of his heels the blisters have widened into a raw gash. His overgrown toenails are cracked and split.

  Maria doesn’t make a sound. She sets each foot, as if it were fine porcelain, on the makeshift towel. She fills a washbasin with the warm water and brings his feet to it. Not until Maria rolls up his ragged cuffs to keep them from getting wet does she gasp. The sound catches in her throat, like a wounded bird, before she swallows it down.

  Teodor’s bony ankles are a mottle of bruises—green, yellow, and brown. Each one branded by the chafing of iron shackles. Layers of rings, some recently scabbed over, others faded to deadened white scars. The constant wearing of steel on flesh.

  Three feet away, one of the children coughs and rolls over in their sleep. As if caught in an act of transgression, Maria pulls the pant cuffs down before realizing what she has done. She looks up to Teodor’s face, but he isn’t looking at her. His eyes are fixed on the door. In the lamplight, she sees the creases that furrow his forehead and are etched around his eyes. He is listening to a lone coyote. Its plaintive howl echoes across the prairie, climbing higher and higher in pitch before trailing off. In the sustain, the coyote stops and listens. Calling for someone to answer him, someone to find him.

  Maria lowers Teodor’s feet into the basin.

  Anna is awake. She hears the coyote calling her. Anna never sleeps at night. Not for the last twenty nights, anyway, not since Stefan came home drunk.

  When she first came here, she wasn’t afraid of the night. Anna wasn’t afraid of anything. She wanted to come to this country. She wanted the adventure, wanted to start her life, build a new world. She was fearless and headstrong. Boys lined up to dance with her. Her father had received five proposals for her hand. But none of them had been good enough for his daughter.

  And then along came Stefan. He was an officer, rumoured to be a friend of the tsar. People feared him. He brought presents. Pears and oranges. Once, a silver mirror and hairbrush. Another time, a sapphire necklace. He brought her father vodka, and her mother silk. He was handsome in his uniform; all the girls said so. Anna didn’t know that Stefan’s job was to chase down traitors and punish them. She didn’t kn
ow that the silver mirror had come from a house where he had shot the owner in the head. She didn’t know that the sapphire necklace was torn from the neck of a girl not much older than herself. She only knew that when Stefan danced with her, everybody watched. And so they married.

  She should have known when he passed out at his own wedding. She should have known when she wiped the vomit from his shirt. She should have known when he tried to kiss her, reeking of alcohol. By the time he threw her onto the bed and held her down, she did know. But by then it was too late.

  Another war came, and this time Stefan was the traitor. He survived an assassination attempt, escaping with a bullet lodged in his thigh. He bought his way out of the country with the sapphire necklace. He sold all the spoils of his years in the service, except for the silver mirror and hairbrush. Anna refused to let them go. They were hers, the only things of beauty she still believed were given in love. Stefan loved her long chestnut hair that spiralled in curls to the small of her back. When they were courting, he would run his fingers through her tresses, brush the back of his hand against her cheek and neck, and breathe in its sweet lavender scent. The day after their wedding night, Stefan brushed her hair as he begged forgiveness. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he promised, promised as the brush twisted and pulled at her locks.

  Stefan promised her that everything would be different in Canada. They would be treated with the respect and honour they deserved. They would be aristocracy. They would be rich. People would bow to them in the street.

  Anna remembers her first night on the prairies. Stefan built a huge fire. He kept the pistol and rifle at his side. He said he was going to keep watch; she knew he was afraid. But Anna loved the darkness and the vastness. It made her feel like she belonged. Something woke her in the middle of the night. She looked to Stefan, who had fallen asleep wrapped tight in a blanket. Even his head was covered. Anna turned to the sound. Short, panting snorts. Feet padding back and forth. Then she saw the eyes, reflected yellow in the firelight.

  A young coyote circled the edge of their fire. Head down, nose rising, sucking back their scent. Anna had never seen anything so beautiful, so wild. Slowly, she stood up. The animal retreated a few feet. Anna took another step away from the fire into the darkness. She spoke quietly in a singsong voice. She crouched down. The thin female, its tail between its legs, slouched warily toward her. Anna held out her hand. The animal sniffed the air.

  Fingers outstretched, Anna sat still and quiet, her breathing even. She bowed her head and looked sideways into the animal’s eyes. The coyote nudged its nose forward, inches from her hand. Anna could feel its hot breath condensing into moisture in the cool night air. She inched her fingers closer. The animal’s lip curled, revealing an incisor. Anna stopped and lowered her head more. The coyote leaned forward and touched its cold nose to her warm fingers.

  Off in the darkness, another coyote wailed. Startling the night, long and urgent. The female turned to its cry. A shot thundered and the female’s side ripped open. Another explosion and the left side of its head erupted in blood and bone, spraying Anna’s face. She stumbled to her feet and saw Stefan running toward her screaming, but Anna couldn’t hear him. She could only hear the gunshot ricocheting in her head. She could only see the coyote’s body convulsing at her feet.

  That was the first night.

  There were other nights. Night was when Anna braided Lesya’s hair. Her baby girl had the same colour hair as she did. The same blue eyes. Lesya was ten now. When Anna looked into Lesya’s eyes, she could almost see herself. But when she looked down at the child’s thin body, to the deformed foot, she knew the child was nothing like her.

