Astrid returned to her reading. ‘‘Here’s an article about the new books in the library. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a real library with rooms full of books and not just three or four shelves?’’
‘‘Many people would be exceedingly grateful for a whole shelf of books to choose from.’’
‘‘I know, but I’ve already read some of the ones on the shelves at school two and three times. Oh, here’s an article about a lady who wrote a book about a dog. It’s called Beautiful Joe.’’
‘‘I sure would like to read that book,’’ Andrew put in.
‘‘Me too. We should tell Thorliff to write a book about Paws. If that lady can write about a dog, why not Thorliff?’’
‘‘You write and suggest that to him.’’
‘‘I will.’’
‘‘Thank you, Astrid, for reading. Let’s save some for tomorrow night. As you go help your mor with the dishes, how about handing me my Bible?’’
‘‘You better read fast. You look about asleep already.’’ Ingeborg poured water from the reservoir into the rinsing pan. ‘‘You want to wash or dry?’’ she asked Astrid.
‘‘Dry.’’ Astrid handed her father the big leather-bound volume that had come from Norway with Roald and Ingeborg. ‘‘I think we should get a Bible written in English.’’
‘‘Why? Reading in Norwegian helps you remember your mother language.’’ Ingeborg dunked a plate in the rinse water and handed it to Astrid to dry.
‘‘But since I was born in America, why is Norwegian my mother language?’’
‘‘Good question. I guess it isn’t. But I still think it is important that you can read and speak both languages. Just think, Thorliff can read Greek and Latin too.’’
‘‘Whatever good that will do him.’’
‘‘Hey, Andrew,’’ Trygve called from the door, ‘‘you want to play hide-and-go-seek?’’
‘‘Sure.’’ Andrew scooped all his shavings and dumped the bits of wood in a can in the woodbox kept there specifically for his shavings to use for tinder.
‘‘Hurry, Mor, I want to go play too.’’ Astrid quickly dried another plate and added it to the stack.
‘‘You go on ahead. We’re about done.’’ Ingeborg took the dish towel from her daughter. ‘‘It’s a perfect evening for hide-and-seek.’’
Astrid kissed her mother on the cheek. ‘‘You’re the best mother ever.’’
When Ingeborg finished the dishes, she dumped the wash water out the door on her rosebushes and hung the pan on the hook behind the stove.
‘‘More coffee?’’
Haakan shook his head. ‘‘But I’ll take a cookie if you have any.’’
‘‘Sure.’’ Ingeborg set a plate of cookies on the table and took out the canister of sugar.
‘‘What are you making?’’
‘‘Raspberry swizzle. You know they’ll be thirsty after running like they do.’’ She paused to listen to the laughing and shrieking. She could hear Sophie teasing Andrew and Sammy calling Astrid. The dog added to the din, his joyous barks giving away the hiding place of one child after another, bringing shrieks of ‘‘No fair’’ and ‘‘Go away, Barney.’’
Ingeborg stirred the sugar and ginger in warm water until it melted, then she added the vinegar and poured in the canned raspberry juice.
She poured the drink into glasses, set out more cookies, and went to the door to call the children in.
‘‘Thank you, Tante Ingeborg. How did you know we wanted something special to drink?’’ Sophie took another long sip, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘‘Ma is sewing us new dresses for school. Ours are too short.’’
‘‘I think you each grew half a foot this summer. What has your mother been feeding you?’’
Grace’s eyes lit up. ‘‘Fertilizer.’’ She spoke slowly but precisely and giggled behind her hand when she saw all of them laughing.
‘‘You made a joke, Grace. You made a joke.’’ Astrid grabbed her hands and danced her around in a circle.
‘‘How’s the arm, Trygve?’’ Ingeborg held out the plate of cookies.
‘‘Good. Never hurts anymore. But not as strong as the other.’’ He rubbed the weaker arm that had yet to become as tanned as the left.
With gentle fingers, Ingeborg probed the once broken arm. The bone felt straight and true. ‘‘God healed you well.’’
‘‘Mor said the same thing. Thanks for the dessert. We better get home.’’
