Alida's Song Read online

Gunnar shrugged and filled his lower lip with snuff. “If the truck could get to Three Rivers like this it can get home like this. What is the difference?”

  “But how can we stop?”

  “We will stop the engine. The truck will stop if the engine stops. It is possible if we drive at a slow rate of speed.” He smiled, teeth stained by snuff. “But I think we could go faster than this.”

  The boy hesitated, then thought how much he liked to drive and that this was, at least, driving. He looked to the rear—there were no rearview mirrors—and pulled back onto the road and increased speed. The speedometer didn't work either so he accelerated to what he thought might be forty miles an hour—he saw Gunnar tighten up—and he held that as they drove north up the small, two-lane highway bordered on both sides by thick forest.

  In three quarters of an hour—Gunnar didn't speak the whole time—he saw the grain-elevator tower of Grant, about a mile before town, and Gunnar pointed ahead at a gravel road heading off left, to the west. “Go that way.”

  The boy took his foot off the gas and the transmission slowed the truck well before the turn. Once on the road he brought the speed back up to thirty, or what felt like thirty. “How far is it?”

  “We must go this way seven farms and then north for three farms. The third farm is ours. You will see a white house and a red barn with a brick silo and that will tell you it is our farm.”

  The boy nodded and started counting farms. There were more open fields now, cleared land around each farm, and while the buildings were often back in trees they were easy to see.

  Every single farm had a white house and red barn and brick silo. Nevertheless the boy counted farms and when he reached seven he saw a smaller road leading north. He slowed and turned in the fading light and after four more miles Gunnar said, “There. On the right. That is our farm.”

  At an old mailbox the boy turned right and drove up a quarter-mile driveway to the farmyard. It was nearly dark—and just as well, for the boy found later that the headlights didn't work any better than the brakes—but he could see that the farm looked neat and clean. A black-and-white cross-collie dog came out to meet the truck, its tail wagging so hard it nearly fell over, and when the truck ground to a stop in the yard the boy looked at the house and saw his grandmother coming from the door.

  She was tiny. He always remembered her as large—not fat, but she was large in his mind, mostly because he had lived with her when he was very young and remembered her from then. It surprised him to see how small she really was, and as short as he was, as he got out of the truck and went to where she stood at the gate with her hands wrapped in her apron, a bit of flour on her cheek and some dusted in her hair, he found himself looking down on her.

  “Hello, Grandma,” he said.

  She looked at him for a long time—half a minute—without speaking and then she smiled, first her eyes and then her mouth, and said, “It's good to see you. Come and eat. You look like you need food.”

  Chapter Three

  He was dreaming about the bowling alley.

  He was setting pins, double alley, working in the rhythm as he swung back and forth between alleys: pick up the ball and flip it into the ball return, grab three pins in each hand, slap them into the pin machine, swing to the next alley. It was league bowling and he was making eleven cents a line—four more cents than the seven cents he made for weekend bowling—and men were jamming dollar tips into the ball holes on their balls. He had money stuffed in all his pockets and still they sent more, dollar bills flying out of the balls when he picked them up …

  “You must wake up now.” Somebody was shaking him. “It is time to get up.”

  He opened his eyes and saw his grandmother backlit by a Coleman lantern in the kitchen. He was on a bed on the screened-in porch. It was still pitch dark. “Up? Now? What time is it?”

  “Time to get up,” she said, and left him there, and he soon heard the sound of stove lids scraping and paper rustling as she lit a fire in the kitchen stove.

  It can't be, he thought. It's still hours before dawn. He rolled over and closed his eyes and tried to find the dream again—so much money— but no sooner had his eyes closed than she was back. “Now.” Her voice firm but not sharp. “There are chores to do.”

  “All right. I'm awake.” He sat up and realized that he needed to go to the bathroom. She had fed him an enormous supper—meat and pota-25 toes and corn and a second meat and apple pie— and it now made demands on him. “Where's the bathroom?” he called from the porch to the kitchen.

  “There's an outhouse. Out the door and to the left. Mind the geese, they should be waking up about now.”

  “Geese?” he asked, but she didn't hear him and the urgency was too great. He ran for the door in his underwear and to the outhouse, tripping on the step up into the small building. When he was done he looked for toilet paper and could find nothing but what felt like an old catalog. He tore pages from it and finished and opened the door to head back to the house.

  Halfway there, still a good twenty paces from the door, he was attacked by—he found later— twenty-one geese. It was so abrupt and so unexpected—the geese were gray and were hardly visible until they were on him—that he thought it was some kind of monster.

  Hissing and flapping their wings, they hit him from the back and side at the same time. He swung and hit something soft, which fell down and away, but eight or ten others were on him and he yelled—he remembered yelling and swearing—and then something exploded against the back of his head and he was on his hands and knees and then it hit again, this time against the side of his head, and he went down.

  He had a vague image of somebody who looked a lot like his grandmother towering over him, swinging a broom left and right, and then there was a bright flash of color and he saw nothing.

  He awakened slowly, his head pounding. He was back in his cot on the porch and his grandmother was standing over him. To her rear were Gunnar and Olaf. They all looked concerned.

