The coffin I made was shabby and uneven, but sealed tight. I ran my hand through it as I imagined my mother at her final rest. It wasn’t right; I hadn’t the skills for more than a rough box. And yet this was all I knew how to do.
I set it beside her bed and climbed in to get a good hold on her. Under the shroud I’d sewn of her sheets and blankets she lay, arms crossed, dressed in her best dress by me the morning she’d gone. I lit a candle on her bedside table, sang a short blessing above her, and prayed that He welcome her into His arms, and then added, in the silence made deep by the new winter, a request for the strength to get her into her grave.
And then I began.
The cold had kept her but she was heavy to the touch as she had never been in life; Death seemed to have left something with her, some new weight to help her keep her place under the earth. It startled me as I pulled against her, and the composure I’d felt since her illness had begun left me. I became frantic to move her and finish. She slid from my grip and fell to the floor. I tipped the coffin on its side, rolled her into it, and nailed it shut.
Getting her to the grave took the remainder of the day. I would move her, rest, move her, and then rest. Halfway to the hill I fell and the coffin slid back down on the new snow. The old snow’s edges were like glass where my steps broke it, and when I went back to the house for a lunch, I saw I’d cut my shins; my blood had soaked to the edges of my skirt and, when I returned to finish, lay in frozen stripes along the path.
When we reached the grave’s edge, I saw I’d forgotten the dirt would freeze again and the mound mocked me, shining.
I sat down on it and hid my head from the sight. I heard from the barn the sound of the horses, forgotten by me until now, complaining, and I remembered how we had used them for the lowering of the other coffins; they were to take me to town when this was done and needed feed and water. I shut my eyes until my breath grew calm, and then I left the hill, took the bucket by the well, melted the snow in it on the stove, and took that to the barn. I returned to the house, took another bath to wash the blood from my legs, and slept that last night on the kitchen floor, my back against the wood stove, my mother by her grave, the night for her mausoleum.
Whatever you think the sacrifice will be, it is not enough. It isn’t for us to decide. God wants from us what He wants and nothing else.
I still needed a fire large enough to bury my mother.
From the barn, beside the horses blindfolded against the fire, I watched my home burn.
The fire went slowly and then all at once rose up around the house, the house unchanged until the very last moment when it charred to a shadow and fell in on itself. The windows shattered, pinging out over the frozen fields.
I raked the dirt for coals and took them in the wheelbarrow to her grave.
I had packed a small bag for myself that morning and dressed in my mother’s raccoon coat made for her by my father, his pistols belted at my waist. Her grave I staked with a cross made from pieces of the barn door.
I saddled the one horse and led the other and rode the miles into town to sell them and be on my way. I rode and did not look back except to check my direction against what I could see of the sun. None of them had thought the farm was to be mine, my brothers having gotten good with even the sewing. I was to find a man who didn’t mind my cooking and loved a song, and this was the way my mother and I lived right to the end, as if in the spring I would marry and he would come to do what the men had done before.
I hummed to my horse the whole way as I rode. When I dismounted, a patch of ice from my breath striped his brown neck.
§
In town at the general store I walked in and set the pistol and the reins on the counter. The store owner picked them up and looked outside to where the horses stood. He began to open his mouth to ask about my mother, as he had the last time I’d been in when she was healthy.
Whatever is the fair price, I said, is all I’d ask of you. Mine was not the first family lost to this fever. He went out to look at the horses then came back in. I counted what he gave to me.
Where to? he asked me.
Of my father’s family I knew little; of my mother’s, a little more. She was from a well-to-do family in Lucerne—she’d received mail sometimes from her sister there, and some money, which she always took regretfully. On the day she died, I found one of her sister’s letters in her hand, and I’d kept it. It seemed to me she had meant to speak to me of it next, as if she were pointing me there.
On my girl’s map of the world, it seemed like I could get to Switzerland as easily as anywhere else, and I knew there was only one place to start.
New York, I said, thinking of the oceans that began there and the cities beyond them.
He told me the fare, and I paid and sat near the stove to wait.
§
On that first trip to New York I didn’t speak. I watched snowflakes blow in and melt against my clothes, how they shone like tears in the soft winter light. I thought I must have smelled of death, the air around me like match smoke. But no fellow passenger let on.
As we’d buried my brothers and father, my mother had said, This is God’s will for us; pray, pray for mercy. Pray. She said this even as she lay dying; she had kept her faith to the end that this was the work of the Lord. When I did not fall sick, she saw that as a prayer answered. But I had prayed not to be left behind, and I was.
The other passengers smiled and chatted with one another as we rode and smiled at me from time to time. I wanted the relief of conversation also, and a few times I nearly joined in, but instead I could only think of how they would ask me where I was traveling to and why. But to speak would have been to burst, to let out all the anger and grief—anger that I was left behind to roam this world without them.
Here, I knew from my parents, this world, here was where we were tested. The next world was Paradise. To live when they had all died told me I’d failed.
I could have sold the farm that day, could have ridden for help, could have asked my mother, before she died, more questions about her kin, of whom she rarely spoke. If I’d been better at all of what I was to have done in the years before then—but I was not; I did as I did instead. I always knew somehow that I would live apart from them and the farm, and then I was, and I had not prepared.
I was that terrible girl, too stupid to get help, who made a bonfire of her house to undo a patch of winter and filled her mother’s grave with her own hands.
Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.
Four
I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK’S Union Square in a coach that was little more than a wood drum dragged by horses through the winter dark. As I stepped down, I found a city as strange to me as if I’d been brought all the way to Mars, like in a novel from Jules Verne.
There were at least a hundred girls like me arriving on just that day. The fever had taken more than my family, and the survivors had fled. New beggars angered the old ones, and while I wished there was more to my purse than there was, I did not want to beg, and so I left quickly, as if I knew where I was going, though I did not. The mute doors I passed, their purposes unknown to me, mocked me. The men and women in the street walked, confident and dour, and I was little noticed by them except in occasional stares.