The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [9]
He’d stepped around me, leaving confusion and the scent of his cologne in his wake.
I wiped my eyes of the onions. I didn’t tell Mama that part, only that Forest Stapleton was a gentleman and I’d be writing to him instead of keeping a journal. She took that to be that I had wedding thoughts, for heaven’s sake.
“There’ll be little time for writing and such,” my mother informed me. “We must make twenty-nine miles a day to finish on time.”
I gasped. “That’s walking from Spokane to Rockford. Every day.”
“Every day. Oh, don’t look so glum. A woman can do anything for a day.”
“Hurry Ida and the children along,” Mama said. “No sense eating these cold.” She started to sing a Norwegian festival song. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she sang out of tune.
My siblings’ timing proved impeccable. Ida joined us in the kitchen first. My father and Olaf entered from the barn, taking cooled milk from the icebox and replacing it with fresh warm liquid. The middle-age children, Arthur and Bertha, rumbled down the stairs and gathered round the table that Ida and I finished setting. My brothers filled in the bench where Henry once sat, but they couldn’t fill in the space he left in our hearts.
Bertha wiped her eyes with her fingers as she sat, waiting for the signal to begin. She’d been called home from the Rutters’ for this weekend. She scanned the table with the stack of pancakes, little dishes of jams and jellies, fresh-baked rolls promising to be soft and chewy. “It feels like a birthday party with Mama singing. All we need is a cake.”
“Do you remember when I made that cake for your birthday?” Ida asked Bertha.
“When Mama visited her mother? In Wisconsin?”
Ida nodded. “I was your mother for then.”
Actually, I’d taken care of the children while Mama was gone those two months, walking across Minnesota and Wisconsin. I didn’t need to steal Ida’s thunder; she’d be drenched by the end of this meal anyway.
“We had a big cake, Clara. Papa rode to Mica Creek, to Schwartz’s store, but they had no soda, so he had to ride all the way to Rockford to get it so Ida could make my cake.”
“She knows the story,” Olaf told her. He arched one of his seventeen-year-old lanky legs over the back of the chair and sat down, reaching for a slice of the bacon our mother set on the table. Ida rolled her eyes as he said, “We all know the story.”
I knew it but still felt left out. At the time I’d been working on a neighboring farm while they all shared this pleasure.
“Now I make cakes for the Rutters,” Bertha said and she wrinkled her nose at her brother. Bertha reached for a potato pancake.
“You wait for grace,” I cautioned.
“You weren’t here for the party. And neither was Mama,” Bertha said, “so I have to tell you the story.” Her blond hair hung in braids and she smiled.
“Hedvig, fill your plate,” my mother said as she poured the milk. “But wait to say grace.”
“My name is Bertha, Mama. It’s more American.”
“Nothing wrong with Norwegian,” Ida said. She refilled our brothers’ coffee cups, brought a small amount of sugar, and set it in front of Papa.
“Silence,” Papa said. “We pray over the food, then you eat your potet without chatter.”
We all sat now, except for the little children, who still slept. All bowed our heads in silence while Papa prayed in English. Then the sounds of forks on ironstone interrupted while the occasional “please pass” and mange takk, a Norwegian thank-you, punctuated the rest of the meal.
As we finished, the younger children skipped downstairs in their nightclothes, and Ida and I assisted with their dressing. Even though it was May 1, the air felt chilly and I imagine the stove was a welcome comfort to their birdlike legs and slender little bodies. They sat at the table while I served them hot rommergrot, pouring milk on the creamy porridge I’d begun to prepare as soon as I heard their feet on the floor above us. Johnny, William—Billy, we called him—and Lillian ate silently