  “What happened?” the boy asked. “I was just coming back from the outhouse …”

  “It was the geese,” Olaf said. He had a low voice, soft, and seemed many years older than Gunnar. “They don't like strangers.”

  “Don't like? They almost killed me.”

  “It's their wings,” his grandmother said. “They have a trigger in their wings. They hit with the end of the first joint so hard they can drop a dog. It looks like they hit you at least three times.”

  He raised his hand and felt three large lumps forming. The pain was sharp but subsiding and he sat up. He was still in his underwear and he pulled his pants on. It felt nice to have his grandmother worry over him but he was embarrassed to act like a baby in front of the two old men.

  It was still dark outside, the only light coming from the Coleman lantern in the kitchen. The stove was hot and the air was cool enough that it felt good to go into the warm kitchen before lacing his boots. There was coffee boiling. It was straight pot-boiled coffee and his grandmother took some eggshells off the warming oven and threw them into the pot on top of the grounds. Then she dumped in a ladle of cold water from the water bucket on the counter—the farm, it turned out, had no electricity or running water— and handed each of them a clean cup. She poured coffee for them as they stood by the stove.

  The boy put three heaping teaspoons of sugar from the bowl on the kitchen table into the cup and stirred it and drank carefully. It was very hot, and very sweet—the way he liked it—but his whole head felt sensitive to pain and the burn on his lips seemed to add to the ache in his skull.

  “Why did you put eggshells into the coffee?” he asked. The two men sat at the table and drank their coffee so quickly that he thought they must have throats made of iron. They seemed to be swallowing steam.

  “It takes the bitterness away,” she answered. “Can't you taste that the bite is gone?”

  “With so much sugar there wouldn't ever be a bite.” Gunnar hummed the words and held his cup out for mor
e coffee. The boy's grandmother filled both men's cups and put a plate of cookies on the table next to a plate of rolls. Near the rolls was a bowl full of butter and a quart jar of jam.

  “Have something,” she said. “Before work starts—just to get you to breakfast.”

  The boy took a roll—thinking of the bakery rolls he was given each morning on his paper route—and used a knife with a wooden handle to cover it with butter and jam. When he put the knife down Gunnar picked it up and split a roll and added butter and jam and when he was done Olaf did the same and the three of them ate until all the rolls—there must have been a dozen— were gone.

  Then the men dipped cookies in their coffee— the boy copied them—until the cookies were gone.

  “Well,” Gunnar said, standing. “The cows are probably busting.”

  He made for the door and Olaf followed him. The boy didn't know what to do at first but his grandmother was standing by the stove. She was sifting flour for bread and had flour in her hair— he would never remember her for the rest of his life without flour in her hair—and she nodded toward the door. “Go with them.”

  He had worked farms the previous two summers and knew how hard the labor was but it was different here and he saw the difference as soon as he got to the barn.

  The sun was just showing light in the east over a long green flat of pasture that led down to a small stream a hundred yards from the barn. Mist came up from the stream and layered the grass. The cows—huge black-and-white ghosts—were making their way toward the barn through the mist as if walking on air.

  Both Olaf and Gunnar stood by the back door of the barn watching.

  “Never,” Gunnar whispered as the boy came up. “Never seen nothing so pretty, have you?”

  The boy stopped and Olaf put a hand on his shoulder. Normally he hated to be touched. At one farm he'd worked at part of the previous summer a man had whipped him for doing something wrong; once when he was smaller a man had struck him. He started to back away from Olaf. But this was different in some way, as if Olaf were touching a dog or a friend, and the boy found he didn't mind.

  “See how they come?” Olaf said. “It's so old—cows have been coming to barns since before … before everything.”

  “Did they when you were young?” Olaf and Gunnar seemed ancient to the boy—in their sixties at least, maybe older than his grandmother.

  “Always. Back in Norway they came this way, and before that. I have pictures in the house to show you from then.”

  “You talk too much,” Gunnar said softly. “Just watch—you don't have to talk.”

  And so they stood and watched the cows plod along toward them, stood and wasted five or six minutes, and it was the first time working on a farm the boy had ever seen such a thing. Standing when there was work to be done.

  “Here, here …” Olaf spoke softly as the cows moved into the barn on their own. “Just here, girls, come on in.”

  The cows found their own stanchions and Olaf and Gunnar started milking. They milked by hand and did not ask or tell the boy to help. He knew how to milk, knew how to squeeze to get the milk to start, but he was not good at it and he also knew that if a cow was milked wrong it made her bind up and not lower the milk.

  The boy hated to stand and do nothing and he found a shovel at the end of the barn and cleaned the gutters while Olaf and Gunnar milked.

  When they had milked five or six cows Gunnar motioned to the boy with his chin. “Come turn the separator.”

  At the end of the barn there was a cool room, a room with a water tank in the end of it to store the milk cans, with water filtering through from a windmill and tank over the granary.

  In the center of the cool room was a hand-cranked milk separator with a large stainless-steel tub on top to pour the milk in and two spouts coming out to two buckets on the floor— one for milk and one for the cream that was separated from the milk.

