A Land to Call Home (34 page)

“Sometimes even with little ones at my feet, I fear the wind.” Agnes shivered. “Joseph says it will be different when we have a house with more windows, but I don’t know. The wind will still shriek about the eaves and plead to be let in.”

“I know. For me it is the long dark days. Think I’ll move out to the barn this winter.”

“Well, Haakan wanted to build you a house, but you insisted on the barn, remember?”

“I know, and I was right. The cows have to come first.” She clucked the horses into a faster trot. “This way, when the house comes, I will appreciate it all the more.”

Agnes made a rude noise.

As soon as they arrived, Mr. Booth unhitched the team and led the horses off to the barn. Several parked sleighs showed that others had arrived before them. The women greeted one another, settled the children to playing, and found places for themselves. Sitting in a chair by the stove, Auduna Booth just nodded when they greeted her. When Ingeborg brought her some pieces to stitch together, they eventually fell from her lap. Even sewing costumes for the Christmas pageant failed to bring any kind of response. She accepted a cup of coffee when Brynja Magron handed it to her but never answered when Hildegunn asked where she kept the sugar. Andrew brought her the plate Ingeborg fixed for her at dinner, but even his cheery smile brought no acknowledgment.

“Lady sick,” he informed his mother in a whisper heard clear to St. Andrew.

Hildegunn nodded. “Out of the mouths of babes.” Mrs. Odell and Mrs. Magron, who always took the chairs on either side of her, nodded in unison like puppets on a string.

The women exchanged looks of concern and confusion, and soon after dinner everyone gathered up their things.

The women left early.

“Mr. Booth, Hagen, why don’t you let me take Auduna home
with me for a couple of days? Maybe a change of scenery would help her?” Ingeborg asked as she loaded their things back in the sleigh.

He shook his head. “Mange takk for the offer, but I don’t think so. She hates to go anywhere, even out to our barn. She will be better when we get closer to spring again. The winters are always the hardest on her.”

“But isn’t she much worse this year?”

He shrugged. “Only God knows that. We will see you in church on Sunday.”

Obviously dismissed, Ingeborg started to say something else, then thought the better of it. Surely this man knew his own wife better than she did.

But when she told Agnes what had happened, Agnes shook her head too. “Men can be so stubborn, as if asking for help was a mortal sin or something.”

“I just wish there were something we could do.” Ingeborg clucked the horses into a trot, and the jingle of harness bells rang across the prairie. “Maybe even a ride like this would help her.” She turned to Agnes. “Should we go back and just throw her into the sleigh?”

“I don’t think Hagen would like that, nor would Auduna. I heard of a person who did something like this. Heard it called ‘prairie madness.’ It’s not uncommon, you know, and it ain’t just women who catch it. Sometimes men do too.” She shook her head and huddled farther into the furs. “Ain’t no cure far as I’ve heard, except maybe to leave and go back somewhere else.”

When she got home, Haakan had returned, jubilant with the news that he found a sawmill for sale. He and Olaf would take two sledges with teams of four, and since the river was frozen over, they could head due east to pick up their new piece of equipment.

“Should only take two or three days each way. If the weather holds, we’ll leave on Monday next.” Haakan rubbed his hands over the heat of the stove. “We have to go to Grafton to pick up the steam engine tomorrow. If we leave well before dawn, we should make it back in one day, but that will be heavy pulling, even on the snow.”

Ingeborg smiled at the look on his face. She’d seen one similar when Thorliff pressed his nose against a counter window at the Mercantile trying to decide which candy he wanted. She stopped behind her husband and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“You are like a child with a new toy.”

He turned and enclosed her in the circle of his arms. “You don’t mind the extra borrowing?”

“Ja, I mind. But I know you are doing the right thing.” She leaned her head against his chest, his heart thumping in her ear. “Just please be watchful of the weather. I don’t want you caught in a blizzard again.”

“Not to worry. I learned my lesson.” He tightened his arms. “You know, you are becoming more of an armful.”

“Ja, babies do that to their mothers.” She looked up into his eyes and read there the deep love she knew lived in his heart. The lips she raised to meet his said it all.

Kaaren threw every bit of energy and talent she possessed into helping the children with their presents and preparing for the Christmas pageant. At the same time, she developed a routine so that all their subjects were covered and the children were learning not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but geography, history, and English as well. Some were memorizing poems for the pageant, others were learning songs. Each child would have his moment of glory, or agony, depending upon whom you asked. The bigger kids helped the middle-sized, and the middlers helped the little ones. Since Solveig could now move around without her crutch, she helped, too, whenever the twins were sleeping.

Kaaren invited Joseph with his fiddle and Olaf on the harmonica to come and practice two songs the children would all sing together. The harmony of “Jeg er så Glad Hver Jule Kveld” soared along with the fiddle until Kaaren had tears in her eyes at the end.

“That was wonderful. You sound just like an angel chorus must. If you sing like that the night of the program, you’ll have some mighty pleased parents.” She blew her nose and led them into the second number, a Norwegian folk song, “Ingrid Sletten,” about a little girl with a colored cap of wool. Then drawing the benches around the stove, they practiced all the carols.

“Oh, my,” Solveig said on the way home. “I never thought those children could sing like that. You’d think you were a concertmaster and been working together for years. And the looks on their faces.” She drew a square of cotton from her pocket and blew her nose. “This cold weather surely does make my nose run.”

