Under This Unbroken Sky (5 page)

After lunch and supper, Lesya carries covert offerings of food from Maria to Anna. Her mother is still in bed in the middle of the day, staring at the wall. Lesya can hear the murmur of life seeping through the wall from the other side. She clears a space on the table, gathers up yesterday’s dirty dishes to take back to Maria, swats away the flies, sets the plate of food on the table, and covers it with a clean cloth. Then just as quietly as she entered, she leaves, hoping her mother won’t ask her to stay.

Anna wants to starve, but the longer she resists the food, the stronger the urge to eat grows. She finds herself seated in front of the plate. Her fingers inching toward the cold pyrohy, she tears off a mouse-sized piece and nibbles reluctantly. Then her hands grab the food, ignoring the utensils, and she stuffs it into her mouth, gorging down the last crumb. As if waking, she tries to understand where the food has gone, punching herself in the stomach, before crawling back into bed.

In bed, she tries to imagine being dead. Would it feel any different than being alive? Could she still see? Would she know who she was, would she remember anything, would she be free? She has held a knife to her wrist. But she couldn’t. She can’t. That’s when the coyotes first started to cry for her. They cried all through the night, and they’ve come back every night since. She tells them everything and they howl her pain. She wants to grow teeth and run wild.

Lesya’s singing wakes her. The sound is all around her, floating from the rafters, spilling through the chinks in the wall. Anna recognizes the fall and rise of the notes. It is a sad song. She follows its sweet sorrow outside, around the corner of the shack, to the garden.

Dania, Sofia, and Katya are watering the rows. Petro and Ivan are raising a panel of fencing. Maria is on her knees, squirreling away seeds. Lesya sits cross-legged beside her aunt, passing her the seeds and singing about another land, a lost love, and a woman left behind. Lesya’s soprano gives the song yearning tempered with hope. When she reaches the chorus, a call to return home, Anna joins in.

Her pure, smooth alto slips in under the high notes and wraps around them. Lesya stops singing and turns to her mother standing
at the edge of the garden dressed in her nightgown, her hair bedraggled, her eyes fixed on the sky, singing as if hearing an entire choir, unaware that life around her has stopped. The last note sustains and flies into the wind. In the silence, not even a bird answers.

“Anna,” Maria says softly. Anna looks to her sister-in-law, suddenly aware of the staring eyes, her soiled nightgown hanging loose around her body, her bare feet rooted to the ground.

“Come help me plant.” Maria slowly rises and approaches her as she would a frightened animal. “I’m planting peas.” She reaches into her apron pocket and extracts a handful of seeds, takes Anna’s hand, and pours them into her open palm. They stand there a moment, searching each other’s eyes. Anna’s fingers curl around the seeds.

“You can take my row,” says Maria and heads back to the garden. Anna follows, kneels down in the dirt, opens her hand, and plants a shriveled pea. All around her the sound of work resumes.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKS ARE A CONSTANT VIGIL FOR THE first green sprouts to poke their heads up. The peas are first, followed shortly by beans, then onions, lettuce, carrots…until the entire black earth is speckled with tender green. Mornings are for watering to fend against the drying sun. Daytime is for weeding and searching for insects hungrily intent on devouring the crop. Everyone participates, checking the rows for caterpillars, potato beetles, cutworms, aphids, spider mites…an endless barrage of invading armies.

Each person has their own killing style. Maria, Dania, and Lesya efficiently remove the offender and crush it between their nails without a second thought. Maria actually finds the sound of the bug’s shell popping somewhat soothing. She starts debugging a row of potatoes, her mind spinning with the day’s chores, but by
the time she reaches the end of the row, having killed fifty or sixty bugs, her mind has calmed just to the sound of—
pop—
.

Sofia can’t bear touching the bugs and makes Katya pull them from the plant. They have a killing block, a small piece of board they put the bug on and stomp. Once, Sofia was in such haste to annihilate a cutworm that she accidentally stomped Katya’s retreating hand. A purple bruise bloomed like a cauliflower. Katya was assigned to another row, and Sofia was forced to pick the bugs from the plant herself.

