More Than a Dream (3 page)

Blessing, North Dakota

‘‘But, Mor, I want Thorliff to come home so bad.’’

‘‘I know. Me too.’’ Ingeborg Bjorklund put her arm around her ten-year-old daughter as Astrid turned to lean into her mother’s chest, both arms around her waist.

‘‘I don’t like Mr. Rogers.’’

‘‘You don’t know Mr. Rogers. How can you like him or not?’’ Ingeborg smoothed wisps of nearly white hair back off her daughter’s forehead and leaned her cheek on top of her daughter’s head, an act that would not be possible much longer unless she stood on a box.
Ah, child, you are growing so tall and capable. Where has
my little Astrid gone?

‘‘Well, he made Thorliff stay in Northfield. We need him here with us.’’

‘‘That’s the way of jobs. You might have to be far away from home to do your work. Look at Onkel Hjelmer. He has to travel around some. And during threshing season, Far is gone and Onkel Lars too.’’

‘‘But that’s different. They come home again when the threshing is done.’’ Astrid tipped her head back so she could look into her mother’s face. ‘‘I’m afraid Thorliff will never live here again. Like Tante Solveig, we’ll only get letters and never see him again. And Northfield is lots farther than where Tante Solveig lives.’’

Ingeborg cupped her daughter’s strong jaw in her hands and smiled into her eyes, eyes the Bjorklund blue that proclaimed her heritage. ‘‘If Thorliff doesn’t come home, one of these days we will go to Northfield and visit him.’’

‘‘You mean that?’’ Astrid’s face lit up like the sun peeping over the horizon. ‘‘Really?’’

‘‘It is something to think about.’’ Ingeborg ran her tongue along her front teeth and let her thoughts chase after. ‘‘I could call on businesses in Minneapolis that sell our cheese.’’ Her stomach clenched at even the thought of such audacity. But if they were to turn more of their acreage over to hay, pasture, and grain to feed more milk cows to produce more cheese, they would need to add new customers. Would Haakan want to go along on a trip like that? Could both of them leave the farm for that long? Of course they could. Lars and the others would take over all the milking and run the cheese house. It would have to be before or after harvest, and then Astrid would be in school again. Would Pastor Solberg allow her to be gone for a few days? And Andrew? ‘‘Uff da. So many things to think about.’’

‘‘What do you mean?’’ Astrid looked over her shoulder to the door, where the cat meowed to be let in. ‘‘I’m coming, Goldie, just be patient.’’

‘‘Oh, about a trip like that. So much more than just going to see Thorliff.’’

‘‘Someday maybe we could go see Tante Augusta too. South Dakota isn’t that far away.’’

Ingeborg tweaked her daughter’s nose. ‘‘You think you want to travel all over like that?’’

Astrid nodded. ‘‘I want to go to Chicago and New York and Norway and—’’

‘‘Really?’’

‘‘Ja. Mr. Moen talked at school about Norway and the mountains and the fjords and all. I asked Bestemor about Norway too, and she told me about her home there. We could visit Onkel Johann and Tante Soren.’’

Ingeborg closed her eyes as a pang of homesickness, so acute that she had to catch her breath, stabbed her in the heart. Her parents were getting up in years, like Bridget, and while she had always told herself she would see them next in heaven, suddenly the urge to see them in this life seemed as necessary as breathing. Letters back and forth had grown further apart through the years, and she’d never been able to convince any of her family to emigrate. Not like the adventurous Bjorklunds. Only Johann, the eldest Bjorklund son, had remained behind, and he held the home farm, deeded to him as the primogeniture laws ordered. While Roald, her first husband, who had died in a North Dakota blizzard, had grumbled about such laws, once he’d claimed the land they now farmed, he’d never looked back. In truth, neither had she. Until now.

What would it be like to go home to Norway for a visit? She thought on the words. Was Norway home any longer? She gave a mental shrug. Not really. This rich land they farmed was home of both her mind and heart. She watched as Astrid opened the door and picked up the orange-and-white striped cat, his fur impeccably groomed, his feet so white he appeared to have floated over dust or mud without touching down. Goldie’s purr could be heard clear across the room as Astrid held him under her chin and rubbed his ears and cheeks.

