An Untamed Land (42 page)

“Anything I can do to keep my mind off it helps. My mor used to say that pacing helped. ‘Keep moving,’ she would say. So when I am done here, I will go out and hang up the diapers. I am glad we were able to get the spring cleaning done before this.” Ingeborg felt as though she was rambling but didn’t try to stop.

By late afternoon, walking had become difficult.

“What can I do?” Roald asked for the third time, the vein pulsing in his neck.
So brave my Inge, but so big. Surely this babe will be hard to bring forth.
He pushed back the fear that gnawed like a rat at his heart. Those years ago, another woman—his Anna—was in travail like this. And then their life together was over.

“Take Thorliff and Gunny over to Agnes or at least keep them out in the barn. I don’t want them to see me like this.” She panted around the force ripping her apart.

“We will go do chores and make beds in the hay.” Roald gathered up the sniffling Gunny and fled from the house as if wolves were snapping at his heels. Boss looked at him as if he were mad. The
sun hadn’t even set, and here they were in the barn already.

Carl and Thorliff came in from the field.

A sound like a cutoff moan came from the house.

“Her time?” Carl asked.

Roald nodded.

“Ahhh. Hey, Thorliff, I need you to help me here.”

The boy stopped halfway across the yard. “But something is wrong, and I . . .”

“Nothing is wrong. Come here.”

Thorliff looked at his uncle with distrust written all over his sweat-streaked face.

In the house, Kaaren laid out clean sheets, put water on the stove, and had baby things ready on the trunk. “Keep walking,” she commanded.

Ingeborg grunted. Her jaw ached from biting back the groans. But after her water broke, the baby took the birthing into a race for daylight.

Carl Andrew came into the world yelling of his arrival and causing his mother no further difficulties.

Sometime later, all cleaned up and propped up against the goose-down pillows in bed, Ingeborg held him in her arms. She traced the curve of his cheek and put her finger in the palm of his hand so he could grasp her finger. She looked up to see a real smile on Roald’s face. One that not only tugged at the sides of his mouth but went clear to his eyes.

Her own eyes brimmed with tears of joy. Roald was smiling! She handed him the snugly wrapped bundle. “Here, Far, meet your new son.”

Father and baby studied each other as if memorizing faces. Roald jiggled the baby gently and sat down on the edge of the bed. “He is a true Bjorklund.”

“Really? How can you tell?” Ingeborg shifted on the mattress. Sitting up was not very comfortable yet.

“The eyes. Already they are blue, but soon they will look like mine.” He gazed at his wife. “Thank you for a strong and beautiful son.” Just then, Andrew, as they had decided to call him, whimpered, squirmed, and then squalled. “Listen to those lungs. He will have no trouble being heard. Maybe he should become a preacher—or a politician.”

“Or a farmer like his father.”

Thorliff sat on the edge of the bed. “You good now, Mor?” At
Ingeborg’s nod, he snuggled against her side. “Baby Andrew sure cries a lot. Do all babies cry like that? Did I cry, Far?”

Ingeborg and Roald exchanged the smiles of proud parents everywhere. Thorliff was back to normal with his questions, questions, questions. Carl Andrew was making his needs clearly known, and Gunny slept in her mother’s arms in the rocking chair.

Ingeborg could no longer keep her eyes open. She accepted her son back to nurse and fell asleep while he did. Her last thought brought a curve to her own lips. Roald had smiled.

“Mor, come see,” Thorliff called a couple of days later. Ingeborg dried her hands on a corner of her apron and stepped outside the door. The sun so bright after the dim soddy made her blink.

“What is it?” After a glance at Roald’s face, she followed Thorliff’s pointing finger. Right by the door a rosebush now thrust three canes up against the soddy wall. One bud glowed pink against the dark earth.

Ingeborg clasped her hands under her chin, then swiped away a trickling tear with one finger. “Mange takk,” she breathed, staring deep into her husband’s soul.

His blue eyes glistened like the high mountain lakes of home. “Velbekommen.”

“Mor, don’t you like it?” Thorliff gave her a puzzled look.

“Ja. Very much!”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Women do that,” Roald answered, clamping a hand on Thorliff’s shoulder. “It means they are happy.”

Ingeborg nodded. It certainly did.

Ingeborg regained her strength quickly and soon had the baby in a shawl tied to her bosom so she could hoe the garden. She even took the baby fishing when Thorliff pleaded for a chance to try out his worm collection. As long as Andrew was full and dry, he was a happy, mostly sleeping baby, growing as fast as the lambs gamboling after Thorliff on their forays for pasture.

That summer, with pasture in abundance and plenty of land yet to hay, Roald bought more livestock: two cows, ten ewes, a sow that had ten piglets a month later, a team of mules, and a bull.

Joseph Baard bought a boar with his sow with the agreement they would trade off breeding services. During haying they exchanged
labor, and when it was time to cut and bundle the grain, they did the same.

