Roberta_Bride of Wisconsin

by Kirsten Osbourne

Jakob gave her a knowing look, but said nothing. He drove quietly through the streets, and stopped in front of a small restaurant. There was a sign at the front proclaiming, "Inga's Diner."

  There was a tall blond woman who seated them after introducing herself as Inga. She pointed to the menu for the day, written on a chalkboard. "Pick what you want. I'll be back."

  All of them looked at the chalkboard. Konrad started reading things off, rejecting them all. "I don't think I want the roast beef or the fried chicken. The chicken and dumplings sounds good to me, but maybe I want the pork chop with a baked potato. No, I think I'll have the chicken and dumplings."

  Bobbie thought that was odd, but she said nothing. Instead she chose her own meal and sat quietly as she waited for the owner of the restaurant to come back.

  Jakob leaned back. "I think I'll have the fried chicken. Inga's is the best. She makes it with mashed potatoes and a thick cream gravy. I have never tasted any that was so good."

  Bobbie frowned. "I was going to get the chicken and dumplings, but you make the fried chicken sound delicious. I think I'll have that instead."

  Lukas looked at her. "Do you make delicious fried chicken, Frog-mutter?"

  "Are you always going to call me 'Frog-mutter?'"

  "I might need to," Lukas said with a grin. "I like how it sounds. Don't you?"

  Bobbie shook her head. What on earth had she gotten herself into? "I make an all right fried chicken. I've never been a great cook, but my best friend, Sarah, has been teaching me to cook."

  Jakob was surprised at how sad she looked when she said the friend's name. "Where is your friend now?"

  "She's on a train on her way to Minnesota. She's marrying a man there."

  "You both became mail-order brides at the same time?" he asked.

  "Yes. We worked in a factory together, and it burned to the ground," she said, omitting a great many of the details about what had happened. She was certain he wouldn't care that she'd managed the factory or that the owner had burned it to the ground. "Almost half of the women from the factory decided to become mail-order brides. We had nothing else to do."

  "What kind of factory was it?" he asked. He wished he'd known that about her. It would have made her seem more like a real woman to him, and less like an imposter who wanted to take Erna's place in the world.

  "It was a clothing factory. Some of the women worked on looms, and some worked on sewing machines."

  "Which did you do?" he asked.

  "I worked on a sewing machine," she told him. And she had at first. He hadn't asked if she'd ever managed the factory. She simply left out the fact that she'd stopped doing that years ago.

  "Oh, good! I'm glad to hear you know how to sew on one. I bought Erna one shortly before she died, but she never could get the hang of the thing, preferring to do everything by hand."

  "Erna was your wife?" she asked, wondering if it was a topic he was comfortable with.

  He nodded, his face sad. "Yes, she was."

  "I'm sorry about her death. Was it recent?" She knew it was after her talk with Bertha on the train, but she wanted to hear it from him. Listening to gossip was something she'd never been comfortable with.

  "It was last winter." Jakob was relieved when Inga came back to their table to take their order.

  "And you boys go to school?" she asked Konrad and Lukas.

  "Yes, ma'am," Lukas said.

  "I'll be in school for another two years," Konrad said. "Then I'll be old enough to work with Vater at the logging camp."

  "What?" Bobbie asked, looking at Jakob. "You'll let him leave school to work? Why not make him finish school first?"

  Jakob shrugged. "He will make his own decision when he's big enough to do a man's work. I was big enough at twelve, so I think he will be as well."

  "But, that's ridiculous! There's no way he'll know enough to graduate when he's twelve."

  "Why does he need to graduate? He'll take over my lumber business, and he doesn't need to be a scholar for that. He already reads and writes and ciphers well. He doesn't need more." Jakob smiled at Inga as she set their plates on the table.

  "But...you can't just make him drop out of school! What if he wants to go on to be a doctor or a lawyer?"

  Jakob shrugged. "I'm making him do nothing. I'm giving him the choice. Every man needs to be able to make his own choices."

