Spring for Susannah (27 page)

“We're your neighbors, from the south side of the tracks.” Jesse made introductions. “Saw your good news in the paper. Came to offer congratulations.”

The hollow-eyed man stepped outside. “I'm Colum Duffy.” Dirt-encrusted clothes hung on his skeletal frame. “We're not expecting visitors.”

“Food.” Marta held up the kettle.

The young man wiped his hand across his scraggly whiskers. “I'll tell Maureen you're here.” He disappeared inside. The dugout looked about half the size of Jesse's. Instead of glass, oiled paper covered its lone window. The empty lean-to on the east side needed mucking.

Colum and his wife shuffled out, each holding an infant wrapped in rags. Mrs. Duffy blinked in the sunlight like an animal emerging from hibernation. A rip in her stained dress showed an undergarment made of flour sacks.

Marta stepped forward, issuing instructions. Behind her, Ivar interpreted. “We have a custom in our country of bringing
søt suppe
, sweet soup, for the mother.” He paused, listening to his wife. “
Ja
. We also have a custom of bringing a gift of work to celebrate the new babies. If you will come with us, Mr. Duffy, we'll go for firewood while our wives visit with Mrs. Duffy.”

Susannah caught Jesse's eye as he handed Sara to her. The plan had been to share the soup, then hurry home for spring planting. He gave her a surreptitious wink.

Mr. Duffy swayed. His wife took the baby from him. “Go on, Colum. I'll be all right.”

The men departed for the wooded banks of the Sheyenne. Marta scooted around Mrs. Duffy into the dugout. Susannah peeked at the twins. Tiny pinched faces, no bigger than her palm, slept in the morning sun.

“How old are they now?”

“Five weeks,” the dark-haired woman replied. Veins and arteries laced her face and hands beneath translucent skin. “And yours? She's so big.”

“No, Sara is Mrs. Vold's baby. She's almost a year old.” Sara did look healthy and substantial next to the Duffy infants.

“Dear me!” The young mother hastened inside. “I've not done a lick of work since the babies came and not much before.”

Susannah stood in the doorway. If Jesse's house reminded her of a cave, the Duffys' seemed more like a pit. Three walls were hacked out of the embankment. The window emitted a weak, dull glow. A twist of cloth sputtering in a saucer of fat produced a feeble puddle of light, revealing the squalid condition of the dugout. It smelled like an outhouse. Marta set the kettle on the tiny two-lid stove, then rolled up her sleeves.

“I'm sorry about the mess.” Mrs. Duffy laid the infants in a canvas hammock slung precariously from the rafters.

Marta motioned for the new mother to sit on the sturdier of the two crates constituting their furniture. She took Sara and sent Susannah for water.

As the washtub of diapers soaked, the women enjoyed their soup, an ambrosia of dried apples, plums, apricots, and raisins. When the babies wanted to nurse, Marta had Mrs. Duffy lie with them on the straw pallet. The exhausted mother looked like a little girl with her dolls, her dark tangle of curls spread over the pillow.

Halfway through the load of threadbare calico, the babies awoke. Marta directed Susannah outside with them. The fussy one turned red and burped wetly on Susannah's shoulder. Before she could call Marta, his complexion and breathing returned to normal. The other regarded her solemnly. The first opened his mouth and rubbed against her.

“You just ate, silly boy.” Susannah lifted them to her shoulder. They began to whimper, alternating breaths, so one always sounded the alarm.

“Walk,” Marta suggested from the washboard.

Susannah paced up the slope. The hungry infant nuzzled her neck with his mouth, his silken hair tickling her earlobe. Deep inside Susannah, a spark ignited.

A clatter and rumble announced the return of the men. Hearing the babies' cries, the new father jumped up, almost bolting off the wagon.

“Easy, now.” Ivar pulled him back onto the seat. “Your sons half to try their windpipes.”

Mr. Duffy raised an eyebrow.

“He knows what he's talking about.” Jesse clamped the lad on his skinny shoulder. “You've seen his baby.”

