Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  “Grow big, you guys,” she whispered, using her finger as a magic wand as she tapped each jar in turn. “I believe in you.”

  • • •

  “Who’s been using my emery board?” Terpsichore’s mother asked. She held up the board. Nearly all the rough emery was worn off. “This was my last emery board, and I know it still had a lot of use left on it last week.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Pop said.

  Mother huffed. “Well, somebody not only used it, but completely ruined it.” She stared at the twins, but they just shrugged and went on playing with the kittens.

  Terpsichore could feel Mother’s eyes drilling a hole in her back as she turned each jar to see if there were any signs of a root breaking through the seed.

  “Terpsichore?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Terpsichore said as she turned to face her mother. “I mean, it was me, but I didn’t use it on myself.” She held out her ragged fingernails as evidence. “It was for my pumpkin seeds. I filed all the surfaces except the pointed end. It helps the water penetrate and makes it easier for the leaves to split open the shell.”

  Mother cracked her mangled emery board and hurled it to land on the seed catalog on the table.

  “See what Alaska’s doing to our daughters? A normal girl would be using an emery board on her fingernails, finally taking pride in her appearance and preparing for womanhood. Instead, our daughter is in overalls and obsessing about pumpkin seeds.”

  Terpsichore fingered the straps on the overalls she usually changed into as soon as she got home from school. She liked her overalls. They protected her legs from mosquito bites.

  Pop picked up the emery board and straightened it out. “There isn’t anything wrong with being a dedicated farmer. Your own mother lived on a farm before she married Mr. VanHagen. I lived on a farm until I went off to college.”

  “That’s the point,” Mother said. “You went to college to get off the farm and better yourself. Now we’re backsliding into the life people were living generations ago.” She ticked off months on her fingers. “May, June, July, August, and then harvest just after the fair in early September. Thank goodness we have to live here only four and a half more months, and then I can vote to go back to civilization.”

  Terpsichore turned back to her jars of seeds. “Four and a half months,” she whispered. “You have just four and a half months to grow into the biggest pumpkins Palmer has ever seen.”

  • • •

  Every morning, Terpsichore checked in on her plant nursery first thing. When the seeds sprouted she transferred the jars to the south-facing windowsill in the kitchen so the leaves could soak up sunlight. When the plants were an inch high, they unfurled their first real pumpkin plant–shaped leaves.

  In the sunshine of early May, Terpsichore and her father pounded sticks and strung string to mark off where each crop in the kitchen garden and potato field would be planted. “I figure I need a plot about twenty feet by twenty feet for each pumpkin,” she said. “And I should grow at least two pumpkins so I have a backup.”

  “If we’re going to eat, we have to grow a lot more than two pumpkins in a space that big,” Pop said.

  “This isn’t just about food to eat,” Terpsichore said. “This is about winning twenty-five dollars at the fair.”

  “What are you planning to do with twenty-five dollars?”

  “It’s a secret,” Terpsichore said. “But it’s not just for something for me. It’s for everybody. You too. Please-please-please?”

  Pop laughed. “You’re hard to say no to, Terpsichore. But you’re my practical daughter. Certainly you can see we can’t sacrifice eight hundred square feet of prepared land to two pumpkins.”

  “But what if something happens to just one pumpkin? There’s blossom end rot, damping-off disease, and voles, and moose, and beetles. I need at least one backup.” Terpsichore pointed to the scrubby back section where the tree stumps had been cleared but the soil was still riddled with rocks and shrub roots. “I’ll work that back strip myself, and won’t take any of the land that’s already set to plant.”

  Pop wrinkled his brow in doubt. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into, but if you’re willing to finish clearing that back section yourself . . .”

  “Thanks, Pop! I can do it, you’ll see!”

  A raven cackled from somewhere in the cottonwoods. When Terpsichore spotted the bird, she shook her fist at it. “I’ll do it, you raven, just watch me!”