The four ran out the door laughing with Astrid and Andrew waving good-bye.
‘‘That was fun, but next time Barney has to stay inside. He goes and finds everyone.’’ Astrid pouted at the pup, whose busy tail gave the floor a good dusting.
The next morning Ingeborg took her first cup of coffee outside and stood on the top step of the porch looking out across the wheat fields, no longer shimmering like waves in the morning breeze. Shocks stood in orderly rows awaiting the lifting pitchforks that would throw them onto the wagon and from there onto the conveyor belt. When they finished up with their own fields, the men would follow the tractor that would haul the steam engine and separator to the next farm and the next, heading westward as the wheat ripened. The changing of the unchanging seasons.
Lord, I really don’t want Haakan to go this year. I mean, I never do, but this year more so than ever. With all the work here . . . She shook her head. What could she say? Threshing brought in cash money, as the threshing crew received a percentage of each farmer’s harvest, paid at the granaries along the railroad tracks. She sucked in a breath of the cool morning air, already tasting the hint of fall. Turning, she reentered the house and started breakfast. Not long before she’d be cooking for the threshing crew. For the local farmers, the women took food to help out whoever had the crew there that day. Meals were almost a party, as everyone got together for a welcome visit.
Three days later harvest began in earnest with the firing up of the steam engine that ran the threshing machine.
Less than a week after that, Ingeborg kissed Haakan good-bye and headed for the cheese house. Another batch of curd was ready for pressing, and several wheels were ready for their wax coating, after which they could be put on the cooler shelves to age. A batch of soft cheese was ready for sale, so she would ship some to Grand Forks and take the rest to Penny to fill the orders she had waiting at the store.
‘‘I know, Lord, I should be grateful for the work that we have and the blessings you have given us through this farm. Your Word says to sing praises to your name, to give thanks in all things. I am doing that. I praise you. I give you thanks. I worship your holy name, but Lord, this is truly a sacrifice of praise because I don’t feel thankful or grateful at all right now.’’ She slammed the weights down on the glutinous mass that would eventually be a rich wheel of cheese. Whey poured from between the slats and into a trough that fed to a spigot. The cans that brought milk from other farms would go home full of whey for pigs and other livestock. Nothing was wasted.
‘‘I will sing praises. I praise thee, my God.’’ She gritted her teeth and kept on with the words. A bit of a tune tiptoed into the far reaches of her mind and lifted up a word or two, then three and four, and finally she sang to herself. I will praise thy name. I praise thee. I worship thee, Lord God, heavenly king. The song left her mind and forced itself out of her mouth until she was singing along with all her work.
‘‘That’s a pretty tune, Mor,’’ Astrid said when she came in the cheese house door.
‘‘Thank you. I guess I made it up.’’ Ingeborg sluiced a bucket of clean water over the cheese forms, then took a brush and scrubbed out the crevices, all the while humming her new song.
‘‘How come you are so happy?’’
‘‘I’m not happy. I’m—’’ Ingeborg stopped. After laughing at herself, she amended her words and thoughts. ‘‘I wasn’t happy; in fact I was downright mad because Haakan left.’’
‘‘But Pa always leaves for harvest.’’ Astrid turned off
the spigot to the cans, capped the full one, spun it out of the way, and placed an empty one in its place.
‘‘I know he does, but I don’t have to like it.’’
‘‘And so you were singing ’cause you were mad?’’ Astrid’s face told how clearly she didn’t understand her mother.
‘‘No, dear heart, I took God at His word. He says we are to praise Him in all things, so even though I didn’t want to, I did, and pretty soon my heart was happy again. And it started singing.’’
‘‘So . . .’’ Astrid shook her head. ‘‘Doesn’t make sense.’’
‘‘I know, but since when does God have to make sense? He says to do something, and when we do it, He can make good out of it.’’
‘‘If you say so.’’
‘‘I say so. Now that this is all cleaned up again, let’s go visit Bestemor and Tante Penny. You start school next week and we won’t have time for many more visits together.’’
