Years (60 page)

Frantic, close to shock himself, Theodore felt tears of desperation form in his eyes. If they coursed down his face, he couldn’t tell, for his cheeks were long since numb. “Goddammit, John, you can’t die! I won’t let you! Now get in!”

Finally, realizing John was incapable of making decisions, or of moving, Theodore rolled him off his knees and pushed him back, stood over him, and wedged the carcass open. “Double up. You’ll fit if you roll up in a tight ball.” The strain was immense, lifting the dead weight. Theodore’s arms trembled and his knees quaked. If John didn’t move soon, it would be too late.

Just when he thought he’d have to let go, John clenched his knees and backed in. A pathetic whimper sounded, but Theodore had no time to waste.

Gutting the second horse was more difficult man the first,
for his energy had been sapped. Steel-willed, he struggled on, shutting out the smell and the sight of steam rising from the entrails in the snow and the sound of John’s whimpers. Once he had to rest, near exhaustion, hands supporting himself, head drooping’. The knife blade broke on a bone and he gave up the fight, unable to labor any longer. Through a dizzy haze, he crawled toward the life-giving warmth, but when he was struggling to get inside, his mind grew lucid for several seconds, and he finally remembered what it was that he had to tell Linnea.

On hands and knees he crawled through the snow, groping for the broken knife, taking it with him as he pulled himself underneath the wagon one last time.

Lying on his back in the murk, he pictured the letters, just as she’d taught them,
L
is for
lutefisk.
I
is for ice.
N
is for — he couldn’t remember what
N
was for, but he need not know. By now he could spell her name by heart.

“Lin,” he carved blindly, “I’m sorry.”

His ears buzzed. His head felt ten times its size. Somebody was crawling through the snow on bloody hands. Now why would anybody want to do a thing like that? On leaden limbs he reached his destination, unaware of the miasma or the gore or the fact that he tore his shirt and scraped both his belly and back as he squeezed inside. There, emotionally and physically exhausted, he lost consciousness.

In the school building six miles up the road a child rubbed her tear-filled eyes and wailed, “But I don’t
like
raith-inth.”

Linnea, her own eyes rimmed with red, forced patience into her voice and soothed Roseanne when all she wanted to do was cry herself. “Just eat them, honey. They’re all we have.”

When Roseanne toddled away still sniffling over her handful of sticky raisins, Linnea wearily pulled the bell rope again, then clung to it with both hands, eyes closed, forehead resting against the scratchy sisal while the woeful
clong-g-g
resounded like a dirge. Outside the wind picked up the shivering sound and carried it over the white countryside. One minute later it carried another... then another... and another...

23

T
HE BLIZZARD LASTED
twenty-eight hours. In that time, eighteen inches of snow fell. The children were rescued just before dark on the second day by men on snowshoes, pulling toboggans. The first one to reach the school was Lars Westgaard. He rammed his snowshoes into a drift, opened the door and met a circle of relieved faces, three of them — his own children’s — tearfully happy.

But as he held Roseanne, clinging to him like a monkey, and petted the heads of Norna and Skipp who hugged close, he met the haunted eyes of Linnea, waiting beside Kristian.

“Theodore and John?” she asked quietly.

He could only shake his head regretfully.

A sick, rolling sensation gripped her stomach and panic girthed her chest. She interlaced her fingers with Kristian’s, squeezing hard and meeting his young, worried eyes.

“They’re probably sitting at someone’s place in town, worrying about us more than we’re worrying about them.”

Kristian swallowed pronouncedly and muttered, “Yeah... probably.” But neither of them were convinced.

The other fathers straggled in, stomping off snow, and wanned themselves by the fire. When all had arrived, search plans were made, then the fire was banked and the little
schoolhouse closed. Someone had brought a spare toboggan and snowshoes for Linnea. Dressed in someone else’s coat, scarf, and mittens, she was pulled home by Kristian.

Already the air was mellowing. In the western sky the red-gold eye of the sun squinted through purple clouds, sending long spans of gilt streaking across the transformed world. The shadows on the downside of the snowdrifts were the same deep purple as the westerly clouds that were already breaking and separating, shedding more sunny shafts and promising a clear day tomorrow.

They made a mournful little caravan, four toboggans pulled by Ulmer, Lars, Trigg, and Kristian, with Raymond walking beside. It had been decided, in the interest of expedience, that the Westgaard children would all be taken to Nissa’s, which was closest, so the men could set out immediately on their grim errand. Even on the short walk home they were alert, watchful, each of them carrying a long cane pole, occasionally stopping to pierce a drift in several places. Each time, Linnea watched the latticed tracks of their snowshoes create cross-stitches on the snow, listened to their low, murmuring voices, and dreaded what they might find. She gazed in horrified fascination at the depth to which the cane poles sank and, holding her stomach as if to protect her unborn child from worry, said a silent prayer.

Poor Kristian. She herself was weary beyond anything she’d ever imagined, and he must be, too. Yet he stalwartly moved with his uncles over the suspicious-looking hillocks, watching while the poles disappeared again and again into the snow, leaving it pock-marked. Each time he returned to her toboggan, resignedly picked up the rope, and high-stepped behind the others, the sleds whining a mournful lament against the pristine surface of the snow.

When they reached Nissa’s house the men had to shovel a drift from the back door. They worked to the continuous bawling of the cattle who stood near the barn in snowdrifts, with painfully bulging bags, waiting to be milked since last night at this time. But the cattle were ignored in light of the much greater urgency.

