“So, are you going to tell me or not?”
They both leaned back from the waist while their feet glided effortlessly. “Tell you what?”
“Whatever it was you poked Isabelle’s shoulder for.”
“Oh, that!” She lifted her chin with an air of unassailability. “I’m going to teach you to read.”
He grinned. “Oh, you are, huh?”
“Yes I am, huh,” she mimicked.
“I’m gonna look pretty dumb tryin’ to fit my knees under one of those toy desks.”
“Not here, silly. At home.”
“At home,” he parroted sarcastically.
“Well, do you have something better to occupy your long winter evenings?”
He gave a snorting laugh and a slight lift of one eyebrow. “You sure you want to take me on? Men my age get pretty thick-headed and forgetful. I might not soak things up as fast as your first and second graders.”
“Honestly, Theodore, you talk as if you’re in your dotage.”
“Prett’ near.”
She cast him a quelling look. “Men in their dotage have rheumatism. You don’t dance like you’ve got a rheumatic bone in your body.”
“No, by golly, my bones are pretty wonderful, at that, aren’t they?” He preened and admired his elbow.
“Straighten up and be serious!” she chided, trying not to snicker. “When the schoolteacher is lecturing, you can’t be making smart cracks.”
His amused eyes met hers while they went on dancing smoothly, enjoying each other more all the time. “And what if I do, what’s the little whippersnapper gonna do about it?”
“Whippersnapper!” she retorted indignantly, and stamped her foot. “I’m not a whippersnapper!”
But at that very moment the music had stopped. Quiet descended upon them while her words carried like a Swiss bell over a fjord. Several inquisitive heads turned their way. Linnea felt herself beginning to blush, but thankfully he guided her from the floor by an elbow. In parting, however, he added insult to injury by saying, “Thank you for the dance, little missy. Don’t stay out too late now.”
For two cents she would have kicked him in the seat of his britches!
She was still stiff and prickly as a new rope when Bill saw her home. As soon as the carriage stopped, he put an arm around her shoulders, pressed her back against the leather seat, and kissed her. She was just angry enough at Theodore to capitulate and hope to high heaven the kiss would raise some reaction in her heart. But it raised nothing.
“I’ve wanted to do that all night long.”
“You have?”
“Mmm-hmm. Mind if I do it again?”
“I... I guess not.” Not if Theodore’s going to keep thinking of me as a child. Maybe this will become more fun.
But it became just the opposite when Bill’s tongue entered her mouth and he rolled to one hip and tried to insert his knee between her legs. She jerked back and let out a squawk.
“I have to go in.”
“So soon?”
“Yes, right now. Bill, don’t!”
“Why not?”
“I said, don’t!”
“Nobody ever done this to you before?”
Lord, how many hands did he have? “Stop it!” She shoved him so hard he clunked his head on a bonnet brace.
“Well, all right! You don’t have to get pushy!”
“Good night, Mr. Westgaard!” With a jerk of her coat front, she leaped down.
“Linnea, wait!”
He caught up to her halfway to the house, but she shrugged his hand from her arm.
“I don’t appreciate being mauled, Bill.”
“I’m sorry... listen, I promise I—”
“No need for promises. I won’t be going out with you again.”
“But, Linnea—”
She left him spluttering in the path. Inside the kitchen she closed the door and leaned back against it, relieved. She felt her way up the stairs, undressed in the dark, and huddled under the covers, shuddering.
She wanted very badly to cry, but tears didn’t come as easily as they used to. Wasn’t this supposed to be a carefree, fun time of her life? But it wasn’t carefree and certainly not much fun. What was she doing, anyway, kissing men like Rusty Bonner and Bill Westgaard when the only one she really wanted to kiss was Theodore?
But in the days that followed, he treated her like nothing more than a child. Always a child.
* * *
Linnea arose one morning shortly thereafter to a wind that whistled out of Saskatchewan bringing with it the chill promise of snow. Dutifully she drew on warm cotton snuggies and long wool leggings, but the walk to school seemed twice as long as it had when the reapers could be seen in the distance.
Arriving at school, she stood in the cloakroom doorway, studying the familiar room. Odd, how it took on different personalities under the different situations. On a sunny morning there was no place cheerier. On the night of a dance, no place more exciting. But today, totally devoid of children’s voices, and with gray clouds churning beyond the long, bare windows, the little room brought an icy shiver.
She hurried outside for coal. The wind formed a funnel near the door of the coal shed and plucked at her scarf tails. She wondered how soon they’d see their first snow. Back inside she kept her mittens on while loading the stove, the sounds of the clanging lids and lifter resounding eerily through the schoolroom. When the fire was finally going, Linnea lingered near it a long time, warming her toes. Finally she forced herself back to the cloakroom, where she discovered the water crock topped with a disc of ice. She chipped it free and returned outside to the pump, feeling again the immense difference between doing this chore on a sunlit September morning and a dismal November one.
When Kristian arrived, she was terribly happy to have his company. Together they moved the water table to a rear corner of the main schoolroom. He and several of the other children brought potatoes to lay on the fender of the stove for their lunches, and by mid-morning the room was fragrant with the aroma. At recess time only half the students chose to go outside. The other half turned their potatoes and passed the time visiting or drawing on the blackboard.
