canning was done, she would give it and all the buttons to Ruthie.
Three days later, it was her birthday — their birthday — but there was no wreath on the table, no burning life candles, no colorful flowers. Instead, six-year-old Myrthen was eye-level with shades of gray. Her mother’s flannel dress. Her father’s threadbare suit, the one he had worn when they left Saxony for a better life. Father Timothy’s cassock. The clothes of mourners, the coal-dusted handkerchiefs that the adults pressed to their eyes.
Beyond them, the morning sky was complementary, with thick, dark clouds. Even the sounds were gray: the low drone of prayer, the sniffles, the throat-clearings, and the belching of the trains, heaving their heaping loads of slick coal down the mountain. But the darkest gray of all — the one from which Myrthen couldn’t tear her eyes — was the black casket that hovered over a fresh hole in the cemetery behind St. Michael’s.
“We therefore commit Ruth’s body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life,” Father Timothy said. Myrthen heard a steep pitch in her mother’s sobs, which sounded both raw and scabbed after three endless days. Myrthen had hardly seen her, but her crying had filled every crack in their small house. It was the sound to which she fell asleep, when she finally did in her suddenly wide bed; the sound to which she woke, always with a few groggy minutes before she remembered why.
Then Myrthen’s father and the other men stooped through her line of gray sight, and lowered her twin’s body into the ground. Poor Ruthie. Ruth didn’t like the dark. Maybe her eyeswere closed; maybe she was playing hide-and-seek. Then she wouldn’t be scared. She always hid in the same place when they played that game, always under her parents’ bed. Myrthen always counted to ten before she went looking, and she had to act like she didn’t know where Ruth was. She looked in different places to keep the game fun, and Ruth always acted surprised when she finally found her.
Myrthen tugged on her aunt’s dark sleeve. “How many do I need to count?”
“
Was
ist das
?” her aunt whispered down at her. Her mother’s sister, Agnes, and family — her husband, Ian, and their son, Liam — had joined them in Verra when the twins were two, but Agnes’s English still lagged behind.
“Until I can go get her?” Myrthen said, pointing to the hole.
“Shhh,” someone said, a man or a woman, Myrthen didn’t know. She hung her head, aching. The only sound besides Father Timothy’s dulled voice was the grasshoppers clacking, searching for their mates. The sound of loneliness. She didn’t know it then, but she would suffer that sound for the rest of her life.
May 21, 1925
“Alta! Stop that daydreaming,” Alta Krol’s mother called from the kitchen window into the late-May morning air. “Those weeds won’t pull themselves.”
“Yes, Mama,” she called back. Her mother set a
piernik
spice cake on the sill to cool, then waved the towel she was holding at her and turned away.
Alta stood up from her crouched position in between rows of lettuce and spinach, rhubarb and peas, and stretched to her new full height. The ground looked farther away again. Most mornings these days, her legs and back ached. She thought of her grandmother, the tiny, stooped figure with fingers like old tree roots and a pinched expression on her hard, lined face. She wondered if the old woman had ached like that all her life; wondered if she, Alta, now thirteen, would ache all her life, too.
Alta sighed, squatted back down, and forced her hands to perform this small duty. She moved aside the fragile, desirable leaves and, from underneath, pulled out the murderous weeds that threatened to deprive her family at the dinner table. A cool breeze cut through the sun’s warmth and raised bumps on her arms, making the short blonde hairs quiver. She