Years

by LaVyrle Spencer

  “Grandma’s with Pa. She could use a breather.”

  “And you, too. You look like you’re ready to tip over.”

  He managed a weary smile. “Tipping over sounds wonderful.”

  “Help me wake the children, then you do just that.”

  The young ones were half-carried, half-nudged downstairs to make the long rides home on toboggans behind their weary, heartsore fathers whose chores today would include making funeral arrangements for their brother as well as seeing after the carcasses of two dead horses and an overturned wagon. The only blessing — and it was an ironic one at best — was how quickly eighteen inches of snow had melted to nine.

  The sun yawned awake, strewing the prairie with tardy warmth, painting sky and snow vivid pinks and oranges before stealing higher into a lustrous sky as clear as springwater.

  It streamed into the east window of Theodore’s room, while in the doorway, Linnea hesitated.

  Beside the bed, Nissa slumped on a hard kitchen chair, her chin resting on her chest and her fingers laced loosely over her stomach. Linnea’s glance moved to the bed. She stifled a gasp. He looked so haggard, so drawn... and undeniably old. The healthy color was gone, replaced by a wan, waxy tone. His eyes, behind closed lids, were surrounded by flesh tinted a faint blue. His cheekbones appeared to have sharpened into hooked blades that seemed as if they might slice through the flesh at any moment. His cheeks were sallow, and upon them shone lighter spots where frostbite had deadened the skin. His beard had grown for — for what? — two, almost three days. It seemed years since she’d waved his wagon off to town from the schoolyard. Studying the whiskered jaw and chin, she grieved afresh for all he’d been through.

  Her gaze passed to Nissa. Poor, afflicted mother. How tragic to outlive your own children. Linnea moved into the room to touch the slumped shoulder.

  “Nissa.”

  Her head snapped up. The spectacles had slipped low on her nose.

  “He took a turn for the worse?”

  “No. He’s the same. Why don’t you go lie down in your own room and I’ll sit watch for a while?”

  She flexed her shoulders, wedged her fingertips beneath her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Naw... I’ll be fine.”

  Linnea could see it would be useless to argue. “Very well, then I’ll sit with you.”

  “I’d welcome the company. Ain’t no other chairs in here, you’ll have to—”

  “This will be fine.” Linnea snagged the small creweled footstool and brought it near Nissa’s chair. She folded herself on it and drew her ankles in with both hands. The room smelled of camphor and liniment. Outside a rooster crowed and a robin boisterously heralded the morning. Inside, the regular beat of Theodore’s breathing was soon joined by the heavier purr of his mother’s soft snore.

  Linnea glanced up to see the old woman threatening to topple from her chair.

  She awakened her again, gently. “Come on, Nissa. You’re not doing Teddy any good when you can’t keep your own eyes open.” She gathered Nissa unresistingly against her side and guided her to the bedroom next door.

  “Well... all right... just for a minute.” Nissa dropped to the bed and rolled to her pillow without even bothering to remove her glasses. As Linnea slipped them from her nose, Nissa mumbled, “... chicken soup on the stove... ”

  “Shh, dear. I’ll see to him. Rest now.”

  Before leaving the room, Linnea loosened Nissa’s shoestrings and slid off the high-topped black shoes, then gently drew a comforter to her shoulders.

  Back in their own room she stood beside the bed, studying Theodore’s haggard face. The silent cry was gone from his lips. With two fingertips she gently brushed his eyebrows, his temple. She leaned to kiss the corner of his mouth; his skin was cool and dry. She touched a strand of his hair — clean but disheveled, curling slightly at the tips. She watched his chest lift and fall. The blankets covered his ribs. Above was the exposed wool of his exhumed winter underwear, buttoned all the way up to the hollow of his throat where the morning shadows delineated the trip of his pulse. His hands lay atop the coverlets. She took one; it lay lax and unresponsive, its skin callused and hard. She thought of that hand lovingly mending harnesses, soothing the belly of the pregnant mare, turning down Cub’s ear as he whispered into it... then grasping the haft of a knife and eviscerating his beloved beasts.