  "But you're encouraging him to stop going to school by offering him a job where he can do a man's work. Why not encourage him to stay in school, so he can see what he wants to do with his life?" she asked.

  "He wants to work in the lumber camp with me. He's already said he does."

  "He's not old enough to even know what he wants. You can't ask him to make the decision now when he's only ten!"

  "He's my son, and I'll raise him as I please!"

  "I'll be his step-mother!"

  "You'll be his frog-mutter, and that's something else entirely! I'll let you know when you've been around for long enough to have an opinion on what my sons do or don't do!"

  Roberta had enough of the man. She stopped talking and stared down at her fried chicken. She was so angry she didn't even want to eat it, but she wasn't going to punish herself for the man's bad behavior. She forked up a bite of the mashed potatoes with their thick cream gravy and almost sighed with pleasure. They really were delicious.

  Throughout the rest of the meal, none of them spoke a word. When they were finished eating, Jakob paid for their meal, and they went back out to the buggy. The boys were dropped off at their school, and Bobbie stayed silent as they rode the rest of the way to his house.

  Jakob couldn't miss her silence as they drove toward the house, but he wasn't sure if he should be angry with her or not. It was a good thing she was showing an interest in his children already, but he didn't want her thinking she could come in and change the boy's plans for his life. He and Erna had encouraged him to do what he wanted when he was twelve, and he would continue to do so, if only to keep his memories of his first wife alive.

  Bobbie gasped when they pulled up in front of the house. She'd grown up in a much bigger house, yes, but this was the biggest house she'd seen in Wisconsin so far. Did that mean her new husband was wealthy?

  Back East when a man was wealthy, he showed it in the way he acted, but maybe it was different here in Wisconsin. It was certainly a different place for her to be.

  He helped her down from the buggy, getting her two carpet bags from the back. "Come on then." He opened the door, and immediately flushed with shame as he saw the house Erna had kept so immaculate through a stranger's eyes. He said nothing, but led her to the room beside his she would be sleeping in. "This room will be yours. Mine is that one," he indicated another room with his thumb, and then he pointed to the stairs. "The boys each have a bedroom upstairs, and there's a family parlor up there as well as a spare bedroom for guests. We have a bathroom right through that doorway, and the kitchen is through here." He mentally cringed as they walked into the kitchen. There were several days' worth of dishes in the sink as well as piled on the work table.

  "I'll be off to work now. The boys will be home around half past four, and I'm usually home by five-thirty. I might be a little late, because I missed the morning of work. It depends on whether or not anything went wrong." He left without another word, closing the door behind him.

  Bobbie looked at the mess in the kitchen, and then slowly walked through the entire house, taking inventory of how dirty it really was. Every inch of the place needed a scrubbing. Why it looked as if no one had made an attempt to clean in almost a year, and they probably hadn't.

  She wanted to sit down at the table and cry, but what was the point? She'd still have the same amount of work to do.

  Instead, she removed her heavy coat, and took it into her bedroom and hung it in the wardrobe. Then she rolled up her sleeves and got to work, starting in the kitchen seemed her best bet. Food needed to come from there, and she didn't want her new family to die from the filth.


  *****

  By the time the boys had come home from school, she had finished cleaning the kitchen to her own exacting standards. Every dish had been washed, the table and floor had both been scrubbed, and the stove had been properly blackened. She had a huge pot of stew simmering on the stove, and she was up on a chair scrubbing the tops of the walls that she hadn't been able to reach from the floor.

  "What are you doing up there, Frog-mutter?" Lukas asked.

  She wanted to scream at him to stop calling her by that ridiculous name, but she smiled down at him instead. "I'm washing the tops of the walls that I can't reach from the floor."

  "No one can see up there," he protested. "Why waste your time?"

  "It's not wasted, because then I'll know it's clean." Bobbie had never been what she would consider an ambitious cleaner, but filth was something else entirely. She would feel dirty until every room in that house had been cleaned by her own hands.

  Konrad walked into the kitchen, ignoring the fact that she was on a chair. "What's for supper?"

