A Measure of Mercy (24 page)

Dear Dr. Bjorklund,

Greetings from Africa and all of us here at the mission. I pray daily for God to help you in making the decisions ahead of you, that you may hear Him clearly. Should you find that you are called to Africa, you will need to first attend a missionary school for several months. I have a good friend in Athens, Georgia, who is dean of the missionary school there. I can send a recommendation to him if you decide to go there.

Our good news is that our church building, which is also the school, much like the early families did in Blessing, is now completed. One day we hope to even have a wooden floor, but for now we rejoice. We use the hut we used to use for school now as our medical clinic. There is a visiting doctor, a man who covers hundreds of miles, calling on villages such as ours.

We are sharing the gospel, as we are called to do, and I am learning the language. I wish I learned as quickly as my children do. Hearing the children sing “Jesus Loves Me” in three different languages makes me think what heaven will be like.

I do hope and pray that you are enjoying your schooling and perhaps even have had some opportunities to see a bit of Chicago. As you no doubt know, Moody Bible Institute is in Chicago. I was privileged to attend there for a year. I’m sure the school has grown since I was there. This must be a day for remembering. One of my men here said he was homesick for heaven, an apt reminder for every day.

Blessings from the mission field, Rev. Schuman

Astrid smiled as she folded the thin paper and put it back in the envelope. The letter had traveled for a month, according to the date. And he’d said he was near a big town that had railroad service.
Homesick for heaven
. The line made her realize she wasn’t as homesick for Blessing any longer. She’d not had time to be.

19

B
LESSING
, N
ORTHDAKOTA

T
his harvest seemed longer than any other. It probably just seemed longer because they got such a late start due to the cold and wet summer.

Ingeborg stared out the window. An early frost turned to strewn diamonds in the rising sun. Good thing she’d been paying attention and covered the tomato plants and the cucumbers. She’d been hoping for a few more pickings, and now the weather would most likely turn warm again. Indian summer, one of her favorite times of the year. Canning was winding down. They had yet to dig the carrots and other root crops to store in the cellar—some in sand, others, like the potatoes, in bins.

If only Haakan were home. Granted, they had more places to thresh this year, the reason for his prolonged absence, but sometimes rationality had nothing to do with feelings. No matter that Freda still lived with them, she missed Haakan. And Astrid. Maybe that’s why this year was harder—the holes were larger. She tried to push back the concern that still simmered in her for Astrid. There was something beyond the strain of her studies, but she couldn’t read between the brief lines Astrid managed to send home. “Lord, you know, so please keep her heart,” she prayed.

She heard Andrew whistling on his way to the barn. She’d seen him striding across the fields, his dog at his heels. Staying home from the threshing crew was always his choice, and a good one it was. Someone had to take care of the home chores. The cows always needed milking and the other animals needed to be fed. Once it really turned cold, they’d be butchering hogs and the steers now kept in the corral and fed extra grain to fatten up for slaughter.

She rubbed her elbows, feeling the chill from the partially opened window. She always hated to close up the windows and lock the storm windows in place until spring.

The rattle of the stove lids told her Freda was up and starting the fire.

“Uff da, I’m getting lazy lately. Freda is spoiling me rotten.” She turned from the window, and after pinning her braided hair into a coronet around her head, she donned a clean apron and joined her cousin in the kitchen.

“It froze last night. I should have realized you would know better than I about the weather here. Yesterday was so warm and beautiful, I can hardly believe the change.” Freda slid the last stove lid back in place and adjusted the damper.

“I didn’t get the zinnias covered. I’m sure they’re drooping, along with the marigolds. Neither of them tolerates frost.”

“Would the seeds still be good?” Freda took the bread knife from the drawer. “I thought fried egg bread sounded good for today.”

“That’ll be wonderful.” Ingeborg dumped the used coffee grounds into the bucket for the garden. Even the chickens didn’t need coffee grounds, but her roses loved them. After filling the pot halfway with water, she set it on the stove and measured in the ground coffee. Since they didn’t need to make breakfast for the men, Andrew went home to Ellie and the children, George McBride went back to his shop at Kaaren’s, and the two boys from the deaf school had breakfast there, as did Samuel. Two years earlier they had built a separate house for George and his wife, Ilse, who helped Kaaren run the deaf school. Besides helping with the farming, George taught woodworking skills to the boys from the school.

The cat meowed at the door and, when Ingeborg opened it, trotted in carrying a dead mouse. She laid it on the braided rug in front of the stove and looked up at Ingeborg.

“So you are bringing me a gift, are you?”

The cat chirped in response.

“Well, I thank you, but you may eat it.” She nudged the dead body closer to the cat. She would have sworn the cat shrugged before picking up her prize and going behind the stove for her breakfast.

“She’s a good hunter, that one.”

“I know. But since she seems past the kitten-bearing years, she brings her offerings to me. One day the mouse was not dead, and we chased it all over the kitchen before she caught it again.”

Freda shuddered. “Never have cared much for mice, especially not in the house.” She made a face. “Dirty things.”

“Astrid used to catch them and wanted to keep one for a pet. She fixed a cage out of wire screening and fed it oats out of the feedbox. Along with bits of cheese.”

“In the house?”

“For a short while. One day the cat tipped over the cage and dispatched the mouse. I talked her out of getting another.”

With the bread, dipped in beaten eggs with a bit of milk added, sizzling in the pan, the kitchen began to smell like morning. Ingeborg set a jar of raspberry syrup on the table along with a bowl of applesauce.

“I used the last of the sour cream for the cookies yesterday. That would have been good on the bread too.”

“At home we used lingonberries.”

