Years (67 page)

There was a barn dance at their place Saturday night, and Teddy and Linnea spent the first hour laughing and dancing with everybody in the place but each other. Teddy slugged down two beers, eyeing her over the beer glass most of the time, thinking how pretty she looked pregnant. Some women got dowdy and washed-out looking when they were carrying babies. Not his wife. She glowed like someone had lit a candle inside her cheeks. He screwed up his courage to cross the hayloft and ask her to dance, and after several minutes, made his move. Before he reached her, his palms were sweating again.

With feined jocularity, he paused beside her, hooked his thumbs in his waistband and raised one eyebrow. “So what do you say, you wanna dance?”

She flicked him a glance of unadulterated feline haughtiness, shifted it pointedly to Isabelle Lawler, and replied, “No, thank you.” Then, with a slight lift of her nose, she turned away.

So he danced with Isabelle. And one hell of a lot more than four times!

Linnea tried not to watch them. But Teddy was the best darn dancer in the county, and every corpuscle in her body was bulging with jealousy. Thankfully, Nissa offered an escape.

“Think I overdid it with the homemade wine,” she said. “Either that or the spinning or both, but I feel a little dizzy. Would you walk me to the house, Linnea?”

Naturally, Linnea complied. Halfway there, Nissa took up reminiscing in an offhand manner, “I ‘member once when my man brung home this new rag rug. I says to him, what you wanna go buy a rug for when I can make ‘em myself? What you wanna waste your money on a thing like that for? He smiles and says he thought it’d be nice one time, me not having to make a rug, but just flop it down on the floor already warped, woofed, and tied. But me, I got mad at him cause one o’ the boys — I can’t remember which one — was near out of his shoes. Should’ve got new boots for the boy, I says, instead of throwin’ your money away on rag rugs. He said there was a widow woman with two young ones peddling her rugs in town that day and he thought it’d help her out if he bought that rug.” Nissa sniffed once. “Me, well, I asks, what you doin’ talkin’ to widow women, and he says I might be his wife, but that don’t give me the right to tell him who he can and can’t talk to. So I asks who this widow woman was, and he tells me, and I recall these several times we was all at a barn-raising together and how he’d talked and laughed with her some, and my hackles got up and before you know it I asks how she’s gettin’ on without her husband, and where she’s livin’ now. And, by Jove, if he can’t answer every one of my questions. And pretty soon I’m telling him I don’t want his blame rag rug, not if he got it from her! As I recall, we didn’t speak to one another for over a week that time. Rag rug laid on the floor and I refused to put a foot onto it, and he refused to pick it up and take it away.

“Then one day I went to town and happened to run into her on the street. She’d got tuberculosis and coughed all the time and was nothin’ but a bag of bones, and when she saw me she says how grateful she was that my man bought that rug from her, and how one of her little ones had needed a pair of boots so bad, and when she sold that rug, she’d been able to buy em.”

Linnea and Nissa had reached the back door by this time, but the older woman stood on the steps a moment, looking up
at the stars. “Learned a thing or two that time. Learned that a man’s heart can get broke if he’s accused when he ain’t guilty, Learned that some men got hearts o’ gold, and gold, it don’t tarnish. But gold... well, it’s soft. It dents easy. Woman’s got to be careful not to put too many dents in a heart like that.” Nissa chortled softly to herself, turned toward the door, and opened it but hesitated a moment before stepping inside. “As I recall, the night I finally told him I was sorry, he laid me down on that rag rug on the floor and put a couple rug burns on m’ hind quarters... hmm... still got that old rug around here someplace. In a trunk, I think, with my wedding dress and a watch fob I braided for him out of my own hair when I was sixteen years old.” She shook her head, touched her brow. “Land, lookin’ up like that makes a person dizzier than ever.” Without glancing back, she continued into the house. “Well, good night, child.”

Linnea was left with a lump in her throat and a thick feeling in her chest. She glanced toward the barn. The apricot lanternlight shone dimly through the windows. The distant strains of concertina and fiddle music drifted dimly through the night. Go to him, it seemed to say.

