Years Read online

  “I don’t know exactly. He started with the west rye this mornin’, but it’s hard to tell where he is by now. You might see him from the road if you head on out that way though.”

  “I’ll do that, but I’m leavin’ her here. She ain’t comin’ to my house, so she might’s well stay here with you till you find someplace else for her.”

  “Here!” Hilda pressed both hands to her chest. “But I got no spare rooms, you know that. Wouldn’t be right stuffing the teacher in with the kids. You take her, Theodore.”

  “Nosirree, Hilda. I ain’t havin’ no woman in my house.”

  Linnea was incensed. The nerve of them, treating her as if she were the chamber pot nobody wanted to carry out back.

  “Stop!” she shouted, closing her eyes while lifting both palms like a corner policeman. “Take me back to town. If I’m not wanted here, I’ll be more than happy to take the next tr—”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Now see what you’ve done, Theodore. You’ve hurt her feelings.”

  “Me! Oscar hired her! Oscar’s the one who told us she was a man!”

  “Well, then go talk to Oscar!” She threw up her hands in disgust, then, belatedly remembering her manners, shook hands with Linnea again and patted the girl’s knuckles. “Don’t pay no attention to Theodore here. He’ll find a place for you. He’s just upset cause he’s wastin’ time out of the fields when all that wheat is ripe out there. Now, Theodore,” she ordered, turning toward the house, “you take care of this young one like you agreed to!”

  And with that she hustled back inside.

  Defeated, Westgaard could only set out in search of Oscar with his unwanted charge beside him.

  Like most Dakota farms, Knutson’s was immense. Traveling down the gravel road, they scanned the horizon over his wheat, oat, and rye fields, but there was no sign of his team and mower crossing and recrossing the fields. Westgaard sat straight, frowning across the ocean of gold, peering intently for some sign of movement on the faraway brow of the earth, but the only thing moving was the grain itself and a flock of yapping blackbirds that flew overhead in ever-changing patterns before landing somewhere in the oats to glut themselves. The wagon came abreast of a shorn field, its yield lying in heavy plaits stretching as far as the eye could see. Drying in the sun, the grain gave up its sweet redolence to the sparkling air. With a subtle shift of the reins, Westgaard turned the horses off the gravel road along a rough grassy track leading between the cut field and another on their right whose grain was still straight and high. The track was bumpy, created chiefly for access to the fields. When the wagon suddenly lurched, Linnea grabbed her towering hat as it threatened to topple from its perch.

  Westgaard angled her a silent glance, and for a moment one comer of his mouth tipped up. But her chin was lowered as she busily reset the hatpin to hold the infernal nuisance on.

  They rocked and bumped their way up the track to a slight rise in the land. Reaching it, Westgaard intoned, “Whoa.”

  Obediently, the horses stopped, leaving the riders to sit staring at an eternity of Oscar Knutson’s cut rye, with no Oscar in sight.

  Westgaard held the reins in one hand, removed his hat and scratched his head with the other, mumbled something under his breath, then settled the hat back on with a disgruntled tug.

  This time it was Linnea’s turn to smile. Good enough for him, the rude thing! He agreed to keep me, now he can put up with me, whether he likes it or not.

  “You’ll have to come to my place till I can get this straightened out,” Westgaard lamented, flicking the reins and turning the horses in the rye stubble.

  “So I shall.”

  He gave her a sharp, quelling glance, but she sat stiff and prim on the wagon seat, looking straight ahead.

  But her ridiculous hat was slightly crooked.

  Theodore smiled to himself.

  They set off again, heading south, then west. Everywhere was the sound of the dry, sibilant grain. The heavy heads of each stalk lifted toward the heavens only momentarily before bending low beneath their own weight.

  Linnea and Theodore spoke only three times. They had been traveling for nearly an hour when Linnea asked, “How far from Alamo do you live, Mr. Westgaard?”

  “Twelve miles,” he answered.

  Then all Was still but for the birds and grain and the steady beat of the horses’ hooves. Three times they saw mowing machines crawling along in the distance, pulled by horses who appeared minuscule from so far away, their heads nodding as they leaned into their labor.