It was clear that Nissa hadn’t slept at all. It was equally clear that she was one of those who functions well under stress, whose thought processes clarify in direct proportion to the
necessity for clear thinking. She had gear all packed: quilts tied into tight bundles like jellyrolls; steaming coffee and soup in fruit jars bound with burlap; sandwiches wrapped in oilcloth; bricks in the oven and hot coals ready to be scooped into tins. Though her face appeared haggard, her movements were brisk and autocratic as she scurried about the kitchen, getting the boys outfitted and prepared to move out again. Recognizing the value of time, they wasted little of it on useless consternation. The only pause came when Kristian and Raymond insisted on going along. The men exchanged glances, but to their credit included them. “You sure?” Ulmer asked.

“My pa is out there,” Kristian answered tersely.

“And I go with Kristian,” Raymond stated unequivocally.

With Ulmer’s nod, it was decided. Within minutes after their arrival, the men were gone again.

Nissa neither fretted nor watched them snowshoe away. Instead, she turned her attention to her grandchildren, for whom she’d prepared a pot of thick chicken noodle soup. There was fresh bread, too, and a batch of fresh-fried
fattigman,
evidence that she’d remained industrious during her worried hours alone.

How Linnea admired the scuttling little hen. No taller than her eight-year-old grandsons, Nissa didn’t slow down a bit. She moved like heat lightning, rarely smiling. Yet all seven children instinctively knew she loved them as she tended to their needs and they babbled about their night at the schoolhouse.

Somehow Roseanne’s voice could be heard above all the others, shrill and lisping. “And Grandma, gueth what! Aunt Linnea made me eat raith-inth, and I
did
it! I can’t wait to tell Mama.” Her mobile face suddenly drooped. “But I lotht my lunch pail and Mama’th gonna thpank me for thure.”

The jabber continued as soup bowls were emptied and refilled. When the children were stuffed, they seemed to droop in unison, and within minutes were asleep on the two downstairs beds.

The house quieted. From outside came the sound of snow melting off the roof, dripping rhythmically, even though the sun had gone down.

Nissa gripped the tops of both knees as if to navigate herself up from the hard kitchen chair. Her faded skirt drooped between her thighs like a hammock. She looked as if a deep sigh would
have done her a world of good, but instead she sounded stern.

“Well, I guess I better try to give them cows some relief.”

“I’ll help you,” Linnea offered.

“Don’t think so. Milkin’ cows is harder’n it looks.”

“Well, I’d like to try, at least.”

“Suit yourself.” Nissa donned her outerwear without the slightest hint of self-pity. If a thing’s got to be done, it’s got to be done, her attitude seemed to say. For Linnea there was great reassurance in sticking close to the stubbornly determined little woman.

Dressed in Theodore’s and Kristian’s outsized overalls, they trudged through the snowdrifts to the barn.

Milking, as Nissa had declared, was “hardn’n it looked.” Linnea was a total flop at it. So while Nissa milked, Linnea shoveled a path between the barn and the house. Together they carried the white frothing pails up, cleaned the children’s soup bowls, then faced the dismal task of waiting with idle hands.

Nissa filled hers. She found a fresh skein of yarn and sat in the kitchen rocker, winding it into a ball. The rocker creaked in rhythm with her winding. Outside the sky was the color of a grackle’s wing. Stars came out, and a moon thin as a scimitar blade. Not a breeze stirred, as if the last twenty-eight hours had never happened.

The rocker creaked on.

Linnea tried knitting, but couldn’t seem to keep her hands steady enough to make smooth stitches. She glanced at the woman in the rocker. Nissa’s blue-veined hands with their thin, shiny skin worked mechanically, winding the dark-blue yarn. It was the same color as the cap she’d knit for Teddy at Christmas. Was she thinking of that cap now, packed away in mothballs along with all of Theodore’s and John’s other woolen clothes?

“Nissa?”

The old woman looked over her spectacles, rocking, winding.

“I want you to know, I’m carrying Teddy’s baby.”

They both knew why Linnea had told her — if Teddy didn’t make it, his child would. But Nissa only replied, “Then you oughtn’t to have shoveled all that snow.”

At that moment Roseanne toddled to the kitchen doorway, nibbing her eyes and her stomach. “Grandma, I got a thtomach
ache. I think I ate too much thoop.”

The blue yarn lost all importance. “Come, Rosie, come to Grandma.” The drowsy-eyed child padded into her grandma’s open arms and let herself be gathered onto the warm, cushioned lap and settled beneath a downy chin. The old bones of the rocker creaked quietly into the room.

“Grandma, tell me about when you was a little girl in Norway.”

For long minutes only the chair spoke. Then Nissa started recollecting the story that had obviously been told and retold through the years, in terms sometimes strange to Linnea’s ears.

“My papa was a crofter, a big strong man with hands as horny as hooves. We lived in a fine little glade. Our house and byre was strung together under a green-turfed roof and sometimes in spring violets blossomed right there on the—”

“I know, Grandma,” Rosie interrupted. “Right there on the roof.”

“That’s right,” Nissa continued. “Some wouldn’t call it much, but it had a firm floor that was always fresh-washed and Mama made me go out and collect fresh green sprays of juniper to spread on it after she swept. And at our front door was a fjord... ” Nissa looked down. “You ‘member what a fjord is, don’t you?”

“A lake.”

“That’s right, a lake, and at our back door was the purple mountains. Up a hill toward the woods and marshes was the village of Lindegaard. Sometimes Papa would take us there and we’d dress in dark homespun and the men wore plush hats, and off we’d go, maybe at Whitsuntide when the spinneys on the hills was only just tinged with pale green and the bare fields smelled like manure and the night never got darker than pale blue. And that was because Norway is called... “Nissa waited.