Dakota December and Dakota Destiny (17 page)

“You have a letter!” Daniel met her halfway home a few evenings later.

“From Will?” Mary broke into a run to meet him. A raised eyebrow from the hotel manager made her drop back to a decorous walk.

Daniel skidded to a stop, his cheeks pink from the exertion. “It is, it is! Read it aloud.”

“How about if I read it first to myself and then to you?”

“Awww, Mary. I want to know how he is. Does he like being a shoulder?”

“Soldier, Danny boy, soldier.” Mary grinned down at him. She slit the envelope with care and pulled out a flimsy sheet of paper. Well, Will certainly wasn’t one to waste words on paper any more than he did in person. Working with Dag Weinlander had taught him many things through the years, including how to conserve energy and speech.

My dearest Mary.
The word dearest sent a thrill clear to the toes of her black pointed shoes.
I cannot not tell you how much I miss the sight of your sweet face. When you were away at school, I always knew that if I grew desperate enough, I could take a train to Fargo and see you, if only briefly. Now I am clear across the continent from you, and so I commend you to the care of our loving God, for He can be with you when I cannot.

Mary dug in her bag for a handkerchief.

“Is Will sick? Something is wrong.” Daniel backpedaled in front of her so he could watch her face.

“No, silly, it’s just that I miss him.”

“Oh.” He turned and walked beside her, slipping his hand in hers in spite of being out in public.

Mary continued reading.
I never dreamed people could be so ferocious with each other. The sergeants here shout all the time and expect us to do the same. When I think we are being trained to kill our fellowmen, my soul cries out to God to stop this war before anyone else dies. But the Huns must be stopped or the world will never be a safe place in which to love and raise our children.

Mary tucked the letter in her pocket. She would have to read it later when she could cry along with the heartfelt agony of the man she loved. Will had never been afraid to stand up for the weaker children, and he was carrying that same strength into the battle for freedom.

That night she could not see the Big Dipper; clouds covered the sky.

Within a week Mary had both Joey and Jenny waiting by the front windows for her arrival. Mrs. Oien brightened when her young friend walked into the room, and she seemed to be getting stronger. While she sometimes slipped into staring out the window, she more often read to the children and would pinch her cheeks to bring some color to them before Mr. Oien returned home for dinner.

“How would it be if I took the children home to play with my brothers and sisters this afternoon?” Mary asked after dinner one day. “We have a big swing in our backyard, and the cat in the stable has new kittens.”

“Kittens.” Joey looked from his father to his mother, his heart in his eyes.

“Now, no pets. Your mother has plenty to do already.” Mr. Oien effectively doused the light in the child’s eyes.

“You can play with them at my house; they are too little to leave their mother yet.” Mary stepped into the breach. As far as she was concerned, an animal might make things more lively in this often-silent home. Her mother had never minded when the children brought home another stray—of any kind. In fact, she frequently brought them home herself.

“Perhaps you would like to come, too,” she said to Elizabeth. “I know you would love visiting with my mother.”

“Another time, dear, when I am feeling stronger.” Elizabeth smiled at her children. “But you two go on and have a good time.”

Walking down the street with a child’s hand in each of hers, Mary pointed out the store, the post office, and the hotel. But when she passed the livery, all she could think was that Will wasn’t the one pounding on the anvil out back, most likely fitting shoes to one of the farmer’s horses.

Jenny refused to leave the kittens. She plunked her sturdy little body down by the nest the cat had made in the hay under the horse’s manger and giggled when the kittens nursed. She reached out a fat little finger and stroked down the wriggling kittens’ backs.

Ingeborg had come out to the stable with Mary to watch. “I can’t believe one so little would have the patience to sit like that. She is just enthralled with the kittens.”

Joey had looked them over and then gone to see what the boys were doing. Knute was hoeing weeds in the garden and Daniel followed behind on hands and knees, pulling out the weeds too close to the plants for the hoe to work. He showed Joey which were weeds, and the little boy had followed the older one from then on. When they found a worm, Joey cupped it in his hands and brought it to Mary.