  She broke the silence again when a small once-white building with a belfry appeared on their right. Her eager eyes took in as many details as she could — the long narrow windows, the concrete steps, the flat yard with a grove of cottonwoods at its edge, the pump. But Westgaard kept the team moving with the same unbroken walk, and she gripped the side of the wagon seat and craned around as the building receded too fast for her to take in all that she wanted to. She whirled to face him, demanding, “Is that the schoolhouse?”

  Without turning his eyes from the horses’ ears, he grunted, “Yeah.”

  Ornery, pig-headed cuss! She bunched her fists in her lap and seethed.

  “Well, you could have told me!”

  He rolled his eyes in her direction. His mouth twisted in & sardonic smirk as he drawled, “I ain’t no tour guide.”

  Anger boiled close to eruption, but she clapped her mouth shut and kept her rebuffs to herself.

  They rode on a little farther down the road, and as they passed a nondescript farm on their left, Theodore decided to rankle her just a little more. “This here’s my brother John’s place.”

  “How wonderful,” she replied sarcastically, then refused to look at it.

  Less than ten minutes from the school building they entered a long, curving driveway of what she supposed was Westgaard’s place — not that he bothered to verify it. It was sheltered on its north side by a long windbreak of box elder trees and a parallel row of thick caragana bushes that formed an unbroken wall of green. As they rounded the windbreak, the farmyard came into view. The house sat to the left in the loop of the driveway. All the outbuildings were to the right, with a windmill and water tank situated between a huge weather-beaten barn and a cluster of other buildings she took to be granaries and chicken coops.

  The wood-frame house was two stories high, and absolutely unadorned, like all they’d passed on their way from town. It appeared to have been painted white at one time, but was now the color of ashes, with only a flake of white appearing here and there as a reminder of better days. It had no porch or lean-to to relieve its boxlike appearance, and no overhanging eave to shade its windows from the prairie sun. The center door was flanked by long narrow windows giving it the symmetrical appearance of a face gaping at the vast fields of wheat surrounding it.

  “Well, this is it,” Westgaard announced in his own good time, leaning forward to tie the reins around the brake handle of the wagon. Bracing his hands on the seat and footboard, he vaulted over the side and would have left her to do the same, but at that moment an imperious voice shouted from the door of the house, “Teddy! Where are your manners! You help that young woman down!”

  Teddy? thought Linnea, amused. Teddy?

  A miniature whirlwind of a woman came hustling down the footpath from the kitchen door, her frizzy gray hair knotted at her nape, a pair of oval wire-rimmed glasses hooked behind her ears. She shook a finger scoldingly.

  Theodore Westgaard made a dutiful about-face in the middle of the path and returned to the wagon to reach up a helping hand, but the expression on his face was martyred.

  Placing her hand in his and leaping down, Linnea couldn’t resist mocking sweetly, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Westgaard, you’re too kind.”

  He dropped her hand immediately as they were joined by the bustling woman who made Linnea — only a little over five feet tall — feel like a giant. She had a nose no bigger than a thimble, faded brown eyes that seemed
to miss nothing, and lips as straight and narrow as a willow leaf. She walked with her fuzzy knob of a chin thrust forward, arms swinging almost forcefully. Though her back was slightly bowed, she still managed to give the appearance of one leaning into each step with great urgency. What the woman lacked in stature, she made up for in energy. The minute she opened her mouth, Linnea realized she wasn’t one to mince words. “So this is the new schoolteacher. Don’t look like no man to me!” She took Linnea by both arms, held her in place while giving her a thorough inspection from hem to hat, and nodded once. “She’ll do.” The woman spun on Westgaard, demanding, “What happened to the fella?”

  “She’s him,” Westgaard answered tersely.

  The woman let out a squawk of laughter and concluded, “Well, I’ll be switched.” Then sobering abruptly, she thrust out her hand and pumped Linnea’s. “Just what this place needs. Never mind that son of mine I should’ve taught more manners. Since he didn’t bother to introduce us, I’m his ma, Mrs. Westgaard. You can call me Nissa.”

