Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  She leaned against Laura. How would she raise the rest of the money she needed to buy the piano? Some kids were making root beer to sell at the fair. Mendel had been mounting butterfly specimens to exhibit, and Gloria and her mother were going to make pies and cookies to sell. Was there something Terpsichore could sell to tourists before Miss Zelinsky sold the piano to the next person who wanted to buy it? Thinking about leaving the money-raising to the last days of the fair gave her stomach cramps.

  After breakfast, she headed to the teachers’ dormitory on the other side of the tracks to collect the key to the school from Miss Fromer. Once inside the school, she locked the main doors to the school behind her. The halls still smelled like the floor polish that the CCC workers had used to wax the floors after school let out. Even though there was no one to hear, she tiptoed to the shelf-lined workroom that housed books waiting to be processed for the library.

  When she opened the door to the workroom she was dismayed by how far behind she had become in the weeks she had been tending pumpkins. Dozens of boxes of books had arrived from groups down below and were stacked up higgledy-piggledy all over the room.

  She shoved boxes right and left to clear a path between the shelving and the door. As she shuffled boxes, she read some of the return addresses: the Wisconsin branch of the American Red Cross, a Lutheran church in Minneapolis, and women’s book groups in Chicago, Seattle, Denver, and New York. With a serrated knife, she cut the twine securing three of the boxes and started sorting books onto mostly empty shelves. She put children’s books and magazines on one wall, grown-up fiction on another wall, and intermixed nonfiction on another. Some boxes were full of boring stuff, like old school textbooks, but even among those she found one book on bugs and butterflies Mendel would like.

  Sunlight beamed through the windows above the shelves. As the sun rose toward noon, the room got hot, which brought out the musty smell of the old books. She quickly shelved duplicates of best-sellers of a few years ago, but lingered on a book from the last century on elocution, which had drawings of the gestures to make to signify surprise, wonder, horror, and sadness. Gloria would get a laugh from that one. She’d also want to see issues of movie magazines that were only a few months old.

  When she came to half a dozen cookbooks, she sat down on one of the boxes and flipped to the index of each book to see if there were any ways to use pumpkin and salmon she had never tried. All the books had pumpkin pie and variations of the recipes she had developed herself, but there were a few new ideas, like pumpkin gingerbread, pumpkin butter that sounded like it would produce something like jam, and pumpkin bread pudding. Reading the recipes set her stomach to rumbling.

  Terpsichore thought of all the strange recipes she’d collected since they moved to Palmer. She had developed a dozen unique ways to fix canned salmon. And there was Mr. Crawford’s recipe for jellied moose nose that she hadn’t been brave enough to try yet. With all those recipes and a few more local specialties, she could make a souvenir cookbook tourists might buy. She stood, squinting into the window at the sky that was beginning to cloud over. She wasn’t seeing sun and clouds, though; she was seeing tourists thronging to her booth to buy copies of her cookbook. If she sold enough, she could buy the piano for sure.

  She turned away from the window. She could only sell recipe books if she could print them. How could she make enough copies? Maybe Miss Quimby would let her use the mimeograph machine in the office. She was grateful now that Mother had made her apologize to Miss Quimby so they were on good terms again.

  She would have to decide which recipes to include. Mendel had perfect printing, and had run the office mimeograph machine for the teachers, so he could help run copies. Gloria could help her design the cover, and she knew Pop would help get the pumpkin to the fair.

  She finally had a plan to raise all the money for the piano. But she wouldn’t know if either part of her plan worked until the last day of the fair, when Miss Zelinsky might sell the piano to someone else.

  CHAPTER 43

  Tragedy

  TERPSICHORE LET OUT A HOWL THAT COULD PROBABLY have been heard in Anchorage. Mother dropped her hoe in the patch of beets, picked up Matthew, and came running. “What’s wrong?” she said. She dropped Matthew so she could examine Terpsichore’s hands and check her feet to make sure Terpsichore still had all her fingers and toes.