Ivan and Petro prefer to race. Ivan in lettuce, Petro in cabbage, they count: ready-set-go. The first few games the victor was whoever finished first, but once Maria inspected their rows and found at least twenty bugs in the first ten feet, the rules were changed to the victor being the one who killed the most. The boys gather three or four bugs at a time, then rub their hands together, holding up the smeared remains to each other’s delight. Large bugs, like cutworms, are gathered in jars so the final count can be verified, but also to act as execution chambers.

They experiment with myriad techniques: sometimes drowning, sometimes heat, suffocation, dehydration, dismemberment. The most dangerous method is frying them on the woodstove. The boys are certain the punishment will be severe if Maria discovers what the burned crisps are that she scrubs off the stovetop every night. The best method, by far, is leaving them on Sofia’s side of the bed.

The garden is constantly under attack. The first tender shoots are prone to damping off—a soil infection that will rot the seedlings and decimate the crop.

If the infant plants manage to survive, they still need to overcome early blight, late blight, rust, and downy mildew. Any sign of a fungus is a call to arms. Infected leaves are pulled off, whole
plants sacrificed, and their remains cremated in the woodstove. Maria concocts a sulfur mixture and pours the toxic tea over and around the plants.

If the plants survive the blights, they still face late frosts. Maria nervously steps in and out of the shack on the nights the temperature starts to drop. On more than one occasion, she sounds the alarm after the children have climbed into bed. Sofia and Dania follow their mother into the night, illuminated by the kerosene lamp, to cover the plants with burlap. Not until mid-morning, after the sun has warmed the soil, does she gently lift the burlap off, relieved to feel the escaping heat and find the plants still thriving.

There are so many enemies. The birds; the cats that dig at the furrows for a place to shit; their own clumsy feet; and the cow that got loose when Ivan left the barn door open because he said the cow told him it was afraid of the dark and didn’t want to be alone.

Maria prays that there will be no hail, no drought, no frost, no swarming infestations, no floods, no fires, no rogue horses or cows, no birds, no mice, no gophers, and especially no rabbits—she prays every night for the safety of her vegetables. She asks Anna to make a scarecrow.

Anna selects two long spruce poles and uses the ax to sharpen one point into a stake. She lashes them together with binder twine, forming a cross or a man standing with stiff arms outstretched. She wraps the poles with willow, shaping a body, a curved body with breasts and a waist. She puts her ankle-length, hand-woven and elaborately embroidered wedding sorochka on the skeletal frame. She stands back and examines her work. Then she picks up a knife and slashes the skirt and sleeves and is pleased to see the wind grab at the tatters. Maybe Maria should have stopped her, but she knew this was an exorcism.

She had tried to talk to Anna about Stefan. She offered to make
her a balm to heal her heart. Anna had laughed, laughed so hard that it frightened Maria. She was relieved when Anna joined them in the garden. Hard work, fresh air, sunlight, and, most important, being surrounded by life would be the best cure for her sister-in-law. Sometimes it is better to forget.

Anna works obsessively, not stopping for water or food, refusing any help. She stuffs the arms with straw, ties strands of one-foot lengths of barbed wire to the hands, and fastens metal jar lids to the barbs. The scarecrow claps cacophonously, tambourines twirling and dancing grotesquely. Its head is a white sugar bag stuffed with hay, garroted at the throat with rope. Its eyes—metal washers stitched in place with red thread. It has no mouth.

She climbs a makeshift ladder, propped against the body, even though she is afraid of heights, to place the wreath upon its head. A crown Anna had worn when she was married. Back then it had been braided with Guelder rose and periwinkle. The dead petals crumble as she drapes the tail of ribbons—red, green, and blue—over the creature’s shoulders.

Anna jumps down hard, letting the force of the landing jostle through her body. She steps back and for the first time in months smiles, her eyes blazing against the sun, looking up at herself.

Petro, Ivan, and Katya have nightmares for weeks.

T
EODOR CHOOSES A SITE A HALF-MILE NORTHEAST from his sister’s house to cultivate, roughly at the property line that halves the two quarter-sections of land. Combined, their properties span three hundred and twenty acres. When Teodor was sent to prison, Anna applied for homestead entry of the quarter-section adjacent to hers on Teodor’s behalf, knowing that when he got out he would be ineligible to own land. He would be responsible for making all the necessary improvements to earn patent as prescribed in the Homesteaders Agreement, including the breaking and planting of twenty-five acres over three years, building a house and outbuildings including granaries and a barn, digging a cribbed well, cutting timber, and erecting fences. It would be his land. He was her brother and Anna didn’t hesitate to help him. Teodor insisted he would pay the ten-dollar entry fee on the first harvest.

