“Sometimes.”
“How much?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Come on... how much?”
“Oh, all right. A lot.”
“When?”
“What do you mean, when?”
“I mean, how long before we were married?”
“Mmm... at least four years.”
“Four — aw, you didn’t even know me then.”
“Yes I did. But your name at that time was Lawrence.”
“Lawrence!”
“Oh, lay back down and don’t get all huffed up. I had to name you something, since I didn’t know who you were yet.”
A powerful arm looped her neck in a lazy headlock. “Girl, you’re a little bit crazy, you know that?”
“I know.”
He chuckled again. “So tell me what you used to imagine.”
“Oh... at first I used to imagine how it was to kiss a boy — I mean a man. I’ve kissed an awful lot of strange things in my day. Tables, icy windows, pillows — pillows work really well, actually, if you haven’t got the real thing. Then there are blackboards, the back of your own hand, plates, doors—”
“Plates?”
“Well, sometimes when I’d be doing the dishes I’d imagine I’d just finished having supper with a man and he was helping me do the cleanup afterward. I mean, you look in this nice clean plate and there’s this person looking back at you, and you close your eyes and pretend and... well, you’ve got to use your imagination, Theodore.”
“Not anymore, I don’t,” he countered, and rolled her onto his belly to end the night as they ended each.
She was more than he’d ever hoped for. She was bright, happy, spontaneous. She made each day a joyous sharing, a cause for celebration, a span of hours so piercingly rich and full he wondered how he’d ever survived those solitary years without her. He took her to school each morning, and from the moment he kissed her good-bye beside the warming stove, he counted the hours till he could go back and collect her. He never knew what she’d come up with next. She saw things from a refreshingly youthful perspective that often made him laugh, and always made him happy she was as young as she was.
One particularly frigid morning as they stood beside the stove waiting for the building to warm up, the school mouse slipped out of hiding and cowered by the mop board.
“Didn’t you ever catch that pest?”
“I never tried. I didn’t have the heart to kill the poor little thing, so I’ve been feeding him cheese instead. He’s my friend.”
“Feeding him! Linnea, mice are—”
“Shh! He’s cold... see? Be very still and watch.”
They stood silently, unmoving, until the mouse timidly scuttled closer, drawn by the heat, and stood on the opposite side of the stove on his hind legs, warming his front feet as if they were human hands.
Theodore had never seen anything like it in his life.
“Do you two do this often?” Theodore asked, and at the sound of his voice the creature retreated, stopped, and turned a bright-pink eye on them.
“There’s enough death — don’t you think — that we don’t have to cause any more.”
He wondered if it were possible to love any stronger than he did at that moment. Life had never been more perfect.
But one day in late March Kristian shattered that perfection.
He’d been down along the creek bottom with Ray, hauling in their traps for the season, and at supper that night, Theodore could tell there was something on the boy’s mind.
“Something bothering you, Kristian?” he asked.
Kristian looked up and shrugged.
“What is it?”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“There’s lots of things I don’t like. That don’t change ‘em.”
“I’ve been talking with Ray about it for a long time, and I’m not sure if he’s decided yet, but I have.”
“Decided what?”
Kristian set his fork down. “I wanna enlist in the army.”
Eyelids could have been heard blinking in the room. All eating stopped.
“You want to what?” Theodore repeated menacingly.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I want to do my part in the war, too.”
“Are you crazy? You’re only seventeen years old!”
“I’m old enough to shoot a gun. That’s all that counts.”
“You’re a wheat farmer. The draft board ain’t gonna get you. You’re exempt from the draft — have you forgotten that?”
“Pa, you aren’t listening.”
Theodore jumped to his feet. “Oh, I’m listening, all right, but what I’m hearing don’t make a lick of sense.” Linnea had never seen Teddy so angry. He pointed a finger at Kristian’s nose and shouted, “You think all that’s going on over there is them doughboys still pointing brooms at each other, well you’re wrong, sonny! They’re getting shot and killed!”
“I want to drive airplanes. I want to see ‘em!”
“Airplanes!” Theodore drove his hands into his hair, twisted away in exasperation, then rounded on Kristian again. “What you’ll drive is a pair of horses and a plow, because I won’t let you go.”
“Maybe I want to do more with my life than drive horses and a plow. Maybe I want to see more than horses’ rumps and smell more than horse droppings. If I enlist, I can do that.”
“What you’ll see over there is the inside of a trench, and what you’ll smell is mustard gas. Is that what you want, boy?”
Linnea touched Theodore’s arm. “Teddy—”
He shrugged it off violently. “Keep out of this! This is between me and my boy! I said, is that what you want?”
“You can’t stop me, Pa. All I have to do is wait till school’s done and walk down that road, and you won’t know where to find me. All I have to do is tell ‘em I’m eighteen and they’ll take me.”
“Now I raised a liar, too, as well as a fool.”
“I wouldn’t have to be one if you’d give your okay.”
“Never! Not so long as I draw breath.”
Kristian showed profound control as he said quietly, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Pa, but I’m going just the same.”