  It was night when Lesya was born. Anna had been in labour since the morning, with the midwife chattering unrelentingly through it all. Soothing her, encouraging her, admonishing her to be quiet. Stefan had left the cabin when Anna first started to scream. He didn’t return despite her pleas, even though she knew he was just on the other side of the door. When the baby slipped out, the midwife fell silent. She cut the umbilical cord, swaddled the newborn, and left her lying at the foot of the bed. The baby didn’t make a sound. The midwife took Anna’s hand, and Anna was sure that she was going to tell her the baby was stillborn. But instead she cautiously said, Sometimes babies aren’t meant for this world. Sometimes it’s better to let them return to God. She said that she could help. The newborn began to wail, its tiny lungs exploding with air, and Anna knew it wanted to live.

  As soon as Anna wrapped her arms around the baby, its perfect face relaxed—a beautiful baby girl. Stefan was ushered back in, looking contrite. Their baby. She knew that she could love her. Love him. They could start again.

  Her heart nearly broke when the child wrapped her tiny hand around Anna’s finger. She unwrapped the sheet that was wound too tight around the child, freeing her fragile chest, the heart pounding visibly through the almost translucent skin. She freed the legs from the cloth binding and saw the left foot grotesquely twisted sideways, almost back onto itself. It looked blue, dead. Anna pushed the child away. The infant rolled over and lay splayed in the middle of the bed. Its deformed foot jutting out, pointing at Anna, accusingly.

  Hysterical, Anna tried to get up from the bed, blood pouring between her legs. Stefan and the midwife pushed her back down. She tried to beat them away. She bit their arms, clawed at their clothes. They tied her wrists and legs to the bed, forced her to drink Stefan’s bitter moonshine. Its heat seared her throat, as she choked on the salt of her own tears. She remembers Stefan stroking her forehead, his breath hot on her cheek, promising her everything would be all right.

  When she woke, the baby was beside her, watching her. Not whimpering. Not crying to be fed. Just watching. She never gave her breast to that child. She milked herself like a cow and fed the baby like an orphaned calf. As Lesya got older, she followed her mother everywhere. Trailing a few feet behind. Watching, always watching her. Mimicking her mother’s movements. Sometimes Anna wondered if Lesya was mute, too. But the child could talk. She just knew when to keep quiet.

  One day, when Lesya was two, Anna was making pyrohy, and as she rolled the dough and cut out the circle shapes, she absently sang the songs she remembered her own mother singing back home. Songs of soldiers going off to war, peasants wooing young girls, hymns for good harvests, songs of mothers teaching their girls to be good wives. When Lesya started to sing, she followed her mother’s every note. That night, Anna let the child sit on her lap. She ran the silver brush through the girl’s tangled hair and braided it. Stefan came home in high spirits and danced for them. They laughed. That was when the night was good.

  Then she had Petro. Stefan was away on one of his trips to town again. Business. A day here and a day there. Returning home with expensive gifts they couldn’t afford. Smelling of booze and faint, sweet soap. Anna was in the garden when her water broke. She took a few steps and a contraction forced her to her knees. She tried to stand, but was driven down again. Lesya was only three. She stood watching her mother crawling on all fours, writhing and wailing in pain. Petro was born right there in the August dust. It was Lesya who cleared the dirt from her newborn brother’s mouth as Anna tried to crawl away, tethered to the umbilical cord.

  It had been seven years since that day, and Anna had managed to protect herself. There were ways: vinegar douches; parsley tea; scalding baths; once, she rode a horse. And then she learned how to protect herself from him. The first time she pulled the knife on Stefan, it wasn’t planned. She was chopping beets when he grabbed her from behind. She didn’t think, she spun around, knife still in hand, and the blade sliced across his belly. His grimy white shirt split open and a fine red stain flowered outward. It was only a scratch, but Anna didn’t drop the knife. She didn’t feel remorse. Her hand didn’t shake. From then on, Anna kept the knife under her pillow. Stefan stopped reaching for her. Now he spent weeks away from home. He didn’t bother to bring back presents anymore or wash the perfume and women’s scent from
his body. But he left her alone.

  Until that night. Twenty nights ago. That night, Anna was dreaming she was a young girl again. She was running toward something golden, something she couldn’t see but knew was there, when she was plunged into darkness. Fighting for air, she opened her eyes to find Stefan on top of her. His hand pressed against her mouth, his forearm crushing her chest. His other hand tore back the covers, clawed at her legs, pried apart her knees. Anna groped under the pillow for the knife, knowing it was already gone.

  That night, the moon was hidden behind clouds. Anna couldn’t see the children, though they lay only a few feet away. Once, when the moon dared to peek out, she thought she saw Lesya’s eyes watching her; an instant later they were gone. When he was done, Stefan tried to stroke Anna’s hair from her forehead. He whispered how sorry he was, how much he loved her, how much he missed her … Anna spat in his face. She didn’t cry when he walked out the door. She got up, found the knife, and cut off her long, tangled hair. That was twenty nights ago.

  Tonight, as she sits in the dark, she can feel it growing in her belly. She listens to the coyote calling calling calling.

  “I’m here,” she whispers back. “I’m here.”

  Teodor sleeps for three days and three nights, unaware that on the first day little Katya gathers wildflowers for him and sets them in a canning jar beside the bed. Or that on the second night, Ivan crawls in bed with him and falls asleep nestled against his belly until Maria carries him back to his own bed. He doesn’t see Sofia place a spider on his hand and watch it crawl up his arm across his chest until it disappears into the bedding. He doesn’t hear Dania, who is pressing his pants with a hot iron, burn her hand. He doesn’t know that Myron stops at the bed and stares down at him each morning on his way to chores before turning his back on him. Or that his niece, Lesya, and nephew, Petro, touch his toes at Ivan’s goading. Or that Maria’s been sleeping in a chair the last two nights because she doesn’t want to risk waking him.