The Waiting

by Cathy LaGrow

  She’d come to America, and America had stolen her daughter’s innocence.

  Just as, fifteen years ago, it had claimed her husband’s life.

  * * *

  July 1911.

  One day after Americans celebrated their country’s 135th birthday with fireworks and parades, the SS Potsdam entered New York Harbor and sailed past an enormous statue of a robed lady holding a torch. Her brown copper facade, starting to tinge into the soft green that would eventually cover her, reflected a blistering, bright sun. The region was in the middle of a deadly streak of hot weather, and faint harbor breezes brought little relief.

  It had been a trying voyage for Tjiske de Jong. When she’d sent her husband, Bouche, ahead of her in April, she hadn’t known that their second baby was already nestled deep within her. Now she was nearly five months pregnant, and the heat pasted her long skirts to her legs and swollen stomach. During the journey she’d eaten soda crackers; tended to her toddler son, John; and repeatedly patted her pockets, feeling for the twenty-five American dollars that Bouche had sent her, which she couldn’t afford to lose. She’d practiced the new names they’d be using in this new country: Ben and Jennie. The names sounded flatter than she was accustomed to, and her tongue struggled with the muted tones. Ben and Jennie. Ben and Jennie DeYoung.

  She and her son were spared the large crowds and long waits inside the Ellis Island terminal, an arduous experience reserved for steerage passengers. As a second-class ticket holder, Jennie was allowed to undergo medical examinations aboard the ship. Once released, she and John walked carefully down a gangway and into the chaos of the world’s second-largest city.

  Using a combination of Dutch, German, and English words with clerks who were used to dealing with immigrants, Jennie collected her luggage and purchased train tickets. Then she and little John boarded the first in a series of rattling railcars that wound along the upper United States and around the Great Lakes. Her new country’s vastness kept her staring out the windows. After three days on stuffy trains, past towns and cities dotting an endless expanse of hills, woods, and rolling prairie, Jennie had traveled only halfway across America.

  When they’d decided to move, she and her husband had likely never even seen pictures of their destination—the local Dutch newspapers featured only written descriptions and the occasional hand-drawn illustration. But America’s fame had grown as large as the country itself, and to millions of Europeans, the stories were irresistible. Free land. Extravagant opportunities. Enough independence to make a man feel like a king.

  Before making the ocean crossing three months earlier, Bouche and two friends had been offered jobs by a Dutch acquaintance who’d already settled in a place called South Dakota. They would be working at a dairy—a modest start, but there was plenty of time for future grand plans. Bouche was only twenty-four years old, and although small of stature, he was hardy and a good worker.

  When Jennie finally stepped onto the dusty planks of the train station in Aberdeen, South Dakota, her eyes took in glimpses of her new home, but she sought one face. And then she saw Bouche . . . no, Ben now . . . with his dear, solemn face and his carefully combed blond hair. His gaze landed on their little boy, her rounded belly, her eyes. He smiled.

  Their new town seemed wild and bare and so young. Most of the streets were still unpaved, and passing buggies churned up clouds of dirt, leaving deep ruts in the street. There were no windmills, no tree-lined canals, no centuries-old cathedrals.

  But the family was happy to be together again, and Jennie busied herself with organizing their one-room cabin and sewing clothes for the coming baby. That November she gave birth to a girl they named Minka Bernard DeYoung. The family spent the first days of the baby’s life huddled near their cookstove, as the temperature outside hovered near zero and snow piled to alarming heights. Christmas Eve ushered in an even colder snap of weather, and then in January 1912, Aberdeen measured the coldest temperature ever recorded there, before or since—a bone-shattering forty-six degrees below zero.

  The DeYoung family survived that first harsh winter in their small cabin. The following year, John learned to put together words and sentences, Minka learned to crawl and babble, and Jennie discovered she was pregnant again. The couple felt their lives were blessed. They were saving money, one dollar at a time. Someday they would buy a place of their own. And who knew how many children they would have? They were used to big families—Jennie’s own father had produced nine children.

