The Barter Read online

  “They both fall asleep?” Dusana asked Adeline. “I told her, nurse on her side so she can rest.”

  “She’s resting now, I think,” Adeline murmured, gently yet pointedly. Good old Frau. Dusana’s next words were softer.

  “He coming to visit them soon. I saw, he washing up at the pump.”

  “Mmm,” Adeline said noncommittally.

  Rebecca, meanwhile, felt a thread drawing through her body that pulled a warm tautness from her knees to her heart. It was an anticipation and an anxiety together: She was more resolved than ever to play possum, and yet eager for the women to leave the room so that she could—what? Prepare. Pinch her cheeks for color, brush out her hair, exchange her milk-crusted nightgown for a fresher, sweeter-smelling one. It was the old brightness returning—it had been returning, slowly and strangely, all the fall into winter into spring into summer, as she’d been forced to witness all that John did to care for her—without (it must be said, and here was the true mystery of it) in fact caring for her. Not even the little boy had brought John back to her—not even Matthew, perfect and shell white and long lashed, could do that. Matthew was too small and dependent and sweet to know any needs greater than his own: Mother, hunger, sleep. Mother, hunger, sleep.

  The understanding of her little boy, which had apparently been born in her at the moment of his own birth, produced a sudden longing. Rebecca inwardly urged Adeline to bring her little one back to her. See how my arm is extended? See the hollow right here where he would be comfortable? Bring him back to me. Bring him back to me.

  “Better if she wake up,” Dusana said, experimentally.

  “Perhaps not,” Adeline replied, with perfect neutrality.

  And here he came. She sensed the sweep of air before him up the stairs before she heard him arrive at the landing.

  “Good afternoon,” John said, and his voice made what felt like a thundercloud in her, low and electric.

  She heard Frau transfer the little one into John’s arms. Matthew didn’t awaken, but he did make a small sound, almost a purr, met by an answering purr from Frau, raspy and pleased. She tutted and kissed. Rebecca heard John exhale with satisfaction. Another sensation with which she was familiar.

  But she knew too well also its opposite: the frustration and pain of nursing him, and the weak fury of exhaustion that could not rest. It wasn’t fair to resent John, or men generally, for never experiencing those things, but resent she did.

  Keep your eyes shut. It’s the smartest thing you can do.

  The room was then quiet. She pictured them, close enough that she could have, should have touched them: her husband, John, his long legs in field-stained trousers, his shoulders straight and stubborn, his dark eyes shining down at his boy, and his good strong hands, one under the boy’s rump, one under his tiny head. She heard a soft kiss, John’s dry lips parting.

  “He’s a good boy,” Dusana offered. “He not give us a minute of trouble.”

  John didn’t reply for some minutes, during which Rebecca allowed herself to wonder if he spared a glance in the direction of his wife, his corpse wife, lying motionless, bloodless, and thin in what ought to have been, but for her own strangeness and rigidity, their bed.

  “She’s all right. She’s resting,” Rebecca heard Frau say. So he had looked at her. “We’ll leave you.”

  “No. Please don’t leave on my account,” John said. “I have to get back.” But still he lingered, still he held Matthew in his arms. Rebecca strained to hear what he was doing, telltale whispers of fabric and skin that would tell her where John’s body was. Without moving she felt herself yearning toward them, her husband and her little boy, feeling very much as if she had died and was surging upward from the bottom of her grave toward everything she’d lost. Oh, don’t be sentimental, you stupid girl. Open your eyes.

  No, keep them closed. It’s best.

  So in the end, she waited until her husband laid Matthew back down on the bed next to her, without touching any part of her, deliberately or no. She heard Dusana follow John down the stairs to the yard, to continue hanging out the washing. And finally she heard Matthew begin to stir.

  And she opened her eyes. Frau stood at the end of the bed, watching her. Without expression, like the dead woman that she was, Rebecca stared back.

  * * *

  In the year since they had been married, John refused to fight with her, and he proved devastatingly effective at defusing clashes before they began. After all, the Heinrich boys and Dusana ate dinner with them every day except Sunday, and often supper, too, and the five of them, John and the Heinrichs in the field and she and Dusana in the house, were too much together and too much occupied with the work of the farm for the problem between herself and John to be allowed to come down from their bedrooms upstairs—for that was where it undoubtedly lived.

  Rebecca couldn’t have foreseen it, but the problem of their inelegant sleeping arrangements, a problem she herself had created the very first night of their marriage, had initiated an ongoing sense of disaster in the farmhouse, like a train derailment that kept skidding and shrieking along, for miles and miles on end. John rarely spoke to her unless it was to communicate something about the farm—they both worked so hard that he was scarcely around to talk to anyway. Their old bond had been lost, and it was a bitter thing to think about their old bantering ways and how they’d once enjoyed each other’s company.