  Her hand was all bones, but strong. “I’m Linnea Brandonberg. You can call me Linnea.”

  “So, Lin-nay-uh.” She gave it an old country sound. “A good Norwegian name.”

  They smiled at each other, but not for long. It was becoming apparent Nissa Westgaard never did anything for long. She moved like a sparrow, each new action abrupt and economical. “Come on in.” She bustled up the path, yelping at her son, “Well, don’t just stand there, Teddy, get her things!”

  “She ain’t stayin’.”

  Linnea rolled her eyes toward heaven and thought, here we go again! But she was in for a surprise. Nissa Westgaard spun around and cuffed her son on the side of the neck with amazing force. “What you mean, she ain’t stay in’. She’s stayin’ all right, so you can just get them ideas out of your head. I know what you’re thinkin’, but this little gal is the new schoolteacher, and you better start watchin’ your manners around her or you’ll be cookin’ your own meals and washin’ your own duds around here! I can always go and live with John, you know!”

  Linnea covered her mouth with a hand to hide the smile. It was like watching a banty rooster take on a bear. The top of Nissa’s head reached no higher than her son’s armpit, but when she lambasted him, he didn’t talk back. His face turned beet red and his jaw bulged. But before Linnea was allowed to watch any more of his discomfiture, the banty whirled around, grabbed her by an arm, and pulled her up the path. “Bull-headed, ornery thing!” she mumbled. “Lived too long without havin’ no woman around. Made him unfit for human company.”

  It came to Linnea to say, “I couldn’t agree more,” but she wisely bit her tongue. It also occurred to Linnea that Nissa was a woman. But obviously, in these parts having a “woman” in the house did not mean living with your mother.

  Nissa pushed Linnea through the open back door into a kitchen that smelled of vinegar. “It ain’t much, but it’s warm and dry, and with only three of us Westgaards livin’ here, you’ll have a room of your own, which is more than you’d have anyplace else around here.”

  Linnea turned in surprise. “Three of you?”

  “Didn’t he tell you about Kristian?”

  Feeling a little disoriented from the woman’s ceaseless speed and authoritative tone, Linnea only shook her head.

  “What’s the matter with that man! Kristian’s his boy, my grandson. He’s off cutting wheat. He’ll be in at suppertime.”

  Linnea looked around for the missing link — the wife, the mother — but it appeared there was none. It also appeared she was not going to be told why.

  “This here’s the kitchen. You’ve got to excuse the mess. I been puttin’ up watermelon pickles.” On a huge round oak pedestal table fruit jars stood in rank and file, but Linnea scarcely had a chance to glimpse them before Nissa moved on through the room to another. “This is the front room. I sleep there.” She pointed to one doorway leading off it. “And that’s Teddy’s room. You and Kristian are upstairs.”

  She led the way into the kitchen, and as they breezed through it to the doorway leading up, Linnea caught a glimpse of Theodore coming in with her suitcase. She turned her back on him and followed Nissa up a steep, narrow stairwell to the second floor. At the top was a cramped landing with matched double-cross doors leading both left and right. Her room was the one on the right.

  Nissa opened the door and led the way inside.

  It was the crudest room Linnea had ever seen. Nothing was pushed flush against the wall, for there were no walls, only the sharply pitched roof angling from its center ridgepole to the outer edges of the room. From underneath, the joists and beams and sub-roof were plainly visible, for the ceiling was neither plastered nor wainscoted. The only upright walls were the two triangular ones at either end of the room. But they, like the ceiling, were unfinished. Opposite the door, facing east, was a small four-paned window with white lace curtains tied back to the raw wood frame. Now, in late afternoon, the light coming through the panes was negligible, but from across the tiny landing the afternoon sun streamed through a matching window, warming Linnea’s room slightly.

  The floor was covered with linoleum bearing a design of large pink cabbage roses on a dark-green background. It did not quite reach the edges of the room, leaving a border of wide, unfinished floor planks exposed. To the right of the door, crowded beneath the roof-angle, was a single bed with a white-painted iron frame, covered with a chenille bedspread of bright rose. Across its foot lay a folded patchwork quilt and on the linoleum beside it a homemade rag rug tied with green warp. Beside the bed, on a square table with turned legs, a kerosene lantern was centered upon a white crocheted doily. Pushed against the opposite roof-angle was a chest-high dresser draped with an embroidered dresser scarf of snowy white cotton edged with crocheted lace. In the corner left of the door, the wide black stovepipe came up from the kitchen below and continued out to the roof. Across the way, beside the window, was a low stand holding a pitcher and bowl, with a door underneath that undoubtedly concealed the “nighttime facilities.” On the wall beside the washstand hung a mirror in a tin frame with an attached bar holding a length of white huck toweling. Next to the tiny window was an enormous oak rocker with green and pink calico cushions on its seat and back.

  Linnea’s eyes moved from it to the rugged beams overhead, and she stifled her disappointment. Her own room at home was decorated with floral wallpaper and had two large windows facing two different directions. Every other spring her daddy gave the woodwork a fresh coat of ivory paint, and the oak floorboards were kept varnished until they shone. At home a large grate blew a steady stream of heat from the coal furnace, and down the hall was a newly installed bathroom with running water.

  She looked at this raw-beamed, dark attic and searched for some comparison that would find it desirable. She glanced at the snowy-white dresser scarf and doily that were obviously starched and ironed with great meticulousness, at the hand-loomed and tied rug, at the linoleum that looked as if it had just been added for the new teacher, while beside her Nissa waited for some sign of approval.

  “It’s... it’s so big!”

  “Ya, big all right, but you’ll be bumpin’ your head on these rafters anyway.”

  “It’s far bigger than my room at home, and I had to share that with my two sisters.” If ever you wanted to be an actress, Linnea, this is the time. Disguising her disappointment, she crossed the room, looking back over her shoulder. “Do you mind if I try this out?” Nissa crossed her hands over her stomach and looked pleased as Linnea sat on the padded chair and rocked widely, throwing her feet in the air. For added effect, she gave a little laugh, massaged the curved arms of the chair, and said truthfully enough, “At home, with three of us in one room, there wasn’t any space left over for rocking chairs.” She tilted her chin up to look back at the miniature window, as if overjoyed. “I won’t know what to do with all this privacy!” And she flung her arms wide.

  By the time they headed downstairs again, Ni
ssa was beaming with pride.

  The kitchen was empty, but Theodore had left her suitcase by the door. Glancing at it, Linnea felt disappointment well afresh. He hadn’t even the courtesy to offer to take it upstairs for her, as any gentleman would.

  Nissa thoughtfully offered, but Linnea felt suddenly deflated by her dubious welcome into this home.

  “Nissa, I don’t want to cause friction between you and your son. It might be better if—”

  “Nonsense, girl! You leave my son to me!” And she would have taken the bag upstairs herself if Linnea hadn’t quickly done so.

  Alone for the first time in the room under the rafters, she set the suitcase on the rag rug and dropped disconsolately onto the bed. Her throat constricted and her eyes suddenly stung.

  He’s only one man. Only one crabby, bitter old man. I’m a qualified teacher, and an entire school board has approved me. Shouldn’t that mean more than his bigoted opinion?

  But it hurt.

  She’d had such dreams of how it would be when she got here: the open smiles, the welcoming handshakes, the respect — ah, that she wanted most, for at age eighteen she felt she had truly earned the right to be honored not only as a teacher but as an adult. Now here she sat, blubbering like an idiot because the welcome she’d received hadn’t matched her expectations. Well, that’s what you get for letting yourself be carried away with all your silly imagining. Tears blurred the outline of her suitcase and the cabbage roses and the homemade rag rug.

  You had to spoil it, didn’t you, Theodore Westgaard?

  But I’ll show you.

  I’ll show you!

  2

  THE LITTLE MISSY was still upstairs when Theodore stalked out of the house and headed back for the fields. Women! he thought. The only thing worse than having one of them around was having a pair. And what a pair he had now!

  He was infuriated by the way his mother had treated him in front of the girl, but what choice did he have except to stand there and take it? And how much longer would he have to put up with her bossing him around? His face burned yet with embarrassment.