A Cozy Country Christmas Anthology (9 page)

“You’re plump as a market hog,” she scolded
him. “Go guard the grain and earn the milk Papa squirts into your
mouth each morning at milking.”

The thought of never going back to school
gnawed at her like the sharp teeth of a varmint chewing through a
feed sack. She stretched on her toes to hang a pair of Papa’s work
pants by the legs. The wind pounced and shook the pants as Lefse
would shake a mouse to break its neck.

Lonesome for company, Erik wandered outside
to join her. After rubbing Lefse’s belly, he looked up and Betsy
smiled at the black smudge on his nose. His eyes grinned up at her,
blue as the autumn sky stretched over their heads.

He held up grimy hands. “My teacher will
holler at me tomorrow for having dirty fingernails, Betsy. Can I
play now?”

Erik thought they were enjoying a day off.
With a pang, Betsy realized that Erik would suffer also from a lack
of schooling. If they somehow lost the farm and a farmer was only
one disaster away from doing so, her brother’s only choice would be
to work as a laborer for someone else. The breeze ruffled his straw
blond hair and Betsy noticed that a button was missing from his
shirt. She’d neglected both the house and her family.

Her brother stuck out his tongue and tilted
his head back.

“What are you doing, you silly boy?” Betsy
picked up the last shirt and a couple of clothes pins.

“Tasting the wind.”

“And what does the wind taste like?”

He gave her a mysterious smile. “Just like
apples and leaves and cinnamon.”

Betsy stuck out her tongue too, but couldn’t
taste anything. Erik had such an imagination!

“And just a little bit like maple syrup.”
Erik loved maple syrup as a sweetener—in cookies and on oatmeal and
everywhere he could get it. They boiled their own from the trees on
the back quarter of their farm.

“You’d be happy if I’d let you drink maple
syrup by the gallon.” Betsy grasped the handles and lifted the
empty clothes basket to rest on her hip.

Erik crouched to study an ant hill, grimacing
when a gust of air kicked up a puff of dirt. He grabbed a sleeve
from one of the shirts snapping in the wind and used it to wipe his
eyes.

“Erik! That’s clean! Or it was clean.”
Betsy’s shoulders slumped when she saw that the black smudge of
soot across her brother’s nose had now transferred to one of his
father’s work shirts.

“Sorry, Betsy!”

She took down the shirt. “I haven’t emptied
the tubs yet—I’ll wash it again.”

“It’s the wind’s fault—it threw the dirt in
my face, Betsy.”

“We can’t do without the wind.” She ducked
under the line of flapping clothes. “Without wind, how would the
windmill turn? And the clothes wouldn’t get dry. Mama always said,
“There’s no such thing as an ill wind—”

Her brother abandoned the ants and scuffed
along behind Betsy through the long grass. “What else did Mama say
about the wind?”

He sounded so interested, he always was when
she slipped and mentioned Mama. But she didn’t want to talk about
their mother. Instead, Betsy dangled the basket by one handle and
pretended the warmth of the sun on her shoulders was the touch of
loving hands. But she’d already let Erik down today by antagonizing
Papa about school.

“Folks say it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow
good to someone.”

At Erik’s puzzled expression, she forced
herself to share a memory, one she kept locked away like a precious
gem in a jewel box. “Even if the wind might not be helping us,
someone else needs the breeze. I used to be afraid when the wind
would howl on stormy nights, so Mama taught me a poem to help me be
brave.”

“Like Hickory, Dickory Dock?” It was Erik’s
favorite and as a little boy, he always checked their grandfather
clock in the hope of seeing a mouse swinging on the pendulum.

Betsy paused on the steps of the washhouse
and chanted:

“Wind is the breath of God ruffling our
hair,

Changing the weather from stormy to fair.

Bending the grass and rustling the
leaves,

Shaking the apples down from the trees.”

Catching her breath, she remembered the last
time she and Mama had picked up windfalls. They had been in high
spirits, with Mama teaching her to juggle three apples and chasing
her with a tiny green worm who had poked his head out of a hole.
She blinked at the memories washing over her, the sweet smell of
ripe fruit crushed underneath, the sound of wind tossing the
branches overhead and the plop of apples dropping to the cushioning
grass. Mother and daughter dodging between the gnarled trees amid
the giggles of two year old Erik as he toddled around with an apple
clutched in his baby hands.