The two linked arms and headed for the house.
‘‘Where’s Andrew?’’
‘‘Checking his snares to see if he has any rabbits for Metiz; then he said he and Trygve were going fishing.’’
‘‘Good. We’ll have either fried fish or fried rabbit for supper.’’
‘‘And if I know Bestemor, we’ll have dinner at the boardinghouse.’’
‘‘We’re not canning today?’’
‘‘No, today is our holiday. No men to cook for and the summer about gone.’’ And the dark of winter will come far too soon, and we better get out of here before I feel too guilty to leave. It’s not like there is nothing here for me to do. Lord, please take care of the men as they travel, and bring them home safely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Northfield, Minnesota
September
‘‘I am afraid of going back to Chicago.’’
There, she’d said it, even if only to her friend the mirror on the dresser in her bedroom. ‘‘And I don’t want to tell Mother because she is still nervous from that stupid abduction.’’ She ground her teeth for a moment. And it was worse now that she had finally remembered who that voice belonged to.
Not long after ‘‘that night,’’ as she referred to it, she started having nightmares, dreams so terrible she would wake up shaking with her hands clutched around her throat, trying to protect her vulnerable jugular from a slashing knife. The glittering knife was always poised just above her, held in the hands of a man with a stained and filthy gunnysack over his head.
But one night her dreams had reverted back to the hospital and to the day that Moira and her baby had died and her grief-stricken drunken husband had carried Patrick like a sack of potatoes under his arm and had thundered vengeance against Dr. Morganstein and her hospital for butchering his wife.
That was when she knew.
It was the same voice that threatened to slit her throat if she screamed. And she’d believed him.
But how did Ian Flannery get to Northfield? And why did he come after her instead of the doctor? Or was he planning on meting out his brand of justice to both of them? Should she call Dr. Morganstein?
Elizabeth recognized the purple shadows under her eyes, painted there by sleep just before he stole off instead of taking up residence for the night. And soon her mother would be asking what was wrong, and then she would have to lie and say that nothing was wrong. She rubbed her forehead where a headache had formed in the wee hours when she’d been turning and tossing and pounding her pillow into submission.
‘‘So you want to say what is bothering you?’’ Cook caught her before her mother did.
‘‘Just nightmares. I am having a hard time sleeping.’’ Elizabeth took the proferred cup of coffee, already laced with cream, the kind called café au lait in France, where she’d learned to like it. She and her mother had spent a month in France the summer before her senior year in high school, supposedly to improve her French and introduce her to real art and to the world beyond American borders. In actuality she had found a hospital to visit. Her mother had not been pleased. Today she really needed the dark brown, near to black sludge kind of coffee from the hospital. Something that would pop her eyes open and put apples on her pallid cheekbones.
‘‘Looks like more than nightmares to me. Although with what you went through, not having them would be more surprising.’’ Cook set a plate with warm buttered cinnamon bread down on the counter Elizabeth leaned against. ‘‘You’ve not been eating either.’’
‘‘I think my abdomen is still bruised from bouncing on that man’s shoulder.’’ Elizabeth rubbed her middle with the hand not holding the coffee cup, still inhaling the fragrance rather than drinking. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could see dark lines in front with faint light between the mesh. No matter that she’d taken baths and wore perfume to kill the stink, her nose refused to forget. Finally the coffee fragrance took over, and she sipped while reaching for the bread.
‘‘Made just this morning, right?’’ Sometimes she wondered if Cook ever slept.
‘‘Don’t get many chances to make your favorite things anymore, least not with you here to enjoy them.’’ She nodded toward the outside. ‘‘You go on out and lie back in that chair out there, and I’ll bring you scrambled eggs with bacon.’’ When Elizabeth started to protest, Cook pointed a long finger toward the door.
Feeling as though she were eight years old again, Elizabeth did what she was told. Inside, she chuckled at the sight. How good it felt to be where someone was trying to take care of her instead of . . . She blocked the rest of the thought and swung by the rosebush to sniff the perfume of the late bloom. Her mother’s roses didn’t look quite as well cared for as usual; in fact she picked off a yellowing leaf with black spots and stuck it in her pocket. Her mother was spending more time at the newspaper than in her yard. And Old Tom was not as careful as she.
