Watching the expression on Nissa’s face, Linnea could see and hear it all. Then Nissa looked up, caught herself woolgathering, and dropped her hand from her heart to the handle of her cup. She sniffed, as if to clear more than just her nose.
“Well, she was there on the train somewhere, Melinda was. Her pa was on the McKinley/Roosevelt campaign committee and her ma was dead, so she went everywhere with him. As it turns out, they stayed in Williston for more than a whistlestop. Seems there was some rich fellow there by the name of Hagens who had donated plenty to the campaign, and there was a regular rally where the farmers could have a chance to talk to the candidates and pin ‘em down to some promises. Afterwards there was a dinner at the Manitou and they spread all of McKinley’s key people around at the tables to answer questions, and Melinda and her pa ended up at our table.
“I don’t remember much about it and maybe it was Hjalmar’s and my fault for not payin’ much mind to them young people, but he was busy talkin’ politics and I was gettin’ my eye full of that fancy hotel. I do remember there was a band playin’ again and once I nudged Hjalmar’s shoulder and said ‘Would you look at there,’ because lo and behold, there was our Teddy dancing with that young girl. Course Hjalmar, he was caught up in arguing the goods and bads of Mr. Roosevelt’s new civil service system, and I don’t just remember what time it was but our Teddy he comes and tells us he and the young lady are going out for a walk. Sure, I was surprised, but Teddy, he was seventeen, after all.”
Linnea tried to imagine Theodore at seventeen, but could not. She tried to imagine Theodore dancing, but could not. She tried to imagine him taking a young woman out for a walk with her hand on his arm, but could not. Having seen only his irascible side, these pictures seemed out of character.
“But seventeen or not, that boy had us in a tizzy fit before mornin’. We waited and we waited, and we checked with Melinda’s pa, but she wasn’t back either, and it wasn’t till nearly five in the mornin’ them two got back and when they come down the hall they was holdin’ hands.” Nissa peered over the tops of her glasses and crossed her arms over her chest. “Now, you ever seen what it’s like when a weasel sashays into a hen house? That’s about what it was like when we caught sight of them two in that hall. There was feathers flyin’ in all directions, and some of ‘em was from me. Granted, I was doin’ my share of dressin’ down, but, lord, I never heard such bawlin’ and screamin’ and shoutin’ as when Melinda’s pa hauled her off into their room down the hall, flingin’ accusations at her. She was yowlin’ fit to kill and claimin’ they’d done nothin’ to be ashamed of and that if she lived in a house and stayed put like other girls she wouldn’t have to stay out all night to make new friends.” Nissa rubbed her mouth, staring at the cold coffee in her cup. “I never asked where they was all that time, nor what they done. Truth to tell, I don’t think I wanted to know. We hauled Teddy into our room and slammed the door while that girl was actin’ like a wildcat in the hall yet, and heads was poppin’ out of doors. Land, it was awful.”
Nissa sighed. “Well, we thought that was the end of it and we hauled Teddy out of there in the mornin’ without settin’ eyes on Melinda again. But don’t you know it wasn’t a week later she showed up at my kitchen door, bold as brass — we was livin’ in John’s place then. That was the home place up there — said she wanted to see Teddy and would I please tell her where she could find him.” Nissa shook her head disbelievingly. “I can see her yet, with that face lookin’ like she wouldn’t have the spunk to ask for second helpings, standin’ there on my doorstep demanding to see my boy — it never fit, how she acted then and how she turned out to be. Guess it was just one of them crazy times of life some of us goes through when we’re chafin’ at the bit and think it’s time to cut the apron strings.”
Nissa faded off into memory again, pondering silently.
“What happened?” Linnea encouraged.
Nissa looked up, drew a deep sigh, and went on. “What happened is she marched right out there into the field where Teddy was cuttin’ wheat with Hjalmar and the boys, and she says she had decided to come here and marry him after all, just like they talked about. Now, I never asked, but it appeared to me her showin’ up sayin’ that was as much of a surprise to Teddy as it was to the rest of us. But he never let on, and with a face like Melinda’s, it was easy to see he was knocked off his pins.
“They married all right, and fast. Hjalmar, he give them this land here, and all the boys put up this house for them. We all wondered how it’d work out, but we hoped for the best. It come out later how she’d been fightin’ with her pa about travelin’ on the train with him, and I reckon what was actually behind it was she was nothin’ more than a young girl being told to do one thing and decidin’, by lizzie, she wasn’t gonna be told what to do.
“So she married my boy. But she never suited.” Nissa shook her head slowly. “Never. She was a city girl, and what she wanted with a farm boy I never could understand. First thing you know she got in a family way, and I can see her yet, standin’ at the window staring at the wheat, sayin’ it was drivin’ her crazy. Lord, how she used to cuss that wheat. Trees, she said, there wasn’t no trees out here. And no sound, she said. The sun gave her rashes and the flies drove her crazy and the smell of the barnyard give her headaches. How Teddy ever thought a woman like that could be a farm wife, I’ll never know. Why, she had no sense about raisin’ gardens — didn’t like gettin’ her fingernails dirty, didn’t know how to put up vegetables.” Nissa made a sound of humorless disdain: “P’chee.” Again she shook her head, crossed her arms. “A woman like that,” she ended, as if still mystified by her son’s choice.
“I seen it happenin’, but there wasn’t nothin’ I could do. Teddy, he was so happy when she first come here. And when he found out there was a baby comin’, why, that boy was in his glory. But little by little her complainin’ turned to silence, and she started actin’ like she was gettin’ a little tetched. At first, after Kristian was born, I could see she tried to be a good mother, but it was no good. Teddy never said so, but Clara used to come down here and play with the baby, and she’d come home and tell us how Melinda cried all the time. Never quit cryin’, but what could he do about it? He couldn’t change all that wheatland into woods. He couldn’t put no city in the middle of this here farmyard for her.
“And then one day she just up and left. Left a note sayin’ to tell Kristian she loved him and she was sorry, but I never saw it, nor did I ask to. It was Clara told me about it.” Again her thoughts trailed off.
“And you took care of Kristian after that?”
A new sadness came into Nissa’s eyes. “Me and Clara did. You see, my man, my Hjalmar, he’d died that year. We’d been up to church one spring evenin’ to help with the graveyard cleanin’ like we always did every spring. We come home and was standin’ just outside the kitchen door and I remember Hjalmar had his hands in his pockets and he looked up at the first star comin’ out and he says to me, he says, ‘Nissa, we got lots to be thankful for. It’s gonna be a clear day tomorrow,’ and just like that he pitches over and falls dead on our doorstep. He always used to say to me, Nissa, I want to die workin’, and you know, he got his wish. He worked right up to the very hour he died at my feet. No pain. No sufferin’. Just a man counting his blessings. Now, I ask you, what more could a woman ask for than to see her man die a beautiful death like that?”
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 Kristi
an 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.”