  At seeing Terpsichore’s tears and moaning, Matthew screwed up his face and howled. “Tip sad,” he said. He reached out to Terpsichore to pat her, like Mother did when he was sad.

  Mother put her hands on Terpsichore’s shoulders and bent down to Terpsichore’s eye level. “Tell me, what is it?”

  Between hiccoughs, Terpsichore got out, “It’s ’Manzo, ’Manzo.” She dropped to her knees in the mud that had formed in the last two days of rain and hugged Almanzo, leaning her cheek against his ribbed side and mixing her tears with the last drops of rain.

  “Almanzo . . . your pumpkin? You’re crying about a pumpkin? You nearly scared me into heart failure!”

  “But Almanzo was the biggest,” Terpsichore said. “He was already three inches bigger around than Laura, but with this last rain he must have soaked up so much water that he grew so fast he . . . he . . .” Terpsichore couldn’t bear to say it.

  Mother ran her fingers around the top of the pumpkin, and then walked around to the back where her fingers felt a fissure down the side. The skin had burst, exposing the flesh beneath.

  Terpsichore continued to sob. Mother pulled her up out of the mud. “I know you’ve worked hard all summer on these pumpkins, but you still have another pumpkin. And think of all the pumpkin muffins you’ll be able to make.”

  Terpsichore looked up, her forehead wrinkled and her mouth in a scandalized O. “Eat Almanzo?” She’d cooked pumpkins before, but never one she had talked to and named.

  “Terpsichore, it’s a pumpkin. People grow pumpkins to eat. If this is how you react to eating pumpkins you’ve grown, how on earth are you going to face eating a piglet if we get pigs, or a lamb?”

  Matthew started to chant, “This little piggy . . .”

  Terpsichore howled even louder. “Not a piglet! Not a lamb!”

  “Why did you think we raise animals here?” her mother asked. “We’d better go back to Wisconsin before you have to face the hard facts of farm life.”

  “Wisconsin? Noooooo.” If Mother had thought she was already crying as hard as a person could cry, Terpsichore proved her wrong.

  Mother gave up on consoling Terpsichore, picked up Matthew, and strode back to the kitchen garden. Terpsichore was alone again with her pumpkins.

  “I’m so sorry, Almanzo.” She kissed the gash in his side as if to make it well, but she knew no Band-Aid could fix Almanzo. Once a pumpkin was split, it would stay split, and be disqualified from the competition. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and took a deep breath.

  With feet slowed by mud and dread, Terpsichore picked her way between her two champion pumpkins. Would Laura also be split? She ran her hands along Laura’s skin as she slowly circled her last giant pumpkin. Laura was intact.

  It was all up to Laura now. Terpsichore was glad school wasn’t starting this year until after the fair, so she could devote full time to her only remaining pumpkin. “If I hear of frost coming, I’ll cover you with a horse blanket. If it rains, I’ll stand here with an umbrella, I’ll talk to you at least an hour every day, and when I run out of things to say, I’ll read to you. I’ll read all the most inspiring stories: the chapter of Farmer Boy when his pumpkin wins first prize at the fair, the part in Black Beauty when he’s rescued by Farmer Thoroughgood, and “Jack and the Beanstalk,” with the stalk that grows to the sky . . . Well, not the last part.” Terpsichore remembered just in time how Jack chopped down the beanstalk at the end. Laura was too young and innocent for such violence.

  CHAPTER 44

  The Deadline Looms

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p; BY THE END OF AUGUST, EVENINGS WERE ALREADY GETTING chilly enough for a fire. Terpsichore sat with a tablet and a pencil, doodling possible names for her cookbook. Tigger occasionally roused herself from half napping on Terpsichore’s lap to bat at the end of her pencil.

  What to Do with a Two-Hundred-Pound Pumpkin?

  Jellied Moose Nose and Rhubarb Pie?

  Cabbage Patch Soup and Eskimo Ice Cream?

  The Best Souvenir of the First Palmer Fair?

  None of the titles sounded right.

