The Barter (18 page)

He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his wallet, and takes a thick sheaf of twenties out. He tosses it onto the foot of the bed, where her feet are tucked under the covers. He steps out of his pants, and his belt jingles to the floor. In his boxers, he makes for the door, to take a shower and change before he heads back to the office.

“I don't make
little comments
,” he says, and it would be ridiculous if he weren't so angry. And if he hadn't just left a spiteful little pile of money at the foot of their bed.

Bridget hears the bathroom door close out in the hallway and knows there will be no more sleep for her that night. Soon Mark will go back to the office. Soon she will be alone again with the ghost.

R
ebecca could hardly stay in bed for the entire harvest season, however much Frau and the Doctor and perhaps even John might have wished it. Whether or not she could walk without feeling like her insides were falling out, there was simply too much to do.

And besides, by October Dusana had made a few remarks too many about how tired-out Frau was (“she not a young woman, after all”), how exhausted John and the men were, how no little boy so healthy should be spending so much time indoors, even at his tender age, how, really, her color seemed to be coming back. How every other homestead in the county but theirs was full to the rafters with people helping to pull in the grain, neighbors and relations and even children, all sitting down to the table at dinner with clean hands but otherwise bodily coated in sweat and sweet smells from the fields, oh, the prodigious amount of baking and cooking it took to keep that many friends in full stomachs during the busy weeks. “To me, that is a harvest season, although I know you and Mr. Hirschfelder do things different. Ah, but me, what fun!”

“There's plenty I can do sitting down,” Rebecca snapped at her
father one afternoon during a follow-up call, and that was the end of her time in bed.
Never would he argue with her,
as Frau had often said of her parents. Rebecca was beginning to realize just how much the Doctor and John had in common in that regard.

After emerging from the hot bedroom upstairs and rejoining the world where her work was welcome, Rebecca carried her little boy around the farmhouse and the yard in a cotton sling between her shoulder and her hip, and when he couldn't be there, he was in a crib with wheels that John built for him. Frau went back home to her room at the Doctor's house.

Those final days of autumn, every man and woman on the place worked from darkness to darkness to get the farm through the late season, John and the men wagoning the harvest to the grain elevator and the railhead in town, all the while simultaneously plowing for the winter crops, and Dusana and Rebecca gathering and preserving the late vegetables from the garden plot while undertaking the strenuous annual effort of ridding the house of a summer's worth of dust.

It would be far from true to say that the work invigorated her—in fact Rebecca found herself dreamily focused on sleep, thinking about it throughout the day, weighing pieces of sleep in her mind, tasting it like a broth, imagining with longing the sweet, swift decline into sleep, like a fall off a ladder. Matty woke twice every night to nurse, once at midnight or so and once at four, maddeningly close to Rebecca's usual waking time at five
A
.
M
.
Between feeding sessions she slept so hard that she often awoke disoriented, unsure where she lived, who she was, or why she was alone with an infant.

But at least now she knew the difference between a dreaming life and a waking life: Whatever else one could say about it, a farm in late harvest left no one feeling listless and purposeless and about to
be consumed by her own bedsheets. While getting back to work on the farm with John and the hired help didn't energize her, it did strengthen her. Because it was more obvious to her than ever what she was truly working for—she thought she would have needed to be a stupid woman indeed not to see it, when she carried it with her day in and day out and it woke her up in the night. The point of all this effort was not to outpace John's mother or hide from her own mistakes but to help build a life for herself, for her boy, for her family. The point wasn't whether she was good at it. The point was doing it, with every bit of will she possessed.

Rebecca and Dusana struggled at first with caring for the baby after Frau went back home; the farm's demands were an unyielding machine that didn't—couldn't—stop its ratcheting gears for a hungry infant. Matty was an insistent squaller when he wanted to feed, and despite Dusana's repeated, embarrassed, and finally short-tempered tutorials, Rebecca had a difficult time learning how to nurse the baby while he was in his sling. “But that what the sling is for!” Dusana exclaimed in exasperation, her imperfect English breaking apart. “It's no reason for carry him all day if you sit down to feed him!” Of course, Dusana was right—it would have been the better way. But Matty was as little and floppy as a hot water bottle, and Rebecca couldn't balance him correctly. He would lose the breast and be inconsolable, and the milk springing forth would ruin her dress. More laundry. It seemed unfair. The nursing hurt less by now, but she was still a novice, and she finally acknowledged that she simply couldn't feed the baby while standing up—Dusana's older sisters and their superior mothering abilities notwithstanding.

