13
1915
Joy filled Marta when she saw Niclas waiting for her. He looked tan and lean, his face intent as he looked from car to car. When he saw her, he smiled broadly. Laughing, she lifted their son, swaddled in a blanket Carleen had given her, so Niclas could see him through the train window.
Gone was the anger that had consumed her during the hours of her travail, when she had felt deserted by Niclas. Still, the anger had helped her press through the pain. She had cried out only once, when her body forced Bernhard into the world and he screamed in protest. Carleen washed and swaddled him in blankets and handed him over to Marta. A bubble of joy came and she laughed. She had never thought she would ever have a husband, let alone a child, and now God had given her both. A brief cloud darkened the moment as she thought of Elise and her child dying in the cold. But she pressed it away and drank in the sight of her newborn son nursing, his small hand pressed against her flesh.
Niclas ran and caught up with the passenger car, then strode alongside until it came to a full halt. Paying a porter to gather her things and collect her trunk, she headed for the door.
“Marta.” Niclas waited for her at the bottom of the steps, his blue eyes moist. He steadied her with a firm hand beneath her elbow. “I thought you’d never come.” Giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, he drew the blanket down so he could get a better look at his son.
“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” Her voice quavered.
He raised eyes. “Ja. Wunderschön.” He slipped his arm around her. “Come. Let’s get your things loaded into the wagon. We’re staying overnight at a hotel before heading out to the farm tomorrow morning.”
She looked up at him. “English, Niclas, or have you forgotten already?”
He laughed. “Let me have him.” She deposited the baby carefully into his waiting arms. Niclas held him close against his heart, gazing down at him in wonder. The baby awakened. “Bernhard Niclas Waltert, I am your papa. Mein Sohn.” Tears slipped down Niclas’s bronzed cheeks as he kissed him. “Mein Sohn.”
Marta felt an odd twisting inside her. “And if he’d been a daughter, would you have loved him as much?” Niclas raised his head, gaze questioning. She didn’t repeat the question.
When they reached the hotel room, Niclas took Bernhard from the basket where Marta had settled him. “I want to see him.” He laid the baby on the bed and unwrapped the blanket. Marta protested.
“He fussed half the night. I hardly slept.”
“I’ll hold him if he fusses.”
“And will you nurse him, too?”
Niclas looked at her. “So sharp, Marta.” He returned his attention to their son, who awakened and began to kick his legs and cry. Niclas lifted him. “I have not seen you in nearly a year, and this is the first day I have laid eyes on my son. Do you begrudge my being eager to hold him?”
His reprimand stung. They could have been together all this time. She could have come into Winnipeg that last week or two and had the services of a midwife. She was his wife and belonged at his side. She watched him pace the room with Bernhard in his arms. Turning away, she unpacked the diapers, baby clothing, and blankets she would need for that night, afraid she would cry. Bernhard cried instead, and Marta felt her milk let down. Pressing her arms against her breasts, she tried to stop the moisture from seeping. Bernhard cried harder.
“What’s wrong with him?” Niclas sounded distressed.
She turned and held out her arms. “He’s hungry.”
Niclas returned the child to her arms and stood watching as she sat on the far side of the bed facing a wall. Head down, back to her husband, she opened her shirtwaist. She jerked slightly as Bernhard took hold and suckled. When Niclas came and sat down beside her, she blushed and raised the blanket over her shoulder. Niclas drew it down again. “Don’t hide from me.” His expression filled with wonder.
She stood and moved away as she shifted Bernhard to the other side. Niclas watched her. When Bernhard made a loud noise, he laughed. Marta laughed, too. “In one end and out the other.” When she finished nursing Bernhard, she flipped out a blanket on the bed and changed his diaper.
Niclas stood over him. “He’s perfect. God has given us a great gift.” When he brushed the tiny, star-shaped hand with his finger, Bernhard grasped hold. “Strong, too. Unser kleiner Bärenjunge.”
“Yes, and our little bear cub will probably keep us awake all through the night.”
