A Dream to Follow (30 page)

“There are blankets and a quilt in the trunk, pots and pans, flour, beans, and other basic supplies. I fixed you a medicine kit. Everyone donated what they could.”

Metiz stood on the other side of Baptiste. “Furs and skins too. I put in a knife for each of you.”

“There’s a cutting from that rosebush by the porch. It should root easily.” Ingeborg gave Manda another quick hug. “We weren’t sure if you were going to have your own house or live with Zeb, but either way, I’m sure you’ll have use for all these things.”

“We can never say enough thanks.” Baptiste turned to Thorliff. “You knew?”

“Ja. Spent half the night helping Hjelmer set the hoops. That canvas has been patched some, but it should keep things dry for you.”

“I’m so sorry we didn’t have time to make a wedding ring quilt for you like we have the others.” Ingeborg shook her head. “But you can pick it up when you bring the horses back next summer.”

“Sure.”
How do I thank you for all of this?

“We thought you and Baptiste might like to start out in the wagon this afternoon. Zeb will catch up with you tomorrow.”

“That would be good.” Baptiste let out a breath and nodded.

“All your things are packed.” Mary Martha came to give Manda another hug and to peel Deborah away from her sister’s side.

As Baptiste helped Manda up over the wagon wheel, ignoring her snort, he whispered something in her ear.

She nearly choked, sat herself on the seat, and turned to wave at those surrounding them. “Thank you all for . . . for everything.” She smoothed the skirt of the dress she still wore. Anji had said it was hers, another present. And if the look Baptiste gave her as they pulled out had anything to do with anything, perhaps she’d wear it again sometime.

“Where’s my hat?” She shaded her eyes against the westering sun.

Baptiste reached behind the seat and pulled up a sunbonnet, also yellow and trimmed with daisies. “This one?”

“No. My . . . perhaps so.” The wide brim did indeed shade her eyes. Who knew how life was going to change if her wearing a sunbonnet was any indication?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Dawn had yet to ribbon the horizon.

Thorliff slung his bag into the chest at the rear of the cook shack and slammed the lid. While he wouldn’t be along with the threshing crew for the entire harvest, he’d help out with a good part of it. That was his and Mor’s plan. Haakan still insisted that Thorliff didn’t need more schooling. Not that so many hands were needed, since the drought made the harvest both early and slim. They’d finished their own acres and those right around Blessing in little better than a week.

Mrs. Sam turned from storing flour and beans, her dark face nearly disappearing into the shadows. “You gonna drive de team, or me?”

“I will.” He leaped to the ground, ignoring the step that folded up when they traveled.

“Breakfast is ready,” Ingeborg called from the kitchen door.

“Tell her we already et.” Mrs. Sam leaned her head out the door, referring to herself and her daughter, Lily Mae. Between the two of them they would cook for the traveling crew. Haakan and Lars had built the compact house on wagon wheels several years earlier so that they could have good food all the time. Some of the places they’d set up the threshing machine as they traveled from farm to farm had fed them so poorly, their stomachs rebelled.

Haakan finished the blessing as Thorliff slid into his place. He’d hardly slept between spending a late evening walking along the river with Anji, then going to bed and dreaming of never finding home again. He filled his plate with sliced ham, fried eggs, and biscuits dripping with butter and strawberry jam. He licked the jam from his fingers and caught his mother’s gaze.

“Sure is good.” He took another bite. “No one makes biscuits good as you.”

“Astrid made these.”

He glanced at his sister, who stuck her tongue out at him. “Oh, I guess you’re getting to be a good cook too, but only because you have a good teacher.”

“All right, Thorliff, what is it you want?” Ingeborg poured her husband another cup of coffee.

Thorliff flinched.
How did she know?
“I . . . I was just wondering if you could invite Anji over once in a while. She’ll get lonesome with me gone.”

“Ha.” Astrid wrinkled her nose. “We’re all too busy to miss anyone.”

“I sure hope that’s not true.” Haakan looked up at his wife.

“W-e-ll.” Ingeborg appeared to consider both sides, then laughed as Haakan shook his finger at her. “Letters would be nice, on a regular basis I mean, not one a season.”

“Last year I sent you two telegrams.”

“Ja and scared the life near to out of me with them. I thought sure someone had been hurt or killed or something.”

Haakan shoved back from the table, shaking his head. “A man can’t win.”

“I put paper, pencil, and envelopes, already addressed, in your kit. Just as a hint, mind you.” Ingeborg handed her husband a tow sack.

“What’s this?”

“Something special for the journey.”

“For me?”

“If you don’t want to share.”

“Um. I don’t share very good.”

“Thorliff, you saw the sack.” She turned to wink at her eldest. He grinned and stretched his arms above his head, then stood and pushed his chair back in place.

“Come on, Far, we got miles to go.”

Lars had the boiler nearing the pressure for them to leave. Ever since they had bought the new steam tractor and put the separator up on wheels, they’d needed fewer horses and men to keep in business. Traveling around the countryside, the machine looked like some gigantic monster, belching steam and smoke with a racket to be heard for miles. The rear wheels on the tractor were nearly as tall as Thorliff and the cab perched above that.

“Go with God,” Ingeborg yelled above the engine noise.

Haakan and Lars waved from the iron-roofed cab and shifted gears, and the beast lumbered forward, the treads in the wheels gouging holes in the road as it passed. Thorliff waved from the seat of the cook wagon, and Hamre drove the wagon that carried barrels for water and other supplies.

Hanging back enough to miss most of the dust, Thorliff let his mind wander.
Anji.
He was already missing her, and it wasn’t like he saw her every day anyway. He thought back to the night before, his last visit with her. . . .

