No Distance Too Far (16 page)
Let your work be your sales pitch. You can answer questions. That’s what’s important.”
He glanced up to thank Miss Christopherson, then pushed his meat around with his fork. Double his wages and paid twice a month. He wouldn’t need to pay for his room here while out with the crew, so that would be more money going into his savings and to pay off his lot. That would go a long way to paying off his debt. But he most likely wouldn’t be here when Astrid returned.
If
she returned. But he could get his house sooner. And they still could write.
He looked from Hjelmer to Thorliff and back. “You’re going to have to teach me how to keep the books.”
Hjelmer slapped him on the shoulder, a grin creasing his face. “I knew we could count on you. I can guarantee you’ll be pleased with this entire proposal.” They shook hands, and Joshua inhaled, letting his breath out on a sigh.
“That’s just the beginning,” Thorliff said with a nod. “We’re putting Toby Valders in charge of the building arm of the company, running the projects. We’re going to add on to the old granary and set up shop in there for the manufacturing arm. Jeffers will be in charge of that. We’re looking for someone with experience in steel manufacturing. I’m getting ready to send out advertisements to some of the regional newspapers, including those in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
With his dessert now before him, Joshua almost wished he’d not ordered it. But one bite put that idea to rest. He’d better enjoy the good food now, because once they were on the road, the cooking would be up to them if the farmers didn’t invite them for meals. He sure hoped that either Trygve or Gilbert knew more about cooking than he did. Or at least one of them better be asking for some lessons over the next few days. He thought of one other difficulty. Gilbert spoke little English—he’d arrived from Norway less than a year ago—and Joshua spoke no Norwegian.
I
certainly hope the garden can be plowed, now that we’ve scattered the straw on it,” Ingeborg commented after she ate her last bite of cake.
Ingeborg had spent the afternoons, after seeing patients at the surgery, pitching the straw and manure banking from around the house into the wheelbarrow and spreading it across the garden. With Emmy and Freda helping, the job had gone quickly. “I know you need every moment out on the fields that are dry enough to work, but the garden needs to get in too.”
Andrew glanced to his pa, who blew a smoke ring into the air to make Emmy giggle. Maybe her delight in smoke rings came from something she’d learned about them from her years in the tribe.
“More,” she pleaded.
Haakan shook his head. “Your grandma says we got to get out there and plow the garden. Means I can’t spend all afternoon playing with smoke rings.” He tweaked the little girl’s braid of dark hair that had grown out quickly since they cut it off to get rid of the lice.
“What is plow?”
“A machine that the horses pull to turn over the soil.” Andrew nodded at her puzzled look. “You can come ride the horses while we plow the garden.”
“Horses.” Her eyes sparkled. She nodded, hard enough to set her braids to bobbing. “I ride.”
“You better help clear the table then, while we go harness up.” Haakan stood and, walking to the stove, lifted a lid with the coil-handled lid lifter and tapped the remains from his pipe into the fire. After setting the pipe and tobacco container back on the shelf, he headed for the back door. “At least we don’t have to wear winter jackets any longer.” He settled his fedora on his head and followed Andrew out the door.
Emmy carried the empty plates over to the stove and set them in the dishpan waiting on the cooler part of the stove. “I wash?”
“No, I’ll wash. You dry.” Freda set the coffee cups in the soapy water and dug down for the dishcloth. “You brush the crumbs off the table into the scrap bucket. Those leftover bits of bread go in the same.”
Emmy hurried through her tasks, keeping an ear cocked for the jingle of the harness that signaled the arrival of the horses.
One day Ingeborg had gone down to the barn for oats from the grain bin, and she turned around to find Emmy in the horse stalls, talking to the work horses and rubbing their noses. She loved the horses, singing to them in the language that Ingeborg hadn’t heard since Metiz died. At least now she knew which tribe Emmy came from.
“Here they come,” Ingeborg told her now. “You better put a sweater on.”
The little girl grabbed a sweater off one of the low pegs that Haakan had put on the wall for the grandchildren and slipped out the door, her eyes sparkling in delight.
“Between her and Inga, what a pair,” Freda said. “How come you didn’t bring Inga back out with you?”
“She was over playing with Benny. Rebecca had asked if she could come since it is Saturday and no school.”
“And how was Elizabeth today?”
“Restless, which means she is feeling better. At least I hope that is what it means. She got a letter from Dr. Morganstein asking when the men from the hospital board might come out on the train to talk with her and those of the community most interested in building the hospital. They don’t understand how we work together as a co-op here in Blessing, that everyone who wants to can come to the meeting and have their say. Might be a bit of a surprise to them.”
“When you consider that half the businesses in Blessing are owned and managed by women, well, that might be another shock for them.”
“You know, I never think much about that.” Ingeborg set the last of the clean dishes on the shelf. “Speaking of businesses, how are things in the cheese house? I’ve been so busy, I’m afraid I’ve let you do all the hard work.”
“That’s one of the reasons I left Norway, remember? To help you.”
“Helping is one thing. Being forced to take over is quite another.”
Freda
tsk
ed, muttered something, and shook her head. “Will dinner be here after church tomorrow?”
“No. Remember, we are having a church meeting, so everyone will be bringing food with them to church.”
“How could I forget? You’d think that gathering things for the Indian reservation like Astrid asked was of world importance. I just don’t understand this. Haven’t you been donating to a different reservation for years?”
“Yes. I don’t understand it either. But maybe it’s because we are asking for more than a barrel of castoffs and a couple of quilts.”
“Andrew said you’ve sent a beef up there before.”
