Years (2 page)

Again he gave a grumpy, disdainful
hmph
that made her want to poke sticks up his nose. “Ain’t nobody else. We’ve always had the teachers livin’ with us. That’s just the way it is — cause we’re closest to school. Only one closer’s my brother John, and he’s a bachelor, so his place is out.”

“And so what do you propose to do with me, Mr. Westgaard? Leave me standing on the depot steps?”

His mouth pinched up like a dried berry and his brows furrowed in stern reproof as he stared at her from beneath the brim of his straw hat.

“I ain’t havin’ no woman livin’ under my roof,” he vowed again, crossing his arms stubbornly.

“Perhaps not, but if not yours, you’d best transport me to someone less bigoted than yourself under whose roof I will be more than happy to reside, unless you want a lawsuit brought upon you.” Now, where in the world had that come from? She wouldn’t know the first thing about bringing a lawsuit upon anybody, but she had to think of some way to put this uncouth ox in his place!

“A lawsuit!” Westgaard’s arms came uncrossed. He hadn’t missed the word
bigoted,
but the little snip was throwing threats and names out so fast he had to address them one at a time.

Linnea squared her shoulders and tried to make him think she was worldly and bold. “I have a contract, Mr. Westgaard, and in it is stated that room and board are included as part of my annual salary. Furthermore, my father is an attorney in Fargo, thus my legal fees would be extraordinarily reasonable should I decide to sue the Alamo school board for breach of contract, and name you as a—”

“All right, all right!” He held up two big, horny palms in the air. “You can stop yappin’, missy. I’ll dump you on Oscar Knutson and he can do what he wants to with ý’. He wants to be head of the school board, so let ‘im earn his money!”

“My name is Miss Brandonberg, not
missy!”
She gave her skirt a little flip in exasperation.

“Yeah, a fine time to tell me.” He turned away toward a waiting horse and wagon, leaving her to grouse silently.
Dump me on Oscar Knutson, indeed!

Reality continued to make a mockery of her romanticized daydreams. There was no fancy-rigged Stanhope carriage, no glossy blood-bay trotter. Instead, Westgaard led her to a double-box farm wagon hitched behind a pair of thick-muscled horses of questionable ancestry, and he clambered up without offering a hand, leaving her little choice but to stow her grip in the back by herself, then lift her skirts and struggle to the shoulder-high leaf-sprung seat unaided.

And as for gentlemen in beaver hats — ha! This rude oaf wouldn’t know what to do with a beaver top hat if it jumped up and bit him on his oversized sunburned nose! The nerve of the man to treat her as if she were... as if she were...
dispensable!
She, with a hard-earned teacher’s certificate from the Fargo Normal School! She, a woman of high education while he could scarcely put one word before another without sounding like an uneducated jackass!

Linnea’s disillusionment continued as he flicked the reins and ordered, “Giddap.” The cumbersome-looking horses took them through one of the saddest little bergs she’d ever seen in her life. Opera house? Had she really fantasized about an opera house? It appeared the most cultural establishment in town was the general store/post office, which undoubtedly brought
culture
to Alamo by means of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

The most impressive buildings in town were the grain elevators beside the railroad tracks. The others were all false-fronted little cubicles, and there were few of them at that. She counted two implement dealers, two bars, one restaurant, the general store, a hotel, a bank, and a combination drug and barber shop.

Her heart sank.

Westgaard glared straight ahead, holding the reins in hands whose fingers were the size of Polish sausages, with skin that looked like that of an old Indian — so different from the long, pale fingers of her imagination.

He didn’t look at her, and she didn’t look at him.

But she saw those tough brown hands.

And he saw her high-heeled shoes.

And she sensed how he hunched forward and glared from under that horrible-looking hat.

And he sensed how she sat like a pikestaff and stared all persnickitylike from under those ridiculous bird wings.

And she thought it was too bad that when people got old they had to get so crotchety.

And he thought how silly people were when they were young — always trying their best to make themselves look older.

And neither of them said a word.

They drove several miles west, then turned south, and the land looked all the same: flat, gold, and waving. Except where the threshers had already been. There it was flat, gold, and still.