Pressing her hand against her stomach, Betsy
fought to hold in the hurt. For a moment, her mother had been there
with them again and the realization that the happy time in the
orchard had been part of their last day together brought hot tears
welling up. Mama had been wrong, there were ill winds. One had
blown across Betsy’s life that day, one which four years later
still possessed the power to dry up laughter with its scorching
breath.

“Betsy?”

Erik’s anxious voice made her manage a smile
for his sake. “Papa missed his biscuits this morning. Help me
finish the washing and then we’ll take a picnic out to him in the
field.”

“Hurray!”

Like anything else on a farm, brisk breezes
were not to be wasted. Erik helped his sister strip the beds and
they carried armloads into the washhouse to soak in the
washtubs.

Excited at the prospect of even a small
outing, Erik worked hard, humming as he steadied the heavy flour
sack so his sister could refill the canister. Betsy mixed bread
dough and set it aside to rise. She sent Erik out to gather some
windfalls. Along with the bread and biscuits, she’d bake a pan of
apple crisp and a pie.

Mixing biscuit dough, she tried not to think
about the future. Her brother arrived, panting as he hauled in the
fruit. When he asked what he could do next, she asked him to get
out the pie tins.

The sound of him poking around in the
cupboard receded as she wondered whether she should have Erik start
peeling apples. No, his skills weren’t up to the task, but he could
help cut out biscuits—

“Hey, Betsy! What’s this silly thing?” The
little boy held up a metal colander with a wooden pestle rolling
inside.

She gasped and dropped her spoon into the
floury mixture in front of her. Drawing a deep breath, she ordered,
“Put that back, Erik!”

“Can I take the silver cone down to the pond
and strain for frogs?”

“No!” Betsy jerked the colander out of his
hands and whirled to replace it in the cupboard. Kneeling, she
gazed blindly at rows of dusty, capped Mason jars that lined the
long unopened storage area.

Sitting back on her heels, she gazed at the
colander. Someone had cleaned away the applesauce. Closing her
eyes, she remembered...

* * * *

Kitchen windows steamed from the fog of
boiling water. Sara Swensen opened a window to allow the late
September breeze to play peek-a-boo in her handmade organdy
curtains.

Betsy stood on tiptoe to peer into the depths
of a pot bubbling on the stove. “The apples must be mushy enough by
now, Mama!”

“I’m raising such an impatient dumpling,
Betsy. Apples have to be very soft before they can be made into
applesauce.”

“Can I measure out the sugar?”

Erik, his blue romper-covered bottom planted
on the floor, clapped plump hands together to call attention to his
successful stacking of two wooden blocks on top of each other.

Bending to hug her son, Sara praised, “Such a
clever little man!”

Excited by the attention, Erik knocked over
the tower with his elbow and burst into a wail of dismay.

His mother planted a kiss on top of his head.
“Don’t cry, my little potato cake. Build me a barn for Papa’s
cows.”

As the baby chuckled over his handiwork, Sara
poured softened apples into the colander. When it was nearly full,
she inserted the pestle and began to roll the heavy wooden
implement, crushing the plump fruit. Betsy stuck her finger into
the sauce oozing through the holes and transferred the warm, tart
mixture to her tongue, groaning in pleasure.

“Let me take a turn and smush the apples,
Mama.”

“Betsy, keep up the wheedling and you’ll grow
up to be a fine cook or a rich beggar.”

Pushing a chair over to the table, Betsy
stood as tall as possible as her mother triple-tied an apron around
her waist. “Your mama’s going to start fattening you up like a hog
bound for market. You’re as thin as a baby willow tree.”

A leaf, red and gold like the windfalls in
the pails, blew in the open window, skidding across the oil cloth
before drifting to the floor. Erik jumped up to chase it with the
eagerness of a kitten in pursuit of a bug, pouncing when the leaf
came to rest against the dry sink.

Betsy brushed the hair out of her eyes with
the back of her hand, crooning as the pestle rolled in her fingers.
“Smush, mush, hush. Smush, mush, hush.”

A bead of sweat rolled down, tickled the
corner of her eye. The pots boiling on the stove made the kitchen
seem as humid as mid-August. Betsy loved the hours spent learning
how to bake, sew and clean, watching her mama scour the tiles so
clean that they could eat off the floor if they had a mind to do
something so foolish.

