Shandi Mitchell Read online

  Katya’s dress is one of Sofia’s castoffs and hangs almost to her ankles. Maria tucks in the waist and adds a ribbon to cinch in the extra material, but the shoulders and collar still droop over her small frame. No matter how much she feeds this child, she doesn’t gain weight. Maria pushes away the pang of guilt and promises to add more cream to Katya’s oatmeal in the morning. As she takes in the seams, Katya refuses to put down the limp bouquet of daisies, milkweed, blazing prairie fire, brown-eyed Susans, and wild oats she has collected for the baby Jesus.

  Katya loves church. She loves the paintings on the wall, the fiery gold crosses, gleaming chalices, and the sickening sweet incense that makes her feel dizzy. Sometimes she imagines floating up to the ceiling and taking the crown of thorns from the Jesus on the Cross and pulling the nails from his hands so he can fly away. She hasn’t made the connection that the baby and the man on the cross are the same person. She wonders if they keep the Christ body in a root cellar, or in a salt barrel, or frozen in the lake in the winter. She wonders how much of the body is left and how long everybody has been eating it and what will happen when it runs out. At communion, when she is on her knees, supposed to be praying into her hands, she spits out his body. She now has a large doughy ball of Christ she keeps hidden under the blanket chest in case the church eats all of him and doesn’t save any for her family.

  By ten to seven, the family is dressed and fidgeting in their uncomfortable clothes. Maria looks to Teodor, sitting at the table in his dirty workpants, bare feet, picking a poppy seed from his teeth, and frowns.

  Since his return from prison, he has refused to attend church. At first Maria believed he needed time to recover and build up his strength, then once he started breaking the fields, he insisted he couldn’t take the time or the planting would be late.

  But he doesn’t work the fields on Sundays. He hitches up the horse, loads the cart with tools, and heads across the field. He rolls past the ground broken through the week, past the birch grove, around the bush, and northwest through the clearing to the top corner of his quarter-section, exactly one mile from his sister’s house. There, on the crest of the hill, he is building his family’s home. It overlooks all one hundred and sixty acres. From a distance, it seems to hover between the earth and the sky.

  He hasn’t made much progress. The frame is down and the first three rows of logs are laid. It will be a one-level house, ten times larger than the shack they are in now, with rooms for the children. He has planned for a window on the south side looking down over the fields, with wooden shutters that can be boarded up against high winds and bitter winters. This is his church.

  Teodor releases the horse, free to feast on the tall grass or lounge under the shade of the trees, a day off from the fields, and heads to where the door will be. Here he feels calm. The sound of the crickets, the swish of the prairie grass, and the gophers watching him from a distance bring him solace. Here he can hear silence and that silence is holier than any words a priest could ever utter.

  He no longer believes in promised lands. He rejects suffering for salvation later. He believes in life now. There was a time when he worshipped, bowed, and kneeled to a higher power. He believed if he lived a good life, he would be rewarded. But now he knows there is no God. A compassionate God wouldn’t have tried to starve his family. A just God wouldn’t have taken away everything that he had built. A merciful God wouldn’t have abandoned him in prison.

  Maria begged him for her sake, for his children’s sake, for the sake of his soul, she begged him to tell her why. She tried to convince him that God was with them, that He had never left. How else did they survive? How else were they together again? She tried to make him see how much they’d been given. She showed him the garden, the fields, their children, each other … she begged him to come back. He always walked away, disappeared into the barn or headed to the fields. One night, she chased him.

  The children were already asleep. She was in her nightgown and had just laid out the children’s church clothes for the following morning. Teodor was working on the house plans by lamplight. She asked him again to come with her. She pleaded with him, her angry whispers heightened with his refusal to answer. One of the children groaned and shifted in the bed. Teodor pushed back his chair and stormed out. She followed him into the dark barn. Her voice now free, she demanded that he talk to her. He pushed deeper into the darkness, retreating to the empty stall beside the horse.

