The Barter (5 page)

“Except making men fall in love with her,” Rebecca answered, eyes shaded.

“
Ja,
except for that.” Frau laughed and then coughed. Frau had known her mother, who had died shortly after Rebecca's birth. Rebecca understood that her mother had been instrumental in convincing the Doctor to take Adeline in, and that the two of them, despite their inability to communicate in the same language, had been merry conspirators against the Doctor's dourness and pipe smoking. Rebecca's mother had been of Italian descent, beautiful, strong willed, and all the other things that one said about long-dead, romantic mothers. Frau loved nothing more than making Rebecca unhappy with stories about her. “Well, they say you're good enough at that, too,” Frau allowed.

Rebecca snorted, patted Frau's shoulder, and went up to the house to try to find a cool, dark place to sit and think. Of these there were many: The Doctor, her father, had one prevailing philosophy when it came to equipping a house, and that was to furnish every available corner with a place to sit and read a newspaper. Rebecca pulled herself through the kitchen door and made her way, blinking like a fish at the transition from the bright afternoon to the dim murk of the house, to a chair she favored in the dining room, where just that morning she'd laid a thick old copy of
Practical Housekeeping,
which had probably been given to her mother when she had married. It read like a good joke. A practical joke. One that Rebecca was going to be relying on to keep her and her good-natured husband alive. Not for the first time, Rebecca reminded herself that she wasn't a prairie forty-eighter who had to learn to survive a harsh winter in the Dakota Territory. She had only to learn to live in a farmhouse without an icebox, for heaven's sake.

In the warm dimness of the room Rebecca gathered the book into her lap and sat down, feeling the weight of it on her thighs. She reached into her bodice and pulled out her reading glasses, which the Doctor had insisted upon, to save her eyes.

And suddenly there he was, looming overhead.

“Your John is coming here for dinner?” the Doctor demanded. Rebecca looked up at him. Typically her father's sudden appearances and disappearances had an invigorating effect on her, although she suspected they were calculated to surprise.
Swoop, here I am in my chair under the lamp, frowning at a newspaper. Zop, I am gone to my office to see patients and I may not return for dinner. Whish, here I am standing over you in the doorway between the parlor and the dining room as you sit down to read and be alone—nothing escapes me, and especially not my freedom to do as I wish; I am an old man.
The Doctor's summer suit was pressed and fresh; he held his watch in his hand.
Live forever,
Rebecca thought suddenly, and almost managed a smile up at his unamused face.

“Papa, how should I know? He has a lot to do on the farm now. He'll come to dinner if he can.”

At this rejoinder the Doctor looked at her approvingly, which nevertheless reminded her that she ought to have smoothed her hair and washed her face before she sat down. “I like it better when he comes here. You and Frau bore me.”

Rebecca snorted again and balanced her glasses on her nose. “I might be more diverting if
I
knew how to break a field or build a chicken coop?

“You might!” the Doctor almost bellowed in his glee at the thought. “
Ja,
you might!”

For all his intelligence the Doctor had raised her unthinkingly.
She'd gone to the village school, and at night in the parlor she'd read the newspaper with him, or novels, but if her father had ever considered sending her to college, he'd never mentioned anything about it, and she wasn't the type who would beg for such a thing. Her mother's family was all dead or in New Orleans or back in Italy. In a more adventurous version of her own life, Rebecca imagined, she might have traveled abroad to know her mother's family better, but she didn't believe herself to be a particularly adventurous person.

She was modern enough—she'd been up to Austin, of course, and to San Antonio and Galveston, like many of the other girls her age. Trips to the cities reinforced for girls like her just how country they were, but still, the modern way of thinking found them all, even out here in the hill country. Some girls Rebecca knew wondered “what they'd do with their lives,” what it was that would make them happy the way they believed they deserved to be. One thing—every man, woman, and child gets one thing: It is the thing you must seek out and sacrifice for, the thing that will make you happy. Perhaps for one girl it's mothering babies; for one girl it's an ambition for the stage; for another girl it's marrying well; for another girl it's an education and a large life in a strange city. But one thing only, one key. To desire more than one thing, to pursue more than one thing in the name of your life's happiness, was unseemly and greedy.