  And yet. When she thought back through the first year of her married life, her mind filtered quickly to those nights when the barrier between the two upstairs bedrooms became suddenly and inexplicably permeable, followed by long weeks when there might as well have been a stone wall and a moat between them. Often she’d gone to him, surprised at herself, as hungry and apprehensive as an animal emerging from close winter quarters into a biting spring. But there had been nights when need, or resentment, or the loneliness they shared drove him to her. When she went to him, it was because she was awake. Or bored. Or yearning. Or uncomfortable. Or carrying too much remorse and heartsoreness to stay away. It was never far from her mind that this was all her fault—this, this, what is this?—the ruins they lived in like survivors of a collapsed civilization, clustered around the fallen walls, bewildered, with their pitiful little fires at night. She’d done this to herself; she’d been willing but unloving, persuaded but uncommitted.

  Not infrequently, though, she found herself exasperated with John. Didn’t it seem ridiculous to hold a grudge this way? Didn’t it seem childish? Why did he have to take her so seriously? Why couldn’t he yield, just a little bit? She was trying; she was trying so hard. Her irritation and self-pity would take sinister root, then develop and bloom, sometimes over the course of weeks, into petulance and then anger and, finally and catastrophically, into contemptuousness, which she in her own moments of childishness would not bother to conceal. She was able to observe that these slow-moving tides of rage provoked John’s curiosity, his concern, and at last his sympathy—he was not a man who could live with an obviously unhappy person without at some point asking what was wrong, any more than he was a man who could fail to let a hapless animal out of a trap that had been set for a larger predator—and just when she saw him begin to bend, she would say something cutting, and he would retreat into his own anger and confusion. And then they’d exchange roles—her anger would disappear in an instant, swallowed up by remorse, and she’d be the one to watch him grow increasingly distant, cold, enraged, until a fissure finally erupted and his anger was released.

  Never did he say a cruel word to her, though. No, John’s way was to unleash a torrent of work. He would stay up all night to rebuild a chicken coop or repair a mower or sharpen every tool in the shed. He was painfully thin yet surprisingly strong. He never seemed to sleep. She thought sometimes that his disappointed anger was like an oven in him, keeping every vessel of his mind on a scalding boil, and indeed anything that remained too long within the furn
ace of his attention was likely to emerge scorched and burned out from within. Rebecca and Dusana and the hired men had learned that it was better, far better, not to tell John when something was wrong, or broken, or could be improved—better to let him discover the problem on his own; better not to ask even in the most casual way whether, say, his folks had ever considered planting the fruit trees in the field south of the house rather than to the west beyond the kitchen garden. Even such foolish, conversational notions could spark a flinty resolve in him to make improvements that required Herculean effort for negligible reward, and you might wake up to discover that John had dug up and replanted a row of young trees, or managed to come into possession of a half dozen peach saplings in order to start a new orchard in an experimental location down below the cow pen.

  This kind of restlessness was what got farmers into trouble, and everyone who knew Rebecca and John’s farm could sense what they were headed for. So they stayed away. It was true, as Dusana had often resentfully pointed out, that they had few friends to help during the harvest season, despite John still being as generally well liked as ever, and Rebecca still being as beautiful and admired and untouchable as she ever was when she lived in town as the Doctor’s peculiar daughter. They had become lonely people; they had few visitors, and Rebecca rarely went calling on their neighbors. It was as if they were cursed, or as if their house was haunted. Rebecca and John never discussed it, but both of them knew where the root of their loneliness lay.

  Rebecca had last seen her husband in her bed on an early June night that was moonless and dark. Her belly had a pleasing, firm roundness to it then, and her breasts were already full, although not to the point that they ached—not yet. Her color was high, her eyes a bright and lively gray, her hair even thicker and wilder than usual. She’d been experiencing a strange attraction to herself—something like vanity, she supposed; she would watch herself in the mirror and see an unfamiliar woman who was gorgeous, unrestrained, and uncanny. There was something powerful in her. She was impossible to ignore, no matter how dry the wheat fields got or how sick the new calf was. John, as busy as he was during that time, could not resist her. Didn’t want to. Watched her and watched her, like a burned man wanting to drink from her hand. There was a delirious week when he came to her almost every night.

  By then, their nights together had long since arrived at a pattern—what amounted to a conjugal constitution—tacitly agreed to by both husband and wife in what seemed to be an effort on both sides to minimize further humiliation. It was purely practical—any advances being made by either of them were already quite freighted enough without adding the risk of rejection. So: Whoever came to the door did not need to knock, but etiquette required that a lengthy, respectful pause be observed between turning the knob and pushing the door open to enter the room. Whoever entered the room then took the necessary steps to close the distance between them—from the door to the dresser, from the door to the bed, or sometimes no distance at all. But whoever had been sought, whoever had been the object of that nighttime breaching of daytime barriers—it was the sought-after one’s responsibility to touch first, to reach for the seeker’s hand or waist or mouth. John always rose before dawn and left her, regardless of whose bed they were in. Although sometimes, to spare herself the agony of creeping back to her own bedroom in the morning light, Rebecca would slink away as soon as her husband had fallen asleep.

  It was unusual for them to talk even on these nights. They both were still too stubborn, too hurt, too young to put into words what might have saved them. Their silence made them both feel deserted, and cheap. It made them both vow that the next time wouldn’t be by their instigation—the next time, they would wait for the other to break down and arrive at their door, if it took months, if it took years. Nothing—no need, however human—could be worth this. This, this, what is this?