She glanced in the opposite direction. Nestled beside the caragana hedge the bulky form of the cook wagon hovered like a threatening shadow. The moon, like a half-slice of shaved cheese, threw its light across the yard while the night breeze played the dried seedpods of the caragana bushes like tiny drums. But it’s he who should be apologizing, they seemed to say. He’s the one who’s dancing with somebody else.

Dully, she went inside and climbed the stairs to her old room once more, then lay beneath the covers, cold and lonely.

Each night she’d expected Theodore to come to her. She’d lain and imagined him opening the door silently, standing in the shadows and looking at her sleeping form, men kneeling beside the bed to awaken her, press his face to her neck, her breast, her stomach, and say, “I’m sorry, Lin, please come back.”

But this was the eighth day and still he had not come. And he was down in the barn jigging with another woman while his pregnant wife lay in tears. Why, Teddy, why?

She was determined to stay awake until the dance ended and the wagons pulled out of the yard, then watch through the
window to see if he came straight to the house. But in the end she fell asleep and heard nothing.

In the morning she awakened as if touched, her eyelids parting like two halves of a sliced melon. Something was wrong. She listened. No sound. Not so much as a tinkle of silverware or the crackle of an expanding stovepipe. Stretching an arm she found her watch on the table. Why wasn’t Nissa up at seven-fifteen? Church would begin in less than two hours.

She heard footsteps on the stairs just as her heels touched the floor. Without wasting time on a wrapper she flung the door wide and met Theodore on the landing, his eyes dark with worry, hair tousled from sleep.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Ma. She’s sick.”

“Sick? You mean from blackberry wine?” Even as she spoke, Linnea was following Theodore down the stairs in her bare feet.

“I don’t think so. It’s chills and congestion.”

“Chills and congestion?” Linnea’s skin prickled as she rushed to keep up with Theodore. At the bottom of the steps she grabbed the shoulder of his underwear, swinging him to an abrupt halt. “Bad congestion?”

His eyes and cheeks appeared gaunt with concern.

“I think so.”

“Is it... ” After one false start she managed to get the dread word past her lips. “... the influenza?”

He found her hand, clutched it hard. “Let’s hope not.”

But that hope was dashed when the doctor was summoned from town. When he left, a yellow and black quarantine sign was tacked on the back door, and Theodore and Linnea were given instructions that neither of them was to enter Nissa’s room without a mask tied over both nose and mouth. The two stared at each other in disbelief. The influenza struck soldiers in the trenches and people in crowded cities, not North Dakota farmers with an endless supply of pure air to breathe. And certainly not old bumblebees like Nissa Westgaard who buzzed between one task and the next so fast it seemed no germ could catch up with her. Not Nissa, who only last night had been tippling wine and dancing the two-step with her boys. Not Nissa, who rarely even contracted a common cold.

But they were wrong.

Before the day was over Nissa’s respiratory system was already filling with fluids. Her breathing became strident and chills racked her body, unmitigated by the quinine water they periodically forced her to drink. Theodore and Linnea watched helplessly as her condition worsened with fearful rapidity. They sponged and fed her, kept her propped up with pillows, and took turns sitting watch. But by the end of the first day it seemed they were fighting a losing battle. They sat at the kitchen table, disconsolately staring at the servings of soup neither of them felt like eating, their hands idle beside their bowls.

Their worried gazes locked and their own differences seemed inconsequential. He covered her hand on the red and white checked oilcloth.

“So fast,” he said throatily.

She turned her hand over and their fingers interlocked. “I know.”

“And there’s nothing we can do.”

“We can keep sponging her and feeding her the quinine. Maybe during the night she’ll take a turn for the better.” But they both suspected it was wishful thinking. The influenza preyed first upon the very old, the very weak, and the very young. Few of them who contracted it survived.

Theodore stared at their joined hands, rubbing his thumb over Linnea’s. “I wish I could get you out of here where you’d be safe.”

“I’m fine. I don’t even have a sniffle.”

“But the baby... ”

“The baby’s fine, too. Now you mustn’t worry about us.”

“You’ve put in a long day. I want you to rest.”

“But so have you.”

“I’m not the pregnant one, now will you do as I say?”