  She leaned back against the pillows she’d stacked against the wooden arm of the settee and stared out the window at Pioneer Peak for inspiration. Polly sat cross-legged on the braided rug in front of the woodstove, leaning over to stroke Willa behind the ears. Willa sighed and stretched in kitten bliss. Cally sat with Rogers on her lap. With one hand she petted Rogers just enough to keep him purring, but her attention was firmly on the Sears catalog, open to a page of horse equipment. Rogers meowed a complaint when she stood, dumping him to the floor.

  “Smoky is going to need a blanket before winter, and I found the perfect one for him.” She walked over to the table to show the page to her father.

  Pop sat at the kitchen table, making lists of all the supplies that would be needed to build the new church. He sketched, scribbled figures, and erased, figuring and refiguring. He looked up, grinning. “Yankee doodle dandy!” he said. “Guess how many peeled logs we’ll need to build the new church?”

  “But Pop,” Cally said, “see this blanket? This is exactly what Smoky needs. Can we order it?”

  Pop crossed the room to rub Mother’s neck. “Don’t you want to know how many logs we’re going to need for the new church?”

  “But what about a blanket for Smoky?” Cally persisted.

  Pop dropped his hands. “Doesn’t anyone want to know how many logs we’re going to need?”

  Terpsichore closed her tablet. “Okeydokey, Pop. How many logs will it take to build the new church?”

  Pop smiled at Terpsichore. “If all the logs are at least twenty feet long and at least eight inches in diameter, it will take a thousand . . . give or take a few,” he said.

  “Wow, a thousand,” Cally and Polly said.

  “That’s nice,” Mother said. “But I thought work on the walls and roof wouldn’t start until late this fall, and you know, we might be gone by then.”

  “Clio, you said you’d wait until after the harvest fair to give your vote. Who knows what might happen between now and then?” Pop said.

  “I’d almost forgotten that we might not stay,” Cally said sadly. She closed the catalog and put it back on the bookshelf.

  “Me too,” Polly said. She snuggled Willa against her neck, and Willa licked Polly’s face in return.

  “Well, I most emphatically have not forgotten,” Mother said. “And neither has your grandmother.”

  She put down the old sweater she was unraveling into a ball of yarn to reuse, and took the latest letter from her mother from her apron pocket. She read one line from the letter:

  “‘I’ll be up by the last week of August to bring you all home to Madison. I so look forward to having you here with me!’”

  Mother laid the letter on the kitchen table. She was smiling, but nobody else was.

  “If we move back to Grandmother’s house, we won’t get to take Smoky,” Cally said.

  “And not even Tigger and Willa and Rogers,” Polly said.

  Terpsichore slipped off the couch to confront her mother. “That’s not what you said before! You said you’d wait until after the fair to vote!”

  “What difference does a few days make? Once she gets here, I know she won’t want to stay very long.”

  Terpsichore wrung her hands. “But you said you’d wait until after the fair!”

  “You did say you’d wait to vote until after the fair,” Pop said.

  Terpsichore put her hands together in thanks to her father for sticking up for her. “Yes, Mom, you never know what might happen at the fair.”

  • • •

  Terpsichore led the twins upstairs so they could talk privately. Both twins sat on Cally’s cot in their bedroom. Terpsichore sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. “I don’t want to leave Alaska,” she said.

  “We don’t either!” the twins chorused.

  “I have a plan that I hope will work,” she said. “And maybe you both could help. One of the things Mom misses most is her piano. Miss Zelinsky is selling hers, and if I can earn seventy-five dollars by the end of the fair I can buy it for Mother.”

  “How can you earn that much money?” Cally asked.

  “I plan to win the twenty-five dollars for the biggest vegetable at the fair.”

  “But that’s not enough,” Polly said.

  “I know, but I also thought of something I can sell at the fair—a book of my Alaska recipes. If I can sell one hundred cookbooks at fifty cents apiece, I’ll have enough to buy the piano from Miss Zelinsky by the last day of the fair.”

  “How can you make a cookbook?” they asked.