  Terpsichore loaded a shovel, hoe, and rake into a wheelbarrow that she pushed to the half-cleared land. She wouldn’t think about how many blisters she would have by the time she cleared and fertilized it all. She’d take it one square yard at a time.

  After school each day, Terpsichore left Gloria and her sisters to their Wizard of Oz rehearsals and ran home from the bus stop to change into her overalls, check on her pumpkin plants, and clear another few yards of ground for the pumpkins’ new home. After roughly clearing the land, she lugged wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of compost to her pumpkin patch. In mid-May, past the danger of frost, she placed her crate of pumpkin starts and a trowel in the wheelbarrow and wheeled them out to their new home. “You’re going to love it here, little guys.”

  She turned slowly, taking in the mountains on three sides of the valley. Hatcher’s Pass and the rest of the Talkeetna Mountains were to the north, and the Chugach Range guarded the south and east. The colonists had started calling the tallest peak just a few miles south of Palmer “Pioneer Peak.”

  Two hundred families had come north to meet the mountains of Alaska, and great things were bound to happen. She felt it, right down to her toes firmly planted in Alaska soil, that this was where her family was meant to be. She hoped that Mother would come to think so too.

  With Tigger supervising, Terpsichore created two mounds, each three feet across with a trench around it to collect excess water during the summer rains. She dug two small holes in each mound, and gently turned each jar upside down to free the seedlings. “Okeydokey, in you go, little guys, right up to your first set of leaves.” She patted the soil tenderly around each plant and returned with a bucket of water and compost slurry to give her pumpkins their first meal in their new home.

  She didn’t tell them that only one plant on each hill would be allowed to live. She didn’t want to discourage any of them from trying to grow the biggest they could be.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Play’s the Thing

  FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, MOTHER’S PITCH PIPE ANNOUNCED the start of another rehearsal session. The twins had long since memorized the words to all their songs for The Wizard of Oz, but now Mother was coaching them on interpretation.

  “Hold on to the last note in that phrase,” Mother said, “and see if you can get a little warble into it. See, like this.” Her voice floated out across the greening fields to where Terpsichore and Pop were taking advantage of the long hours of daylight to work in the fields.

  Pop stopped to ease his aching back as he looked back toward the house. “It’s good to hear your mother singing again, isn’t it?”

  Terpsichore nodded as she passed Pop with another sloshing bucket of water for her pumpkins. “It is,” she said. She paused when she heard another voice. “Who’s that?” she asked.

  Pop shrugged.

  “It wasn’t Mother. It wasn’t the twins.”

  As soon as she heard the words “Just a simple girl of the prairie,” she knew. That was from Gloria’s first song, so Mother must be coaching her too.

  Then she heard Mother, the twins, and Gloria’s voices join in on “Home, Sweet Home,” the number that Miss Zelinsky had substituted for the finale from the original Broadway show. “Home, Sweet Home” was a song even Pop and Terpsichore knew, so they sang along as they hoed and watered.

  • • •

  For the whole last week of schoo
l, mothers baked cookies and more cookies for the bake sale to raise money for the school band. Terpsichore baked too, after working in her pumpkin patch.

  On the day of the play Terpsichore made the twins’ favorite dinner, fried salmon burgers, but Cally and Polly were too bouncy to sit down and eat.

  Mother draped a sheet over the twins’ freshly ironed dresses from Easter. “Showtime!”

  They all piled into the wagon and Smoky trotted them into town. The gymnasium was filled with every folding chair and bench that Palmer could round up. The twins went backstage to change into their dresses, and the rest of the Johnsons found places as close to the front as they could get. After hearing the twins rehearse, hearing Mendel’s description of the special effects, and memorizing Gloria’s copy of Miss Zelinsky’s script, Terpsichore thought she knew what to expect.

  She knew the house on stage was really a painted sheet stretched and stapled over a wood frame, but she oohed along with everyone else when Gloria stepped through a flap door in the pretend house and started her first number. The applause had barely stopped after Gloria’s song when the chorus began singing, sliding up and down scales that sounded like howling wind, and Gloria dashed back through the doorflap.

