At any rate, we sat down to face facts—the fact that I was no longer needed or helpful to the Lappala household. Milma cried. I cried. The children cried. But I knew it was time for me to leave. Milma said, “My biggest regret it not forcing you to attend school with the children. You have such a good mind it’s been a shame not to use it. I noticed your working with Risto on his lessons, and I so regret not making sure you went to school with him.”
I’d told her about my aborted attempt to attend ninth grade in Alango. She had not forgotten. “Had you gone with Risto,” she bemoaned, “you would’ve been treated differently. He would have been there to protect you, and anyway, you would have been dressed just like everyone else.” For Milma had been born into a rather wealthy family, although one would never know it by the way she dressed or acted, and she was aware of the importance of being dressed correctly.
“Ah, well,” I said, honestly, “I wouldn’t have been comfortable at any rate. And I did learn so much from Risto. You’re a very good teacher,” I said, turning to him.
He blushed, perhaps aware for the first time I was a girl—older than he but still a girl—and one who had just paid him a compliment. He wasn’t quite sure how to accept it!
That gave me pause. I wasn’t sure either. I’d spent most of my adolescent years with the Lappalas, acting as an adult. I’d had neither time nor inclination to act my age—to attract boys, for example, or to interact with them outside of Confirmation class. The thought crossed my mind that I had a lot to learn.
“But we’ll miss you just terribly,” Milma said. “Not just because you have been such a wonderful help but because of the kind of person you are.”
That time it was my turn to blush. I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly, but I knew it had been a great compliment, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do so I just did what came naturally—I reached over and hugged her.
“As I shall miss you,” I said, consciously using correct grammar. I had learned so much while living there—about life… and death—about how and when to keep secrets—and why… about not only cooking and baking and cleaning but also helping the children to become better people, and I hope, learning the same lesson myself.
How could I ever begin to thank them all? There simply weren’t words.
Ever practical, Milma said, “You came to us fully outfitted. It seems as if we should send you home that same way.” And she brought me to Ketola’s dry goods store and bought me new outfits—one that was, according to the saleslady, who deferred to Milma with many a bow and a nod, the “height of fashion for the eighteen-year-olds this year.”
Milma also asked me if I wanted to have my hair bobbed. “Oh, yes,” I exclaimed. I had yearned to look like the girls in the pictures in the Sears & Roebuck catalog that spring. “I would love to have it done!”
So that, too, was arranged. I left feeling light-headed in a number of ways, not the least of which was my new hair-do. I hoped Mother would approve.
It suddenly occurred to me it was important to me that my real family approve of me just as the Lappalas had.
I held that thought as I got onto the train carrying a carpetbag filled with “memorabilia.” Milma had told me to feel free to take anything of Grandmother’s I wanted. I took the recipe book I had worked on so studiously and the notes I had taken about her life, not quite sure yet what I was going to do with them but wanting to keep them close anyway. Risto, Tellervo, and Daniel had gotten together to buy me a really good English dictionary and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a book to which I had gone so many times during our years of memorizing poetry and reciting it to everyone. From Milma came an envelope with a check inside. “It’s for everything that we didn’t get you. Please use it for something ‘frivolous’! You’ve been so serious it’s time for you to let go and fly!”
I sent kisses and waves as the train departed, leading to the stop in Angora where my real family would be waiting. I was sure Ronny would certainly drive Mother and Eino to get me since I had sent them a letter a couple of weeks ago giving them my arrival time.
Then I settled back in the cushioned seat in the train, trying hard not to cry, but with tears flowing anyway. One part of my life had ended. Another door was opening. What would it lead to? Where would I go? Whom would I meet along the way?
Those questions filled my mind as the train chug-chugged north out of Virginia through the farmland that led to the Angora station.
I had no idea what the answers would be, but suddenly I was anxious to find out!
15: Home
Oh, dear, I thought as I stepped down from the train. I had forgotten. I had forgotten so very much during my time with the Lappalas. I had forgotten that not everyone owned a car. I had forgotten how shabby my brother’s clothes were. I had forgotten the coarseness that accompanied him—his language, his mode of behavior, his very being.
I had not realized how very sheltered I had become and how very spoiled. But I was reminded quickly and thoroughly. Ronny’s speech was neither the “literate” Finnish nor the “cultured English” I had been used to hearing. He talked “farm language”—the language into which I had been born and into which I was returning. I felt almost as if I should hold my skirts away from him as I climbed onto the seat of the wagon he had brought to haul me home—much as he had hauled potatoes yesterday—or hay. “Well, Miss Priss,” were his first words to me. “Welcome back to the real world.”
The real world indeed. It was obvious as we took the winding, tree-lined Highway 22 to Highway 25, where—at the Alango School site—we turned left. “No school?” I asked.
“It burned down.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, “when?”
“A couple of years ago. Now everyone goes to school at the Pihjala house on the other side of the road.”
I spent a few minutes coming to terms with that. Obviously there would have been no sophomore year for me even if I had stuck out freshman year.