  “Mendel has tidy printing, and he’s going to write out all the recipes. Gloria has drawn a picture for the cover. And we’ll make copies on the mimeograph machine at school. My giant pumpkin will help bring people to the booth, but once they get close, how else can we get attention for the cookbook?”

  “You need a jingle too, like on the radio,” Polly said.

  “Pumpkins . . .” Cally started. “Polly, do you remember the song we learned in class last year, the one about the pies with crazy stuff in them?”

  “‘The Pumpkin Pies That Grandma Used to Bake’?” Polly said.

  The two began to sing:

  “My grandma was a wizard

  At baking pumpkin pies;

  The things you would find in them

  Were surely a surprise!”

  “Only we can change the ‘grandma’ to our sister,” Cally said.

  “And the things that get baked into the pies to things that are more Alaskan . . .”

  “Like ice skates or dogsleds . . .”

  “Like salmon and snowflakes . . .”

  Cally and Polly slid off the bed to hug Terpsichore from both sides. “If we could keep Smoky and the cats and have a piano again, it would be perfect!”

  “It sure would!” said Terpsichore.

  “Leave it to us,” the twins said.

  CHAPTER 45

  Laura’s Moving Day

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE FAIR, TERPSICHORE BORROWED her mother’s tape measure. She and Gloria tiptoed into the field, as if afraid to wake Laura from her beauty sleep.

  Gloria’s arm looked spindly compared to Laura’s stem. “That stem must be as thick as a lumberjack’s arm,” Gloria said.

  “Let’s see just how big she is today.” Terpsichore took a carpenter’s pencil from the side pocket of her overalls and made a light line on the skin of her pumpkin at the widest point, careful not to press too hard and make a dent in Laura’s hide.

  “Here,” she said. “Hold the end of the tape here while I walk around with the rest of it.”

  Gloria held the tape while Terpsichore walked around Laura, careful to keep the tape level all the way. “There’s two hundred . . .” Terpsichore said, “two hundred and seven! And she’ll probably grow another four inches tonight.”

  “Mr. Hopstadt next to our place claims he’s going to win for his cabbage,” Gloria said. “I think he’s been training the outer leaves to stretch out sideways as far as they’ll go without cracking.”

  “But that’s just stretching across empty air; that doesn’t count.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Gloria said. “Did the contest rules say they’d judge size by leaf-span or weight?”

  Sweat broke out on Terpsichore’s forehead and trickled down under her bangs. �
��The rule book didn’t say,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Gloria said.

  Gloria wanted to be an actress, but she wasn’t convincing Terpsichore not to worry.

  “How are you going to get it to the fairgrounds?” Both girls turned to see Mendel stepping over withering pumpkin vines.

  “Pop said he’d help,” Terpsichore said. “And he’s going to borrow a truck and get some of his friends to help too.”

  Mendel laid both hands against the pumpkin, braced his feet in a giant step, and threw his whole weight into a push. The pumpkin did not budge. “Just as I thought,” he said. “This pumpkin is going to take more than brute strength. It’s going to take mechanical assistance. I’ll rig something up tonight and meet you tomorrow morning. What time should I be here?”

  “Thanks, Mendel! If you can make a house fly across the stage, you can figure out a way to move a pumpkin. I know you can! Seven tomorrow?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Mendel said.

  • • •

  The next morning, Terpsichore walked out to Laura with an old towel draped around her shoulders. One hand clutched a bucket of water. The other hand held a hacksaw behind her back. After hiding the hacksaw under a shriveled pumpkin leaf, she swabbed Laura with a sponge and rubbed her down with the towel. Terpsichore stood back to admire the result.

  “You’re a beaut!” she said. How could anyone disagree? Laura had turned a classic yellow-orange, a little lopsided, but just enough to give her character. Terpsichore squinted, imagining wheels, a door, and Cinderella peeping out the window on the way to the ball. With a sigh, Terpsichore stepped forward to lean her cheek against Laura’s burnished side and stretch her arms out to hold as much pumpkin as she could in a hug.

  “This had to come eventually,” she whispered. “I’ll make the cut as quickly and painlessly as I can.”