Free The Russlander by Sandra Birdsell

Michael came crashing into the underbrush in search of a rabbit they were sure they had killed.

    Katya went across country with her father and Greta. Grass swept against the wagon bed, its wheels banging against a corrugation of furrows, jolting the air from her chest. Then the mares found their stride, pricked their ears as killdeers cried out while racing across the sky. The ride grew less unpredictable, the bumps even and quick, making her bones chatter. Her father’s sharp knees jutted out from the bench, his hands clenching the reins and resting on his thighs, his knuckles white, and she knew he was still angry. They would need to apologize to the fruit-picker woman for taking her baby, he’d said.
    â€œ
Na
, girls, what’s to be done with you?” He ended the silence which had come between them since he’d turned the horses from the road for open country. Katya knew he didn’t expect an answer.
    The sun travelled alongside the wagon, a fiery apricot about ready to drop into a yellow sea of grass. Her father turned his face to it for a moment, its warmth at sundown a caress, its slanted light making the curvature of the earth more apparent, making a person realize how the earth was a sphere that rotated as it moved through the heavens, the miracle being that, somehow, they didn’t fall off. She often wondered if the earth might one day become too heavy to float, because each year plants grew and died, leaves fell, people died too and became dirt, which all added to the weight of theworld. Her father’s eyes became slits and his sun-browned face wrinkled, giving her a picture, she thought, of what he might look like when he grew old.
    He turned away from the sun and lifted his hands from his thighs, allowed slack in the reins, and the whiteness of his knuckles began to fade. He said he thought he’d made it clear, long ago, that they were not to borrow any more babies.
    Whether or not they improved the babies was beside the point, he had told them. A bath in a basin of water in the summer kitchen and a set of clothes which Lydia would smuggle from the Big House weren’t improvements that the baby’s parents necessarily appreciated. A child feeling lost and wanting its mother wasn’t comforted by their cuddling, their songs and chanted nursery rhymes, or a curl stiffened with spit to stand up on top of the baby’s head.
Jump, billy goat Jump, over the garden fence, here comes an old gypsy to pull your beard
. They gave up teaching babies, then, for teaching Sophie; Greta and Lydia coached her to learn the German Christmas carol she had recited so well that Christmas. They had not taken a baby in years.
    â€œUnless you’re a parent, you can’t understand how a mother feels to find her baby gone,” her father said.
    â€œBut it wasn’t us. It wasn’t us who took the baby,” Greta said in a burst, her voice betraying how close she was to crying.
    â€œBirds of a feather,” her father said, meaning that they, being with Lydia, became guilty of her action.
    They were going across country to Lubitskoye, a village they travelled through when they went to church in Nikolaifeld, a Russian village of thatch-roof cottages and small gardens set behind wattle fences lining a single dusty street. Katya wondered now if the women she had seen working in the gardens blamed her father for the high cost of kerosene and matches.
    When they reached the outskirts of Lubitskoye, a cottage suddenly appeared. Children of varying ages sat on their haunches nearto its door, playing a throwing game with pig-knuckle bones. Katya had seen the children of the workers on the estate play this game. When they saw the wagon, they gathered up their bones and drew together, becoming silent and watchful. Her father drove the team onto the yard, a piece of earth marked by its flattened grass, and scattered a flock of russet-coloured chickens. Several more children came running