Devotion, p.6
Devotion, page 6
‘Your family does not ignore the body,’ I said eventually.
Thea rested her head on my shoulder.
Despite her initial trepidation, Mama tolerated my weekly absences from home in a way she had not since I was a child. Other than occasionally quipping that if I loved Anna Maria’s Sauergurken so much I should just live there and save her the effort of setting my place at the table, she held her tongue and said nothing when I continually came home late on Sunday evenings, face flushed with cold, as long as I was back in time to milk the cows with Matthias – the one day I was able to share the chore with him.
‘Do you think Mama is relieved to be rid of me?’ I asked Matthias one night. I had returned home from the Eichenwalds’ earlier than usual and had felt, immediately, that Mama was displeased to see me.
Matthias turned and opened his mouth, and I attempted to squirt milk into it. We both laughed as it hit him in the eye.
‘Do you even care?’ Matthias replied, wiping his face on his shirtsleeve. ‘You don’t have to sit and listen to Papa complaining about Calvinists all day.’
‘She can’t wait to marry me off and get me out of the house,’ I muttered.
‘Hanne, I doubt it’s you. She’s happy for me to head off with Hans, when Elder Pasche allows him to go. Perhaps she just likes the time to herself.’ He reached out and took my pail of milk, hooking it onto the yoke across his shoulders. ‘You’re lucky Thea never has to sit and study sermons to keep the Sabbath. Think of how Hans suffers.’
It never occurred to me that Mama might have been preoccupied with her own affairs until, one morning in late January, I found her hunched over in the orchard, a mess in the frost and one arm gripping the bare branches of an apple tree for support. She did not know I was there until I placed my hand on her shoulder. She was shaking.
Mama allowed me to help her into the house and ease her into a chair, even as she told me she was fine, that she had just had a funny turn. Even in the days following, when she stopped eating and heaved at the fatty smell of frying Leberwurst, she refused to admit she was unwell.
That Sunday I chose to remain home in order to look after her.
‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ I asked, after a day of watching her run outside to throw up in the snow. ‘If you were truly sick?’ I was washing the dishes and, when Mama did not reply, I stood up from the pan of hot water and wrapped my arms around her middle.
Mama gently steered me back towards my chore. ‘Hanne, what I need now is a little rest and nothing more. A little space.’ She picked up her plate and scraped the uneaten food into Hulda’s pail.
I hovered at her side. ‘You could speak to Anna Maria. She makes all her own balms and medicines.’
‘Does she just?’
‘Yes. If you tell me what is wrong, she might teach me how I could cure you.’
Mama sighed and reached past me to pick up Matthias’s empty cup. ‘I would prefer you just did what I asked of you rather than dirty the kitchen making balms.’
‘I only stopped to ask you how you are,’ I insisted.
‘And I have told you that it is nothing.’
‘Mama . . .’
‘Truly, Hanne, if you are not going to clean, please just get out of my way.’
I was relieved when, by the end of February, Mama’s nausea eased and the colour returned to her face. It was only when I returned to the Eichenwalds’ cottage and gave them the reason for my absence that Anna Maria explained to me that my mother may have been pregnant and, if so, had lost the baby to miscarriage.
I was angry then that Mama had let my fears grow wild and tangled. Angry that she had not shared with me this hopeful, miraculous thing. When I returned home that evening, I cornered her in the cellar and asked her why she had lied to me.
‘It was my own concern,’ Mama said.
I sat down on the steps and watched her open a crock. The smell of fermenting vegetables was thick in the air. ‘Are you sad?’ I asked her eventually.
‘I trust in the Lord with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding,’ Mama muttered, ladling pickled cabbage into a shallow dish. ‘In all ways I submit to Him, for He will make my path straight.’ She handed me the Sauerkraut. ‘Go set the table.’
‘Mama?’
‘Yes, Hanne?’
I stared down at the cabbage. ‘Do you remember when I was a child and I couldn’t sleep, and you would let me sit with you in front of the fire while you sewed?’
Mama did not look at me, but I saw her hands pause in their work. ‘I remember,’ she said.
‘I miss that sometimes.’
I turned to go. I did not want to give her an opportunity to wound me with derision or with yet another reminder that I was grown. But before I placed my foot on the stair, I felt Mama catch my elbow and turn me back to face her.
‘Hanne . . .’ She held my arm in her hands, as though I might run from her. ‘Would you like to sew with me tonight? Just us,’ she added, and there was something so tender and conciliatory in her request that I could not refuse.
That night, Mama waited until Matthias and Papa had retired to bed and then set two chairs in front of the fire. ‘I’m going to teach you how to whitework,’ she said, giving me a rare smile. ‘That way you can begin preparing your hope chest.’
My heart sank. ‘A hope chest?’
‘For when you are married. Whitework is lovely on a tablecloth. A christening gown. Bed linen.’
I was silent as Mama chalked a pattern onto fabric so I might practise. ‘Try this to begin with,’ she said. ‘Here, thread your own needle.’
‘I don’t know why you are so determined I marry,’ I said.
‘Oh, Hanne.’
‘I thought you wanted to spend time with me tonight.’
