Years (3 page)

A miniature whirlwind of a woman came hustling down the footpath from the kitchen door, her frizzy gray hair knotted at her nape, a pair of oval wire-rimmed glasses hooked behind her ears. She shook a finger scoldingly.

Theodore Westgaard made a dutiful about-face in the middle of the path and returned to the wagon to reach up a helping hand, but the expression on his face was martyred.

Placing her hand in his and leaping down, Linnea couldn’t resist mocking sweetly, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Westgaard, you’re too kind.”

He dropped her hand immediately as they were joined by the bustling woman who made Linnea — only a little over five feet tall — feel like a giant. She had a nose no bigger than a thimble, faded brown eyes that seemed to miss nothing, and lips as straight and narrow as a willow leaf. She walked with her fuzzy knob of a chin thrust forward, arms swinging almost forcefully. Though her back was slightly bowed, she still managed to give the appearance of one leaning into each step with great urgency. What the woman lacked in stature, she made up for in energy. The minute she opened her mouth, Linnea realized she wasn’t one to mince words. “So this is the new schoolteacher. Don’t look like no man to me!” She took Linnea by both arms, held her in place while giving her a thorough inspection from hem to hat, and nodded once. “She’ll do.” The woman spun on Westgaard, demanding, “What happened to the fella?”

“She’s him,” Westgaard answered tersely.

The woman let out a squawk of laughter and concluded, “Well, I’ll be switched.” Then sobering abruptly, she thrust out her hand and pumped Linnea’s. “Just what this place needs. Never mind that son of mine I should’ve taught more manners. Since he didn’t bother to introduce us, I’m his ma, Mrs. Westgaard. You can call me Nissa.”

Her hand was all bones, but strong. “I’m Linnea Brandonberg. You can call me Linnea.”

“So,
Lin-nay-uh.”
She gave it an old country sound. “A good Norwegian name.”

They smiled at each other, but not for long. It was becoming apparent Nissa Westgaard never did anything for long. She moved like a sparrow, each new action abrupt and economical.
“Come on in.” She bustled up the path, yelping at her son, “Well, don’t just stand there, Teddy, get her things!”

“She ain’t stayin’.”

Linnea rolled her eyes toward heaven and thought, here we go again! But she was in for a surprise. Nissa Westgaard spun around and cuffed her son on the side of the neck with amazing force. “What you mean, she ain’t stay in’. She’s stayin’ all right, so you can just get them ideas out of your head. I know what you’re thinkin’, but this little gal is the new schoolteacher, and you better start watchin’ your manners around her or you’ll be cookin’ your own meals and washin’ your own duds around here! I can always go and live with John, you know!”

Linnea covered her mouth with a hand to hide the smile. It was like watching a banty rooster take on a bear. The top of Nissa’s head reached no higher than her son’s armpit, but when she lambasted him, he didn’t talk back. His face turned beet red and his jaw bulged. But before Linnea was allowed to watch any more of his discomfiture, the banty whirled around, grabbed her by an arm, and pulled her up the path. “Bull-headed, ornery thing!” she mumbled. “Lived too long without havin’ no woman around. Made him unfit for human company.”

It came to Linnea to say, “I couldn’t agree more,” but she wisely bit her tongue. It also occurred to Linnea that Nissa was a woman. But obviously, in these parts having a “woman” in the house did not mean living with your mother.

Nissa pushed Linnea through the open back door into a kitchen that smelled of vinegar. “It ain’t much, but it’s warm and dry, and with only three of us Westgaards livin’ here, you’ll have a room of your own, which is more than you’d have anyplace else around here.”

Linnea turned in surprise. “Three of you?”

“Didn’t he tell you about Kristian?”

Feeling a little disoriented from the woman’s ceaseless speed and authoritative tone, Linnea only shook her head.

“What’s the matter with that man! Kristian’s his boy, my grandson. He’s off cutting wheat. He’ll be in at suppertime.”

Linnea looked around for the missing link — the wife, the mother — but it appeared there was none. It also appeared she was not going to be told why.

“This here’s the kitchen. You’ve got to excuse the mess. I been puttin’ up watermelon pickles.” On a huge round oak
pedestal table fruit jars stood in rank and file, but Linnea scarcely had a chance to glimpse them before Nissa moved on through the room to another. “This is the front room. I sleep there.” She pointed to one doorway leading off it. “And that’s Teddy’s room. You and Kristian are upstairs.”

She led the way into the kitchen, and as they breezed through it to the doorway leading up, Linnea caught a glimpse of Theodore coming in with her suitcase. She turned her back on him and followed Nissa up a steep, narrow stairwell to the second floor. At the top was a cramped landing with matched double-cross doors leading both left and right. Her room was the one on the right.

Nissa opened the door and led the way inside.

It was the crudest room Linnea had ever seen. Nothing was pushed flush against the wall, for there were no walls, only the sharply pitched roof angling from its center ridgepole to the outer edges of the room. From underneath, the joists and beams and sub-roof were plainly visible, for the ceiling was neither plastered nor wainscoted. The only upright walls were the two triangular ones at either end of the room. But they, like the ceiling, were unfinished. Opposite the door, facing east, was a small four-paned window with white lace curtains tied back to the raw wood frame. Now, in late afternoon, the light coming through the panes was negligible, but from across the tiny landing the afternoon sun streamed through a matching window, warming Linnea’s room slightly.

