Years ago when I stood on the deck of that ship, the sea reflected the sun. It lit my face from beneath. I believed I might go blind from the light. Even now I blink when I think of it. Me, only thirty-three and ignorant of everything save for what I could grow with my own hands. Born as I was a farmer. Raised in the northern German lands of wheat. The rest of my life, I learned little I would find important. About war, perhaps. About children and the duties of family. Yet these were not light. I could not make of them that.
When at last they released me from that prison Ellis Island, I wandered the streets of the city for a place to lay my head. With difficulty, I found boarding and determined to use it well. For two days I slept. Still I believed myself drifting on that ocean. On the third, a noise stirred me. A man stood next to my cot. His knees pressed into my mattress. I shared the room with a dozen others, and we had avoided so much as a glance. This man was short, powerfully built. He wore nothing save a stained undershirt, his naked arms and legs masked with hair. His breath more than stank. He watched me until certain I was alert, cleared his throat and puckered his lips. I turned my face. He let out a low guttural noise then, insulting me in some foreign language. In my innocence, I shook my head. Without another word he hurried to the toilet. From that room I heard worse from the man. His stomach seemed to drop out of him whole, leaving him gasping. When at last I sat up, I felt dizzy. Disjointed from my sleep. A spot of wet stained the blanket that lay across my chest. It was no larger than my thumb and just as harmless-seeming. Yet I remembered that man clearing his throat and understood such a spot never came from me.
Sleep on, Julius. Sleep on. The man had shared his pains as punishment. But for what crime? Come morning I would make my escape and discover the land they promised.
Early the next day, I packed my meager belongings and wandered the streets. I had often heard about the land in the west. New York seemed to promise little of such openness. How was it that its people settled on top of one another, never to fear trampling? In the afternoon, the streets shimmered with heat. I found only a bench in a park to give me rest. A church bell called once and again. I counted the bills that lined my wallet, wishing there were more.
Already I worried about my decision to leave home. To think I had wanted but a small bit of soil. Something not carved out by my father or his father before him. Yet almost every acre in my country had already been claimed. The thought of my father once he discovered my absence troubled me further still. The morning I went, I planned to leave hours of road behind me, long before my parents stood from their beds. I took a loaf of bread. A knife with which to cut it and keep for my protection. The cows I milked. The milk I poured in a jug for my mother. My bed I straightened, my church shoes placed at the door for one cousin to have or another. I had no heart to write a note. The cows would tell enough. The story, it would circle the village. How the son made well what was needed of him. How he had started in the darker hours to finish it. I imagined my father lifting his hat in the barn to find the cows asleep. Their stomachs would be full, their pails heavy with milk. I imagined my mother happening upon my bed and lifting the sheet. At its touch, warm or cold, she might guess the hour I had gone.
Week after week I trolled for work in that city, only to return to a different boardinghouse. I now had a room of my own with a lock. Still, my pockets had grown thin. My stomach suffered cramps. Outside in the hall, a washerwoman sang to herself as she scrubbed the floor. I opened my door to hear her better. “Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked, turning. Are you all right? Need you anything? “Nichts,” I answered. Her German held the thick lilting hum of the southern states, her s’s full between her teeth. Every word she spoke trailed from the roof of her mouth. At once I felt the home I had left restored to me. The woman wore hard wooden shoes. Her torso was narrow, her neck long. It rose to a faint line of hair, more white than blond and tied in a net. Without stopping her hands, she rinsed her rag in a bucket, wrung it, set it to the floor. Her singing never dropped a note. Despite the sorry house, she seemed to hold its very cleanliness on the tip of her thumb.
Mornings passed. I saw her many a time. Margrit was her name. An orphan. Her father gone to drink, her mother dead. At the age of twelve she had sold her family possessions to make the passage across. What little of Germany she knew remained in the language she spoke, her sense of work. She cared for that boardinghouse like her home.
“Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked.
“Nichts,” I answered again. Still I was growing more reluctant to close that door between us.
Inside the daylight hours, I continued my search for employment. Often I passed the same forlorn sheet of paper tacked to a post. An advertisement, in German no less. acres by the millions. lands for sale. It showed a crude drawing of a railway cutting between miles of grass. I brought it to the man at the boardinghouse desk. Margrit held the sheet close, a translator for us. I was to purchase my train ticket. Labor in the place day and night to fill my pocket. Offer my bid within thirty days. “My own brother did it, and my dad. But not me,” the man explained. “Nothing there but dust.” “Nur Staub,” Margrit said. But dust, I thought, it needs soil to run beneath it. More land than could fit inside a fence. Margrit rolled the paper neatly, warmed it in her hands. When she offered it back, it seemed a gift. When next I saw her, I had a different answer to her question.
“Brauchen Sie irgendetwas?” she asked. “Ja,” I said.
Margrit and I were a week later married. With my last dollars, I purchased our tickets west.
They say one countryside is like another. There are horses and cattle. The smell of dung. At home, my father owned a small farm of forty acres where we raised wheat and maize. Yet as soon as our train crossed into the western plains, I knew this land would be different. The maps showed a state bordered on both sides by rivers. The Mississippi on one. The Missouri the other. A mouthful both of them, wide as any plain. Iowa. The word gives nothing for the tongue to hold. Still when we arrived, it seemed wholly settled, if only in the steadiness in its terrain. In Iowa, I held my hand level to the earth, my fingers splayed. If I squinted right, the very crevices in my skin disappeared into the dust. There was little difference between me and it.
Yes, this suits, I thought. It will a man and his family feed. It will bear a house on acres enough to build further still. With Margrit at my side, I believed this country held no trickery or grief. It was only as it seemed.
It was late in the summer when Margrit and I arrived on our stake of land. Our wagon was full. Our pockets drained. Bottomland, we had been promised. But I feared a rich soil swamped up to our britches. Only the spring before, we were told, the channels in the northeast had swallowed their banks. When the waters retreated, the soil was black as ink. Flat as an ironed sheet. Now the river stayed in its bed, a murky line that marked the border of our land. We had but a hundred and fifty acres, so far from the closest village we had earned twice our dollar. With the savings, we purchased a team of horses. A dairy cow and chickens. A plow and harrow for planting. At first only ten of our acres were broken in, the rest overrun with prairie grasses. An abandoned dugout stood in the southeast corner, so narrow it held no more than a cot. The door fell off at a touch, little better than a piece of canvas. The agent told us two brothers had run of the place. In the months before, the dugout had been found deserted. All that remained was a starveling dog tied to a post, a packet of tobacco hidden in the wall. Now both dog and tobacco were gone.