‘I do.’
‘No, you just want me to sew up things for a hope chest so you can be rid of me.’
My mother sighed. ‘It is not about getting rid of you.’
‘Why else do you keep talking about it?!’
Mama hesitated, then placed a hand on my knee. ‘Hanne, I need you to listen to me. Your future will be uncertain without the security of marriage.’
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but her face was gentle and searching.
‘Women who do not marry do not have children of their own,’ she said softly. ‘They must live with family, who must then provide for them. If they have family, that is. Take Rosina, for example. Her parents died. But when she marries Elder Christian she will be certain of a future. Of safety. A family and a roof over her head.’
‘What would happen to Rosina if she wasn’t marrying Christian?’ I asked.
‘She’d marry someone else.’
‘But what if no one wanted to marry her?’
Mama sat back in her chair and licked her thread. ‘There is always a man in need of a helpmeet.’
‘But, Mama, what if she married someone but she did not love him?’ I paused. ‘Does Rosina love Elder Pasche?’
‘Hanne, that is a private affair.’
‘I just –’
‘Love comes. In time she will love him.’
There was something in her voice that made my skull prickle. I looked at her, hair sleek and shiny from vinegar wash, eyes black against the darkness of her clothes. ‘Did you love Papa when you married him?’
Mama took a deep breath and blew it out, top lip pursing. ‘All wives must love their husbands. All husbands love their wives.’
‘But sometimes you can’t help not loving something. Like giblets and bacon.’
Mama smiled. ‘You love giblets and bacon.’
‘But what if I didn’t?’
‘Then you would love the children the giblets and bacon gave you.’ She tapped my hand holding the needle. ‘Begin.’
The year opened out into a blowy, blossomed spring. Petals fluttered to rest against doorways and walls, and I noticed bees hovering about the tight-budded flowers. A season of humming.
Mama began to run outside in the mornings, hand to mouth, and when I found her bent over, spitting into the new grass, I thought I knew the cause. Remembering our conversation in the cellar, I never asked her outright if I could expect a sibling. Still, Thea, as a midwife’s daughter, had an older woman’s understanding of these things, and she told me what I might do to ease my mother’s nausea. Mama did not refuse the small cups of mint tea or the dry slices of bread I brought her. She might have guessed that I had learned a thing or two at the Eichenwalds’.
Anna Maria had started to attend to some of the women in the area as a midwife, and those who had seen her work agreed that she was capable and calm and worthy. Rumour also had it that she was often already on the road when someone set out to fetch her. She would meet them on the lane, basket in hand. No one other than Christiana and Magdalena Radtke ever suggested out loud that she was a Hexe – there was no question that the family had suffered for their faith, and what witch would gladly suffer for Christ? – but it became known that Anna Maria had a preternatural ability to know when a woman was in labour. I was a little afraid to ask Thea about it. Thea, too, sometimes had an uncanny way about her, a way of guessing at my thoughts. Once she answered a question before I had the opportunity to ask it aloud. When I pointed out that I hadn’t spoken, she seemed a little taken aback. ‘Yes, you did, I heard you.’
‘I didn’t say a word.’
Anna Maria interjected, throwing flour upon the table in a steady arc. ‘You two are old friends recently met, I think.’ She smiled at me, handed over a wrapped cloth. ‘Take this to Johanne. It’s blood sausage, to fortify her.’
Mama gave birth one year after the quiet loss of the unmentioned, unnamed child. She sent me for Anna Maria at midnight, bracing herself against the doorframe to my room, face licked with sweat.
Sure enough, as I ran towards the pine forest, breathless and clumsy, I saw the Wend’s headdress bobbing in the dark before me. She grinned at me as we met in the field and told me to wait for Thea, who was following behind.
When Thea approached, carrying a heavy basket, I ran to help her and together we returned to my home. Matthias had not woken from his bunk in the loft – nothing but Papa’s shouted summons would wake him in those days – but my father was up, sitting at the bare kitchen table as my mother’s groaning – and Anna Maria’s calm tones of reassurance – issued from behind their closed bedroom door. He nodded at Thea as she entered, stood then sat again, built up the fire and lit his pipe before knocking it out against the mantel. He pulled on his boots and headed outside.
Thea held out her scarf to the hearth to dry it and smiled at me over her shoulder. ‘He’s worried for her,’ she said.
I sat down on the floor in front of the fire and held my knees to my chest. ‘Papa is never worried. He says that the worried lack faith.’
‘He is worried. Of course he is.’ She sat down beside me, eyes reflecting the flames before us. ‘People here believe that they are born with a fixed reservoir of blood in their bodies. Maybe your father thinks childbirth will lower the stores.’
I turned to her. ‘You mean that’s not true?’
Thea wrinkled her nose at me. ‘If it were true, how do you account for the fact that men and women die at a similar age?’
I blushed then. Thea noticed and laughed. ‘You look so uncomfortable.’
‘I don’t understand how you can talk so easily about these things.’
‘It’s natural. You need not be ashamed.’ She picked up the poker and broke a log into embers. ‘Mama told me it was a sign of a gift. The power of creation.’