“How is everyone?” I asked politely.
“Just fine. Better now that you’re here. Ma needs the help.”
“Well, I’ll certainly give it.” I could be as short as he.
“You’ll have to. Aini has her hands full now with her baby just born.”
“I hadn’t heard.”
“It just happened a couple of days ago. Eino and I have been ‘batching’ it while Ma helps Aini out.”
What “batching it” meant did not take on a full meaning until I opened the front door, leading to the front porch of the house—an unwashed separator, unwashed dishes and pots and pans, filthy floors that smelled of barn and manure, and a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of the bedroom, which I entered with trepidation.
At some point during my other life, a second story had been added to the house so the bedrooms were on the second floor with the back room turned into a “living room.” But the boys had been living in it too easily since Ma had been gone. They had taken to sleeping down there on the floor instead of climbing upstairs.
I went up to check on the addition. The stairs led up from the kitchen, turned sharply halfway up, and led to the first bedroom, through which I walked to the second.
The upstairs, however, was a real disappointment. There had been no inside finishing to the outside boards, so the winter wind could whistle through the cracks. The joists, too, were open. In a way that was good, because it gave us a higher ceiling. But in a way that was bad, too, because although the roof had been covered with a rolled roughing material, I was quite sure that when it rained or snowed hard, some of that might well fall down onto whoever was sleeping.
I wondered which room would be mine. Mother’s things hung in the corner in a curtained-off area, and her comb and brush and hair-holder (the small celluloid container into which she put the hair that she pulled off of her brush. It formed a �
�rat” that she could put under the front of her hair to give the illusion of a pompadour), along with another small round container which, when I opened it, held the cameo I had sent her for Christmas the year before and the small watch with its ribbon “pin” that I had sent the year before. Other than those gifts, the container was empty.
“Oh, dear,” I thought, remembering that I had forgotten to send her a special gift in addition to the small amount of money that Lappalas paid me and that I had resolutely sent home. I had forgotten because there has been so much to do with Grandmother that previous winter. “Mother, I owe you one,” I had promised her—in absentia.
“I’ll stay up here and unpack,” I called down to Ronny, who had sat down at the kitchen table, waiting, I was sure, for me to start supper. “Would you start the sauna?”
“Why? It’s not Wednesday or Saturday night.”
“Because you smell, and the house smells… dirty.”
“Not high-fallutin’ enough for Her Ladyship?”
“Not clean enough for me or for Mother once she gets back.”
Once I got upstairs, Eino had come rushing in, calling, “Maria, come down! I’ve missed you something fierce, and I’m so glad you’re home!”
“At least one person is,” I said, meeting him at the foot of the stairs to give him a hug.
“Oh, don’t bother with him. He’s just mad because Inez Mustala went out with one of the Rahikainen boys last Saturday. He’ll get over it.”
I shrugged, completely out of my comfort zone. Where should I start?
Another change had been the addition of a pump in the kitchen. Thank goodness, I thought, heading back upstairs to change into the house dress Milma had purchased for me just days ago. If she had any idea… and I set the thought aside. I needed to face what was, not what I had expected or hoped for.
“I’ll start making supper as soon as I get a fire going in the stove. Why did you let it go out?” I looked straight at Ronny.
“Eino was supposed to keep it going, but he went outside and forgot.”
“Well, I think it’s time both of you began to remember how Mother likes this house to be kept.” My tone of voice was adamant.
“As soon as we have hot water, I’m going to make some fresh coffee. Is there any bread?” Usually Mother kept a fresh loaf or two somewhere—perhaps in the small pantry underneath the stairs where it seemed to be cool.
“She did, but we ate it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to wait until I have time to make another batch, and I won’t do that until this kitchen is spotless.” I had added one of Mother’s aprons to my housedress and set to work. “You both had better get busy. But first of all, get out of those barn clothes. Start the sauna and put a washtub filled with water on top of the kiuas to heat. Throw your barn clothes in there, and after you both take a good hot sauna, change into clean clothes.”
“We don’t have any.”
“I don’t believe that,” I insisted. How long had Mother been gone anyway? They couldn’t possibly have dirtied all of their clothes in just a couple of days.
“I guess maybe we have some upstairs,” Eino said, his voice unhappy at my severity.
“Good,” I said, giving him another hug. “Now you two need to get cleaned up first and then to start helping me get this house clean. Ronny, you fill the water tub—the one that’s on the side of the stove. Eino, you grind some fresh coffee beans. We’re going to get this place in shape before Mother sees the mess you’ve made.”
Among the three of us—with Ronny helping reluctantly and Eino willingly—it really didn’t take us too long to clean the kitchen. As soon as they came in from the sauna—clean—I set Eino to work on the separator (I still hated that job!), Ronny to restocking the woodbox and to cleaning the entry, which smelled strongly of barn. That was where they were supposed to take off their barn clothes and leave them before they entered the house, but before they came in there, they were supposed to clean their boots, take them off, and leave them outside. It was obvious to me they hadn’t been doing that. I had Ronny scrub the entry from the middle of the ceiling, down the walls, and across the floor, which didn’t even take him very long since he had grown so tall and strong.