  Wrapped up in all these youthful dreams, how could they have guessed what was coming?

  * * *

  Sunday, June 29, 1913. Jennie was on bed rest, nursing a nine-day-old newborn, Jane. Minka, now nineteen months old, toddled around after her brother, John. With household supplies running low, Ben decided to go to Aberdeen for groceries. Maybe little John asked to go too—he was nearly four years old—but in the end, all three children stayed home with Jennie. Hours passed. Then more. The cabin grew dim, so Jennie lit a lantern. The children fell asleep. Ben did not return.

  Fear clenched at Jennie’s stomach, cold and hard, but there was no one to send to town to find Ben. She kept pacing and peering outside until she could stand it no longer.

  Leaving the children in bed, Jennie crept out the door into the warm, dark air. She walked slowly down the road, trying not to jar her still-tender body. Finally, she heard a familiar sound: the clop of horses’ hooves, the rattle of buggy wheels. She held the lantern up, its feeble light spilling in front of her, and called out for her husband.

  “Is dat jou, Bouche?”

  It wasn’t Ben. It would never be Ben again.

  His friends mournfully explained what had happened. It had been so very hot that day. By the time Ben completed his errands in town, it was late afternoon, and the sun was high and fierce. When he ran into some Dutch friends in Aberdeen, a swim sounded like the best idea in the world. They drove their buggies to Lake Minne-Eho, a popular swimming hole that townspeople had recently carved out of a former slough. It was only a mile or so from home. Ben wanted a quick, cooling dip before starting another hot week at the dairy.

  He was not a great swimmer. But there was a small island in the middle of the lake, solid and enticing, and all his friends headed toward it. As Ben followed them, he lost his rhythm. Then his sides began to cramp.

  Surely he fought hard, willing his mind to override the sharp pain stabbing through his muscles. As his head bobbed beneath the water, he must have thought of his young wife, his three little ones. His friends moved toward him, calling his name, then shouting to strangers for help.

  By the time they reached him, Ben had sunk into a hole formed where an old roadbed crossed the slough. His friends dove again and again. Someone rowed over with a boat. But thirty minutes passed before they could grab hold of Ben’s leg. It was far too long.

  His friends picked up his heavy, sodden body and placed it into a buggy. They made the agonizing drive back home. Before they got there, they were met on the dusty road by a twenty-three-year-old woman who, for a few more moments there in the lantern light, did not yet know she was a widow.

  For years afterward, Jennie recounted the story to friends, while the children listened silently. She told about the drive to the cemetery, when the cart driver had hurried across the dirt roads, jostling the wooden casket behind him. This bit of indignity would hurt Jennie for the rest of her life. Her beloved lay inside that bouncing box, the man with the full lips and the boyish nose whom she’d married when she was just a teenager. The father of her babies deserved more respect.

  Jennie stood at the grave site, holding her newborn in one arm, gripping the hand of her toddler daughter in the other.

  “John,” she said to her son, “houd mijn rok vast . . . en nooit loslaten.” Hold on to my skirt . . . and never let go.

  After just two years in America, most of that time spent in a cabin with her children or with other immigrants, Jennie still struggled to speak English. She had no prof
essional skills. But she knew how to keep house, how to stretch a dollar, how to work harder than anyone else. Now solely responsible for the survival of a family of four, she would have to make do.

  She certainly wasn’t going anywhere without her children—that point was nonnegotiable. When farmers came to interview Jennie for housekeeper positions, she’d point firmly to the corner, where her children played and the baby slept, and say one English word, over and over. “Mine. Mine.”

  Where I go, she meant, they go.

  Jennie gratefully accepted her first job offer from a young farmer, who seemed to fancy the Dutch widow. But he was less enamored with the children. He took John to the hayloft and left him there alone. He put Minka into a trunk and closed the lid over her. He pushed baby Jane near to the stove, close enough to singe her feet.