  Tears burned her eyelids again, and this time when she kissed his temple she lingered, breathing in the scent of his living flesh and hair, feeling his reassuring pulsebeat beneath her lips. Oh, Teddy, Teddy, we came so close to losing you, the baby and me. I was so scared. What would I have done without you?

  She stretched out beside him, on top of the covers, pressing her stomach close against his side, wrapping a protective arm around his waist, and for a while she slept, with their baby pressed between them.

  His cough awakened her. She sat up, listening for signs of congestion, got off the bed, and pulled the covers up to his ears. On the chair beside the bed, she kept vigil. For the most part he lay quietly, but once he rolled to his side, not with the wild flinging of one experiencing haunted dreams, but with a slow, tired deliberation, as of one too exhausted to move quickly. He spoke not a word, no unconscious outcries prompted by the horror he’d suffered. For now, he seemed at peace.

  He awakened near noon, as undramatically as he’d slept. He was flat on his back, hands on his stomach when he opened his eyes and rolled his jaw to the pillow. His pupils and mind tried simultaneously to focus, finally lighting on Linnea. When he spoke his voice sounded like nutshells cracking.

  “John?”

  Her throat and mouth filled. Her heart wrenched with pity. She’d feared being the one to whom he’d awaken and ask the question, yet perhaps it was best that Nissa and Kristian be spared answering it.

  She took his hand. “John didn’t make it.”

  “Tell him to get under the wagon,” Theodore said very clearly. Struggling to brace up on both elbows, he ordered in an eerily normal tone, “John, get in,” then made as if to get up and see to it.

  Linnea sprang to her feet, pushed him back, and struggled to keep her tears hidden.

  “Go to sleep... please, Teddy... shh... shh... ”

  He fell back, closed his eyes, and rolled toward the wall, again claimed by the blissful arms of sleep.

  He was still dead to the world when Nissa came to spell Linnea. And later in the afternoon, when the men returned to discuss funeral arrangements. Linnea took Nissa’s place again and was sitting beside the bed when Lars and Ulmer came to the bedroom door and knocked softly. Lars asked, “How is he?”

  “Still sleeping.”

  The two men came in and quietly stood looking down at their sleeping brother. Ulmer reached to brush the hair from Teddy’s forehead, then turned to rest a hand on Linnea’s shoulders. “How you doing, young ‘un?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m fine. Don’t waste your worries on me.”

  “Ma tells us you’re in a family way.”

  “Just barely.”

  “Barely’s enough. You take it easy, okay? We don’t want Teddy to wake up to more bad news.”

  He glanced at Teddy again while Lars leaned over to give Linnea a kiss on the cheek. “That’s wonderful, Linnea. Now how about a breath of fresh air?”

  She glanced at Theodore. “I’d rather not leave him.”

  “We went out with a couple horses, cleaned up the mess, tipped over the wagon, and brought it back home. It’s sitting down by the windmill. There’s something carved in the bed of it we think you should see.”

  They let her go alone. On the fast-disappearing snow the shadow of the windmill stretched long. She ran through the late afternoon toward the parsley-green wagon with its bright red wheels. The words were easy enough to spot — after all, Theodore kept everything in shipshape, including the thick green paint on the wagon bed. The letters were slightly disconnected, but decipherable just the same.

  Lin, I’m sorry.

  More t
ears? How was it possible to feel more pity, more love than she already did? Yet she experienced as real a pain while reading the message as she imagined he had felt writing it. She ran her fingertips over the scarred paint, picturing him lying beneath the overturned wagon carving the words, afraid he’d die without saying them, without seeing his child.

  Love welled up, combined with grief, despair, and hope, a mixture of emotions brought about by the random hand of fate choosing one life and sparing another.

  That evening, when she was sitting beside Teddy, his eyes opened. She saw immediately he was lucid.

  “Linnea,” he said croakily, reaching.

  She took his hand; his fingers twisted tight and pulled. “Teddy... oh, Teddy.”

  “Come here.”

  Gingerly, she sat beside him.

  “No... under.”

  Sweater, apron, shoes, and all she got beneath the covers where it was warm and he was waiting to roll her tight against his stomach and hold her as if he were shipwrecked and she was a sturdy timber.

  “I’m so sorry, Linnea... so sorry... I didn’t think I’d—”

  “Shh.”

