We will take care of the land and the house for as long as you wish, unless you can arrange a return. Travel here is ever the worse. Every boy has put on his boots for war, and the Kaiser would rather starve us than give way to France. We haven’t the feed to keep our cattle. Our potatoes look blacker this year than the last. A quiet place like this might not survive all the trouble. I dare say your parents might have escaped the worst of it, if you can find peace in that. You are better off where you are.
Your cousin,
Martha Hess
“What is it, Julius?”
I closed the letter in my lap. The room seemed to dim. Margrit clicked her needles. Outside, the cicadas droned and the Elliot pups yowled from their barn. Oh, the food we had wasted. The expense of those tablecloths. I imagined them hanging in the parlor as curtains, sown in patches. Now with the letter from my cousin, the last string had been clipped. I had nothing in the old country left to me. Little way to return. How often had I wished the same? “Schwierigkeit,” Martha had written. Trouble. The beginnings of a war. A thing so distant we could only but stand in the early dark and think of our milking. How could war be trouble any more than burying a mother and father? And only weeks from each other? I had been absent to witness both. I might never have stepped foot in the place. Never been born.
“Julius.” Margrit rested her fingers on mine.
“Trouble in Germany,” I said.
“What sort of trouble?”
Out the window, my daughters ran in their bare feet from the river. In her belted sack, Esther looked dry as a bone. Myrle plodded behind, her dress soaked. Her skin showed pink underneath, her hair wet on her cheeks. She shivered. I thought to call out to her, but could not find my voice. When the curtain fell back, the sight vanished.
“Julius.” Margrit crouched at my side. She had turned the letter so she might read it.
I closed the page in my fist. “It’s over now. It’s gone.”
Every day of that fall, I thought of little but Clark and his ailing heart, his five empty graves. I owned but a hundred and fifty acres, a decent lot of land for my sons. Yet others after us had bargained more. Every year at harvest, their wagons stood heavier with grain. Their horses strained. He left the land to us, wrote my cousin. I had never wanted the family acres. My own were far the closer and ever growing. Still, a good half dozen were wasted by their nearness to the river. A good half saved if I straightened the channel. Made that mud into something stronger to hold a seed, to drive the plow. The water lay like a boundary never to be trespassed. Yet I would trespass. Damn if Elliot helped or not.
My sons and I were thick in the worst of it. Two days of mud with only the aid of our horses, the tractor at the end. The water ran four hands deep at the driest times of year. Yet when it was full, those banks lost inches. Now with the river low, we had only strength enough to build a wall of timber and stone to shore up our banks, keep the river on its course. When at last our efforts held, a shadow broke over us.
“What’s this here?” said Elliot.
I leaned against my shovel. On the far bank, Elliot was a gaunt figure. I washed the sweat from my face with the thick of my sleeve. “As I told you.”
“You told me, eh?”
“Straightening the channel. It will give the both of us more usable land. If you want to bring your boy to help, we can make the going faster. Your side of it anyway. We are working on ours now. Just a portion to start before the freeze.”
“You think we have time for helping?”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Come spring, we can begin your side.”
Elliot marched off. I squared my hat. Lee and Ray had stopped their work, their blades in the bank. “Until spring,” I said. “He will change his mind.”
“What if he doesn’t?” Ray asked.
I chewed my cheek. “You cannot help a man who will not help himself.”
“With our banks holding, what if the water swamps his?” Lee stood next to his brother in waders. He was taller than Ray by a head, twice as broad. Still there was something small in the boy.
“It won’t.” I bent to my work. The water snaked round my boots. When I raised my face, the wind sent me to shivering. “Lee,” I called. The boy gazed across the pastures on the far side. Elliot himself was gone. In front of their barn his son Tom stood, watching us.
The trees turned bare with winter. Margrit and I drove to town in our wagon for the last trade of the year. The snow had narrowed the road, the river only ice and stone. Beside me, my wife pressed her hands together in her lap. When we passed the Clarks’ fences, she tapped her knuckles.
“Haven’t seen the Clarks since weeks,” she said. Their house was dark. In the barn, one of the daughters sang a tune. The barn was dark as well.
“I never see them much.”
“Mrs. Clark missed sewing on Wednesday and the Wednesday before that.”
“I suppose the county has run out of cloth for her.”
Margrit smiled but quickly fell silent. Her eyes stayed with the house. “She has a fast hand. I’ll give you that.”
“We have no need of Mrs. Clark.”
My wife stirred. “We have no need of her sewing. But she and Mary are the only ones who visit us.”
I drove on. My wife often hid her worries, but she kept her eyes on me for now. When we reached town, the streets seemed deserted. The doors closed, shutters drawn. No wagons stood before the market other than a single four-wheeled cart. Only Mr. Wilkerson walked on the path. When I nodded to him, he offered a look back. A trio of boys played with their marbles. The tallest of them held his like a fist of stones. The horses grew restless, the boys leering at us. When I stepped out to secure the wagon, I rubbed at the horses’ flanks and Margrit hurried to the market. It was then I heard a voice.
One of the boys lay on his backside in the snow. His cheeks were red as his hair, his lips bloody. The other two straddled him with their boots on his hands. They dropped one marble after another into his mouth. The boy squirmed. The marbles struck his teeth with a wet snap. If he dared close his lips, one of the boys pried them open again. I called out to them. The two dropped their marbles just the same. The mouth of the boy filled. He was close to choking. When I took to my feet, the two raised their heads, glanced at the other, and ran. The red-haired one rolled onto his stomach, spit the marbles out. The underside of his coat was soaked with mud and snow. He gripped his stomach, tried to lift himself. Before I could reach him, he had leapt from the ground and run off as well.
I stood in the street alone. At my feet, a frozen puddle of spit and blood and a handful of marbles, white as milk. The boys had vanished. The marbles lay sunken in the mud. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. At my back, the market door opened. “Wo bist du?” Margrit called. I slipped the marble into my pocket and raised my hand to her.
Margrit held the door with its bell ringing. From the wagon I hefted our jug of cream and carried it up the steps. The weight of the jug weakened me, as did the strangeness of what I had seen. Two boys. Intent on drowning another with playthings. Inside, the market was airless. An old woman sniffed, eyeing me as if I had somehow caused her sickness. I lugged the cream to the counter. The bell sounded again. Before I could turn, something sharp and wet struck my neck. Margrit pushed at my arm. “Ignore it,” she begged. I looked to find an egg bleeding on the floor, and there was the red-headed boy, not lying now in the mud and snow but his face raw. His lips were bloody still. He stood in the door with his arm cocked from the throw of that egg, and slammed out of the place the way I supposed he would the rest of his life. An unthankful creature. A ruffian. A boy not much higher than dirt.