Racing Home (5 page)

Early in the evening, Rolf tethered the oxen. Erik laid the last of the prepared sods while Rolf unloaded the wagon. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll see Lars for wood to make window and door frames.”

Erik looked at the house. The walls were above his knees, but he thought them too low for the amount of work they’d done.

The next morning, a wagon rattled into the yard as they finished breakfast. Lars sat on the wooden seat beside the red-headed young man Erik and Rolf had met on the trail when they first arrived in the district.

He must be Olaf, Erik realized. His cousin, or step- cousin if there was such a thing.

“We’ve come to help,” said Lars, pulling the horses to a stop. “Unless you’re done?” He grinned at Erik.

“Olaf,” said Rolf, ignoring his brother. His voice was high-pitched and unlike himself. “I didn’t know it was you the other day, when we met.”

Olaf looked at Rolf. He opened his mouth but no words came out.

“Olaf,” said Lars. “This is Erik Brekke, the son of Rolf’s new wife, Inga.”

“Good morning,” said Erik.

Olaf shot him a quick glance and an even quicker nod.

Lars turned to Rolf. “I found a few pieces of lumber lying around. Perhaps you can use them in your house.”

“Manga takk,
Lars,” said Rolf, still looking at Olaf. “We were just going to visit you to buy wood to make a door.”

Lars climbed down from the wagon and gestured to Erik. “Help me unload this,” he said. “We’ll leave those two to stare at each other.”

As Lars spoke, Olaf deliberately looked away from Rolf and climbed down on the other side of the wagon.

Confused, Erik helped Lars lay the boards in a pile.

“Olaf,” Rolf said, still in that strange voice. “It’s been so many years. You’ve grown to be a man.” He moved around the wagon, his hand outstretched.

Olaf looked at the hand.
“Ja,”
he said, his voice hard. “Many years.” Turning his back on Rolf, he tugged on one of the boards in the wagon.

Rolf stood a moment longer, his hand still out in front of him.

“You help Olaf with that long one,” Lars told Erik. “Rolf can show me what he has planned.”

He went over to Rolf and laid his hand on his shoulder. “Show me your house, Rolf,” he said. “You’ve made progress in a short time.”

Rolf seemed to give himself a shake. “Certainly,” he said. “Erik is a hard worker.”

Erik almost dropped the piece of wood he’d just picked up. Rolf had said something nice about him! He took a
firmer hold on the wood, trying not to show how pleased
he felt. At the other end of the plank, Olaf scowled.

While the brothers made window and door frames, Olaf joined Erik laying sods. They worked silently. Olaf’s sullen face didn’t invite conversation.

When the framing was done, Lars fastened together strips of wood to make a door, while Rolf went back to ploughing.

Using Lars’s team, Olaf and Erik stacked the sods in the wagon instead of carrying them one by one to the house. Olaf worked swiftly, effortlessly lifting each heavy sod into place. Erik pushed himself to keep up, but Olaf moved two sods for each one of Erik’s.

When they stopped at noon to eat tinned beans, Lars admired the rising walls.

“Perhaps you should start filling in the cracks,” he said to Erik. “Olaf can keep laying sod. What do you think, Olaf?”

Erik looked up from his plate. Filling cracks sounded easier than hauling sods, but he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t do the hard work.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Olaf indifferently. “It all needs to be done.”

“What do we fill the cracks with?” asked Erik, trying to remember what Mr. Johnson had told them.

“Mud from the slough,” said Lars. He glanced at his son. “Olaf can show you how to do it.”

“I can figure it out,” said Erik. He didn’t want to ask Olaf anything.

“Good,” said Lars, handing mugs of coffee to his silent brother and son. “Isn’t it great working together?”

No one replied, but Lars didn’t seem to mind. He took a sip of his coffee and glanced at Rolf. “The slough water’s not bad now,” he said, “but later on you’ll want to get water from the spring.”