Land up in these parts was untamed, choked by bush, rocks, and bogs. The flat rich land farther south went to the British and the gentrified. This part of the country was allocated for Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Hungarians, and shared with the decimated Blackfoot, who had been pushed farther and farther north by train tracks, towns, and fences. This was land set aside for laborers, nonwhites, peasants with deep guttural languages and mysterious customs. It was a place of poor people, but the soil was rich.

Teodor could tell when he pushed his fingers gently into the dirt and found no resistance. Sliding his hand back out, he smelled the
sweet scent. He rubbed the warm, moist soil between his fingers and let it fall loosely back to the earth. This land was fertile. If this quarter-section, all one hundred and sixty acres, was planted with wheat, Teodor would indeed be a wealthy man. “This is where we begin,” he told Myron.

They clear-cut the first acre of brush and pile it in massive heaps. They coat themselves with mud and kerosene to stave off the blackflies and mosquitoes. Their hands and faces swell beyond recognition from the bites. After the first few days, they give up trying to swat away their attackers. The insects’ constant drone becomes a part of the daily sound swarming around their heads. One sweltering mid-afternoon, Teodor abruptly stops as he heaves up a root, acutely aware that he can hear nothing. He shakes his head, slaps at his ears. For a moment he thinks he has gone deaf, before realizing the bugs have been driven away by the heat.

When the trees are too large to be dug out, they are grubbed. Teodor chops and hacks through the roots around the base as Myron shimmies up twenty feet to fasten the rope around the trunk. The horse strains, its withers quivering, slathered in sweat, as Myron hollers and slaps its rump, until the tree finally groans and falls cracking to the ground. Then it is skidded to the growing woodpile.

Fuel for the woodstove is set aside to be gathered in the fall. The longest, straightest trunks are stacked for building material, and skinny poplars tagged for fence poles. Roots and branches are lit on fire. The smoke that stings their eyes and chokes their breath mercifully wards off the flies. Deep into the night, the glowing bonfires dot the horizon like so many rising suns.

They pry two tons of rocks from the ground, stack them one by one in the cart, and haul them to the property line that divides the two sections. There they unload and pile the stone to form
a long, low wall. They hack, saw, rip, and curse at the roots that refuse to let go. They use picks, axes, shovels, and claw with their hands to reach the rich black soil. They clear an extra twenty feet around the entire perimeter to serve as a firebreak. And finally they plow—one agonizing foot at a time—coaxing this mistress to yield herself.

As Teodor tends the earth, he heals himself. In the field, he forgets about the past, forgets about the prison walls, and focuses only on the job at hand. His muscles grow taut and firm. He puts on weight. His chest fills out his baggy shirt and his pants stop slipping below his waist. His hands grow strong, the plow becomes lighter, his strides longer, and the land responds to his request to open. Deep furrows bloom upward, aching to be seeded.

But in those first days, he could barely lift the smallest rock. He had to carry it in both hands; his back stooped over, his knees bowed, he’d waddle to the cart where Myron was loading five stones to his one. His son would take the rock from him and toss it effortlessly to the front of the cart. Behind the plow, driving the horse, he reined the horse in hard, afraid to unleash its harnessed strength. Even holding the animal back, he was forced to run behind its lurching thrusts. The wide, leather plow strap cut into his shoulders, branding him black-and-blue. Once, he fell and was dragged through the twisted roots and jutting twigs.

Myron halted the horse, but Teodor screamed, “Keep going!” And when Myron hesitated, he shouted louder, “Go!” He struggled to his feet and slammed the full force of his remaining energy down into the wooden handles through the iron blade into the earth. He’d pushed what felt like a mile, only to find he’d made a twenty-foot run. His body dripping with sweat, his hands a bloody mash of blisters, his lungs bursting—he’d holler,
Whoa!

And Myron, who was leading, rolling stones out of the way,
and the horse that was just getting up to speed, would look back at him, wondering why they had stopped. Teodor would bend down on one knee, supporting his weight on an outstretched arm pressed against the ground, sucking back air, and curse his damn boots as he made a big show of retying a shoelace that he said had come undone.

