Years (11 page)

The room grew quiet except for a soft sigh of ash collapsing in the stove. Nissa’s stiff old hands rested, crossed, beneath her drooping breasts. In her eyes was the bright sheen of remembrance as she stared, unseeing, at the red flowered oilcoth beneath the catalogue. A lump formed in Linnea’s throat. Death was an entity she hadn’t pondered, and certainly never as a thing that could be beautiful. Studying Nissa’s downcast eyes, Linnea suddenly understood the beauty of lifelong commitment and realized that for those like Nissa it took more than death to negate it.

Nissa lifted the cup to her lips, unaware that the coffee was cold. “The home place was never the same without Hjalmar, so I left it to John and came up here to take care of Teddy and the baby, and I been here ever since.”

“And Melinda? Where is she now?” Linnea inquired softly, holding her breath for some inexplicable reason. She sat absolutely still while waiting for the answer.

“Melinda got run over and killed by a streetcar in Philadelphia when Kristian was six.”

Oh, I see. The words were unspoken, but buzzed in Linnea’s mind as she released the lungful of air in small, careful spurts that slowly relaxed her shoulders. The room grew still except for the soft, absent tapping of Nissa’s fingertips upon the forgotten catalogue. Her apron swagged between her spread knees, and the afternoon sun lit the soft fuzz on her cheeks. Suddenly it seemed the kitchen was being visited by two people long dead, and Linnea strove to see their faces, but all she made out was a white drooping moustache on one and the drooping shoulders of the other as she stared out the window at the fields where even now Theodore was cutting grain.

She glanced at the window.
So that’s why you’re bitter. You were so young and the wound was so deep.
She felt a twinge of guilt for her impatience and anger with him. She wished she could somehow undo it, but even if she could, what good would it do? It wouldn’t change what he’d suffered in the past.

And Kristian, poor Kristian. Growing up without a mother’s love.

“Does Kristian know?” Linnea asked sympathetically.

“That she run away? He knows. But he’s a good boy. He’s
had me, and Clara, and plenty of other aunts. I know it ain’t the same as his real ma, but he’s got along fine. Well... ” The mood was broken as Nissa threw a glance at the catalogue. “We ain’t gettin’ them shoes picked out now, are we?”

They chose the storm boots of pebbled black box calf that tied up the front to mid-calf, and while Linnea was filling out the mail-order blank, Nissa added one last postscript to the personal story. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Teddy I told you. He don’t talk about her much, and, well, you know how men can get. I figured you ought to know, being Kristian’s teacher and all.”

But Linnea didn’t know how men could get. She was only now coming to learn. Still, the story had had great impact on her, and she found herself promising to treat Theodore more patiently in the future.

The men returned late again, and when they shuffled in, Linnea realized she was studying Theodore as if expecting to find some physical change in his appearance. But he looked the same as ever — powerful, somber, and unhappy. All through supper she was conscious of the fact that he had studiously refrained from glancing her way; neither had he spoken to her since she’d upbraided him earlier that afternoon. As they all took their places at the table, John offered his polite, self-conscious nod, accompanied by a shy, “Hello, miss.” And Kristian angled furtive glances her way after a stumbling greeting. But Theodore concentrated on his plate and nothing else.

When the meal was half over, she could tolerate his disregard no longer and found herself overwhelmed by the need to end the enmity between them. Perhaps what she really wanted was to make up in some small way for Melinda.

He was taking a bite of mashed potatoes and gravy when she fixed her eyes on him and spoke into the silence. “Theodore, I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you this afternoon.”

His jaws stopped moving and his gaze rested on her for the first time that evening while he tried to mask a look of total surprise.

Completely dauntless and wearing an open look of ingenuousness, she went on, “I’m certainly glad none of my students were here to see me, because I didn’t make a very good example. I was sarcastic and snappy, which is really no way to
treat people when it’s just as easy to ask nicely. So I’m asking nicely this time. In the future, Theodore, would you please speak to me directly when I’m in the room, instead of talking over my head as if I’m not there?”

Theodore stared at her for a moment before his glance flickered to Nissa, then Kristian.

Kristian had stopped eating to stare in surprise at Miss Brandonberg taking his father down a notch, and all with the coolest of courtesy and a direct look that Theodore was having trouble meeting. Furthermore, she’d done it again — started talking in the middle of supper. Nobody around here cared much for talking on an empty stomach, and he could see Theodore’s eagerness to get on with his meal in peace. But she was staring him down, second for second, sitting as pert and straight as a chipmunk while beneath her steady gaze his face turned pink.

“Somehow,” she went on benevolently, “you and I managed to get off on the wrong foot, didn’t we? But I think we can be more adult than that, don’t you?”

Theodore didn’t know what to say. The little missy had apologized — to the best of his memory the first time in his life any female had ever apologized to him — yet she seemed to be calling him childish at the same time.
Him!
When he was nearly old enough to be her father! He swallowed, feeling confused and wondering what sarcastic meant. Nissa, John, and Kristian were all watching and listening, nobody moving a hand, and finally Theodore had to say
something
!

He swallowed again and it felt like the potatoes were stuck in his throat. He stared at the little missy’s fresh, wide-eyed expression and realized what a pretty young thing she was.

“Yeah, maybe we could at that. Now eat.” And he gratefully dropped his attention to his plate.

