Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  She didn’t have to scold Tigger away from the buttermilk a second time. The cat backed up, shaking her head and working her tongue in and out of her mouth, trying to get rid of the taste.

  Terpsichore picked up the paring knife. “This is a knife, Almanzo, but don’t be scared. I’m just going to make a tiny slit, like a little mouth so you can drink this buttermilk.”

  Tentatively, she poked at the stem a few inches from the pallet where Almanzo rested. “It’ll just be a little prick, Almanzo . . .” Wincing, she jabbed the stem, making a half-inch slit. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” She patted Almanzo reassuringly.

  “Now I’m going to feed you milk and watch you grow into the biggest pumpkin Palmer has ever seen.” With the ice pick, she wedged one end of the string into the vine and put the other into the pan of buttermilk. She watched as the buttermilk slowly wicked from the pie plate to Almanzo. “Now wasn’t that worth it? Milk will help you grow big and strong.”

  With more confidence, she approached her other pumpkin with her supplies. Kneeling, she said, “I guess I need to name you too. How about Laura? You saw it didn’t hurt Almanzo, so I expect you to be brave.”

  She cut a slit in Laura’s stem, wedged a length of string into the slit, and placed the other end into the milk. “There now, isn’t that good? You’re in a race now. One of you is going to win.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Changes Coming

  EVER SINCE FOLKS HAD MOVED OUT OF THEIR TENTS AND into roomier houses, families had taken turns having church at their houses. It was the Johnsons’ turn. The good part about your turn to host church was that people left behind most of the food that wasn’t eaten during the social hour after services. The bad part was that for the whole week before, Mother nagged Terpsichore and her sisters to pick up their rooms, not to track dirt into the house, and to keep the shedding cats outside. Mother poked a mop at the cobwebs on the ceiling, washed windows, and re-washed all the teacups on the shelves.

  Saturday night, Mom and Pop moved the table, settee, and chair to the side to open up the living room. Everyone had a turn in the claw-foot bathtub, and Mother put Cally and Polly’s hair in rag curlers. She sorted through her records, finally settling on a Bach organ recital and a recording of hymns sung by her college choir.

  Standing in the middle of the room in her nightgown, Mother turned slowly to inspect the result. “We’ll pass,” she said, “as long as no one lifts the linen tablecloth to see that we’re still eating off the picnic table we had in the tent.”

  “It’s church, not a military inspection,” Pop said.

  “Humph,” Mother said. “Nosy women can be more critical than any drill sergeant.”

  There were just over two hundred houses now in Palmer, and all had been built to one of five slightly different house plans. In the seven months since the last house was built, however, families had gradually put their own touches on each one. During Pastor Bingle’s sermons at each neighbor’s home, Terpsichore would try to imagine the lives that family had left behind in Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Michigan from the clues of their old belongings. She could also walk into any other house and know which catalog that family had ordered their couch or dining room set from.

  The Johnsons’ house was one of a kind, and Terpsichore liked it that way. Pop had made their simple settee, and Mother had covered a cushion for it with a flowered tablecloth. To go with the table, Pop had made benches with backs, so you could always squeeze in one more when they had company.

  Their furniture was rough-hewn. But the Johnsons also had brought nice things from their old home, like her mother’s Royal Copenhagen teapot, silver candlesticks, and damask tablecloth. She was happy her parents didn’t do things just like everybody else. It made her proud to be a Johnson.

  • • •

  On Sunday morning, Gloria’s father pulled a borrowed pickup as close as he could get to the front door without running over Mother’s flower garden. Gloria and her mother slid out one side door and Gloria’s father out the other. Pop came out to help unload the planks and nail kegs they set up as makeshift pews.

  Chatter among the arriving families quieted at the sound of Pastor Bingle’s bus. The motor sputtered, then stilled, and a dozen more people followed Pastor Bingle into the Johnsons’ house, pushing aside the mosquito netting that hung in the doorway.

  Mother stood next to Pop to greet families as they came in. As Mother predicted, their eyes darted from one corner of the room to the other, taking in things like the chair rails and baseboards Pop had added to the basic plywood walls.

