Shandi Mitchell Read online

  They walk the remaining half-mile not speaking. Maria keeps her eyes fixed on the building perched atop the hill, afraid that if she blinks it might disappear. They climb the path worn by the cart’s wheels up to the front of the house. When they are a few feet away, Teodor stops and lets Maria continue alone.

  The house is long and low. The logs, stripped of their bark, seep sap from their wounds. The six-foot walls are complete, the sides interlocked with notches. Soon the roof will be going on. A large hole for a window is set next to the door’s opening. Maria reaches the door and runs her hand along the frame over the hand-hewn timber. She notices the slashes in the wood where it has been planed and carved into shape. Each mark, her husband’s mark.

  She steps inside a massive room tented by blue sky. On the back wall, the golden sun blazes against the wood. Her backlit shadow, framed by the door, looks back at her. A rectangle of light floats beside it. She turns and looks out the window’s opening. Wild grass speckled with milkweed, clover, and starflowers unfolds from the threshold of the house to the black rectangular swatch of freshly turned earth. The horizon blushes pink and orange.

  Teodor watches Maria burnished in the light. She looks at him, her eyes shining. Her hair has come loose. He brushes it from her eyes. It is the first time he has touched her since his return.

  Maria leans against the wall between the door and the window and lifts her skirt.

  Teodor wakes to a chickadee’s song. He sees a robin facing south, choking back a big, fat worm. When he puts on his boots, he hesitates and empties them first, and a June bug falls onto the floor. All signs of luck indicating that today is a good day to plant.

  The ground has absorbed the early summer rains, the sun has dried the puddles, and the earth is warm and swollen. The clouds are towering puffs with white bottoms. The birch leaves have flipped, showing their silvery-green underbellies to the sky, promising a soft rain in the next few days. A slight breeze blows from the south. The full moon has passed and the new moon is rising.

  Teodor never plants under a full moon. He has heard the stories of seeds failing to germinate and seedlings shrivelling. The same stories caution against breeding livestock or birthing under a full moon or run the risk of lame colts, two-headed calves, and stillbirths. Something in the moon’s light causes monstrosities caught between life and death to be born. But today everything is perfect.

  Teodor is surprised by his good fortune of late. First, Josyp Petrenko, who holds the quarter-section northwest of theirs, lent Teodor his disc harrow and horses to help smooth the field, in appreciation for Teodor repairing a broken wagon axle and saving his family the shame of being late for church. Josyp’s a respected man. He’s paid off his homestead. He owns two horses, two oxen, three cows, a bull, and has just built a new barn. Now he is Teodor’s friend.

  And Maria managed to thresh and winnow almost three bushels of wheat from the confiscated stalks. Enough seed to bring in a good harvest so he can pay off his debts, provide for his family, maybe get ahead a little, and even repay Josyp Petrenko’s generosity. They are planting three weeks late, but if the weather holds, if it is dry but not too dry, and the heat of summer spills into fall, there will be enough time.

  The two families stand at the edge of the broken ground; even Anna has joined them for this occasion. Silhouetted against the sky, they look like a child’s paper cutout stretched across the horizon, each person six rows apart. Strapped across their shoulders are bulging sacks cradled in their arms. The children tilt slightly backward, balancing the weight. They are watching Teodor.

  It has been light for an hour. When they arrived, they lined up at the cart and Teodor dispensed the seed, adjusting the quantity to each child’s size and weight. Ivan and Petro eyed each other’s bags to make sure the amounts were the same. Anna insisted on carrying far more seed than Teodor thought she could handle. When she started swaying from the weight, he refused to give her any more. Her face red from the exertion, she carried the bundle high on her belly. Teodor filled his pouch last and brushed the remaining seeds from the cart floor, careful not to lose a single kernel.

  He stands at the edge of the field, running his fingers through the loose seed, feeling its dryness slip through his fingers. The furrows glisten with the morning dew. The horse grazes, gently tearing at the tall grass on the other side of the stone wall. Its tail contentedly swishes back and forth.

  “Ask,” insists Maria.

