Then Sings My Soul (10 page)

EARLY 1904

Eastern Ukraine, Russian Empire

CHAPTER 16

“Scho vy tut robyte, dity?”
*

Peter, Jakob, and Raisa, traveling together, jumped at the voice and then exhaled relief as an elderly woman, her bent form wrapped in layers and her head covered in a floral, hand-embroidered scarf, stepped into the kitchen.

Raisa had seen the little house they stood in before either of the boys. She had been in charge of Galya's reins on account of Peter's severed fingers, and Jakob had been pressing his cold-numb face tight against Peter's back. When he'd finally lifted his head, he, too, glimpsed the little wooden home with whitewashed window frames and a bright-blue door in the valley below them. They had been riding up and down the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains for a couple of days by then, afraid to get too near villages but desperate yet again for food and warmth. All three of them figured the little home in the valley would be emptied and looted like the rest they'd found, or worse, with a murdered family decaying inside. But regardless, none of them cared anymore about the dead bodies. They'd be grateful to put anything in their growling bellies with or without corpses staring at them. And if someone was there who would kill them, at least they'd have eaten something before they died.

As they rode closer to the cottage, their assumptions that it was abandoned appeared accurate. The turquoise front door creaked as the wind pushed it back and forth. From the smashed objects and furniture strewn across the front yard, it was clear that the home had already been ransacked and cleared of most anything of value.

Peter ran his hands above the coals in the fireplace. “They're still warm. But barely. The pogromshchik must've been here recently. They probably won't return anytime soon.”

Jakob stood by the fireplace next to Peter, and he tried to glean whatever warmth he could from the coals while Peter and Raisa began rummaging through cupboards to grab whatever they could find, a morsel of food, anything that might help them on their journey.

That's when the old woman scared them as she shuffled out from the shadows of the back bedroom.

“My name is Luda,” she offered, her face reminding Jakob of a dried apple with all the wrinkles and framed by her bright-red head scarf. Her left eye was nearly swollen shut and severely bruised.

Peter explained, “We don't intend to harm you,
baba
. We are only injured and hungry children.”

The saggy folds of her cheeks curved into a grin when she saw Jakob. She ran to him, scooped him up, and held him, rocking him close like Mama had. Jakob shrank back from her affection.

Soon the old woman began to weep, then wail, as she told the boys how the pogromshchik came in the early morning hours a few days earlier, raping her and leaving her for dead, then taking her family, her son and daughter-in-law and their four children, to the woods nearby, where they shot them. Her youngest grandson had been about Jakob's age. She'd give anything to hold him again.

Luda's lack of teeth made her appear chinless, Jakob thought as she held his face in her hands. Her knuckles were fat and crooked. And her swollen eye only added to her harsh appearance. Even so, Luda's pale-blue eyes felt like a lake of sympathy washing over him. “Do not let the evil harden your heart, my son. You must believe God is bigger than all this.”

Later, over the weak borscht Luda made with Raisa's help from the few beets and onions she'd hidden under the floorboards, she told the boys they were not far from Hungary. She sketched out a map for them detailing how to reach the border. She told them about the location of a village of Christians who would help them. She said many Christians all over Austria-Hungary and Germany were trying to help the Jews escape, and that with the stones Papa had given Peter, they should be able to buy a train ticket to Rotterdam and then the ship passage to America. She knew this from many others who had passed by her house, tens if not hundreds like them. That is why the pogromshchik had raided her home—they learned that Luda and her son were helping Jews escape.

“Stay as long as you like here to rest and heal,” Luda offered.

Jakob and Peter, and Raisa especially, hesitated. Surely the home would be raided again.

“They have no more use for an old woman. They finished what they came to do here,” Luda assured them, as if sensing the reason for their hesitation.

Once again desperate for warmth and exhausted from running, the boys stayed, the longest they stayed anywhere on their journey. They were careful to blow out the candles at night and search the hills for invaders before they went out to check the traps they'd set for rabbit or squirrel during the day. Luda helped Raisa nurse Peter's severed hand until the gray and yellow oozing stopped and new, pink skin began to grow around the edges. Luda had stockpiled dried yarrow, too, and together, she and Raisa made more poultices.