The floor was covered with linoleum bearing a design of large pink cabbage roses on a dark-green background. It did not quite reach the edges of the room, leaving a border of wide, unfinished floor planks exposed. To the right of the door, crowded beneath the roof-angle, was a single bed with a white-painted iron frame, covered with a chenille bedspread of bright rose. Across its foot lay a folded patchwork quilt and on the linoleum beside it a homemade rag rug tied with green warp. Beside the bed, on a square table with turned legs, a kerosene lantern was centered upon a white crocheted doily. Pushed against the opposite roof-angle was a chest-high dresser draped with an embroidered dresser scarf of snowy white cotton edged with crocheted lace. In the corner left of the door, the wide black stovepipe came up from the kitchen below and continued out to the roof. Across the way, beside the window, was a low
stand holding a pitcher and bowl, with a door underneath that undoubtedly concealed the “nighttime facilities.” On the wall beside the washstand hung a mirror in a tin frame with an attached bar holding a length of white huck toweling. Next to the tiny window was an enormous oak rocker with green and pink calico cushions on its seat and back.

Linnea’s eyes moved from it to the rugged beams overhead, and she stifled her disappointment. Her own room at home was decorated with floral wallpaper and had two large windows facing two different directions. Every other spring her daddy gave the woodwork a fresh coat of ivory paint, and the oak floorboards were kept varnished until they shone. At home a large grate blew a steady stream of heat from the coal furnace, and down the hall was a newly installed bathroom with running water.

She looked at this raw-beamed, dark attic and searched for some comparison that would find it desirable. She glanced at the snowy-white dresser scarf and doily that were obviously starched and ironed with great meticulousness, at the hand-loomed and tied rug, at the linoleum that looked as if it had just been added for the new teacher, while beside her Nissa waited for some sign of approval.

“It’s... it’s so big!”

“Ya, big all right, but you’ll be bumpin’ your head on these rafters anyway.”

“It’s far bigger than my room at home, and I had to share that with my two sisters.”
If ever you wanted to be an actress, Linnea, this is the time.
Disguising her disappointment, she crossed the room, looking back over her shoulder. “Do you mind if I try this out?” Nissa crossed her hands over her stomach and looked pleased as Linnea sat on the padded chair and rocked widely, throwing her feet in the air. For added effect, she gave a little laugh, massaged the curved arms of the chair, and said truthfully enough, “At home, with three of us in one room, there wasn’t any space left over for rocking chairs.” She tilted her chin up to look back at the miniature window, as if overjoyed. “I won’t know what to do with all this privacy!” And she flung her arms wide.

By the time they headed downstairs again, Nissa was beaming with pride.

The kitchen was empty, but Theodore had left her suitcase
by the door. Glancing at it, Linnea felt disappointment well afresh. He hadn’t even the courtesy to offer to take it upstairs for her, as any gentleman would.

Nissa thoughtfully offered, but Linnea felt suddenly deflated by her dubious welcome into this home.

“Nissa, I don’t want to cause friction between you and your son. It might be better if—”

“Nonsense, girl! You leave my son to me!” And she would have taken the bag upstairs herself if Linnea hadn’t quickly done so.

Alone for the first time in the room under the rafters, she set the suitcase on the rag rug and dropped disconsolately onto the bed. Her throat constricted and her eyes suddenly stung.

He’s only one man. Only one crabby, bitter old man. I’m a qualified teacher, and an entire school board has approved me. Shouldn’t that mean more than his bigoted opinion?

But it hurt.

She’d had such dreams of how it would be when she got here: the open smiles, the welcoming handshakes, the respect — ah, that she wanted most, for at age eighteen she felt she had truly earned the right to be honored not only as a teacher but as an adult. Now here she sat, blubbering like an idiot because the welcome she’d received hadn’t matched her expectations. Well, that’s what you get for letting yourself be carried away with all your silly imagining. Tears blurred the outline of her suitcase and the cabbage roses and the homemade rag rug.

You had to spoil it, didn’t you, Theodore Westgaard?

But I’ll show you.

I’ll show you!

2

T
HE LITTLE MISSY
was still upstairs when Theodore stalked out of the house and headed back for the fields. Women! he thought. The only thing worse than having one of them around was having a pair. And what a pair he had now!

He was infuriated by the way his mother had treated him in front of the girl, but what choice did he have except to stand there and take it? And how much longer would he have to put up with her bossing him around? His face burned yet with embarrassment.

She didn’t have no right to humiliate him that way! He was a full-grown man, thirty-four years old. And as for her old threat about moving in with John — he wished to high heaven she would!

But at John’s house there’d be nobody to butt heads with, and she knew it.

Still disgruntled, Theodore reached the place where two figures, guiding two teams, could be seen in the distance, moving wheat. He paused and waited at the end of a windrow. There was a measure of ease to be found in watching John and Kristian change the profile of the field. The whirling blades of the sickles sliced away at the thick stand of grain, which appeared burnished gold on top, tarnished along its hewn edge.
They cut parallel swaths, with John’s rig slightly in the lead, Kristian’s close behind, forming a steplike pattern on the edge of the grain as they crept along at a steady, relentless pace.

In time the pair became dots on the horizon, then swung about, returning in Theodore’s direction, growing more distinct with each strenuous step the horses made. As they drew closer, he could hear the soft clatter of the wooden sickle bars as they met the bed knife. He watched the stalks topple, and inhaled — nothing sweeter than sweet wheat drying in the sun.

Sweet, too, was the price it would bring this fall. With the war on in Europe, each grain was pure gold in more than just color. Standing in the molten sunlight, watching the reapers bring it down, Theodore thought it a sacrilege that something so beautiful should end up in something so ugly as war. They said the day would come when that wheat might feed Yankee soldiers, but not the way things were going. Though American training camps bulged with restless recruits, word had it they had neither uniforms nor guns. Instead they drilled in civilian clothes armed with broomsticks. And with people all over the country singing songs like “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier,” it seemed the only war Theodore had to worry about was the one between himself and that young whippersnapper of a teacher.