“A spring?” repeated Erik. “There’s a spring around here?”

“Surely is,” said Lars. “Couple of miles northwest. I’ll draw you a map so you can find it.”

After they ate, Rolf and Lars stretched out on the grass and closed their eyes, appearing to fall asleep immediately. Erik looked at them, surprised that brothers, separated for so many years, could still be so similar.

He gathered a metal pail and spade and headed for the slough. The cattle lay in a contented group; the chickens scratched in the dirt nearby. The calf bounced up as Erik approached, running to hide behind its mother. Erik held out a hand, talking softly, but the calf watched him warily, not moving.

“Next time,” he said, dropping his hand. He filled the pail with mud, then lugged it back to the sod house.

Olaf was at work already, lifting a sod from the wagon. He turned to glance at Erik. “Pack it tight,” he said. “So the snakes can’t get in.”

Snakes? How could they keep snakes out? They lived in dirt.

Erik sighed and forced the first handful of mud into the cracks between the layers of sods, determined to keep anything from creeping through.

As he reached for another handful, he saw Olaf still watching him.

He looked less angry, so Erik risked a question. “Have you built a sod house before?” he asked.

“Ja,”
said Olaf. He swung the sod onto the wall. “I’ve worked at many things. I build with Gunnar Haugen and my –” he stopped speaking as he positioned the sod perfectly, then started again. “I’ve built with wood and I’ve built with sod. Sometimes I dig holes for people, or I drive wagons. I do any work I can to earn money.”

Erik looked at him with respect. “What do you do with your money?” he asked. “Do you give it to Uncle Lars?”

“No. He says, ‘Keep the money, Olaf, and buy yourself some land.’” Olaf reached for another sod and glanced over his shoulder at Erik. “So I put the money in the bank in Hanley, and one day I’ll buy myself some land.”

“When?”

“When I’m eighteen, or maybe seventeen.” Erik looked at him, wondering how old he was now. “I’ll be sixteen soon,” said Olaf, answering Erik’s look.

“In September,” said Rolf.

Erik looked up in surprise. He hadn’t seen him coming.

“September 9th,” Rolf added. “I’ll never forget that day.”

Olaf carried the sod to the wall without looking at Rolf. Rolf watched him lay the sod in place, then turned away, his shoulders sagging.

Two days later Olaf laid the last sods on the walls of the house. He made the front wall of the house two layers taller than the back wall, then sloped the sides toward the back.

Erik dug handfuls of mud from his pail, trying to smooth the inside walls, keeping one eye on Lars and Rolf laying poles above his head. When Rolf spread tarpaper across the poles, the house grew dim.

Erik refilled his pail with mud. On the way back from the slough, he saw the men were laying the sods on the roof with the grass side up.

Inside the house, dust sifted through where the sheets of tarpaper overlapped. Rolf poked his head in the door and glanced around. “It won’t be so dusty when the sods
settle,” he said.

“What will happen when it rains?” asked Erik, but Rolf was already gone.

When the roof was covered with sod, they carried the furniture in from the wagon, piling it in the centre of the room. Erik chased a chicken out of the house, then stood in the doorway to keep it from coming back.

Even with the windows, it seemed dark in the house. Dark as a barn, dark as a cave.

“We’ll buy wood to divide the rooms,” Rolf added. “Later.”

“You should whitewash the walls,” Lars said. “It will be brighter for your Inga.”

“Ja,”
said Rolf, but it was Erik who ended up brushing the mixture of lime, salt, and water on the walls. Olaf rode up on a horse the next morning while they were mixing the whitewash.

“Your brother thinks you need more help,” he said, not looking at Rolf.

“Don’t you have more lumber to bring from Hanley?” Rolf asked stiffly.

Olaf shrugged. “He says it will wait.” He glanced around, gesturing to a few poles left from making the roof. “What are you doing with those?”

Rolf glanced at the pile. “I’ll need most of them for the outhouse,” he said.

