Alida's Song Read online

  “Grandma,” he said. “You never eat.”

  Olaf smiled and said nothing for a moment and his grandmother nodded. “I eat here and there. I eat when I cook, bits and pieces. Food finds my mouth.”

  “But I've never seen you sit down and eat a meal.”

  She shook her head and waved a hand as if shooing a fly. “It's because I cook.”

  “This is so?” Olaf stopped chewing. “You never sit to eat?”

  “It's not a thing to think about.” The boy was surprised to see she was blushing. “I'm always busy cooking. It is not something to mind.”

  “No,” Olaf said. “It is there you are wrong. It is only right that you sit to eat. Tonight we will cook for you for a change.”

  “But you hired me to cook. That is why I am here.”

  Olaf nodded. “That is true. But we did not hire your whole life. There must be a little easing here and there. Tonight we will cook and the boy”—he smiled—“can clean up after us. Is that all right?”

  It took a moment for the boy to realize that Olaf was asking him, not her. Rarely did adults ask for his approval and it surprised him. “Sure.”

  “There it is, then,” Olaf said, standing. “We will work the day out and then stop before dark to cook.” He walked off into the field, pulling at mustard plants while the boy took a bite of sandwich and followed him, grabbing weeds, thinking that of all the places he had worked, and all the work he had done, this was perhaps the strangest place of all.

  Chapter Five

  The boy sometimes had soft dreams. He had Thard dreams more often—about people not liking him, about having everybody in school staring at him, about his father drunk throwing him through a kitchen window—but sometimes he had soft dreams and usually when he dreamed softly it was of his grandmother.

  She had raised him for most of his young years and even when he wasn't with her in some way she had continued to raise him because he thought of her often, thought of what she would say or do if she saw him doing something wrong. Not of what his mother would say or what his father would say but what his grandmother would say.

  Once when he was very small, maybe three, he had awakened in the night with terrible pain in his knees. No matter what he did, bend them, straighten them—no matter, the pain was there, aching, pushing from the joint both up and down in his legs, and he had cried. His grandmother had come into the room. He could not remember even where it had happened or for sure when, but his grandmother had come into the darkened room and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands on his knees and pushed down gently, just the softest pressure, and had sung a quiet song in Norwegian and the pain had gone away.

  He dreamed of that now, as he worked in the field until lunch, letting his mind go to pleasant things, watching Olaf out ahead of him, listening to Olaf humming. Sometimes Olaf broke into Norwegian, but usually he hummed, and the boy felt relaxed as the morning sun hit his back and he thought, I have been here only half a full day and it seems as if I've never been anyplace else.

  They went to the house for lunch—which they called dinner, as opposed to the evening meal, which they called supper. The noon dinner was a meal that would have foundered many.

  There were three kinds of meat—venison, pork and beef, as well as blood sausage, which the boy ate before he knew what it was, and liked it, and couldn't eat after he knew. There were mashed potatoes, fresh-baked bread with buttered crust, a bowl of freshly churned butter sprinkled with coarse salt, rhubarb preserves in sauce, canned peaches, new-baked apple pie and, for the boy, fresh chilled whole milk from the milk house on the barn. There were also coffee and grape juice with water and sugar added and small green onions to dip in a bowl of salt with each bite.

  They ate for a full hour and the boy did not see how in any way he could ever eat again, let alone that day. He could hardly walk when they stumbled out into the sun and back out to the fields.

  Gunnar had hooked the team of horses to a cultivator and was working the soil on the other side of the field, which took out most of the weeds between the rows but not the mustard growing in with the corn.

  The horses had done it many times and knew what to do and walked evenly without stepping on the corn while the chisel teeth scraped along and turned the spaces in the middle into new earth, thick and black against the green.

  It was not hard work but they kept at it steadily all that afternoon, and well before dark Gunnar stopped the horses at the end of the field and Olaf looked at the sun and saw the boy back in the corn and said, “Come, it's time for evening chores.”

