The next disclosure, about the “bear facts,” lightened the mood. When Tony and Daniel were four and six years old, they divided up the bears: Yogi Bear and the Hamm’s beer bear. Daniel claimed Yogi Bear for himself. He liked the bear’s deep, silly voice. “Tony,” he’d say, trying to sound like Yogi, “I should have Yogi ’cause he’s ‘… smarter than the av-er-age bear!’ and I’m older and smarter than you. You can have the Hamm’s bear.”
“No. He falls down a lot. I don’t.” Tony punched Daniel in the arm but not hard. Daniel was bigger; there might be consequences.
“Tony, you like to fish. Hamm’s bear can fish all the time. He’s always by ‘sky-blue waters.’”
“Okay.” They went back to watching The Yogi Bear Show.
Watching and listening to their children, Britt and Andy couldn’t quit smiling. They were surrounded by their handful of children, and all were happy and doing well. Life was good.
It was getting late. Andy was tired. He’d worked harder and later than usual the week before Christmas, cutting hair and even shaving some men—people wanted to look their best for Christmas. Time to start for home. Britt offered to drive, an offer Andy was happy to accept. He shook Zack’s hand and suggested they go hunting together next fall. Everyone thanked Sara and Zack for the good time. Sara hugged her mother and whispered in her ear, “I think I’m pregnant,” before she hustled her out the door.
The cold, starless night and the deserted highway gave the effect of being just outside a lighted bubble, with the light from the headlights pulling the car toward home. Some snow had melted during the day, but now with night’s chill, patches of ice clung to the paved road. It was almost midnight, and all was quiet but for the radio playing soft music. Britt turned her head to the right to check on her husband. He’s sound asleep. Good! Now I can speed up a little and get home faster.
They were both tired. The shock of Britt’s father’s drowning and then the funeral, followed by Ingrid moving into town—it had been one thing after another: exhausting. I miss Dad so much. I really thought he’d live to be one hundred. Maybe tonight I can sleep the night through. Britt’s foot pressed down on the accelerator pedal, and the car shot forward.
“Britt Lucy Anderson, slow down!”
Startled, she jerked her head to the right. Andy still slept, mouth open. He didn’t say anything; besides, he would have just said “Britt.” That voice! It was my dad’s voice. When he really meant business, he always called me by my full name—but he’s dead! Britt’s stomach clenched, and her mind locked up, but her foot acted on its own and lifted off the accelerator—just in time. The front wheels hit an ice patch, and the car veered from one side of the road to the other, and then onto the road’s right shoulder. The tires gripped some dried roadside grass, the car straightened, and Britt got it back on the road. She drove the rest of the way according to existing conditions, which meant at least ten miles an hour under the speed limit.
Britt slowed down, but now her mind unlocked and went into high gear. My father is dead. He’s gone but where? His voice boomed right above me; how could he know about the ice? No stars in the sky, but eyes in the sky? Spooky. It’s as spooky as the letters written by my aunt Christina, a deaconess in the Lutheran church—a deaconess wouldn’t lie. She and Hannah wrote to each other for years. When Aunt Christina died of stomach cancer, Hannah sent the letters to me for safekeeping. Hannah’s job keeps her on the move, and she feared the letters might be lost. She said they were very detailed because Aunt Christina had planned to use them as the basis for a book about her father’s “contract” with God. I’d written the story off as a hallucination of a man sick with the flu, but could the story be true? I need to read those letters again.
The next day Britt sat down in the old rocking chair, her aunt Christina’s letters in her lap. She picked up the first one and began to read. It gave Britt some background on the grandfather she never knew. Christina wrote:
In 1882, my father, at the age of nine, left Hultsjõ, Sweden, with his family and sailed to America. His life here would be ruled by two grand passions: hunger for education and hunger for land.
