Shandi Mitchell - Under This Unbroken Sky

Maria adds another clove of garlic and a last pinch of salt. Only then does she feel the wetness of her dress clinging to her body, her hair limp around her face, the crick in her back and the ache in her legs. She wonders if her face is as flushed as her daughters’ faces. She fills the spoon with the rich broth, blows on it, and holds it out to Dania, who takes a sip, then to Sofia, who does the same, and then Maria brings it to her own lips. She holds the broth in her mouth, assessing the complexity of the flavors before swallowing. Her tongue runs across her lips. She looks to her girls and nods, and they nod back.

JUST BEFORE HER GUESTS ARRIVE, ANNA DRESSES. LESYA tightens Anna’s corset. “Tighter,” she says. Lesya pulls the strings more but can see they are already cutting into her mother’s flesh. “Tighter.” Lesya wraps the strings around her fists and pulls. Anna exhales as the corset constricts around her belly and cuts into her ribs. “Tighter,” she gasps and Lesya pulls harder. Anna presses her hand to her flattened belly. “Enough.”

ANNA MEETS HER GUESTS AT THE DOOR, LIKE A LADY. She ushers the family to the table. Maria is relieved to see the room tidy and clean. Even the window has been washed. She notices that every trace of Stefan has been removed. Anna looks radiant as she caters to her brother, insisting that he sit at the head of the table. She keeps up a constant chatter, making everyone laugh, until they have eased into the comfortable role of guests.

The two families sit around Anna’s table dressed in their best clothes, hair combed, fingernails scrubbed, blooming wolf willow in a Mason jar vase, the delicate porcelain pitcher glistening with condensation, and the table laden with glorious food—they could be mistaken for a well-to-do English family. Anna squeezes Teodor’s hand: “This is for you.”

Maria bows her head. The children follow, placing their hands together in prayer. “Dorohyi Bozhe …” Maria gives thanks and asks that her family, both her families, be watched over and protected, and given the strength and courage needed to build this new life. She asks for this food to be blessed, and for the garden to be blessed, and the cow and the horse and the fields and this house.

Teodor and Anna do not bow their heads. Teodor stares at the heaping bowl of steaming potatoes. Anna watches a fat housefly traverse the lip of her mother’s pitcher. She leans into the corset rib digging into her side. Petro squeezes his eyes tight, expecting his father to be there when he opens them. The others give themselves to the intoxicating aromas. Maria says, “Amin’.” The children echo, “Amen.”

She looks at the faces hungrily turned to her and says, “Ïzhte.” A swarm of hands descend on the offerings. She notices that Petro’s eyes are still closed.

THE FAMILY WAKES AT SIX TO READY THEMSELVES for their Sunday church pilgrimage. Freshly laundered clothes, laid out the night before, are donned. Shoes are polished and hair is washed. The youngest are given baths. The oldest sponge themselves behind the privacy of the burlap screen. A tentative knock at six-thirty announces the arrival of Lesya and Petro. Myron helps the smaller boys grease back their cowlicks. Katya’s unruly curls are braided and coiled. Sofia covertly dabs wild rose petal water, a concoction she brewed in a liniment bottle, behind her ears.

Myron squeezes into his only dress shirt. It binds across his chest and shoulders, broadened from weeks of fieldwork. His fingers fumble with the tiny collar button and he grimaces as it tightens around his throat. If it wasn’t for Irene, who sits in the second pew to the right of the altar, whose bare ankle Myron glimpsed when she knelt to pray six Sundays past, he would have found an excuse to stay home with his father. He squeezes the button through the hole and it snaps off. The curse that spits past his lips is greeted by a swipe across the ear by Maria, who blames Teodor for these new words. Dania offers to sew it back on and retreats to a corner, grateful for the reprieve from the eight other bodies tripping over one another in the shack’s confines.

Ivan’s rump is smacked once for kneeling in his clean pants on the dirt floor to retrieve a daddy-long-legs scurrying under the bed. Assigned to sit on the bed and not move, he sidles off when the spider reappears and grinds it into the floor with his recently polished shoes. When he insists that he is still hungry, Maria makes him remove his shirt and drapes a towel over his lap while he eats another half-bowl of oatmeal. She makes Petro wash behind his ears again, though he claims he already did, and gives him a pair of Ivan’s suspenders to hold up his droopy trousers. Noticing Lesya’s bare legs, she orders Sofia to loan her a pair of her stockings. Sofia selects her oldest pair, not ever wanting them returned.

Dania wears one of Maria’s dowry sorochky, a straight cotton chemise with traditional embroidered red motifs on the sleeves, the front, and along the bottom hem. She doesn’t care that it is too large in the waist and bosom. Its shapeless form gives her comfort in its anonymity.

Despite the season, Sofia dons a black skirt and white sweater trimmed with a rabbit fur collar given to her by her classmate Ruth, whose father owns the bank. Her parents consider themselves tolerant Christians and they look for opportunities to teach their only child lessons of charity and compassion. They proudly watched as Ruth passed the bundle to Sofia, who was asked to wait on the back porch. Sofia darned the hole at the right shoulder as best she could, and if her hair hangs just right, no one can notice it. The stain on the skirt isn’t obvious either, so long as she stretches the sweater past her hips.

When Sofia pulls back the burlap curtain and makes her entrance, Lesya gasps at her beauty. Maria gasps too, at the sight of the too-tight sweater hugging her daughter’s budding breasts, and makes her change into something more respectable. Ignoring Sofia’s sobs, Maria selects the blouse with roses embroidered down the arms, which she made for her three Christmases ago. It took seven weeks of hand-stitching, squinting beside the kerosene lamp after the children had gone to bed, to complete. The strain on her eyes gave her headaches and the precision of the stitches cramped her fingers. Sofia’s protests that the blouse is too small and none of the other girls wear blouses like this are silenced when Maria questions the appropriateness of the skirt’s length and whether the shoe’s small heel, also a charitable present one size too large, is too high. Teodor intervenes and Sofia decides half a stylish wardrobe is better than none.

Katya’s dress is one of Sofia’s castoffs and hangs almost to her ankles. Maria tucks in the waist and adds a ribbon to cinch in the extra material, but the shoulders and collar still droop over her small frame. No matter how much she feeds this child, she doesn’t gain weight. Maria pushes away the pang of guilt and promises to add more cream to Katya’s oatmeal in the morning. As she takes in the seams, Katya refuses to put down the limp bouquet of daisies, milkweed, blazing prairie fire, brown-eyed Susans, and wild oats she has collected for the baby Jesus.

Katya loves church. She loves the paintings on the wall, the fiery gold crosses, gleaming chalices, and the sickening sweet incense that makes her feel dizzy. Sometimes she imagines floating up to the ceiling and taking the crown of thorns from the Jesus on the Cross and pulling the nails from his hands so he can fly away. She hasn’t made the connection that the baby and the man on the cross are the same person. She wonders if they keep the Christ body in a root cellar, or in a salt barrel, or frozen in the lake in the winter. She wonders how much of the body is left and how long everybody has been eating it and what will happen when it runs out. At communion, when she is on her knees, supposed to be praying into her hands, she spits out his body. She now has a large doughy ball of Christ she keeps hidden under the blanket chest in case the church eats all of him and doesn’t save any for her family.