Years (6 page)

The white stripe near his hairline turned brilliant red and he lunged to his feet, the chair scraping back on the bare wood floor as he pointed a long, thick finger at her nose. “He sure as hell don’t, so I’m stuck with you! But stay out of my way, missy, you understand!”

“Theodore!” his mother yelped, but he was already slamming out the door. When he was gone, the silence around the table became deadly and Linnea felt tears of mortification sting her eyes. She glanced at the faces around her. Kristian’s and John’s were beet red. Nissa’s was white with anger as she stared at the door.

“That boy don’t know no manners atall, talking to you like that!” his mother ranted.

“I... I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have goaded him. It was my fault.”

“Naw, it was not,” Nissa declared, rising and beginning to clear away the dishes with angry motions. “He just got ugly inside when — ” She stopped abruptly, glanced at Kristian, who was staring at the tablecloth. “Aw, it’s no use tryin’ to straighten him out,” she finished, turning away.

To Linnea’s surprise, John made the one gesture of conciliation. He began to reach for her arm as if to lay a comforting hand on it, drew back just in time, but offered in his deep, slow voice, “Aw, he don’t mean nothing by it, Miss.”

She looked up into friendly, shy eyes and somehow realized that John’s brief reassurance had been tantamount to an oration, for him. She reached out to touch his arm lightly. “I’ll try to remember that the next time I cross swords with him. Thank you, John.”

His gaze dropped to her fingers, and he flushed brilliant red. Immediately she withdrew her hand and turned to Kristian. “Would you mind taking me to the school tomorrow, Kristian? That way I won’t have to bother your father.”

His lips opened, but nothing came out. He flashed a quick glance at his uncle, found no help for whatever was bothering him, and finally swallowed and smiled broadly, growing pink in the cheeks yet again. “Yes, ma’am.”

Relieved, she released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Thank you, Kristian. I’ll be ready directly after breakfast.”

He nodded, watching her rise to pick up a handful of dishes. “Well, I’d better lend Nissa a hand with cleaning up.”

But even before she’d gotten to her feet, she was being excused.

“Teachers don’t clean up!” Nissa informed her. “Evenin’s are your own. You’ll need ‘em for correctin’ papers and such.”

“But I have no papers to correct yet.”

“G’won!” Nissa flapped a hand as if shooing away a fly. “Git out from underfoot. I’ll tend to the cleanin’ up. I always have.”

Linnea paused uncertainly. “You’re sure?”

Nissa peered up at her from behind her oval lenses while reaching for the empty cups and saucers. “Do I strike you as a person who ain’t never sure of things?”

That made Linnea smile again. “Very well, I promised my mother I’d write to her immediately after I arrived and let her know I’d made it without mishap.”

“Fine! Fine! You go do that.”

Upstairs she lit the kerosene lantern and studied her room again, but it was as disappointing as ever. Nissa had replaced the pitcher and bowl with a blue-speckled wash basin. The sight of it brought back Linnea’s disappointment not only in the room and the Westgaard family but in herself. She wanted so badly to act mature, had promised herself time and again that she’d give up those childish flights of whimsy that forever got her into trouble. But she hadn’t been here thirty minutes
and look what she’d done. She swallowed back tears.

From her first thirty dollars a month she’d have to pay the price of a new pitcher and bowl. But worse, she’d made a fool of herself. That was hard enough to face without having to confront Theodore’s antagonism at every turn.

The man was truly despicable!

Forget him. Everyone told you becoming an adult wasn’t going to be easy, and you’re finding out they were right.

To put Theodore from her mind, she took up a wooden stationery box and sat on her bed.

Dear Mother and Father, Carrie and Pudge,

I have arrived in Alamo all safe and sound. The train ride was long and uneventful. When I arrived I searched the horizon for a town, but found to my dismay only three elevators and a handful of sorry buildings I would scarcely classify as a “town.” Yes, Daddy, you warned me it would be small. But I hadn’t expected this!

I was met at the station by Mr. Westgaard, who escorted me to his farm, which appears to be of immense proportions like all the others out here, so big we tried to find one of his neighbors working in the field, but could not. Mr. Westgaard — Theodore is his first name — lives here with his mother, Nissa (a little bandy-legged spitfire whom I loved immediately), and his son, Kristian (who will be my eighth-grade student, but is half a head taller than I), and Theodore’s brother, John (who comes here at mealtimes but the rest of the time lives at his own farm, which is the next one up the road to the east).

We had a delicious first supper of steak and gravy, potatoes, corn, bread and butter and bread pudding and more relishes than I’ve ever seen on a table in my life, after which Nissa would not allow me to lift a finger to help her clean up — Carrie and Pudge, I know you’re green with envy because I don’t have to do dishes anymore! And now I’m settled into my very own private room with nobody to tell me to put out the light when I’d rather read a little longer. Imagine that, a room of my own for the first time in my life.

But then she glanced around that room, at the bare rafters overhead, the minuscule window, the commode where the new
blue washbasin stood. She remembered the untarnished optimism she’d felt while riding toward her new home on the train, and her immediate disillusionment from the moment Theodore Westgaard had opened his mouth and declared, “I ain’t havin’ no woman in my house!” She glanced at the letter from which she had carefully winnowed all the disappointments and misgivings of her first six hours as the “the new teacher,” and suddenly the world seemed to topple in on her.

She curled into a ball and wept miserably.