Niclas scooped him up. “You won’t do that to your papa, will you?” He nuzzled him and whispered in his ear.
Someone knocked on the door, turning Marta’s attention away. She opened the door wide so the servant could bring in a dinner tray. Marta paid the man and closed the door behind him. Niclas put Bernhard in the middle of the double bed while they ate dinner. Bernhard cooed and kicked, making fists and swinging his arms. “He’s wide-awake, isn’t he?”
“Unfortunately.” Marta sighed.
Niclas lifted the baby and jostled him. After a while, he put the baby in the middle of the bed and stretched out beside him, dangling a rattle over Bernhard. Marta sat in the chair, barely able to keep her eyes open. Giving up, she closed her eyes as she listened to baby coos and Niclas’s soft chuckle. She awakened when Niclas lifted her. “Bernhard?”
Niclas placed her gently in the middle of the bed. “Asleep in his basket.” When he began to unbutton her shirtwaist, Marta came fully awake. As he looked into her eyes, he brushed his fingers against her throat and leaned down to kiss her. She felt everything inside her open and grow warm. She removed his shirt, and she found that months of hard physical labor had thickened the muscles across his chest and down his arms. When he lifted his mouth from hers, she felt herself drowning at the look in his eyes. “I’ll be gentle.” And at first he was, until her response gave them both the freedom they needed.
Pulling the blankets up over them, Niclas tucked her against his body. He let out a long, deep sigh of contentment. “I was afraid you would never come. You had everything you wanted in Montreal.”
“I didn’t have you.”
“So you missed me?”
She raised his blistered and callused hand and kissed his palm.
He nuzzled her neck. “God has answered my prayers.”
“For now. We’d better both start praying the seed you planted will sprout and the weather will—”
Niclas put a finger to her lips. “Let’s not worry about tomorrow.” They both went still as Bernhard cried softly in his basket. Niclas gave a soft laugh. “Today’s trouble is enough.” Flipping the covers back, he walked naked across the room and lifted their son from the basket.
* * *
Every mile that passed furthered Marta’s dismay. As Niclas snapped the reins over the horses and clicked his tongue, she could only stare at the flat land before her. She didn’t see a hill anywhere, but endless prairie that reminded her of the ocean crossing. She felt a little queasy.
“Are there any trees where we’re going?” She removed her jacket and wished she could unbutton her shirtwaist.
Niclas glanced at her. “We have a tree in our front yard.”
“One tree?”
“Right where we need it.”
She wiped beads of moisture from her forehead. Dust chafed her skin beneath her clothing. She glanced over the seat at Bernhard in the basket behind her, sleeping contentedly in the wagon bouncing over the dirt road. Marta remembered the canyon of buildings in the heart of Montreal, the trolleys and a few of the new automobiles.
“There it is!” Niclas pointed, face beaming.
She saw a small house in the distance, squat and sturdy, shaded by one tree. A barn and shed stood nearby. Four horses grazed in an enclosed pasture while a thin cow stood, head drooping, inside a corral next to the barn. “That cow is sick, Niclas.”
“Madson said she could give milk.”
“Has she?”
“None so far.” He shrugged. “I don’t know much about cows.”
&
nbsp; Oh, God, help us. “You didn’t know anything about growing wheat either, and you said you have planted a lot of it. I know a little about cows.” She could always write and ask Arik Brechtwald’s advice. He’d grown up around cows. “You said Madson gave you chickens too.”
“One rooster and four hens.”
“Where are they?”
“Off somewhere scratching for food, I guess.”
He guessed? “Are they laying eggs?”
“I haven’t had time to look.” He pointed. “There’s the rooster now.”
The rooster strutted out from behind the barn, two hens following. She waited, but the others didn’t appear. Annoyed, she imagined a very happy fox sleeping somewhere close by. The chickens scattered again as Niclas drove the wagon into the yard. As the rooster flapped away, the hens gave chase.
Niclas jumped off the wagon and came around to help her. She put her hands on his shoulders as he lifted her down. “The first thing we have to do is build a henhouse. Otherwise we’ll lose them all.”