  Teodor hesitates, but even he is unwilling to take such a risk. He asks. He asks for help from the sun, the souls of the ancestors, the spirits in the fields and woods to help make a good harvest; protect them from lightning, storms, floods, fires, and grasshoppers; and bless them with the sacred bread. The families cross themselves. Teodor reluctantly makes the sign. He does this for Maria.

  Teodor fills his hand, takes a step forward, and strews the seed side to side in sweeping graceful arches. Like a priest, he anoints the ground: Accept me, accept me.

  The family steps forward as one advancing line, scattering their offering in a silent, holy procession. The seeds catch the sun as they spin through the air, falling to life.

  July brings the first vegetable harvest. Young green fruit, bitter and hard, nestles against swollen ripe vegetables that if not picked soon will fall and rot on the ground. Every morning the children free the overburdened plants from their offspring. They twist off the stems of beans, pickling cucumbers, and early tomatoes and toss them into overflowing buckets. They cut back lettuce, thin carrots, pull onion bunches, strip the vines of peas … only to discover the next morning the garden has birthed again.

  They eat from the vine—shelling sun-warmed peas, one for the pail and one for their mouth, and no one tells them they can’t. The first day, they gorged themselves so much, they had diarrhea and bellyaches for three days. The novelty of fresh food has worn off. They chew absently on celery and rhubarb stalks, not because they’re hungry but because they can. They have settled into the daily chore of harvesting.

  They sit heavily in the dirt as they root for the ripest vegetables to pluck. Their fingers automatically search out potato weevils and cabbage thrips and smush them as absently as brushing away crumbs. The heat keeps them pressed close to the earth’s coolness. Maria fills the extra daylight hours with more chores: gather wild raspberries, sterilize jars, muck the barn, change the hay, repair the willow fence, stake unruly plants, fertilize, weed, water … a never-ending list of things to do.

  Vegetables pile up on the table and on the floor, some for tonight’s dinner, the rest to be washed and pickled. Braids of onion and garlic hang from the rafters. Dill dries in upside-down bunches. As Maria bottles the eighteenth jar of yellow beans and looks to the next three pails awaiting her, she decides that it is time to go to town.

  She chooses Dania and Lesya to accompany her. Sofia is relieved that she won’t have to carry the heavy baskets or be seen selling wares on the street, but is also dismayed that she won’t see the new Sears Roebuck catalogue or be noticed by an English boy. The children sort the vegetables, scrub them, separate the bruised and damaged, then pack the flawless in baskets nestled with straw. They cover the bounty with crisp white linen cloths and line them up on the parched, dusty grass. They step back and admire the half-dozen baskets laden with treasure, a caravan of riches about to embark on a journey. Maria knocks on Anna’s door and asks whether she would like to come.

  Anna has put on weight. Her face is tanned from helping in the garden. Her shorn hair has grown a little and she even let Maria trim it once. She manages to help with the canning, smiling and nodding as if she is listening. Only when Maria looks directly at her while recounting a child’s indiscretion or a day’s funny event is she unsettled by the emptiness of her sister-in-law’s eyes. Anna must notice, because invariably she contributes to the conversation, more of a query to keep Maria talking, or remembers something else she needs to do and turns away.

  Every morning, Anna goes for a long walk. She
follows the same path west toward the bush. She doesn’t wipe away the sweat damping her face. She lets her skirt trail in the dust. She walks briskly, her breath laboured, until she reaches the shade of the trees. Then she slows and carefully searches for signs. A pawprint or a tuft of fur. She stops at a hollow beneath two twisted poplars. This is where the grass is trodden down and the dirt sometimes scratched away. This is where they sleep.

  Initially, Anna would quickly leave her offering of a piece of bread, a half-eaten pyrih, or a cracked egg, a gift of thanks, and hurry away, not wanting to trespass. She would retreat to the stone wall and watch for their shadows darting between the trees. Rarely would she catch a glimpse. But every morning when she returned, the food would be gone. Lately, Anna lingers at the spot. She has started to leave her scent. She has sat on the grass. Touched the tree. Took a bite of the bread. Left a stocking. She wants to tell them, I am one of you.

