Mixing biscuit dough, she tried not to think about the future. Her brother arrived, panting as he hauled in the fruit. When he asked what he could do next, she asked him to get out the pie tins.
The sound of him poking around in the cupboard receded as she wondered whether she should have Erik start peeling apples. No, his skills weren’t up to the task, but he could help cut out biscuits—
“Hey, Betsy! What’s this silly thing?” The little boy held up a metal colander with a wooden pestle rolling inside.
She gasped and dropped her spoon into the floury mixture in front of her. Drawing a deep breath, she ordered, “Put that back, Erik!”
“Can I take the silver cone down to the pond and strain for frogs?”
“No!” Betsy jerked the colander out of his hands and whirled to replace it in the cupboard. Kneeling, she gazed blindly at rows of dusty, capped Mason jars that lined the long unopened storage area.
Sitting back on her heels, she gazed at the colander. Someone had cleaned away the applesauce. Closing her eyes, she remembered...
* * * *
Kitchen windows steamed from the fog of boiling water. Sara Swensen opened a window to allow the late September breeze to play peek-a-boo in her handmade organdy curtains.
Betsy stood on tiptoe to peer into the depths of a pot bubbling on the stove. “The apples must be mushy enough by now, Mama!”
“I’m raising such an impatient dumpling, Betsy. Apples have to be very soft before they can be made into applesauce.”
“Can I measure out the sugar?”
Erik, his blue romper-covered bottom planted on the floor, clapped plump hands together to call attention to his successful stacking of two wooden blocks on top of each other.
Bending to hug her son, Sara praised, “Such a clever little man!”
Excited by the attention, Erik knocked over the tower with his elbow and burst into a wail of dismay.
His mother planted a kiss on top of his head. “Don’t cry, my little potato cake. Build me a barn for Papa’s cows.”
As the baby chuckled over his handiwork, Sara poured softened apples into the colander. When it was nearly full, she inserted the pestle and began to roll the heavy wooden implement, crushing the plump fruit. Betsy stuck her finger into the sauce oozing through the holes and transferred the warm, tart mixture to her tongue, groaning in pleasure.
“Let me take a turn and smush the apples, Mama.”
“Betsy, keep up the wheedling and you’ll grow up to be a fine cook or a rich beggar.”
Pushing a chair over to the table, Betsy stood as tall as possible as her mother triple-tied an apron around her waist. “Your mama’s going to start fattening you up like a hog bound for market. You’re as thin as a baby willow tree.”
A leaf, red and gold like the windfalls in the pails, blew in the open window, skidding across the oil cloth before drifting to the floor. Erik jumped up to chase it with the eagerness of a kitten in pursuit of a bug, pouncing when the leaf came to rest against the dry sink.
Betsy brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, crooning as the pestle rolled in her fingers. “Smush, mush, hush. Smush, mush, hush.”
A bead of sweat rolled down, tickled the corner of her eye. The pots boiling on the stove made the kitchen seem as humid as mid-August. Betsy loved the hours spent learning how to bake, sew and clean, watching her mama scour the tiles so clean that they could eat off the floor if they had a mind to do something so foolish.
Mama made every moment fun, teaching Betsy to square dance using the mop and broom for partners or making up silly rhymes about why a pig’s tail was curly or how daisies knew when it was time to poke their white bonnets up through the spring grass. And then there were those hours spent sitting in Betsy’s room and making plans for her future. Serious talks about becoming a teacher, the secrets to making a husband happy and the joy of raising children.
While Betsy pressed the pestle against the metal sides of the colander, her mother used the tongs to place empty jars into a pot of boiling water.
“Always boil the jars, Betsy. They must be clean or you can make your family sick.”
Every word her mama said during these magical times seemed to be written down in her mind in the beautiful colors of the Northern Lights, never to be forgotten.
Turning, Betsy saw her mother come in with her arms full of wood to replenish the supply for the stove.
As she brushed dirt from her calico apron, she smiled at her daughter. “Your papa has promised we’ll have electricity one of these years and we’ll also get a telephone. We’ll get a radio, so on winter nights we can hear music from faraway places.”