  Terpsichore cranked the handle on the Victrola, opened the doors beneath the turntable for maximum volume, and gently placed the stylus on the recording of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor. At the majestic thunder of the opening notes, a baby wailed and Mr. Carlsen dropped the mug he’d brought for the after-service social hour. As he bent to pick up the pieces, Terpsichore guiltily shut the doors on the Victrola to mute the sound. She liked the sound of the pipe organ loud enough to rattle her rib cage, but apparently not everyone shared her preference.

  Mother strode from the door to where Terpsichore stood beside the record player. “Let’s have the hymns instead—”

  “You wanted the organ first,” Terpsichore said.

  “I changed my mind,” Mother said.

  Terpsichore lifted the record by the edges and slipped it back into its sleeve and replaced it with the recording of her mother’s old choral society. Everyone was looking at her as she adjusted the doors under the turntable so the hymns would come out at moderate volume. The room sighed in relief at the more familiar opening to “In the Garden.”

  After the service, the men helped stack the planks they used for pews in the back of the pickup and the women moved the table back to the center so they could set out the food they’d brought for the social hour. Mrs. Bingle complimented Mother on how homey they’d made their place. “I see you have several stacks of sheet music, Mrs. Johnson. Do you play an instrument?”

  “I studied piano and voice at St. Olaf College before I married. And before moving here I taught piano.”

  “Why did you give it up?” Mrs. Bingle asked.

  “I had to sell the piano before we moved,” Mother said. “And sadly I haven’t played since.”

  “You must miss it terribly. You know, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this . . . My husband should be the one to make the official announcement. Can you keep a secret?”

  From halfway across the room, Terpsichore’s ears pricked to attention on the word secret. She picked up a plate of her pumpkin cookies and started passing them out, gradually working her way closer to Mrs. Bingle.

  Mrs. Bingle guided Mother toward the corner by the bookcase and leaned in toward Mother.

  Terpsichore, with her back to her mother and Mrs. Bingle, so it wouldn’t look at all as if she were eavesdropping, offered the cookies to everyone nearby. She listened with one ear to everyone asking for her recipe and listened with the other ear to what Mrs. Bingle was saying.

  “The Presbyterians down below have offered a fifteen- hundred-dollar loan to the Palmer church council to begin construction on a real church. Pastor thinks that if all the groundwork gets done this summer before the ground freezes and if he gets enough volunteers, the church can be finished over the winter when the men aren’t needed in the fields. The church can be dedicated in time for Easter services next spring.”

  “That does sound like good news,” Mother said cautiously. “Why did you think I should know now, before Pastor Bingle announces it?”

  “So you can start thinking about putting together the music program for the first service. And you can help select a portable organ. I play enough to accompany the hymns, but I’m not a real musician. And, of course, once we have a real church we’ll need someone to direct the choir. You said you studied voice?”

  “Y
es, but there’s a big difference between singing and leading a choir,” Mother said. “And I’m not even sure we’ll still be here when the church is dedicated. Right after the fair, as soon as harvest is in, I get to decide whether we stay on in Palmer or we move back to Wisconsin.”

  “You’ll want to stay,” Mrs. Bingle said. “Alaska grows on you.”

  “We’ll see,” Mother said. “Everybody keeps saying Alaska will grow on me, but I’m not so sure I want to be grown upon.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Invasion of the Squash Bugs

  AFTER CHURCH, TERPSICHORE DRAGGED GLORIA AND Mendel back to her pumpkin patch to show off Almanzo and Laura. Gloria followed Terpsichore reluctantly, making sure she kept to the rock-edged path that led through the potato field back to where the pumpkin vines stretched in luxury.

  Gloria surveyed the eight hundred square feet of leafy green. “You got all this from two seeds?”

  Terpsichore preened. “They’re the descendants of my biggest pumpkin in Wisconsin,” she said. “But with seventeen hours a day of sunlight, they’re growing even bigger than back home. To get two giant pumpkins, I thinned each plant down to one pumpkin.” She swept her hand over the swath of green. “All of these leaves are soaking up sunlight and the roots are soaking up minerals and water. And all of that is feeding just one pumpkin on each plant.”