On the way home that afternoon, a few dry, hard snowflakes were falling. The brown grass in the ditch shivered and seemed to hunch low, preparing for its winter mantle. There was a menacing look to the clouds. They gamboled faster across the slate sky, their underbellies dark and heavy.
She entered the yard and discovered Isabelle Lawler’s cook wagon gone. She glanced around, but there were no hired hands in sight. Somehow she knew they were gone and wouldn’t be back till next year.
It was quiet in the house.
“Nissa?” she called. Nobody answered. “Kristian?” The kitchen was warm and smelled of roasting pork and new squash, but the only sound to be heard was the wind soughing bleakly outside. “Nissa?” she called again, searching the front room, but finding it empty, too. Cautiously, she peered into Nissa’s bedroom. It was shadowed and unoccupied, the chenille spread tucked neatly beneath the pillows and everything in perfect order. Upon the dresser stood a gallery of photographs — her children as infants, toddlers, youngsters; on their confirmation days with Bibles in hand; on their wedding days with their spouses posing stiffly beside them. Without conscious volition, Linnea moved toward the dresser, bending to study them at closer range.
And there was Theodore with his bride. His hair was cropped painfully close above the ears and his face looked almost childish in its thinness. His neck appeared half its present girth, and his left ear seemed to lap over slightly at the tip. Funny, she’d never noticed it before.
Linnea’s eyes moved to the image of the woman sitting erect on a straight-backed chair just in front of him. She had a face as serene and delicate as a violet blossom. Her eyes were very beautiful and her lips the kind — Linnea supposed — that men found dainty and vulnerable.
So you’re Melinda. She studied the pretty face a moment longer. They don??
?t say much about you around here, did you know that?
In keeping with the day, she shivered, then backed from the room. She paused, staring at the door to the adjacent bedroom. Unlike Nissa’s, which had been left wide, it stood only slightly ajar. She had never seen what lay behind it.
“Theodore?” she called softly. His door was painted ecru, like all the woodwork in the house, and was of double-cross design with a white porcelain knob on a black metal escutcheon. “Hello?” She rested five fingertips on the wood and pushed. The door swung back soundlessly; as with everything, Theodore kept the hinges well oiled.
Guilty, but curious, she stared.
This room was lonelier than the last. The bed appeared to have been put into order this morning by Theodore himself. The spread was thrown over the pillows but not tucked beneath them as a woman would have done. There was no closet, only a hook board on one wall holding his black Sunday suit on a hanger, his overalls by their straps. On the floor his best boots nestled side by side like a pair of sleeping coots. Looking at them, she felt a ripple of guilt run through her — there was something so personal about abandoned shoes. She glanced away.
The wallpaper was floral and faded. Beside the nightstand perched a low, miniature footstool with a hand-creweled cover that must have belonged to Melinda. It seemed the kind of thing a shy-looking violet like her would have liked. It looked very sad and out of place in the dim room, as if waiting for the return of the woman who was gone forever.
On the bulge-fronted dresser lay a photograph in an oval frame, the kind that should have been hanging on a wall. Unable to make it out from her oblique angle, Linnea moved closer.
There was Melinda again, only more beautiful — if that were possible — than in her wedding picture. Linnea’s hands were drawn to the photograph. She lifted it, touched the domed glass. Such melancholy eyes, such haunting exquisiteness. How hard it must be for a man to forget a woman like that. Melinda had been so young when the photograph was taken — as least as young as Linnea was now. The thought saddened her and she rued the years that separated now from then, and her own youth, which she’d gladly forfeit if she could make Theodore look at her just once as he must have looked upon this woman.
Sighing, she replaced the likeness in the exact spot where it had been before. Once more she glanced at the double bed, then stealthily withdrew from the room, setting the door at the same angle she’d found it.
The house felt lonely, and Linnea suddenly didn’t want to be in it without the others. She wanted to find them and shrug off the lingering effects of the brooding weather, the photos and the deserted feeling lying over the whole farm. She tightened the wool scarf beneath her chin and headed out the door.
The cook wagon was really gone. Funny she should miss it when she’d been so jealous of Isabelle Lawler. Just the caragana bushes remained, dressed only in their long banana-shaped pods that clicked together forlornly in the wind. It wasn’t the cook wagon she missed, but the passing of the season it represented. What was between Theodore and Isabelle? If there really was something, how could a man be attracted to her when she was so diametrically opposite of Melinda?
The wind pressed Linnea’s coat against the backs of her legs as she turned toward three diminutive figures in a distant paddock. Even from here she could tell it was Theodore, Kristian, and Nissa. What were they doing out there by the horses? Again she tugged her scarf tighter and sailed downwind, buffeted by the Saskatchewan nor’westerly. It appeared that all of Theodore’s horses were gathered in one spot, their tails lifting like spindrift while they shifted restlessly. As Linnea approached, she saw Theodore caressing the broad dappled nose of a mare named Fly.
“Is anything wrong?” she called.