Like her older brother Andrew, Astrid had a way with animals. They gentled at her touch and voice, even the cows and pigs. The horses came when she called them, and the chickens flocked around her feet, knowing she always carried a scattering of oats in her apron pockets. Only Astrid could pick up the barn cats, who were friendly just at milking time and never tolerated more than a quick pat or two.

Ingeborg often wondered at the many gifts these two children of hers had been given and what would happen to both children and their gifts as they grew older. Watching Astrid with the cat, smiling at the picture they made, she scolded herself.
You know
better than trying to think ahead like that. Jesus said we should let
the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day. You’d think I’d have
learned that clear down to my toes by now
.

But thoughts of the possible trip didn’t leave her. They took up residence in the back of her mind, popping out at strange times to cause her to stop again and think.
When I get it thought out, the
next step will be to talk it over with Haakan. Father God, is this
something you want me to do, or is it that prowling jackal sending
me dreams that I ought not to own?
She glanced around her kitchen. Fresh yellow-and-white gingham at the windows, braided rag rugs on the dark blue painted floor, the chest that she and Roald had brought from Norway painted in rosemaling patterns. A big black stove. Such riches for which she was grateful. She sighed. Was one ever grateful enough?

‘‘Astrid, would you please bring in some buttermilk and sweet milk both? I think a chocolate cake would be just the thing for dinner. Oh, and some cream. We can whip that for the frosting.’’

‘‘Anything else?’’ Astrid paused at the door and looked over her shoulder. The sun glinted off the fine white hairs that haloed the top of her head, and her skirt swished well above her ankles. Another indication of how much she had grown.

‘‘No, I have the ham baking, and we’ll make scalloped potatoes from those poor shriveled things that made it through the winter.’’ Ingeborg shook her head. ‘‘Ah, the thought of new potatoes . . .’’

‘‘And peas. Some are blooming already. How come the weeds grow so much faster than the vegetables and the wheat?’’

‘‘You ask that every year.’’

‘‘Ja, and you always say God made it so, and so it is. That means you don’t want me asking anymore.’’

Ingeborg made a shooing motion, her hands fluttering in front of her. ‘‘I need the buttermilk.’’ Astrid’s laughter floated back over her shoulder and mingled with her mother’s chuckle as the girl leaped from the top step to the ground.

‘‘Uff da. Such a child.’’

Even though in the past she had pleaded for more children to fill their house, God had seen fit to send her and Haakan only one. But she knew her second husband loved their two strong sons as if they were from his own loins. He’d told her so with such firmness in his voice and touch that she’d never questioned him again. Thinking of Haakan made her reach up and tuck trailing strands of hair back up in the two braids that circled the crown of her head.

Astrid returned, laden with the milk jug and the crock of buttermilk, set them on the table, and watched her mother creaming the butter and sugar. ‘‘You want I should help in here or go on back to the weeding? The sweet corn needs hoeing too.’’

Or you could bake the cake and I could go outside
. Oh, to be outside with the sun beating down on her back and chasing away the winter cold that still seemed stuck in her bones. But she glanced at Astrid, who shifted from one bare foot to the other. ‘‘You go on outside. I’ll get this in the oven and join you.’’

‘‘Mange takk, Mor. You are so good.’’ Astrid dashed out of the kitchen just in case her mother might change her mind, her long braids flopping against her back. As soon as she had returned home from the last day of school two weeks earlier, her shoes came off for the summer, only to be worn to church on Sundays.

Ingeborg finished mixing the cake, poured the batter into the greased and floured pan, and checked the temperature gauge on the oven door before adding more wood to the firebox. She slid the cake into the oven and placed the bowl and wooden spoon in the dishpan full of water keeping warm on the back of the reservoir. She had a good hour before she’d need to put the potatoes in.

The garden beckoned, and Ingeborg followed its siren song.

She stood a moment on the top porch step of the white two-story house and, shading her eyes with her hand, stared across the fields to where the men, including her younger son, Andrew, were cultivating the acres they had planted to corn this year in order to have more cattle feed. With wheat prices down and shipping prices up, cattle, both beef and dairy, looked like a better crop all around. They’d kept all the piglets too, since more whey could feed more pigs, and more pigs going to market would add to the income.

Diversifying from wheat to other crops took courage and unending discussions.