  After a few weeks, Jennie gathered up her children and left. She wasn’t going to sacrifice their safety, not even for their survival. And finally salvation came in the form of an older German farmer named Pansegrau. The children couldn’t pronounce his name.

  They simply called him “Uncle.”

  * * *

  In the end, for all her efforts to survive with her children and to shelter them from the tragedies of life, Jennie was not able to protect her quiet daughter. Minka had always been such an obedient girl, so uncomplaining. She could be stubborn, to be sure, but she’d never caused Jennie to wonder how she’d “turn out.” Independent John and carefree Jane were the ones who needed close watching.

  There was one thing left in Jennie’s power: she would do everything she could to soften the repercussions for Minka. The baby would be placed in another home with a real family. Minka deserved a good life, free from disgrace. She needed to go away before her thin body started to swell with the proof of her situation. Jennie knew this. Honus knew this. The Reverend knew this. And no one else needed to know anything.

  Minka would be going south as quickly as possible. By next summer, it would all be over. And just maybe, for Jennie’s precious daughter, it could somehow be as if nothing bad had ever happened.

  Chapter Four

  OVER THE WEEKS, Minka caught her sister eyeing her, once when Minka reached for a cow’s udder and a sharp pain made her gasp, and several times when she lifted her nightdress over her head.

  “You’re getting fat,” Jane finally said one Sunday morning when Minka struggled with the buttons of her dress.

  What overalls could hide all week, Minka’s church dresses could not. Her breasts had grown, making her figure resemble that of a curvy movie star. Minka shrugged at Jane’s comment. She was afraid to offer an excuse her sister would see right through.

  When Jane repeated the observation to their mother over breakfast, Jennie replied without pause. “Minnie seventeen, no little girl now.”

  For weeks, Minka had fought the compulsion to rub her hands over her growing stomach. She was ever mindful of her sister, who didn’t hide her frustration about the underlying changes that had occurred within the house. Their mother treated Jane with a thread of impatience, while being kinder to her older sister. Even Honus tiptoed around them more than usual. And Minka acted oddly, avoiding her sister even at bedtime. There were secrets woven into their lives now, but of course Jane could not suspect the enormity of the deceit.

  Shortly after Christmas, Jennie told Minka that she and Honus would be driving her to Tante Hogerhide’s house in Iowa the following week. Minka barely knew Honus’s aunt, but the girl knew she needed to leave soon.

  When the day came, Jane was not happy to be left behind. A couple of Honus’s friends were helping with the milking and deliveries, and Mrs. Janssen would check on Jane every day, but Jane would be alone with her routine unchanged—except for Minka’s glaring absence. That morning Jane barely said good-bye as she stomped to the barn, looking pretty as usual, even in her worn overalls.

  Jane had been told that Minka was headed to Tante’s house, but she knew that the dead of winter was not the typical season for visiting distant relatives. Who on earth went traipsing around the countryside when they could get caught in a snowstorm? She worked at the reasons behind her sister’s departure, dropping hints, watching for reactions. Maybe Tante Hogerhide needed help or was sick or dying, and her grown sons were of little assistance. But then why couldn’t they just tell Jane that?

  Or perhaps Honus and Jennie were already seeking a husband for Minka. The sisters knew one or two girls, barely older than Minka, who’d already gotten betrothed.

  As Minka, wearing her Sunday best under her wool coat and clutching a borrowed luggage bag, waited for Honus to bring the truck around, she knew she appeared to be a favored child going on an adventure.

  In reality, she was so nervous she felt like throwing up.

  If Jane only knew.

  * * *

  A great unknown waited over the frozen plains, beyond the icy morning horizon. Minka, who’d never been more than fifteen miles from Aberdeen, was filled with both apprehension and curiosity.

  The milk truck jostled down slushy roads and the occasional paved highway, moving toward a future that felt like puzzle pieces, scattered and loose in the wind. And no matter how tightly Minka wished to grasp all that remained behind her—her sister, the dairy, and the routine that divided each day and week into a steady, predictable rhythm—hour after hour this unknown approached, and the familiarity of home receded.