The three turned. Kristian answered. “No, just saying good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” Puzzled, she looked from one face to the next.
“This is the day we turn the horses loose. Harvest is all done. The crew is gone,” Nissa explained.
“Turn them loose?”
“Yup.”
“Where?”
“Open range.”
“Range? You mean, they just run free?”
“Yup.”
“But how can you do that? They’re worth a lot of money.”
This time Theodore answered. “We’ve been doing it for years. They always come back in the spring, just like clockwork, when it’s time to get the fields plowed.”
Linnea’s face reflected amazement. “But how can they know when that is?”
Theodore jerked his head out of harm’s way as Fly threw her powerful head up and shook her mane.
“They’re smart. They know where they belong and what their jobs are.”
“But why turn them loose?”
“To save on fed. They’ll be back all fat and sassy, come April.”
“And you’ve never lost one?”
“Never.”
She watched the three Westgaards take turns scratching Fly’s nose, sensing their subdued sadness at the good-bye. Such trust, she thought, to free the creatures who meant so much to their livelihood.
“Do they all have to go?”
“All but old Cub and Toots,” Theodore answered. “I keep them in every winter, just like my pa did. Got to have a way to get into town and to church. They always seem to know they’re being kept behind and get a little let down.”
There were twelve horses in the paddock. They shifted constantly, tossing their heads and whickering into the wind while Cub and Toots thrust their noses over the fence from the adjoining padlock where they were confined. A sturdy buckskin named Chief pranced around the pack, rearing once, then neighing as if to scold Theodore for delaying their release.
“Guess they’re getting impatient. They know what’s gonna happen.” Theodore grabbed Fly’s halter. “Don’t you, girl?” He glanced at Kristian. “Well, I guess we better do it, huh, son?”
“I guess.”
Linnea moved closer to Nissa, watching as the men circulated through the stirring herd, removing bridles. The animals shook their heads, their restlessness growing more palpable as the moment of release grew closer. “You want to let ‘em out?” Theodore asked Kristian.
Without replying, Kristian transferred his bridles to Theodore’s arm, then Theodore stepped to Linnea’s free side.
They watched silently while Kristian opened the pole gate on the far side of the paddock, then circled the herd and flapped his arms, giving a sharp whistle through his teeth. The sound pierced the steely late afternoon and set twenty-four equine ears up straight. For one infinitesimal moment the animals stood still, caught in relief against the roiling leaden sky that seemed to personify their moods. Linnea shivered in appreciation. It was one of those moments of sterling clarity, a niche out of her life that would, in memory, forever remain as rich and real as the moment in which it was happening. Theodore on her left, Nissa on her right, Kristian with the herd, tiny bites of snow pelting her skin, the horses pawing, their nostrils dilated. There was a raw beauty to the scene that made Linnea swallow thickly.
Then the horses moved. Out through the gate and off to freedom, all tails and rumps and flexing flesh. The thunder of their hoofbeats came up through the soles of Linnea’s shoes. Cub and Toots trotted to the far fence, their heads high, whinnying as if to call, “Wait for us!” They ran the fence line back and forth, back and forth, bugling in distress.
Standing between Nissa and Theodore, so close their shoulders nearly touched, Linnea hugged her arms. It wasn’t the cold. It was the rapport she felt with all three of the Westgaards at that moment. She had never before stopped to think of the skein of feeling between a fanner and the beasts who fed him, clothed him, kept him safe from peril, but she felt it now intensely. It was beautiful... and sad... and poignant.
Good-bye, horses. Keep safe.
Linnea leaned forward just enough to press her arm to Theodore’s. He neither pulled away nor returned the pressure, but stood with his hands in his po
ckets, watching his horses gallop off to their winter world of freedom.
“Where will they go?” she asked quietly.
“Down to the bottomland first, probably, along the creek. We let the hay grow wild down there, and we put in a crop of millet that we don’t cut. They love the millet.”
“And after that?”
Theodore shrugged.
“How far away do you suppose they get?”
“Eight, ten miles or so. There’s a lot of government land and school sections, plus what we all leave unfenced.”
“Are you sure they’ll have enough food?”
Theodore looked down at her head. The red plaid scarf was tied in a double knot beneath her chin, making her look more like a little girl than ever. But her concern came from the heart and made her seem as much an adult as he. He thought again of the wonderful gift Linnea had for finding beauty in things others sometimes took for granted. So different from Melinda.
She looked up and found him studying her, and they both returned to watching the horses move off. “They’ll have enough. When the millet and hay run out, they’ll start in on the stacks we left out in the fields.”
“They look so cold, don’t they?”
“Don’t worry about them. They’re off to find the others, and they’ll bunch up thirty or more in a herd. When the blizzards come, they’ll huddle in a coulee someplace and press up close to keep each other warm.”
Suddenly Linnea realized her arm was pressed close and warm against Theodore’s. He felt it, too, and stayed where he was.
“Will we see them at all till spring?” she asked.
“Might, now and then. They make a sight, with their coats all shaggy, churning through the snow on a gray and windy afternoon like this one. Only the ground will be all white until you can’t tell it from the whirlwind they leave behind. There’s nothing prettier.”