Shandi Mitchell - Under This Unbroken Sky

By ten to seven, the family is dressed and fidgeting in their uncomfortable clothes. Maria looks to Teodor, sitting at the table in his dirty workpants, bare feet, picking a poppy seed from his teeth, and frowns.

Since his return from prison, he has refused to attend church. At first Maria believed he needed time to recover and build up his strength, then once he started breaking the fields, he insisted he couldn’t take the time or the planting would be late.

But he doesn’t work the fields on Sundays. He hitches up the horse, loads the cart with tools, and heads across the field. He rolls past the ground broken through the week, past the birch grove, around the bush, and northwest through the clearing to the top corner of his quarter-section, exactly one mile from his sister’s house. There, on the crest of the hill, he is building his family’s home. It overlooks all one hundred and sixty acres. From a distance, it seems to hover between the earth and the sky.

He hasn’t made much progress. The frame is down and the first three rows of logs are laid. It will be a one-level house, ten times larger than the shack they are in now, with rooms for the children. He has planned for a window on the south side looking down over the fields, with wooden shutters that can be boarded up against high winds and bitter winters. This is his church.

Teodor releases the horse, free to feast on the tall grass or lounge under the shade of the trees, a day off from the fields, and heads to where the door will be. Here he feels calm. The sound of the crickets, the swish of the prairie grass, and the gophers watching him from a distance bring him solace. Here he can hear silence and that silence is holier than any words a priest could ever utter.

He no longer believes in promised lands. He rejects suffering for salvation later. He believes in life now. There was a time when he worshipped, bowed, and kneeled to a higher power. He believed if he lived a good life, he would be rewarded. But now he knows there is no God. A compassionate God wouldn’t have tried to starve his family. A just God wouldn’t have taken away everything that he had built. A merciful God wouldn’t have abandoned him in prison.

Maria begged him for her sake, for his children’s sake, for the sake of his soul, she begged him to tell her why. She tried to convince him that God was with them, that He had never left. How else did they survive? How else were they together again? She tried to make him see how much they’d been given. She showed him the garden, the fields, their children, each other… she begged him to come back. He always walked away, disappeared into the barn or headed to the fields. One night, she chased him.

The children were already asleep. She was in her nightgown and had just laid out the children’s church clothes for the following morning. Teodor was working on the house plans by lamplight. She asked him again to come with her. She pleaded with him, her angry whispers heightened with his refusal to answer. One of the children groaned and shifted in the bed. Teodor pushed back his chair and stormed out. She followed him into the dark barn. Her voice now free, she demanded that he talk to her. He pushed deeper into the darkness, retreating to the empty stall beside the horse.

Inside the small pen, Teodor paced back and forth from wall to wall. He counted off the steps, one two three four five , and turned, one two three four five , stopping at the imagined stone wall that he had faced a thousand times a day in prison. Maria could see him moving side to side, his head down, his eyes fixed on the ground, slipping in and out of the moon’s shadows. She couldn’t see his hunched shoulders, his body coiled tight, his clenched fists. She couldn’t know that the wooden boards of the stall had transformed into stone and iron bars, or that Teodor could smell the rank sweat of human decay that had gagged him for six hundred days. Talk to me , Maria cried, hurt by how far her husband had pulled away from her. Talk to me!

The horse snorted and banged against the stall, the cow rubbed its head up and down against the boards, unsettled by their intensity. Maria lifted the stall’s latch and Teodor heard a metal lock rasp open. He tried to get past her, but she wouldn’t step back. Leave me alone , he said over and over. He retreated to his right and tripped against a feed bucket. He smelled the stench of urine and feces from a jailhouse piss pot that hadn’t been emptied in days. The horse jolted. He turned in the other direction, blinded not so much by the darkness but by the panic roaring in his head, and then he slammed into the wall.

Pressed against the boards, his heart pounding, he didn’t feel the roughness of the wood. He felt the coldness of stone. He didn’t hear Maria say his name or the concern in her voice. His erratic breathing merged with the animals’ restless shuffling. His fingernails clawed into the wood, driving splinters under his nails, his shoulders heaved. Leave me alone , he said so low that she could barely hear.

She touched his shoulder. Teodor?

He felt a nightstick dig into the back of his neck. Smelled his sour stench. Felt his fat gut pressed against his back.

Don’t fucking touch me! He spun around and grabbed her arm and twisted it against her throat, driving her backward. His eyes wide, unseeing, his mouth distorted in a scream, inches from her face, he slammed her against the opposite wall. Maybe it was the lack of resistance, or her lightness, or the shock of hitting a wall that was more than eight feet away, or the softness of her skin, the thinness of her wrist in his grip, or the terrified eyes staring up at him—a woman’s eyes—he saw her and let her go. He crumpled to his knees.

Maria stood, arms out to her sides, pressed against the wall as if she was holding it up. He looked to her, unable to speak, his eyes like those of a small child waking from a nightmare. Maria slid down the wall, her throat and wrist throbbing, kneeling in front of him. He lowered his head onto her lap and wrapped his arms around her waist. It took a long time for Maria to touch the back of his head. She never asked him to come to church again.

Maria dons her khustyna, tucks the loose strands of hair under the bandanna, and ties it severely back. She looks austere and proper in her crisp white blouse and long black skirt. She strings the crucifix around her neck. It is a simple wooden cross, carved from white birch.

She once owned an engraved, silver cross, decorated with rubies. It had been in her family for five generations. The family story was that it had been a present from a Russian countess to her maid, Maria’s great-great-grandmother, a thank-you for a lifetime of service. Maria had never seen anything so beautiful. As a child, she would sit in her mother’s lap for hours, running her fingers over its swirls and patterns. She’d close her eyes and practice seeing it with her mind, until she no longer had to practice and could conjure it whenever she needed comfort. It was her family’s only treasure. She thought it had been taken with everything else during The Hunger. She was pregnant with Katya then, the last to be born in Ukraïna. It’s why her youngest daughter is so thin, why she’s weaker than the others—it’s Maria’s fault for not having enough food.

The other children were mercifully too young to remember that time. That’s what she wants to believe. Children see things differently. They don’t know that Teodor went into the stripped fields at night to rummage for stalks of wheat that had been overlooked. Or that she made stews with mice and rats and pretended it was rabbit. If they saw someone lie down in the streets and not get back up, she told them they were tired and needed to sleep.