A New Day Rising (24 page)

She sat down to eat, composed at least on the outside. Haakan took the chair across from her and Kaaren the one on the end. Between them, they peppered her with questions until she raised her hands in surrender. "How am I supposed to eat and answer all you've asked?"

Kaaren rested her cheek on Andrew's soft hair. "Sorry, Inge, I didn't think. Tomorrow we will plant that slip of geranium. It will bloom so pretty in your window."

Lars moaned from his bed. "Kaaren." His voice sounded weaker than when she left in the morning.

"Coming." Kaaren dipped a cup of warm water from the reservoir, added three drops of the vile brown liquid, and crossed the room. If this didn't work, what would they do?

ou better cut if off," Lars muttered a day or so later.

"No, not yet. There must be something more we can do." As Kaaren and Ingeborg stood by the side of the bed, Kaaren reached for the whiskey bottle.

"If you're going to pour that over my foot again, give me a swig or two of it first. What a waste of good whiskey." Lars reached for the bottle, at the same time lifting his foot. "Looks awful bad, don't it?" He tipped the bottle to his lips and chugged. "Whew" With a grimace, he handed the bottle to his wife and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Now, if I was a drinkin' man, I might appreciate that, but as I ain't, that burns something fierce both inside and out."

Ingeborg studied his swollen foot. "What if we made a dressing and soaked it in the whiskey. That would keep the alcohol in place and might do some leaching of the poison."

"Well, put me under first. I can hardly stand to have you touch the thing, let alone wrap it."

Kaaren went for the laudanum, while ingeborg, with one finger on her bottom lip, continued studying the foot. Father God, I just don't understand. I've been praying for you to heal this foot and also for wisdom to know what to do. Do you want Lars to lose his foot? That doesn't seem fitting with what I read in the Scriptures. She looked from the foot up to Lars' face. How could she ask him such a personal question?

She sucked in a deep breath. This could be no more difficult than birthing the twin lambs with a fractious, frightened ewe. "Lars, you remember the stories of Christ healing the lepers in the Scriptures?"

He shrugged. "Well, kind of ... I mean, I heard them a long time ago when I went to church with my family and all. Ain't been no church out here, you know."

"I know, but Kaaren reads out of the Bible every day."

"Sure, but we ain't been reading about the lepers."

Ingeborg nodded. Knowing Kaaren, she was reading from her favorites, the Psalms or Proverbs. Whenever there was trouble, those were the first places she headed. "For some reason my Bible fell open to one of the leper passages, so I read it and then the others. In all cases, the lepers had to ask for Christ to heal them, and then do something He commanded."

"So?" He closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillows Kaaren had stacked behind him. "You think I haven't been praying for this foot of mine? What kind of idjit do you think I am? Of course I've been praying." He sat forward, wincing at the action. "I pray and pray, and my foot looks worse and worse. You got an answer for that? Do you?" He shook his finger in her face.

Ingeborg stepped back. Was this what she'd been like when she had questioned God? No wonder people stayed away from her. "I don't have an answer." She softened her voice. "All I know is that God loves us and promised to be beside us through all the trials on this earth."

"Yeah, well, right now I think God is looking the other way, too busy with some other part of the world." He laid the back of his hand over his eyes. "Thanks for trying, Inge, but I need to resign myself to losing this foot, and if we don't take care of that soon, I'll lose my life, too."

"If onlys" flashed through Ingeborg's mind. If only they hadn't gone to town; if only they had listened to her; if only ... if only ... She closed her eyes and mind against the memories. Blizzards, indeed, had taken their toll on the Bjorklunds.

"We have to deal with what's now." She said the words as much to herself as to the man in the bed.

"Mor!" Thorliff threw himself through the door and stopped in front of her, puffing heavily.

"What is it?" Ingeborg looked from her grinning son to follow where he pointed. "Metiz!"

The old woman, a descendent of marriages between the French Canadian trappers and the Lakota and Chippewa Indians, stood grinning in the doorway. She'd lost a front tooth to the winter, but her silvered hair was still pulled back in a single braid, her black eyes still snapped with delight, and the lines in her face resembled a dried apple more than ever. "We come back."

"We?" Ingeborg crossed the room and, extending her hand, drew her old friend into the room. "Oh, Metiz, I am so glad you came. We need your wisdom so desperately."

Metiz gestured behind her. A sturdy boy with the same bright eyes and dusky skin as hers stepped forward. He wore a combination of skin vest, bright red shirt, and leather leggings, while a thong held back his thick, black hair. "My grandson. Baptiste. He friend for Thorliff."

Thorliff wore a grin that would have split a more tender face. He looked up at Ingeborg.

She nodded. "Perhaps you'd like to show Baptiste your sheep."

"Come on." Thorliff straightened his back, shot a grin over his shoulder at his mother, and walked over to the newcomer. "You want to see my new lambs? I have," he wrinkled his forehead in thought, "twenty-three. Two black ones."

Baptiste nodded. He glanced up at his grandmother for permission and, at her nod, followed Thorliff out the door.

