A Measure of Mercy (35 page)

Kaaren took her Bible and flipped it open. She raised her voice. “I’m reading from Psalms to start today. Since we are so near to Thanksgiving time I thought to start with Psalm 150.” She ended with “ ‘Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.’ ”

“Sometimes it is easier to complain than to praise Him, I think.” Penny stuck her finger in her mouth to keep the blood from a needle prick from staining the pieces.

“What if we all agreed to write down five things to be thankful for every day, and on Thanksgiving Day we put the lists in the offering plate?” Mary Martha looked to Ingeborg for her agreement.

“Five every day?” Sophie’s voice squeaked on the words.

“We could make it ten.” Kaaren rolled her lips to keep from laughing at the look on her daughter’s face.

Hildegunn nodded. “What a good idea.”

“Who’s going to read them?”

“Why does anyone have to read them? They are an offering to God from each one of us.” Penny mentally counted. “We have twelve days. Surely we can manage this for twelve days.”

“Do they have to be different every day?” Ellie asked. “I haven’t even had time to write to Astrid, let alone to read. Good thing Andrew reads to me every evening.”

Ingeborg smiled at her daughter-in-law. How good to know that her son was following in his family’s footsteps. She loved it when Haakan read to her while she sat sewing or knitting. The box she kept for Christmas presents was filling fast, but it was a good thing she had started so early. This quilt for Emmy was not bed size but cuddle size, so she would have something of her own.

Ellie turned to Ingeborg. “Don’t go making a doll for Emmy for Christmas. I have one about finished. I gave the doll a tan face and dark hair so she’d look more like her.”

“What a good idea. I wonder if rag dolls might be something else we could put in the barrels for the reservation children.”

A
harrumph
came from the quilting frame group.

———

WHEN KAAREN AND Ingeborg got home from the quilting, Emmy flew across the floor and threw herself into Ingeborg’s arms. She raised a beaming face, her eyes dancing. “Did you have a good time?” Ingeborg asked.

“Emmy likes for Grandpa to give her cookies,” Inga informed them as she made sure she got her hugs too. “So does Carl.”

“And you don’t care for cookies?” Kaaren asked, passing around hugs too.

Inga looked at her, wide-eyed in disbelief. “I gave out the cookies. Grandpa said so.”

Ingeborg looked over at Haakan sitting at the table, coffee cup in front of him and another plate of cookies on the table. “Did you have dinner?” she asked Inga.

The child nodded. “No one even spilled.”

The thought of Haakan getting the two children up to the table and serving soup with bread and a glass of milk made her give her husband a raised-eyebrows look. While she had left the soup kettle on the stove and sliced the bread, she knew that getting the two taken care of at the same time took some doing.

“Inga helped,” he said with a smile.

“Pa came too,” Inga said, gazing up at her grandmother. “But then he left.”

“After dinner?”

She nodded.

Kaaren burst out laughing. “Oh, Haakan, and here we were feeling sorry for you. I should have known better.”

“Thorliff delivered the newspaper and stayed for dinner. It was only polite to ask him.”

“Pa drew us kittens. We colored them.”

Ingeborg glanced down at the little girl holding on to her skirt. Emmy watched and listened but still had not said a word. Yet she and Inga got along fine. How come children could play so well together even when they didn’t speak and adults couldn’t? She thought back to the early days when Metiz would come to visit. She always brought something along to work on, like the rabbit-skin mittens that everyone prized. Ingeborg still had a pair of the soft, fur-lined mittens. How she wished Metiz were here to bring her special wisdom and more mittens and vests. Samuel had tanned a bunch of rabbit skins. She should make some herself.

“Are we taking Inga home?”

Haakan shook his head. “She’s spending the night. Carl is invited too.”

“I see.”

“I’m heading home,” Kaaren said. “You want me to send Freda back?”

“If she wants. You think they finished the wash?”

“I see that the sheets are all hanging on the clothesline. She and Anna have made things so much easier for Ilse. This pregnancy has been hard on her.”

“And she still has a month to go.”

“If she makes it that long.”

“Thorliff brought the mail. We have a letter from Astrid and one from Augusta.”

“Wonderful. Surely you can stay to hear them?” She turned to Kaaren. “Take your things off and be comfortable. School will let out soon, and you can ride home with your bunch.”

