Believing the Dream (3 page)

Blessing, North Dakota
December 1893

“I miss Agnes so much, I . . .” Ingeborg Bjorklund shook her head.

Penny, her sister-in-law, nodded. “Me too.” Penny lifted long-awaited baby Gustaf to her shoulder for a burp. Penny’s hair, straight as wheat and just as golden, was braided and coiled at the back of her head. “How she would have loved holding this one. No one loved babies like Agnes. I always thought Tante Agnes would be here forever.” Penny leaned her cheek against her baby’s head, the near white hair almost invisible. She raised tear-filled blue eyes. “She was too young to die yet.”

“Ja, and too broken to live.” Ingeborg had listened to her dear friend talk of heaven and the glories there. While the rest of them had not been ready to let her go, Agnes had looked only forward, bit by bit fading from this life, preparing for the next.

Ingeborg wiped her eyes. What a paradox, to be so happy for her friend who’d gone home and yet miss her so terribly. “You remember when you all first came here? You so young and lovely even then, with a smile fit to charm the birds from the trees. The boys and Thorliff were friends from the first moment. When Joseph said he guessed this was as good a place to settle as any, I wanted to sing and dance. Had no idea Agnes would become the best friend I could ever have.”

“Ja, and we’ve done a lot of singing and dancing. Weddings and harvest parties. I know Tante said so many times she was glad the wandering bug went on and left them behind.”

Ingeborg heard Andrew’s whistle for Paws. “School’s out.”

“Eh, how the time does fly when we’re together.” Penny looked around the kitchen, the yellow-and-white-checked curtains at the windows, the braided rag rugs on the floor. “Your place is so welcoming, like someone with arms wide open. Every time I come, I go home feeling rested.” Penny shook her head. “Strange and wonderful.”

“That’s because at home you are always listening for the tinkle of the bell over the door to the store. Customers coming and going.” Even before she and Hjelmer were married, Penny opened her store by the railroad tracks. Now it was famous for selling everything a family needed, including Singer sewing machines.

“True. How is that new student of Kaaren’s doing? Hjelmer said he never saw one so angry as George McBride.”

Ingeborg, aproned from shoulder to ankle in white, brushed a tendril of hair from her cheek. She wore her hair long and braided like so many of the local women and coiled around the rear top of her head like a halo without the shine.

“Hjelmer said that? When did he see him?”

“He and Olaf were out to Kaaren’s school, measuring for some new desks. All hers are for children, not big enough for a grown man like this new fella.”

“Did he talk to him or what?” Sitting back down at the oak table, Ingeborg pushed the plate of molasses cookies down to her guest. The teakettle sang its own tune on the back of the stove where a pot of stew perfumed the house.

“A bit. He’s hard to communicate with, but Mr. McBride reads lips some. Since we all learned sign language along with Kaaren for Grace, I forget that others don’t have that advantage. Uff da, the things we take for granted.”

The baby started to fuss a bit, so Ingeborg reached for him and crisscrossed the cozy kitchen, jiggling the baby and crooning to him at the same time. How she would love to have a baby again, but God hadn’t seen fit to bless them that way. She’d carried a resentment in her heart for several years until one time she and Agnes had a real crying session over their lack of conceiving and decided to give up hoping. While Agnes’s last baby had been stillborn, Ingeborg lost hers early on in a runaway accident in the fields. They’d both decided to forgive themselves and accept God’s forgiveness too.

She could hear Agnes, plain as if she sat right where Penny was sitting like she so often had.
“Not like we can do anything now, and God in his mercy knows best. Fighting against God is a real waste of time, you know?”
This time Ingeborg used baby Gustaf’s gown for a crying towel.

“Mor.” Eleven-year-old Andrew and Astrid, only eight, burst through the door. “There’s a letter from Thorliff. Read it quick.” They grinned at their guest, matching blue eyes sparkling with delight. “Hi, Tante Penny.”

Astrid stopped in front of her mother and reached out a finger for Gustaf to clutch. “Hi, baby. You sure look happy.” She moved her finger in a circle, then tickled Gustaf under his chin as his smile widened.

“Oh, good. I’d like to hear that, and then I must get on home,” Penny said. “If the mail is out, Mr. Valders is right busy.” Anner Valders worked in the bank and the store, since an accident during harvest took part of his arm.

