Free Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell Page B

ear by Maria, who blames Teodor for these new words. Dania offers to sew it back on and retreats to a corner, grateful for the reprieve from the eight other bodies tripping over one another in the shack’s confines.
    Ivan’s rump is smacked once for kneeling in his clean pants on the dirt floor to retrieve a daddy-long-legs scurrying under the bed. Assigned to sit on the bed and not move, he sidles off when the spider reappears and grinds it into the floor with his recently polished shoes. When he insists that he is still hungry, Maria makes him remove his shirt and drapes a towel over his lap while he eats another half-bowl of oatmeal. She makes Petro wash behind his ears again, though he claims he already did, and gives him a pair of Ivan’s suspenders to hold up his droopy trousers. Noticing Lesya’s bare legs, she orders Sofia to loan her a pair of her stockings. Sofia selects her oldest pair, not ever wanting them returned.
    Dania wears one of Maria’s dowry sorochky, a straight cotton chemise with traditional embroidered red motifs on the sleeves, the front, and along the bottom hem. She doesn’t care that it is too large in the waist and bosom. Its shapeless form gives her comfort in its anonymity.
    Despite the season, Sofia dons a black skirt and white sweater trimmed with a rabbit fur collar given to her by her classmate Ruth, whose father owns the bank. Her parents consider themselves tolerant Christians and they look for opportunities to teach their only child lessons of charity and compassion. They proudly watched as Ruth passed the bundle to Sofia, who was asked to wait on the back porch. Sofia darned the hole at the right shoulder as best she could, and if her hair hangs just right, no one can notice it. The stain on the skirt isn’t obvious either, so long as she stretches the sweater past her hips.
    When Sofia pulls back the burlap curtain and makes her entrance, Lesya gasps at her beauty. Maria gasps too, at the sight of the too-tight sweater hugging her daughter’s budding breasts, and makes her change into something more respectable. Ignoring Sofia’s sobs, Maria selects the blouse with roses embroidered down the arms, which she made for her three Christmases ago. It took seven weeks of hand-stitching, squinting beside the kerosene lamp after the children had gone to bed, to complete. The strain on her eyes gave her headaches and the precision of the stitches crampedher fingers. Sofia’s protests that the blouse is too small and none of the other girls wear blouses like this are silenced when Maria questions the appropriateness of the skirt’s length and whether the shoe’s small heel, also a charitable present one size too large, is too high. Teodor intervenes and Sofia decides half a stylish wardrobe is better than none.
    Katya’s dress is one of Sofia’s castoffs and hangs almost to her ankles. Maria tucks in the waist and adds a ribbon to cinch in the extra material, but the shoulders and collar still droop over her small frame. No matter how much she feeds this child, she doesn’t gain weight. Maria pushes away the pang of guilt and promises to add more cream to Katya’s oatmeal in the morning. As she takes in the seams, Katya refuses to put down the limp bouquet of daisies, milkweed, blazing prairie fire, brown-eyed Susans, and wild oats she has collected for the baby Jesus.
    Katya loves church. She loves the paintings on the wall, the fiery gold crosses, gleaming chalices, and the sickening sweet incense that makes her feel dizzy. Sometimes she imagines floating up to the ceiling and taking the crown of thorns from the Jesus on the Cross and pulling the nails from his hands so he can fly away. She hasn’t made the connection that the baby and the man on the cross are the same person. She wonders if they keep the Christ body in a root cellar, or in a salt barrel, or frozen in the lake in the winter. She wonders how much of the body is left and how long everybody has been eating it and