A Heart for Home (12 page)

Good thing tomorrow was Sunday. They all needed a day of rest.

The train whistled off in the distance. Maybe Astrid would be on it.

“Joshua!”

He turned back to the job. They were pouring concrete now and would finish the floor before quitting. They’d gone ahead with the plans made, and discussion had started on building a dike before spring. Which really meant before winter and the dirt froze too solid to be moved.

“Yeah?”

“Jeffers wants you over at the office.”

“Okay, thanks.” He crossed the street and headed for the printing shop, where a construction office had taken over the front room. How Thorliff was managing to put out his newspaper every week in spite of all this was beyond him. He should have brought his dinner pail. He could hear the screech of the iron wheels on the rails as the train ground to a halt. The bell tinkled over the door when he pushed it open.

Thorliff waved him over. “I need to get this order in today, or we won’t get anything until September. I am ordering six house-building kits, and you will get a fifteen percent savings if you go in with us to make it seven. What do you say?”

Joshua pushed out a deep breath. “I can’t turn down an offer like that. When do you want payment?” While he spoke, he tried to figure how much he had in the bank.

“When you can. I’m writing a check for the entire amount, so you will pay the company.”

Since he had already paid off the note on the land, he didn’t think he had enough for the entire cost of the house. Going into debt again. He could hear the disappointment in his father’s voice. At least it was no longer a sneer. Gratitude for the time with his father before he died was a good thing.

Joshua ignored the voice. His father had kept his farm from growing by not being willing to work with the bank. He lost one son and almost a second. If Aaron came to work in Blessing . . . Surely he had gotten the letter by now.

“Write me up a note so I can sign it, then.”

Thorliff shook his head. “We’ll deal with that later.”

The noon whistle blew, another newfangled invention, as Mr. Valders had been heard to say, especially since the official clock hung on the bank wall.

“Bring your dinner pail over here so we can talk while we eat. I think you might as well make that a habit. Oh, and please stop by the house and tell Thelma we are ready to eat.” He stood to clear rolls of blueprints off the table. “On second thought, we’ll eat on my back porch. It’s cooler there than here.”

When Joshua returned to the old granary, he saw Pastor Solberg walking up the street.

“Welcome home,” Joshua called.

“Thank you. It’s good to be back. Do you know where Thorliff is?”

“Setting up for dinner on the back porch of the surgery. I’m sure Thelma would set another place. I’m getting my dinner pail and going there myself.”

“Good. I’ll wait for you.” Solberg set down his carpetbag and mopped his head. “Here I thought it might be cooler in Blessing.”

He’s all alone. What about the rest of the group that went south? Mostly,
what about Astrid?
Joshua grabbed his dinner pail, and after taking a minute to assign duties to his workers for the afternoon, he returned to the street, where Solberg was now talking with Hildegunn Valders.

Solberg smiled, nodded, and motioned to Joshua. “I have to go now, Mrs. Valders. I’ll talk with you after church tomorrow.”

“So good to have you back,” she said with a wave and started toward the post office. She turned. “Oh, and Mrs. Jeffers has arrived. We are going to plan something so she can meet the ladies of the town.”

“Good. Good.” He waved again and picked up his pace to meet with Joshua, exhaling a
whew
when he arrived.

Joshua grinned. “Have you had dinner?”

“No, but let me tell you, I am extremely grateful to be sitting down at a table with Thelma as the cook.”

“You look like you’ve not been getting enough to eat.”

“That’s true. None of us had enough to eat. It is very hard to eat when people around you are starving to death. Combined with the measles, the reservation was indeed a pit of despair.”

“Where are the rest of them?” Joshua asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.

“Dr. Bjorklund felt several of her patients needed a few more days of medical care. They should be here later this week.”

Leave it to Dr. Bjorklund.
. . . Joshua felt his jaw tighten. He’d heard of the near tragedy at Andrew’s house a couple days before. News got around Blessing even faster now that the telephones connected everyone. Would it have been different if Astrid had been there? What if her mother had indeed been struck dead? Instead of staying home, Astrid had to go off helping a bunch of Indians who didn’t much appreciate the help, as far as he’d heard from Hjelmer.

“What is it, son?” Pastor Solberg asked, laying a hand on Joshua’s arm.

“What? Ah, nothing. Nothing at all.” Joshua stared at his boots. “We’d better get a move on. I know the others will be glad to see you’re home.”

“Joshua, you do know that any time you need to talk something over, I have a good listening ear.”

“Thank you, sir, I know that. I guess this is just something I need to work out for myself.” He held the gate open, and they took the sidewalk around the house to the back porch, well shaded by a cottonwood and a maple tree, both trees now as tall as the two-story house.

“Pastor Solberg, welcome home,” Thorliff said as he and Daniel Jeffers stood and came across the porch to meet the two new arrivals. “Come sit down and make yourself comfortable. Thelma will set another plate.”

“Good to see you, Mr. Jeffers,” the pastor said as they shook hands.

“It feels good to be here. Wait until you see how much we’ve accomplished in the short time you’ve been gone.”

“You don’t know how good this feels,” Solberg said.

“Being home again?” Thorliff asked.

“Ja. Blessing and friends and family. We worked so hard, and yet the heart always finds time to miss home.”

“Where are Far and Astrid?”

“They all stayed a few more days. I wanted to be here for church tomorrow, to let everyone know what their contributions have done.”

John Solberg took the chair he was offered. “I understand your mother came with you, Mr. Jeffers.”

“She did. We are living at the boardinghouse for now. She must be feeling better already. She’s beginning to get restless, says she has nothing to do.”

Solberg turned to Thorliff. “Have you taken her out to meet your mother?”

“I thought tomorrow would accomplish that, but now that Mor has been ordered to rest, she might not invite everyone over for dinner like usual.”

“You better catch me up. What happened?” He glanced at the men gathered. “No, you go ahead. I can see this is a business meeting. Just tell me she will be all right.”

“Oh, she is and will be. Wait until you hear the story.” The smile Thorliff wore made Solberg settle into his chair and set his black fedora on the bench beside him.

Thelma greeted him with a smile and a glass of lemonade. “I’ll set you a place too. Welcome home.”

“Thank you.” He drew a letter from his chest pocket. “Could you please see that Dr. Elizabeth gets this letter from Astrid and also ask her to telephone me when she has time?”

“Of course.”

Solberg turned back to the others. “Sorry for the interruption.” “We’re talking about housing and how to provide some quickly, since we are in desperate need of more construction workers.” Thorliff nodded as Thelma set the plates in front of the men. “Thank you. Is Elizabeth back yet?”

“No. She telephoned to say she and Inga are at your mother’s.”

“Thank you.” Thorliff laid the various pictures of the Sears and Roebuck house kits on the table. “That’s the one Joshua is ordering. Jeffers, you decided on this one. Right?”

“Yes, for now. I need to get my mother into a home of her own. We can build a larger one later, if we need to.”

“Good. Then this is what I’m planning. We’ll build three twobedroom single-story houses on speculation, and two that are a story and a half. All will have indoor plumbing and be wired for electricity. We’ll have electric lights here in the not too distant future, so we might as well be prepared.”

Now that he was committed to finishing his house, Joshua let his mind roam, only half listening to the discussion. Surely if Astrid cared for him, she would have included a letter for him. After all, she sent one to Dr. Elizabeth. The slow burn ignited in his belly again. Why was it that every time he thought he had his feelings about the Indians under control, something else blindsided him? He’d not realized how much he was counting on talking with Astrid again. When was she going to return, anyway?

“What do you think, Joshua?”

His mind snapped back. “Sorry, I was thinking on something else. Could you repeat that, please?” He could feel the heat climbing his neck. After all, this was a business meeting, not a social call.

“How do you think young Gould is doing?”

“He’s a hard worker, and he listens to Mr. Geddick, who is teaching him how to use the tools. Willing to help any way he can.”

“Good. He said he called his father in New York and asked him to try to find us more workers. Today Mr. Gould telephoned to say that he has ten men ready to get on the train tomorrow. All have experience in construction. Some have a few tools of their own. He asked how many more we need.”