Rebecca still didn't know what her one thing would be, and that above all was what caused these smothering moments of panic. She supposed she'd always believed she'd have more time to think about it; she hadn't anticipated life rushing at her like this and demanding that she step into its cold, busy current before she'd even had a chance to take off her shoes.

“I am endeavoring, you see, to be of use to you and Mr.
Hirschfelder, too,” she said mildly, lifting the corner of her book and letting it drop again. Her father made an unflattering sound and moved toward the kitchen door, on his way to smoke on the back porch. As usual, her father had no remark to make on the subject of her moving out of the house. “Boring or not, you'll miss me,
mein Herr,
” she warned his retreating back.

When John next came to visit—it was that evening after all—Rebecca told him what her father had said that afternoon, just to make him laugh, which she loved to do. “I have to wonder what the good Doctor's reaction was when you asked him permission to marry me,” she teased.

They had gone to the backyard for some fresh air after dinner and found the night loud with insects, and heat lightning scattering the breezes, and the small-leaved bushes clustered around the house trembling.

John walked close enough to her that his sleeve brushed hers. “He said, ‘
Gott im Himmel,
you?'”

Rebecca halted midstep. When she saw that he wasn't making a joke, she cackled with laughter. John smiled on—he was used to this sort of outburst from her, she thought. Still, she sensed she wasn't behaving quite correctly toward her fiancé, and wiping her eyes, she said, “I'm sorry, John. I think we owe you an apology. He's just a rude old thing.”

“Oh, I didn't mind. I don't know but that I had the same thought myself at the time.”

“Don't say that,” Rebecca said warmly, and she smiled up at him and then her breath caught. His brightness was back. She never knew what to do with it. “He just loves to make a man's knees knock if he can,” she hurried on. John, meanwhile, had slipped an arm carefully
around her waist. Her heart struggled. She was painfully aware that the fabric at the small of her back where her shirtwaist and her belt met was damp: The day had been hot, and the air in the dining room stifling.
Don't touch me there,
she wanted to plead as a favor—she didn't want either of them to be embarrassed.
Oh, not there, I'm not at my best at the small of my back.
Her neck was damp, too, the curls at her nape sticking and clinging; her palms were clammy with nervousness. There was no part of her, it seemed, that
was
at its best. She felt light-headed. John's hand was gentle. It didn't feel as if he were guiding her or pressing—that is, he didn't make it feel that way. His arm was about her waist because he longed to touch her, and that was all.

“Is this all right?” John said in a low voice. Rebecca nodded, her throat dry.

In four days they would be married.

She knew, naturally, what that would mean. She wasn't stupid. It wasn't just gardening and cooking that she'd have to learn. Marriage was an entire vocabulary she didn't know yet. A married woman was a wise thing, an experienced thing, a careful thing. A married woman has crossed an invisible bridge.

So she forced herself to turn in toward John Hirschfelder, there in the humid, flashing night on the grass, her whole body tense like an arrow just shot. Something coursed through the tree branches overhead, and she realized it was only the wind, not a ghost, not her soul, not a tribe of witches. Her lips parted, and she took in the disturbance of the breeze with a little click in her throat. She closed her eyes and then forced herself to reopen them.

Rebecca was known as a tall woman, with a slim figure, but John stood several inches taller than she. John was well formed and
well built, but like her he was thin, still thinner than most men in town.
I'll feed you,
she found herself thinking in that moment, looking up at his brightness, breathing the gentle heat of his breath.
I'll nourish you, it can't be so hard.
His face had never been so close to hers, and she found that she liked it; she liked to see his broad cheek and his dark lashes, she liked to see his strong mouth, with lips that curved up on one side and down on the other, and she liked the straight dark hair that fell over his forehead. “You're looking at me strangely,” he said to her.

“Am I?” she whispered. Her lips were tingling as if someone were tickling the roof of her mouth.