  With one hand resting on the door for balance and the other holding the blanket around her winter coat, Minka rode on a milk crate in the enclosed back of the rattling truck. The luggage bag sat at her feet. She’d never used such a thing before.

  As Honus drove, his eyes stared forward, flashing on occasion to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. Jennie sat stiffly in the passenger seat, rarely speaking except in short conversations with Honus that Minka did not try to hear.

  Minka had never been an excitable girl, except during threshing time at Uncle’s, when the sight of the big machines thundering up the lane made even grown adults giddy. Minka remembered running to hang off fences when the great threshing caravan arrived on a late-summer morning. But now her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. Her breath came shallow, and her pulse pounded in her throat, prompting her to undo several buttons near her neck. She’d already added to the waistline of this dress when her flat stomach started rounding out, but her belly still constricted against the fabric at every deep breath.

  She wiped her hand across the cold glass where her breath kept clouding out the landscape. The prairie’s continuity made her think of her mother’s descriptions of the endless ocean that had carried Jennie from Holland. The familiar vista of open farmland helped to steady Minka.

  A visitor to South Dakota might not see the variations in the landscape. But Minka watched how the land took on different characteristics over the miles: rising up tall like enormous piles of hay, or bunching up like a porch rug rumpled against the front door. Then the rolling hills flattened out for miles, as if pressed down with an iron.

  Farms cut up sections of prairie, but at this early time of year they were stripped bare of crops and dusted with snow. Stands of elm, willow, and cottonwood trees reached bare arms skyward or stood like sentries protecting rivers and streams. Towns, some large and others barely outposts, were a welcome distraction. Whenever the truck passed through one, Minka drew close to the glass, holding her breath to keep the view clear as she studied people and buildings.

  In one town, as Honus slowed to navigate between pedestrians and autos and wagons, Minka caught the eye of a young girl who stood yanking at her mother’s long coat. The mother was engrossed in a heated discussion with a butcher wearing a bloodstained apron. The girl stared at the truck, then waved at Minka, who lifted a hand in return as the milk truck continued by.

  Minka had once been that girl watching people travel on, wondering if they were headed to the exciting places she heard about on the radio, places she had seen only in newsreels at the movie
theater, where the black-and-white images seemed not particularly connected to the real world. She knew there were exciting and dangerous places like New York—Jennie had told of her first glimpse of America, in a city that seemed big enough to swallow up all of Holland—or shimmering playgrounds like Hollywood, where palm trees stood tall and the weather was so warm that men and women lounged around wearing bathing suits as revealing as underwear. These worlds half-existed to Minka, like the imaginary lands in fairy tales.

  Now she traveled not just to another town but to a different state. Minka would have given anything to go home, but her sentence had been handed out. Not until this baby was born would Minka be allowed to return.

  * * *

  After a short break for lunch and then more cold miles in the truck, Honus pulled to a stop in front of a two-story bungalow with white clapboard siding and a tidy front porch. They were in northern Iowa, not far from her ultimate destination of Sioux Falls. The houses here were lined up with trim lawns and long walkways, and it was quiet. This place was nothing like home, where barns and silos were surrounded by acres of crops and a clanking rail yard stood across the street.

  Minka stretched her aching limbs as she stepped from the truck. It was warmer here than in Aberdeen, although in this case “warmer” was still well below freezing. Honus carried Minka’s bag with a kind of silent compassion that had been subtly on display since her troubles began.

  Tante Hogerhide opened the door as they reached the porch steps. She ushered them inside, out of the biting afternoon air.

  “Welkom, welkom, kom je maar opwarmen bij het vuur,” Tante said. Come and warm yourself by the fire. She touched Minka’s shoulder, drawing her deeper into the house. Her gentle hand brought a small relief. At least Minka wasn’t being abandoned into the hands of a tyrant.

  “Danke,” Minka murmured. Her face flushed. Kind aunt notwithstanding, this whole thing was deeply embarrassing.