When it was time to leave, the trio offered—Peter nearly begged—for Luda to come with them, and she finally, tearfully agreed, collecting what was left of family photographs and mementos. She covered Jakob and Raisa in extra shawls and woolens. She gave Peter what was left of her son's clothing too. Peter walked while Luda, Raisa, and Jakob rode on the back of Galya. In the end, Luda would only go as far as the next shtetl, to the home of one of the Christian families she'd told them about.

Their names were Russie and Chaim, and the couple and their three children—one daughter close to Raisa's age—recognized Luda. Despite their polite protests, Jakob, Peter, Raisa, and Luda were presented with dish after dish of soups and sausages and desserts, the best of what they had, which wasn't much, judging from their dirt floors and leaky roof. But still the family insisted on lavishing the four tattered guests with hospitality, as Luda had with her meager borscht, and just as Mama and Papa always had for visitors too. Russie and Chaim tucked them into their warm beds, while they slept on the floor. Chaim even fed and watered Galya and gave him a spot in one of their barns for the night while one of their horses stayed outside.

Jakob lay on the straw mattress, the first mattress he'd slept on since home, and he listened to Raisa giggle for the first time as she snuggled in with the other children on the other side of the room. On the wall next to his bed hung an icon of a kind-looking man with a beard whom he recognized as Messiah Yeshua from the icons and books Sasha the priest brought to their home in Chudniv. Blue-and-red robes fell gently around the icon Yeshua's shoulders. In the painting, His eyes were dark and gentle like a doe. A circle of light rimmed in gold surrounded His soft, brown hair, and His right hand raised in a way that reminded Jakob of his mama's as she had reached toward his forehead on dank days when she worried he might have a fever. To the right of that image hung a large cross, like the kind Sasha the priest had worn around his neck, with Yeshua hanging there, dead. Lifeless. Unable to help them or deliver them or save them from the long and ever-cruel nights and days.

Which image of Yeshua was real?

Or were either of them?

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is One …

Jakob heard Peter faithfully whispering the evening Shema, and he wanted to believe the words.

Jehovah-Shammah.

He wanted to believe they weren't alone.

“Be brave,” Raisa whispered as she held Jakob tight and kissed him good-bye on the cheek the next morning.

“Keep your heart soft, little one,” Luda whispered next.

Chaim lifted Jakob onto Galya behind Peter and pulled the buckles and ties of supplies tight on the saddle, then gave Galya a cheery smack on the hindquarters to start them off.

As they rode away, Jakob turned and kept his eye on Luda and the family waving until they rode over the hillside. It was the only time besides the day they first left home that he looked behind, and when he did, he saw a silver cross around Luda's neck gleaming in the sun.

“Our help doesn't come from the hills, Jakob,” Peter said over his shoulder. “Our help comes from Yahweh. Psalm 121. Do you know what that song was written for?”

Jakob shook his head.

“For pilgrims. Pilgrims headed to the Promised Land.”

1994

South Haven, Michigan

CHAPTER 17

A teenager in an overtrimmed Camaro threw his arm in the air, middle digit raised, and laid on his horn as Nel struggled to steer and ended up curbing the right wheel of Jakob's Crown Victoria as she pulled into the parking lot of Lakeview Meadows Nursing Home. She shrank down in the cream leather seat and felt heat rise to her face. She'd been driving the behemoth ever since she'd arrived in Michigan, but still she hadn't gotten used to the difference between the enormous size of it compared to her little Volkswagen Jetta back in Santa Fe. She'd never told her dad about the Jetta. He'd throw a fit if he knew she'd never bought an American-made car since she'd bought her first VW Bug all those years ago.

