Beneath the Apple Leaves(68)
*
The next morning, Eveline shoveled pancakes onto her husband’s plate. They were pale and broken. Hardly an egg had been laid this week and she mixed the batter with only one. Wilhelm’s eyes were bloodshot and she knew his head throbbed with the hangover from the Muellers’ hospitality. While she poured his coffee, she subtly inspected his cheek to see if a mark showed from where she had slapped him.
She regretted her temper. She had never acted out violently and she didn’t understand how she could have hit her husband. The guilt, hot and terrible, nearly too fierce to utter an apology. She didn’t know why she had been so angry. All she knew was that she was left in this cold home eating stale bread and listening to Will and Edgar whine while Wilhelm perched warm and fed at the Muellers’.
And then she realized why she had struck him. Because this was the life she had chosen for them. This was the life she had begged for, a life that at times seemed to slowly squeeze the life out of them all. And she panicked that her husband wouldn’t come back, either by choice or by accident, and she would be left in this freezer on her own. It was her fear that had hit him and the regret stung sharply.
“Do you want Andrew to go with you?” she asked timidly. “To town?”
Wilhelm shook his head, finished the last of his bland breakfast and pushed the plate away. She wanted to hold him, tell him she was sorry—sorry for everything. But she took his plate and turned away without another word, didn’t even say good-bye as he picked up his coat and headed out to meet the Muellers’ wagon on the main road.
*
Lily shimmied into the creases of the old sofa, the cushions long bleached from sun and wear, frayed and bald along the rounded arms. Claire made bread in the kitchen, the punching of the dough in a steady beat, a slight pitter-patter like a child’s feet playing hopscotch. Frank stayed in his office all morning.
The hour had been late when Wilhelm Kiser knocked on the door, swaying and loud and asking to see Frank. The men had met briefly, just long enough to sign papers. And Lily’s heart sank then, fell in sympathy for Will and Edgar, for Mrs. Kiser—for no one came to Frank unless in desperate straits.
Andrew. The pain fluttered to the pit of her stomach, the missing sticking to the walls of the closed house, the absence of him leaving her lost in each listless day. She pushed his smooth, strong features from her thoughts and dug through the tangled yarn basket next to the sofa.
Lily pulled a clump of rose-tinted wool, dyed long ago with beet juice, and found her knitting needles in the bottom. In quick, harsh loops, she started the scarf, the tools clicking, clicking, clicking.
Frank’s footsteps clomped upstairs on the floorboards, pacing. The oven in the kitchen clattered metallically as Claire rearranged pots and bread pans above the fires. The snow carried softly outside the window, hung upon the skeletons of the bushes in lines of new white. And through it all, Lily’s fingers found the knots and fell into the design of her knitting absently and without observation. Until she paused. She looked at the yarn, the tiny baby sock that had taken shape between the pointed x of the needles.
She rubbed the little sock, the smooth bumps along the heel. For a moment, the dream flowed again, trickled to the man of blue eyes and gentle tones, to the farmhouse that she could clean and cook in and to the great apple tree that she had once climbed and where she had found the man she loved.
Frank’s boots stomped down the stairs and Lily buried the small bootie under the mounds of hand-spun wool.
Winter in the Kiser farmhouse morphed into a world unto its own that lasted years or centuries between the slow seconds. They spent Christmas with the Muellers. But for that day, life outside the frozen home did not exist, as they pulled themselves within the walls and hibernated.
In the evenings, Wilhelm read the Pittsburg Press, the news drafted in black-and-white English clarity—Americans were good; Germans were evil. Andrew and Eveline didn’t read the newspaper. The headlines were enough to add to the weariness, the photos of tanks and cartoons of sabers through the Kaiser and his Huns. They all saw the listed lines of the deceased—the doughboys hot to enlist only to return to American soil in burnt and shattered pieces. But the adults did not speak of these notices, of the stories of feral bloodshed, and when Will and Edgar were present the paper was turned over or folded to reveal innocuous advertisements for Maytag washers and Hawthorne bicycles. The young boys did not need to know of this war. Not yet.
Andrew strained under the confines of the house and the strength in his shoulders and thighs weakened. They ached, as only the muscles of the young do, for action and movement, for physical labor and exertion. When the body lay idle, the thoughts grew strong, as if all the physical movements dwarfed into mental movements and pounded within his skull. The missing of many things clung to him as the black ashes clung to the bricks of the fireplaces.
His right arm scolded his former left one, lamented on the imbalance and the inadequacy of being able to do half of what it used to. And the missing left one argued back. Said that the right had no right to complain, that it was useful and alive—that it did not sting and burn and throb in an infinite display of mockery. And then Andrew would curse himself, ignore the rival sides. But upon their quieting, the missing and longing would set in. The missing of his parents, of the laughter around an old, worn table at breakfast and dinner, of a tiny house whose timber and warmth proclaimed a safety that had eclipsed the poverty. There were thoughts of a young woman also, and these thoughts made him heat from the hips and made him want to climb the walls and dunk his head in a bucket of snow. But then he remembered that she had stood by and defended men who made slurs, who took their side over his own, and so he squashed the wanting and shoveled snow and carried firewood and cleaned the frozen cow stalls until he was too tired to think or feel.