The next morning the pail at the well knocked on ice. I left it out to collect the new-falling snow while I hurried to finish. I knew I had a day before the snow would be too deep to get to town.
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.