  Inside the small pen, Teodor paced back and forth from wall to wall. He counted off the steps, one two three four five, and turned, one two three four five, stopping at the imagined stone wall that he had faced a thousand times a day in prison. Maria could see him moving side to side, his head down, his eyes fixed on the ground, slipping in and out of the moon’s shadows. She couldn’t see his hunched shoulders, his body coiled tight, his clenched fists. She couldn’t know that the wooden boards of the stall had transformed into stone and iron bars, or that Teodor could smell the rank sweat of human decay that had gagged him for six hundred days. Talk to me, Maria cried, hurt by how far her husband had pulled away from her. Talk to me!

  The horse snorted and banged against the stall, the cow rubbed its head up and down against the boards, unsettled by their intensity. Maria lifted the stall’s latch and Teodor heard a metal lock rasp open. He tried to get past her, but she wouldn’t step back. Leave me alone, he said over and over. He retreated to his right and tripped against a feed bucket. He smelled the stench of urine and feces from a jailhouse pisspot that hadn’t been emptied in days. The horse jolted. He turned in the other direction, blinded not so much by the darkness but by the panic roaring in his head, and then he slammed into the wall.

  Pressed against the boards, his heart pounding, he didn’t feel the roughness of the wood. He felt the coldness of stone. He didn’t hear Maria say his name or the concern in her voice. His erratic breathing merged with the animals’ restless shuffling. His fingernails clawed into the wood, driving splinters under his nails, his shoulders heaved. Leave me alone, he said so low that she could barely hear.

  She touched his shoulder. Teodor?

  He felt a nightstick dig into the back of his neck. Smelled his sour stench. Felt his fat gut pressed against his back.

  Don’t fucking touch me! He spun around and grabbed her arm and twisted it against her throat, driving her backward. His eyes wide, unseeing, his mouth distorted in a scream, inches from her face, he slammed her against the opposite wall. Maybe it was the lack of resistance, or her lightness, or the shock of hitting a wall that was more than eight feet away, or the softness of her skin, the thinness of her wrist in his grip, or the terrified eyes staring up at him—a woman’s eyes—he saw her and let her go. He crumpled to his knees.

  Maria stood, arms out to her sides, pressed against the wall as if she was holding it up. He looked to her, unable to speak, his eyes like those of a small child waking from a nightmare. Maria slid down the wall, her throat and wrist throbbing, kneeling in front of him. He lowered his head onto her lap and wrapped his arms around her waist. It took a long time for Maria to touch the back of his head. She never asked him to come to church again.

  Maria dons her khustyna, tucks the loose strands of hair under the bandana and ties it severely back. She looks austere and proper in her crisp white blouse and long black skirt. She strings the crucifix around her neck. It is a simple wooden cross, carved from white birch.

  She once owned an engraved silver cross, decorated with rubies. It had been in her family for five generations. The family story was that it had been a present from a Russian countess to her maid, Maria’s great-great-grandmother, a thank-you for a lifetime of service. Maria had never seen anything so beautiful. As a child, she would sit in her mother’s lap for hours, running her fingers over its swirls and patterns. She’d close her eyes and practise seeing it with her mind, until she no longer had to practise and could conjure it whenever she needed comfort. It was her family’s only treasure. She thought it h
ad been taken with everything else during The Hunger. She was pregnant with Katya then, the last to be born in Ukraïna. It’s why her youngest daughter is so thin, why she’s weaker than the others—it’s Maria’s fault for not having enough food.

  The other children were mercifully too young to remember that time. That’s what she wants to believe. Children see things differently. They don’t know that Teodor went into the stripped fields at night to rummage for stalks of wheat that had been overlooked. Or that she made stews with mice and rats and pretended it was rabbit. If they saw someone lie down in the streets and not get back up, she told them they were tired and needed to sleep.

