Franz shrugged uncomfortably, said nothing. He felt like grabbing Betty’s hands off the steering wheel, telling her to pull right over. Kissing her. At the same time, he thought that if she did pull over he’d jump right out the passenger’s side door and run like hell. Her hair was arranged so carefully he wondered how she ever slept — sitting up? There was a sharp smell of sweat when she lifted her arms. She couldn’t hide that. The feral scent made him shiver, as though he’d walked by the den of a fox.
“Come home with me,” she said. “I need help with mathematics.”
She smiled at the road, flying rough across a pothole. Franz wet his lips and told her he couldn’t go to her house, stumbled on explaining that he had to work. And right away. He was late in fact, his father would be waiting. The thought of all he had to do made him suddenly grateful. Betty shrugged and turned the car down his road. When she stopped before the shop, he jumped out. Safe, he rounded the hood and leaned down into her open window. From outside, he was able to laugh and apologize all at once in a natural way that he congratulated himself, later, for sustaining even while he ached to be alone.
AFTER THE CAR PASSED, Mazarine got back on her bicycle and rode the rest of the way home over frozen dirt, her head buzzing, but calm, not weeping. She cleaned up after her mother, who was resting, and looked around for something to make for dinner. There were a few cups of flour left at the bottom of a sagging sack, a little lard in an old brown jar, three fat golden turnips with purple smears where the sun had hit them. She boiled the turnips with their peels on, scraped them and salted them. She made biscuits with the flour and the lard. She left a biscuit beside her mother’s bed, and then she sat on the steps of the rough little house, waiting for Roman. She ate her share of the dinner, slowly, and saved the rest in a clean towel for her brother. As she sat there it suddenly occurred to her that Betty Zumbrugge had a z in her name too. When Mazarine thought of this she froze, staring at the bare tangle of young trees at the side of the yard. And then, with no warning, tears spurted up in her eyes, tipped over her cheeks, and ran straight down, hitting the tops of her hands.
A COUSIN OF Gus Newhall’s was married to a Braucher, a healing woman. This woman had some powerful healing secrets passed down from her family, he said, persuading Fidelis to let the woman visit Markus. In her own illness, Eva had been urged to see such a person, but as she had no time for Russian-Germans, she would not. “They wear out their women,” Eva had said, and recited a saying she’d heard from those western settlements.
Weiberschterba, koi Verderba
Pferdeverrecka, des brengt Shrecke.
“In other words,” she said, “when women die it is not a tragedy. But when horses die, it is a disaster!”
No one could deny now that the most renowned clinic in the Middle West had failed to do a thing for Eva. Besides that, it was well-known that the practice of Brauche was especially effective in dealing with children. Another customer’s family had allowed this Braucher woman to tie an egg to the stomach of their child, transfer an illness into the egg, and then burn the raw egg in the fire as she said the precise words to bind the illness in the burning yolk. She was also an accomplished Messerin, a measurer, who read tendencies to certain diseases in people’s measurements and knew the appropriate Brauche verse to repel harm from each part of the body. So the woman was sent for, and one day she showed herself at the door of the shop. She was not wearing a black head shawl/scarf of the Russian-Germans, as Delphine had expected, or a gathered apron-type skirt, nor was she even fat. She was a small, neat, sturdy little woman with short dark brown hair and ruddy, freckled skin.
“Wo ist das Kind?” she asked, all business.
Delphine brought her into the boys’ bedroom, where Markus lay sleeping underneath a pile of quilts, and called Fidelis, who came and stood in the doorway. From her handbag, the woman drew a length of blue string, which she wound on her hand as she drew the blankets away from Markus and gently awakened him. She spoke some quiet words to him in German, then asked him in English to please lie still on his back while she measured him. Still caught up in his dreams, Markus obediently stretched his arms out while she put the string to them. As she worked, his eyes widened, his face took on an expression of disbelief. The Braucher measured all of him — torso, thighs, neck, hands, feet, and head — and then she stared at him assessingly, put the string back upon him, measuring in the same sequence, only this time reciting German words in a calm firm voice every time she moved the string. By now Markus had gone rigid with an outraged fear, but neither Delphine nor Fidelis really noticed him. They were caught up in the drama of the measuring. When she was finished, the Braucher pulled the covers up around Markus’s neck, patted him gently, and turned away. On her way out, Fidelis paid the woman a shoulder picnic ham. Delphine was distracted by customers, and so she did not check back in on Markus. Meanwhile, he lay in his darkened room, thinking.
“Hello.” He suddenly appeared in the doorway that led into the shop. “I’m hungry,” he said for the first time in many weeks.
His voice was flat, suspicious, and he looked sideways at Delphine in a way she didn’t understand. “You feel better?” she asked, amazed at the Braucher’s success. She brought him back and sat him down at the kitchen table. Markus nodded, sullen and watchful. Slowly, he swallowed spoon after spoon of potato soup, sopped it up doggedly with bread. “I’m going to school,” he announced, and picked up his books with his good arm.
Delphine stopped him, put a hand on his forehead. He glowered up at her from underneath her fingers.
“You still have a bit of fever.”
“I don’t care.” He knocked her hand away and moved past her with stiff dignity. It was clear that he was terribly offended, but Delphine had no idea in what way until Franz asked, a few days later, “What’s this about Markus getting measured for a coffin?”
Delphine looked at him, speechless at first. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s telling all the kids in school, bragging sort of, that he was almost dead. That the undertaker’s wife came and measured him for a coffin.”
Delphine had meant to tell him the truth, but then, she feared suddenly, what if he were to simply crawl back into bed? And refuse to be roused this time at all? Whatever else, the Braucher’s visit had infused him with an indignant horror necessary to his sudden improvement. Markus did seem recovered, though he moved with an air of self-righteous injury and babied his arm. She waited for several weeks before she told Markus what had truly happened. By then, his nameless sickness had entirely passed, and he was firmly among the living.
ELEVEN. The Christmas Sun
T HE SNOW FELL as a bitter powder all December, light dustings that did not soften the earth’s iron. The sky was clear. Day after day the sun rose, attended by two fierce sun dogs, glittering with collars of rainbows, cold fire. Where the snow was blown aside, the old plow marks and grooves in the earth sprouted a miserable stubble of wheat and cornstalks. In some places, where the crops had entirely failed, the dirt had drifted up against some lone tree or the occasional fence line. The dirt went so deep it would not be lost, it would always be there, but already it was clear that a great deal of the life was sucked from it. In higher places, the soil had leached an anemic whitish gray, like an old man’s pallor. The stuff mixed with the snow to make a gritty and punishing substance that polished the paint from the houses in Argus, and painfully scoured the cheeks of schoolchildren, who walked to school backward with their arms tucked up in their sleeves, in little groups, taking turns as lookouts. Snow is a blessing when it softens the edges of the world, when it falls like a blanket trapping warm pockets of air. This snow was the opposite — it outlined the edges of things and made the town look meaner, bereft, merely tedious, like a mistake set down upon the earth and only half erased.
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