Charity (11 page)

That morning she had tried a small fabric rose at the neck, but it was too much. “This is no party I’m going to,” she muttered and threw the rose on the bed. Nevertheless, she was determined not to look somber, either, as if she had anything to be ashamed of, or anything to fear. She was a respectable woman and was going to look respectable, and that was that. She settled on the dress, plain, with no flowers, a simple belt in matching fabric. The blue dress brought out the cornflower in her eyes and highlighted the natural rose of her cheeks.
I still have my complexion
, she thought.
Staying out of the sun does it. Not like Ma Kaiser, nasty old brown thing.

She held her handkerchief in one hand and her pocketbook in the other, then laid them down to run a comb through her hair even though it was already perfect, lying in auburn waves about her head and pinned into a loose bun at her neck. She picked up the handkerchief, a plain white linen square around which she had crocheted a scalloped edge, tucked the purse once more under her arm, and approved her reflection. She went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It was seven-thirty in the morning. The hearing was not until ten o’clock.

She pulled her dress smoothly about her before she sat. Her Bible lay on the kitchen table and she opened it to the Beatitudes.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth...

She read the eleven verses in the book of Matthew, and read them again, trying in vain to dull the edges of her anxiety. She turned to her favorite Psalm, which never failed to comfort:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Divine assurances helped but did not completely alleviate her desolation, her longing for human comfort. Where was everybody? No one from Will’s family had called upon her. No one from her own. She had not personally notified her family, but news traveled like prairie fire in Stone County. Gustie was the only one she could count on, and now she had disappeared again. Where in Sam Hill did she go all the time? She peered through her curtains at the overcast sky. She really didn’t need gloomy weather on top of everything. The Kaisers’ excuse would be Pa’s funeral preparations. She didn’t know how she was going to get through this day. Still clutching her handkerchief, she rubbed the space between her brows.

There was a light rapping at her door.

Now who in blazes?
Before she could get up, the door opened and Tori walked in, in his baggy farm clothes, smelling like he hadn’t scraped his shoes well enough after morning chores in Peterson’s barn. She put her arms around him crying, “Oh, Tori. I’m so glad. So glad you’re here. Here take your shoes off. Leave them on the porch. I’ll clean them for you later.”

“Mr. Peterson give me the day off. Come to go with you.” Torvald was twenty-two, with mouse brown hair and fair skin. He was small and looked too delicate for farm work. Lena worried about him all the time.

Except for his shoes, Tori looked clean and scrubbed. His fly-about hair was plastered to the top and sides of his head with oil. He looked like a boy playing at being a man. Torvald Halverson was what folks called simple. No one could say what was missing in Tori. He could read and write. He could follow orders. He could be left alone with farm chores: the animals would be well looked after, everything kept clean and in good repair. He was scrupulously honest and could be sent to town for supplies and return with an exact accounting of purchases and change. But without a specific task at hand, he would most likely be found just sitting and smiling to himself. Lena had often wondered if her brother was a saint or an idiot. Growing up, he had endured teasing from other children and remained good natured and pleasant. The only one who had never teased him, even among their own siblings, was his big sister, Lena, and his devotion to her was canine.

Lena had found a good situation for him. Ole and Agnes Peterson gave Tori a little pocket change, a room in the back of their house, all he could eat, and Agnes washed and ironed his clothes. In return he worked hard doing everything they asked of him.

But the Petersons were not young. When they died, Tori would be on his own again. The Peterson place would go to their son-in-law who was not likely to keep Lena’s brother on.

Lena tried to hold off that worry till the time came. By then she hoped Will would have enough business to take Tori on himself, and she could look after him.

“Have some coffee. Here, sit down.” She pulled out the chair and pushed him down into it.

He drank his coffee the same way Lena sometimes drank hers, pouring some in his saucer to cool, putting a spoon of sugar in his mouth and sipping the cooled coffee from the saucer.

Lena sat down again. “It’s supposed to start at ten o’clock. But I don’t know. I just can’t seem to...” She was at a loss to describe her feelings—knowing her duty was to be by her husband, but not being able to face a courtroom and the hungry eyes of the curious.