She reached back into the porch and snagged her wide-brimmed hat from the nail where it hung most of the time, even when it should have been on her head. Sunbonnets, straw hats, heavy skirts—sometimes she remembered back to the ease of wearing britches in the days when she and Kaaren fought to save the land after their husbands died. Britches would make kneeling to weed the garden far more simple.

But she’d promised Haakan she’d wear skirts instead of the men’s pants she had been forced to wear in the early days while trying to save the farm, and so she would. She took the other hoe that leaned against the post and attacked the weeds in the potato patch, hilling up the rich black soil around the growing plants so the new spuds would not get sunburned. While the hat shaded her eyes and neck, it kept the breeze from blowing through her hair. There was always a trade-off.

‘‘We need rain.’’ Ingeborg glanced west in the hope there were thunderheads amassing.

‘‘I know. Far said we might have to haul water again.’’ Astrid looked up from weeding the carrots, a job that had to be done by hand.

‘‘Are you thinning those as you go?’’

‘‘Mor.’’

‘‘Sorry. I keep forgetting you know all about gardening by now.’’ After one row Ingeborg’s shoulders already felt the bite of muscles unused to the push and pull of hoeing. The fine dirt crumbled beneath her feet, bare like her daughter’s. Give Red River dirt a steady drink of water, and it would turn to black gumbo that could be slick as ice and bring horses and humans both to a stop when it clung to hooves, boots, and wheels. Give it just enough moisture and it could grow anything. She chopped the weeds out, leaning over to pull pigweed too close to the four-inch-high plants. Quack grass, the bane of her existence, also needed to be pulled out; the slightest bit of root left in the soil would take over the patch seemingly overnight.

Sweat trickled down her back. She squashed a potato bug with the back of the hoe and checked other plants. Wasn’t it early for potato bugs? Bugs and weeds, drought and hail, all the forces that fought to keep them from getting a good harvest. And grasshoppers. Another drought year could possibly bring that scourge again.

A meadowlark trilled off in the hayfield and robins hopped and foraged behind Astrid, keeping a safe distance but making sure no worm dug back down beyond beak level. Barn swallows dipped and stole the mud from around the watering trough to build their nests along the overhang of the barn and shed roofs.

Ingeborg inhaled the heady scents of spring sliding into summer. Fecund earth, mint from the patch she’d planted in an old tub so it wouldn’t take over the garden, green grass, daisies, and cottonwood leaves, the breeze as it blew over the water trough and surrounding mud bringing the smell of cows and manure, all a rich potpourri of farm and growing life. She dug into her midback with her fists and rolled her shoulders back and then forward.

A hawk’s
scree
floated from above, and she and Astrid immediately looked toward the chicken yard. Ingeborg shaded her eyes to find the bird spiraling against a blue so intense that the few clouds cottoning the heavens glistened white. Astrid sprinted for the chicken yard to chase the hens out of harm’s way. While a full-grown hen was pretty big for a hawk to kill and carry, the chicks and half-grown stock were fair game.

‘‘I’ve got to get the potatoes on,’’ Ingeborg called to Astrid, who waved back at her. The inside of the house felt dark after the brilliance of the sun, but the smell of chocolate made her hustle to the oven. She pulled the cake pan out and frowned at the edges pulled away from the pan and slightly crispy. ‘‘Uff da, good thing we have plenty of cream. How could I go off and forget the cake like that?’’

The cat blinked golden eyes at her from the chair cushion where he liked to curl up and sleep. He yawned, tongue pink and teeth shards of white, then closed his eyes and tucked his chin back into the fur of his front legs.

‘‘Sorry to bother you, Goldie. Don’t you think you could look for the mice on the porch instead of laze your days away like this?’’

His ears twitched along with the tip of his tail.

Ingeborg peeled the shriveled potatoes and sliced them into the cast-iron kettle. She dusted each layer with flour, salt, and pepper, wishing she had onions for flavor. The ones in the garden weren’t large enough to eat yet. With the potatoes stacking to an inch from the top of the kettle, she poured in milk to almost cover the potatoes and added a layer of thinly sliced cheese to top it off. She took out the roasting pan that held the ham and slid the kettle in. She opened two quarts of canned string beans into another kettle and set that on the back of the stove to simmer until the potatoes were done. They had at least an hour until dinner.