  On that last June night it had been trembling and sweat, a ferocious consumption: His kisses, her kisses, were all teeth and tongue and little tenderness. They loved each other like they were half trying to murder each other. And then they lay on their backs, trying to catch their breath, until the sensation of lying on her back made Rebecca dizzy and she had to roll onto her side, the white of her hip the only half-moon in the room, everything else darkness and shearing crickets and heat.

  She dared to say to him, in a low voice, “That felt good.”

  John cut his eyes in her direction, surprised. She lay on her side, her hair loosened from the coronet braids she wore in these hot summer months, her breasts tumbled together against her arm. His lips parted, and she thought for a moment that he was going to strain toward her and take the tip of one of her breasts in his mouth again, but then he said, “I’m glad you’re feeling well. I hear it’s not easy for some women.”

  Rebecca misunderstood him, of course. She sometimes forgot altogether that she was pregnant; she had been so overtaken by this strange and desirable force. A fire shook her, and her fists clenched. “What a stupid thing to say.”

  John sat up. His armor had already descended. He was too accustomed to this kind of thing. He didn’t even rise to meet her anger; he merely retreated. “I meant your health, Rebecca. I meant the baby. I meant how easy it seems to be for you. I was glad.” He was already standing, already dressing, and already close to the door. And Rebecca’s remorse, that familiar thing, had already flown in through the window, shattered by her angry outburst, and alighted on her shoulder like the better angel that it was, whispering dismay and contrition.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, making her voice clear, although her throat had closed up. And her body was still aching, still angling out for his, even though she’d already done things that night she’d never thought a sister would do to a brother.

  “Don’t be,” John said, and paused at the door. “I’ll leave you alone. I think sometimes—” But he didn’t finish the thought. He disappeared into the black heat of the upstairs hallway and had not returned to her bedroom since.

  * * *

  All throughout the long, harshly lit period of Rebecca’s recovery, Frau stayed on, feeding the hired men and bossing Dusana around, soothing Matthew and sometimes taking him away from Rebecca so that she could rest and he could see a bit of the world. Some nights Frau would come to sit with Rebecca to keep her company in the intolerable evenings before sleep came, sensing without asking how it was between Rebecca and her husband, who slept in another room and who came to visit only when her eyes were closed.

  On these warm black nights—so similar to the nights of Rebecca’s childhood, when Frau would sit at her bedside and rehearse all she remembered of the Brothers Grimm, which was considerable and terrifying—Aunt Adeline liked to tell Rebecca the old funny stories about her mother’s failed housekeeping efforts, and strange stories about her father, too, the Doctor, which seemed to reveal the old man in unpredictable ways. Rebecca would lie in the deep, swallowing bed, near sleep, listening, and at some point in the telling, Frau’s stories would become part of the waking dreaming that was her life now, the bed that wouldn’t release her, the sleep that would never quite come but never quite leave her, either. Frau’s stories tended to blur the border between life and dream. Rebecca supposed it was a deliberate effect—that these half-dreamed family stories were intended to be a grown woman’s lullaby. She found herself wanting to believe in things she hadn’t believed in since she was a child. She wanted to believe these stories exactly as they were told.

  “Your mother’s first child, which I think you know, was a little boy before you, and he came early and died.

  “Abergläubisch, Florencia. Or perhaps not superstitious—she had rituals. Perhaps that is the better way to say. She was Catholic, you know. You could have been Catholic, too, if you hadn’t been raised here.

  “When the little boy died, she wanted to plant a tree in the yard, to remember him. It took her some time to do it, though, and by the time she finally did, she knew th
at you were coming. So she planted two trees, one oak and one ash. Your father, he did not like this. He didn’t argue with her, but he didn’t like it. He knew she felt poorly that it had taken her so long to do. He felt that arguing with her would call attention to it. I understand him. I also wondered why she had waited, if it was so important to her. But never would I argue with her, either.

  “Your father had a story about the ash tree. He said that one day in March, he saw a hobbling Frau with deep eyes and a velvet satchel passing through the gate in front of the house. She slipped in the yard, quiet as a spoon, and she rested against Florencia’s little ash sapling. Your father said she looked to catch her breath. While she stood there, this Frau, she pressed the tiny ash leaves to her lips, to her heart, and to her forehead. From her satchel she drew a piece of bread and ate it, sprinkling crumbs over the ground where the little tree’s roots were starting. And then toward the oak tree she turned, but your father came out of the house at that moment and demanded her business there. He told me the Frau looked surprised, and snatched her velvet bag and vanished.

  “‘You shouldn’t have scared her off,’ I said to him. ‘Where did she run to?’

  “And your father, he would say, ‘She did not run. She vanished.’”

  Rebecca thought of her mother often during these strange, trapped days. Mostly she found herself amazed: I will survive this—I have survived this—but you did not. She had borne something her mother had not been able to, even though Florencia, in Rebecca’s imaginings (and even in Frau’s retellings), was a stronger force of life, larger and more important in every way than she felt herself to be. Especially now. She felt so weak, like she was a fading impression stamped without enough force on the surface of the world.