Before we knew it, Eino had made a great deal of headway on the dishes, the oven was hot enough for me to bake a bread dough, which I had set to rising as soon as we had finished our coffee. After that, it was just a matter of scrubbing down the tables and the long, narrow, tin basin sitting on a stool that caught the extra water from the pump, washing the windows and the walls, and scrubbing the floor (I changed water at least three times). By the time we went to bed that night, the kitchen at least was back in order, the barn smell having been replaced by the scent of Mother’s lye soap, and we had had a meal of fresh bread with the partridge Ronny had shot on his way to pick me up that morning.
When I had told him I had no idea how to clean it, he growled but took care of that job, and I fixed it as Mother always did—with onions in the cavity and a dried apple, browned on the top of the stove after being dredged with flour, and set to bake in the oven. I had found the potato sack and put some baked potatoes in with it, so we had a feast.
The furniture in the living room had seemingly been made by hand—Ronny’s hand, I suspected, and I was able to compliment him on his work. He had shaped the legs of the small tables to the right and left of the sofa as best he could to mimic the legs on the “secretary—china cabinet” Mother had bought—with her milk money, I supposed. It was beautiful—made of oak—with an oval mirror atop a pull-down desk. Inside on the right were cubbyholes for keeping paper, and below were three drawers. On the left, four shelves lay behind curved glass. It was such a beautiful piece of furniture that it made the whole room shine in its glory. I sat amazed that Mother had somehow saved enough money to buy it. I had seen similar ones in the Sears & Roebuck catalog for $25.00 or more.
Instead of purchasing the usual horsehair couch, Mother had created a kind of “settle,” a seat for which she had made cushions and a wooden back also with a cushion. So it functioned like a couch although it had been made entirely by hand. Ronny had also fashioned matching “chairs”—square seats with legs and backs, for which Mother had sewed matching cushions. They were remarkably comfortable, and the material she had used had not been from flour sacks. Instead she must have ordered a whole bolt of cloth from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and used it to make the cushions and curtains, which she had hung ingeniously from a long rod Father had used when tanning hides. She had made a “pocket” at the top of each curtain and slid each one onto the rod, which was held up by nails Ronny had pounded into the wall. They weren’t lace curtains, but they looked very nice, and the whole room looked rather like a picture with the colorful flowered material in shades of blue, red, green, and yellow. On the floor lay rag rugs she had made on her rug loom, which I didn’t see in the corner. That must have been moved into the tanning shed, which Ronny told me he and she had converted into a summer kitchen.
All in all, I wholeheartedly approved of the changes and improvements they had made in both the house and the tanning shed, which now held wash tubs on a stand and a wood stove, which she could heat in the summer (or in the winter), to hold the tub into which she put the white clothes. She still had to wring things out by hand, but as far as I could tell, she and Ronny had made the job as easy as it could possibly be, given the lack of a wringer, which I refrained from even mentioning to her. It had been such a novelty and performed such a wonderful service for me at the Lappalas! I was back to the scrub board and brush, but between them, she and Ronny had made the act of washing clothes as simple as possible. Ronny had even shoveled a hole deep enough in the ground to hold the white-pine logs to which he attached cross-pieces on the top with boards. They had managed to rig up a method of stringing clotheslines from the board on one side to the other, whic
h I thought was very clever. And the whole business had been set almost right outside of the new summer kitchen so it got the benefit of a lot of sun and wind. “Wow!” I exclaimed when I saw it. I gave Mother and Ronny both big hugs. They had been busy while I was gone, Ronny trying to make life easier for Mother. Unlike me, who had simply enjoyed the “easy life” with the Lappalas.
I felt ashamed. None of this had happened while I was there to help. The miniscule amount of money I had sent home had surely been put to use somewhere, but the bulk of the changes and improvements had all been Ronny’s and Mother’s work, and they had done so very well! Sure enough, in the new summer kitchen I found Mother’s rug loom, all set up and ready for her to continue weaving. The basket of rags she had torn and cut into lines of fabric sat next to the seat, ready for her to use.
“Wow” again!
A big rainstorm attended Mother’s return home. She had sent word with the milkman that she would ride home with him the next day, and so we were waiting for her, the sauna hot, fresh pulla made, flowers from the roadside picked and put into a quart canning jar in the middle of the kitchen table. Not a whiff of barn smell had entered the house since the boys had begun to use the entry as they were supposed to, the milking had been done, I had kept up with the making of butter, using the churn as I had learned to do years and years before, and had managed to fill the shelves around the opening to the well with cream, milk, and butter, ready to give to the milkman when he dropped Mother off.
He had stayed for a cup of coffee and a piece of pulla, which, he asserted, was “just as good as your mother’s!” before loading the milk into one of the big cans he carried in the wagon, the cream into smaller cans, and the butter carefully wrapped on the side.
Gifts of the Spirit Page 18