Oh, Mother and Daddy, I miss you so much. I wish I was back home with all of you, where suppertime was filled with gaiety and talk and loving smiles. I wish I could pick up the dishtowel and complain loudly about having to help Carrie and Pudge before I was excused from the kitchen. I wish all three of us girls were back together, crowded into our pretty little flowered bedroom with the two of you siding against me when I wanted to leave the lights on just a little longer.

What am I doing out here in the middle of this godforsaken prairie, with this strange family, so filled with anger and reticence and a total disdain for manners?

I wish I had listened to you, Daddy, when you said I should stay closer to home my first year, until I knew how I liked independence. If I were there, I’d be sharing all this with you and Mother right now, instead of burying the hurts inside and sobbing out my sorrow in this sad little attic bedroom.

But she loved her family too much to tell them the truth and give them the burden of worrying about her when there was nothing they could do to comfort her.

And so, much later, when she discovered her tears had fallen upon the ink and left two blue puddles, she resolutely dried her eyes and started the letter again.

3

B
Y TRADITION, THE
school year officially began on the first Monday of September. Linnea had arrived on the Friday preceding it. Saturday hadn’t quite dawned, when some faraway sound awakened her and she groggily checked her surroundings in the muted lavender light of the loft.

For a moment she was disoriented. Overhead were the unfinished beams of a roof. She groaned and rolled over. Oh yes ... her new home in Alamo. She had slept poorly in the strange bed. She was tempted to drop off for a few more precious winks, but just then she heard activity below, and remembered the events of yesterday.

Well, Miss Brandonberg, drag your bones out of here and show ‘em what you’re made of.

The water in the basin was cold, and she wondered if she’d run into Theodore or Kristian if she sneaked down to warm it. Maybe nobody’d lit a fire yet: a glance at the window told her it was very early. She eyed the stovepipe, scurried out of bed, and touched it. Ah, someone had been up a while. She drew on her blue flannel wrapper, buttoned it to the throat, tied it at the waist, and took her speckled washbasin downstairs.

She tried to be very quiet, but the stairs creaked.

Nissa’s head popped around the doorway. Her hair was
already in its tight little bun, and she wore a starched white ankle-length apron over a no-nonsense dress of faded gray and red flowered muslin.

“You up already?”

“I... I don’t want to keep anybody waiting this time.”

“Breakfast won’t be for a good hour yet. The boys got ten cows to milk.”

“Are they... ” She glanced above Nissa’s head and pressed the basin tighter against her hip. “Outside already?”

“Coast is clear. Come on down.” Nissa dropped her eyes to the bare toes curled over the edge of the step. “Ain’t you got no slippers for them bare feet?”

Linnea straightened her toes and looked down. “I’m afraid not.” She didn’t want to mention that at home she’d only had to slip down the hall to reach the lavatory.

“Well, appears I better get out my knitting needles first chance I get. Come on down ‘fore you fall off your perch. Water’s hot in the reservoir.”

In spite of Nissa’s brusque, autocratic ways, Linnea liked her. The kitchen, with her in it, became inviting. She whirled around in her usual fashion, reminding Linnea of the erratic flight of a goldfinch — darting this way and that with such abrupt turns that it seemed she wasn’t done with one task before heading for the next.

She lifted a lid from the gargantuan cast-iron stove that dominated the room, tossed in a shovelful of coal from a hod sitting alongside, rammed the lid back in place, and spun toward the pantry all in a single motion. Watching her, Linnea almost became dizzy.

In a moment Nissa breezed back, pointing to a water pail sitting on a long table against one wall. “There! Use the dipper! Take what you need! I draw the line when it comes to givin’ the teacher a bath!”

Linnea laughed and thought if she had to put up with some nettlesome tempers around here, Nissa would more than make up for it. Upstairs again, all washed, with the bandage removed from her hand and her hair done in a perfect, flawless coil around the back of her head, Linnea felt optimistic once more.

She owned five outfits: her traveling suit of charcoal-gray wool serge with its shirtwaist of garnet-colored silk, a brown skirt of Manchester cloth bound at the hem with velvet and a
contrasting white-yoked shirtwaist, a forest-green skirt of twilled Oxford with three inverted plaits down the back and a Black Watch plaid shirtwaist to match, a navy-blue middy dress with white piping around the collar, and an ordinary gray broadcloth skirt and plain white shirtwaist with no frills except a pair of narrow ruffles dropping at an inward angle from each shoulder toward her waist.

The suit was strictly for Sundays. The middy made her look childish. The Manchester cloth would be too warm yet, stiffened as it was with percaline. And she was saving the new green skirt for the first day of school because it had been a gift from her parents and was the most adult of all her outfits. So she chose the utilitarian gray skirt and plain white blouse. When she was dressed, she eyed herself critically.

Her hair was perfect. Her skirt was dry. Her bandage gone. Her clothing sensible, sober, even matronly. What could he possibly find to fault her for?

Suddenly she realized what she was thinking, and her chin took on a stubborn thrust. Why should I have to worry about pleasing an old grouch like Theodore? He’s my
land
lord, not my lord!

She returned downstairs to find breakfast cooking, the table set, but the men still absent.

“Well, look at you! Now don’t you look pretty!”

“Do I?” Linnea smoothed the front of her white shirtwaist and looked at Nissa uncertainly. “Do I look old enough?”

Nissa hid a smile and gave the girl a thorough inspection over the tops of her wire-rimmed spectacles. “Oh, you look old, all right. Why, I’d say you look at least... oh... nineteen, anyway.”