  She made sure they didn’t hear the rumours of graves being dug up and what was cooking in other people’s soup pots. They didn’t hear the stories of neighbours stealing from and betraying one another. She kept her children safe from all of that. Teodor travelled north. He had heard stories of others crossing the Russian border and returning with rations. He had heard many more stories about those who hadn’t returned. He didn’t tell Maria those stories. She wanted him to barter their wedding bands, but he wouldn’t. He had another cache—an Austrian silver coin from the Great War and a gallon of whisky. He came back with potatoes and beets that he buried behind the house. She didn’t ask where he got them or what he had seen. He didn’t ask where she got the bags of flour.

  Soldiers came to the village and selected peasants who looked fatted. The villagers pointed to Maria, whom they suspected of hoarding food, ignoring that she was pregnant. Her neighbours hid behind their doors when the soldiers came to her house. She was given new clothes and enough food for a week. They sat with her while she ate. She refused until they let her children eat, too. She was taken to the railway tracks, ten miles away, where there were a hundred others like her. Round, fat faces. Flesh on their bones. New clothes. New tools. Even a tractor. They had one job. When the train rolled past, they had to wave and smile. She waved; she smiled. They gave her two bags of flour in case they needed her again. That flour fed her family and her parents for six months. The neighbours were right. She did hoard her food.

  The day of their escape, her mother gave her the jewelled crucifix, which she had hidden inside the hollow of a tree. She told her that its power had kept their family safe and Maria wanted to believe her. She had to believe her. Otherwise she would have hated her mother for letting them starve. When Teodor was sent to prison, Maria traded the crucifix for the wagonload of grain that the police had confiscated.

  She had walked into the one-room prison with its three-foot-by-three-foot cell in the corner, the same cell that Teodor had been held in before being transferred to the penitentiary five days earlier, and startled the town’s only officer, who was playing a game of solitaire. At the sight of a woman in the precinct, the officer hurriedly fastened his belt, tucked in his shirt, and brushed away the cards. He glanced out the window and saw a ragtag of children clustered around the cart. Their clothes were dirty and tattered. Their belongings huddled around them in gunnysacks. Stove parts and pots and pans protruded from overstuffed bags. The smallest children sat on the bags, scuffing the dirt with their bare feet. A young girl held a toddler in her arms. The oldest boy held the reins of a sickly-looking horse. The officer put on his coat and made himself taller. Maria held out her family passport to prove who she was and pointed to the cart.

  The grain that Teodor had cut still lay in the back. He had scythed only the heads for their seed. Confiscated property was usually sold to the highest bidder or distributed to gain other favours. In this case, there wasn’t enough grain to sell, it wasn’t worth the bother to husk, and the cart was so dilapidated no bidders had come forward. Maria pointed again to the cart and set a few kernels of wheat on the table. She pointed to herself and back to the wagon. The officer shook his head no. Maria opened the sack she was carrying and set out two jars of raspberry jam and a hand-woven tablecloth and pointed to the cart again.

  The officer told her she had to leave. He could smell the garlic on her clothes. She didn’t want to beg. She refused to let him see her cry. She tried to tell him that she needed the wagon for her children. They had taken everything else: the house, the barn, the land, the wheat … all she wanted was the cart and the seed. She was willing to pay.

  He didn’t understand a word she said. She was one more of a hundred like her that accosted him in the streets, fell to their knees, came begging at the door—they disgusted him. He moved to escort her from the building. Maria untied the strings around the collar of her blouse and the man’s eyes sharpened. He watched as she reached into her shirt, saw a flash of skin and the shadow of a crease.

  The officer looked out the window. The children were shuffling in the dirt, picking their noses, watching a stray dog take a shit. Only the oldest boy stared straight ahead at the police station, refusing to blink. The officer looked back to Maria. She pulled the silver cross from its hiding place nestled between her breasts. It was hot in her hand. She felt his eyes on her throat. She removed the necklace and pointed to the cart.

