Emil walked over, and in the glow of the fire, walked around the two branches, studying them. “Well,” he said at last, “I think Walt’s branch is bigger.”
“What?” Will said.
“I told you!” Walt crowed.
“But,” their father said, “given the fact, Walt, that you have two years on Will, and eight kilos, I declare it a tie.”
“What?” Walt said.
“A tie!” Will said, dancing around.
Walt looked dejected until Emil reminded him that firewood would be needed every night until their journey was over, and Adeline went over to give him and his brother a hug.
“Why’d you hug us, Mama?” Will asked.
“For getting the firewood.”
“Should we hug you for making dinner?”
“Yes, please,” she said, teasing him. “And for everything else I do for you.”
A girl’s voice grumbled loudly behind them. “Stop with all the hugging. It’s giving me a headache on top of my stomachache.”
Adeline looked across the fire, past her mother-in-law, and saw Emil’s sister, twenty-one-year-old Theresa, who was climbing down from their wagon. Known as “Rese,” she was dressed as Adeline and the other women were, in heavy, dark wool jackets and long smock skirts, but unlike the other women, Rese wore her golden hair down rather than wrapped in a kerchief or wool scarf.
“How do you feel?” her mother asked.
Rese had her hands jammed in the pockets of her jacket. “Like I’m freezing and there’s a nail in my head and I want to puke.”
The boys started laughing. Adeline smiled. She liked Rese. As with her own sister, you never knew what she was going to say.
Sure enough, Malia tapped her head and chimed in, “Could be worse. You could have a mule kick your skull.”
Rese stopped, tapped her lower lip. “I will not argue with you, Malia. A mule kick to the skull would be worse than wanting to puke when you’ve got a nail in your head.”
Will and Walt laughed at her again. Even Emil chuckled until Karoline said, “That’s enough, all of you. Don’t encourage her. Rese, do you ever think before you speak?”
Emil’s sister walked past her mother, dismissively. “What fun would that be?”
“My God, what have I created?” Karoline said.
Adeline caught a flicker of pain crossing Rese’s face before she smiled and said, “You didn’t create me alone, Mother.”
Her mother gasped at her impudence. Johann smiled.
Rese held her cold hands out to the fire. “And think: if God had a hand in it, too, if being born is a miracle like you once told me, Mother, then I am a miracle, and I am everything I am supposed to be right now. Right?”
Karoline was staring at her like she was speaking another language. Malia broke into a huge grin.
“Johann,” Karoline complained, “where does she think these things?”
He shrugged, still smiling.
“In her brain,” Walt said.
Rese laughed, pointed at Walt. “I like how my little nephew thinks.”
Karoline threw up her hands, looked to the first stars in the night sky, and said, “I give up. She’s beyond me.”
Rese came around the fire and talked to the boys while Adeline stirred the stew. When she was done, Rese came over and whispered, “Ever notice how it’s always about Mother? What did ‘I’ create? What did ‘I’ give up?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Deep down, I think she doesn’t like other people because she doesn’t like herself.”
“I gave up trying to understand your mother a long time ago,” Adeline said, and retrieved the pot from the coals.
Lydia brought bowls that Adeline filled with piping hot stew.
“That smells great,” Rese said. “Can I have some?”
Her mother heard that. “You have your supper here. Biscuits and dried meat.”
“Biscuits and dried meat?” Rese complained. “It’s cold out, Mother. I’d rather eat what they’re eating.”
“I’m sure you would,” her mother said. “But if we all eat like that now, we’ll all be starving before this journey’s over.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence that was finally broken by Malia, who looked up from her stew bowl, smiled at Karoline, and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Sunshine.”
Adeline turned and walked away to not be seen smiling, but Rese howled with laughter. Emil was trying not to, but soon had his head thrown back, chuckling. His father had his head down, snickering, before Lydia and the boys joined in. Everyone around that campfire was laughing, then, feeding on each other, their worries and pains forgotten. Everybody, that is, except Adeline’s mother-in-law.
When Adeline looked back at Karoline, she had stood up. Her lower lip was twisted with scorn as she spat venomous words at Malia.
“You’ve forgotten the Horror?” Karoline said in a harsh whisper. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to starve, haven’t you? Of course you have. You’d have to have only half a brain to forget what it feels like to have an empty belly for weeks on end. The things you’ll do to keep living.”
The laughter died. Lydia said, “That’s not right, Karoline.”
“Your daughter’s not right in the head,” Emil’s mother said.
“You spiteful woman. You—”
Malia put her hand on her mother’s shoulder, then looked at Karoline without a trace of self-pity or anger. “No, I am not right, Mrs. Martel. Not as right as you. But I have more than half my brain left, so I remember the Holodomor. I remember being so hungry, we ate field grass. Mama and Adeline and our brother, Wilhelm, were right beside me, on our hands and knees and crying because Papa was taken east two years before, and we had nothing, and we were all choking at the way the grass cut at our throats and swelled in our bellies. I remember that plain as day.”
Adeline’s right hand had gone to her throat, for she could suddenly taste the gritty chaff from the grass stalks coating her tongue and felt a pang of the abdominal pain that built in her gut after days on a grass-and-weed diet.
Karoline appeared shocked to be talked to this way by a younger woman, even more so as Malia went on.
