Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

“What’s this here?” said Elliot.

I leaned against my shovel. On the far bank, Elliot was a gaunt figure. I washed the sweat from my face with the thick of my sleeve. “As I told you.”

“You told me, eh?”

“Straightening the channel. It will give the both of us more usable land. If you want to bring your boy to help, we can make the going faster. Your side of it anyway. We are working on ours now. Just a portion to start before the freeze.”

“You think we have time for helping?”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Come spring, we can begin your side.”

Elliot marched off. I squared my hat. Lee and Ray had stopped their work, their blades in the bank. “Until spring,” I said. “He will change his mind.”

“What if he doesn’t?” Ray asked.

I chewed my cheek. “You cannot help a man who will not help himself.”

“With our banks holding, what if the water swamps his?” Lee stood next to his brother in waders. He was taller than Ray by a head, twice as broad. Still there was something small in the boy.

“It won’t.” I bent to my work. The water snaked round my boots. When I raised my face, the wind sent me to shivering. “Lee,” I called. The boy gazed across the pastures on the far side. Elliot himself was gone. In front of their barn his son Tom stood, watching us.

The trees turned bare with winter. Margrit and I drove to town in our wagon for the last trade of the year. The snow had narrowed the road, the river only ice and stone. Beside me, my wife pressed her hands together in her lap. When we passed the Clarks’ fences, she tapped her knuckles.

“Haven’t seen the Clarks since weeks,” she said. Their house was dark. In the barn, one of the daughters sang a tune. The barn was dark as well.

“I never see them much.”

“Mrs. Clark missed sewing on Wednesday and the Wednesday before that.”

“I suppose the county has run out of cloth for her.”

Margrit smiled but quickly fell silent. Her eyes stayed with the house. “She has a fast hand. I’ll give you that.”

“We have no need of Mrs. Clark.”

My wife stirred. “We have no need of her sewing. But she and Mary are the only ones who visit us.”

I drove on. My wife often hid her worries, but she kept her eyes on me for now. When we reached town, the streets seemed deserted. The doors closed, shutters drawn. No wagons stood before the market other than a single four-wheeled cart. Only Mr. Wilkerson walked on the path. When I nodded to him, he offered a look back. A trio of boys played with their marbles. The tallest of them held his like a fist of stones. The horses grew restless, the boys leering at us. When I stepped out to secure the wagon, I rubbed at the horses’ flanks and Margrit hurried to the market. It was then I heard a voice.

One of the boys lay on his backside in the snow. His cheeks were red as his hair, his lips bloody. The other two straddled him with their boots on his hands. They dropped one marble after another into his mouth. The boy squirmed. The marbles struck his teeth with a wet snap. If he dared close his lips, one of the boys pried them open again. I called out to them. The two dropped their marbles just the same. The mouth of the boy filled. He was close to choking. When I took to my feet, the two raised their heads, glanced at the other, and ran. The red-haired one rolled onto his stomach, spit the marbles out. The underside of his coat was soaked with mud and snow. He gripped his stomach, tried to lift himself. Before I could reach him, he had leapt from the ground and run off as well.

I stood in the street alone. At my feet, a frozen puddle of spit and blood and a handful of marbles, white as milk. The boys had vanished. The marbles lay sunken in the mud. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. At my back, the market door opened. “ Wo bist du? ” Margrit called. I slipped the marble into my pocket and raised my hand to her.

Margrit held the door with its bell ringing. From the wagon I hefted our jug of cream and carried it up the steps. The weight of the jug weakened me, as did the strangeness of what I had seen. Two boys. Intent on drowning another with playthings. Inside, the market was airless. An old woman sniffed, eyeing me as if I had somehow caused her sickness. I lugged the cream to the counter. The bell sounded again. Before I could turn, something sharp and wet struck my neck. Margrit pushed at my arm. “Ignore it,” she begged. I looked to find an egg bleeding on the floor, and there was the red-headed boy, not lying now in the mud and snow but his face raw. His lips were bloody still. He stood in the door with his arm cocked from the throw of that egg, and slammed out of the place the way I supposed he would the rest of his life. An unthankful creature. A ruffian. A boy not much higher than dirt.

“Julius,” Margrit scolded. “The cream.”

At the counter, Mrs. Conners turned from her cash box. “That boy is my own daughter’s.”

My wife pinched my hand. “So grown. I never would have recognized him.”

The woman looked us over. “No, you wouldn’t.”

Margrit blushed. “Always so many children about. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize my own.”

Mrs. Conners hummed and moved away from us. “Never known folks who keep so to themselves. The Schultes. The Meyers. They don’t keep to themselves so much.”

Margrit raised her voice. “We’re ready with the cream, then, Mrs. Conners.”

“I don’t think we’ll be taking your delivery today.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“With all the trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

Mrs. Conners dropped a newspaper in front of us.

AMERICAN STEAMER HOUSATONIC SUNK

U.S. BREAKS WITH KAISER

“I suppose my boy has it right, doesn’t he, Mr. Hess?” said the woman. “I suppose he knows what to do. There will be more of them, boys like that. They’ll all know what to do when there’s a need.”

I drew back, looked out the door, where I expected the boy to hover still. I reached into my pocket and felt for the marble. When I pulled it out, I found it not a marble at all but a muddied tooth. I closed it in my fist.

“They’ll be war,” said Mrs. Conners. “Wilson is just waiting to set the Germans straight. Why, my own son, he’s itching to go.”

That evening, we sat about the dinner table. None of us stirred once we took our seats. Margrit set her hands to the bowls and circled to fill plates. “I never thought you would lose your appetites.”

I counted empty chairs. “Where are Esther and Myrle?”

“In the kitchen,” explained Margrit. “They say they have a surprise.”

No one at the table seemed eager for surprises. Agnes and Lee were more than quiet. Ray never turned his head from the window. Nan sat in her corner, her face down yet her cheeks glowing. She twisted at one of her fingers.

“Mother.,” started Agnes.

“What is it?”

Ray held onto his knife and fork and cut fiercely at his meat.

“It’s Harriet,” said Agnes.

“Harriet Clark?”

Agnes nodded. “She said the whole town wants to know: ‘Doesn’t your father talk Kraut?’”

Margrit cleaned her spoon off the edge of a bowl. When she took up her chair again, she unfolded her napkin into her lap one square at a time. “That’s not a proper word.”

“It never matters how a person talks,” I said. “Those Clark girls are not smart enough to rub two pennies together.”

Agnes wiped her cheeks. “I don’t care.”

“Of course you care,” said her mother. “A girl with a father so sickly. Who knows what comes into her mind?”

“Ray’s the one in trouble.” Agnes fidgeted. “Why don’t you look at him?”

“What about your brother?” At the end of the table, Ray sat in shadow. When he raised his head, his eye appeared blackened. A bruise on his cheek. “Ray, what happened to you? What happened to him?”