Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  I kept that vow through the next month of Saturday night dances. But then came the big night when, according to rumor, the CCC boys would be at the dance. The girls were all agog, telling me about how cute they were and how spiffy they looked in their brown khaki uniforms, which, according to rumor, were pressed when they started out, but looked a little worn by the time they arrived. Nine miles of walking would do that.

  And in a way Doris was right. When they walked in, a pack of them—eight or ten—they did make a fine entrance, shaking hands with the local men and boys, and eyeing up the girls.

  One in particular caught my eye. He was tall—at least six feet—with a muscular body that showed through his uniform. His features were regular, but his hair seemed unruly, as if he had trouble keeping it in order, because a lock of it fell over his eyes, and he had to keep pushing it back. I found out later his eyes were blue, he had lived in Linden Grove with his sister since he was ten, and he had a couple of months to go before his “enlistment” was up.

  He told me all of those things while we waltzed and during the break when we went downstairs together to have coffee.

  “My name is Arvo Mattson,” he told me when he came over to ask me to dance. The local boys stood aside for him, which I thought strange and rather exciting. He must have a reputation, I thought, with a qualm of worry.

  But as we danced, he kept his distance, never pulling me toward him as the other young men had almost all tried to do, and we talked. Or at least he did. I listened, fascinated by him and his story.

  “My dad’s a mean bugger,” he said, and apologized for the use of the word. “I left home instead of being beaten with a board or with his razor strap. And my mother wasn’t much better. She’s a drunk,” he said, as calmly as if he were telling me the time of day. “So I don’t come from what you might call ‘good stock,’” he said, looking down on me as if in warning.

  It was a warning I heeded that first night. I danced with him three times—the normal limit—and I refused his offer to walk me home.

  “That’s silly!” I told him. “You have nine miles to go. Add the two to get to my house, and you won’t get back to your barracks until it’s time to get up and go to work!”

  “I don’t care.” He looked down at me with those blue eyes, and I almost gave in. Almost. And then I remembered Elsie Hauala, and I demurred.

  But the next time he came to a dance, he headed straight for me and warned the other fellows off. “She’s mine for the night,” he insisted, and surprisingly, everyone obeyed him.

  Spending the whole evening together meant we danced every dance, but in between time we talked. I told him about the Lappalas and about Father (so he wouldn’t think that, despite the way I was dressed, I had been raised in luxury). He told me about the projects they were working on—planting Norway and white pine trees to replace the ones logged off years before. He said he loved to plant anything. “I guess I was meant to be a farm boy,” he said. “I love to work the soil. It gives me a sense of peace.”

  That was a huge admission, one that seemed to come from his heart. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with my life now,” I said in response. “I knew when I left the Lappalas I was closing one door, but I haven’t figured out what the next door will be.”

  That was the first time he mentioned marriage. “What about if the next door includes me and opens into a life that we share?” It came out sounding rather poetic, which surprised me.

  Again, I thought of Elsie Hauala, and I finally told him about her and what had happened to her with a fellow from the CCC camp.

  He laughed out loud. “What a joke!” he said. “That guy does it every time we move to a new camp. He finds himself a young girl, one whose family is fairly well-off, and offers to marry her, all the time knowing that he has a family of his own back in southern Minnesota.”

  “Well,” I said, “that story certainly is a warning for young girls—like me—to beware.”

  He sobered up quickly. “I’m not like that,” he protested. “I’m footloose and fancy free,” and then, looking down at me, “at least I was until I met you.”

  That night when he offered to walk me home, I agreed. We walked slowly, holding hands, swinging them back and forth, and talking. I had sent Ronny ahead and warned him I would be coming along later.

  He wasn’t happy about it, but he really didn’t have a choice. I was eighteen now, and old enough to make my own decisions.

  “Just be careful,” he warned me as he set out. “Remember Elsie Hauala!”

  “I know, I know.” I said, laughing.

  We sat down once we got to the top of Ticklebelly Hill, turned to each other, and were about to kiss when I suddenly remembered, “Oh, no! I left my good shoes at the Hall!”

  “I’ll go and get them.” He was on his feet in an instant. “You just wait here, and I’ll be back in just a few minutes.”

  I knew it would take him more than a few minutes to walk a mile, and I said so. I insisted it would be all right, that I could pick up my shoes on our way to church the next Sunday, that he needn’t bother.

  “It’s no bother,” he said, and set out back over the path we’d just followed.

  In no time, it seemed, he had returned with my shoes, but my mood had shifted, and I had had time to think while he was gone, and I had second thoughts about his kissing me.

  So I simply grabbed my shoes, thanked him for getting them for me, told him I could find my way back home by myself, and said, “Goodnight,”

  “Good… night,” he stammered, disappointment in his every movement. The stars and moon were so bright that night that it was as if they had been shining just for us, but suddenly I had become afraid. Of myself, of him, of the feelings that he aroused in me.

