Tie My Bones to Her Back Read Free

precepts of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander von Humboldt. With the money saved from his newspaper work, he’d bought this land near Heldendorf, west of Milwaukee, and made it into a small but productive farm. He had borrowed money from the bank only to improve his herd and his orchards, and to send his daughter to the Heldendorf Academy.
    Otto never attended the academy. He went off instead to fight in the war with the 2nd Wisconsin Regiment of the Iron Brigade. Wounded twice, at Antietam and Chancellorsville, he came home a sergeant. Jenny didn’t recognize him when he returned. He was pale from the hospital, his pallor accentuated by his big black mustache and the black slouch hat of the Iron Brigade, and he walked with a limp. But he smiled and slapped her hard on the shoulder, and then she knew him as of old.
    That fall he took her on hunting trips. They camped out up north in the big woods and slept under a canvas tent from the war that still smelled of old gunpowder and the red Rebel mud that had stained it. They ate rabbits and squirrels and deer meat fresh killed from the woods and speckled trout from cold black streams that smelled of iron. Those were good days, Jenny recalled now, without the sour stink of the dung heap behind the barn and the clamor of hens waiting to be fed, only the drumming of partridges in the pine woods, the ice like a mirror on the water kettle in the morning . . .
    But Otto had contracted the wanderlust from too many years on the march. Like so many veterans, he could not stay at home. So he went West. Mutti had cried and pleaded, but Vati said he couldn’t blame Otto, for hadn’t he himself gone West at the same age? It’s in the blood, her father said, this chasing the setting sun. Mutti had cried even louder.
    America is hard, Jenny thought.
    It tried to kill my brother, and when it couldn’t kill him, it killed my father and mother instead. I’m sure it’ll try to kill me, too, sooner or later. May all bankers burn in hell. Especially Herr Jochen Sauerweiz of the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank.

2

    O TTO ARRIVED THREE days later, in time for the funeral. Jenny walked into town to meet him at the railway station. He was tanned as dark as an Indian, with sunbursts of white wrinkle lines fanning outward from his grave blue eyes, and he did not look as large as she remembered him. He still wore the black slouch hat, dusty from the war—or perhaps merely from the train ride, she realized—but with the same bullet hole through its battered crown, not yet patched ten years after a Rebel minié ball had perforated it somewhere along the Rappahannock. He was thinner, too, and as he walked unsmiling toward her, she noticed flashes of gray in his mustache and at his temples. The limp, though, had vanished, except for a slight hunching of his left shoulder as his weight came down on the opposite foot. An almost imperceptible wince, perhaps habit now after all these years of pain, tensed his facial muscles as a spasm of toothache might have done.
    “Na ja, du Hübsche,” he said—Now then, pretty one. And smiled finally, a sad smile but a warm one, revealing a gap where a shell fragment had extracted his lower left molars, both top and bottom, in the cornfield near the Dunker Church at Antietam eleven years earlier. The exit wound had left a knot of scar tissue in the center of his left cheek. It was shaped, she suddenly realized, like a gnarled heart. The small piece of shrapnel must have entered through his open mouth, for there was no sign of an entry wound. He could not remember just how it had happened, there had been so much tumult in the cornfield that day.
    “Ah, dear one, how did they die?”
    “Selbstmord ,” she said. He winced again, and his eyes slipped out of focus for a moment.
    “ Ach , Christ, Hanna! How? Why?”
    She told him as they walked uphill from the station to the Lutheran church on the ridge above town. The day was cool and bright, and overhead ragged