  “Sort of like hundreds of worker bees all bringing back pollen and nectar to feed one queen,” Mendel said.

  Terpsichore thought her pumpkins were more impressive than bees, but Mendel saw everything in terms of bugs.

  Gloria bent down to ground level and lifted a couple leaves. “What pumpkins?”

  Terpsichore grinned and pointed to the back of her plot, twenty feet away. “Look back there!”

  “Glor-i-osky!” Gloria breathed as they neared Laura.

  “Holy tomato!” Mendel said. “That’s really just one pumpkin?”

  Terpsichore patted Laura proudly. “Gloria and Mendel, meet Laura. Laura, these are my friends Gloria and Mendel.”

  Gloria snorted. “So are we supposed to shake hands now?”

  “At least say something nice. They like to be talked to,” Terpsichore said. “Or give Laura a hug; I think she likes that too.”

  Mendel bowed. “Pleased to meet you, Laura. That shade of green is most becoming on you.”

  “Good pumpkin, good pumpkin,” Gloria said as she patted Laura like a dog that had obeyed a command to sit.

  “Now come meet Almanzo. He’s even bigger. I just measured him and he’s already twelve feet around.”

  Placing each foot carefully between sprawling vines, Terpsichore led Mendel and Gloria to where Almanzo sat regally among leaves as big as umbrellas. “What kind of compost did you use?” Mendel asked. “Fish guts would have made a great slurry, but I guess you couldn’t use guts because then you’d attract the bears. Do you really think talking to them makes a difference? We should do an experiment and talk to one group of plants and not the other. Maybe it’s not really the talking that does the trick, but the CO2 that you breathe out at them, because plants need the CO2 . . . Hmmm.”

  “Eek! Ugh!”

  Mendel’s musings were interrupted by Gloria, who was trailing behind because she was bending back each leaf she passed to avoid getting any leaf stains on her church clothes. “There are yucky bugs on these leaves!”

  At the word bugs Mendel started a high-stepping sprint over vines and leaves to see what Gloria had discovered. Terpsichore followed, one hand over her mouth, afraid of what she might find.

  Mendel took a small collecting jar and a magnifying glass out of the pocket of his Sunday trousers and squatted down to leaf level.

  Terpsichore wrung her hands as she waited for the verdict. Was it a relatively harmless roly-poly pill bug, or something worse?

  Mendel swept one of the bugs into a collecting jar and capped it. “Anasa tristis, I’d guess,” he said.

  “Is that bad?” Terpsichore said.

  “Very bad,” Mendel said, without looking up. He examined the underside of a leaf with his magnifying glass. “And they’ve started laying eggs by the thousands.”

  Terpsichore steeled herself to look over Mendel’s shoulder. He gave her the magnifying glass so she could see for herself. Clusters of reddish eggs stuck to the underside of the leaf. She traded the magnifying glass for the collecting jar and squinted at the evil bug inside.

  “What’s an Anna-whatsis?”

  “Anasa tristis,” he corrected. “The tristis is Latin for sad or stinky. One common name is stinkbug, but the other common name is squash bug, and they’ll start sucking the life out of these leaves, and Laura and Almanzo could die.”

  “Yikes!” Terpsichore said. “What’ll I do?”

  “The only way to get rid of them is to pick off the bugs one by one and drown each in a bucket of soapy water. And the eggs have to be squished.”

  Gloria clutched her skirts close to her legs to keep them from coming into contact with any infected leaves. “I think my mom is probably looking for me,” she said. “I hope the bad bugs don’t hurt your pumpkins.” She leaped over vines toward the main road.

  Terpsichore raced through panicked calculations. Fifteen vines times two plants, that’s thirty vines. Each vine was roughly twenty feet long, and had leaves roughly every six inches . . . That was over a thousand leaves to inspect.

