Married! His good friend would be married in the fall to a girl he had met just five months earlier. And he wanted Zalman to stand beneath the chuppah with him as his best man. Well, of course! At the same time that a sense of elation lifted the young man’s spirits, he could not help but feel a gnawing apprehension, because there was something more to the letter. We will talk. Zalman knew the portent of these words. We will talk. The two had had plenty of conversations, first in person, then by letter. Innumerable discussions. The subject was always the same. Jacob wanted his friend to join him in New York. He was lonely for a landsman, one of his own. Jacob needed his advice, his encouragement, but most of all, his listening ear. Since their first meeting in the hayloft of dear Frau Blanc’s barn, he had learned little of Jacob’s former life, but Zalman realized that for Jacob, he had become a touchstone, a necessary connection to a past that would forever bind the two.
He left the telegram on the top of the small wooden dresser, resolving to handle the matter later. He stood by the window and stared out at the wide spaces buoyed by the tall blades of wheat-color grass, now fragile, as if their backs were on the verge of breaking. The sun, promising a bright winter day, remained high in the sky. Soon, he knew, shards of light would be flashing through the grayness, and the rooster, flapping its wings in readiness for the day, would begin its insistent call.
Zalman reached into his closet, retrieved his muddy rubber boots, and pulled them over his stockinged feet. He wiggled his toes wrapped in the heavy wool socks he had been given back in Europe, and relished the warmth, if only temporary, before he pushed his arms through the sleeves of his heavy coat, also made of sturdy wool, and ventured out into the frigid air. He buttoned carefully over the layers—thermal polo, blue plaid shirt—as he missed his old sweater knitted with tight loops, torn now, and braced himself for the smack of winter in early March. And even now, as he set out on a day when his mind would be occupied by milking, feeding the chicks, even now, he remembered. It was like a virus in his brain, some days lying dormant, others, flaring up, consuming him like a fire. And no matter how many times Zalman reminded himself that today his bones were warmed by a coat, his belly filled daily with thick oatmeal and hot coffee that embraced his insides like a lover, no matter how many times he repeated to himself how lucky he was to be here in Minnesota, alive, still Zalman could not forget. And the fear haunted his movements in the daylight hours, terrorizing him at night.
Zalman placed his trembling hand on the knob of the door and squinted up into the sun before stepping out onto the porch. He could not help but marvel at the row of neat corrals that housed sixteen Guernsey cows waiting for their troughs to be filled, the chickens, fat and eager, already scratching the ground that lay dormant, waiting for the rows of corn that would grow tall and ripe until ready for the farmer’s hand.
A day of milking would usually bring about four gallons per cow, and if he were lucky, perhaps he would get to drive the wagon with its special produce of milk and eggs to town later that afternoon. But first he would have to check on the newly hatched chicks in the barn; yellow and soft, they would burrow into the palm of his hand, and Zalman wondered at these moments if this was what it felt like to enter heaven.
He gulped, pushing back a recollection, and belched the bromide he had taken last night for one of the headaches he’d sometimes had since leaving the old country. By the time Zalman had ten squirts of milk in the tin pail, others had joined him—the farmer’s two sons, both frail looking, with unkempt black beards and wire-rimmed glasses, looking more like yeshiva students than farmhands. Within minutes, two more came, survivors like himself, hauling large bales of hay, raking it, readying the feast for the cows while the steady streams of milk against metal kept beat as the roar of a wind banged against the shutters of the farmhouse. Sometimes, only sometimes, Zalman thought about engaging the others, also from Polish towns near the woods, but when he looked at their faces, intent on the hauling, the feeding, the daily chores demanded by a farmer’s life, their eyes downcast with another secret preoccupation, he thought better of it.
By 8:00 a.m., the cows had begun to grow drowsy, their heavy lids drooping. The milking and feed work done, the men walked out into the open, breathing the air in huge gulps as if it were water, and led the animals to pasture.
The men then trudged back, not toward the rectangular building that held their small lodgings but to the farmer’s house, where a breakfast of bubbling-hot oatmeal and fried eggs already plated by the farmer’s wife was waiting on the dining table. Looking at the building with his father’s eye, Zalman guessed it had taken no more than three months to construct the gray ranch house with its flat roof and simple porch. Before stepping up onto the porch, Zalman and a couple of the men dug into their deep pockets for unfiltered cigarettes and watched as the smoke drifted up against the blue sky. If Zalman ever gave it much thought, he would acknowledge that this was his favorite part of the day.