Tori’s eyes were full of sympathy. “You look nice, Lena.”

“I don’t...I don’t think I can go, Tori.” Her elbow rested on the table and she put her head in her hand to keep from crying.

“Well, I’ll go. You don’t have to. I’ll go for you.” He slurped the dregs from his saucer. “That’s it then. I better get these shoes cleaned, huh?”

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“Ja, Mrs. Peterson fed me good before I left.” Tori went out in the shanty and scraped his shoes, then brushed them thoroughly. When he finished, he came back for some more coffee.

“Well, I better go now.” It was 9:30. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell Will you’re okay, and I’ll be right back to tell you everything. Don’t you worry, now.”

He patted her back awkwardly and left her sitting at her kitchen table, unable to speak, tears rolling down her cheeks, sucking the tip of her finger.

Two hours later, Lena still hadn’t moved. Her coffee was cold, the stove had gone out, pages had been turned in her Bible, but she couldn’t concentrate. The door was opening again. She hadn’t even noticed who came up the driveway. Probably Tori with his sympathetic eyes, which she appreciated and couldn’t bear, telling her the latest bad news. She didn’t look up.

“Hey, Duchy, what’s for dinner?”

Will stood in the kitchen, his hat in his hand, grinning.

Lena didn’t believe her eyes. She sat still.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to go to Olna’s to get us a bite to eat then.” He slapped his thigh with his hat and chuckled.

“Oh, Will!” She hurled herself at him. He lifted her off the floor and waltzed her around and around the kitchen. “They let you go?”

“Nope, but I can walk around a free man until the trial.” Only then did Lena notice the two men, waiting patiently in her shanty, both grinning from ear to ear. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Tori. Pard? Come in here.”

“Pard spoke up good to the judge and got me off on bail. The judge said he didn’t usually post bail in a case of murder, but Pard said it was all...ehh...circumstantial. And what with that and me being a married man and Pa’s funeral this afternoon, he set the bail.”

Lena’s eyes fluttered nervously between the lawyer and her husband. “How much bail?”

“Thousand dollars.”

Lena felt sick. She lowered her head and stood close to Will, speaking softly, “We don’t have any money.”

Pard Batie stepped forward. “That’s been taken care of, Mrs. Kaiser.”

“What do you mean, taken care of?” Nobody said a word. “Well, for heaven’s sake.” Oscar, Walter, Frederick. For once in their lives they did the decent thing. She could hardly believe it, but she was grateful. She and Will would probably spend the rest of their lives paying them back for it, but right now, she didn’t care.

Pard stuck out his hand. Will engulfed it with his own and shook it heartily. “Will, I’ll be talking to you,” the lawyer said. “Come to my office on Monday. You come along now too, Missus.”

Lena nodded.

“Bye now, Tori.”

“Bye now.” Tori grinned and nodded as Pard went out the door.

Lena bustled. Will had asked for dinner. Here it was 12:00 and nothing ready. She tied her apron on, carried her Bible into the dining room with a whispered, “Thank you, oh Lord.”

She came back into the kitchen and took the bacon out of the ice box and began to strip off slices and lay them in the skillet. “Oh, what am I doing?” she said aloud as the bacon lay there, silent in a cold pan. She reached for the box of matches that sat on the back rim of the cook stove. It was empty. “Gustie did our shopping. I forgot to tell her we needed matches.” She held the empty match box in her hand and began to cry.

“Oh, now here.” Will reached into his pants pocket and took out a couple of long stick matches and handed them to Tori. “Dennis allowed me a smoke once in awhile. I still got these left.” As Tori slipped around Lena to light the stove, Will pulled her to himself. Her head hardly reached up to his chest. “See, I’m gone just a couple days and everything goes haywire,” he chuckled. “No matches. No nothing.”

Lena raised her head, still crying. “It would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for Gustie! I had nothing here! You left me with nothing all right, so don’t go talking!” She made a fist and thumped him hard on his chest.