Summers he would work on his father’s farm, but in the winter when farm work slacked off, he sought work close enough to a college so that he could attend night classes. He read voraciously. When he was twenty, he married my mother, Solvig, and together they had fifteen children—two dying shortly after their birth. He determined that his daughters, all seven, would not only finish high school but also go on and become either teachers or nurses. He wanted them to have a profession, to be self-sufficient.
Hunger for land, his other passion, meant he bought all he could lay his hands on, even if he really could not afford it. My mother objected, but he always managed to talk her into signing the papers. He was rich in land and rich in children. Father wanted the land for his sons; he dreamed of them farming close by some day—a cluster of Anderson farms. He was mortgaged to his eyeballs.
Disaster struck in 1919. Father became very ill, with what, I was never told, but I do know that the doctor came by horse and buggy out to the farm, which was fourteen miles from town.
As Britt read, she could picture Grandpa Ephraim, lying in the bed he shared with Grandma Solvig—the bed in which fifteen children were conceived and born. He looks unconscious. He has a farmer’s tan, yet his face looks pale and his body is so very still.
I can see Grandpa Ephraim turn his head, moaning at the pain this causes. His gaze falls on the dark, walnut-stained dresser on the south wall. Above the dresser hangs the oval mirror with its carved walnut frame. Grandma Solvig loved that mirror. Britt’s grandma was a handsome, strong woman. Ephraim had a tough time convincing her to marry him, but in the end, he’d beaten out the Frenchman, Durand, to win her as his bride.
Solvig hated cows. In fact, she never wanted to be a farm wife. Ephraim had tried his best to make her life less difficult by putting in the first indoor bathroom in the county. The toilet was gravity flushed and the tub gravity drained. So what if the tub needed hand filling? It was inside. He had also driven a team and wagon to the music store in Rillstead to buy a fine organ to grace their living room, finer even than the one in their rural church. It took him three days to complete the trip.
I can see Grandpa Ephraim close his burning eyes, only to open them again when he hears the bedroom door open. He watches as Dr. Guilfoyle and his nurse, Miss Imdahl, enter the room.
Grandpa sees Dr. Guilfoyle, a portly man with a warm personality, take off his hat and coat and put them on a chair. Miss Imdahl takes off her coat, but she leaves her starched, white nurse’s cap on. Grandpa would appreciate that—he likes those caps, so professional.
He hears the doctor giving orders to the nurse: “Here’s the thermometer. Put some alcohol on it and take his temperature.” Dr. Guilfoyle rummages in his black doctor’s bag and pulls out his stethoscope.
With the thermometer stuck in his mouth, Grandpa couldn’t very well say anything to them; besides, he doesn’t have the energy. But he keeps an eye on them and listens to what they say.
Thermometers needed to stay in the mouth for a full five minutes, so as the doctor and nurse wait for Ephraim’s temperature to register, they talk, not knowing that their patient is listening.
“Do you think it’s another case of Spanish flu, Doctor?”
“It looks like it, but I hope not. We’ve had nine cases of the flu in the past ten days, and eight have died. I do my best for them all, but there’s no cure, no medicine.” They look at each other, and their tired eyes reflect their mutual lack of hope.
Miss Imdahl takes the thermometer out of Grandpa’s mouth and reads it, not realizing that the doctor is not the only one to hear her say, “It’s 104.5—he’s burning up!”
“Take his pulse, Miss Imdahl, while I listen to his lungs.” Dr. Guilfoyle puts the stethoscope on Grandpa’s chest and listens to
his heart. “His lungs sound like crackling paper.” He then checks his throat and ears. “His throat is red and sore, but at least his ears are all right. Help me turn him over. I want to hear if his bronchial tubes sound clear.”
Grandpa groans when they turn him—every muscle in his body screams in pain. They turn him onto his back again, and again his muscles hurt when they touch him. He’s dizzy, but he lies motionless, exhausted, but not too tired to listen to their conversation.
“What was his pulse, Miss Imdahl?”
“Ninety-seven.”