As she walked toward the entrance, she waved at the usual half dozen hunched and graying residents staring at her from behind the panorama windows, where nurses parked them in their wheelchairs after lunch. She considered the stretched-out, single-story nursing home, yellow brick from the seventies adding to the morose facade of the building, and guilt squeezed at her heart for the hundredth time since Jakob had fallen and she found him on the floor. If only she'd heard him get up that morning. If only she'd found him sooner. If only he hadn't gotten an infection that kept him in the hospital three weeks instead of one. If only he hadn't had to go to Lakeview for rehabilitation. If only she'd brought him straight home.

Now she felt guilty for not arriving before lunchtime to visit him, but she'd been sidetracked. Matthew had been kind enough to pack up and send her four boxes of her jewelry supplies so she could stay on deadline as best she could. Catalogs and their customers couldn't have cared less about the woes of her nonagenarian father. She'd unpacked the supplies and taken over Jakob's lapidary room and was relieved to find that she remembered, with only a few initial glitches, how to carve cabochons with his outdated equipment. She was especially grateful that Jakob's old rock tumbler still worked since her own would have been way too large to ship. She used a tumbler more than anything with her designs, which were much more rustic than Jakob's precise work. Matthew could work on the replicable designs sold in the catalogs. He really didn't need to be apprenticed—he had taught Nel many new techniques. He'd be more than capable of taking her prototypes and expanding on them once they were approved by Sandra and the catalog buyers.

But many orders she had to create herself—commissioned orders from wealthy customers who paid for her signature, personalized line, and the trademark scripted “Nel” she discreetly engraved on those items alone. She'd been putting the finishing touches on a turquoise cabochon for one of those commissions when she'd realized the time and remembered her lunch date with her dad.

Lakeview's revolving door pushed her from the cold December air into the moist warmth of the front lobby, where the smell of disinfectants and fresh greenery greeted her, reconfirming her decision to bring Jakob here instead of the other nursing homes she'd visited in the brief time she'd had to choose one. She'd had an aversion to any facility, but if he had to go to one, Lakeview's attention to detail, the decor and holiday celebrations, and the administration's conscientious efforts to personalize care took the edge off the inevitable decision. She'd heard horror stories from friends and the news about patients lying for hours on urine-soaked pads, bedsores festering deeper as they lay neglected for hours while aides sat around laughing, thumbing through catalogs, and stuffing snacks in their mouths. Lakeview seemed to offer the best geriatric specialty care and amenities available. Art therapy. Music. Exercise classes. Pet visits. Games. She'd felt certain this was the best place for Jakob. And so far, the kind staff helped affirm the choice whenever she visited. Between Mattie and Nel, Jakob was rarely without a visitor for more than a day. Not even Mattie, who was more particular than Nel, had found anything concerning when she came to visit Jakob.

Nel found her dad sitting in a chair by the window in his room. He wore his old gray wool cardigan pulled loosely over the top of a blue oxford shirt. The sweater was buttoned up crooked, the left side hanging lower, which matched the lopsided droop of his saggy neck. He lifted his bloodshot eyes to her, the weakened eyelids too loose for their bony sockets. There again was the look of an old basset hound behind the thick bifocals.

Nel leaned toward him and grasped his hands. “Hey, Dad.”

“Well, well, well. Look who's here.” Long wrinkles on his jowly cheeks stretched into a smile, and his eyebrows lifted in a moment of acknowledgment before he looked back out at the snow collecting on the arms of the evergreens dotting the rolling hills of the pasture and golf course beyond.

Nel sat in a chair next to him, and she fought the temptation to get weepy, as much from the drastic, rapid wasting that had occurred since his fall as from feeling so overwhelmed by this disaster happening so close to her mother's death. She knew from friends and stories in the news how people married so long often die within a short time of each other. Living away from Mom and Dad had done more harm than good by isolating her from the more gradual ebb of life others who lived close to family experienced with their aging parents.

She picked up one of his favorite books,
Reflections from the North Country
by Sigurd F. Olson
,
which sat next to his empty denture cup on the nightstand, beside a framed picture of him and Mom. He'd grown quiet—the doctors had said depression was common in elderly patients who fall—and she'd discovered reading helped ease the sometimes awkward silence of their visits.

