“Lee sent a letter.” Nan took out an envelope. The envelope was stained, torn at the edges. As with the others, it was so heavily stamped the scrawl across the front barely was visible. Nan read:
Dear Family,
We don’t get much time to think of home, but if there’s a minute extra, we write. We have marched a great deal. The farms in France aren’t a bit like ours. The land is divvied into patches no larger than an acre, every inch plowed. This makes for hard walking what with the hedgerows, and we move like turtles. Yesterday we hit open land. I took a bath and washed my clothes in a mountain stream and it was some cold. Had horse meat for dinner. Thought that was a strange meal, but I didn’t tell. Corporal thinks I’m fine at chopping wood. We do so for as many as seven days when out of the trenches, and the others are slow. Corporal thinks I’m slow in other ways, but he doesn’t say how. He calls me Hush. The boys do the same. I don’t know what to make of that. This morning, an aeroplane battled in the air. Interesting to see, though the others say they’ve seen it by the dozens. The woods are so thick here the planes were soon out of sight. Had a sick spell a short time ago but it didn’t stick. Well, Corporal is calling for us now so I must finish this. Tell Mother not to worry. I haven’t seen a German yet.
Yours,
Lee
“Is that it?” I asked.
“It’s Lee.”
“Has your mother seen it?”
She shook her head.
“Best not, I suppose. Best not tell the boy about your mother either.”
“Mother told me not to.”
“What else has your mother said?”
Nan drew her shoulders together. “Do you want to write a note back?”
I sighed. “They will be sending him home, I would think. They cannot keep a boy forever.”
Nan made a sound in her throat and folded the letter away. “They can keep him as long as they like.”
The toast had run cold. The scrappling tasted of nothing more than skin and fat. My youngest son had long outgrown me. I hoped he would outgrow me further still. Too soft a heart never made a man any good. I prayed my son knew the same. Prayed it turned him sensible instead. Through the open window, the whine of a saw in the Elliot yard.
“Close it,” I said.
A fog of sawdust broke from their barn. Soon the beating of hammers. Nan stood and shut the pane.
“Have you heard from Carl?”
She sat again. “Nothing.” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “Mother said I should think of the girls if I think of anyone. I should think of them as my own.”
I dropped my chin into my hands. “Family is everything.”
She looked at me as if wanting more. The girls already had a mother. And Nan, she was engaged to be married. The man was miles across the ocean and not heard from in months, yet she had that.
“She thinks I might not have my own — children, I mean,” said Nan. “Why would she say that?”
“Of course you will have children.”
Nan covered her mouth. She took a breath before she spoke. “Mother said I mustn’t leave the girls alone.”
“No.” The word came more as an echo than an answer. Outside, Elliot’s saw had started up with greater force, and a thought burned in my throat. I knew at once I must speak to Margrit, no matter her sleep. I must ask her what she meant.
Nan closed her eyes. A sob escaped her. I looked to the window. When she spoke, her words were plain. “The note?”
I pressed my hand to my forehead. A note to my son, with his mother in bed. What could I write?
“Very well,” she said. On the other side of the wall, Margrit coughed and coughed again. My daughter scraped her chair across the floor and picked up my plate. Her hands had roughened, the skin chafing. She worked too hard. But I could not have her work less. She stumbled against a catch in the floor, swung out an arm for balance, and quickened her steps. When I looked again, her ring lay small and thin on the tablecloth between us.
It was a week later when I lost Margrit for good. The flu, said the doctor. Yet I believed it far the worse. A fever that ran on ships. Ate slices of lemon cake at our kitchen table. I might as well have fed that fever to Margrit myself. With the Harding proclamation, we never could bury her in the churchyard with a German prayer. Never so much as inscribe hier ruht in gott on a stone. I was left with not a child who dared speak my native tongue. Nor a neighbor who might welcome it. Beneath a slab of slate, we laid her in a field where she might see the house, the river behind it. The girls stood with bouquets of lilies. As the eldest, Nan was the first to throw hers in the dirt. She had the children dressed in black, their faces clean. By rights, a year they should wear the same, but in this place I imagined they would forget.
The winter became spring. Though the war had ended, Lee still had not returned. Our Agnes papered the house with drawings of her mother, all of them blurred. With the break in the weather, Nan stripped the linens from our beds. The stove was afire with boiling pots. The rooms puckered in the heat. Outside, just behind the smokehouse, my daughter starched and bleached the sheets. Shut the windows as I might, the children opened them again and leaned their faces out.
I lie now in this bed, the churchyard nearer to me, awaiting a doctor, a shovel, a hymn. The room about me is vacant. In the closet, Margrit’s dresses draw moths. How often I hear the noise of that man from the boardinghouse. The sound of him losing himself in the toilet. The sound of his shame. My children are all that is left me, strangers every one. I am in the house I built on my own acres, more than thirty years in making. The blanket across my chest is white and laundered fresh by my eldest daughter, now grown. Have I escaped nothing? You are not a father, the man in the boardinghouse tells me. You are no better a man.
Do you know that the most beautiful word in my language, the word that forgives all actions and desires, becomes its opposite when mistaken for English? Bitte. The t’s are soft and the e at the end opens in an exhale. In German the word means please, as in please forgive me. I have heard no better word for pleading. Yet in English, the word sounds closer to bitter, a sour taste. The German word asks for absolution. The English only carries blame. How can a man trust a language that turns pleading into a kind of hate?
That spring, we suffered days of rain. It melted the last of the snow. The river overflowed its banks. It wrenched hold of fence posts and sent them drifting. The work on the channel was gone, our acres a brilliant sheet of ruin. Ray tried his best, but a boy alone can only save so much. Whenever I looked out, a heavy-set woman waited by our fences. Ray spoke to her with little kindness. Still week after week, she stood until he took off his hat, wiped his hands on a trouser leg. At the end of a month, he set out earlier to his work to wait for her at the fence. When later the boy brought Patricia home as his bride, I was not the only one to believe he had raised her out of the dirt.
Outside, the sheets hung on the line. On the porch, Myrle sat alone. The girl wore little but a cotton dress, one nearly sweated through, and not a shoe on her feet. Since the death of her mother, her hair draped her forehead, a sound like a cat rising from her. I remember my parents scolding me. Keep your face dry. Cold water on the cheeks. There is sorrow. Tiefer Trauer. And the sorrow that is silent. Stille Trauer. What better than silence could I teach?