When they’d been traveling for half an hour, Westgaard pulled into a farmyard that looked identical to every other one they’d passed — weather-beaten clapboard house with a cottonwood windbreak on the west, the trees only half-grown and tipping slightly south by southwest; a barn looking better kept than the house; rectangular granaries; hexagonal silos; and the only friendly looking feature reigning over all: the slow-whirling, softly sighing windmill.

A woman came to the door, tucking a strand of hair into the bun at the back of her head. She raised one hand in greeting and smiled broadly.

“Theodore!” she called, coming down two wooden steps and crossing the patch of grass that looked as golden as the fields surrounding them. “Hello! Who do you have here? I
thought you had gone to town to get the new schoolteacher.”

“This is him, Hilda. And he’s wearin’ high-heeled shoes and a hat with bird wings on it.”

Linnea bristled. How dare he make fun of her clothes!

Hilda stopped beside the wagon and frowned up at Westgaard, then at Linnea. “This is him?” She shaded her eyes with one hand and took a second look. Then she flapped both palms, pulled her chin back, and smiled as if with scolding humor. “Oh, Theodore, you play a joke on us, huh?”

Westgaard jabbed a thumb at his passenger. “No, she’s the one who played a joke on us. She’s L.I. Brandonberg.”

Before Hilda Knutson could respond, Linnea leaned over and extended a hand, incensed afresh by Westgaard’s rudeness in failing to introduce her properly. “How do you do. I’m Linnea bene Brandonberg.”

The woman took her hand as if not actually realizing what she was doing. “A woman,” she said, awestruck. “Oscar hired us a woman.”

Beside her Westgaard made a throaty sound of ridicule. “I think what Oscar hired us is a girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes, pretending to be a woman. And she ain’t stayin’ at my house.”

Hilda’s face sobered. “Why, Theodore, you always kept the teachers. Who else is gonna keep her?”

“I don’t know, but it ain’t gonna be me. That’s what I come to talk to Oscar about. Where is he?” Westgaard’s eyes scanned the horizon.

“I don’t know exactly. He started with the west rye this mornin’, but it’s hard to tell where he is by now. You might see him from the road if you head on out that way though.”

“I’ll do that, but I’m leavin’ her here. She ain’t comin’ to my house, so she might’s well stay here with you till you find someplace else for her.”

“Here!” Hilda pressed both hands to her chest. “But I got no spare rooms, you know that. Wouldn’t be right stuffing the teacher in with the kids. You take her, Theodore.”

“Nosirree, Hilda. I ain’t havin’ no woman in my house.”

Linnea was incensed. The nerve of them, treating her as if she were the chamber pot nobody wanted to carry out back.

“Stop!” she shouted, closing her eyes while lifting both palms like a corner policeman. “Take me back to town. If I’m
not wanted here, I’ll be more than happy to take the next tr—”

“I can’t do that!”

“Now see what you’ve done, Theodore. You’ve hurt her feelings.”

“Me! Oscar hired her! Oscar’s the one who told us she was a man!”

“Well, then go talk to Oscar!” She threw up her hands in disgust, then, belatedly remembering her manners, shook hands with Linnea again and patted the girl’s knuckles. “Don’t pay no attention to Theodore here. He’ll find a place for you. He’s just upset cause he’s wastin’ time out of the fields when all that wheat is ripe out there. Now, Theodore,” she ordered, turning toward the house, “you take care of this young one like you agreed to!”

And with that she hustled back inside.

Defeated, Westgaard could only set out in search of Oscar with his unwanted charge beside him.

Like most Dakota farms, Knutson’s was immense. Traveling down the gravel road, they scanned the horizon over his wheat, oat, and rye fields, but there was no sign of his team and mower crossing and recrossing the fields. Westgaard sat straight, frowning across the ocean of gold, peering intently for some sign of movement on the faraway brow of the earth, but the only thing moving was the grain itself and a flock of yapping blackbirds that flew overhead in ever-changing patterns before landing somewhere in the oats to glut themselves. The wagon came abreast of a shorn field, its yield lying in heavy plaits stretching as far as the eye could see. Drying in the sun, the grain gave up its sweet redolence to the sparkling air. With a subtle shift of the reins, Westgaard turned the horses off the gravel road along a rough grassy track leading between the cut field and another on their right whose grain was still straight and high. The track was bumpy, created chiefly for access to the fields. When the wagon suddenly lurched, Linnea grabbed her towering hat as it threatened to topple from its perch.