“His symptoms are the same as the others.” Grandpa sees Dr. Guilfoyle’s shoulders slump in defeat and hears as he says, “There’s nothing we can do here. He’s dying. I need to talk with the family.” Dr. Guilfoyle puts his stethoscope into his black bag along with the thermometer and shuts it with a snap.
He watches as Dr. Guilfoyle and Miss Imdahl leave, neglecting to close the bedroom door. Grandpa hears the doctor tell his wife and children that he is dead, and he hears his children cry. He begins to pray with all his might.
He later told his daughter, Aunt Christina, what he’d said in his prayer and what God said to him. She wrote it down in detail:
In his prayer, he laid out the untenable situation like so: “I can’t die. My wife and children need me. I can’t leave them with the land mortgaged so much! I can’t die now.”
His mind was a maelstrom, and then from the center came the deep, commanding voice of God. He had listened; He knew this man. God spoke, and now Ephraim listened:
“Ephraim Emmanuel Anderson,
More time I giveth to thee.
Send thy daughters to school.
Pay all that thou owe; be debt-free.
Verily I say to thee,
Nine years l shall give to thee.
Work hard; use well thy time.
Take care of thy family.”
In time he regained his former strength, and when he did, he called his family into the living room so he could tell them of his contract with God.
(A solemn occasion calls for a solemn room, and this room was that. For years we’d celebrated Christmas in this room. It was perfect. With maroon draperies and Victorian style furniture, it was a rich but solemn room, a room that made all laughter guilty laughter.)
Aunt Christina describes Grandfather’s talk with his family:
When all had assembled, sitting on the sofa and straddling its arms, with Mother sitting in her armchair, and the leftovers decorating the floor, Father said, “I know you all remember when Dr. Guilfoyle and his nurse were here. Well, I heard the doctor tell the nurse I was dying.”
Not a sound was heard in that room until Father cleared his throat and went on. “I refused to accept that. My mind whirled, and I reached out to God and told him I couldn’t die, that I had too much to finish on earth.” He looked over at his wife. “Solvig, I just couldn’t leave you to make do with all these children.”
There was the sound of sniffling, of a nervous shifting of seating positions. Three-year-old Flossie, the youngest, started to cry.
“Now, Ephraim, you weren’t really dead; Dr. Guilfoyle just thought you’d die, but you didn’t. You are here, and we’ll all be fine.” Mother, ever clinging to the logical, could not believe a person standing in front of her could ever have been dead.
“Solvig, I’m not done.” Father cleared his throat again and went on. “God answered. He revealed that He would give me nine more years. In that time, I must pay off the mortgages and the bills we owe and put our daughters through school. Daughters need something to fall back on just in case. Solvig, I made a contract with God.”
(I, Christina, second oldest of the children, listened carefully. I was born a sickly child, covered with eczema. Father told me that I had trouble sleeping and cried a lot. Mother, as I was to learn when I was eight years old, had wished that I would die. Father was more compassionate—many nights he walked the floor with me. I had a special place in his heart, and I adored him. When I heard him say that God had given him only nine more years to live, I could hardly bear it.)
“That does it,” Father finished, “but it means that we all have a lot of work to do in nine years. Meeting adjourned.”
All trooped out of the living room and soon forgot the big meeting and Father’s revelation, all except me.
Christina watched her father as he worked. She saw that he had changed; no longer did he collect his wife and children to go and see the circus when it was in town, and no longer did they attend even a one-day Chautauqua. She kept close track of the years and dreaded the passage of each one. She writes in another letter:
It’s now 1928. Father has given Carl, his oldest son and my brother, land for a farm. The farmhouse was in a low spot and had to be moved to higher, healthier ground. My father and my brother readied the house for moving by putting screw jacks under each corner of the structure. The house would be raised slowly until a large flatbed trailer would fit under it. Using Father’s pulling tractor, the house was moved to the desired location. A concrete foundation awaited it. The house was lifted incrementally by way of the screw jacks, onto piles of wooden beams, called cribs, which were the height of the foundation. It started to rain. He hurried, and one of the jacks my father set slipped, crushing him from the chest down and causing severe internal injuries. My brother freed him and pulled him out.