But she made of it a wiry little math problem to solve, and she made good use of the time whenever she found herself dropping into
a chair, or even cross-legged on the floor, with Matthew in her lap, whether in the cellar or outside the linen closet or on the porch or in the kitchen garden. She learned to arrange the baby in the sling across her lap so that she could keep her hands free, and she sewed larger pockets into her aprons and kept her spectacles and some mending work there. She spent many a pleasant half hour that way, sitting in the warm, sun-baked grass under a denuded peach tree with a happy baby at her breast and her sewing kit spread out around her, her fingers working at something, her eyeglasses on her nose, her back aching as it almost always did. If she talked to Matty while he nursed, she found that she could keep him awake long enough to nurse each breast to empty. So she would mutter stories to him like the ones Frau used to tell her as a girl, only the hapless heroine was herself and not Florencia. John found her in such a state one afternoon, midstory.

“Once upon a time your mama was trying to pluck a chicken. Nobody had told her how to do it, and she didn't want to ask.” (All this, so far, was true.) “She was looking forward to a nice hot chicken for supper. So she pulled and pulled and plucked and plucked, but it seemed to her that no sooner did she get a feather pulled than another one grew in its place. She began to think she must be doing it wrong. She said to the chicken, ‘How do I pluck you, silly old thing?' Wasn't that a funny thing to do, to ask the chicken? But your mama is a funny one. And do you know what? The chicken said, um . . .” Rebecca paused here to bite off the loose end of a thread with her teeth.

“The chicken said, ‘Ask the fox.'”

John, ducking underneath the branches of the peach tree behind them, was almost laughing. Rebecca could hear it in his throat,
and the sound of it made her long to trace the length of that throat with her mouth. She turned her head to look up at her husband, aware that she wasn't exactly at her prettiest, with her spectacles slipping crookedly down her sweaty nose and her hair falling out of her coronet braids, unwashed and lank looking. But she found that he was looking at her with warmth nonetheless, and it fortified her heart.

John came around the peach tree to kneel in front of them and admire his little boy, who came off the breast to stare at his father with interest. “Hello, little fellow.” With soft, sure fingers, as if he did it every day, John pulled Rebecca's chemise over her damp breast, and then he stroked Matthew's thick wheat-brown hair. “And how are you this afternoon, Mrs. Hirschfelder?” he asked quietly.

Everything in her was shivering as if she hadn't been sitting in eighty-degree heat all afternoon. His touch had awakened every nerve. “Thirsty,” Rebecca managed. “I've been out here too long and it's hot.”

“I'll get you a drink,” he offered in a soft voice. He kept his eyes trained on Matthew, deliberately it seemed to her. The boy made no secret of his excitement at his father's voice and presence, so close by.

“It's all right, don't bother. I'll go in,” Rebecca said immediately, then regretted rejecting his offer. She knew it was a fault of hers that had become an ingrained habit—pushing off Dusana's offers of help, and Frau's, and her father's, and of course John himself, his entire being. Her solitary ways hadn't done much for her happiness thus far, and nothing reminded her of how lonesome she could make herself so much as her little sweet companion, her dear constant audience. “Don't go,” she added in a gentler way. “He loves it when you hold him.” She transferred the bundle of boy into John's arms and stretched
her back and waggled her sore fingers while John stood with Matthew and raised him.

“So how does it end?” John asked, still looking at Matthew, who kicked his legs mightily in the sunshine over his father's head.

“Excuse me?” Rebecca felt a bottoming-out sensation.
I think it's bound to end the way it began, my dearest. With me saying something you can't forgive.

“What does the chicken say?” And he grinned down at her, his handsome face looking relaxed and joyful. The flash of the old John was almost too much for her to bear. Rebecca looked aside hastily into the browning grass.