  They made their way to the barn and Gunnar called the cows—they were closer in now, drinking water in the tank by the barn—and they milked as they had in the morning, the boy cranking the separator and the men pulling the milk.

  There was a difference now, however. They whistled and sang and hummed with the sounds of the cows and the whine of the separator but now and then they would stop and Olaf would say:

  “We should have potato sausage. She would like potato sausage. With melted butter.”

  “And milked potatoes,” Gunnar would answer. “They go well with potato sausage.”

  “We have those plums we picked and canned last year before she came,” Olaf added. “They taste like summer.”

  “And kraut from the crock. I'll rinse it to take the salt out.” Gunnar poured the last of the milk into the separator. “And gunpowder biscuits and after we eat you can fiddle and I will slap bones and the boy and I might play krokono—”

  “What's krokono?” the boy asked.

  “It's a game,” Gunnar said, “that you play on your lap by snapping doughnuts at each other.”

  “Oh.” And the boy thought if he didn't want to tell me he should have just said so—he didn't have to make up silliness—but the moment passed and they went to the house carrying the dirty buckets and separator parts.

  His grandmother was in the kitchen when they came in and she took the buckets to the sink but Olaf stopped her.

  “No. You must sit and watch. Or you can go and read. I have three books in the front room which have never been read and need reading. The boy will clean and we will cook now.”

  And he would have it no other way.

  Chapter Six

  They went well into night and all of it was new to the boy. Though he loved his grandmother—and he frequently thought of it that way, that of all the adult people in his life he loved only his grandmother—he came from a different world. He was from a city—or at least a large town—where they had electricity and radio and television (though it was new then and not everybody had it and there were only two channels, which often had snowy pictures, and all he had ever seen was blurred) and traffic and other people.

  Here it was quiet and with no danger other than the geese—which came at the boy as he walked from the barn to the house with empty buckets and by god, he thought, that gander wouldn't try it again, having taken a bucket across the side of the head so hard it staggered away with one wing down and flapping—and no electricity and no radio. Not even lights. It was all different, all new to him.

  In the kitchen there was the Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling, which hissed and gave off a flat white light, but this evening Olaf did not fire up the lantern. Instead he used oil lamps. He lit two of them in the kitchen and adjusted the wicks to give off a soft yellow light and the boy's grandmother at last relented and stopped working, although she did not leave the kitchen but sat in the corner by the oil lamp and crocheted while she watched the men cook.

  They filled a large pan with hot water from the reservoir on the cookstove, which stood by the kitchen sink and hand pump, and as they dirtied a pan or dish they would throw it to the boy at the sink and he would wash it and dry it and hand it back and they would dirty it again.

  Olaf brought out casings packed in salt from a jar under the sink. They looked like pale dead snakes and the boy could not see what they would be used for until Olaf rinsed them in fres
h cold water to take the salt off and cut them in four-foot pieces.

  “Hog guts,” Olaf said to the boy. “They make the best casings.”

  Not for me they don't, the boy thought. But he remained quiet and watched Olaf and Gunnar peel potatoes and process them in a hand grinder, then mix them with raw ground-up venison and a little salt.

  Gunnar put a large pot of water on the stove and added pitch pine to the fire under the burners. This had the same effect as pouring gas on a fire and the stove became nearly red hot. It was summer and though the evening was cooler than the day it wasn't that cool and soon the kitchen was sweltering. Olaf and Gunnar both took off their shirts and the boy was surprised to see they were wearing long underwear. They kept their bib overalls on and pulled the shoulder straps back up, and with a word of apology to the boy's grandmother at having to “show their unders,” went back to work.

  The boy was wearing a T-shirt and decided it would be better not to go down to skin so he kept the shirt on and poured sweat over the sink.

  The men cooked like fiends, all the while keeping up a steady banter.