Susannah followed the wagon back to the dugout, past Marta laying out clean diapers in the sun. Mr. Duffy dashed inside to check on his wife while Ivar and Jesse stacked the wood. The babies' cries waned into sleep.

“Susannah.” Ivar wiped his brow. “You half a way with babies. Jesse should give you some of your own.”

Jesse broke a dry stick over his friend's head. “As long as they come one at a time.” He turned to Susannah. “Colum says at least one's awake and crying ever since they were born. Fellow slept all the way to the river.”

“I agree, one at a time.” Susannah shifted the babies in her arms, trying to scratch her nose, finally resorting to scrunching her face. “Holding two means you don't have a hand free.”

“Well, that could have some advantages.” Pulling Susannah, babies and all, into a big hug, Jesse kissed her.

Ivar thumped Jesse across the back of his knees. “I meant, when you get home, make babies.”

“You're a regular Simon Legree, Ivar Vold.” Jesse returned to the woodpile. “Didn't anyone tell you? Slavery's abolished.”

Inside, Susannah laid the babies in the hammock, tucking the crocheted afghan around their tiny bodies. The inner spark kindled into an unfamiliar flame of yearning.

Mrs. Duffy embraced Susannah. The girl's bones poked through her homespun. “Bless you, all of you.” The brief nap and soup put a little color in her cheeks. At the stove, Colum scooped the last of the fruit into his mouth. He grunted his agreement.

Susannah wished they could do more. “What are their names?” She nudged the hammock to keep it rocking.

“Liam and Seamus. Liam's a bit larger. Seamus has little red marks between his eyebrows.”

“Too bad you couldn't think of Irish names for them,” Jesse said. This drew a smile from Maureen Duffy. “It's time we head for home. Hope you'll come visit us next time.”

“Bless you, Mr. Mason.”

From the wagon, Susannah turned for a last look at the couple waving from the dugout.

“Fifteen and sixteen,” Jesse said from the wagon seat.

“What?”

“If you thought they're half our age, you're right. Fifteen and sixteen.”

“Do their parents know?”

“Their folks know, all right. In fact, they shipped their children to Dakota when they figured out the girl was in the family way.” Jesse thumped Ivar on the arm. “So, how old is this Norwegian custom of cutting wood and washing diapers for new parents?”

Ivar glanced at the sun. “I'd say three, maybe four hours.”

Jesse grinned at Marta. “Good custom.”

Ivar let the Masons off near their claim. They strolled through the cool spring evening, the fragrant prairie flowers blowing away the odor of the Duffys' squalor.

Jesse squeezed her hand. “Thought I started out with nothing. Colum was so hungry, he ate those raw potatoes Ivar keeps in his grub box. Bit into them like they were Northern Spy apples.”

“Compared to them, we live like royalty.” Susannah nodded. “Are you jealous?”

“Oh yeah.” He swallowed. “Colum and Ivar swapping progeny stories, you bet.”

Susannah slid her hand down his back, inside the waistband of his pants at the triangle of space over his backbone. “Shall we take up Ivar's suggestion, then?”

Jesse extracted her hand. “No, but we will take up the doctor's suggestion.”

“Which? The doctor's methods or the orphans?”

Jesse's eyebrows peaked. “Both.”

She looked up into the face more familiar than her own, its hard lines a disguise for a soft heart. She wanted to lay him down in the spring grass and love him until she was sure of carrying his child. “What size baby would they send?”

The hard lines curved. “Probably bigger than the Duffys'. Never seen babies that small. My guess is they'll be more the size of Sara.”

Longing burned her throat and threatened to spill out her eyelids. She could love an adopted baby, certainly. But what she wanted was Jesse's child. Their child.

White puffs of cottonwood seeds danced like lazy snowflakes in the Sunday sun. Jesse continued through the chord progression but stopped singing in the middle of a phrase. “Ivar, how many Indians are behind me?” he asked in a casual tone, his voice just loud enough to be heard over the guitar.