“I know. Here we have Juneberries, chokecherries, and the berries we grow in the garden.”

Freda dished the fried slices onto two plates she’d heated on the warming shelf and set them on the table. “Will you say grace?”

Ingeborg nodded. She bowed her head and let the kitchen noises settle her. The steaming teakettle, a piece of burning wood breaking, the cat now purring her contentment, a rooster crowing, all part and parcel of her mornings, all things to be thankful for. She started to say something else but switched to the Norwegian tradition. “I Jesu navn . . .” The two women finished the age-old words together and smiled at each other at the amen.

“A piece of home.” Freda spread the butter on her toast then added the syrup.

Ingeborg looked up at the sound of boots being scraped at the boot brush nailed to the porch floor.

“I brought you a bucket of milk,” Andrew said as he set the metal bucket on the counter out of the cat’s way. “I didn’t run it through the separator. You heard anything from Far yet?”

“Thank you. Just the letter you brought over two days ago.”

“I thought he might telephone.”

“I’d be surprised if very many farmers out West have telephones yet. Would you like some breakfast?”

“No, thanks. Ellie will have mine ready.” He looked to Freda. “You need some muscle power in the cheese house today?”

“I do. Takk for asking.” Freda nodded at him.

“I’m taking a shipment in to the train today, all those you crated yesterday. You need anything from the store?” Ingeborg held her cup with both hands, elbows resting on the table.

“I’ll ask Ellie.” He headed for the door. “I’ll be back right after I eat.”

Freda watched him go. “Such a fine young man you raised. Well, all of them.” She nodded. “You can be proud.”

“Thank you. I give God all the glory. He has blessed us so mightily.”

Freda mopped up the last of her syrup and sighed with pleasure. “I hope the men are eating well too.”

“They have to be, or Mrs. Geddick will know the reason why.”

“How she can take such pleasure in cooking in that little bitty wagon is beyond me.”

“She loves to feed men. Haakan often says that she can turn little into so much.” Ingeborg got up and brought the coffeepot over to pour refills. “I need to catch up on some correspondence, so I’ll be ready to go by eleven or so. If you need anything, the list is on the counter. Just add to it.”

“Do you have any yarn you have spun finer for a baby’s sweater?”

“I might have some left. Look in that cupboard behind the spinning wheel. Why?”

Freda leaned closer. “Anna thinks she is pregnant again.”

“This is wonderful. Why are you acting like it is a secret?”

“She hasn’t told Solem yet.”

“How can she? He’s been gone for six weeks.” Ingeborg smoothed her napkin with her fingertips. “Such wonderful news. If I don’t have any yarn left, we can buy some at the mercantile. Penny carries a variety of yarns now that so few people have sheep anymore.” She stopped at the look on Freda’s face. “What is it?”

“She’s so afraid she might lose this one too. That’s another reason she’s not told anyone.”

“How many times must we tell her, the cord around the neck like that is rare. Sometime the baby must have turned wrong or some such. It was not her fault.”

“You know that and I know that, but she worries.”

“We have to get a house built for them, that’s all there is to it.”

“I could go live with them, then.”

“But why? Are you not happy here?”

“Of course I am happy. This is a dream come true, but I have this yearning for land too. I’ve been thinking that maybe we need to go farther west so we can homestead like you did.”

“But does Solem want to do that? Or would he blame you for another decision that he is unhappy with?”

Freda heaved a sigh. “Sometimes I think I should have been a man.”

“Well, I’m going to run that pail of milk through a strainer and set part of it for the cream to rise. We’ll be needing to churn again in a couple of days. If you want my opinion, I say you should stay here, where you have family and friends. Homesteading is terribly hard work, and you are no longer a young woman, let alone not having a husband who dreams of land.” She pushed herself back from the table. “Leave these dishes. I’ll do them after a bit.”

After straining the milk through a clean dish towel, she set two shallow pans in the pantry for the cream to rise and poured the remainder into a jug and set it in the icebox. No longer did she have to keep everything out in the springhouse to keep cool. Penny had talked her into buying an icebox shortly after she returned and started restocking the store.

———

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, after running out to take the covers off the garden, and with the crated cheese wheels in the back of the wagon and her lists in hand, Ingeborg drove into town. Leaving the crates at the train station to be shipped to her customers, she tied the team in front of the Blessing Mercantile, although most of them called it Penny’s store.

The bell over the door announced her arrival, and Penny came through the door from the kitchen, her face blooming into a smile when she saw who it was.

“Ingeborg, I was beginning to think you were mad at me or something the way you never darken my door.”

“Oh, fiddle, you know that’s not possible.” Ingeborg inhaled the fragrances of the store: leather from boots and harnesses, including the tooled saddle that hung on the rack on the wall, kerosene for lamps and lanterns, the oil that coated various tools to keep them from rusting, starch and dyes, waxes for cleaning and candles, herbs like sage and thyme hanging in bunches from the bare rafters. “It always smells so good in here now that it is back to normal.” She shuddered remembering what the false Harlan Jeffers had done to the store.

“You must be smelling the molasses and ginger that went in the cookies I baked this morning. Surely you have time for a cup of coffee.”

“I was beginning to think you’d never ask.” She handed Penny a list. “Let me go get the mail first and leave my other list at Garrisons’. No one made it to town yesterday.”

“You want me to start filling this?”

“If you like.” Back out on the boardwalk that edged Main Street from the store to the grocery store and Rebecca’s soda shop to the building that housed the bank, the post office, the barbershop, and the telephone switchboard, then the boardinghouse across the street, Ingeborg waved to Rebecca, sweeping the walk in front of her shop.