“Like you're an animal who wants to eat me.” John grinned. He was joking, of course. His sense of humor, famous, irrepressible, even when she wished he'd be serious. “I recognize that look. I shot a mountain lion once for giving me that look, on a hunting trip with my father.” But he did not move away from her; he stayed close, where she could study his face, his
brightness
—the term she'd begun to attach to a phenomenon she'd noticed early in their engagement and kept noticing, even when it made her unhappy. When she looked at John sometimes, in the mornings or evenings, it was like looking at a gem underwater. Parts of his face would seem to glint at her, like a mermaid's hair glimmers to a drowning sailor, and she saw now where it originated: around the eyes, yes, but also at the corners of his mouth, sometimes—yes, just there. And his arm, still around her waist, and she, still so close to him, but she could step closer, couldn't she? Yes, to be sure.

John's smile had faded, but the brightness was still present. They were still for a moment, and then Rebecca seemed to feel as if she'd been holding her arm aloft, and then simply let it fall, softly, so that
her hand rested on his chest—with that same sense of muscular relief she experienced when she realized she'd been sitting hunched over a book or a piece of handwork and simply stretched her neck and pulled back her shoulder blades.

When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

“You had better kiss me, John,” she said raggedly. “My heart—”

“Mine, too,” he said. He smiled at her, with what they both knew to be false bravery. He brought his lips to meet hers. To her surprise—and his, she thought—a small sound escaped his throat as their lips touched, and her body tensed in response to his. It broke her heart.

*   *   *

A
t the altar in the Lutheran church. Everyone at the ceremony looking at the two of them, seeming to know something they didn't know, seeming to nod at her wisely, smile at her encouragingly. Rebecca had never known before what terror was, and now, when she most needed her heart to beat true, she felt almost faint with heat and the rush of blood. She felt glittering and thin like a soap bubble.
What am I so afraid of,
she kept asking herself.
What could it possibly be.
When the priest invited them to kiss after announcing that his incantations had worked their invisible, unsurprising results, Rebecca turned to John so quickly, seeking his strong mouth, that the congregation laughed, approving. She had wanted that mouth, more of it, ever since his kiss in her yard (even though that night she'd broken away and excused herself with a hot, blushing inarticulateness, and raced upstairs to throw herself into her room in the dark and stare out the window and listen to her heart, her heart, her heart).

John looked more handsome than she'd ever seen him, in a dark-gray suit, his eyes sparkling, and she knew herself she was pretty today, wearing an ivory embroidered dress with lace at the sleeve tips and collar. She kept John close to her throughout the wedding reception that afternoon, leaning on his arm when she could and leaning to keep him within sight when he had to move away. He brought her cold tea, fried chicken, sweet light peach cake that Frau and some other women had made for the party. The Doctor's house was fairly turned upside down. The old man was nowhere to be seen.

At five o'clock Rebecca and John were to leave for the farmhouse. Frau showed the young men, John's friends, where Rebecca's trunks were—her clothing and books and small possessions, and the wedding gifts that had been sent to the Doctor's house. John told Rebecca that there was a pile of presents waiting for them at the farmhouse, too, dropped off by their country neighbors, including “enough pickle and pie to keep us until next summer, probably,” a bit of good news that Rebecca tried to absorb with equanimity.
Now begins my life in the kitchen,
she thought.
Now begins my life in the vegetable patch; now begins my life in the coop, in the barn, in the cold cellar. Now begins my life as a woman who has married a farmer instead of staying where she belonged, in a chair by the stove in the dark, with an old, grumpy man reading a newspaper under a light across the room, and a furtive, friendly spinster waiting for me to take her place.

At four forty-five Rebecca began to hunt for her father in earnest. He couldn't possibly mean to send her off to the farm without wishing her well or indulging in a few archly delivered parting words. She couldn't find him. Upstairs, downstairs. Oh, their good house. She was looking for her father but she was finding evidence that a trap had sprung around her: It was going to happen, after all. She was
going to move from this good, comfortable house, with its kitchen and garden and yard from which came delicious and good-smelling things, on a leafy street in town, near stores where she could buy cakes of soap and bricks of butter, near the post office where mail and magazines came, near the seamstress, the laundress, the school, the sidewalks where she could meet and talk to neighbors. . . . From here she would step back in time. She would go to a place where she could no longer be careless about bread, or buttons, or jelly jars.