  At least the older one had yet to call her 'frog-mutter.' "Stew. If I can get the walls washed in time, I'll make some biscuits to go with it."

  "Biscuits?" That got both boys' attention, but Konrad in particular. "How can I help you then?"

  "I need this water dumped out, and more water from the pot on the stove added to it, with a bit of the soap."

  Konrad hurried to help her, dumping the dirty water out the back door, and coming back in to add the hot water, and some of the lye soap to it. "Is that good?"

  She nodded, dipping her cloth into the water and getting back to work.

  "I'll go to the basement and get some of the strawberry preserves to go on the biscuits," Konrad said, hurrying away.

  Lukas continued to stand below her, still watching her. "The kitchen looks almost like it did when our real mutter was alive," he finally said before leaving the room quietly.

  Bobbie wasn't sure if she'd just been insulted or complimented, but she decided to take it as a compliment. Why get offended over something that an eight year old boy said? There was no point.

  Chapter Three

  She'd just taken the biscuits out of the oven when Jakob got home from work. He frowned as he walked through the downstairs parlor and back toward the kitchen. Had the woman done nothing while he'd worked? As soon as he stepped into the kitchen, the smells from dinner and the fresh clean smell of soap hit his nostrils. The kitchen looked like someone had removed the old one and built a fresh new one. He'd begun to wonder if it was even possible for the kitchen to be clean again with the way he and the boys had abused it, but there it was, looking as good as ever.

  "The kitchen looks good. You're a hard worker," he told her, hoping she would be as complimented as he meant her to be.

  "Did you think I'd spend all day sitting around in your filth?" she asked, setting the biscuits atop of the stove before piling them together on a plate and putting them on the table. "I'm not that kind of woman."

  She put butter from the icebox onto a plate before she called the boys down to eat. While she was waiting, she put stew into each of four bowls and set them on the table, pouring milk into a glass for each of them.

  He sat at the head of the table, so she immediately went to the foot. The boys ran into the room, and Konrad's eyes lit up when he saw the fluffy biscuits. "Are they good?" he asked her, his voice low and full of awe.

  "They should be. I try not to make inedible things." She didn't mention that she'd burnt her first three batches of biscuits because she had always gotten distracted and gone off to do other things. She had more patience now, though, and she stayed in the kitchen to wait for the biscuits to be done. Never had she been so thankful for the hours of cooking lessons she'd received from Sarah.

  Both boys took a biscuit, added butter and jam, and set it on their plates. They looked at their father expectantly.

  He bowed his head and said a prayer. When he finished, the boys practically fell on their food. "Biscuits are delicious!" Konrad announced, eating the first half in one bite.

  Jakob grinned at his son, reaching for a biscuit of his own. "I guess they're edible after all," he said with a wink toward Roberta. She wrinkled her nose at him, annoyed that he'd thought she would sit around all day while he worked.

  "It's going to take me several days, maybe several weeks, to get the house where it needs to be," she said. "If there's mending that needs to be done, I'd appreciate it if you would bring what needs to be fixed to the kitchen after supper, and I'll start a pile. I can work on the mending when I need to sit down for a few minutes."

  "We'll all do it right after supper," Jakob promised. He was thrilled to see the way she'd jumped in and started working. He'd meant to tell her to wait and get started working on Tuesday, but he'd not thought of it until he was back at work, and he was unsure of whether he should come back to talk to her. "You should take a day off to rest after your long journey."

  Bobbie glared at him. "I have no time to rest. Have you actually looked at this house? It's going to be all I can do to get it caught up. I can't believe you would let it get this bad."

  Jakob felt his anger rise to the surface. "You have no right to talk to me that way! Have you ever lost a loved one and tried to do their work and your own? I had no time after working all day to keep a house clean! That's why you're here!"

  Bobbie closed her eyes and counted to ten, wondering why she'd let herself say something so anger-filled. They really had gotten off to a bad start. She took a deep breath before she spoke. "What I said was uncalled for. I appreciate the place to live. I will make sure I get it looking like it should as soon as I can."

