Dakota Dream (13 page)

She stretched her arms over her head and wriggled her toes. Somewhere a rooster crowed . . . and another answered.

When she thought of Dag, she remembered a dog she’d seen beaten one time. How it crawled away with its tail dragging in the dirt. How all his life this man had been beaten down by his conniving younger brother. The fire simmered in her belly again. What could they do to make Jude crawl like the worm he was? How could they get even?

“I could kill him!”

“Dag, no!” Will shook his master’s shoulders. “Wake up, Dag, you’re dreaming.”

Dag fought his way out of the fog and sat upright. He could feel his brother’s throat clenched between them, his hands squeezing, squeezing the life out. “No!”

“It’s all right, come on, everything will be all right,” Will murmured in the soothing, singsong voice Dag had taught him to use with a skittish horse. “You’ll never kill anyone, not even your brother, even if he does deserve it.”

“He was going to use Clara to make a fool out of me again.” Dag sank down on the crinkly mattress. “Why does he hate me so? All my life I tried to do as my father said, take care of Ma and my brother. All my life. I know I’m dumb, dolt they called me, and big and ugly, but Will, I tried.” He sat up and grasped Will by the collar of his shirt.

“No, Dag, no, no, you’re not dumb.” Will reached for the massive hands of his master and friend.

Dag continued, not even hearing Will’s plea. “I quit school so I could go to work and earn some money. They could have farmed, but Ma said the land was too poor. Even when I got my own forge, they called me dumb dolt.”

“Dag, listen to me. They’re just jealous. And lazy and mean.”

“Dumb dolt and now I feel such anger I want to kill my brother. My only brother.” Dag rolled his head from side to side. After a time he began again. “And now Clara won’t see me. After attacking Jude like that. Humph! No one puts anything over on my Clara. God, can’t I do anything right?” He threw himself from his bed and thundered out the door of the soddy.

Dag ran as if pursued by the devil himself. As his bare feet pounded the mud of the road, his mind kept pace.
God, if You are really the God they talk about in church, take me away from here now. They say there’s a heaven. It’d sure beat this life on earth.
He slipped in one viscous hole and fell to his knees. When he rose to run again, he caught himself slipping and sliding with fatigue.

The next time he fell, he lay flat out, face down in the mud. He raised his head just enough to breathe. “God,” he panted at the heavens, “I give up! You hear me, I give up!” The words ended on a screech.

Dag lay there waiting for a lightning bolt to strike him. When nothing happened, he pushed himself to his knees and then his feet. When he staggered home, chills rocked his body, but he stopped at the windmill and, with one shaking hand, began pumping. After sluicing buckets of clean water and scrubbing with the bar of soap in the scrub bucket, he rinsed again and padded into the soddy. He rubbed himself dry with a coarse towel and fell back in bed. Clean, he finally felt clean. “Father, forgive me,” he mumbled as he drifted off to sleep.

The rooster crowing from the farm across the way brought Dag bolt upright in bed. Had it all been a dream? More like a nightmare. He rubbed the top of his head. No, his hair was still damp. He had indeed lain in the mud and been washed clean. But now he felt . . . he felt like crowing as the rooster did. He began singing instead, “Onward Christian soldiers . . .” His rich baritone filled the soddy and escaped out the chimney.

Will stumbled from the other room, rubbing his eyes. Dag singing . . . in the morning? Dag singing . . . at all? “Yip-pee!” He dragged his pants from the end of his bed and staggered after Dag, pulling his pants on as he ran.

“I’ll go see him as soon as he gets to the shop.” Clara took another turn around her room. “He must open at seven.” She glanced at the clock on her chest of drawers for the umpteenth time.

“I’ll go see her as soon as it is polite.” Dag brushed an imaginary piece of straw off his navy wool pants. He gave his hair another brushing.

They met halfway in the middle.

“I’m sorry,” they both said at once. They looked at each other and laughed.

“Have you had breakfast?” Clara asked. At the shake of his head, she took his arm. “Good, Mrs. Hanson makes wonderful pancakes.”

“I . . . I—” They both started to talk again at the same time.

“Ladies first.” Dag looked down at the silly black feather bobbing almost at his shoulder. What was she doing wearing such a fancy hat this early in the morning?