“Now where'd we leave off? Here we go. The chapter on ‘Flashes of Insight.'” Jake's countenance relaxed as Nel read. When she finished the paragraph, the room stilled, and both of them stared out at the snow. Eventually Jakob turned toward her when he realized she had quit reading, and she looked deep into his hazel eyes that were flecked with all the colors of a fall hillside. How fast the seasons had changed.

“I gotta talk to you about something,” she finally said.

His eyes widened and wrinkled, his mouth flattening with concern. “What is it, Catherine? What is wrong?”

Catherine. His lapses in lucidity, compounded with the severity of his episodes of delirium in the hospital, broke Nel's heart. For a while she wondered if she should correct him, but that only agitated him. So as much as she could, she went along with his confusion until he slipped back into reality and remembered who she was. His short-term memory was the worst. Most days he was quick to talk about stories from when she was growing up, from when he and Catherine dated, and about the trips they'd taken. But then he couldn't recall if he'd eaten breakfast or where to find or how to use the nurse call light, which he'd been taught to do tens of times. She wondered more and more about dementia, his family history, and the mystery of his past that Catherine had been researching.

“Nothing's wrong … There's a few things to fix around the house, and I think I'm going to ask David Butler to do that for us, if that's okay.”

“Okay.”

“And I figured out how to get you some help at home. I'm going to stay here with you for as long as I need to.”

He didn't reply.

“Dad? Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm going to be your help.”

He turned toward her, and she was surprised to see tears puddling in his eyes. “I never wanted to be a burden to you, Catherine.”

She scooted her chair closer to him. “Dad. It's me, Nel.”

He studied her face, and she saw recognition flash across his eyes. “Nel. Of course. What did I say?”

“Never mind that. You're not a burden, Dad. I want to do this.”

“It's all too much.” He turned away.

Nel sat back and studied him, this man who had held her on his shoulders for summer parades, hooked fish for her, carried her into the house and lifted her into bed on moonlit summer nights after she had fallen asleep on burlap-covered cushions under the stars. He'd always been the strongest, kindest man in her life, and she wasn't going to risk going back to Santa Fe and leaving him to die without her mom. “I don't want to waste whatever time we have left.”

With as much lucidity as he'd had since his fall, he searched her eyes, and the tears that had been gathering in his fell. “Neither do I.”

“Okay, then. It's settled. I'm staying.”

Nyesha nearly tumbled into the room before he could argue. Her arms were loaded with a stack of linens and waterproof bed pads. “I brought your linens since you're up, Mr. Jake.” She set them down and nodded toward Nel as she began stripping the bed. “Meant to get this done before you came to visit.”

“Thanks, Nyesha.”

“You're welcome.” She smiled and gave Jakob a quick hug, then she tucked in the sheets and spread out the clean pads.

Nel took a deep breath, considering whether or not she should broach the other thing she wanted to talk about with him. She didn't want to upset him. But at the same time, she didn't know how many more times she'd have to talk to him about her mom's research. And what if it was information she and her dad both needed to know?

“There's one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, Dad.”

Nyesha wrapped up the dirty linens and stuffed them into the hamper as she left the room.

Nel pulled the envelope out of her bag and showed him the picture of the two boys.

“Dad … who's Peter?”

Jakob's eyes widened as he took the photo from her, then squinted as he strained to see the image clearly.

“Where did you get this?” His voice held an urgency Nel hadn't heard before.

“Mom had been working on some genealogy before she died. An envelope came from New York, immigration services, and this picture was in it. I don't recognize the name Maevski. I thought Mom's family came from Pennsylvania. Who would we know from Russia?”

“Ukraine,” he corrected her.

“Ukraine? You know about this?”

He continued to stare at the photo. His hands were trembling now.

“When you were in the hospital, you kept mentioning someone named Peter. Is that one of the boys in this picture? Was he a friend of yours?”

“I … I had a brother.”