She stands looking out over the emptiness that surrounds the cabin. Mile upon mile of it, stretching off into the distance in all directions. But this is her home, the one she had made with her husband Isaac and which they share with her sons, the much-loved product of her twelve year union with the farmer from Minnesota who uprooted her for her comfortable life on her father’s dairy farm and brought her here. It is early morning, the light still unformed, creeping slowly through colours and textures as it settles on the barren landscape. She stands and gazes at the stillness. Somewhere, out there her husband and boys are taking livestock to market. Gone for three days, another will pass before they return.
Behind her, stirring in his sleep, another occupies her bed.
He had arrived the afternoon following the departure of her men folk. A shabby scarecrow who had walked the fifteen miles fro the farm of their nearest neighbours where he had spent two days mending fences and sleeping in the barn. Appearing on the porch, he had startled her - till she saw the eyes that looked out from under the battered hat that had surely been old when Methuselah was a boy. Stubbled and unkempt, he would have been turned out of even the lowest of the bars in town and when he spoke it was with an accent so thick she could scarcely understand his apology nor his request for work.
His name was Josip and he came from somewhere in central Europe she had never heard of until he showed her on the map in the big atlas which, with the King James Bible and encyclopedia of animal husbandry, were the sole items in the family library.
But this was later after she had fed him, allowed him to wash behind the stoop and even found one the razors which Isaac, with his shovel-shaped, Old Testament beard had not used in all their married life. Cleaned and shaved Josip was not at all like Isaac. Wiry and strongly muscled from a year spent tramping between the farms where he spent his days in manual labour in return for a bed in the barn and three squares, he was the physical opposite of the bulky Issac. His face, though not handsome, was tanned and aquiline, the sharpness alleviated by a full-lipped mouth that was quick to smile. And those eyes.
In his halting English he told her how he had left home three years before, making his way via the Chicago stockyards out to the prairies, where even the relatively paltry cost of land had proved beyond him.
This he told her, as that evening, the firewood chopped and the horses fed, he ate the meal she cooked. She had watched him as he ate and spoke, smiling inwardly at the hunger that occasionally got the better of his good manners, his courtesy and his humor.
Food eaten, it was then she had fetched the atlas and watched as he found the relevant page, tracing with his finger till he located what he wanted, jabbing triumphantly at the small dot that was his home. He had performed an impromptu dance of celebration, some kind of polka, during which he took her arm and whirled her around unselfconsciously.
What made her catch his hand and place it against her breast she could not have said. His eyes locked hers with an expression she had never seen on Isaac’s large, bearded face. She had pulled him closer, encouraging his other hand to follow its partner. His smile was a wondrous mixture of innocence and desire, and suddenly her universe shrank until that smile and all it implied was the sum of it.
Haltingly he had begun unbutton her dress, her heat fluttering as he did so, hands held out to facilitate him. As her dress dropped to the floor she reached forward, unbuckling the clasp of the heavy belt that secured his threadbare pants.
Her physical relations with Isaac had never been like this. These were uncharted waters and her navigator was a young man with little English from a land she had never heard of.