  The coyotes have moved farther away these last few weeks. Fatted and contented, they have retreated into the wilds to feast on gophers, rabbit, and fawns. But there is at least one that has stayed for her. She has seen its print in the mud. When she placed her hand over it, she was surprised that its track was smaller. She sits still, hoping she is being watched.

  As the blistering sun climbs, Anna heads toward the stone wall. She knows the coyotes pass by it at night. She wonders what they must think of this strange thing that has cropped up in their fields. She wonders what they can smell. She runs her hands over the rough stones, then climbs over onto Teodor’s side of the field.

  Now that Teodor has been free of the field to work on the house full-time, he is pushing to complete it before the harvest. Anna can see him and Myron shingling the roof. She watches dispassionately. They are a part of the prairies like the gophers, the sky, or the fence posts.

  She visited Teodor’s new house once, in the early morning, before the world had woken. It rose grey and empty from the twilight. Gaping holes for the door and window. The rafters in place, but the roof not closed in. The framework of the house not yet marred by life. Full of promise and possibility. She wandered through its interior, absorbing the smell of fresh-cut timber, the dew clinging to her dress, the swallows and chickadees announcing the light. The sun rising orange, scalloping the clouds red, and she felt sad. Sad that this house would lose its innocence. The carefully hewn beams will crack, the chinking will crumble, the door and window will settle and twist. The roof will leak, the foundation will rot. The winds and rain and snow will strip away the facade. She ran her fingers over the logs, pondering a recess chiselled into the north wall, a small rectangle, eight inches wide and ten inches high. A strange anomaly in the straight, pure lines. She didn’t hear Teodor approach or she probably would have fled. She has been avoiding her brother, unable to find words.

  When they were young, they had no secrets between them. Now they’ve lost the ability to speak to each other. Afraid that through words, they will reveal too much. Afraid that each will see into the other and know what is being hidden.

  “What’s this?” she asked, running her hand along the carved-out niche. Teodor shuffled his feet and searched for an answer.

  Anna answered for him. “A secret?”

  Teodor grinned and confirmed her guess. “A secret.”

  “What do you have to hide?”

  But there were no more words. Teodor picked up his tools and set to work. Anna watched him strip bark from a log for a while. The green sweet skin peeled off in long strips, exposing alabaster flesh. She watched her brother crafting a new life, a new home for his family. Saw how much care he had put into every notch, noticed the tightness of the fits, and the pine trim he had framed around the window. She saw every cut of love and could have wept. But didn’t. Neither of them would have known what to do with the tears. She has never gone back.

  Anna’s skirt skims against the foot-high blades of wheat, tender and green. The wheat bows and parts before her, closes behind her, veiling her path. She cuts across to the very centre until she reaches a small circular spot of flattened stalks. There she sits. She unbuttons her blouse and lays it neatly on the ground. Then she unstrings the corset, breathing in deep as it releases her. She opens her breasts and belly to the sun.

  Her breasts are swollen. The nipples are larger and a deeper brown. Her belly protrudes round and low. This sensitive skin, usually kept hidden from the sun, is raw and red from a burn that has not been allowed to heal. Heat blisters weep and the imprint of the corset, like skeletal fingers, grips her belly. She slips off the corset and arches her belly toward the sky. It has been four months and it’s still inside her.

  She sits in the field, willing the sun’s fire to sear its way inside her. She is unable to stop her hand, which claws fistfuls of cool black earth and shovels it into her mouth.

  Anna tells Maria she thinks she’ll stay home today.

  “IT’S WARM!” Ivan screeches with delight as he runs naked into the water, splashing torrents of spray in a shower of rainbow light. “Come on!” He dives in headfirst and disappears from sight. Katya holds her dress high above her waist and wades into the water. Minnows flicker around her feet in the shallows. Her toes follow them slowly so as not to scare them away.

  “Don’t go out any farther and don’t get your dress wet,” Sofia admonishes her, “or I’ll whip your behind.”

  “No you won’t,” Katya challenges, “or I’ll tell Mama.”