  There was nothing beautiful about the woman who stood before him. She was coarse, with heavy hands, thick fingers, stout and overweight. Her features weathered and tanned like hide, her eyes almost black, her face chiselled expressionless, fierce. But her breasts were large and inviting. She stepped toward him and laid the cross on the desk. He picked it up and examined the jewels, felt the weight of the silver, and put it in his pocket. He pointed at the wagon and then he pointed to her.

  That’s when the Blessed Virgin appeared to Maria, her heart bleeding in her hands. A poor woman, in a coarse frock, her skin weathered from the fields. Maria looked into her eyes—eyes that had no colour, no centre, no pain. The Virgin smiled, lifted her heart to her mouth, and swallowed it whole.

  Maria came out of the building, tying up her blouse with one hand and clutching the jam jars with the other. She hollered at the children to put their things in the cart and ordered Myron to hitch up the horse. The officer watched from the doorway, not bothering to buckle his pants. She threw their belongings on top of the grain. When the children didn’t climb in fast enough, she roughly lifted them in. She yelled at Myron to go, even though he hadn’t double-checked the harness. Maria walked behind the cart, her head held high, looking straight ahead, counting her children, praying that she would make the fifty-mile trek north to Teodor’s sister’s homestead, the contours of the cross still burning in her palm.

  Maria checks herself in the mirror. Her hair, smoothed back in a bun and parted in the middle, frames her round face. Small lines show at the corners of her eyes and lips. A practical face. She makes the effort to soften her worry frown. She is surprised how much younger she looks even with a slight smile. She straightens the wooden cross so it falls just past the first button of her blouse. The first night they lay beside each other, after almost two years apart, Teodor asked about the crucifix. She told him that she traded it for the cart and grain. When he reached for her hand, she pulled away. She said it had to be done. Nothing comes from looking back.

  The next day, he went to the grove of white birches and selected an unblemished limb. He carved the cross following the grain, revealing a perfect whorling heart at its centre. He sanded the edges round and smooth. Drilled a hole through the top and threaded a leather string. When he placed the cross over her bowed head and it touched her chest, she grabbed it away. He took her hand in his and kissed it. Gently, he placed the cross against her chest and covered it with his hand. In his eyes, she knew that her God had forgiven her.

  Maria herds the children out the door. They fan across the prairies, a jumbling parade of quick steps and swinging arms, some running ahead, others lagging behind, veering to the right then to the left, before settling into a ragged line marching east into the rising sun. It is only seven. She is confident they will traverse the eight miles in time for the nine o’clock service.

  ONE WEEK LATER, Teodor breaks the last acre. He and Myron p
low the final twenty feet by the waning moon’s light. Walking home, they follow the dim beacon of the kerosene lamp Maria hung outside the shed, the only star anchored to land. After giving the horse extra hay, Teodor enters the shack, pulls off his muddy boots, and announces that soon it will be time to sow.

  THE NEXT DAY, after church, Maria asks to see the field. She and Teodor head out alone, leaving Dania in charge. Maria still wears her black skirt and crisp white shirt from the service. Her hair is braided and coiled in a bun. She holds the skirt hem up to keep it from dragging in the mud and catching on nettles. Teodor guides her around marsh holes and puddles and takes her hand to help her over the stones.

  Maria tells him the news from town and Teodor listens. Occasionally, she stops and pulls a long blade of sweet grass to chew on. They wander slowly, stealing glances at each other, reacquainting themselves with the oddness of being alone together. The sun is low by the time they reach the fieldstone wall marking the start of their property. Teodor helps Maria over the wall. She lifts her eyes across the tilled ground.

  Long black furrows stretch ahead of them, not straight and rigid but rolling and soft. Maria takes Teodor’s hand. They walk through the rows, a furrow between them. They walk from one end to the other. Teodor points out where the biggest stumps and rocks had been, where the horse had thrown a shoe, and where the pickaxe had shattered. When they reach the end of the furrow, they turn: Teodor from habit and Maria wanting to see again. The sun casts their shadows across the waiting ground. Maria asks to see the house. Teodor says it isn’t ready. She asks again.