Will took her blow and brought her in close to him again. “Sure, sure. I know. I know. There now, Duchy.” She sobbed until the grease began to pop, then she pushed him away. She didn’t trust Tori not to burn the bacon.

“Oh, it’s all right. Go sit down now.” She took her handkerchief out of her pocket, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “Tori, take the plates, will you, and set the table. You know where things are.” She waved in the general direction of the cupboards.

She made the coffee and turned the bacon. She sliced an entire loaf of the bread and put it on the table along with butter and jam. “It sure smells good.” Will smiled at her. “Olna’s a good cook, but not like you, Duchy.”

Tori nodded in agreement. “Nope, not like you.”

She broke eggs into the sizzling bacon fat and fried them the way Will liked them—crisp and brown around the edges and soft in the middle—and slid them onto a platter alongside the bacon. When the platter was full, she brought it to the table. The coffee perked furiously and she moved the pot to the cool side of the stove to finish.

“How’d you get in today, Tori?” Will asked between mouthfuls. “Ole bring you?”

“Yup. Ole brung me.”

Lena realized she had forgotten to wonder how Tori had made it in to town, but now she asked, “How’d you get home here? Pard?”

“Pard’s buggy,” said Tori. “Sure is a nice one.”

“Yup, that Pard—boy, he sure talks a good one.” Will made an enthusiastic arc with his fork. “Don’t he Tori?”

“Yup, he talks a good one.” Tori grinned at Lena reassuringly, his mouth full and his chin shiny with bacon grease.

Lena poured the coffee. “When is the trial?”

“In a month or so, I guess. Next time Judge Pike comes around. Pard says that’s long enough to make a good case. He says nobody’s much interested in prosecuting me anyway. Nobody thinks I did it.”

“Well, I should say not,” Lena sniffed. She was nibbling a piece of bread and sipping coffee. She had no appetite.

“Pard says he tried to get us a dismissal. Lack of evidence. But the judge wouldn’t go for it. Pard says Pike just wants a trial because he never gets to have one because nothing ever happens around here. He wants something just to chew on, you know. Give everybody a go. But nothing’s gonna come of it because there isn’t any evidence. Me walking out of a barn isn’t real evidence. That’s what Pard says.”

Lena listened, secure for the moment in Will’s confidence, happy to see her nearest and dearest at her table. Her dark thoughts thinned to shadows.

When Will had sopped up the last of the yellow yolk on his plate with his bread and washed it down with the last mouthful of coffee, he pushed himself away from the table. “Well, we’ve got to see Pa buried.”

Lena felt the darkness thickening around her again. She slowly untied her apron, hung it in its place, and picked up her pocketbook and handkerchief and went with him. Tori followed.

They trotted the ten blocks up Main Street to Gethsemane Lutheran, a plain white church with a steeple and a brand new bell. Inside, white walls contrasted with dark pews and an altar and pulpit in middle-aged oak. Gethsemane boasted one stained glass window above the baptismal font in the back of the church.

In the tiny narthex, they came face to face with the casket, closed. There were candles set around it and a vase of spring flowers, which Lena supposed were from Julia’s garden.

Lena assumed this funeral would be the same as every other at Gethsemane, and she led them to the pastor’s office.
Good grief, they’ve squeezed everybody in here but Julia’s cat,
she thought as she peered into the cramped room. Though all heads were bowed as Pastor Erickson intoned a prayer, Lena sensed an edginess in the room and felt that all of them were very much aware of their arrival.

Not one to disrupt a prayer to the Almighty, she bowed her head, shut her eyes, and folded her hands reverently. Will lowered his head and clasped his hands in front of him, but he did not close his eyes. He was not a church goer. Lena went every Sunday without fail, and twice a week during Lent. The last time he’d been to church was for a funeral. He couldn’t remember whose.

The prayer ended and the pastor said in his well modulated baritone, “Now if you’ll all gather in the narthex and follow the casket in during the first hymn.” He made his way through the family, none of whom seemed to know what to do next in spite of his instructions. “Glad to see you here, Will...Lena. How are you, Tori?” He shook hands firmly with each of them. “Our prayers are with you.”