  “Will I see you again?” he asked plaintively as I hurried down the hill.

  “I suppose. At the next dance. Or the next one that you come to.”

  Leaving him behind had been one of the most difficult things I had ever had to do and yet… I couldn’t quite trust him. Or trust myself.

  It was a frightening moment out there in the moonlight so far from home.

  I relived that moment a million times the next day and the next, wonder­ing and worrying until Mother finally asked me what was wrong, until finally the following Saturday morning I told her the whole story.

  She sat very quietly, listening, not saying a word except that she reached over to give me a hug and a soft kiss on the cheek.

  “What do you think, Mother?” I asked, desperate for advice.

  “I think your heart will tell you,” was all she answered,

  It was—and it wasn’t—quite what I had expected her to say, and she left me sitting forlornly at the kitchen table while she went about the normal morning’s work. That morning, however, she took care of cleaning the separator for me, and gave me the easiest Saturday tasks—as if leaving me free to think would help.

  It didn’t. Not at all.

  17: Aini and Arvo

  Ever since I got home, Aini had been pleading with me to come to visit, “and stay a few nights with us! You have a nephew to meet!”

  And so I sent a message via the milkman that I would be accompanying him on his next run, packed a few housedresses, aprons, and underclothes, and made ready to leave the next morning.

  When I got there, Aini virtually fell into my arms. “I’m so grateful you’re here at last! I can use all the help I can get. What with the baby and all the chores to keep up with, I never can get ahead—or even equal to everything I have to do!”

  That had become apparent as soon as I walked into the house. To be very honest, it stank—of dirty diapers, of dirty dishes and pots and pans, of soured milk because the separator hadn’t been cleaned. In general everything was in a state of utter chaos.

  “Oh, my,”
I said, looking around. “Where do you want me to start?“

  “Well,” she said, “it’s time for me to nurse the baby again… it seems as if that’s all I do! So you could start anywhere.”

  She settled herself down in a rocking chair Karl had evidently built for her—he was a very clever carpenter—drew little Ernie out of his cradle (also made by Karl), and set him to nurse. He hadn’t been fussing at all, but, I thought, who am I to judge? I had had absolutely no experience with babies other than with Eino, and I wasn’t much older than he was. Somehow it seemed as if Mother had managed to nurse him, sometimes holding him to her breast with one hand while she worked with the other, and to keep up with the house at the same time. But clearly, Aini hadn’t gotten the hang of that yet.

  “The dirty diapers are in that pail,” she pointed. “If you put a bucket on top of the stove so that the water will boil, add soap, and then put them in, they can be cleaning themselves while you wash dishes.”

  “Where’s Karl?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s gone to Angora to pick up the sewing machine he ordered for me,” she told me, rather smugly. And then, with a sigh, “He’s trying to get back into my good graces, but it will take much more than a sewing machine to accomplish that!”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, because clearly something was very wrong

  “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. You’re not married,” she said. And then she went on, “He wants me to go back to sleeping with him,” she announced angrily. “I’ve told him and told him it isn’t good for the baby when I’m nursing for us to have…” Her voice dropped off at the end as if she couldn’t say the word.

  “You remember what it was like between Mother and Father,” she reminded me. “Well, that’s what marriage is like for everybody.”

  She sounded disillusioned.

  Again, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “It’s what’s not going on that’s causing the trouble.”

  There was a long pause while I dipped water from the hot water container on the side of the stove into a dishpan into which I had shaved bits of Mother’s soap. In went the worst of the pots and pans to soak while I worked at the dishes.

  I waited for her to continue. She just sat there, stubbornly silent.

  “You wouldn’t understand because you’re not married and you don’t have a boyfriend, or do you?”

  “No.” My tone was absolute, even though Arvo’s face appeared in the back of my mind. I resolutely shut it out.

  “Well…” she paused for a long time as if weighing her answer against my innocence. “You know what happens between a husband and wife—how a baby is made—don’t you?”

  Of course I did. We lived on a farm. I had seen stallions mount mares and bulls mount cows and even for that matter our cats mating. I knew the basic facts about what happened, but I had thought…

  “It’s exactly the same between a husband and a wife,” she announced. “And it hurts. It hurts horribly when he…” Again she paused, again weighing the information against my innocence. “When he sticks his… thing… into me. It hurts like the devil. In fact, I bled the first time.”

  “Doesn’t that always happen the first time?” I asked, not entirely innocent of the process. I had heard that some blood on the sheets after the first night meant that the woman had been a virgin. It was an important sign, evidently, but the fact was that I hadn’t given the whole process much thought.

  “Yes, but I kept on bleeding for at least a couple of weeks. Finally I told him I must be having my period and he had better wait until I was through.”

  “But he didn’t?” I asked.

  “When he finally started again, at least a month later, it was the same. There was no blood, but it hurt like fury. Once I found out I was pregnant, I told him he couldn’t do that anymore because it was dangerous for the baby.”

  “Is that true?” I asked, really wanting to know.