Myron never says a word when he has to wait for his father. He stands silently a few feet away and busies himself looking at the horse’s hooves or stares off, chewing on a blade of grass, as if assessing the time of day by the sun’s position. Sometimes he has a sip of water, pretending to gulp back more, before passing the canteen to his father to drain. If he hurts, he never lets his father see it. To Teodor, Myron seems oblivious to the briars clawing his skin and impervious to the stings and bites welting his body. He tries to remember his own youth, when he too felt invincible and his body did his bidding without complaint, but that memory is lost.

Teodor feels every bump and bruise. He feels his hands dry and crack, not from the sun, but from the dirt leaching the water from his skin. Dust to dust. Blisters harden into thick calluses, robbing his fingers of sensation. He no longer feels how hot the soup is in a cup. He can’t feel the softness of Maria’s skin, only his own roughness against her body. He feels the sun blaze into his neck, face, and forearms, his skin on fire, shocking him with pain at the slightest touch. His skin bubbles, peels, and itches, then finally turns a deep, rich brown, as if he has taken on the color of the earth.

At midday, Ivan and Petro can be seen running toward them. Two small dark flecks far in the distance. Dancing in the heat waves, growing into flailing arms and legs, until finally arriving with lunch in hand. Ivan always wins the race to his father. Myron unhitches the horse and lets it graze. The men eat cold pyrohy and flatbread with lard and the last of the chokecherry jam, while the
boys walk up and down the fresh furrows collecting worms, round stones, the occasional bone, and, once, an Indian arrowhead.

Petro found the arrowhead. Ivan took it from him. Petro grabbed for it and then the boys were tumbling and rolling in the dust. When Petro started to cry and blood was dripping from Ivan’s nose, Teodor separated them by the scruff of the neck, took the arrowhead from Ivan’s clutched hand, and, in one smooth, swift movement, hurled it far into the bush. He didn’t say a word to the boys, just told Myron to hitch up the horse and slipped into the plow’s harness.

The two boys watched the work start up again; his father didn’t say, Dopobachenia
—
until we see each other again
.
Ivan felt the urge to cry but punched Petro in the arm instead and raced home, not caring whether his cousin caught up.

The first day, Teodor plows eighty feet. An acre is roughly two hundred and eight feet by two hundred and eight feet. It takes him four days to reach the end of the first row. When he finally pulls the plow around and starts the next furrow, Myron is ten rows ahead of him, clearing the rocks and roots. Two hundred and seven more turns to make. Teodor counts his steps as he did in prison, measuring down the distance. Myron only counts the turns. At the eightieth turn, Teodor begins closing the gap. By the one hundred and tenth turn, Myron is once again scrambling to stay ahead of his father. By the one hundred and fiftieth turn, they are working in syncopated pace. Two men and a horse crossing back and forth with the precision of a pendulum.

When the day finally loses light, Teodor and Myron stumble home, unable to talk, their bodies one numb ache. They arrive blackened with the earth’s body. Her dirt ground so deep into their skin that only the whites of their eyes announce their arrival. They scrub her dust from their bodies outside at the metal tub that
Maria fills with hot water as the sun sets. After the first plunge of their hands, the water mires into mud. It doesn’t matter how much they scrub, the dirt never releases itself from their pores. It clings under their nails, obliterates their fingerprints, and burrows deep into their ears. It cries from their tear ducts. When they blow their noses, white handkerchiefs turn black.

Before Teodor collapses into bed, he pulls a chair outside for one last cigarette and to clean his boots. The boots have cracked and stretched from the sloughs of mud. Nicks and scuffs mar the surface. One shoelace has broken. The leather has molded to the shape of his feet like an ancient skin. Despite the grueling work, his boots have never inflicted any pain: not a blister, not a pinch, not even a chafe. They are good boots.

With his penknife, he scrapes off the chunks of caked dirt from the soles, then uses an old horse brush to vigorously scrub the edges and stitching before carefully fishing out the dirt plugging the eyelets. He rubs them down with a scrap of burlap, wiping away the residue of dust. Then he greases them with dubbin, rubbing the fat deep into the leather until the skin glows. He laces the boots back up, straightens out the tongues, and finally sets them beside the stove to dry. He always faces the toes toward the door. Only then can he let himself sleep.

That spring, Teodor and Myron break six acres.