The Barter (28 page)

I
n the weeks that turned into months after Dr. Mueller's funeral, Rebecca, numbed as she was by the sadness and the lonely hideousness of the end of her father's life, found herself wrapped up tight in an isolation from which she could not see an easy way to extricate herself. For her, of course, it was not an unfamiliar sensation.

For the Doctor had left his house to her—to his beloved daughter, “Rebecca Mueller.” And John, insulted but not wanting to reveal it, had seemed to align immediately with the notion that his mourning wife should remain in her childhood house in town, along with Frau and Matthew.

John went back out to the farm without them, coming into town for weekend visits, as if the family had decided to prolong their terrible holiday visit long, long past the date of its exhausted and joyless expiry. At first the separation seemed temporary, or at any rate they all assumed it to be so. But it was not long before an air of fatigued permanence and failure attached itself to the split household.

To Rebecca it seemed as if she had put on seven-league boots and stepped not forward but backward in time, to the days when she
was a young and indolent beauty, except the small man in whose thrall she was held was not the Doctor but her little boy, for whose sake this arrangement purportedly made the most sense: He must be with her, after all, and she, oh, she must not be asked for anything, not now. And it was true that she was tired all the time, terribly tired.

Sometimes she stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up, just being quiet. Sometimes she found herself standing there without remembering when she'd moved into that spot, or why, and she'd think,
Oh, what was it, what was I doing here?
Thinking she should make some excuse to go up the stairs and look for something—just to see. Just to see if it might happen again: if she might suddenly drop into another house, onto another stair. At these moments she sometimes found herself thinking,
Who is waiting in that place for me? What was I trying to get to, up there?
And then the questions themselves would seem as unlikely as her own behavior, and she would force herself to move away and try to find something useful to do.

Perplexing as it was, Rebecca sensed that her father's house was a box she herself had stepped into, closing the lid over her own head. The listlessness of the place crept into her bones. She was as unaccustomed to inactivity now as she had been unprepared for the endless work that had awaited her when she'd moved out to the farmhouse after her marriage, and to her amazement she found herself as exhausted by drifting around her father's house as she'd been last year working through her first winter on the farm. Now, here, without the purpose that the farm gave her or the heightened awareness that she and John produced in each other's company, everything she thought she was simply dissolved. All the self-doubt and the loneliness and the self-loathing she'd come to associate with her own many mistakes—
everything she'd done wrong in her marriage, on the farm, even as a mother to Matthew—became a shroud in which she felt herself being embalmed, day by endless day. She lacked the power to fight her way out. It was a frightening sensation, this helplessness, and yet she supposed it ought to have felt familiar, perhaps even welcome: Wasn't this how the fortunate among women lived, or dreamed of living? Comfortably in place, tending their dear babies and their dear homes and their dearly beloveds? Shouldn't she feel
more
real and not less? But something was missing, something she wanted badly, and without it she felt she might become so insubstantial as to fly apart into pieces.

As the winter ended and the spring reared up, John was at the house in town less and less.

Frau was not herself, either. The Doctor's death and the way she'd lost him—the long night that had rendered her as helpless as a girl in a dark, pitching boat leaving her homeland, never to return—stayed with her. She let the few remaining servants do whatever they would, whenever they would do it, while she sank into her chair by the kitchen window for long hours. She even allowed her garden to go to weeds.

“My father's will was out of date,” Rebecca suggested out loud one afternoon, sitting with Frau in the kitchen. They avoided the parlor when they could help it. Her father's chair and pipe stand still stood there.

“
Ja,
no doubt it was,” Frau replied, without conviction.

“Perhaps he meant us to keep this house as a Sunday house.” In the old times in their town, as in other hill-country towns where Germans had settled, farm families had kept little dwellings that were known as Sunday houses, two-room cottages with sleeping lofts
for the children. Entire families would trundle into town on the farm-to-market road on Friday evening with wagonloads destined for the Saturday market, crowding into their Sunday houses and remaining until after church and Sunday dinner, then towing themselves back out to the farms for the week's work. The houses themselves were half squalid and half charming, as was the custom itself, which had been mostly abandoned, although some of the little houses remained. Rebecca knew even as she made the suggestion that the notion of her father's roomy, well-built house as a Sunday house, even for a successful farmer, was a preposterous one. But she couldn't quite believe it of her father, that he had meant to maroon her here like Rapunzel or brick her up like the tell-tale heart.

“I ought to sell this place,” Rebecca said, feeling at the same time a wave of crashing exhaustion at the very thought. “You should come out to live on the farm with me and John,” she went on. But with their debts, the house in town was now more valuable than the farm. They'd be foolish to sell it—even John had said so. The question was what exactly they should do with it, and that question, lacking any better answer, was to be met in this way: she, alone with her boy and her old relative, drifting through the rooms every day, either looking for something to do or doing nothing at all, playing with the boy or looking out the window or reading the Doctor's newspapers.

“
Ja,
” Frau said, and then said no more, and Rebecca dropped the subject and went upstairs to take a nap with Matthew.

March arrived, powerless to stir them from their torpor despite the near-violent greening of the countryside beyond their windows. Rebecca longed to clap eyes on their old friendly fields.