  Jakob nodded, wanting to stay angry with her, but she'd apologized. "We'll do our best not to let it get so bad again. The boys will make sure to keep their beds made and bring their laundry down to you every morning. Have you been in the basement yet?"

  She shook her head, wondering why he'd ask such a question.

  "There's a Triumph Rotary Washing Machine down there. It's amazing. I will show you how to use it."

  "A washing machine?" She'd heard of them, of course, because they were supposed to be wonderful time-saving devices. "Really?"

  He nodded. "There's a clothesline as well. That way you can hang the clothes in the basement and not have to go outside in the cold to dry them." He was proud of the little things he'd bought for Erna to make her life better. Bobbie should get the benefit of those things as well.

  "That sounds wonderful!" She'd never expected to be able to do things so easily. Of course, she was living in a house with electricity for the first time in her life. She'd been in houses that were electrified, but she and her mother had moved out of her father's home before he'd had electricity added. She'd been too poor since to even think about it.

  Working in the factory had given her an independence that most women never had. Girls seemed to go from their parents' house to their husband's house, and never really get a sense of how to do for themselves. When they were widowed young, or their husband left them, they had no idea what to do or how to take care of themselves. Her life hadn't been easy, but she'd learned a great deal. She wouldn't give up the last few years for anything.

  After dinner, Jakob took Bobbie down to the basement to show her the washing machine and how to use it. She liked the idea of being able to hang her clothes to dry down there in inclement weather, but she was certain she would hang them outside most of the time. She loved being outdoors and couldn't wait to explore her surroundings. Wisconsin was pretty, and from what she'd read, soon it would be too cold to do a great deal outdoors.

  The walls of the basement were lined with shelves of canned goods. "I purchased things from many of the local farmers' wives when the crops came in. I know how hard life is when you don't have enough money, and I knew we'd need to have many things that were easy to fix without Erna."

  Every time Jakob said Erna's name, a lost little boy look came over his face. B
obbie felt bad for him. "You miss her, don't you?"

  He nodded. "She was everything to me. She took care of the house, the boys, and everything else around here. I did nothing but go to work. It's been so different without her." He knew his fear was that he would become too close to his new wife. He wanted to remain unmarried, but he had to think of his boys. "I want you to know that you'll be sleeping alone. I've made sure the spare room was ready for you. I'll sleep in my own bed. You never have to worry about that from me."

  Bobbie nodded soberly. "Honestly, I can't say I'm disappointed. It's not something I was looking forward to. Really, I'll be a live-in housekeeper and cook, but I'll carry your name and have more respectability."

  "Ja. Exactly. I'm glad you understand."

  "I not only understand. I'm all for the idea. We'll be partners in raising the boys, but not in bed."

  "Well, I don't know how much I'll let you be partners raising the boys either. I want to keep on the path Erna and I outlined for them. Your opinions really won't matter much."

  Bobbie closed her eyes. "You have to ruin everything, don't you?" She walked toward the steps. "Just when we're getting along you have to say something stupid. I'm going to go take a bath."

  She didn't stomp up the stairs, but she may as well have. Jakob watched her go with a slight smile on his face. She wasn't Erna, and really, she couldn't be less like his first wife. But there was something about Bobbie that he was attracted to. He wished it wasn't so, but he couldn't deny it. Her attitude would keep him busy.

  *****

  Roberta prepared her bath, sinking into the claw-footed porcelain tub with a sigh. Running water. Who would have thought she'd have a more luxurious life in Wisconsin of all places? While she bathed, she mentally wrote a letter to Sarah, knowing she would have to get all her anger out. What was wrong with her husband that he was so negative about everything? Yes, she knew he'd lost his wife, but did that mean he had to treat her as if she was a second class citizen?

  When she got out of the tub, she put on her nightgown and her robe, making sure she was decent from head to toe. She went into her room and closed the door, getting her brush and carefully brushing her hair dry.