Four days later, on November 28, l928, at the age of fifty-five, my father died. His nine years were up; the contract was fulfilled.
Britt lifted her head from her reading and learned back in the rocking chair until her head rested on the chair’s back and closed her eyes. What am I to make of all this? Grandpa and God entered into a contract, and the contract was fulfilled. Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy that actually killed him? I’ve heard that if you believe something hard enough, it will come true because you act and speak in ways to make it come true. That’s the way voodoo works, I’m told. Not only was his daughter Christina keeping track of the years going by, but so was he.
He was a man of rock-solid faith who knew his time was soon up. He probably was in a hurry to get his son, my future father, into a home set on a firm foundation before the nine years were up. From what I’d heard about him, I knew he’d be moving fast, and to make matters worse, it was raining. He set the jack, yes, but it was obviously not set solidly enough. It slipped. When it rains in Minnesota’s Red River Valley, the rich black earth becomes a sticky, slick “gumbo,” as they call it. A corner of the house fell on him, crushing the lower half of his body. His son, my father, got him out. Or was it simply that his time was up: contract fulfilled, so—poof?
What I do know as surely as I’m sitting here in this old rocker with my aunt’s letters in my lap is that my dead father’s commanding voice prevented a possibly serious accident on a starless night on a lonely, icy rural road. Perhaps there is more to the makeup of us humans than just a collection of cells with a limited life span, after which they are recycled into who knows what. A caring voice called out to me. I don’t understand how, but I accept its reality.
Britt couldn’t get the content of the letters out of her mind as she went about her day’s work. That night, while lying in bed, she tried to relax, to calm down, but sleep wouldn’t come. Had her father really spoken to her? Maybe she just imagined it, the way she imagined her grandpa Ephraim’s “death” bed. But the voice of her father, saying her name, including her middle name—it had to be him. But there would be no answer tonight—she might as well drop it.
Almost asleep, another thought struck her. Sara said that she thought she was pregnant! If true, I will become a grandmother—that sounded so old! I’m not ready to be a “granny.” I haven’t thought of Jesse in weeks; now I’d better wipe him from my mind forever. It would be unseemly for a grandmother to have such thoughts.
I’m going to have to learn how to kn
it!
CHAPTER
28
Britt was ashamed of herself. When she first thought of Sara having a baby, she thought of herself, that she would become a grandmother. How selfish. Sara would become a mother, and in so doing, creating and securing the future. Nothing is more important than the bringing forth of new life and then nurturing it. Britt and Andy were the old; now in with the new.
She decided that she’d crochet a baby blanket for the new life to come—but what color? No one knew if it would be a boy or a girl, so she scratched blue and pink off the list. Green and white then—green, the color of life, of growing things, and white for purity and innocence—the essence of a little baby.
Sara felt great during her pregnancy. No morning sickness, but she said at night she sometimes felt a little queasy, though not enough to throw up.
Britt was busy teaching and looking forward to being a grandmother, or so she told herself. One thing did bother her at night, and that was a recurring dream. The third time it happened in two months, she wrote it down:
It was a dark and stormy night—evidently dreams don’t mind using clichés. I was trying to climb down a steep, grassy hill, wearing a skirt and heels. Lightning and thunder only added to the difficulty of my descent. I turned and looked back up the hill. At its top I could just make out an iron fence, and then a flash of lightning revealed the dark figure of a man coming down the hill—was he after me? I tried to run. I stumbled, and the dark figure leaped on top of me. Screaming—pain rips through me as does the sound of thunder—a shot? The figure stops what he’s doing. Another figure, male, has pulled him off me. Lightning flashes, and I see my attacker lying spread eagled in the grass—dead. Another flash, and I notice he’s wearing a blue, bloodstained work shirt and denims—prison garb. I don’t need a flash of lightning to let me know that I’m now pregnant.
Breeding Like Rabbits Page 23