Trying to find time to make presents for her own family seemed
impossible. She knew Lars was making something out in the barn, and Ingeborg had whisked something out of sight one afternoon when she stopped there. Even Thorliff and Baptiste snickered once in a while, their eyes on her. She wanted to give each of her pupils some bit of a gift too. As the days grew shorter and the cold deepened, she was tempted a few times to remain at home. But she knew the children would show up, and she needed to have the schoolhouse warm for them.

One morning Lars rode the horse over to the school to start the stove so she could rest a bit longer. “You’re looking peaked,” he said to her. “Maybe this teaching while nursing the twins is too much. We don’t need no one sick here before Christmas, or after, either, for that matter.”

She could tell he was worried about her and trying to hide it behind a gruff voice.

“If the weather does what it normally does, we probably won’t have school in January anyway, possibly February too. I will get some rest then.”

“Ja, and the Norwegians worship the Pope.”

“Lars!” His grin returned at her shocked look. She shook her head. “The things you say sometimes.”

With the upright steam engine standing beside the barn, the men looked forward even more to the trip for the sawmill.

“We need to build a machine shed,” Olaf said, looking at the engine still set on skids so they could move it to the river when they were ready. “Mighty expensive things to have out in the weather.”

“Ja, so much we need to build. Will be easier and cheaper when we have our own lumber.” Haakan watched carefully as Lars tinkered with the engine. “You sure you know how to get that thing running?”

Lars laughed. “I’m about as good with this machine as you are with an ax, if that answers your question.”

“Ja, well, my ax is a lot cheaper to replace, you know.”

“You just go get me a couple buckets of water and we’ll have this thing chugging in a few minutes.” Lars started the fire in the firebox, and with the water in the holding tank, soon the dials began to flutter and move steadily upward. “See, I told you.” When the dial hit the correct pressure, Lars pushed the lever for the flywheel and it
began to spin. Lars stood back with a grin that overrode his sigh of relief.

“That’s all there is to it. Simple.”

“Ja, when you know what to do.” Haakan slapped Lars on the shoulder. “Now we got another mouth to fill with wood. Come on, let’s get some more trees cut today. Then when we get back with the saw, we can go right to work.”

The moon still hung like a silver sliver in the western sky when they drove out of the yard before dawn. With four up the long sledges pulled easily over the iced snow, and by sunrise they were already miles away heading east.

They spent the first night with a couple who owned twenty cows and supplied milk to a nearby town and arrived at the mill by the following evening. Loading the next morning took several hours, using a crane with four horses to lift the saw pieces high enough for the sledges to back under the load.

Olaf and Haakan admired the large new rig the man had bought to take farther north where the timber was more plentiful. After the man’s wife packed them a box of food and filled a jar with coffee, they struck out for home, the horses leaning into their collars with the extra weight.

Haakan hunkered down into the elk robe he tucked around his shoulders. The wind blew up bits of snow and tried to tug the robe away. He looked up at the sky where mare’s tail clouds dimmed the sun. He hated to admit it, but there could be snow in the offing.

Small flakes started to fall about dusk. The horses dripped with sweat from pulling the heavy load, their breath steaming in clouds.

“I think I remember a farm not far from here,” Haakan shouted to Olaf. “We’ll see if we can stay overnight there.”

After about another mile, they saw a lamplit window off to the north and heard a dog barking. They spent the night at the home of two Norwegian brothers, who had more questions about homesteading than Haakan had answers.

“Why do you ask?” he finally said.

“Our brother wants to come from Norway, and one of us will go help him out in the beginning.”

“Is there nothing left in Minnesota?” Olaf asked.

“Only far to the north where it is too marshy for good farming.”

“Near as I can tell, the Red River Valley is all taken, but western Dakota has room. Just that the land isn’t as good as what we got.”

“Still better’n Norway, I bet.” The brother with the full beard nodded.

“Ja, but with rocks and hills, and there are a couple of Indian reservations out there too.” Haakan leaned forward in his chair. “You be sure to stop by our place on your way west. You going by train or wagon?”

“Wagon, so we got something to start with. We’ll take some livestock too.”

The brother who hadn’t said much asked softly, “There any women of marrying age in your neck of the woods? They be scarcer than hen’s teeth around here.”

Haakan and Olaf exchanged glances of amusement. “I think maybe I should go back to Nordland and bring over a boatload of women. If they were saleable, we’d make more money than out west digging gold.”

“Don’t let Kaaren and Ingeborg hear you say something like that. You won’t eat for a month of Sundays.”

Laughter rang out from both the brothers Robinson.

“We will see you sometime this spring, then,” the bearded one said early the next morning. Four inches of new snow lay on the ground, but the stars above again glistened in their assigned places. “Go with God.”

The trip took two and a half more days. At one point they stopped and cut four small pine trees and tied them to the tops of the loads.

“One for each of our houses, one for the Baards, and the biggest for the schoolhouse.” Haakan brushed his gloves off before picking up the reins. He reached back and dabbed a glob of pitch off the trunk of the nearest tree and stuck it in his mouth.
Better’n chawing tobacco any day
, he thought, enjoying the bite of the sticky stuff.