“If there’s extra,” suggested Olaf, “you could start a corral.”

“Do we need one?” asked Rolf. “The cattle seem content being tethered.”

Olaf shrugged his shoulders. His expression said he didn’t care. It wasn’t
his
farm.

“It might be good,” said Erik, “especially for the calf.” Right now the calf never strayed far from its mother, but it would grow more adventurous.

Erik listened to Olaf and Rolf rummage through the small pile of poles while he stirred the thin whitewash mixture. He wondered why Rolf and Olaf had so much trouble speaking to each other. It was even worse than him and Rolf.

After a few minutes, Rolf dragged a few of the poles behind the house, while Olaf began cutting the others in half.

Erik dipped his brush into the pail and ran it down the wall. When he dipped a second time, specks of dirt floated in the whitewash. After he painted a section, he stepped back and looked. He could tell where he’d brushed, but he couldn’t call it white.

While he worked, Erik thought of life in Norway. He’d never worked this hard there. He’d helped Grandfather in the mornings before breakfast, and sometimes he’d go out again before supper, but he and Elsa were both at school much of the day.

No one had mentioned school since they’d left Minnesota.

They stopped briefly at noon to eat soup Kirsten had sent with Olaf, then went right back to work. An hour or so later, Erik stopped for a rest, laying his brush across the pail.

Hearing a raised voice, he looked out the open doorway. Olaf stood by a corral post, glaring at Rolf a couple of metres away.

“I’ve been helping all week,” said Olaf, “and you haven’t said a word.”

“What do you mean? I talk to you every day.”

“Right,” said Olaf. “About work I should do and if the wind will stop blowing. Not one word about how you didn’t want me. Gave me away. Never wrote in all the years we were here.”

“I wrote to Lars,” Rolf protested. “I didn’t know what to say to you. You were just five years old.”

“Ja!
Five years old! I come and work for you every day.
For free!
And you talk about me being five years old!”

“That’s not what I meant,” exclaimed Rolf, his voice rising. “You are a man now, I see that. I don’t know –”

“That’s for certain you don’t know,” said Olaf angrily. “You don’t know how to be a father and I doubt you know how to be a farmer, either. What farming have you ever done?”

“I will learn,” Rolf began, but Olaf threw his spade to the ground and strode angrily toward his horse.

“I’m going back to my
real
parents,” he said over his shoulder. “You can build your own farm. You and your
new
son.”

Rolf yelled something to Olaf, but Erik could barely hear it over the sound of the horse’s hooves. It sounded like “I came here to find you.”

CHAPTER SIX

Discovery

Erik stepped backwards into the house. Grabbing the paintbrush, he finished the first coat of whitewash and started the second. While his hands worked, Olaf’s words echoed in his head. “You and your
new
son.” It could mean only one thing.

Rolf was Olaf’s father.

They were father and son, but they hadn’t seen each other in ten years.

Erik stood still, the brush suspended in the air. He hadn’t seen
his
father in nine years. It was bad enough having a father who died. Wouldn’t it be worse if his father had given him away?

And Olaf thought Erik was taking his place. What a joke! Erik didn’t consider Rolf his father, and Rolf certainly didn’t see Erik as his son.

Had he heard Rolf correctly? Had he come to America just to see his son again? But if that was his only goal, he had no reason to get married, no reason to bring a family with him.

Erik watched whitewash drip from his brush onto the dirt floor. Shaking his head, he dipped the brush in the pail. What did it matter, anyway? He, Erik, had come to be a farmer. Olaf didn’t make any difference to his plans. And Ma? Erik thought for a moment. It wasn’t going to matter to her either, because he was certain she knew about Olaf already.

Later, his pail empty, Erik cautiously poked his head out the door. There was no sign of Rolf. He peered into the hole Rolf had been digging.

“How’s the whitewashing?”

The sudden voice behind him made Erik jump and spin around.