“I’m going tomorrow, and when I get home, I leave right away again for school,” he said, taking her hands in his and facing her in the brilliant moonlight. He wanted to touch her face, her hair. Her lips, parted on a soft breath, smiled in that special way she had just for him.

“I know, but that is the way life is.” Anji sighed and leaned her forehead against his chest.

His heart thudded as if he’d been running five miles. He dropped her hands and cupped his palms along her jawline, lifting her chin so she had to look up at him. “I . . . I love you, Anji Baard.” There, he’d said the words that had been drumming in his heart and mind for months. Her smile made him want to run and jump and shout for joy.

“And I you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you, back when our wagon was heading west.”

“And my far invited all of you to homestead here. We were so little then.” His thumbs caressed the curve of her cheeks. Her skin felt soft as pussy willows in the spring. His eyes memorized her face—the slightly tipped nose, eyebrows that could say more with one arch than a page in a book, eyes that looked at him with such love he could feel his heart clench.

“Can you—will you wait for me?”

“Yes. Four years is nothing. Besides, I can’t leave my mother.”

“I know. Someday though, I pray you will go to school to become the teacher God meant for you to be.”

“Someday.”

Her breath teased his lips. He leaned forward. Their lips met in a trembling kiss that whispered of love and yearning and . . .

“Thorliff, you sleepin’ up dere?” Mrs. Sam rapped on the wall behind the seat.

He jerked upright. “No, not at all.” But when he looked ahead, the distance between him and the metal monsters had widened to nearly half a mile. The horses pulling the wagon had slowed to a shuffle. He flipped the lines, and they picked up their feet to a slow but jingling trot. He could feel the heat creep up his neck, and it wasn’t from sunburn.

They pulled into the first farm just in time to set up to serve dinner, which Mrs. Sam and Lily Mae had been preparing as they traveled. Since they couldn’t light the fire, they had laid out sandwiches and potato salad, which Ingeborg had helped prepare the long night before. The threshing crew ate quickly so they could get started to work.

As soon as they had the steam engine up to pressure, had checked all the belts one last time, and Hamre had filled all the places needing oil, Haakan released the lever, and the long belt began to turn. Thorliff waited for the signal and threw the lever for the bed of the threshing machine to pull sheaves of wheat into the maw of the dragon. Within minutes golden wheat streamed into the gunnysack hooked under the chute.

Each wagon pulled up to the carrying belt, the men forked sheaves, and straw blew out the arched spout into a growing stack. Wheat spears snuck inside shirt necks and under overall straps. Sweat poured from the bodies as the sun burned down. Besides taking care of the oiling, Hamre kept water in a covered barrel for the men to drink.

Always on the watch for sparks, they kept buckets of water near all sides of the machinery. Sparks could fly from the smokestack of the steam engine in spite of the metal roof on top.

By dusk, when the last wagon left empty, the threshing crew collapsed in the shade of the monolith called steam engine.

Mrs. Sam brought cold drinks around for all of them. “Supper ready soon as you wash up.”

Thorliff groaned. What would it hurt to eat dirty for a change? He slapped his hat against his bent knee and watched the dust fly.

Haakan finished checking over the machinery and dumped a bucket of water over his head so that it sluiced down his whole body.

“Good thing we’s near de river yet and can refill de barrels. Dat man say some wells be dryin’ up,” Mrs. Sam said.

“You’re right. Bad enough the harvest is so light, but to go without water too . . .” He shook his head, water drops splattering the thirsty earth, rock hard from lack of moisture.

Thorliff watched his father joke with the others, but when it came to him, the silence ached. All because he wanted to go to school. He thought back to the worst fight he’d seen in his family. Usually if Haakan and Ingeborg had a disagreement, they went to the bedroom or out for a walk. Not this time. . . .

“Where will you be when Thorliff needs to come home?” Ingeborg poured another cup of coffee for her husband, her hand resting on his shoulder.

“Thorliff will come home with the rest of us.”

“Then you think you will be done by September tenth? Is the harvest that bad?”

“I hope to heaven not.” Haakan shook his head and twisted to see his wife’s face. “You aren’t going to back down on this, are you?”

She shook her head. “No. This is too important. Thorliff must have this chance.”

“And it doesn’t matter that we sweat our blood for him to have this farm?” Haakan lowered his voice with great effort.

Thorliff wanted to slide right under the table. Veins corded on his father’s neck. The handle snapped on his coffee cup, and he threw it toward the woodbox, but it pinged off the side of the stove. When Thorliff started to get it, Haakan roared. “Leave it be. Why isn’t this farm enough for you? Are you better than the rest of us?”

Thorliff straightened his spine and looked straight into his father’s eyes. “Not better, no, never that, but different. Andrew is in love with this farm, not me.”

“You hate this good life of tilling God’s good earth?”

“No, Far, that’s not it at all. I love the land and all of you. I just want something else, that’s all. Something else.”

“Haakan, never have I gone against your will. . . .” Ingeborg paused for a moment, obviously thinking back to the time she’d been working the fields against his express wishes and lost a baby due to an accident. Then taking a deep breath, hands strangling her apron, she continued. “But this is what is right. Our children must be given every opportunity that we can give them. Not everyone in this great land will be a farmer; we need teachers and writers and doctors and . . .” She let her hands drop to her side. “Please, don’t make him go against your wishes.”

Haakan shoved back from the table and headed for the door. “You will do what you must, but I cannot give my blessing. I cannot.”

Thorliff fought the tears that burned at the back of his throat and watched his mother dry her eyes on her apron.

“Mor, I cannot go then.”

“Yes, you will go. He will come around. Just give him time.”

But they were running out of time, and each farm they left brought that time that much closer. Sometimes if he let himself think of it, rage simmered low in his belly. Why did this have to be so difficult? Why did his father have to be so stubborn?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX