Years (16 page)

T
HEODORE TRIED TO
remember when he’d felt this angry. A long time ago, maybe as long ago as when Melinda abandoned him and the baby. Then, as now, he’d felt inadequate, which only increased his anger. There were a thousand more churning thoughts seething for release, but Theodore had had long practice at keeping his rage concealed. Throughout supper he ignored Miss Brandonberg, unable to look at her without feeling a suffocating sense of inferiority. The table was silent again and, by God, that’s how it ought to be! He’d had all he could take of her high-handed back talk, and he wasn’t about to speak another civil word to a sharp-tongued little snot like her who had no idea how to respect her elders.

The minute the tense meal was over, Theodore sought solace in the place he loved best. He pushed away from the table and without a word to anyone took his hat from the hook behind the door, lit a lantern, and walked through the darkness toward the barn. The night was throbbing with the trill of crickets, but he scarcely heard. The moon was nearly full, but he scarcely saw. Head bowed, footsteps automatic, he made his way through the living night.

The barn door squeaked when he opened it, the first thing to register on his troubled mind. He moved through the barn
to the door of the tack room and lifted the lantern high. He glanced across the whitewashed walls where harnesses draped thick in garlands of heavy leather, the order as meticulously maintained as in any woman’s pantry. Here was his domain. Here he had total control. Here nobody laughed at him or found him lacking.

The lantern turned his face to gold as he reached to hang it on an overhead hook, then the shadow of his hat darkened his scowling eyes. He let his inward rage run its course, externally calm while unconsciously moving to touch familiar things, finding an oil can and returning to oil the hinges of the barn door, scarcely aware of what he was doing.

Words at whose meanings he could only guess roiled through his thoughts.

Cynic. Literate. Sarcastic.
Pondering them, he felt ignorant and impotent. How many times had he wished he could read English? He had grown up to the sound of Norwegian being spoken around him. His ma had taught him to read it when he was a boy, but in those days no other language was necessary here. Things had changed though. Laws had changed. Children were now versed in the language of the new country rather than the old, and only the old-timers clung to the language of their native land.

How did you get so dense?
The blood rushed to his face afresh as he recalled the schoolteacher’s words. Vehemently, he whacked the barn door shut, returned to the tack room, slammed the can down, then snatched a horse collar from the wall. He hooked it over the arm of the chair and found a thick needle. But as he threaded it with black whipcord, his hands shook. The frustrating sense of impotence came back stronger than ever, and he flung down the needle and thread, closed his eyes, hung his head, and pressed his palms hard against the top of the tool bench.
Dense. Dense. Dense.
It was true. She was nothing more than a child and already she knew more than he’d ever know in a lifetime. But how dare she throw it in his face!

His hands still trembled but somehow managed to thread the needle. Then he fell into the worn chair, took up the collar, and propped it on the floor between his feet. The seam of the leather had torn, exposing a line of pale wood within. He stared at it absently for a long time before patiently beginning to stitch.

There’s no such word as ain’t.

There ain’t? he thought. She might be right, but everybody he knew said
ain’t,
even Kristian, and he’d been to school to the seventh grade already!

“She
ain’t
goin’ to make me feel like an ass again,” he vowed aloud, deliberately using the word, “cause I
ain’t
going to talk to her and give her the chance.”

His fingers fell still. He stared at the collar without seeing it. The light from the lantern fell upon his straw hat and slumped shoulders and threw a shadow over his hands and boots. Outside the crickets still sang. Inside, all was still. Then, hesitantly, he began speaking aloud once more.

“She... ain’t... ” He paused, thought, remembered the schoolteachers of the past and how they’d talked. “She’s... not... goin’ to make me feel like an ass again, cause I ain’t... cause I’m not going to give her the chance.”

He pondered again for some time, picked up the collar, and hung it over his crossed knees, continuing to mend it. “She ain’t even dry behind the ears,” he said to the collar, then amended, “She’s... not... even... dry... behind... the... ears.”