  The separator worked by centrifugal force, caused by spinning some disks in an enclosed chamber while milk dripped down on them from the bowl on top. The spin was furnished by a hand crank and the boy started cranking it, faster and faster until the disks spun with a high whine.

  Once it came up to speed it was not hard to keep going and he had time to watch two cats that came into the barn trying to catch the milk from the spout. He would have stopped them but they were doing it when Gunnar came in and he didn't stop them so the boy assumed it was all right.

  One of them was experienced and leaned out over the bucket and deftly lapped from the stream as it came down.

  The other, the boy decided, had something wrong with his head, or was just stupid. He would look at the falling stream, open his mouth wide and stick his whole head under the downpour. It splashed in his eyes, some in his mouth, back in his ears and down his neck, and he would jump back as if he'd been scalded and would spit and then stop, smell himself, lick it all off and start over.

  All in all it made the separating go fast—like having entertainment—and chores were over before the boy knew it.

  They put the milk cans on a concrete ledge in the cool tank—twice a week the milk truck came for the milk and cream—and walked back up to the house for breakfast.

  On the way they passed the geese. The instant the birds saw the boy they all raised their wings and lowered their heads and hissed and came at him.

  For a second he started to run but Olaf swore at them in Norwegian and they stopped and lowered their wings and moved off—although they would look back at the boy and hiss until he was at the door of the house and inside.

  It was not, he thought, over yet. If they caught him alone it would be like when the street kids tried to catch him and beat him up and take the money he'd made selling papers.

  He'd have to fight the geese.

  Chapter Four

  They had been working only two hours—Tcows in from the pasture, milked, and let back out to the pasture—but the boy found he was starving when they went in for breakfast.

  His grandmother had made pancakes, a huge stack of them, and there was birch syrup and more coffee and rolls with raspberry jelly and doughnuts and strips of fried meat he found later was venison and fresh milk and fresh bread to put in the milk and sprinkle sugar on and eat for dessert when breakfast was at last done.

  The boy did not think he could move but Olaf grunted and stood and looked at his grandmother and then back to the boy and said, “Come with me to check for mustard.”

  Which made no sense at all, but he followed. Olaf put on a denim, plaid-flannel-lined jacket, though it was warm enough for the boy to wear only a T-shirt, and they left the house and headed back around the front yard.

  The house was two-story, frame, old and in slight need of paint, surrounded close in by a small picket fence that was also in need of paint. The grass in the yard needed mowing as well— or would in a week—and the whole of it, the barn, granaries, toolshed and house, lay in the exact center of four forty-acre fields. Across the road from the house, close but set slightly apart, lay another forty-acre plot, and Olaf and Gunnar had all five forties planted. Two were in oats and barley, one was in wheat and two were in corn. They were all well up—the corn half- way to the knee—and all looked clean and well tended.

  “We'll do the corn,” Olaf said, heading for the two fields of corn. “Mind you step only in the rows.”

  The boy was still confused but he followed along as Olaf entered the cornfield and walked along and when he came to a weed he pulled it up by the roots.

  “We get the mustard now, before it goes to seed and makes new plants and soon there are no more weeds.”

  From working on other farms the boy knew of the mustard weed—so called because it had a small flower that was the yellow of mustard. It was everywhere and strangled other plants out, ruining crops. Most farmers used a tractor and tanks of fluid and sprayed to kill it.

  “You're going to pick all the mustard?” he asked.

  Olaf smiled. “We always do. There are times
when not so many other things need to be done and it is nice to walk through the fields of a morning and pull weeds. Here, try it. You take those two rows and I'll take these.”

  The boy started down the rows and when he looked he saw that there weren't very many weeds in the field. A hundred or so in the whole forty-acre stand of corn.

  “There are hardly any of them. How long have you been doing this, picking the weeds?”

  Olaf, two rows off, smiled. “My whole life. My grandfather picked them, my father picked them and I'm picking them. They've never had a chance to get a start.”

  They moved through the field pulling weeds. In the middle of the morning his grandmother came out to the edge of the corn with a large cream bucket with a lid and called to them.

  “Forenoon lunch.” Olaf looked at the sun. “I didn't think it was that late.”

  They walked carefully through the corn and sat in the grass at the edge of the field, where his grandmother spread a tablecloth. The cloth was made of sewn-together feed sacks with pictures of chickens and sheep on them, along with a large red diamond and the name RED DIAMOND FEED circled around the sheep and chickens protecting them.

  The boy sat at one end and Olaf at the other and his grandmother in the middle. She put out two plates with a fresh loaf of bread and cut pieces of venison and a bowl of butter and a quart jar filled with hot coffee wrapped in another feed sack to keep it warm. There were two cups and sugar in a Ball pint canning jar, rhubarb sauce in another, a jar of chokecherry jelly and salt in another jar.

  The boy reached for the bread but Olaf took a breath and said:

  “I would like to thank God for the meal.”

  The boy pulled his hands back and put them together and Olaf took another breath and said:

  “Thank you, God, for this food.”

  The boy waited but that comprised the whole prayer. Olaf reached for bread and meat and the boy made a sandwich and they ate in silence. His grandmother did not eat. The boy realized then that he almost never saw her eat, could not remember her eating.