When they had their cups of coffee poured and the little ones sitting on the floor with a cookie each, Ingeborg broke the seal on Astrid’s letter.

“Dear Mor and Far,

“I am so excited that Rebecca and Gerald are coming to take Benny home. Thank you for your willingness to step in and help them. Gerald told me his mother is excited about Benny’s coming.”

Ingeborg glanced up at Kaaren. “Hildegunn didn’t mention this today. Do you think she’d react with joy?”

“She took in those boys years ago, and look what a blessing it has been to her and them. She’ll make a good grandmother. It’ll give you two one more thing to share.”

Ingeborg raised an eyebrow. This could get interesting.

“I wish I could bring Benny to Blessing myself, but all of us will be staying here at the hospital. You know he has nothing of his own except what he came in wearing. He needs a warm coat, so remind them to bring one with them. He is so game in learning to use his artificial legs, but when he wants to get somewhere fast he crawls.

“Red Hawk and I have nearly completed our dissection of our cadaver. The old man has become a hero to us as we study every bit of him. I am grateful for people who are willing to donate bodies like this. We have learned so much.

“I was at the meeting with Dr. Morganstein and her friends who are gathering information of our dreams for a hospital. Isn’t it interesting that God has given them a dream for building other hospitals at the same time as we’ve had a dream? I told them as much as I could but suggested they need to come to Blessing and talk to people there. Dr. Morganstein’s nephew asked most of the questions. She calls him her money man.

“I need to close this and get some sleep. I am hoping and praying that the women of Blessing will be willing to help those on the reservations. I know you are already doing some.

“Love from your Astrid.”

Ingeborg looked up. “I do wish I could have been a mouse in a pocket at that meeting and after Astrid left. I agree with her. It is amazing to watch when God goes to work.” She looked at Kaaren. “Such big dreams we have now, when all we wanted in the beginning was to prove up our land. You with the school, now a hospital, traveling clinics.” She shook her head slowly, a verse trickling through her mind.
What a mighty God we serve. Mighty indeed.
With dreams far outstretching their own. “We are so blessed that God is letting us be part of all this. When I think of all He is doing right here in Blessing . . .”

She looked down to see Emmy leaning against her knee, staring up at her with her dark eyes. “What do you want, little one?”

“She wants another cookie.” Inga joined her. “Me too. And Carl.”

Ingeborg glanced over to see Carl sitting on his grandfather’s lap, finger in his mouth, leaning against Haakan’s chest, eyes at half-mast.
Now, that is the perfect picture
, she thought and leaned over to kiss each of the girls. “You go pick up your toys, and I’ll see if I can find another cookie.”

“What about the plate on the table?” Leave it to Inga.

“Toys first.”

Emmy scampered over to pick up the blocks and wooden train Haakan had made for them. Inga followed her.

Ingeborg could tell Emmy was learning the language, at least cookies and toys and her name.

Since the lane bordered Ingeborg’s yard and went on to the Knutsons’, they heard the schoolchildren coming.

“I’ll go tell them to stop,” Kaaren said. “Anything you want sent to my house?”

“George took the cheese this morning,” Haakan said, “and plenty of milk. Tell Lars we’ll be butchering day after tomorrow if the cold holds. We’ll start with the steers.”

TWO DAYS LATER, as soon as the chores were finished, two rifleshots rang out, signaling the death of the two steers. Haakan made sure that when the throats were slit, the blood was caught in basins to be used for making blod klub.

“You think we have enough potatoes ground?” Freda asked.

“We’ll know soon enough.” Ingeborg looked up at the sound of boots on the porch. “Here comes the blood.”

Using every large bowl and pan, they mixed the grated potatoes with flour, added the fresh blood, and formed balls of the dough around pieces of salt pork, the last of that in storage. Like cooking dumplings, they placed the sticky balls in boiling water and set them to simmer. When they ran out of space, they filled other bowls and sent Trygve running to Kaaren’s to cook them there.

The hearts, livers, and tongues were brought in next. After setting the tongues to boiling in pickling spices, they sliced the liver for dinner. Fried liver and onions was the traditional dinner, while the blod klub would be served along with it and later heated in cream for supper.