  “Let me say it. I’ve got to.”

  “But I found the carving on the wagon. I know, love, I know.”

  “I thought I was going to die and you’d think I didn’t want the baby, but when I was laying under that wagon thinking I’d never see you again I... I kept thinking that the baby was a godsend, only I’d been too stubborn to recognize it. Oh, Lin, Lin... I was such a fool.” He could not hold her close enough, nor kiss her hard enough to convey all he felt. But she understood fully as his hand stole down to mold her stomach where his seed grew, healthy and strong.

  “And I thought you’d die in the blizzard and I wouldn’t get a chance to tell you I knew you hadn’t meant it. But you’re alive... oh, dear Teddy... ”

  “You feel so good, so warm. It was so cold under that wagon. Hold me.”

  She did, gratefully, until his tremors passed.

  In time she whispered, “Teddy, John... ”

  “I know,” came his voice, muffled against her chest. “I know.”

  He shuddered once, convulsively, then his hands clutched her sweater and he pulled her tightly against him while she cradled his head, her lips buried in his hair.

  There were no words she could say, so she didn’t try. She let him breathe of her warm, live, pregnant body, clutch it, draw from it, until the worst had passed. When he spoke, he spoke for both of them. “If the baby’s a boy, we’ll name it after him.”

  A life for a life — somehow they both found ease in the thought.

  24

  JOHN’S FUNERAL WAS held on May Day, the temperature reaching an unprecedented seventy-nine degrees. There remained no hint that the blizzard had ravaged the countryside save for the casket of the man who’d lost his life in it. Indeed, the wild crocus and buttercups blossomed euphorically. In the cemetery beside the little white country church a myriad of spring flowers were up and radiant beside the headstones — creeping phlox in carpets of purple, peonies in explosions of heliotrope, and bridal wreath in cascades of white.

  But what a woeful scene at the graveside. On a day when the children should have been gathering those flowers for May baskets, they stood instead among them in a crooked flank, singing a farewell hymn in clear, piping voices while their teacher directed them with tears in her eyes. The family stood nearby, hemmed in close, their elbows touching.

  When the song ended, Linnea took her place by Theodore’s shoulder, he was still too depleted to stand through the ceremony, so sat instead on a plain wooden kitchen chair. It looked out of place with its spooled legs buried in the spring grass. It was the kind of chair usually seen with toddlers climbing on its seat, or with a man balancing it on two legs while considering what card to play, or with a work jacket carelessly flung over its back. The sight of it at the graveside brought Linnea’s tears up again with new vigor.

  But it wasn’t really the chair at all. It was Theodore who made her cry, sitting upon it so wan and gaunt, dolefully formal, his legs crossed at neither ankle nor knee. The gentle breeze riffled his pant legs and fingered the hair on his forehead. He still hadn’t shed a tear, though she knew his agony was even greater than her own. But all she could do was stand at his side and squeeze his shoulder.

  And then there was Nissa, listening to Reverend Severt eulogize her son, breaking down at last and turning against Lars’s broad chest for support until from somewhere a second kitchen chair was produced and she was gently lowered onto it.

  The faces of John’s siblings were vacant, each of them undoubtedly reliving their own private memories of the gentle, unassuming man they had protected all their lives.

  The eulogy droned on. Funny, Linnea thought, but it didn’t seem to touch on any of the important things: John, selfconsciously shuffling his feet while peeking around a cloakroom door with a Christmas tree hidden behind him; John, blushing and stammering as he asked the new schoolmarm to dance; John, winking at his partner just before playing the winning card; John, planting morning glories by his windmill; John, saying, “Teddy, he never gets mad at me, not even when I’m slow. And I’m pretty slow.”

  Oh, how they’d miss him. How they’d all miss him.

  The ceremony ended as Ulmer, Lars, Trigg, and Kristian lowered the coffin into the grave. When a symbolic spadeful of dirt was dropped upon it, Nissa collapsed in a rash of weeping, repeating woefully, “Oh, my son... my son... ” But Theodore sat on as before, as if part of his own life had been snuffed out with John’s.