Her face appeared clearly, eyebrows angling, blue eyes intent and glistening as she stalked him with angry zeal and made
Alamo, North Dakota,
sound like the armpit of the earth. She was too good for Alamo, huh? Just like Melinda, though to Melinda’s credit, she had never been nasty about it. But what did it matter now? She was gone.

What angered him now was the fact that the schoolmarm’s coming had aroused his seething memories of Melinda, ones he’d successfully submerged for years.

He should have followed his initial instincts and tossed Linnea Brandonberg out on her smart little rump while he had the chance. He cut the whipcord, hung the collar up, and put the needle in its appointed place.
Well, when it comes right down to it, it don’t matter. The schoolmarm will only be here one year, just like all the rest. She won’t come back.

He could ignore her for a year... couldn’t he?

But when he’d hung around the tack room until weariness got the best of him, he found it impossible to ignore even so much as the fact that she was in his house. Making his way into the yard he eyed her tiny window. Though it was dark,
lights burned yet in the kitchen. He halted, unnerved at the thought of running into her downstairs.
You ain’t
...
you’re not gonna let that little smarty-pants make you think twice about walkin’ in your own house, are you, Teddy?
Resolutely he continued past the windmill toward the golden rectangle that threw an oblique slash of color into the yard. But he breathed a sigh of relief to find everyone had gone to bed. It must’ve been Ma who left the kerosene lantern on the kitchen table for him.

He took it along to his bedroom where he momentarily paused in the doorway. The room was simple, homespun, the furniture sturdy, old, but well-preserved. There was a mirrored dresser with bow-front drawers. It matched the heavy headboard of the bed, both stained as dark as a hickory nut. The bed was covered with one of Nissa’s hand-stitched patchwork quilts in blue and red. The handloomed rag rugs brightened the wide pine floorboards, which were the color of coffee without cream. Upon the single window hung shirred lace curtains the color of coffee with cream.

Theodore crossed to the dresser whose top was protected by a white embroidered dresser scarf with blue crocheted edging. He stared at it a long time before setting the lantern down and touching an embroidered blue butterfly, remembering a woman’s slim hands holding a needle and hoop, stitching, stitching, trying to stitch away her loneliness. He ran his fingers along the variegated edging until a callus caught the thread and pulled the scarf awry. Sadly, he straightened it, then with slow deliberation opened the top dresser drawer and searched beneath the clothing for the photograph he hadn’t looked at in years. It was surrounded by a wooden oval frame with a domed-glass front and looked ridiculously feminine when contrasted against his wide, horny palm. The delicate likeness of a beautiful woman smiled up at him in sepia tones as colorless as she had become during the two precious years he’d had her.

A band of hurt cinched his chest.
Melinda. Aw, Melinda, I thought I’d gotten over you.

He set the picture down atop the butterflies and flowers she had stitched, watching her as he drew his suspenders over his shoulders and methodically undressed. He turned down the lightweight patchwork quilt, folded back the coarse white sheet, extinguished the light, piled the goose-down pillows one on
top of the other, and stretched out with both hands beneath his head. Even in the dark he could see her face smiling with the winsome appeal no woman had had for him before or since. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, forcing himself to remain as he was, forcing his hands to cup the back of his head instead of running them over the empty half of the bed. Loneliness was a thing he usually accepted with the stoicism peculiar to his people and their way of life. But tonight it crept in stealthily, causing his heart to thump with a heavy ache he couldn’t control. He was only thirty-four years old. Had he lived three-fourths of his life? Half? Had he thirty-four more years to sleep in this large bed alone? To come in from the fields at the end of the day to share a table with nobody but his ma and son and brother? And when Ma and Kristian were no longer there to share it, what then? Nobody but John, whom he loved — yes — but who could scarcely compensate for the void left by Melinda. Times were rare when he wished for a woman to replace her. Common sense told him that even if he wanted one there was none to be found around here, where half the women in the county were related to him and the other half either already married or old enough to be his mother.