  “She’s not here,” Sofia reminds her, and Katya lifts her dress higher. Petro stands barefoot at the edge of Bug Lake, shyly gripping his shirt in his hands, acutely aware of Sofia staring at his thin, underdeveloped body. Ivan resurfaces, hooting and hollering, shaking his long hair from his eyes. “Come on in, don’t be a chickenshit!”

  “Watch your tongue!” Sofia says with her hands on her hips, the self-appointed adult while the others are in town. Ivan ignores her and floats on his back.

  “Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit …”

  The cool water embraces him as the burning sun evaporates the droplets on his belly. He tilts his head back, submersing his ears, enamoured by the deep bass sound of his voice echoing in his head. He stretches out the words, altering the pitch. “Chic-ken-shit …”

  Bug Lake is not much more than a watering hole skirting the west property line. By the end of August, it dries into a slimy green mire that’s maybe four feet deep. The children can walk across it, if they keep their chins up. But at this time of year it’s deep enough to swim to the bottom and almost run out of air before getting back up. At dawn and dusk, perch and pike jump, creating the illusion of raindrops hitting the water’s surface.

  “You don’t have to go in,” Sofia dismisses Petro as she looks for a nice place in the shade, free of bugs and pokey roots. She has brought her mother’s good woollen blanket that’s kept tucked away in the blanket chest for safekeeping. It has never been used in Sofia’s memory and she is certain her mother won’t notice it has been borrowed. Besides, she’ll have it back in with the camphor balls before Maria returns home. She also has a thin Hudson’s Bay blanket to string in the branches for shade, her version of an umbrella she saw in a magazine that Ruth brought to school.

  The black and white photograph showed a group of men and women dressed in white stretched out on a blanket, with a picnic basket, eating strawberries and drinking from tall glass goblets. It was titled “Picnic in the Park.” The women, with their upswept hair, giggled at the camera. The young men, dashing in straw hats, lay on their bellies, looking up at the girls. One had his mouth open as a girl held a fat strawberry above him with a white-gloved hand. Sofia arranges herself on the good blanket, with her knees tucked coyly under her, like the girl in the photograph, and sets out a bowl of wild raspberries she has picked along the way. Their vibrant red contrasts beautifully with the blanket’s muted blue, ivory, and salmon floral design, the green grass, and Sofia’s yellow smock.

  “Chickenshit!” Ivan bellows louder.

  �
��Shut your trap or we’re going home!” She snipes at Petro: “Are you going in or not?” Irritated that his skinny shadow is falling on her blanket.

  Petro wants to go in, but he doesn’t want to take his pants off.

  “Look away,” he says.

  “I’ve seen a bare ass before.” She raises her voice to make sure Ivan hears: “I saw his chicken ass last week running from the outhouse. Saw his little dangly too, bobbing up and down, like a hen peckin’ seed.”

  Ivan splays his arms low to create a tidal wave and drives it at Sofia. The wave peters out before reaching shore.

  Sofia laughs. “Sookie baby.”

  “Cow.” Ivan fills his mouth with water. He squirts it at her in a long, high arch that almost reaches her toes.

  “Don’t get Mama’s blanket wet!”

  “You’re scaring the fish,” Katya whines, trying to calm the rippling water.

  Ivan fills his mouth again and aims for the blanket.

  “Don’t … I’m warning you, don’t do it.”

  Ivan spits the water high, a perfect stream cascading toward the blanket. Sofia steps in front of it, blocking the potential disaster. Water blooms across her chest, turning the fabric transparent, illuminating her small buds.

  “I can see your teats,” crows Ivan. Petro can’t help but look. Sofia whips off her smock and Ivan is surprised to see soft blond down on her crotch.

  “I’m going to drown you.” Sofia races into the water after him, not caring about her recently curled hair. Water wheels wildly around her as she chases him down. Ivan swims for his life, screaming for help.

  Petro slips off his pants and runs in to save his cousin. From behind, his tiny butt is stark white against the deep brown of his back and shoulders. As he hops past Katya, shouting, “I’m coming!” he forgets the long, thin black-and-purple bruises slashed across his backside, betraying the previous night’s punishment.