From that day forward the tension in the house was palpable. It extended into Theodore and Linnea’s bedroom, too, for that night was the first since they’d been married that they didn’t make love. When she touched his shoulder, he said gruffly, “Let me be. I’m not in the mood tonight.”
Abashed that he’d turn away her offer of comfort when he most needed it, she rolled to her side of the bed and swallowed the tears thickening her throat.
At school, too, Linnea’s placid days seemed to be over. As if the sap were rising in him as well as in every cottonwood on the prairie, Allen Severt started acting up again. He put pollywogs in the water crock, a piece of raw meat behind the books in the bookshelf, and syrup on Frances’s desk seat. There were times when Linnea wanted to bash his head against the wall. Then one day he went too far and she did.
He was walking past her at the four-o’clock bell when he nonchalantly plucked her watch out and let it retract with a snap against her breast. Before her shock had fully registered, she grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and cracked his skull against the cloakroom wall.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” she hissed, an inch from his nose, pulling his hair so hard it lifted the corners of his eyes. “Is that understood, Mister Severt?”
Allen was so stunned he didn’t move a muscle.
The young children looked on saucer-eyed, and Frances Westgaard snickered softly.
“You’re hurtin’ me,” Allen ground out through clenched teeth.
“I’ll do worse than that if you continue with this sort of behavior. I’ll have you expelled from school.”
With his eyes slanted back, Allen looked more malevolent than ever. She could sense the vindictiveness in those cold, pale eyes, something worse than heartlessness
. It was a cruelty with which she simply did not know how to deal. And now she had embarrassed him in front of the other children for the second time. She could sense his vengefulness growing, and her hands shook as she released his head.
“Children, you are excused,” she said to the others, her voice far from calm. Allen shrugged away from the wall and shouldered her roughly aside on his way to the door. “Not you, Allen. I want to talk to you... Allen, come back here!”
But he swung around at the bottom of the steps and pierced her with a venomous glare. “I’m gonna make you sorry, teacher,” he vowed, low enough that only she could hear, then turned and marched away without a backward look.
She stared after him, realizing only after it was over how weak-kneed she was. She sank onto a cloakroom bench, hugging her shaky stomach. Well, he’s backed you into a corner again, so what are you going to do, sit here quaking like a pup with the palsy or march down to his house and tell them what a devil they have on their hands?
She marched down to his house to tell them what a devil they had on their hands. Unfortunately, Martin wasn’t home at the time, and his wife’s response was “I’ll speak to Allen about it.” It was said dryly, condescendingly, with one eyebrow raised. Her lips were compressed into a superior moue as she held the door open for Linnea’s exit.
I’m sure you’ll speak to Allen, thought Linnea, while her own hope of having Allen dressed down on the spot went unsatisfied.
She walked home feeling more frustrated than ever and utterly ineffectual.
Two days later she found her mouse dead in a baited trap.
She told Theodore about it and he wanted to march right down to Severt’s house himself and put a couple more dents in the kid’s skull, but she said she could handle it, and he said are you sure, and she said yes, and something good came of it anyway, because they made love again as they used to, and afterward she begged him to talk to Kristian about going to war, only this time without anger. And he agreed to try.
But the attempt failed. The two of them talked down in the barn the next day, but Theodore’s fear for his son’s life manifested itself in anger once again, and the session ended with the two of them shouting and Kristian marching out and heading down the road without telling anybody where he was going.
He went to Patricia’s house because lately it felt better to be with her than with anybody else he knew.
“Hi,” he said when she answered the door.
“Oh... hi!” Her eyes brightened and a flush beautified her face.
“You busy?”
“No, just knitting. Come in!”
“I was wondering if you could come out instead. I mean, well... I’d like to talk to you. Alone someplace.”
“Sure. Just let me get my coat. Ma?” she yelled, “I’m going for a walk with Kristian!” A moment later she appeared in a brown wool coat with a tan scarf looped over her head, its tails hanging over her shoulders. They both stuffed their hands into their pockets as they headed down the prairie road. Beside it the snow was already pithy and showed deep ruts. The north-westerlies had a milder breath — soon the snowdrops would blossom in the ditches. The days were growing longer and the late afternoon sun was warm on their faces.
He needed to talk, but not now. What he needed now was to simply walk along beside Patricia with their elbows softly bumping. She took her hand out of her near coat pocket and he followed suit. Their knuckles brushed... once... and again... and he took her hand. She squeezed his tightly and looked up at him with something more than a smile: a look of growing awareness and trust. She tipped her head against his shoulder for two steps, then they walked again without saying a word.
Not until they’d turned and were heading back did he speak.
“You ever get sick of looking at the same old road, the same old fields?”
“Sometimes.”
“You ever wonder what it’s like beyond Dickinson?”
“I’ve been beyond Dickinson. It looks just like it does around here.”
“No, I mean way beyond Dickinson. Where there’s mountains. And the ocean. Don’t you wonder what they look like?”
“Sometimes. But even if I saw them, I’m sure I’d come back here.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you’re here,” she answered guilelessly, looking up at him.