He didn’t understand what had brought on these thoughts of women. He didn’t understand why this sadness had struck now at the height of the harvest season, which usually filled him with a sense of fullness and contentment. He didn’t understand so many things, and if there was anything that made Teddy Westgaard feel stupid and inadequate, it was not understanding. He wished there was someone he could talk to about it, about Melinda, about the hurt she’d caused all those years ago, about how the hurt could be so intense yet when he’d thought it mastered. But who was there to talk to? And what man would ever resort to spilling out his feelings that way?

Nobody he knew.

Not a soul he knew.

In her bedroom upstairs, Linnea listened to the sounds of Theodore entering below, settling down for the night. She recalled his icy treatment of her at supper and the isolation she’d felt at being closed off that way. It made her feel like crying, though she didn’t exactly understand why. Theodore was wrong and she was right. And just because she’d had a tiff with a
bullheaded moose like him was no reason to bawl herself to sleep.

Resolutely she flopped over, burying her face in the pillow to stop the stinging in her eyes. Everything seemed so hopeless.

She recalled the conversation she’d had with Nissa right after her run-in with Theodore. She’d thought surely Nissa would see her side, but the older woman had offered little encouragement.

“We didn’t tell you the boys wouldn’t be in school ‘cause we knew you’d be vexed,” Nissa said. “And anyway, you ain’t gonna change Teddy’s mind. He’s had the same fight with every schoolteacher that ever came here. Matter of fact, that’s why most of ‘em never come back a second year. Might as well get used to it. The boys won’t be in school till the threshing crew’s come and gone.”

“And just when will that be?”

“Oh, about mid-October or so. Things move faster once the hired help comes in.”

“Hired help?” Where were they going to get hired help when they were already using every available man and boy? And if Theodore could afford to hire help, why didn’t he do it now when it would do Kristian the most good?

“Soon as the harvest is done in Minnesota, these boys come out here and hire on. We get some of the same ones, year after year.”

So Linnea was alone in her fight to get the older boys the full nine months of education they deserved. Kristian was sixteen years old already and only in the eighth grade. Didn’t they understand the reason was that he couldn’t complete a full grade’s work in six short months?

The tears were coming fast now. She blamed them on frustration and her shattered expectations and the trying day she’d had, what with her shortened roll and her confrontations with Allen Severt and Theodore. But when the tears turned to sobs it was not academics, or roll call, or Allen Severt of which she thought, but of Theodore Westgaard entering the kitchen, sitting at the table, eating an entire meal, and leaving the house without once glancing at her or acknowledging that she existed.

She was treated to more of the same whenever their paths crossed during the next several days. The only time he spoke
to her was when she forced him to by greeting him first. But he never raised his eyes. And if she was in the room, he got out of it as fast as he could. On Sunday they ended up side by side in church, and she was conscious of the care he took to make sure his sleeve didn’t brush hers. His enmity had by now become a winch about her heart. Each time he gave her the cold shoulder she wanted to clasp his arm and beg him to understand that in her position as a teacher she could not take any stand but the one she had. She wanted to bare her soul and admit that she was utterly miserable, living with his frigid detachment. She wanted him friendly again so the strain in the house would vanish.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in her life. She had never made an enemy of a friend — not that Theodore had ever really been her friend. But his point-blank snubbing was a far cry from the neutrality they’d managed to reach before she blew up at him and called him dense. To sit beside him, feeling his contempt, withered Linnea’s heart.

Reverend Severt announced hymn number 203. The organ bellows swelled, the music spilled forth and the congregation got to its feet. It seemed providential that there was only one hymnal for each two people in a pew. Linnea picked one up and nudged Theodore’s arm.

He stiffened. She peeked up from beneath her bird-wing hat and offered a hesitant smile. He realized she was offering much more than to share a songbook. He also realized he was in the House of the Lord — no place to practice hypocrisy. As he reached out to hold one edge of the book, he didn’t consciously set out to dupe her into believing he could read the words between the stalves.

Though his antipathy seemed to mellow in church, he said nothing to her during Sunday dinner. He ate stolidly, then left the kitchen to change into work clothes. When he came back through the room on his way outside, he came up short at the sight of her staring at him from across the room. She twisted her fingers together and opened her lips as if struggling to speak.