“The chicken—the chicken says . . . ‘I'll make you a deal. You can pluck me and eat me for supper if, and only if, I can have a kiss.' And being a funny woman, Matty, your mama thought, ‘Well, it can't be
so
bad, to kiss a chicken.'” John released a husky laugh. Rebecca lay back in the grass and squinted up at the two of them outlined against the bright afternoon. “So Mama said, ‘All right, chicken. That seems a fair exchange.' And she bent toward the chicken to give it a kiss, and only then did she realize how she'd been fooled.”

Rebecca stopped. This story, the ending of which she'd heard from Frau many times before when Florencia had played the starring role, suddenly seemed like the wrong one to tell. She was seized with a moment of doubt that was like looking into a mirror and seeing a face she didn't expect to see.

“Go on,” John said, almost smiling.

“Well . . . a chicken—a chicken has no lips.”

John laughed heartily.

“So she couldn't kiss the chicken, and the crafty chicken came
back to life and regrew all its feathers and hopped back out into the yard, and Mama was despondent and sat down at the kitchen table to wonder what on earth they'd eat for supper, because all the men were due in from the fields soon. But then she smelled a delicious scent in the air, and she looked up, and the oven was glowing merrily, and she went to the oven and opened it up, and there inside was a fat, juicy roast chicken, all brown and glistening in the pan, and ready for their supper.”

John pulled Matthew into his chest and sat down beside her in the grass, looking at her fondly. “Is that one of Frau's stories?”

“It is,” Rebecca admitted with a slight smile. “I'd better ask her for a fresh lot, I suppose. I'm running out of Frau-and-Florencia stories Matty hasn't heard before.”

They let a moment's silence elapse while Rebecca put a blade of grass into Matthew's fist and let him examine it. “Do you ever miss living at home with Frau and your father, Rebecca?” John asked absently. He seemed to have withdrawn behind some invisible barrier again.

He could not have foreseen how the question would outrage her, else he would never have asked it, but Rebecca's heart was suddenly ablaze in her chest. After the past few months, after what it had cost her, after what she had put into getting back into the rhythm of the work around the place, for him to ask her whether she wanted to go back to that old, indolent life, sitting on chairs and reading newspapers and waiting for something to happen—it was as if he simply wasn't looking at her, as if he didn't know her heart at all. “This is my home now,” Rebecca replied hotly. “I work just as hard on this place as you do. It's
my
home. And don't you forget it.”

John nodded stiffly. He bent over to kiss his little boy in the
grass, and then got up and strode down the line of trees toward the barn.

*   *   *

A
good German farmer was a man who planned for and overcame the everyday catastrophes of farm life, of which there were as many as there were days in the week: broken wagon wheels or tools, recalcitrant or wounded animals, not enough rain, too much rain, early frosts, too much heat, yields that were low or, what was often just as bad, too high to bring in without hiring extra help. The farms in German Texas had an old reputation for being run by good farmers. Ever since the German folk had first begun arriving in the hill country, many years before the Civil War, their farms were known to be the neatest, the best equipped, the best run; besides their competence in the field it was often declared that German farmhouses, too, had the brightest gardens, the sweetest water, the cleanest sheets. German farmers were said to have a gift for high yields. It was not unheard of, in their county, to see melons planted neatly among the cornrows, as equidistant between the corn stalks as if the farmer had planted them with a yardstick. No one here in the German country grew just corn, or just wheat, or just cotton, the way farmers farther east toward Galveston were doing. For that matter, no one raised just hogs, or just sheep. Here where the Hirschfelders lived, their way was to plant more crops, and more kinds of crops, on smaller parcels of land that were then relentlessly tended, usually with the inexpensive help of other, more newly arrived Germans. From New Orleans and from Galveston, Germans had kept coming and coming, learning by working for other Germans what farming could be done here on the verdant, rumpled edge of the western
desert, before setting out for the new settlements their people had made to the east and to the north. John's own parents had arrived in the seventies. They had worked together at a farm close to New Braunfels for several years before buying their own land and moving farther inland, in the same direction as the others who had arrived around the same time they did, as if Texas were a hungry ocean that demanded more and more little ships.