Helga and Josef

By Rachel Bara

Spring 1927, West Virginia

She rocked forward in her chair even though he insisted on sitting in front of her, pushing his chair just beyond the doorway, so that the neighbors who looked up as they walked past would see him first, hands covering dungarees so thoroughly washed that the blue had run out yet so stiff that the points of his knees, the points of his hip bones were visible through the fabric. His hands held over loins that had given Helga five children. Two of which died before the age of three, their small bodies folded up in pine boxes and buried in the churchyard at the end of their road. His hands were the only part of him that seemed large. Over time everything else had fallen inward. Even his eyes looked smaller, harder to his wife. 

She rocked behind him in the doorway, the second face to be seen by a passerby and only seen if they were willing to spend some time looking into the darkness of the cabin, letting their eyes adjust in order to find the white of her forehead and the line of her center part. While Helga did not get larger, her body seemed to stretch, skin pulled taut over bones that had always been there, but used to be softer and rounder. His favorite part of her body had been the fat and muscle just above her elbow, grown from working in the house and in the garden, and when the children where smaller from lifting them when they said, “Up, Up.” When he used to come in from the field he would watch her through the open doorway, see her body in the kitchen, with her arms around the child's back, lifting the child up in the darkness of this cabin. Until he told her that should stop, too. He did not tell her why it had bothered him. 

Even now as they rocked in the doorway, children grown, if she mentioned the children, her voice folding over the words like pebbles saved in a kerchief, buttons placed in the bottom of her pockets lifted out by her long fingers, he could not tell her why he had told her to stop. He was sorry that she had stopped. But the children grew too large anyway. Larger than him. And when they stood in the doorway, the house felt smaller than it had been when the family was young.

He could tell that they both thought about it often. Especially when it rained and he could  not leave the house, and they sat in their separate chairs. “Let me try that,” he had said, as she passed the pieces of thread through the wooden tube to come out on the other side, a thicker strand of thread that in the tubes had been braided and twined in an order she understood. She would use the new thread to sew the buttons back onto the edge of her sweater, or to add to the patches on the quilt that they had slept under for so long, so long he had forgotten, and had to count back through the ages of his children in order to remember how long. And as they sat, threading and rocking, with the smoke rising from the damp logs, and she looked over the thicker thread he had made, the one with knots and pieces that doubled back and snagged, making the thread unusable, he thought about it. When she later put her cold feet against his under the blanket, and he looked out the window at the trees bending to the cabin and the moon just beyond, he thought about it. When she decided that she wanted to be in his place on the porch and moved first her chair outside upon the planks and then his back behind the doorway and sat down while he walked towards her, knowing he could not move faster, he thought of it. 

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Rachel Bara is currently pursuing a MFA in fiction at The Pennsylvania State University.