Her mother had come from a wealthy family in Minneapolis, enjoying the pleasures of gas lighting and graduating from a woman’s teaching college. Instead of educating a group of children, however, her dreams had shrunk to teaching one daughter about the joys of knowledge and the household arts. But she had never expressed regret.
“Music from faraway places?” Betsy loved to dance around when her mother played the pump organ in the parlor. “Like St. Paul?”
Betsy’s best friend, Libby Hanson, had moved to St. Paul to live with her grandparents when her father had been killed in a farm accident. The girls exchanged letters and Libby wrote about cable cars and picture shows. St. Paul sounded like an exotic country to Betsy.
“Music that your father and I can dance to.” Sara swayed to an inaudible tune. “If we lived in the city, we’d have electricity, a telephone and a fancy bathroom.”
Frowning, Betsy ignored the reference of to her parents dancing. “But we couldn’t keep cats and cows if we lived in the city. And how could we make apple sauce without apple trees?”
A kiss pressed on the top of her head made her shiver with happiness. “Don’t fret, my Betsy. We won’t be moving to the city. Your papa loves this farm and I love your papa. We’re very happy here. God even paints the sky for us with green and pink lights. We don’t need a radio to have fun—”
Her mother’s hug suddenly became a heavy weight on Betsy’s shoulders and she winced away from the oppressive contact. Sara Swenson staggered away and leaned against the table.
“Mama!” Betsy started to climb down from the chair. “Your face is as red as Mrs. Jeppson’s Sunday hat!”
That Sunday hat was a family joke. The widow had worn the hat to church as far back as Betsy could remember, a scarlet confection crowned with matching plumes that became more and more shopworn with each passing year.
Whenever Papa saw a cardinal, he’d say, “There’s the bird who donated some of his feathers for Mrs. Jeppson’s Sunday hat.”
But this time, Mama didn’t laugh and it made Betsy’s tummy feel funny. The flush coating Mama’s cheeks gradually faded, leaving her face bleached as white as Betsy’s petticoat.
With unsteady hands, Sara Swensen used the tongs to remove the jars from the boiling water and set them in a row on the towel spread across one end of the table.
Papa had once told Betsy, “When your Mama’s happy, even her voice smiles.”
Betsy didn’t hear any smiles when Mama said, “My head aches, Betsy, so I’m going to lie down for a minute. Add sugar to the applesauce and fill the jars. Please be careful not to burn yourself. I’ll help you clean up the mess when I come downstairs. Please take care of Erik for me.”
Mama rested her hand on the doorpost as she left the room and Betsy glanced at the windows to reassure herself that the sun hadn’t disappeared behind a cloud. But it wasn’t gloomy out there, just inside her heart. She felt queer, as if something fluttered in her tummy. Poor Mama. She’d been having these headaches more and more, spoiling their fun together.
But pride at having been given the responsibility to finish the final batch of applesauce took over as Betsy added sugar, measuring twice to make sure, and ladled the warm sweet mixture into the waiting jars. Erik had curled up on the floor and gone to sleep, one of the blocks that Papa carved sti
ll clutched in his fist.
Betsy wiped up the applesauce on the oil cloth covering the table and added the peelings and cores to the bucket of apple chunks destined to be fed to the pigs and the chickens. She decided to leave the colander, sticky and awkward, for when Mama came back to help her heat water to wash the supper dishes.
She punched down the bread dough that had puffed up so high in the heat from the applesauce making for the final time and covered the pans with a dish towel. When the fire died down a little more, she could pop the bread inside and Mama would wake up to the delicious smell of baking bread.
Betsy swept the kitchen and wiped off the dust on the window sill that had blown in along with the leaf. The kitchen had cooled down a little, so she went and got a small quilt to cover up Erik who was snorting like a baby piglet in his sleep.
Glancing at the clock, Betsy realized it was almost time to start supper. Why wasn’t Mama up yet? She climbed the stairs and peeked in. The window was opened; Sara Swensen loved fresh air, breezes blew through every room of the house until autumn’s chill took over. Betsy’s mother curled up on the wedding ring quilt covering the bed, one hand tucked under her cheek. The other hand lay palm up beside her.