“Did you ever see such a big worm?” he asked.

“I think tomorrow we will dig in your flower beds and perhaps find some there.” Mary stroked the hair back from the boy’s sweaty forehead. Pulling weeds in the June sun could be a hot task.

“Not this big. This is the biggest worm ever. Can I take it home to show Mama?”

Mary nodded. But when Joey stuck the wriggling worm in his pocket, she shook her head. “He’ll die there. Come on, let’s find a can for him, and you can put dirt in it.” By the time Ingeborg called the children in for lemonade, Joey had several more worms in his can.

“Mor, could we take Joey fishing?” Daniel asked, wiping cookie crumbs from his mouth. All had gathered on the porch for the afternoon treat.

Ingeborg looked up. “I don’t see why not. Mary, where is Jenny?”

Mary put her finger to her lips and pointed to the barn. When she and her mother tiptoed into the horse stall, they saw Jenny on the hay, sound asleep. The mother cat and kittens were doing the same.

“I checked on her a few minutes ago and decided to leave her there. Isn’t she a darling?”

“You children used to love to sleep in the hay, too. How is their mother, really?”

Mary shook her head. “She scares me sometimes, Mor. It’s as though she isn’t even there, and other times she is so sad. I don’t know what to do to help her.” Mary pondered the same question that night when she added to the week’s letter to Will. “I wonder about Elizabeth Oien,” she wrote. “She loves her husband and children but seems to be slipping away from them. What makes one person have such a strong will to live, like Mrs. Norgaard, and another unable to overcome a bodily weakness? Doc says she has never been the same since Jenny was born. I guess it was a hard time and she nearly died. But the children had such fun at our house.”

She went on to describe the afternoon. She closed the letter as always, “May God hold you in His love and care, Your Mary.”

Joey caught two fish and a bad case of hero worship. Jenny pleaded every day, “Kittens, pease see kittens.” Daniel spent as much time at the Oiens as he did at home. And Mr. Oien paid Mary double what they’d agreed.

“I cannot begin to tell you what a difference you have made in our lives,” he said one evening when he handed her the pay envelope. “Elizabeth and I are eternally grateful.”

The Fourth of July dawned with a glorious sunrise, and the rest of the day did its best to keep up. The parade started in the schoolyard and followed Main Street to the park, where a bandstand had been set up. There would be speeches and singing, races for the children, carnival booths set up to earn money for various town groups like the Lutheran church ladies, who sold fancy sandwiches and good strong coffee. Mary had worked in that booth since she was old enough to count the change.

The Grange sold hot dogs, the school board ice cream that was being hand-cranked out behind the booth by members of the board, and the Presbyterian church made the best pies anywhere. Knute won the pie-eating contest for the second year in a row, and one child got stung by a bee. The fireworks that night capped a day that made Mary dream of Will even more. Last year they’d sat together, hands nearly touching while the fireworks burst in the sky to the accompaniment of the band. Did they have fireworks in the training camp he was in?

The next day an entire train car of young men left, waving to their families and sweethearts. They were on their way to an army training camp.

Mary stood next to her father, who had given the benediction at the ceremony. “Soon we won’t have any young men left,” she said softly. “Who is going to run the farms and provide food for the troops if all the workers leave?”

“Those of us left at home. It is the least we can do.” John Moen blew his nose. “God have mercy on those boys.” He used his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Unseasonably hot, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Father, it is hot, but you can’t fool me. That wasn’t all sweat you wiped from your face.”

“You are much too observant, my dear. You will make a fine teacher; the children will accuse you of having eyes in the back of your head.” John took his daughter’s arm on one side and his wife’s on the other. “Let’s go home and make ice cream. I only got a taste yesterday.”

The heat continued, made worse by air so full of moisture it felt like they were breathing underwater. Heat lightning danced and stabbed, but it failed to deliver the needed rain. How hot it was became the talk of the town. When the farmers came in to shop on Saturdays, their horses looked as bone-weary as the people.

