We ducked our heads. The roof was never so tall for a man to stand. Margrit reached for the ceiling. Her fingertips blackened. “Wie ein Grab,” she said and wiped her hand on her skirts. No better than a grave. She left our bedding outside. “I am not sleeping in it. Might be fine for dead brothers, but I am far from that.”
“If it rains?”
“We drown.”
“And snakes?”
She considered. Out of her trunk, she uncoiled a woolen rope intended to hang sheets. She laid the rope around our blankets. “To confuse the snakes.”
That afternoon we built a shanty from discarded tree limbs and covered it with bark. The sun would in a week curl the bark. Yet for our first evenings, the shanty suited us. A proper house, I promised Margrit, with a wooden frame. It would be finer than the log cabins we had seen, only earth and grass to fill the cracks. Margrit gazed about the prairie. No tree stood larger than an old man.
The animals we roped together behind the dugout where they ceased to whine. I scraped out a circle of dirt and lit twigs for a fire. What dried codfish we had was sweet, with meal to fill it. Our husks of corn buttered our chins. Around us, the fields stretched, the zikaden singing. Where we camped seemed the bottom of a bowl. So steady that wherever a man set his foot, it would remain. As would every wall he built. Every pole of a fence. When at last Margrit began to sing, it was a song I knew from my own mother. She had been born in the south of the country, where farming lands were little but gardens and German sons tried their hands at blacksmithing instead. Margrit stretched her legs to the fire and lifted her skirts. She rested my hand on the flesh of her knee. I felt every muscle of her thigh and the blood going there, alive as the good earth beneath us. She dropped her head against my shoulder.
“Wo sich Fuchs und Hase gute Nacht sagen,” she said. Where the fox and hare say goodnight.
Later we slept. Margrit buried her hand in mine and rested a foot across my ankle as if I might drift. Clouds to the east grew heavy. What stars appeared seemed distant. Owls screeched in the trees far along the river. Farther yet, the moan of a wolf. We had arrived. Now we but needed to show how we deserved this place. How everything it held would with faith and sweat be earned. Our sons never would vanish and leave their good shoes by the door. The silence seemed to promise this very thing. I felt none of the loneliness I had often known. Still as I closed my eyes, I sensed myself floating. Waters ran far beneath the earth at my spine. In the quiet, I heard nothing save for the river as it gushed and I felt all of it spinning. We might in any moment be drowned.
II
It was more than twenty years before the letter arrived. Since the day I left, I had every month or two written my parents. I gained no reply. I imagined my mother and father sitting in their kitchen. They stared at my words under a dim kerosene lamp. Were she alone, my mother might push her plate aside and search for a piece of paper to write. But my father would surely hold her arm.
Selfishness, I had often heard him say. I am not rewarding it.
Those were the years I walked our land morning and night. Our crops transformed from seed to harvest. Seed again. Farther off, farmers brought their wagons to stake the land. At home my wife birthed four daughters and two sons. The years were months. The marks of a pencil on the wall. One girl replaced another in the same hand-me-down dress. With every child, I feared for Margrit’s health. I swore I never would touch her again. It was the kind of thing that turned sleeping with a wife, as God saw fit, a terrible bloody business.
“We are from this place,” Margrit told the children. “We are from nowhere else.”
But then our youngest, Myrle. “We should not think to have another,” Margrit said. I held the girl to my shoulder, her breath on my neck. The child was so slight, so strange. Her every cry moved me to distraction. How desperately I worked to spare her pain. Must a man reach his last before his children become more to him than their endless demands?
“Father, you have a letter,” my eldest said.
It was a sweltering day in autumn. Nan stood at the stove, stirring a pot of soup. At the table Myrle clutched at her doll of buttons and rags. The other girls kicked their feet in their chairs, a pile of corn husks between them. The kitchen was in a state. The room was thick with steam, the sting of onions. The ceiling above the stove had gone black, the planks below caving beneath its stout iron weight. Our tabletops never were enough to feed so many at once. Still we were to host our neighbors for a picnic, as Margrit insisted. Their farms had quickly appeared on the horizon. Their children ran our fields as if ignorant of fences. I knew the men that owned these farms mostly by sight. An exchange of words about seeds or weather. That seemed enough. Now Margrit needed tablecloths, napkins.
“Why such a fuss?”
She squeezed my chin between finger and thumb. “I will wash them after for us to have curtains. Then you can close them all you want.”
Nan stopped her spoon and drew the letter from her pocket. The blue envelope was mottled with stamps. “It’s from Europe, I think. The postmark says Hamburg.”
“Germany?” asked Margrit.
I turned the letter over. “My mother.” Though I was not so certain. The writing on the envelope was strange, as if my mother had stooped beneath a candle with her pen.
Margrit sighed. “After so much time?”
I shook my head. The bread was rising in the oven, the soup simmering. A large sour roast and spätzle crowded the stove. The house seemed to breathe with every boiling pot. Our Esther gave up helping and raced screaming in a pair of trousers down the hall. “I asked her to wear her green dress,” explained Nan. “You’d think I’d cut off her head.” Myrle let out a wail, her doll fallen to the floor. Agnes gathered the husks close so they might not be swept away from her. Soon the kitchen spun with one girl after another. I stood unmoving in fear of collision, the letter pressed to my stomach as if it had somehow unmade us. Of that land I had left, I could not think. Could not so much as remember its smell. Calm now under the arm of her mother, Myrle whimpered. Her hair clung to her cheeks in pale strands. I slipped the letter in my pocket and rested a hand on her crown, soft as silk as her hair was.
“Go on now, Nan, take a rest,” said Margrit. “But first convince Esther to wear something decent.”
Nan swept her apron over her head and hurried out.
“And you, Julius,” said Margrit. “Make yourself some use and see to the tables. I asked Ray to set them, but he wasn’t too happy about it.”
Outside, two tables waited in the shade of our yard, the new tablecloths fastened with pins. Ray had finished what his mother asked. Now he stood with Lee in the barn to see to the broken thresher. At the gate, Elliot and his wife hurried down the path with their son. Elliot dropped a platter on the table, and Mary scattered a handful of flowers. Their boy bounded off to the barn to join my own. In the distance, Mrs. Clark and her brood marched along the grassy lane. Like rabid animals, her trio of girls raced through the weeds. A house full of women. What it might make of a man. Mr. Clark could only but stumble along behind them, thin as a rake.