I hugged my knees closer to my chest and stared at the fire. ‘The first thing Mama said, when it happened to me, was how to wash and dry my cloths so that no one would ever see.’
‘Oh, Hanne.’
To my embarrassment, I felt my chin tremble. Don’t cry, I told myself. Not now.
‘Hanne? What is it?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, but tears had filled my eyes. In the periphery of my blurred vision I was aware of Thea staring at me. I bent my face into my knees and breathed into my skirt, still damp from snow.
The familiar weight of Thea’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘Hanne?’
I pressed my eyes harder into my kneecaps until I saw lights flicker amidst the dark.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘No, I know.’ I wiped my face with my hands. ‘It’s just . . . Gottlob.’
Thea shook her head, confused.
‘Gottlob. My brother.’ I closed my eyes. ‘I had an older brother. He’s dead now.’
Thea was silent. ‘You’ve never told me.’
‘No. I’m sorry. I suppose I should have . . .’ I took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I mean, everyone here knows and I . . . Anyway, I was reminded of him.’ I gave her a small smile. ‘It was at his funeral that, you know . . . At the churchyard. I was wearing Eleonore Volkmann’s dress. Mama had to scrub the blood from it.’
‘Hanne.’ Thea looked aghast. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It was awful.’
‘What happened to him?’
The door opened then, and Thea and I turned to see Matthias entering the kitchen, arms full of firewood, face bruised with sleep. He peered down the corridor and then at us.
‘Has she . . .?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
My brother stacked the logs against the wall then joined us by the fireside, sitting cross-legged. He smiled at Thea and smoothed his hair against his skull, then winced as a heavy groan issued from the bedroom.
Thea reached across me and tapped Matthias lightly on the arm. ‘Hanne just told me about Gottlob.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Matthias glanced at me, the gap in his teeth visible through his parted lips. ‘She didn’t know?’
I shook my head.
‘Our parents never talk about him either.’ He shrugged.
‘Do you want to?’ asked Thea.
‘What?’
‘Talk about him.’
My twin and I looked at each other.
‘How did he die?’ Thea prompted.
‘He fell from a horse,’ Matthias said. ‘Three years ago. He was seventeen and he was taking our horse –’
‘Otto,’ I interrupted.
‘– our horse Otto to Skampe. Hans Pasche found him.’
We were silent. Through the walls Anna Maria said something to my mother over and over again, her voice steady and soothing.
‘Papa blames himself, I think,’ Matthias said quietly.
I looked at him. ‘Really?’
Matthias nodded. ‘He once told me he wished he’d told Gottlob to hide as well.’
I was silent for a moment. ‘I always wondered if Mama felt responsible. She was the one who asked him to ride to Skampe.’
Thea looked confused. ‘Why did Gottlob need to hide?’
‘Something happened a few days before Gottlob’s accident,’ I explained. ‘It was when the soldiers were searching for Pastor Flügel.’
‘They knocked at our door,’ Matthias said. ‘Mama pushed Hanne and me out the back and told us to stay out of sight. We crawled into the rye field and hid there all day.’
‘Later, when Mama called us back inside, we saw that Gottlob had been beaten. When the soldiers had threatened to set the hayrick on fire, to drive out the pastor should he be hiding in there, Gottlob had picked up a pitchfork and the men had set upon him.’
‘Papa intervened,’ Matthias added. ‘They arrested him for disaffection, saying he’d armed his children against the Church’s representatives. When Papa asked how, they pointed to Gottlob’s pitchfork.’
Thea lifted a hand to her cheek.
‘They took Papa to Züllichau,’ I said. ‘That’s why Gottlob was riding Otto to Skampe. Mama sold the horse to a family there to raise the money to free Papa. But later that day Hans Pasche found Otto trotting back towards Kay, riderless.’
From the bedroom sounded a muffled scream. Matthias and I exchanged frightened looks.
‘What had happened?’ Thea whispered.
‘We never really found out,’ Matthias said softly. ‘Hans found Gottlob lying unconscious in the road a little further on. He rode Otto home and told Elder Pasche, who went with his wagon to retrieve Gottlob.’
I was quiet, remembering how, after Hans had told us what had happened, Mama had run out the door. When Elder Pasche returned, Mama was sitting on the floor of his wagon, Gottlob’s head in her lap. The bloodstain in her skirt had been a perfect circle.
Thea was watching me, eyes wide. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated.
Matthias nodded. He reached for the fire poker and turned it over in his hands.
I wiped my face with my skirt.
Another muffled cry came from the bedroom.
The poker dropped onto the hearth as Matthias rose suddenly and left the room.
Thea and I were quiet for a moment. The cry turned into a constant low groaning that made me feel sick in my stomach.
‘Now we’ll have a new brother,’ I murmured.
‘It’s a girl. Mama told me.’
‘She knows things, doesn’t she?’ I asked. ‘Anna Maria.’
Thea gave a small nod. ‘Sometimes. You know, before we moved to Kay, she told me something strange. I didn’t understand it until after we met in the fog.’
‘What?’ I asked. My face felt tight and warm. I pushed myself away from the fire, back into the darkness of the kitchen. ‘What did she say?’