Outside, the men salted down the hides and wrapped them in bundles to age while the carcasses were wrapped in sheets and hung in the smokehouse to age.

When the men gathered for dinner, Ingeborg looked lovingly around the extended table. Knute and Gus, George and Lars, Samuel and Trygve, Solem, Gilbert, Haakan, Andrew and Thorliff, and Hjelmer. Just like cooking for the haying or threshing crew. One would think they were having a party with all the laughter and teasing.

BY THE TIME they finished two days later, they had butchered four steers and eight hogs. Haunches, shoulders, and pork sides were brining to be smoked. Sausage was ground and patties set in crocks sealed with melted lard, which had been rendering in ovens and set in bread pans, so they now had blocks of snowy lard to keep in the cellars.

Thorliff snitched a few pieces of crusty cracklings, what was left after all the lard was rendered out of the slabs of pork fat. “You didn’t salt this.”

“I know. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.” Ingeborg stirred a cup of the crackly pieces into the cornmeal she was setting for fried cornmeal mush in the morning. “Take some home for Thelma, along with a couple of blocks of lard.”

“She has plenty. She’s been rendering too.”

“Where’s Haakan?”

“Out at the smokehouse. There’s so much meat hanging in there, he can hardly get in to feed the coals.” He dug in the bowl for another cluster of the golden bits. “Good thing we’re finished. I need to print the paper tonight.”

“I was wishing I could get out and bag us a few of those geese we hear flying south,” Ingeborg told him. “Smoked goose would taste good too.”

“You think you could still hit any?”

“Thorliff Bjorklund, any time you want a shooting contest with your mother, she is more than game. In fact”—Ingeborg narrowed her eyes—“you can have tonight, but day after tomorrow I challenge you to a goose hunt, winner take all.”

Thorliff backed off, hands raised as in defense. “I didn’t mean anything by it, just teasing.”

“Well, this will teach you to tease your mother.” Hands on hips, she stared at him through half-slitted eyes.

“Just you and me?”

“So far. But when I win, you have to write an apology in your paper about making fun of your mother.”

“Oh, my word, what have I gotten myself into?” Thorliff tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. When he looked at his mother again, he wore a crafty grin. “And when I win, what kind of boon can I demand? A written apology? A new sweater? Two loaves of bread a week?” He twisted his mouth from one side to the other, stroking his chin like a diabolical villain. “I have to think on this, really think on this.”

He was getting far too much pleasure out of this. What had she started? “From dawn to noon, those are the parameters. We will have dinner here at noon.”

Thorliff nodded. “Agreed.”

He sounded so nonchalant, but the look in his eyes said something was brewing.

“ARE YOU REALLY going through with this?” Haakan asked the night before the contest.

“Of course. I just wonder what that son of ours has up his sleeve.” She turned to her husband. “You know, don’t you?”

Guilt couldn’t hide on Haakan’s face.

“Men. All in cahoots.”

“My, my. Such language.”

“Haakan Bjorklund, you are . . . you are despicable.” She had to look away so he couldn’t see the glint that she was sure must be in her own eyes.

INGEBORD WAS DRESSED and out on the most northern of the wheat fields, where she had seen a flock of Canada geese the day before. Carrying two shotguns and hiding behind a row of low brush, she could hear them before she saw them in the dimness. When it was light enough to shoot she picked off two on the ground and two in flight. Four—not bad for five shots, but now to wait for them to come back, or where else should she go looking? Down on the riverbanks?

“Well done.” She turned to see Haakan hunkered down not far from her.

“Takk.” She fetched her geese, tying their legs together with leather thongs she’d stuffed into her pockets. “Would have been easier out here in britches.”

Haakan took them from her and slung them over his shoulder. “Are you done?”

“No. I’ll try the riverbanks.” They turned at the sound of gunshots. “Thorliff?”

“No doubt. We warned all the others to not hunt this morning.”

Ingeborg rolled her eyes. “What all goes on behind my back is what I want to know.” She reloaded her guns and started toward the river. A flock of geese in V formation highlighted against the dawn sky caught her attention. She shaded her eyes to look. “Snow geese. Have you seen any flocks on the ground around here?”

He shook his head. “Only the Canada.”