“All right. Please forgive me for making such a fool of myself yesterday.”

“The only one you made a fool of was my brother. Please, accept my apologies for the way he has acted.”

“Of course. Now that that’s out of the way, I have a plan. How would you like to get even with your brother? Turn the tables on him for a change?”

“And how would we do this?”

“Well, this way.” They climbed the stairs to the porch as she talked. “Jude wanted you to feel like a fool when I learned of his treachery, right?” Dag nodded and opened the door for her. “What if he thought we were courting?”

“How could we do that?” He helped her off with her coat.

“The way everyone courts, silly. You could escort me to church, to the social at the schoolhouse, out for drives in your oh-so-shiny buggy . . .”

“It’s too muddy to take out the buggy.” He hung his own coat up.

“Dag, you know what I meant.” Together they entered the dining room laughing.

“Now these are the faces I love to see in the morning,” Mrs. Norgaard said as she winked at Mrs. Hanson. “I think you better go flip some more of those pancakes of yours and fry extra bacon. Dag looks like he could eat a whole ham.”

She turned to the two young people. “Sit down, my children, and tell me what brings such smiles to your faces.”

“We’re going to get even.” Clara plunked herself down on her chair. “With Jude. He’s been mean to Dag for too long.”

A slight frown marred Mrs. Norgaard’s forehead. “Get even. You know, God says that is His job.”

“I know. But we’re going to help Him out.” Clara explained the plan, totally seriously and in great detail. “What are you laughing about?”

“I’m not laughing.” Mrs. Norgaard swallowed the chortle that belied her words. She sipped her coffee to stifle another giggle. When she had composed her mouth, if not her eyes, she continued. “I think that is a very good plan and you should begin immediately.”

Dag looked from his young friend to his old friend and back again. There was something going on here that he could sense but not recognize. But then, how much had he ever tried understanding women in his monastic life anyway? He shrugged the thought away. At least this plan was better than the one he’d dreamed of during the dark hours.

The sun smiled on their plan as they walked through the town that afternoon. Dag recognized one of Jude’s cronies standing by the train station so he knew word would get back to his brother. But as he and Clara passed the church, he forgot his brother and remembered the song in his heart when he awoke. That night he walked with her to their English class at the church. Will accompanied them, hands in his pockets, whistling away. When Dag had shared a little of “the plan” with him, the young man nodded solemnly. “That’ll get him for sure,” was his only comment. But he didn’t stop whistling.

When Dag walked Clara home, Will made excuses and went another way.

“But I don’t know how to dance.” Dag threw his hands up in the air, hoping to end the discussion.

“But if we are to do this courting right, you must take me to the box social at the schoolhouse on Saturday.” Clara sat in the chair in front of the window in the sitting room. Late afternoon sunlight slanted in and set her hair afire.

Dag couldn’t take his eyes off the golden threads.

“It’s for a good cause. They are trying to earn enough money for a new roof.” Clara laid her hands in her lap.

“I’ll put the roof on myself,” Dag muttered in a voice Clara barely heard.

She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “You could learn to dance.”

“I suppose you would teach me that, too.”

“My box will be the best-tasting and prettiest there.”

“Will and I do just fine at home. We aren’t starving.”

“Maybe Jude will be there. This is a perfect opportunity to—”

“Get even. Yes, I know.” Dag dragged his hands over his scalp, mussing the hair he usually kept so carefully brushed. “All right. We will go. But we might leave early.”

But they didn’t leave early, and even though Jude never made an appearance, Dag and Clara had a wondrous time. Dag was blessed with the natural rhythm and grace sometimes given to big men, and once he learned the patterns of a dance or two, he couldn’t get enough. He danced every dance, even those he didn’t know.

He danced the waltz with Mrs. Norgaard and the polka with Mrs. Hanson. His feet tapped out the reel with Clara, and they swung past each other on the round and square dances. If he made a mistake, he just laughed along with the others and went on dancing.

Clara sank down on a chair along the wall, next to Mrs. Norgaard. “I’m exhausted.” She fanned her hot face with her handkerchief. She watched Dag swing Ingeborg past on another polka.

“I think we are seeing a miracle,” Mrs. Norgaard whispered in Clara’s ear.