  “I had an uncle in the old country,” Olaf said, “who said he used a shotgun barrel for stuffing sausage and just shot it in there but I don't believe him. He told me he'd seen a mermaid too but that she didn't have scales, only skin.”

  “Everybody knows a mermaid has scales,” Gunnar cut in, his voice singsonging. “Otherwise they wouldn't be half fish.”

  Olaf had an old cow horn with the end cut off and tapered with carved rings for the casing to grip. He pushed one end of the casing over the horn and began stuffing the casing full of ground potatoes and meat, working the mixture down until the casing was full—not packed tightly but snug. He did four feet, then another piece, then another until there were twelve full feet of stuffed sausage.

  This he coiled into loops and put in the boiling water on the stove.

  In the meantime Gunnar had been working with flour and water and made dough for rolls— which he and Olaf called biscuits—and he let them rise near the heat of the stove before putting them in the oven.

  While the rolls were rising Gunnar put sliced potatoes with milk over them in a large pan in the oven to bake, and forty minutes later it was pitch dark outside and the meal was on the table.

  Olaf and Gunnar put their shirts back on, the boy set the table around the food and Olaf said, “A minute.”

  He put a pan on the stove with a full pound of butter in it and when the butter was melted he poured it into four bowls on the table, sprinkled salt and pepper on the top and they sat to eat.

  “Thank you, God,” Olaf said, “for this food.”

  “It is in this way,” Gunnar said, “that you eat. You take a foot or so of sausage on your plate, cut a piece off the end, dip it in melted butter and swallow it.”

  The boy had hesitated about the sausage, especially when he saw it come out of the boiling water like a fat gray snake. But a piece cut on the plate didn't look so bad—and he knew all the horror stories about hot dogs and bologna— and once he tasted it, the potatoes and meat and melted butter completely changed his mind and to his utter amazement he found that in spite of the large lunch he was famished.

  “Alida, you will sit at the end of the table,” Olaf had told her, “and you only have to point at what you want.”

  “I cannot speak?”

  Olaf smiled. “Only to ask.”

  So she sat and they fed her and they ate too— the boy ate a full four feet of sausage—and had plums and rolls and milk potatoes and fresh honey from a nearby bee farm for the rolls and when they were done the boy did the dishes while Olaf and Gunnar smoked pipes and when the dishes were done they took the lamps and carried them into the sitting room.

  The boy had seen it in the morning but not been in it and found a room out of the late 1800s. There was old wood furniture and flower-papered walls and a bookshelf with three—just three—books on it, the three Olaf had told the boy's grandmother “needed reading.” The windows had lacy curtains and every corner had shelves filled with small pictures and knickknacks. There was a long couch and an easy chair with soft cushions, tables at either end of the couch and a low coffee table.

  The boy's grandmother sat quietly at one end of the couch, her crochet needle flying, and Olaf sat at the other smoking his pipe. Gunnar went to a bookcase at the side and came back with a board about three feet square with net pockets in the four corners.

  “Get a kitchen chair,” he told the boy, “and bring it in here.”

  The boy did as he was told and Gunnar had him place it opposite the easy chair. “Sit.”

  The boy sat and Gunnar sat and put the playing board on their knees so that it was flat between them. He then took out a small cloth bag and dumped what appeared to be two dozen small wooden doughnuts on the board. Half of them were black, half red.

  “Here, this red one with the black mark is your shooter. See the pockets at the corners? You must snap your shooter with your finger and hit my black doughnuts with your shooter and knock them in the pockets.”

  “Like pool,” the boy said. “Or sort of.”

  Gunnar nodded. “Just so. A kind of billiards except that it is called krokono. Each time you make one of my doughnuts you get another shot. If you miss I will take a shot. Do not,” he said, smiling, “miss.”

  The boy snapped and missed his first shot and watched Gunnar clean the table.

  “You're good at this,” the boy said, and Gunnar smiled.

  “I have hard fingers. It makes it easy to aim before I snap. Let us play again.”