“The dishes... ”

“Leave ‘em. I can see you’re ready to tip off that chair. Now, come on.” He tugged her hand, led her to their bedroom, turned the bed down, sat her on the edge of it, then knelt to remove her shoes. His tender consideration wrenched her heart, and as she looked down at the top of his head it seemed she could scarcely contain her love and concern for him. He had suffered the loss of a beloved brother; his son was off fighting
a war; must he now watch his mother die, too?

When her second shoe was off, Theodore held her foot, caressing it while raising his eyes to hers.

“Linnea, about Isabelle—”

She silenced his lips with a loving touch. “It doesn’t matter. I was stupid and childish and jealous, but you’ve got enough on your mind without worrying about that now.”

“But I... ”

“We’ll talk about it later... after Nissa gets well.”

He tucked her in lovingly, securing the quilts beneath her chin, then sitting beside her on the edge of the bed. With hands braced on either side of her head, he leaned above her, studying her face as if in it he found the strength he needed.

“I want to kiss you so bad.” But he couldn’t; not while there was influenza in the house. He could only look at her and rue the past week of idiocy that had kept them alienated, that had made him do foolish things to hurt her when she was the last person in the world he wanted to hurt.

“I know. I want to kiss you, too.”

“I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, and it feels so good to be back in our bed again.”

He smiled, wishing he could crawl in beside her and snuggle tight behind her with his hand cradling their moving child. But Ma was in the next room and she’d been untended long enough.

“Sleep now.”

“Wake me up if there’s any change.”

He nodded, rested a palm on her stomach, turned off the lantern, and left.

Nissa’s lungs filled with fluid and she died on the third day. Before the undertaker’s wagon could come to bear her body away, Linnea’s worst fears were realized: Teddy was stricken with the dread virus. She was left alone to nurse him, to mourn, and to worry, locked in a house with nobody to spell her bedside vigils or comfort her in her grief. Already depleted from three days of little sleep and weighted by despair, she was near exhaustion when a loud banging sounded on the door and Isabelle Lawler’s voice came through. “Mrs. Westgaard, I’m comin’ in!”

Linnea called, “But you can’t, we’re under quarantine.”

The door burst open and the redhead pushed inside. “Makes no difference to a tough old buffalo like me. Now you need help and I’m the one’s gonna give it to you. Lawsy, child, you look like that undertaker should’ve toted you off, too. You had any sleep? You eat?”

“I... ”

The brazen woman didn’t give Linnea time to answer. “Set down there. How’s Ted?”

“He’s... his breaming isn’t too bad yet.”

“Good. I can poke quinine down him just as easy as you can, but you got his young one to take care of and if I let somethin’ happen to it or to you, I’m afraid I’d lose my cookin’ job around here, years to come, so step back, chittlin’.” While she spoke, Isabelle shrugged out of a heavy, masculine jacket. Linnea got up as if to take it.

“Set down, I said! You need a good meal under your belt and I’m just the one to see it gets there. I’m the best durn cook this side of the Black Hills, so don’t give me no sass, sister. You just tell me what needs doin’ for him, and how often, and if you’re worried about me seein’ him in his altogether, well, I seen him that way before, and you know it, so I ain’t gonna blush like no schoolgirl and cover my eyes. And if you’re thinkin’ I got designs on your man, well, you can put that out of your head, too. What was between us is finished. He ain’t the least bit interested in no loud, sassy moose like me, so where’s the quinine and what would you like to eat?”

Thus the audacious Isabelle dug in for the duration.

She was nothing short of a heaven-sent blessing to Linnea. She mothered and pampered her with continued bumptiousness, and took her turns seeing after Theodore’s needs with equal brashness. She was the most flagrantly bold woman Linnea had ever met, but her very outspokenness often made Linnea laugh, and kept her spirits up. Isabelle blew through the house like a hurricane, her rusty hair ever standing on end, her mannish voice loud even when she whispered. Linnea was utterly grateful to have her there. It was as if she forced the fates to accept her zest for life and to transfer a good bit of it to the ailing Theodore.

When he was at his worst, the two women sat together at his bedside, and oddly enough, Linnea felt totally comfortable, even knowing that in her own way, Isabelle loved Theodore.
His breathing was labored and his skin bright with fever.

“Damn man ain’t gonna die,” Isabelle announced, “cause I ain’t gonna let him. He’s got you and the young one to see after and he won’t be shirking his duty.”