He stopped. Her blue eyes were clear and certain, her mouth somber. The tan scarf had fallen back and the March wind ruffled her hair. In his broad hand, hers felt fragile. He suffered a moment of doubt about the wisdom of going to war.
“Patricia, I... ” He swallowed and wasn’t certain how to put his feelings into words.
“I know,” she replied to the unspoken. “I feel the same way.”
He leaned down and kissed her. She went up on tiptoe and lifted her mouth, resting her hands against his chest. It was a chaste kiss, as kisses went, but it filled their hearts with the essence of first love, while all around them the land readied for spring, for that season of bursting renewal.
In time they moved on, back through her yard, but loath to part yet.
“Want to go in the corn crib?” she asked. “We could shell some corn for the chickens.”
He smiled and she led the way to the far side of the farmyard, pulled a corncob from the hasp on a rough wooden door, and he followed her into semi-privacy. Inside the sun angled through the slatted walls against the steep hill of hard yellow ears. At the base of the corn sat a crude wooden box with a hand shelter attached, and beside it a seat made of nothing more than an old chopping block. Kristian sat down and fed an ear into the hopper and began turning the hand crank. Patricia leveled off the corn and sat down cross-legged on the lumpy ears, watching. It was warm in the corn crib, protected from the wind as it was, with the sun radiating off the wall of gold behind them. She flung off her scarf and unbuttoned her coat. He finished the first ear and she handed him another as the naked cob fell free. He watched the ear rotating as the teeth of the grind wheel gripped it; she watched his shoulders flexing as he cranked the wide flywheel. When the ear was only half clean, he dropped the handle and swung to face her. They hadn’t come to the corn crib to shell corn, and they both knew it.
“What would your ma say if she knew we were out here?”
“She probably does. We walked right past the house.”
“Oh.” He wished she were closer, but felt uneasy about moving over beside her when they sat in a building where anybody could see right through the walls.
Their mutual hesitation hung heavy between them for a moment, then she laughed and plucked up a piece of dry, brown cornsilk. “Let’s see what you’d look like in a moustache.” The corncobs rolled as she moved to kneel before him and fit the tuft of cornsilk beneath his nose and lips.
It tickled and he jerked back, rubbing a finger across his nostrils.
She laughed and pulled him forward by the front panel of his jacket. “Here, don’t be so twitchy. I want to see.”
He submitted, letting her hold the cornsilk in place again and study him assiduously.
“Well, how do I look?”
“Gorgeous.”
The sun threw bars of light and shadow across her face as she knelt between his knees, and the wind whistled softly through the slatted walls.
“So what do you think, should I grow one?” He hardly realized what he was saying; his thoughts were on her and how pretty she looked with her lips the color of sunset and her long-lashed eyes intent upon him.
“I don’t know. I think I should kiss you first and then decide.”
“So kiss me.”
She did, with her finger and the cornsilk in the way, both of them giggling and the fine brown strands tickling terribly. Until she came up against his open legs and they pulled back, staring into each other’s eyes.
“Oh, Kristian... ” she murmured just as he, too, murmured her name. Then no excuse was needed. The cornsilk fell to his jacket collar as she flung her arms around him and they k
issed fully, pressed as close as gravity would allow, with her stomach cradled by his warmest parts and their arms clinging tenaciously. He tightened his thighs against her hips and callowly explored her lips with his tongue. It took some coaxing before she realized what was expected of her and allowed her lips to slacken, and his tongue to probe inside.
The warm, sleek contact rocked them both, and when the kiss ended, they backed off to stare at each other, still somewhat overcome by discovery.
“I think of you all the time,” she whispered.
He straightened a strand of her auburn hair that had caught on her forehead. “I think of you, too. But I need to talk to you about something, and when we start kissing I forget all about talking.”
“Talk about what?”
“Me and my pa had a dilly of a fight — two of ‘em, actually.”
“About what?”
He swiveled around and started shelling corn again. Above the loud metallic grinding and the sound of the kernels falling she thought she heard him say “I want to enlist.” But that was silly. Who’d want to go to war?
“What?”
This time he turned so she saw his lips move. “I want to enlist,” he said louder, still cranking.
She put her hand on his and forced him to stop. “Enlist? You mean go fight?”
He nodded. “As soon as I graduate in the spring.”
“But Kristian—”
“I suppose you’re going to argue with me just like my pa did.”
Crestfallen, she gulped and stared at him, then sat back and folded her hands between her thighs. “Why?”
“I want to fly airplanes and... and I want to see more of this world than Alamo, North Dakota! Oh, damn, I don’t know.” When he would have leaped to his feet she grasped his knees and made him stay.
“Couldn’t you do that without becoming a soldier?”
“I don’t know. My pa says I’m a wheat farmer and I guess I’m afraid that if I don’t go now I probably will end up being a wheat farmer all of my life, and maybe I could be something more. But when I try to reason with my pa about it, he just gets mad and shouts.”
“Because he’s scared, Kristian, don’t you see?”
“I know he is — so am I. But does he have to shout at me? Couldn’t we just talk about it?”
Years Page 42