Betsy took the limp hand in hers. It felt cool and slack to the touch. At least Mama wasn’t running a fever. Unfolding the wagon wheel patterned quilt at the foot of the bed, Betsy draped the comforting material over her mother and closed the window before tiptoeing back downstairs...
“Betsy!” Erik tugged her back into the present, yanking on her apron strings. “Why are you staring in the cupboard? Did you see a mouse?”
She placed the colander back inside and closed the door on the jars in their orderly rows and the memories. Knees aching from kneeling on the tiled floor, Betsy remembered her father’s words from this morning, “Apples are rotting on the ground in the orchard.” A ten year old could be forgiven for mistaking death for sleep, but Betsy still shuddered from the thought how she had failed her beloved mama when she needed her most. If only she’d gone upstairs earlier, perhaps she could have saved her.
Realizing Erik was gazing at her with a puckered expression around his mouth, as if deciding whether to cry, Betsy clapped her hands together. “Guess what! I’ve got a penny in my pocketbook for you to pay my big helper.”
Her brother was quite willing to be distracted from the cupboard’s contents and ran upstairs to get his bank. Betsy checked the oven before cutting out biscuits and arranging them on the baking sheet. Erik arrived, puffing, clutching his bank, which was made of iron and very heavy.
He watched her until she wiped her hands on her apron and fetched the penny. Grinning with excitement, he placed the penny into the dog’s mouth. With a whir, the iron canine jumped through the hoop held by a man in a bright red jacket and deposited the coin into the barrel on the opposite side of the bank.
Laughing in delight, Erik hopped up and down and Betsy found herself smiling, yet envying his joy. If only finding happiness could be as easy as putting a penny in a bank, but a hundred dogs jumping through a hundred hoops couldn’t bring back her mother.
When the biscuits were done, Betsy wrapped them in a napkin along with cold tongue and a chunk of homemade cheese. She accompanied Erik down into the root cellar and let him fish out juicy pickles from the brine in the pickle barrel. A couple of apples and a jug of buttermilk completed the picnic lunch.
On the walk to the field, Erik skipped ahead, darting to chase after a brown rabbit and flapping his arms to imitate birds in flight. They found Papa giving the mare a drink from the bucket he carried on the back of the wagon. Grundel, the black and white dog who always followed him around the farmstead, lay panting in the shade of a huge hickory at the end of the field, a tree whose roots always reminded Betsy of enormous bent fingers clawing into the earth.
Karl Swensen straightened while Erik raced forward and wrapped his arms around his father’s knee, which was as high as he could reach. “I want to play in the corn, Papa!”
After being lifted into the wagon, Erik picked up two ears of corn and tried to juggle.
Betsy cleared her throat. “We brought your lunch.”
Her father turned towards her and she saw the weariness carved in the lines of his broad face. “It’s a good time to take a break.”
Neither of them spoke while they ate, Karl nodding at Erik’s chatter and only smiling when his small son offered to turn a somersault.
When they finished, he plucked his red bandana from the pocket of his dusty overalls and wiped his mustache. “Good biscuits, Betsy.”
“Please take care of Erik for me.” Her mother’s last words echoed inside Betsy’s head, drowning out the chirp of the birds in the hickory tree and the rustle of the corn leaves. She clenched her fists and said in a loud voice, “Papa?”
He turned from soaking his bandana in the water bucket to look at her, his eyes the same clear blue as Erik’s, the blue of the sky.
“Please, Papa, don’t blame school, it’s my fault. I stayed up late reading, not doing school work. I promise to take care of the house and I understand if you won’t let me go back to school, but you have to let Erik go. He must have the chance to learn.” Betsy set her teeth into her lower lip and pinched a fold of her calico skirt.
Karl mopped his brow. “With your hair pinned back, you look like your mama, Betsy.” Typing the damp cloth around his sun-tanned throat, he sighed. “Sara wanted you and Erik to get an education—book learning was very important to your mama.”