“We just did what we thought God wanted us to do. And now He’s asked through a different source, and I wonder if that is part of it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that Astrid wrote and asked for help because she has made friends with an Indian man who is in training at her hospital. That caused a bit of a hullabaloo. Then Emmy showed up here— another Indian, albeit a child. And what can anyone really say about a little one in need?”
“They can say plenty. I remember at home when a family of Sami came down from the north. With their dark hair and dark skin one would think they came from way south.” While Freda tried hard to speak only English, every so often a Norwegian word slipped in. When she got excited, she spoke only Norwegian, which made Ingeborg laugh. “Their language was different; everything about them was different, so people refused to welcome them. They finally moved on from Valdres.”
“Some of the women were not accepting of my friend Metiz, who helped us so much those first years, showing me what was edible in the wild and many natural medicines. She taught me how to tan rabbit skins for those wonderful mittens and vests she made. When we first came, she spent more time with her relatives further north, but in the last years she gave up traveling back and forth, and Haakan built her a cabin on the river, where she said her husband, a Frenchman, had owned land. Of course there was no record of title, so when we homesteaded the land, we just made room for her too. She and Agnes Baard, besides Kaaren, were my best friends.” Ingeborg let her mind wander back and then heaved a sigh. “But life goes on.”
“I wish I could have come earlier.”
“I gave up wishing to change the past a long time ago. Kaaren reminded me of that often after Roald died. She kept quoting Bible verses Paul wrote, about letting go of the past and the things that bind and pushing forward for the prize. Some of the time I wanted to shut her mouth for her.” Ingeborg raised her eyebrows and smiled slightly, her head tipped a bit to the side. “Which would have been a shame, since I had fought so hard to keep her alive and not let her follow her husband and the two little girls who died that winter. Those were some terrible times. I would not wish them on anyone.”
“Someday maybe you’ll tell me the whole story.”
“Someday maybe I will. I’m going out to check on the plowing.” Ingeborg stopped on the top step and raised her face to the sun. Sun that felt warm again, not just a purveyor of light.
God, I
thank you for the sunshine, for the growing grass and the drying ground.
You have brought us through another winter, kept us well and safe.
She stepped down the stairs, thinking they needed to be painted again. The entire porch needed painting. Amazing how one noticed those things when the snow melted away and exposed the wood and the ground again.
Stooping down, she checked the canes of the rosebush to see if the sprouts were showing—not yet. Another week of warm weather and life would burst forth from the ground, the trees, and the bushes. She strolled around the house until she could see Andrew turning a corner, trying to plow as close to the fence as possible. No one liked hand-digging the corner pieces, where she usually planted the pumpkins and squash.
Emmy saw her and waved from the back of one of their oldest team. Haakan figured they were about due for retirement, but the sad way they acted when the other horses were harnessed and headed out to the fields reminded him to give them the easy jobs. They would turn over the potato patch and the corn patch too. He often used them to pull the wagons to town or the buggy on Sunday.
His concern for the animals made her love him even more. While Thorliff and Hjelmer talked about horses being a dying way of farming, Haakan didn’t plan on selling his teams off.
She leaned on the rail fence, welcoming the invigorating fragrance of freshly turned earth. Andrew angled the team over to the fence so Ingeborg could give the horses each a piece of bread she’d stuck in her pocket. She laughed as their whiskery noses tickled her palm. How easy it was to laugh on a day like today. Sunshine and breeze, fields drying, the garden plowed. She knew Andrew would hook up the disc next and give the ground a couple of runovers with that, and— She glanced up at the sky. Nearing midafternoon. While she used to like to rake the garden smooth before planting, now with this late planting season, she needed to get the peas in immediately. Mark the rows, hoe a groove, and let Emmy drop the seeds into the ground.
“Thanks, Andrew.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“I know, so I’ll thank you then too.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get my planting box.” Years earlier she had appropriated one of the two-foot-long toolboxes that had an iron bar from end to end for a handle. Tucked carefully in place were sticks with twine wound around them for markers, her trowel, jars with seeds saved from the year before, and a knife for cutting up the last of the potatoes she’d saved for seed. Every year she planted several hills of potatoes in the main garden, since the corn and potato patch would get worked up after he plowed for Kaaren and Ellie too. Somehow in the last few years, Andrew had taken over working up the garden plots for all of them. He would most likely go into town and do plots for Thorliff and Hjelmer too.
“Bye, Gamma,” Emmy called from her throne on high.
Astrid needs to be here to help put the garden in.
The thought made Ingeborg sniff. This was the first year she wouldn’t be here to help at all. Last spring she’d managed to take a few hours away from the surgery to join her mother in one of their favorite things to do together.
“Lord, I am trying to leave her in your hands, I really am. Were you as lonely for your Son when He came down here to live as I am for my daughter?” She dug in her apron pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose.
“You should be wearing a hat,” Freda said, joining Ingeborg in the garden a few minutes later.
“I know. I always told Astrid that too, but today my head really needs to feel the sun to drive away the thoughts of winter.”
And missing
Astrid
. “Emmy and I will plant the peas if you help me mark the rows. I brought a bundle of stakes out, along with the rakes and hoes.”
Freda put her hands on her hips and lifted her face to the sun. “You know one thing I am missing about a Norway spring?”
“The creeks and runoffs cascading down the mountains and through the fields. I missed that for years,” Ingeborg said. “And the aspen trees leafing out, along with the oaks and maples. But I grew accustomed to this rich flat land and being able to see for miles. Sometimes I climb the windmill just to look out over the fields and farms. You can see forever.”