Ingeborg handed back the now cooing baby and, with a knife, slit open the envelope, taking care so she could use the inside of the envelope for writing paper. She sat down at the table and unfolded the precious page from her eldest child.

“My dear family,

Thank you for the letters, which mean so much to me. I feel a world away instead of only a few hundred miles. I’m sorry to hear there has been no rain, but if you have as much snow as we do, there will be moisture in the earth for spring seeding. I read the
Farmers’ Almanac
here in the library, and it says that 1894 will have more rain. The sad thing is, it says there will be more flooding due to heavy snows.”

“How can a book predict weather way ahead like that?” Andrew, already taller than his five-foot-seven mother, set the cookie jar on the table.

“I don’t know, but I’ve heard it is pretty reliable. Someone at the Grange swears by it.” Ingeborg looked up from her reading and shook her head when Andrew came up with a handful of cookies. “One at a time, please.”

Astrid nudged her brother. “Oink, oink.”

He nudged her back, none too gently.

“If you two will settle down, I will read some more.” Ingeborg waited, then resumed. She read about Thorliff ’s contest for the newspaper and the stories that were already being sent in and how there had been a skating party at the school.

“We had a huge bonfire on the shore of a small pond, well frozen, and someone brought out a hockey puck, so we used brooms to sweep it back and forth. Our team won, but not because I made any goals.”

“We need to make a pond by the barn like we used to.” Andrew dunked his cookie in the cup of coffee he’d laced with cream and sugar. “That was fun.”

“Keep reading, Mor.” Astrid, braids tied with blue ribbons that matched her eyes, leaned over her mother’s shoulder.

“Ah, this part is for me.” Ingeborg read silently for a bit, then continued aloud.

“I will not be home until just before Christmas, as Mr. Rogers has asked me to write an article about the writing contest winners.”

“Then he’ll miss the Christmas program.” Astrid plunked herself down on the chair. “And we’re doing one that he wrote a couple years ago.” She propped her chin on her hands. “I hate Thorliff being gone.”

“I don’t ever want to leave the farm, school or no school.” Andrew reached over and tickled Gustaf, getting a wide smile from the round-faced baby.

“Me neither.” Astrid dipped her cookie in her mother’s coffee. “Does he say more?”

“Just that he’s looking forward to seeing us all.” Ingeborg folded up the letter. “Was there any other mail?”

Andrew shook his head. “I better get out to the barn. Did Bell have her calf yet?”

“Haakan said most likely tonight. Astrid, we need more wool carded. Bestemor is knitting faster than I can spin it.”

“Ellie could maybe come help.” Andrew stopped at the doorway.

“I’m sure her mother has plenty for her to do.”

“I could go ask.”

“Andrew just wants to see Ellie again. He always wants to see Ellie.” Astrid made a face at her brother.

“She’s my best friend.” Andrew made his comment as if that should be as clear to everyone else as it was to him.

“I’ll go get Sophie and Grace, Mor. The three of us should be able to get that whole fleece done.”

Astrid shrugged into her coat and ran out the door, flapping her hand in farewell. “Bye, Penny, Gustaf.”

Penny sighed. “Well, I better be going. Looks like you have plenty to do.” She tied a woolen knit cap on her baby’s head.

“I’ll get your horse hitched. Where’s Far?” Andrew took another cookie.

“Over helping Lars with the steam engine.”

By the time Penny had the baby and herself all properly bundled up, the jingle of the harness said Andrew had the sleigh up to the house.

“Here, take some of these cookies for Hjelmer.”

“He loves your cookies. You ever think of baking for the store again? Ever since the baby, I just don’t find the time, and those railroad people sure do like to stop for cookies and cheese and whatever else I happen to have on hand.”

“Let me think about it. With the cheese house slowing for the winter, I might find the time.” Since milk production fell during the winter months, there was less to turn into cheese, both from their farm and the others who shipped milk over in cans and took back whey to be fed to livestock. While they had butchered five head of hogs, they’d shipped three times that many to Grand Forks to the stockyard. The remaining three sows and boar would feed well on the whey from the cheese house.

Ingeborg hugged Penny good-bye and helped settle her in the sleigh with the baby bundled under an aging buffalo robe. “You come again soon. Taking time for a real visit was such a treat.”