“I miss her very much.” The words squeezed out of Betsy’s throat.
Her father closed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice sounded gruff with emotion. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bellowed like a bull this morning—you’ve done a woman’s work for the past four years and you’ve done a good job raising Erik.”
Words of praise. Betsy couldn’t imagine any of her friends’ fathers apologizing to their children and her voice sounded husky in her ears, “Thank you, Papa.”
His hand, thickened and scarred by years of toil, squeezed her shoulder with gentle pressure. “A man must acknowledge his faults, Betsy. Your mama would take a broom and shoo me back from the gates of heaven, if I told her I took you out of school.” He nodded. “You and Erik have fun this afternoon because tomorrow you’re going back to school.”
Betsy rubbed Belle’s rough mane and the mare blew through her nostrils. “Maybe we should get Belle a straw hat on our next trip to town, Erik. A red hat, as fine as Mrs. Jeppson’s Sunday best.”
Erik, convulsed with giggles at the thought of the horse wearing a hat with feathers, had to be told twice that it was time to go back to the house.
As they walked away to the jingle of Belle’s harness, the wind made waves in the long silky grass which bowed around their feet and the relentless motion, combined with relief that Papa hadn’t banned school, made Betsy dizzy. Erik tried to sing the song she’d sung to him earlier, but he could only remember the line about the wind shaking the apples down from the trees.
“I like to eat the apples God shakes down from the trees, but I’d rather throw them. Will you play under the trees with me, Betsy? I promise not to throw at you as hard as I can.” He flexed his arm to show his muscles and then looked disappointed that his shirt sleeve didn’t bulge like Papa’s did.
Betsy hadn’t set foot in the orchard since Mama died. But the trees held a great attraction for Erik, who loved to stalk the cats with pocketfuls of little green apples for ammunition.
Memory suddenly slanted white hot light into a chink in the darkness of the cupboard with the colander and the dusty jars. Mrs. Nelson, the neighbor lady who stayed with them while Papa fetched the doctor, must have washed it.
Betsy didn’t remember much about that day after Papa had run down the stairs to tell her that Mama was dead. Forgotten until now was what she’d overheard Mrs. Nelson telling a group of ladies at the funeral. But now those words jumped into Betsy’s head, along images of b
lack armbands and the sounds of sobbing.
“The poor young woman had put up over a dozen quarts of applesauce before she took sick. The children were outside when I got there, the babe chewing on a twig and watching his sister hurl jar after jar against the house. Broken glass everywhere and fresh made applesauce dripping down the boards. Child didn’t even seem to realize what she was doing—”
Betsy stopped to gaze at their house. For a moment, she could almost see the white paint marred with brown streaks.
As if it were happening all over again, the pain crushed her chest, tears blurred the grass as she carried out shining brown jars, the sound of breaking glass delighting Erik into laughter. Clanging pot lids together his new favorite game, he loved loud noises.
“I broke them because I thought making the applesauce killed Mama,” Betsy whispered.
She blinked and the memory of the brownish streaks vanished. Dropping the hamper, she ran forward and pressed her nose against the sun warmed boards. She sniffed. Not a hint of apples. Papa had repainted the house and never mentioned the incident. Never asked her to make applesauce, one of his favorites.
Only then she realized the colander had been sitting in the cupboard for four years, ready for use. The pain eased as Betsy remembered the rolling motion of the pestle in her hands, the pride of wearing a woman’s apron, even if it had to be triple wrapped around her waist, and the leaf dancing across the yellow oil cloth, blown by the breath of God.
Erik collapsed, stuffing the last biscuit into his mouth while a blue jay hopped closer, hoping for crumbs. When her brother beamed at her, Betsy felt a rush of love, as warm and rich as new made applesauce. She stooped to kiss the top of his tousled head.
When Erik tossed the rest of the biscuit, the bird snatched up its prize and sprang into the air. Together, they watched the blue jay land on a tree branch.
The breeze hurried the clouds along overhead and blew against Betsy’s forehead in a gentle benediction. “The breath of God ruffling our hair,” she murmured.
A Cozy Country Christmas Anthology Page 7