Thorliff whistled. "Paws, come here. That's my dog." His words floated back into the silent noddy.

"They be good together." Metiz nodded. Her mixture of French, English, and her native tongue, along with a smattering of Norwegian made it possible for them to communicate. Sometimes they needed no words, using signs and actions to convey what they meant.

"I am so happy you came. I don't know what else to use to make Lars' foot better."

"What happen?" She moved to stand beside the bed and looked the sick man in the eyes.

"Frostbite. We got caught out by that last blizzard."

"Bad one, that." She sniffed, leaning over the bed to peer at the swollen reddened foot, now seeping from the open sores. "Foot bad."

"Ja, that it is." Lars shrugged his shoulders, but the furrow between his brows belied the lighter words. "I think we need to cut it off before it poisons the rest of me."

"What done?" She turned to Ingeborg.

"Rubbing it, hot and cold soaking, willow bark tea for pain, now laudanum, and I poured whiskey over it to clean it again."

"1 drink the stuff, too. Maybe it does more good on the inside than out." Lar's attempt at humor fell as flat as the lefse Kaaren had made the day before.

Kaaren entered the house. She'd been outside hanging clothes on the line and stirring the wash in a kettle over the fire outside. "So good to see you, Metiz. Welcome home." Kaaren's knowledge of French made it easier for her to talk with the old woman.

In French, Metiz asked, "Has he run a fever?" Kaaren nodded. "Out of his head at times?"

"Only with the pain. He sleeps a lot now that we have the laudanum for him."

Metiz nodded. She cupped her hands over the foot, pressing gently, exploring the festering member.

Lars blanched, sweat popped out in his forehead, and he clamped his teeth together. Kaaren took his hand, wincing at the force with which he grasped it.

Metiz sniffed again, and closing her eyes, she pressed up the leg. She turned to see the man's reaction. "Better?"

"Up there, yes. I ain't never had anything hurt like this." He took in a deep breath and let it out, the air whooshing from his lungs.

Metiz pondered the man in front of her, one finger tip massaging her chin. "I think not cut off whole foot. Two small toes, save rest. Put foot up high. I bring medicine." She turned and headed for the door. "Boy stay with your boy?"

"Of course." Ingeborg followed the old woman out the door. "What can I do?"

"Make him drink." She mimicked tipping up a bottle.

"We have the laudanum."

"Later. Make knife sharp. Very sharp. Heat poker." She set out for her encampment at the ground-eating trot that Ingeborg had learned Metiz could endure for hours.

Ingeborg watched her go and then headed across the field to her own soddy. She could hear the boys talking from the barn when she reached the door. Off in the distance, Haakan continued to widen the rich brown strip of field as the plow laid over furrow after furrow "Thorliff," she called, "I need you for a minute."

"Coming." The two boys appeared in the barn door, Paws at Thorliff's knee. The boy trotted up to his mother. "What do you want?"

"Would you please go get Mr. Bjorklund for me? Tell him it isn't an emergency, but I need help soon."

Thorliff nodded and with a "Come on, Baptiste," the two boys raced each other across the rippling prairie grass.

Ingeborg watched them go. How good it would be for her son to have a friend, someone that lived close enough to be with often and to do boy things with. She worried sometimes about this lad growing up with no one his age, always the oldest and'responsible beyond his years. When she was eight, she had brothers and sisters both older and younger and went to school. They needed to get the school going, that was one sure thing. And now Kaaren's husband might not live. "No, I will not even think such!" Her words rang loud and firm in the prairie silence.

By the time Metiz returned with a bundle on her back, Ingeborg and Kaaren had all the supplies ready. Haakan had come in from the field to help hold Lars down if need be. Ingeborg had put Andrew down for a nap with strict instructions to Thorliff that he must stay by the house to hear the baby when he woke.

"I'm not drunk, yet," Lars sang, a silly grin belying his words. He hefted the bottle and took another swig.

"I think I could use a swig of that, too," Haakan muttered for Ingeborg's ears alone.

She shot him a nod of agreement. Her stomach was doing small flip-flops at the thought of the work ahead. Would it be enough to just remove the toes? Or would they have to repeat it with the remainder of the foot? God, help us, guide us, and bring healing to this son of yours. And please, I'm so frightened. Give me strength. She caught Kaaren's eye and knew she'd been thinking and doing the same.

"Drink more." Metiz sat on a chair by the bed. "We use table?"

"I know," Kaaren answered. "I have a sheet ready to put on it. We can get more light over there. I have all the lamps ready to light."

Ingeborg looked around and saw that it was so. The room felt stifling with the fire going to heat plenty of water. The poker she'd brought back with her lay on top of the stove, ready to insert in the firebox. She closed her eyes at the sight of the knives, their edges gleaming in the lamplight, newly ground on the whetstone to a fine edge. Dear God, please get us through this.

"Are we ready then?" Haakan asked. At their nods, he leaned over the bed and slipped his arm under Lars' shoulders. "All right, my friend, let's get this over with. You use your strength, and I'll use mine, and we'll get you on that table before you pass out."