“For me too.” Penny turned the horse toward town, the sleigh bells jingling across the snow, now blue-tinged with the oncoming evening. Magenta, gold, and fiery oranges and reds streaked the western horizon, using the clouds as a palette.

Ingeborg stopped on the steps to appreciate the burst of glory, then hurried inside to get warm again, hanging her heavy wool shawl on the peg by the door.

“My land, but the temperature is dropping fast. We’re in for a real cold spell.”

Astrid and her two cousins burst through the door, panting from their run across the small pasture between the two houses.

“Mor, did you—” pant, puff—“know Grace can run faster than anyone?”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Ingeborg wrapped an arm around each of the twins and hugged them to her. “Bring the carding paddles in here by the stove so I can help as I make supper. You are staying for supper, right?” She directed the question to Sophie, who nodded hard enough to make her braids flop. With Sophie every movement flowed fast, like a creek down a hillside, while Grace was the still, clear pond that invited one to sit beside it and think.

“We’d rather stay here. I don’t like eating with Mr. McBride there. He’s not very nice, even though Mor has had talks with him.” Sophie’s amber eyes snapped under straight thick eyebrows.

“Mor said we have to love him with Jesus’ love, but sometimes that isn’t easy.” Grace, her hair two shades lighter than Sophie’s Jersey brown, tipped her head slightly to the side, as if begging for understanding as she signed the words, her fingers flying in her agitation.

“You are right, Gracie, lots of time, loving someone isn’t easy.” Ingeborg made sure she was facing Grace and that she spoke distinctly since her hands were busy with her cooking.

Grace flashed a smile that was heart stopping in its loveliness. Grace could say more with a smile and a lift of an eyebrow than many people could say in two minutes. She hugged her aunt and followed Astrid to retrieve the paddles for carding from the parlor, where the washed and dried fleece filled a basket in the corner. Taking a set of paddles with fine wire teeth, each girl pulled a hunk of wool off the fleece, laid it on her paddle, and began the smooth motions that pulled out the tangles and laid the fine strands of wool all in the same direction so it would be ready to spin.

“Mor is teaching the deaf students to card and spin wool,” Sophie announced. “She said that it’s something worthwhile, and you don’t have to be able to talk. I think Onkel Olaf will teach the boys wood carving.”

“What about the girls?” Astrid stopped her stroking. “I like working with wood.”

Sophie shrugged. “But that Mr. McBride—he doesn’t want to learn anything. I don’t know why he stays.”

Grace laid down her paddles so she could sign. “He stays because he hopes this will help him. But he is afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Ingeborg stopped stirring the stew in the kettle on the stove and looked over her shoulder.

Sophie shrugged. Grace squinted her eyes to help think better.

“I’m not sure. Maybe because people have laughed at him and said he was stupid.”

“How do you know that?” Ingeborg knelt in front of her niece.

Grace shook her head. “I don’t know.” She laid slender fingers over her heart.

“Has anyone ever done that to you?”

“A little.” Grace studied the flat wooden backs of the carding paddles.

“It was that Toby Valders and his brother. Andrew slugged him a good one before Pastor caught them.” Sophie shook her head. “I ha—” She glanced at her aunt from the corner of her eye. “I don’t like him one bit.”

“Ah.” Ingeborg rocked back on her heels, struggling to hide the smile Sophie’s quick change in words had brought.
Another one of those times my son fought for the underdog
.

“Andrew got in trouble, but he warned Toby that he’d beat him to bits if he said anything like that again.”

“And did he?”

“Not yet.”

Grace watched the discussion before her fingers flashed her comments. “Toby told me he was sorry.”

“Told you?” Ingeborg paused. “Oh, you mean he can sign too?” Maybe there was hope for the boy after all. She knew Anner Valders wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior if he knew it was going on.
Was Pastor Solberg not talking with Mr. and Mrs. Valders?
She thought a moment. Pastor Solberg hadn’t mentioned Andrew’s transgressions to them either.
Oh, my son. How do we teach you there are other ways to settle things than with your fists, even when you are in the right? And I don’t blame you a bit for wanting to beat that Toby into the dirt. How could he be mean to Grace, of all people?

Grace reached out and put her hands on Ingeborg’s cheeks to turn her face so she could see. Slowly, with intense concentration, she spoke. “I am right about Mr. McBride.”