Mary tried to entertain the Oien children, but Jenny fussed and pleaded to go see the kittens. Mrs. Oien lay on the chaise lounge on the back porch, where it was coolest, but daily Mary watched the woman weaken.

If only it would rain. Dust from the streets coated everything, including the marigolds and petunias she had planted along the front walk. Early each day she carried water to the struggling plants, praying for rain like everyone else.

The cornfields to the south of town withered in the heat. Storm clouds formed on the western horizon but always passed without sending their life-giving moisture to the ground below.

One day Mary came home from the Oiens to find Daniel lying in bed, a wet cloth on his forehead. He looked up at her from fever-glazed eyes. “I don’t feel so good, Mary.”

The letter lying on the hall table had no better news. Will was boarding the ship to Europe in two days. She checked the postmark. He was already on the high seas.

“He’s a mighty sick boy, Ingeborg, I won’t deny that.” Doc Harmon looked up after listening to Daniel’s labored breathing with his stethoscope. “People seem to fall into a couple of characteristics. Everything seems to settle in the chest for some, in the stomach for others. I don’t understand it, but with Daniel here, it’s always the chest. Onion plaster might help; keep his fever down and thump on his chest and back like this to loosen the mucous up.” He cupped his hand and tapped it palm down on the boy’s back.

Daniel started to cough after only a couple of whacks, giving the doctor a look of total disbelief.

“I know, son, but you will breathe better this way. Make sure he drinks a lot of water, and keep him as cool as possible. That plaster will heat him up some.” He looked Daniel in the eye. “Now you do as your mother says and make sure you eat. Lots of broth—both chicken and beef—are good for building him back up.”

He looked back up at Ingeborg. “You take care of yourself, too. This summer complaint is affecting lots of people. What we need is a good rain to clear the air.”

The rains held off.

Daniel was finally up and around again but more than willing to take afternoon naps. His favorite place was next to Mary. Mrs. Oien seemed better, too, at least in the early morning and after the sun went down. Mr. Oien bought a newfangled gadget called an electric fan.

Everyone wanted to sit in front of it, even when it only moved hot air around. Mary set a pan of water in front of the fan, and that helped them cool more.

July passed with people carrying water to their most precious plants and the farmers facing a year of no crops. At the parsonage, that meant there was no money in the church budget to pay the pastor, and Mary’s wages became the lifeline for the Moens.

The weather changed when walnut-sized hailstones pounded the earth and all upon it. What the drought hadn’t shriveled, the hail leveled. Ingeborg and Mary stood at the kitchen window and watched the garden they’d so faithfully watered be turned to flat mud and pulp.

“Guess we take God at His word and trust that He will provide.” Ingeborg wiped a tear from her eye and squared her shoulders. “The root crops will still be good, and we already had some beans put up. I lived without tomatoes for years, so I know we can do so again. And the corn, well, next year we’ll have corn again. At least the early apples were plentiful and perhaps we can buy a barrel from Wisconsin or somewhere later in the fall.”

Mary knew her mother was indulging in wishful thinking. There would be no money for apples this year. “Mor, I could stay home from school and keep working for the Oiens.”

Ingeborg shook her head. “No, my dear, your school is paid for, and you must finish. If it comes to that, I could go take care of her and those little ones.”

Her face lost the strained look of moments before. “See, I said the Lord provides. What a good idea. All of ours are in school all day. Why I could do all their cleaning and cooking and perhaps—no, I couldn’t cause someone else to lose their job. We will make do.”

Mary knew this talking to herself was her mother’s way of working things out, whether anyone else listened or not. She often found herself doing the same thing. Each night when she wrote her letters to Will, she sometimes spoke the words as she wrote them, as if that made him hear them sooner. Or rather see them.

It rained for two days, much of the water running off because the earth was too hard to receive it. At night she stood in front of her window and let the cool breeze blow over her skin. Cool, wet air—what a blessing. But she had to remember where the handle to the Big Dipper lay because she couldn’t see it through the clouds.

Why hadn’t she heard from Will? Where was he?