Indians? Where? Heart pounding, Susannah lowered her violin to her lap. She saw only a flock of goldfinches tracing a scalloped course around a thicket of white-blossomed plum trees.

Ivar scanned the wooded riverbanks. “No Indians.”

“You didn't happen to bring your rifle today?”

Ivar's blond eyebrows drew together. “You know I don't hunt on Sundays.”

“There's an Indian about twenty-five yards south, heading right for us.”

A rangy man with shoulder-length black hair hiked down the slope. A prickling sensation ran under Susannah's hat.

Marta, calm in every storm, pulled Sara into her lap. Ivar rooted through the picnic basket, finding a kitchen knife. Jesse kept strumming. Susannah tensed, ready to hit the savage with her violin, poke him with her bow, throw herself between him and the baby. Why were they just sitting there?

The Indian's long steps closed the distance. Midday sun glittered off the beads and quills decorating his buckskins. He stopped a few feet away and opened his palms toward them.
“Pain, s' il vous
plaît? Mangez?”

“Bien sûr. Voulez-vous dîner avec nous?”
Susannah responded automatically. He'd asked for bread, and she'd responded with a line straight out of a practice dialogue from school, an invitation for dinner.

Ivar gaped. “Jesse, your wife speaks Indian.”

Jesse strummed the final chord. “Unless I miss my guess, it's French they're speaking.”

The Indian folded himself onto the grass between the two men. His rapid walking pace had led Susannah to expect a man in his teens or twenties, but his finely creased face belonged to someone in his forties or fifties. He seemed composed of straight lines: horizontal eyebrows and mouth, vertical nose and hair, diagonal jawlines, erect posture. His skin was lighter and not as red as the Indians in paintings, almost the color of the back of Jesse's neck at the end of summer. Although he did not carry a bow and arrows or a gun, a knife stuck out of a brightly decorated scabbard at his waist. Susannah shivered, and cold perspiration dampened her camisole.

Continuing in French, the stranger told her he recognized the violin but not the other instrument. “It's a guitar,” she said in a tremulous voice. With a twinkle of amusement in his eyes, he asked why the others were not talking. Susannah explained they spoke English and Norwegian. Mademoiselle Dupont's lessons, preparing young ladies to read menus in Montreal or to tour art museums in Paris, flashed through her memory. She asked the savage where he'd learned French.

“Black Gown, at the end of the river,” he replied, pointing northwest.

Jesse cleared his throat. “You might let the rest of us in on this conversation.”

Through laborious two- and three-way interpretations, Susannah introduced the group. The stranger's Indian name tripped her tongue. She understood only the first two French words of his name. The Indian made some sign language, but Susannah still couldn't grasp his meaning.

“He's called ‘Sees-the-' and I don't recognize the third word, Tatanka. It doesn't sound French.”

“Sees? As in ‘looks at' or ‘grabs'?” Jesse asked without taking his gaze off the man.

“Looks at.”

“Sees-the-Tatanka,” Jesse repeated. He passed the man a prairie chicken sandwich. “Ask what brings him down the river.”

The Indian had traveled alone to a holy place called Standing Rock, one day's journey south. He sought wisdom for his second child, a son. Grinning with pride, he spoke of a grown daughter married a moon ago and a third child who just learned to walk. But this adolescent son—

He pinched dirt between his thumb and forefinger, then let the wind blow it away. Susannah wanted to ask how he had limited his family to only three, with many years between them. Most white families consisted of stair-step children an average of two years apart. But one did not speak of such things.

Marta passed Sees-the-Tatanka a fried pastry. The expression on his face needed no translation. Licking his fingers, he asked if Ivar would sell Marta to him. Susannah shook her head and refused to interpret his offer. The Indian grinned and thudded Ivar on the back. Ah, he knew how to tease, like Jesse. Assuming he asked about the food, Marta gave him the recipe, showing him how to shape the dough with graceful movements of her hands. Enraptured, the Indian sighed.

“He says you are a most fortunate man, Ivar.”