“Ten men?”

“I know. I was as shocked as you. Can you manage with five more? We’ll send the other five over to work on the hospital until the house kits arrive. The man I talked with at Sears and Roebuck said we should have the houses in less than two weeks.”

“I see.” Joshua’s mind kicked into high gear. “What languages do the men speak? Any English?”

Thorliff looked down at his list. “Three Norwegians, four Germans, two Swedes, and a Russian.”

“Russian? Does anyone around here know any Russian?” When they all shook their heads, Joshua leaned back in his chair. “How will we communicate?”

“When will their families come?” Pastor Solberg asked.

“He didn’t say anything about families.”

“Can we get more information?”

“I told him I would telephone him back later this afternoon.”

“What if we took all but the Russian?” Joshua drank half the glass of water sitting beside his plate. “We’ve got the other languages covered.”
Aaron, get out here. I need you.
He paused. “What about tools?”

“I’ll have Penny order what we need. The supplies should be here by the time the men arrive.”

“When will Hjelmer be back?”

“Not till late August or early September.”

Feeling he needed to catch his breath, Joshua nodded. “Is there anything else for now?”

“No, that’s about it. We’ll keep you up-to-date.”

Standing, Joshua picked up his dinner pail and headed back to the site. How would he manage five more men? No, that wasn’t the problem. He had plenty of work. How would he manage five more men who did not speak his language?

They finished troweling off the floor just before the whistle blew. Joshua laid the three-foot level at different corners. “Now if those clouds will blow over without dumping rain on this concrete, we should be able to remove the forms in three, four days.” He debated. Should they just cover what they could with the tarps they had? Were there any extras over at the hospital? They’d not poured any more concrete for weeks now over there. He could hardly believe what he was thinking, but having a telephone on each construction site would sure make life a lot easier.

“I’m going over to the hospital to check on more tarps. Spread out those that we have in case it rains, and then you can go on home. Thanks for getting this done so quickly.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jonathan Gould said.

They brought back two wheelbarrows loaded with tarps and spread them as far as they went.

“Better safe than sorry. That’s one thing my father always says.” Jonathan stuffed his leather gloves into his back pocket.

“Mine too. Guess that’s what prompted me to do it.” Joshua picked up his dinner pail. “See you in the morning. Hey, and thanks for asking your father to find us more construction workers. With all these new people coming in, things are going to be different here in Blessing. That’s for sure.”

“You know, I was thinking of something else,” Jonathan said after a nod. “What if someone asked Mrs. Knutson if she’d like to rent out some of her dormitory space for the rest of the summer? After all, there might be more than these ten men that come in.”

“Good idea.”

“You going to work on your cellar tonight?”

“For a while. I’m about done.”

“Want some help?” Jonathan asked.

Joshua started to say no thanks but surprised himself by accepting the offer.

“I thought you’d be helping finish up the haying.”

“Lars knew I wanted to learn more about construction, so he said coming to work on this building was the best training. They’ll be done haying in the next couple of days. Barring any more rain, that is.”

The two stopped at the hole in the ground that would soon become his house. Sooner than he had dreamed possible. And for less money. “You spent these last couple of days putting up forms over on the work site, and now we need to take these down. The concrete has cured long enough,” Joshua said as he knocked on the concrete. “We’ll use these boards over again for the next house.”

By the end of two hours they’d stripped off most of the forms and stacked the boards on some two-by-fours he’d laid for a base to keep the air circulating.

“Don’t you ever quit?” Toby Valders asked as he stopped by on his way home.

Joshua looked up at Toby, who was leaning over the cellar. “Thanks to Gould here and all the rest of the help I’ve had, I’m nearly ready to set the beams in place.”

“Guess we are working on your house first, least that’s what Thorliff said.”

That caught Joshua by surprise. But then, none of the other houses had cellars dug or foundations already built. “Shame we don’t have anyone to dig out the cellars. If we did we could get all the houses dried in and then finish them during the winter.” The two walked up the ramp built for the wheelbarrows when digging.