Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  By the time he was a year old, he was walking, sometimes holding onto a chair or the edge of a table, but taking big strides toward going all by himself. This really tickled Arvo, who loved to have me hold Nonny by his hands over his head with him standing a couple of steps away, beckoning. Sure enough, soon Nonny was taking those steps by himself, and from there on there was no stopping him. He insisted upon going outside at every opportunity, trying to follow his dad or Ronny or Eino, and he sneaked out every chance he got. I had to keep my eyes peeled. Both Mother and I kept a sharp lookout to make sure he didn’t get into trouble, but he seemed to understand the word, “No,” almost from the beginning. I think he just naturally wanted to please us, and so if we said, “No,” sharply or wagged a finger at him, he would put his hands over his eyes as if he were hiding from us, and repeat the no. It only took one warning usually to persuade him not to do what was dangerous for him—like touching the big black wood stove.

  He loved to be brought into bed with us in the morning when he often woke up dry. Arvo or I would set him onto his potty chair, where he would do his “tinkle” and then pull up his diaper (and before we knew it, his pants) and cuddle him between us. That was the very best time of the day. He giggled and laughed as we tickled him, and soon he was tickling us back! He also picked up languages just naturally. When Mother spoke to him in Finnish, he answered in a baby version of Finnish, and when Arvo, Ronny, Eino, or I spoke to him in English, he answered in a baby version of English. We were very proud of that and “showed him off” to company with Mother speaking to him first and then us doing the same thing. He never failed to answer in the appropriate language.

  “My goodness,” I said to Arvo in bed one night, “he’s going to grow up bi-lingual!”

  “What does that mean?” he asked, his mind on other things.

  “It means he’ll be able to speak two languages when he grows up. That’s wonderful!” I crowed. I was very proud of his ability.

  The “other things” Arvo had on his mind had continued with barely a breather after Nonny was born. And sure enough, after a couple of months, I found myself without a period.

  “I’m pregnant again,” I wailed.

  “Good.” Arvo had never made any bones about his desire to have more than one child. Nor had I for that matter. I just hadn’t quite expected it to happen so soon. But then, we had continued to love each other at every possible opportunity, so I shouldn’t really have been surprised.

  That pregnancy proceeded with almost no hitches at all—no morning nausea, no swollen ankles, no fatigue. I actually felt better than I had before I became pregnant, believe it or not!

  Irma and Mother teased me about my glowing happiness. I was a very happy young woman, doing what I thought God had intended me to do—to love and be loved. I thanked God every night, counting my blessings, and praying that our good fortune would continue.

  It did—for us. But fate has a strange way of taking charge of other people’s lives in ways that they don’t expect.

  Ronny had been “courting” Inez Mustala for so long I couldn’t remember when they had first begun to be a couple. We had waited impatiently for the first few years for him to ask her to marry him, but when he didn’t, we just thought it was good they waited until they were older… and wiser.

  Older they became, but wiser… not so much.

  Ronny, we found out after the fact, had been involved for some time with one of the “loose women” who lived in Angora.

  Her name was Astrid, and she and her sister Ingemar were famous for being “available” to any man who had enough money to pay them for their “favors.” Word about them had spread from Angora to Alango to Sturgeon and eventually even to Korvan Kylla, but we had ignored the whole business, thanking our lucky stars we had the lives we had and feeling bad for both women—that they had been forced to make their living in such a… revolting, disgusting… way.

  All of us, to tell you the truth, considered ourselves “better” than they. I know it wasn’t a kind or a loving way to feel or to act, but that was the way it was.

  What we didn’t find out until later, what, in all our hustle and bustle, we had completely forgotten about Ronny’s and Inez’s on-again/off-again relation­ship, was what was really happening in Ronny’s life.

  Ronny had made a habit of driving into Cook on Saturday afternoon before the Saturday night dance—ostensibly to have his hair cut and maybe to purchase some “moon,” he later admitted.

  He always went alone. Neither Arvo nor Eino ever went with him. He didn’t ask them, and they didn’t offer, being busy with whatever project they were currently working on to improve the farm.

  But one Saturday afternoon, Inez Mustala had gone to Cook, too, and had seen our wagon and horse parked outside of the hotel. She went in—all unawares—and asked if Ronny Jackson were there. The young man at the desk said, “Yes. He’s in Room 12.”

  But when Inez began to walk down the hall, he ran after her, saying, “I don’t think you should…”

  “. . .go in there,” he ended after she had opened the door.

  Inside were Ronny and Astrid—in bed—obviously undressed and in the process of what Ronny later called “making love” although we looked askance at that description.

  Inez had taken one look at the two of them, turned around, shut the door, and at that moment cut Ronny out of her life completely.

  Nothing he said or did after that made one whit’s worth of difference. According to her, he had sullied himself—and her—by circumstance. She would never forgive him for that.

  And she didn’t.

  Ronny came home, crying, appalled by what had happened, and as contrite as only a guilty man can be. But he had made his bed, and he would have to lie on it—alone.