Mama made every moment fun, teaching Betsy to
square dance using the mop and broom for partners or making up
silly rhymes about why a pig’s tail was curly or how daisies knew
when it was time to poke their white bonnets up through the spring
grass. And then there were those hours spent sitting in Betsy’s
room and making plans for her future. Serious talks about becoming
a teacher, the secrets to making a husband happy and the joy of
raising children.

While Betsy pressed the pestle against the
metal sides of the colander, her mother used the tongs to place
empty jars into a pot of boiling water.

“Always boil the jars, Betsy. They must be
clean or you can make your family sick.”

Every word her mama said during these magical
times seemed to be written down in her mind in the beautiful colors
of the Northern Lights, never to be forgotten.

Turning, Betsy saw her mother come in with
her arms full of wood to replenish the supply for the stove.

As she brushed dirt from her calico apron,
she smiled at her daughter. “Your papa has promised we’ll have
electricity one of these years and we’ll also get a telephone.
We’ll get a radio, so on winter nights we can hear music from
faraway places.”

Her mother had come from a wealthy family in
Minneapolis, enjoying the pleasures of gas lighting and graduating
from a woman’s teaching college. Instead of educating a group of
children, however, her dreams had shrunk to teaching one daughter
about the joys of knowledge and the household arts. But she had
never expressed regret.

“Music from faraway places?” Betsy loved to
dance around when her mother played the pump organ in the parlor.
“Like St. Paul?”

Betsy’s best friend, Libby Hanson, had moved
to St. Paul to live with her grandparents when her father had been
killed in a farm accident. The girls exchanged letters and Libby
wrote about cable cars and picture shows. St. Paul sounded like an
exotic country to Betsy.

“Music that your father and I can dance to.”
Sara swayed to an inaudible tune. “If we lived in the city, we’d
have electricity, a telephone and a fancy bathroom.”

Frowning, Betsy ignored the reference of to
her parents dancing. “But we couldn’t keep cats and cows if we
lived in the city. And how could we make apple sauce without apple
trees?”

A kiss pressed on the top of her head made
her shiver with happiness. “Don’t fret, my Betsy. We won’t be
moving to the city. Your papa loves this farm and I love your papa.
We’re very happy here. God even paints the sky for us with green
and pink lights. We don’t need a radio to have fun—”

Her mother’s hug suddenly became a heavy
weight on Betsy’s shoulders and she winced away from the oppressive
contact. Sara Swenson staggered away and leaned against the
table.

“Mama!” Betsy started to climb down from the
chair. “Your face is as red as Mrs. Jeppson’s Sunday hat!”

That Sunday hat was a family joke. The widow
had worn the hat to church as far back as Betsy could remember, a
scarlet confection crowned with matching plumes that became more
and more shopworn with each passing year.

Whenever Papa saw a cardinal, he’d say,
“There’s the bird who donated some of his feathers for Mrs.
Jeppson’s Sunday hat.”

But this time, Mama didn’t laugh and it made
Betsy’s tummy feel funny. The flush coating Mama’s cheeks gradually
faded, leaving her face bleached as white as Betsy’s petticoat.

With unsteady hands, Sara Swensen used the
tongs to remove the jars from the boiling water and set them in a
row on the towel spread across one end of the table.

Papa had once told Betsy, “When your Mama’s
happy, even her voice smiles.”

Betsy didn’t hear any smiles when Mama said,
“My head aches, Betsy, so I’m going to lie down for a minute. Add
sugar to the applesauce and fill the jars. Please be careful not to
burn yourself. I’ll help you clean up the mess when I come
downstairs. Please take care of Erik for me.”

Mama rested her hand on the doorpost as she
left the room and Betsy glanced at the windows to reassure herself
that the sun hadn’t disappeared behind a cloud. But it wasn’t
gloomy out there, just inside her heart. She felt queer, as if
something fluttered in her tummy. Poor Mama. She’d been having
these headaches more and more, spoiling their fun together.

But pride at having been given the
responsibility to finish the final batch of applesauce took over as
Betsy added sugar, measuring twice to make sure, and ladled the
warm sweet mixture into the waiting jars. Erik had curled up on the
floor and gone to sleep, one of the blocks that Papa carved still
clutched in his fist.