  Mendel must have read her mind. “If you haven’t noticed them before, they probably haven’t taken over the whole field.” He stepped between leaves to inspect the next vine over. “Some here,” he said. Then he followed the vine along another six feet and bent down to check again. “And here.” At another six feet he checked a circle of leaves around him. “These seem to be clear, so you might have just a few dozen leaves that have been affected. The bugs like moist dark places. Do you have any shingles left from construction?”

  “I think there are some in the kindling pile,” Terpsichore said.

  “Scatter the shingles among the vines. At night, many of the bugs will congregate on the underside of the shingles and then you can dump the shingles in soapy water. You’ll get rid of dozens at a time.”

  “But what about the eggs?” Terpsichore pictured thousands of eggs turning into leaf-munching squash bugs. She clenched her fists, remembering the calluses formed from hours clutched around bucket and wheelbarrow handles. It was war against the squash bugs. Every last one of them had to die.

  “The eggs are a different problem,” Mendel said. “You have to get them before the nymphs hatch out. Are you squeamish?”

  “Not as bad as Gloria,” Terpsichore said. Looking back toward the house, she didn’t even see Gloria anymore. She was probably at home already, washing her hands and inspecting her skirt to make sure there were no bugs clinging to it.

  Mendel demonstrated. Holding one hand on the top of the leaf to stabilize it, he pressed fingers of the other hand against the eggs. “You’ll have to press just hard enough to squish the eggs, but not hard enough to damage the leaf.” He looked up to see if Terpsichore understood.

  Terpsichore choked at the thought of having to squish bug eggs bare-handed. Her hands would be covered with red slime and nymph bodies.

  Mendel stood and reclaimed his collecting bottle. “Ask your mother for an old diaper. You can put it over the eggs so you won’t have to touch them. Can I have one leaf with the eggs on it, though? I’d like to watch them hatch.”

  Terpsichore’s eyes widened, and darted toward Laura and Almanzo. “You wouldn’t let them near—”

  “No, I promise they’ll meet a watery end in a soapy bucket. I just want to take notes on their life cycle and document how much damage they can do. I’ll report my findings to the agricultural agent so he can put everyone else on the lookout for them so they won’t damage other people’s crops.”

  Terpsichore tr
ied to smile. “Okeydokey,” she said. Her voice shook. She had always thought Mendel was wasting his time studying bugs, but what he’d learned about bugs might save her pumpkins.

  “I’ll help you get started,” Mendel said.

  Two hours later, the shingles were scattered among the vines, the bucket was full of the floating corpses of mature squash bugs and nymphs, and thousands of eggs had been squished before they had time to hatch.

  When they had finished, Terpsichore shook Mendel’s hand, ignoring any egg slime that might be on his fingers. “Thanks, bug boy!” She grinned to show she meant “bug boy” to be a compliment.

  Mendel grinned. “I prefer the term amateur entomologist,” he said.

  “Don’t be modest,” Terpsichore said. “You’re a master entomologist.”

  Tomorrow morning, Terpsichore would dunk shingles with sleeping squash bugs into soapy water before they had a chance to lay more eggs.

  Laura and Almanzo would be safe. At least for now.

  CHAPTER 42

  A Recipe for Success?

  THE FIRST DROPS WERE TENTATIVE PLOPS, AS IF THE CLOUDS were just testing their ability to rain. Random plops became a steady thrumming, and then a torrent. Terpsichore sat up in bed and pulled aside the quilt that shut out the midnight sun. She couldn’t see Almanzo and Laura beyond the potato field, but she imagined a thousand sets of roots along the vines greedily sucking up pure rain.

  She leaned back on her pillow, smiling and listening to the first serious rainfall in a month. She rubbed her thumbs across the calluses on her palms. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, she would not have to haul water from the well. Without the chore of hauling water, she could catch up with the library.

  By morning, the sky was blue again and steam rose from the damp earth. Terpsichore sped down the straw path to her pumpkins to see how they had enjoyed the rain. With three weeks to go until the weigh-in at the fair, Almanzo and Laura were already as tall as Cally and Polly, and were sure to be the biggest entry in the contest. The twenty-five dollars was almost as good as hers. But even with twenty-five dollars for the biggest vegetable, she would be fifty dollars short.