  The audience gasped when the house jerkily rose from the stage and swung back and forth, as if hurled by a cyclone. From her vantage point near the left side of the audience, Terpsichore could see that Gloria had slipped backstage with Mendel and Terrible Teddy in the wings. The boys hauled on the rope in the block and tackle rig that hoisted the house. The audience gasped again when the house crashed back down on the stage and Terrible Teddy howled like a wolf, pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the East, who had been caught under the house.

  As soon as the audience settled down, the twins and all the rest of the primary-grade Munchkins skipped on stage. Matthew stood on his chair and waved. “Hi, Cally! Hi, Polly!” Mother shushed him, but Pop chuckled.

  Later in the production, Mendel and Teddy—maybe not so terrible if he was willing to help Mendel—made papiermâché monkeys fly and a hot-air balloon rise. Terpsichore was sure Mendel was the brains of the special effects, but he had also found a use for Teddy’s brawn to make the special effects work.

  Near the end, when Gloria-as-Dorothy clicked her heels three times and chanted, “Take me home to Aunt Em,” the crowd erupted into applause. The whole cast and crew, including Mendel and Teddy, gathered on stage to sing the final song. Almost everyone knew it, so the gymnasium echoed with the words:

  “Home! Home!

  Sweet, sweet home!

  There’s no place like home!

  There’s no place like home!”

  As the curtain closed, Terpsichore followed Mother, Pop, and Matthew through the crowd to find the twins. So many people surrounded Gloria that Terpsichore had to jump up and wave to get her attention. Mr. and Mrs. LeClerc stood at her side, and Gloria, smiling so hard her mouth must have hurt, held an armful of wild roses and bluebells with a red ribbon tied around the stems.

  “Terpsichore, we’re leaving,” Pop called.

  Terpsichore blew a kiss in Gloria’s direction and sidled through the crowd to the rest of the family. She got there just as Mother bent down to hug the twins. “You were perfect Munchkins! I wish my mother could have seen you.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Drink Your Milk

  NOW THAT SUMMER HAD COME, TERPSICHORE WAS relieved that Miss Fromer had taken over the library and organized other volunteers to take turns checking out books and giving story hours on Saturdays. Terpsichore was only responsible for one Saturday a month, so she had more time for her pumpkins.

  Her greedy vines grew as fast as Jack’s beanstalk, gulping and eating everything she fed them. After the first couple days of hauling water from the well, three hundred feet from her pumpkin patch, Terpsichore’s palms were raw, even when she cushioned the wire bucket handle with a towel. Once she finally reached the pumpkin patch, she leaned over, straining against the weight of the sloshing buckets to dribble the water evenly as she stepped carefully along each of ten or fifteen side vines on each plant. She trained the vines to keep them from tangling, spreading them out like the tentacles of an octopus. Feeling like a villain, she ripped out all but the biggest plant on each hillock.

  Each of those two remaining vines grew a foot a day. Each vine sent down extra roots every six inches to soak up water and nutrients. Each leaf, top and underside, had to be inspected regularly for attacks by rodents or bugs.

  By the Fourth of July, the plants were flowering. The male blossoms opened first, with inch-tall stamens topped with bright golden pollen. The female blossoms opened next, with lobes to receive the pollen. Terpsichore could have left fertilizing each female flower to the bees, but she was taking no chances. She picked the biggest male flowers, and tapped the stamens over the female flowers.

  By midsummer, she had to decide which pumpkins she would allow to live and grow. “Sorry, little guy, you’re just not going to be the big one.” She left only three baby pumpkins each on the main vines of her two remaining pumpkin plants.

  When the six pumpkins reached the size of a basketball, she had to make the final decision of which two to keep. If all six continued to grow, each would be big, but not gigantic, and she needed gigantic to win. Those two pumpkins had to get the royal treatment if one of them was to be a winner, and she knew just how she was going to do it.