She knew she was needed on the farm—she could be useful there, when John and the Heinrichs and Dusana were working
themselves half to death with the first planting. John warned them that there would be several weeks during which he wouldn't be able to come to town. He was in a fever of planning when Rebecca had last seen him, scarcely able to talk for the thundering pressure the corn and oats were producing in his imaginings. This year had to be a good one for the farm, and too much depended on beginning the season the right way, right now. “Dusana will cook for us and keep things up a little. As much as she can. We'll be out in the field so much we'll scarcely see the inside of the house,” he said distractedly, climbing into the wagon for the return trip.

Rebecca held Matthew in her arms, both of them blinking up at John from below. She thought with a surge of intense homesickness of the yellow-green yard around her house, the kitchen garden she ought to have started planting in February, the smells of growing things reaching out to them wherever they stood, inside or out, in the barn or the orchard, like the good strong handshake of the earth. Even standing in her father's yard outside the horse shed, she was assailed by powerful smells: Frau's old garden, looking fresh even in neglect, the shivering bushes and grasses that crowded up against the house, even the pungent oat and manure smell of the horse shed itself. “I want to come home,” she said to John suddenly. “Please take us with you.”

John looked down at them, troubled. Matthew reached up to his father, and John released the reins and took his boy with a grunt of happy effort. “Strong fellow,” he said, smiling into Matthew's dazzled face.

“John. I can't think here. I want to come back out to the farm and do something useful with my time instead of sitting around the parlor, growing roots.” Rebecca put a boot up on the wagon's side step
and pulled herself up, balanced there on one foot, holding to the side of the wagon board and leaning close to her husband, who sat stiffly with his boy on his lap, avoiding, it seemed to her, both the question of her return and the pressure of her body. “Please. Answer me. Why won't you take us with you?”

“Beck,” he said quietly, “I think it's better this way.”

She swallowed a gulp of the muddy, green-scented air of the yard for strength. John was so close to her she was practically pressing her breasts against his arm as she stood balanced on the wagon step. She saw him so clearly then, as if the spring air were a lens. Sadness and resolve had hardened him into a whetting stone that made his body—pressed against hers but even now beginning to pull away—into a knife-edge sharp enough to cut her heart.

“How can it be better?” she whispered miserably.

John shook his head. “We have a chance now to stop making each other unhappy. I'm sorry that it had to happen this way, but now that it has—”

“You mean my father's death is looking to you like a good opportunity to get away from me?” she flashed out.

“I don't see it that way, no,” John said, his careful, neutral tone signaling his characteristic retreat from conflict. “We're both orphans now, and I'm nothing but sorry about that,” he added softly. Then he said nothing else for a maddening pause, and Rebecca realized that was all he intended to say on the subject. Her exasperation pounced.

“You won't
fight
with me! Don't you think we'd be better off if you'd just
fight
with me, just one time? We could have it all out between us!”

Matthew, seeing his parents in disagreement over his head and hearing his mother's sharp tone, immediately turned on his
peacemaker's charms, smiling and unleashing a squeal, giving his father a hearty pat on the chest and struggling to stand up in his lap.

“He's just like you. He won't brook an argument,” Rebecca observed.

John wrangled Matthew in his arms until the boy discovered and fell to examining the leather strap his father held loosely in one hand. “I won't fight with you, Rebecca. It's not respectful to you. My parents taught me that a man who fights with a woman is worse than the lowest dog,” John said slowly. “I just want to give you both a good life. The best I can anyway.”

“That's foolish,” Rebecca snapped. “How are you supposed to understand me if you won't fight with me?”

John looked at her with some real amusement then. His eyes were fond and tired. “How indeed.”

Rebecca felt her cheeks grow hot. She looked at the ground below the wagon, the compressed little grasses and the pale-yellow earth of the lane. She struggled for a moment, then said, “I know I'm—not always good to others. To you. But try. Try, please, to understand me. If you can't, nobody will. I want to come home, and I want to get back to work. I want to be part of your life. I want us to be together and make something, mean something. Don't leave me here.”

Having delivered her final plea, Rebecca forced herself to look up again. John's dark eyes were on his son, and a small smile was on his lips as Matthew bounced in his lap on springy, rubbery legs.

“You aren't listening,” Rebecca said.

“I am, Beck. I am.” He made a face at Matthew, who chortled with joy.

“Well then, if you are listening, and you still take the absurd
position that we should be apart when you know I want the opposite, then in fact you are
arguing
with me, and as you said, only a lowly dog would do that,” she pointed out reasonably.

John spared her a wry glance then.

“Think about it. Please. Take us back.” Rebecca leaned in and kissed his cheek, then stepped back onto the ground and squinted up at the two of them, shining down from above her like a sun. “I'm not so terrible, am I?”

“You are the love of my life,” John said simply. He handed Matthew down to her, and she took him and kissed his sweet, soft temple. “You both are. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, then.”

*   *   *

A
few lonely weeks later, Frau and Rebecca were in the kitchen, sewing and reading while Matthew played on the floor, when the bell hung on the scrolled iron hook outside the house's front door rang once, tentatively, then again with strength. The women looked at each other mutely, then rose and went into the parlor, Rebecca carrying the boy.

They rarely had visitors. Rebecca, with Matthew on her hip, opened the door to the house and saw an unknown figure bathed in gold spring sunshine. She stepped back and the darkened figure resolved into a man, and then a man she thought she half remembered, and then his hat was off and he was bowing deeply and saying with a trace of an accent, “Mrs. Hirschfelder, I may assume?”