She had won a round at last. Realizing it, Linnea felt John’s gaze still lingering on her in amazement. She gave him a wide smile, making him dig into his meal again with self-conscious haste.

The little miss was something new to John. Someone who could make Teddy blush and back down when nobody’d ever been able to do that except their ma. But the way Ma did it was a lot different man the way Little Missy did it. In his dullwitted way, John wondered just how she’d managed it. He remembered one other woman who used to be able to soften
up Teddy. Melinda. She’d been somethin’, that Melinda, pretty and tiny and big-eyed as a newborn colt. All she used to have to do was turn those big eyes on Teddy and he’d get pink around the collar. A lot like he just did when Little Missy talked soft and serious and looked him square. And Melinda used to talk at the table, too. Always sayin’ how she couldn’t understand their Norwegian ways, how they all bottled things up inside and never talked about what really mattered.

Not being one who talked much, John never had understood that.

He glanced up and met Ma’s eyes.

You remember, John, don’t you? Nissa was thinking. That’s the way he used to act around Melinda. She turned her gaze to her right, to the girl politely eating and totally unaware of the undertones she’d just caused, then to Teddy engrossed in his supper but frowning at his plate.

I think, my crotchety son, that you’ve met your match at last.

It was Saturday night. Nissa got down her galvanized washtub, set it near the kitchen stove, and began filling it with steaming water.

“We take turns,” she announced. “You wanna be first?”

Linnea gawked at the tub, at the wide-open kitchen, glanced at the living-room doorway, from beyond which the voices of John and Theodore could be clearly heard, then back at the tub beside the stove.

“I think I’ll just take some water upstairs in my basin.”

She filled the small speckled basin and took it to her room, only to find the amount of water inadequate. Still, the all-over bath felt glorious. While she was washing, she heard John leave for home. The house grew quieter and quieter. She dried, dressed in her nightgown, and sat in her rocking chair to study the notes she’d made beside her students’ names. Nissa took her bath first, then her voice carried clearly as she called upstairs to tell Kristian it was his turn. She heard him go downstairs with his clean clothes, and some time later, come back up wearing them, she presumed. She heard the third bath in progress, and tried to picture those long legs folded into the tiny tub, and smiled. A few minutes later she heard Theodore call Kristian downstairs to help carry the washtub outside.

Then nothing but silence.

John, Nissa, Kristian... Theodore, she thought. My surrogate family now. Each so individual, each raising a distinctly different reaction within her. She’d liked them all immediately. Except Theodore. So why was it she thought about him longest? Why did his unsmiling face and contrary disposition remain in her thoughts even after the lantern was out and she found it impossible to feel sleepy? Why was it
his
bare limbs she thought about in the washtub?

The house was quiet, the lingering smells of supper mixed with the scent of homemade lye soap in the dimly lit kitchen as Theodore and his son carried the washtub out to the yard.

When the water had been slewed, Theodore stood a moment, studying the sky, contemplating. After some time, he said thoughtfully, “Kristian?”

“What?”

He reviewed the word carefully before pronouncing it exactly as she had. “You know what sarcastic means?”

“No, Pa, I don’t. But I’ll ask Miss Brandonberg.”

“No!” Theodore exclaimed, then consciously dropped the anxiety from his voice. “No, it don’t matter. Don’t go askin’ her nothin’ on my account.”

They stood in the darkness, the sound of early-autumn crickets harmonizing through the night, the tub weightless now between their two hands. The moon was at three-quarter phase, white as fresh milk in a star-studded sky, throwing their shadows long and deep.

“She sure is pretty, ain’t she?” Kristian murmured softly.

“You think so?”

“Well, she sure ain’t mousy and puny, like you said. Why’d you say that, anyway?”

“Did I say that?”

“You sure did. But she’s no more mousy and puny than Isabelle, and you seem to think Isabelle’s all right.”

Theodore harumphed. “I think you better take another look at Isabelle when she drives that cook wagon in here.”

“Well, all right, there’s a lot more to Isabelle compared to Miss Brandonberg, but still Miss Brandonberg isn’t mousy and puny. She looks just right to me.”

Theodore eyed his son askance, making out his clear, youthful
profile beneath the bright moonlight. “You better not let her hear you say that, seeing as how she’s your teacher.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Kristian said dejectedly, dropping his glance to the dark earth, standing thoughtfully for a moment before suddenly lifting his face and asking more brightly, “You wanna know somethin’ funny?”

“What?”

“She thinks Russian thistles are
pretty!
She said she’s gonna have us go out in the field and paint pictures of them!”

Theodore grunted, then laughed once, joined by Kristian. “Yeah, well, she’s a town girl. You know they ain’t so smart about some things.”

But later, when Theodore lay down in his double bed, where he’d slept alone for well over fourteen years, he tried to picture a Russian thistle blossom and realized he really wasn’t sure what one looked like. For though he’d seen thousands upon thousands of them in his thirty-four years, he’d never looked at one with anything but contempt. He decided next time he saw one he’d take a second look.

5

L
INNEA WASN
’
T PREPARED
for the change she saw in Kristian and Theodore on Sunday morning. They’d looked the same as always when they returned from doing the morning chores to have their breakfast. But afterward, when Nissa called up the steps, “Come on! Buggy’s waiting!” Linnea dashed outside to find father and son dressed in formal black suits and ties and crisp white shirts, sitting side by side in the front seat of a black four-passenger surrey.