  It was five o’clock in the morning. Terpsichore entered the barn, holding a pitcher in one hand and two battered pie tins in the other. Smoky nickered a greeting, probably hoping it was Cally or Polly with a morning treat of oats or a baby carrot from the garden.

  Rhythmic burbles echoed tinnily as streams of milk hit her mother’s milking bucket. Terpsichore stood at the entrance of Clarabelle’s stall for a moment, waiting for her mother to notice her. “My pumpkins need some milk,” she said. “May I have some?”

  Mother halted the stream of milk flowing from Clarabelle’s udder and lifted her forehead from Clarabelle’s flank. “You want milk for what?” she said.

  “In Farmer Boy, Almanzo grew the blue ribbon–winning pumpkin by feeding it milk.”

  Mother straightened on her stool and all but rolled her eyes in skepticism.

  “It’s true, Mom. That book is based on real life.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to talk to your pumpkins too,” Mother said.

  “Yep,” Terpsichore said. “I’ll be talking to them nonstop if it makes them grow bigger. They won’t get a word in edgewise,” she joked.

  “I always thought that was an old wives’ tale. But, who knows?” Mother said with a shrug. “Maybe talking works. Hearing people talk helps babies thrive, so maybe it works with pumpkins. It couldn’t hurt.” She smiled at Terpsichore and turned back to her milking.

  “So I can have some milk?” Terpsichore asked. She held out her pitcher.

  “How much do you need?”

  “Maybe about half a pitcher or so every day,” Terpsichore said.

  “Every day? That’s going to cut down how much butter I can make to sell.” Mother put on her We have to be sensible face.

  “Isn’t there buttermilk left when you make butter? Maybe the pumpkins would like that as well as whole milk.” Terpsichore’s mouth puckered at the memory of the sour taste of buttermilk. Maybe she could do everyone a favor by feeding the buttermilk to the pumpkins instead of having to drink it. Even Cally and Polly would thank her.

  “Okeydokey.” Mother strangled on the word and slapped her hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that,” she said. “Before long I’ll be talking like an uncouth person from the back of beyond.” She made a wry face and patted Clarabelle’s side. “And I guess that’s just what I’ve become.”

  “Is that so bad?” Terpsichore dropped her pie pans to timidly pat her mother’s back. Her mother wrapped both arms aro
und Terpsichore and drew her closer.

  “I don’t know why you want to win that twenty-five dollars so much. But apparently you want that money for something as much as I want back our old house, my piano, my mother . . .” Mom pressed her lips together to hold back the rest of the list of things she missed in Wisconsin.

  Terpsichore’s throat ached with the effort of tamping down her urge to blurt her whole plan to her mother. She wished she could convince her that although Alaska wasn’t Wisconsin, it could be good here too. And her mother didn’t have to give up her music to live in Alaska. She had a plan to get her mother a piano. And one part of that plan required milk.

  Mother turned over Terpsichore’s hand, tanned to the color of strong tea and as callused as a stevedore’s. “Look what Alaska is turning us into,” she said. “Well, I know how hard you’ve been working to grow those monster pumpkins. You can have all the buttermilk you want if it makes you happy.”

  • • •

  The next day after churning butter, Terpsichore headed out to the field with a half pitcher of buttermilk, a paring knife, the pie pans, string, and an ice pick. Tigger trotted behind. Standing in the middle of eight hundred square feet of pumpkin vines, she beamed. All this growth from two seeds! It was magic, Alaska magic. No wonder folks dreamed big in Alaska!

  Well, she was going to help Alaska magic along with advice from Farmer Boy. She set her supplies down on a level patch of ground and knelt beside one of her pumpkins. “I guess it’s time for you to have a name. Since I’m going to feed you like Almanzo fed his pumpkins, do you like the name Almanzo?”

  A breeze fluttered the leaf closest to the pumpkin, which was now as big around as one of the tires on Grandmother’s Pierce Arrow.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Terpsichore said. As she turned to pick up the knife she caught Tigger dipping a paw into the pitcher to lick off a taste of buttermilk.

  “No, Tigger, that’s for Almanzo!”