He lifted the basket and handed it to her. “Why don’t you go on in the house while I unload everything?”
She looked around, fighting the sick feeling in her stomach. No mountains anywhere, not as far as she could see. And Niclas hadn’t lied. They had one tree, and it was too small to cast a shadow over the house. Oh, God, oh, God . . . “How cold does it get out here?”
“Oh, cold enough.” He hefted the trunk onto his shoulder. “The creek freezes so thick you have to make a hole in the ice so the livestock can get to water. Liam Helgerson, our neighbor, showed me how to do it. He has cattle.”
She looked around again and followed him inside the house. “What’ll we do for firewood?”
“We don’t need wood. We have prairie chips!”
“Prairie chips?”
“Dried cow dung.” He put the trunk on the floor. “Helgerson has a herd. He told me to take all I need. I pick them up by the wagonload and store them in one of the stalls in the barn. The chips fuel the stove, too. It makes the meat taste peppered.”
“Peppered?”
“What’s in the trunk that makes it so heavy?”
“Books.” She had spent hard-earned money trying to prepare for any eventuality.
“Books?”
“On farming, home medicine, animal husbandry.” She followed him outside as he headed back to the wagon. She put her hands on her hips. “You didn’t write anything to me about chips. Any more good news you have to tell me?”
* * *
Managing a boardinghouse had been easy compared to farming. Marta carried Bernhard in a shawl tied around herself while she put in a vegetable garden and tended the chickens. Niclas worked all day in the fields, coming in only for a noon meal before going out again. His hands blistered and bled. He didn’t complain, but she would see him wince when he pulled the work gloves off at night. She gave him a pan of warm water with salt to soak his hands and then wrapped them in strips of cloth. After dinner, while she nursed Bernhard, Niclas read to her from his Bible.
Liam Helgerson came over to meet Marta. He was a big man, lean and weathered after years in a saddle overseeing his landholdings. He had turned over much of his land to sharecroppers like Niclas, but still had enough to run a small herd of fine cattle. His wife had died five years before Niclas arrived. Both lonely, they had struck up a friendship. Marta knew after a few weeks that Niclas wouldn’t have a crop to harvest if not for Liam Helgerson’s good advice.
“Niclas shot a pheasant this morning, Mr. Helgerson. Would you like to stay for dinner?”
His leathered face wrinkled in a broad smile. “I was hoping you’d ask, Mrs. Waltert. Niclas has told me what a fine cook you are.”
He came once a week after that, usually on Sunday. Other than seeing that the animals and chickens were fed, it was the one day Niclas rested. Marta served dinner midafternoon so Liam wouldn’t have to ride home in the dark. While Bernhard played on the rug, Niclas read portions of the Bible aloud as Marta sewed or knitted and Liam sat, head back, eyes half-closed, listening.
“I feel like I’ve been to church when I come over here. Margaret and I went a couple of times a year when we went into Winnipeg. She got some kind of cancer. It’s a long, mean kind of dying. I . . .” Liam shook his head and looked out toward the fields. “Been a long time since I’ve felt any peace.” He raked his hand back through his gray hair and put on his hat. He looked like a lonely old soul.
That night she mentioned her observations to Niclas, as he held Bernhard on his lap. “Liam seems so alone.”
“He is alone except for the men who work for him.”
“He and his wife never had children?”
“They had three, but they all died before they reached adulthood. They lost two in the same week to measles; the other got kicked in the head by a horse.” He set Bernhard on the floor with a pile of blocks. “I’d better see to the animals.”
Marta imagined the sorrow Liam must feel and shuddered at the thought of losing Bernhard. How would she bear it? If Bernhard was to become ill, how long would it take to reach a doctor? She must learn enough to doctor him herself. Her mother had shown her the medicinal herbs that grew in the Alpine meadows, but she would have to order a book on what grew here in this windswept prairie.
Leaning over, she ran her hand lovingly over Bernhard’s blond head. Please, God, keep him healthy. Make him strong like his father.