“Dag?”

“Yes, Dag. I thank the good Lord every night for what He is doing with our young man.”

“I wish—” Clara fanned herself again.

“What, my dear?”

“Oh, nothing. Would you like some punch?” At Mrs. Norgaard’s nod, Clara pushed herself to her feet. What she wished was that Dag was truly her young man and that this courting wasn’t just a sham.

“Think yer purty smart, don’cha.” Jude strolled into the blacksmith’s shop late one afternoon.

Dag ignored him, continuing to forge the point on a pickax. “Well, she ain’t for the likes o’ you.” Jude spit a glob of tobacco juice into the dirt. “You taken her out to see Ma?”

Dag thrust the heavy steel back into the forge and motioned Will to crank the handle on the blower. The whine of the machine overpowered any conversation. When the iron point glowed red, then white, Dag pulled it out and returned it to the anvil.

“Maybe I shoulda taken that little filly fer m’self after all.”

“You have a wife.”

“Don’t remind me.” Jude dug a kerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose. “We’re livin’ out at Ma’s now. To help her out some’at.”

Dag returned the piece of steel to the forge. When he looked up, Jude was gone. Now he’d have to send more food and coal out there. He gritted his teeth and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his glove.

Knowing he would have a massive cleaning job afterward, Dag took the surry out on a Sunday morning to drive the household of women to church. Mrs. Norgaard still wasn’t strong enough to walk the distance. When spring came to North Dakota, the frozen roads bottomed out with the thaw, but the streets in town weren’t quite the morass of the country roads.

After greeting friends, Clara and Dag entered the sanctuary and sat side by side. Sharing the same hymnbook made them smile at each other. Singing together, her soprano blending with his baritone, made them smile.

Reverend Moen took his place behind the carved, white-and-gilt pulpit. He smiled at those before him. “Grace and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Clara settled back against the wooden pew. Today she could truly sense both the grace and peace. She felt it warm her from the inside out. She ignored the warmth emanating from the man beside her and concentrated on the sermon.

“Today’s gospel is from the fifth chapter of Matthew, verse forty-three and following.” He glanced again around the congregation and began reading. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

He closed the Bible and then his eyes. “Father, teach us this day what You would have us to learn. Open our hearts and minds that we might indeed listen unto You. Amen.”

The congregation responded with one voice, “Amen.”

Clara argued with the verses through the rest of the sermon, only catching random phrases of Reverend Moen’s message.
But I have been praying for him, from way back when I first received the letter. And right up until . . .
She tried a different tack.
I don’t hate Jude . . . I . . . I’m just angry with him. Furious is more like it. I don’t want to do good to him . . . I want to get even. He hurt Dag; there’s no love in the way he has treated Dag all these years.
She groaned inwardly.
Yes, persecute would be the perfect word to describe the way Jude and his mother treated Dag.

“Our Father so often gives us a promise along with the hard commands, for these words are truly a hard order for us to follow.” Clara covered her unladylike snort with a cough.

“Just think, that we may be children of our Father who is in Heaven, but who loved us so much He sent His Son to be persecuted and to die on the cross . . . for you . . . and for me.” Reverend Moen leaned forward. There was not a sound from the congregation.

“He forgave each of us . . .” The pause stretched.

Clara’s heart felt like it was being pulled in two directions and at any moment, it might rip in two.

The pastor continued, “And so must we forgive. Amen.”

Dag kept his shoulders rigid through superhuman efforts.
Forgive! I’ve been forgiving them all my life. So they hurt me. That wasn’t so bad, I got used to it. But now Jude has hurt Clara. Beautiful, innocent Clara, who he hadn’t even known. All to play a trick on me, his ugly dolt of a brother. That I can’t forgive!

“As you were forgiven.” The words chased each other through his mind and around his heart, stabbing him as they ran.

Am I really a child of God?
He looked up at the shiny gold cross in front of the picture of Jesus tending His sheep. Dag stifled a groan that tore from his innermost hidden place.

“He died on the cross . . . for you . . . and for me.”

For me. For Dag Weinlander.
Dag swallowed hard against the moisture rising in his throat and blinding his eyes. He blinked furiously.