  We felt sorry for him… at least Mother did. I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of him and of his… “proclivities,” as I called them. Even Arvo shook his head, as if in disbelief of the sheer stupidity of Ronny’s thoughtless action.

  “But it was only that one time,” he told us over and over again.

  “Once was enough,” Mother said, as disapproving as I had ever seen her.

  Ronny stuck around for a while after that, but later he wound up “catching a train”—getting into a boxcar—heading for North Dakota to help farmers there with their picking and threshing.

  He never was quite the same again. I felt awful for him, but I had to admit he had brought it on himself.

  24: Susie

  A daughter was born to us on November 21, after about a day’s worth of labor. She came easily into the world but proved to be the exact opposite of her brother. We named her “Susan Maria” but Mother insisted from the beginning on calling her “Susie,” and that was the name she came to be known all of her life.

  Nonny was remarkably good with her—holding her gently, talking softly to her, bringing her his softer toys. Mother was, too, but for some reason Susie and I never bonded the way I had with Nonny. For one thing, she nursed sporadically, as if unwillingly. She would find a breast, nurse for a couple of minutes, then spit it out and start to cry as if she were hungry but couldn’t be fed.

  After a call to Dr. Raihala, we tried pablum—a mixture of my milk with cooked rice, made so smooth that it went through a baby bottle. That seemed to satisfy her, and so I missed the joy I had found with Nonny. Moreover, she seemed very picky about whom she liked and whom she didn’t. For a while she would have absolutely nothing to do with Arvo, crying and turning away at the very sight of him. Then she began to turn to him and away from me so that Arvo wound up giving her the bottle of milk I had prepared.

  To see her with little Nonny, however, was to experience sheer joy, because she never turned away from him but responded to his voice and his touch as she did to no one else. When she screamed, as she often did for no reason bec
ause she had just been fed, burped, and changed, he was able to calm her. As she grew, always pushing the limits of my patience—and Mother’s—and even Arvo’s, he was able to get her to listen to him when she absolutely refused to listen to any of us.

  It was as if we had given birth to a tiger cub, so irritable was she, so… well… unpleasant, to tell you the truth, always so angry that we actually arranged a meeting with Dr. Raihala to discuss her temperament. He reassured us some children were just like that. We had been blessed with Nonny, he said. Now we were going to have to deal with a “normal” child, he told us, who usually fights his or her parents’ wishes and desires. “It’s not uncommon for children to be… well… nasty… and have temper tantrums even up to the time they start school. Then, for some reason, they often become model students, interested in everything and responsive to the teacher as they hadn’t been to their own parents. It happens,” he said.

  So we were to have five more years of her continual misbehavior until she was old enough to go to school! That was not a happy thought, we told each other as we left the doctor’s office.

  It was a strange situation because sometimes—especially with Nonny—she became tractable, welcoming, easy to handle, and persuadable. But at other times, usually when one of us said, “No,” very firmly, she threw herself on the floor, beating her head, her legs, her arms, her whole body against whatever she found beneath her—whether it was the linoleum in the kitchen, the wooden floor in the living room, or the floor of the neighborhood store.

  Once, when we visited Irma, she caught sight of one of the white cat’s kittens. She wanted one right now. Foolishly, we tried to reason with her, telling her the baby kitten was too young to leave its mother and we didn’t have any way to feed it. She would have none of it. Down on the floor she landed, screaming bloody murder, until we worried the other neighbors would think we were beating her.

  But before long everyone else experienced—at least peripherally—what we did, and they forebore from comment and/or advice, thank God.

  The monthly meeting of the Women’s Club drew out the absolute worst in her. When we were the ones to host the gathering, she made sure to get into everything so we had difficulty preparing the treats, and her tantrums were on display off and on all day—whether the guests were there or not. She wanted a piece of cake. She wanted a cup of punch. She wanted to handle the pieces of handwork the women were working on. She wanted to grab my knitting needles, even though they had sharp points, which she had found out long before. She pulled on the tablecloth, causing the dishes to spill over and almost break. She refused to go down for a nap either in the morning or the afternoon although by the time the women arrived in the late afternoon, she was exhausted. That just made a difficult situation even worse.

  One afternoon, when even Nonny couldn’t get her to settle down, I was tempted to tie her to her crib! Mother and I were at our wit’s end.

  Finally, Arvo offered to take her for a ride on the horse we were still using for transportation, a car still far beyond our means. He held her hard against himself so that no amount of kicking or screaming or squirming allowed her any leeway and rode away across the fields, heading for the woods and a quiet meadow we had found and enjoyed about a half mile from the end of the tilled part of the acreage.

  Arvo and I had often stolen there in the middle of the night after a particularly difficult day, seeking the peace it offered.

  I’m not sure how long they were gone. By the time he returned, little Susie asleep in his arms, the ladies had gone and so had the sun. It was early evening, that drowsy time of the day when it seems as if everything stops, awaiting the sun’s falling asleep and the moon’s rising in its place.

  Handling her down to me, he said, “Well, I think we finally found ourselves a solution. I’ll explain later,” he added, quietly, so as not to wake her up.