* * *
Dearest Marta,
I thank God you crossed the Atlantic when you did. You had only to worry about icebergs, but now the danger is man-made and moves at will beneath the surface. Father read to us this morning that a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. Over eleven hundred people went down with the ship. Several hundred were American citizens, and Father believes this will bring America into the fighting.
The war grows with no end in sight. Men are dying by the thousands in trenches. Arik, Hermann, and my brothers are all on active duty. I have heard rumors that our men will blow up the roads if they must.
The entire country is on alert. I pray our leaders can keep us out of the fray. . . .
Marta prayed constantly for Rosie and Arik. She prayed for her brother, Hermann. She prayed Switzerland would stay out of the war.
* * *
The hens began laying more eggs than the family could eat. Marta took only what she needed and let the hens sit on the rest. Soon she had a dozen chickens and two roosters fighting for dominance. Having watched Niclas do it the first time, Marta built a second coop and separated the males, giving half the hens to each. She beat out and ground enough grain for feed.
The cow’s health improved under Marta’s watchful care. One Sunday when Liam Helgerson came over for his chicken dinner, she asked if she might pasture the bovine with one of his best bulls. “You can have the calf when it’s weaned or a portion of the cheese I hope to make.”
“I’ll take the cheese. You’ve got yourself an enterprising wife, Waltert.”
“She had her own boardinghouse when I met her in Montreal.”
“Then what are you doing out here on the plains?”
Marta gave a short laugh. “I asked him the same thing.” When Niclas’s face tightened, she changed the subject. “You can change your mind about the calf, Mr. Helgerson. Being Swiss doesn’t mean I know how to make cheese.”
He laughed. “Maybe not, but I’ve no doubt you’ll learn.”
Niclas plowed and sowed winter wheat. While he waited for the crops to grow, he hired out to clean wells. Sometimes he would be gone for several days. Marta tried to get used to the silence and loneliness of the prairie, but it wore on her nerves.
“Helgerson said there’s a soft-coal mine five miles from us,” Niclas announced one evening. “I can dig out whatever we can use and sell the rest in Brandon.” He stored the coal in the basement. Marta covered the coal with a tarp to keep the black dust from seeping through the floorboards.
/> When the weather turned, Niclas moved the coops into the barn and piled bales of hay around three sides to keep them warm. Then the snows came, and Marta looked out on a frozen wasteland.
Niclas and Mr. Helgerson went out with axes to cut holes in the frozen river so the horses and cattle could drink. Niclas returned home so stiff from cold he needed her help to walk through the door. Marta spent the rest of the night tending him, afraid he would lose his ears, fingers, and toes.
“We’re going home to Montreal when the thaw comes!”
“No, we can’t. I signed a four-year contract.”
Four years? She wept. “I hate this place! What happens when the holes you chopped fill with snow and ice? What if you end up in a blizzard and can’t find your way home? What if—?”
“I’m all right.” Niclas gripped Marta’s head between his bandaged hands and kissed her hard. “Don’t frighten our son.”
Bernhard sat in his crib, crying loudly.
She put her hands over his. “And what will our son do without his father?” She stood and went to lift Bernhard from his crib.
Niclas wiggled his fingers at them. “See? I am thawing nicely.” When she glared at him, he sighed. “Bring him to me.” Bernhard never cried long in his father’s arms.
Marta threw more prairie chips into the woodstove while Niclas played with their son. “You can’t keep the cold out of this house!” She left the stove door open and rolled rags, stuffing them tightly against the space under the door. “If we have to stay three more years in this godforsaken place, then we’re going to dam the creek so you won’t have to risk your life cutting holes in that frozen river.”
Shortly after they began the project, a neighbor to the south appeared on horseback. Niclas had gone hunting with Mr. Helgerson, leaving Marta alone to fill in the gaps between the larger boulders he had set. Seeing the rider coming, Marta waded out and untied her skirt from above her knees. She lifted Bernhard and set him on her hip as the man came closer. “So that’s why the water’s so low. What do you think you’re doing? You can’t dam this stream. The United States owns the water rights.”