  “No. Not according to Mother. But she’s hardly the source of good news on that score.”

  “And the birth!” she continued, “the pain went on and on and on. I was sure I was going to die.”

  I thought I had heard Mother say that Aini had had a relatively easy time for a first birth. “But you didn’t! And look what you have now as a result of all of that!” I exclaimed, reaching for the baby, to hold him. He badly needed changing. “Where are his clean diapers?” I asked.

  “In that pail,” she answered, looking rather sheepish.

  “Well, I’d better get to them then. Right now.” I left the pots and pans to soak while I hurried to fix the water for washing and rinsing. As soon as I had the wash-tubs full, I started on the diapers, scrubbing each one on the wash board and using the brush on the worst of the stains, then wringing them out to dunk them into one tub of rinsing water and then the second, after which I let them pile up in a laundry basket before bringing them outside to hang. Thank Goodness it was a warm and windy day. They would dry quickly. After all, they were just made of thin muslin interspersed with the soakers Mother had obviously knitted to keep the urine from leaking out during the night. There were a lot of diapers! More, I thought, than any one small child could dirty in a day.

  “How long has it been since you’ve done the washing?” I asked when I got inside.

  “Oh… awhile…” Aini vacillated, as I had known her to do many a time at home when there was something that she hadn’t wanted to do.

  “Well, I suggest you set a schedule and work at keeping to it,” I snapped, knowing I was being hard on her, but aware that perhaps she needed a rude awakening.

  “And the dishes and the pots and pans! How have you become so slovenly?” I directed the question right at her.

  “You don’t know what it’s like… to have a new baby… and not to have any help.”

  “Doesn’t Karl help you at all?”

  “He offers, but I know the price I’ll have to pay if I take him up on it, so I’ve refused to let him.”

  “You know you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  “If I’d known all you were going to do was criticize me, I would never have asked you to come.”

  I thought to myself, rather unkindly, “You knew exactly what would happen when I came. I’d take over and do what you’ve left undone.” But I bit back the words and attended to the rest of the washing. As long as I had started, I thought I might as well finish. So in went the rest of the baby clothes, Aini’s underwear and Karl’s underwear (I felt a little uncomfortable washing his things but thought to myself that I had been washing for Ronny and Billy for weeks), followed by Aini’s dresses and aprons, some of them caked with milk, and finally Karl’s work clothes and the dirty rugs.

  Once I finished, Aini had laid Ernie down in his crib and set herself to helping with washing the dishes. And using the hot washing water one last time, I scrubbed the floor of the kitchen, the side entry, the downstairs “living room” where Aini had evidently been sleeping because the sofa bed had been made up with sheets and blankets and a pillow, and, going upstairs, wiped down the floor there, made the bed, and scrubbed my way down the stairs.

  By the time Karl returned with the sewing machine (and patterns and a couple of other bags I took to be clothes for Aini and for little Ernie), everything was basically back in order.

  As soon as the house was clean, I started a bread dough, and once I got going made a pulla dough, too, and a pie crust, just in case there had been any blueberries picked. Searching the pantry, I found a bowl full and finished the pie just about the time Karl finished getting the sewing machine out of the crate and began to put it together.

  It was a good thing he was good with his hands and clever with fixing things, because when I looked at the directions, I was flummoxed. I had no idea of where to begin.

  Aini had taken the packa
ges upstairs, and so I followed her to find out what had been in them.

  To my horror, I found her standing in the middle of the floor binding herself into a set of stays! “Aini,” I began, but she interrupted me.

  “Not only do I have so much to do, but I look like fright. I’m all big stomach, just as if I were still pregnant,” and she burst into tears.

  I set her down on the side of the bed, and held her, letting her cry out all of her disappointments and frustrations and fears.

  “You are not ugly,” I insisted. “And you will soon be back to being just as thin as you have ever been. Haven’t you heard the stories about how nursing mothers gain weight in order to produce milk for their babies? And then once they are through nursing, they go right back to their original size!”

  She snuffled, leaning against me, “You don’t know how much I have missed you,” she said through her tears. “Your incessant hounding and the pressure you put on everyone—including yourself—to make sure things are ‘just perfect’! I have truly missed you.”

  “And I you,” I said, truthfully. “I promise to… well… to try to…”

  “Quit pressuring!” she said.

  “And in turn, you will…”

  “Try harder to get things done on time.”

  “And to accept help from Karl. Listen to him downstairs, putting that darn sewing machine together just to make you happy. He really seems to want you to be happy.”

  “Then why does he continue to push me to do things I don’t… want… to… do?” And she dissolved into tears again.

  “Be patient with him if you can,” I advised, well aware I was in no position to give her any advice. “Ask Mother… and Irma Lofgren… about the pain you’re suffering. Perhaps there’s something you… or he… could do… to alleviate that.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  “Yes, you can, if you want to save your marriage. Or do you want to give up and come back home to live and leave him here alone?”