  During the hours following the service, while the mourners gathered at the house to share food, Theodore looked haggard and spoke little. When the house emptied at last and the quietude settled too thickly, Nissa sat at the kitchen table, listlessly tapping the oilcloth. Kristian went for a walk up the road with Patricia and Raymond. Linnea hung up wet dishtowels on the clothesline and returned to the tranquil house.

  Nissa stared vacantly at the sunset sky, the budding caragana bushes, the windmill softly turning. Linnea stepped behind her chair and leaned to kiss the old woman softly on the neck. She smelled of lye soap and lavender salts. “Can I get you anything?”

  Nissa heaved herself from her reverie. “No... no, child. Guess I’ve had about everything a body’s got a right to expect.”

  The tears stung once more. Linnea closed her eyes, leaned back, and held a deep breath. Nissa sighed, squared her shoulders, and asked, “Where’s Teddy?”

  “I think he slipped away to the barn to be by himself for a while.”

  “You reckon he’s all right out there?”

  “I’ll go down and check on him if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “He’s awful weak yet. Didn’t see him eatin’ much today either.”

  “Will you be all right alone for a few minutes?”

  Nissa gave a dry laugh. “Y’ start alone, y’ end alone. Why is it that in between folks think y’ always need company?”

  “All right. I won’t be long.”

  She knew where he’d be, probably slumped on his chair polishing harness that didn’t need it. But when she came to the door of the tack room she found him instead with idle hands. He sat in the ancient chair, facing the door, with his head tipped back against the edge of the tool bench, eyes closed. On his lap, washing her chest, sat John’s cat, Rainbow, with Theodore’s hands resting inertly beside her haunches. Though he at first appeared to be asleep, Linnea saw his fingertips move in the soft fur, and from the corner of his eyes, tears seeped. He wept as he’d awakened — quietly, undramatically — letting the tears roll down his face without bothering to wipe them away.

  Linnea had never seen Theodore cry before; the sight was devastating.

  “Theodore,” she said gently, “your mother was worried about you.”

  His eyes opened, but his head didn’t move.

  “Tell her I just wanted to be alone.”

  “Are you all right?�
�

  “Fine.”

  She studied him, trying to keep her lips from trembling, her eyes from slinging. But he looked so forlorn and alone. “Did Rainbow come down here by herself?”

  With an effort he lifted his head to watch his fingers probe the cat’s fur, the look on his face so desolate and lifeless it tore at her soul. “No. Kristian went and got her. Figured she’d sit on John’s doorstep meowing for food... t... till... ” But he never finished. His face suddenly furrowed into lines of grief. A single harsh sob rent the room as he dropped his head and covered his eyes with one hand. Rainbow started and leaped away while Linnea rushed across the concrete floor to squat before him, touching his knees.

  “Oh, Teddy... “she despaired, “I need so badly to be with you right now. Please don’t shut me out.”

  A strangled cry left his throat as his arms lashed out to take her close. Then she was in his embrace, on his lap, holding him fiercely while his ragged sobs heaved against her breast, and hers upon his hair. Clutching, they rocked. Against her dress he brokenly uttered her name while she clung to him — consoled, consoling.

  When the crying subsided, they were left limp, depleted, but feeling better and infinitely closer. A step sounded in the outer barn and though Teddy straightened, Linnea stayed where she was, with her arms around his neck.

  Kristian stepped to the doorway, looking lost and lonely himself. “Grandma was worried. She sent me down here after you two.”

  They’d each had their time alone. Now it was time to draw strength from others. Linnea got to her feet, drew Theodore up, and said, “Come. Nissa needs to be with us now.” She looped one arm around his waist, the other around Kristian’s, and followed by John’s cat, they walked up past the sighing windmill toward the house.

  Life went on. Theodore returned to the fields alone. Nissa started putting in her garden. P.S. 28 had been closed long enough.

  How fast the school year was coming to a close. May seemed to pass in a blur. There was the county spelling bee in Williston — won by Paul this year. Then came Sytende Mai — the seventeenth of May — the biggest Norwegian holiday of the year, celebrating the day the homeland had adopted its constitution. There were games and a picnic at school, followed by a dance, at which Linnea brought up the subject of Kristian’s enlistment.