The evening stretched long in the hot kitchen. Batya helped the cook chop onion, boil sausages, and fill up bowls of food that were almost too heavy for her to carry, but whose aroma made her mouth water all over again. She had never known fatigue like this; it settled in every joint and muscle in her body and made her eyelids drop even as she forced them open. When she was sent to the cellar to bring up coal, she sat down and fell asleep for what seemed like a few seconds, until she was jolted awake by the cook’s angry cry: “Where is that Jewess girl?”

Hoisting the sack of coal on her back, Batya lumbered upstairs. She unloaded it by the oven and saw that the coal had added to the sorry state of her filthy blouse and faded pinafore.

“What a lazy girl you’ve sent me,” the cook complained to the innkeeper’s wife.

Batya vowed not to sit down again even if she fell right into the fire of the open oven. She must continue to work hard so the innkeeper would allow her family to stay in the barn one more day, then maybe another, until her mother regained her strength and they could continue walking to the train that would take them away from this misery.

The moon had traveled to the other end of the canopied sky when Batya finally stumbled back to the barn, ready to fall onto the hay. She didn’t stop to let her eyes adjust to the dark and collided with a horse at the spot where her family had previously been. She stood still for a moment until she could make out a second horse and a large unhitched covered carriage that had been rolled in front of her family’s two-wheeled cart.

“Up here,” her father called to her in a loud whisper. “The ladder is to your right.”

Her eyes adjusting to the darkness, Batya climbed up to the hayloft. “Wake up Surale to go wash the floors,” she murmured as she fell asleep at her father’s feet.

No time must have passed before she felt a small tug on her foot. “The cook is calling you to help with breakfast,” Surale said.

Batya swam up from the depth of her sleep, groaned, and glanced at her sleeping parents. Her mother’s breathing was calm, and her father was snoring. “Will you milk Aggie?” she asked her sister.

She had no idea what to do with all the milk. Her mother was too weak to put in the hours of whipping milk into cream or churning it into butter, and they couldn’t hang their gauze cloths for the days it took soured milk to turn into cheese. Nevertheless, Aggie must be milked or the pressure would build up, she’d get sick, and her milk would stop.