Westgaard angled her a silent glance, and for a moment one comer of his mouth tipped up. But her chin was lowered as she busily reset the hatpin to hold the infernal nuisance on.

They rocked and bumped their way up the track to a slight rise in the land. Reaching it, Westgaard intoned, “Whoa.”

Obediently, the horses stopped, leaving the riders to sit staring at an eternity of Oscar Knutson’s cut rye, with no Oscar in sight.

Westgaard held the reins in one hand, removed his hat and scratched his head with the other, mumbled something under his breath, then settled the hat back on with a disgruntled tug.

This time it was Linnea’s turn to smile. Good enough for him, the rude thing! He agreed to keep me, now he can put up with me, whether he likes it or not.

“You’ll have to come to my place till I can get this straightened out,” Westgaard lamented, flicking the reins and turning the horses in the rye stubble.

“So I shall.”

He gave her a sharp, quelling glance, but she sat stiff and prim on the wagon seat, looking straight ahead.

But her ridiculous hat was slightly crooked.

Theodore smiled to himself.

They set off again, heading south, then west. Everywhere was the sound of the dry, sibilant grain. The heavy heads of each stalk lifted toward the heavens only momentarily before bending low beneath their own weight.

Linnea and Theodore spoke only three times. They had been traveling for nearly an hour when Linnea asked, “How far from Alamo do you live, Mr. Westgaard?”

“Twelve miles,” he answered.

Then all Was still but for the birds and grain and the steady beat of the horses’ hooves. Three times they saw mowing machines crawling along in the distance, pulled by horses who appeared minuscule from so far away, their heads nodding as they leaned into their labor.

She broke the silence again when a small once-white building with a belfry appeared on their right. Her eager eyes took in as many details as she could — the long narrow windows, the concrete steps, the flat yard with a grove of cottonwoods at its edge, the pump. But Westgaard kept the team moving with the same unbroken walk, and she gripped the side of the wagon seat and craned around as the building receded too fast for her to take in all that she wanted to. She whirled to face him, demanding, “Is that the schoolhouse?”

Without turning his eyes from the horses’ ears, he grunted, “Yeah.”

Ornery, pig-headed cuss! She bunched her fists in her lap and seethed.

“Well, you could have told me!”

He rolled his eyes in her direction. His mouth twisted in
&
sardonic smirk as he drawled, “I ain’t no tour guide.”

Anger boiled close to eruption, but she clapped her mouth shut and kept her rebuffs to herself.

They rode on a little farther down the road, and as they passed a nondescript farm on their left, Theodore decided to rankle her just a little more. “This here’s my brother John’s place.”

“How wonderful,” she replied sarcastically, then refused to look at it.

Less than ten minutes from the school building they entered a long, curving driveway of what she supposed was Westgaard’s place — not that he bothered to verify it. It was sheltered on its north side by a long windbreak of box elder trees and a parallel row of thick caragana bushes that formed an unbroken wall of green. As they rounded the windbreak, the farmyard came into view. The house sat to the left in the loop of the driveway. All the outbuildings were to the right, with a windmill and water tank situated between a huge weather-beaten barn and a cluster of other buildings she took to be granaries and chicken coops.

The wood-frame house was two stories high, and absolutely unadorned, like all they’d passed on their way from town. It appeared to have been painted white at one time, but was now the color of ashes, with only a flake of white appearing here and there as a reminder of better days. It had no porch or lean-to to relieve its boxlike appearance, and no overhanging eave to shade its windows from the prairie sun. The center door was flanked by long narrow windows giving it the symmetrical appearance of a face gaping at the vast fields of wheat surrounding it.

“Well, this is it,” Westgaard announced in his own good time, leaning forward to tie the reins around the brake handle of the wagon. Bracing his hands on the seat and footboard, he vaulted over the side and would have left her to do the same, but at that moment an imperious voice shouted from the door of the house, “Teddy! Where are your manners! You help that young woman down!”

Teddy? thought Linnea, amused.
Teddy?