  She had loved the meadow, where he had allowed her to toddle free, to pick the wildflowers that grew there in abundance, to drop them into his lap and to gather more. He had showed her how to twine them together to make a circle, and she had donned that circle of flowers as if it were a crown. The meadow was cool with huge white pines shading it, filling the edges with needles that she had also gathered. She had found rocks that she had tried to pile them atop each other and laughed when they fell instead of screaming.

  “I think our little girl simply needs some space,” he told me after I had put her to bed. He had undressed her as she fell asleep on his lap, and I had just tucked her under her covers, dropped a kiss on her forehead, and tip-toed out of the room and down the stairs.

  Nonny, of course, had long been asleep, always adhering to whatever we set as his bedtime. During the winter when the sun was down for a longer time, we put him to bed earlier. Now that spring had come, his bedtime had lightened with the sun.

  But that night, exhausted from the strain of the day, we had put him down early, and good boy that he always was, he had played with his toys for a while quietly before falling asleep.

  “Do you think that’s the answer—that she just needs some space?” I asked, in wonder.

  “I kind of think that might be a part of it,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee and cutting himself a piece of cake, which he said would be an adequate supper, as he studied the leftovers. We also had some gelatin salad, some green-bean-salad, and some pieces of venison one woman had sliced very thin and set atop a half a slice of bread with cream cheese and half a pimento olive on top. He filled a plate and sat down, indicating that we join him. Each of us filled our own plates, poured ourselves a cup of coffee, and sat down.

  We looked at him, waiting for further explanation.

  “I think…” he paused, still pondering, “Nonny set her an impossible task. He’s always been such a good boy I can’t help but wonder if she feels she has to get her own share of the attention we always give him… but in her own way. This afternoon,” he continued, nodding his head in appreciation at the taste of the cake, “it was just the two of us. She wasn’t held to any comparison…”

  I began to interrupt.

  “No,” he went on, “I know you really try to equalize the amount of attention you give each of the children, but Nonny’s time is always positive. You spend it reading to him or playing with him quietly and in his own way neatly. I think she might feel as if the only way she can get your attention is by being the very opposite.”

  “Oh, my,” I exclaimed. “I had never thought of that!”

  “This afternoon when she had no one to outdo, no one to better, no competition, so to speak, she was free of all of that. Suddenly and inexplicably, she was free, and she reveled in it!”

  “So we need to bring her to the meadow whenever she’s naughty?” I asked.

  “No. But I think that each of us might try to find some time during the day when Nonny’s otherwise occupied, to spend just with her. Mother, you could ask her to help you make cookies, for example. I know… I know…” he grinned, “that she’ll make a big mess, but isn’t that kind of a mess preferable to the kind she’s been making?”

  “And both of us,” he indicated himself and me, “can take turns, for example, taking her outside to play in the sandbox I’m going to be making for the kids,”

  “A sandbox?” I questioned.

  “It’s an idea I got from the teacher down at the Prairie Star School,” he explained. “She has a sandbox in the room where the children can play. They really enjoy it—making roads for their pretend cars, and houses for their pretend people. I’m going to make one for our kids only theirs will be on the ground.”

  “Won’t the chickens get into it?” I asked.

  “Nope. I’ll put a fence around their ‘play area’ just like we do for the cattle. Then sometimes we can let them outside to play without having to watch them every minute.”

  “You do come up with t
he most brilliant ideas!” I exclaimed, grinning at him over my cup of coffee.

  “I know,” he said, returning my grin. “I’m just one smart guy.”

  And he was. He wasn’t “school-smart,” but he had a way of figuring things out that really helped with the farm-work and the trapping, which he had also taken up and begun to tan the hides just as Father had done.

  He had kept up a trap-line all that winter, and it had proved to be unexpect­edly fruitful—and lucrative. He’d caught six mink, seven beavers from the dam they had built over the creek that ran between our house and the neighbors, four otters, and three muskrats, not to mention even a couple of fox and wolves.

  Each one’s meat Mother had cooked and we had tasted, just to see how they would taste.

  Arvo skinned each one carefully and tanned them using Father’s equipment that Mother had saved. He got a few dollars for each pelt, and the money all went into a “savings fund” so we could at some future date purchase a car.

  A third pregnancy was unexpected since we had really tried to use the methods Irma had suggested—putting a piece of cloth dipped in vinegar into my body before we made love, and Arvo made a serious try at pulling out before he spilled his seed. And we were becoming really confined in that little four-room house. Nonny had moved in with Eino as soon as he was out of his crib, but we would be needing another bed for Susie soon. She was growing out of her crib, and we would be using the cradle again, which also took up space.

  Our first big purchase was a gas stove for the kitchen, and we considered long and hard about also ordering an oil furnace for the living room, but the seventy dollars-plus made us decide to wait maybe another year. The big black kitchen stove was relegated to the summer kitchen, where it replaced the old one Mother had struggled with for years. The gas stove made a big dent in our savings, but it was worth it because it made life easier for all of us.