“That’s just what neighbors and good friends do for each other,” Agnes Baard was heard to say more than once. She, too, was in the family way again. Her little girl had been born in the last blizzard of the winter.

One day Thorliff came crying into the house. “Mor, the hawk took the chicks. I chased him off, but the mother hen is hurt too.” He held a limp little body in his hand. “Why, Mor?” Tears brimmed over again and ran down his cheeks.

“Far told you not to let them out of the chicken house, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“That is why. The hawk needs to eat, too, and now we won’t have so many chickens to butcher or young hens to lay eggs.”

“I’m sorry. But I was cleaning the chicken house like Far said, and the chickens were in the way. I didn’t want them to get trampled on.”

“I know.” Ingeborg smoothed a finger down the new feathers of the three-week-old chick. “You can go bury it in the garden. How badly is the mother hurt?”

“She won’t let me see. She just pecks at me and keeps her wings over the last two chicks. I let her in the barn.”

“We will put her back in the chicken house after dark. You’d better check on your sheep, or a coyote might get them.”

“In the corral?” He left to check on his charges.

The Baards and the Bjorklunds worked together cutting and binding the wheat and oats in preparation for the threshers to come. Since this year they had sufficient acres planted, and Roald had seen the metal monster called a threshing machine on his trip to Grand Forks, he had contracted with the owner to stop by the Bjorklunds to help with their harvest.

Kaaren, Ingeborg, and Agnes had been cooking for the last two days.

Thorliff danced and shrieked in delight when the huge rig, pulled by twelve mules, clanked its way to a halt south of their sod barn. As soon as the men had eaten breakfast, they lit the firebox and soon steam puffed from the stack. When the long belts began
to turn, the men forked the grain bundles into the clattering mouth where chain belts pulled the bundles inside. Straw blew onto a growing stack on the south side, and golden grain poured into the gunny sacks at the other end.

Roald had a hard time keeping his stern demeanor. Inside he felt like dancing in delight like his son.

“Far, come see.” Thorliff’s shout could be heard above the clamor of the machine.

Roald came and watched the man sew the full grain sack closed after hooking another on the metal frame that held the sack open. He helped oil the monster and tossed more wood into the firebox. All the while, he dreamed of owning one. Surely the two families could buy one together.

At dinnertime, the three women set venison stew, fried chicken, new potatoes, bread, cheese, pies, and gallons of coffee on boards covering sawhorses for tables.

“Your two wives sure know how to fill a man’s stomach,” Lars Knutson, the owner of the machine, said to Roald as they sat together on one of the long benches. “You’ll have no trouble getting machine help with a table set like this.”

“Mange takk. We are indeed blessed here with good crops and our growing families.”

“Ja, coming to America was a good thing,” Carl, on the other side of the man, added. “I have never seen such a thing.” He nodded toward the machine.

“You ought to go watch or work harvest on a bonanza farm. Lasts for days.” Lars held his cup up for a refill as Ingeborg made her way around the table. “Mange takk for maten, Mrs. Bjorklund. That was right tasty.”

The next day they repeated the process at the Baards’.

Thorliff and the two Baard boys ran after the thresher for a time as it left and then came panting home. “Someday, I want a machine like that,” Swen, the older of the Baard boys, said. “I want to travel all over the country and bring home bundles of money.”

The adults looked at one another and shook their heads. Ja, their children understood the American way already.

With the threshing done, Roald and Carl sat at the table the following morning for a second cup of coffee. “We’d better get started on that soddy of yours pretty soon,” Roald said, rubbing the side of his nose with his finger. “If’n we want it all finished before it gets too cold.”

“Thanks be to God!” Kaaren clasped her hands to her breast. To have the new soddy built and ready in time for the baby—such a blessing.

Ingeborg insisted that Kaaren rest more frequently now that her time was nearing. The heat of summer had not yet let up, adding to her discomfort. One afternoon as she leaned back in the rocker and put her feet up on the stool, she said to Inbeborg, “I think you were the wiser.” She wiped the sweat from her brow with the edge of her apron.

Ingeborg looked up from carding the wool they had sheared from their own sheep. “Why is that?”

“You gave birth to Andrew before the heat and the flies came.”

“Ja, but the screen door has made a big difference. At least we can leave the door open now.” She heard Andrew fussing and immediately her milk let down. She put the carding paddles down on top of the fleece and went to pick up the baby. “You surely do have your mother trained well, my son.” She unbuttoned her dress front and settled him against her breast.

“You want this chair?”

“No, you need it more than I.” The gurgling and suckling of the nursing babe sounded peaceful in the quiet room. Gunny slept in her trundle bed, the men were in the field, and Thorliff was out herding the sheep.

While Ingeborg sometimes wished she could be out in the woods or the garden, right now she was where she most wanted to be—nursing her son.

On Saturday the Baards came, and together they set the other soddy. Carl had marked out the house and barn about two hundred yards away, just on the other side of the property line. Now they would be completely up to the letter of the homesteading law. A dwelling met the requirements. The sod barn was extra.