After sitting on the chaise, Elizabeth held her coffee with both hands, sipping like a little girl at a tea party. But she’d never been one for tea parties. She enjoyed playing hospital far more. Her dolls had worn splints on their arms and bandages on their heads.
‘‘Here you go.’’ The plate held enough food to feed three people.
Elizabeth groaned.
But Cook just shook her head and refilled the coffee cup. ‘‘The cream is there in the pitcher.’’
‘‘The tray is lovely.’’ Elizabeth smiled up at her longtime friend. Yellow and rust-red nasturtiums, their round leaves still bright green, smiled out of a small cut-glass vase. A bit of parsley graced the eggs, and sliced peaches cozied in a shallow layer of cream, lightly sugared.
‘‘I will remember this.’’ She swallowed back the tears that hovered so near the surface.
‘‘We’re having peach pie for dinner.’’
Elizabeth nodded and laid her napkin in her lap. ‘‘Thank you.’’ And how am I supposed to eat dinner in two hours after all this?
As she ate, Elizabeth thought back to an earlier conversation with Thorliff when they’d been sitting out here under the oak tree.
‘‘What do you hear from your family?’’ she’d asked him.
‘‘Mor is busy with all the normal gardening and fieldwork, and she is making more cheese than ever.’’
‘‘All by herself?’’
‘‘No, she has several women working for her, but summer is her busiest time because the cows produce so much better when feeding on grass. I’m not surprised that she and Astrid can’t get away to visit me.’’
‘‘But you were hoping.’’
‘‘Yes, earlier in the summer it looked like they might squeeze in a trip. As Alexander Pope said, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast.’ But from the reports I’ve heard, North Dakota looks to be having a good harvest, barring grasshoppers or hail or too much rain or—’’
‘‘I guess living in town as I have, I never realized how precarious a farmer’s life is. It is easy to take flour and milk and such for granted.’’
‘‘Yes, bu
t if the prices go up because of crop failure, city people scream the loudest, accusing the farmers of selfishness and wanting too much money.’’ Thorliff shook his head. ‘‘They don’t realize how many hands make up the chain from the farm to the city table.’’
She took another bite of Cook’s incredibly light and fluffy biscuits. Perhaps the flour for the baking had come from the Bjorklund farms. And they often had Bjorklund cheese when they could get ahold of it. Thompson’s Grocers sometimes stocked several Bjorklund cheeses.
She looked over to the chair where he’d been sitting and felt warmth creeping up her neck. Often lately, thoughts of Thorliff made her feel slightly mushy inside. Until she reminded herself that mushy feelings for a man did not coincide with her life’s dream.
‘‘Do you have time to go for a walk?’’ Elizabeth asked Thorliff that evening. They’d just finished supper, and Phillip was heading back to the office.
‘‘Go ahead, Thorliff. I’ll keep an eye on the press.’’ The older man waved his hand.
‘‘You sure?’’
‘‘Now, how often do you get an invitation like that from such a lovely young woman?’’ Phillip shook his head, eyes twinkling. ‘‘Not often enough to turn it down. You two go on, and I’ll see you later at the office.’’
Thorliff and Elizabeth followed Phillip down the hall to retrieve Thorliff’s straw boater from the hat rack.
‘‘So where would you like to go?’’ He set his hat firmly on his head when they stepped out the front door.
‘‘You don’t have to do this, you know. It is not required of an employee to walk with his employer’s daughter.’’
Thorliff stopped on the step below and stared at her, eyes slightly slit. ‘‘I don’t walk with you for any other reason than you are my friend and I enjoy your company.’’ And miss you when you are gone, and wish for more walks and talks and family concerts and . . .
‘‘I’m sorry.’’ Elizabeth had the grace to look ashamed. ‘‘I was teasing you, but I can tell it wasn’t funny.’’ She touched his arm but snapped her hand back as if she had been burned.
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