  This time the boy was careful and got two of Gunnar's doughnuts before he lost. The third game he was better still but he knew that if he played his whole life he would not beat Gunnar. Still it was fun and the boy got into the game and even when his snapping finger was in agony—the doughnuts were heavy and hurt when snapped—he did not want to quit and would not have quit except that Olaf left the room and came back in a minute with a violin case.

  The boy's grandmother smiled and put her crocheting down. “Music,” she said. “I do like music.”

  Gunnar put the doughnuts back in the bag and left the room and came back with two polished pieces of rib bone, which he held between his fingers and clicked against his knee as he sat in the chair.

  “Something fast first,” Gunnar said, looking to Olaf, “to wake us up.”

  Olaf nodded, tuned the violin for a moment, then broke into a fast melody with a chop to it. Gunnar picked it up, rapping the bones together against his knees with an almost hollow ringing sound, and the boy saw his grandmother's foot tapping and her fingers drumming on the arm of the couch, and Gunnar's eyes closed and he doubled the rhythm of the bones between the notes of the violin, and Olaf stood close to Gunnar so the music and click-clack of the bones went to gether, and soon the boy's foot was jumping as well as his arm and he was smiling and didn't know he was smiling.

  The tune lasted five minutes and the men drank water—it was hot in the sitting room with the heat from the kitchen stove working into the small space—and then Olaf started another, slower melody and Gunnar muted the bones and slowed the rhythm to a gentle waltz and the boy was surprised to see his grandmother get up and come to him, holding out her hand.

  “Come. We will dance.”

  He hesitated and then sighed. “I don't know how to dance.”

  She stopped. “How can that be? Everybody dances.”

  He didn't want to speak of it in front of Olaf and Gunnar but they kept playing and seemed not to hear and politely looked away. “I don't know any girls … nobody has taught me.”

  She smiled. “Then you shall learn.”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Where better? You have your own music and your own teacher. Come, give me your hand and put your feet here, this way, then this way and this way …”

  And she moved, pushing him to lead, turning him until he could turn himself, until he stopped tripping on his
own feet and tromping on hers and he could feel the beat of the music and his feet sometimes were in the right place at the right time.

  He did not know how long they danced. Olaf moved from one song to the next, Gunnar worked the bones and sometimes hummed in a soft birdlike voice with the violin, and the heat and work of the day seemed to evaporate with the music and when it was finally finished and he went to bed on the porch he knew only that it was dark and that he was wonderfully tired.

  “The first Saturday is coming,” his grandmother said as she blew out the lamp on the porch. “We will go to town then and see if the lessons took.”

  And he wanted to ask what she meant but his eyes closed on this first full day and no matter how hard he tried they would not come open again and he fell asleep with the sound of the bones and the violin in his ears and no memory of what she had said.

  Chapter Seven

  It was no way he had ever worked before. Oh, the work was there. It was a farm and farms required work. The fields were all planted and for the most part weeded and cultivated but there were the chores to do and the barn to clean and the geese to evade and wood to chop and carry for the cookstove and the water to pump and the feed to mix for the pigs and calves in the pens next to the barn and lunches to eat and dinners to eat and suppers to eat and then more wood to split and more feed to carry and the picket fence to paint and more cows to milk and …

  Sometimes it seemed the boy met himself coming around the corner of the barn with a bucket of feed or a forkful of manure.

  But there was something else to this place, another way of looking at things he had never seen before.

  One day he had gone with Gunnar and the workhorses to fix fence at the back of the pasture. He loved the horses. They were enormous—each probably over a ton—and so strong that Gunnar had used them to pull stumps out of the ground but they were very quiet and gentle.

  This day Gunnar harnessed them and hitched them to a four-wheeled wagon. He threw fencing tools into the back and headed for the back pasture, where a windstorm had blown some trees across the wire and knocked it down, and the boy rode on the back of the wagon, letting his heels bounce along the grass, watching the dog trot and stop to smell gopher holes.