She still hadn’t heard from him when she packed her trunk for the return to school. She wrapped the three precious letters carefully in a linen handkerchief and tied them with a faded hair ribbon. While she’d about memorized the words, she’d reread the pages until the folds were cracking from repeated bending.

Each week she mailed another letter to him, in care of the U.S. Army. Was he getting her letters? They hadn’t come back.

The night before she was to leave, she walked to “the mansion” and up to the front door. Fireflies pirouetted to the cadence of the crickets. Mosquitoes whined at her ear, but she brushed them away. She barely raised her hand to knock when Dag swung open the door.

“Come in, come in. Gudrun has been waiting for you.” He turned to answer over his shoulder. “Yes, it is Mary.” When he ushered her in, he whispered. “I told you she’d been waiting.”

“Sorry, I should have come sooner.”

“She’s in the library.”

Mary nodded. She loved coming to this house with its rich velvets and artfully carved sofas and whatnot tables. The embossed wallpaper gleamed in the newly installed electric lights that took the place of the gas jets.

Mrs. Norgaard sat behind the walnut desk that had belonged to her husband when he owned the bank. While she still owned the Soldahl Bank, she employed a manager who ran it and only reported to her quarterly, unless of course, there was an emergency.

“Come in, my dear and sit down.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m glad you could humor an old woman like me this last night you have with your family.”

“They will see me off in the morning.” Mary took in a deep breath and voiced something that had been on her heart and mind for the last weeks. “If paying my school expenses is a hardship for you this year, I could stay—”

“Absolutely not. You will finish your year out, and then you can teach. The children of North Dakota need teachers like you. If you think a few months of drought and then a hailstorm will wipe out commerce around here, you just don’t understand the world yet.

“Companies make a great deal of money during wartime—I sometimes think that is why men start them—and our bank has invested wisely. I can afford your schooling, and you will not hear of my bank foreclosing on the farmers because they can’t make their payments on time this year. Or anyone else for that matter. I hear your mother is going to take over at the Oiens?”

Mary nodded.

“That is good. But I have a feeling you’ve been worrying about the church paying your father’s salary.” She tipped her head to look over the tops of her gold wire spectacles.

“Some. My mother says they will make do, but I know it is hard to feed seven mouths, and five of the children are growing so fast we can’t keep them in shoes.”

“You are not to worry. If I’d known John hadn’t gotten paid last month, it never would have happened, and you can bet your life it won’t happen again.” Mrs. Norgaard sat up straighter. “Those men can bungle things up so bad sometimes, it takes me weeks to just figure it out.”

Mary knew she referred to the deacons who ran the business of the congregation. “How’d you find out?” Curious, Mary leaned forward in her chair.

“I have my ways, child.”

“Doc Harmon?” Mary shook her head. “No, he’s not on the board. Mr. Sommerstrum?” At the twinkle in Gudrun’s eye, Mary laughed. “Mrs. Sommerstrum.”

“I’ll never tell, but it’s a good thing some men talk things over with their wives, even if it’s only to share the gossip.”

Mary nodded. “I see. I’ve often wondered how you keep such good tabs on the goings on in Soldahl when you don’t go out too often. Mrs. Sommerstrum tells Mrs. Hanson, and Mrs. Hanson tells you.” Mrs. Hanson had been the housekeeper at the mansion ever since Mary could remember.

Gudrun nodded. She reached in a drawer, removed an envelope, and handed it across the shiny surface of the desk. “Here. And I don’t want you scrimping and going without to send part of that money home, you understand me?”

Mary nodded, guilt sending a flush up her neck.
How did she know what I’d been thinking of?

“Ah, caught you, did I?” At the girl’s slight nod, Gudrun continued. “Now that we have that out of the way, I have a very personal question to ask. Have you heard from Will?”

“No, not since early July, and that letter had been written while he was on the ship.”

“Neither have we. That’s not like our Will.” She stared at the desk before her. “Did he say anything about where they were sending him?”

Again, Mary shook her head.

Gudrun nodded and rose to her feet. “Well, as the old saying goes, no news is good news. Come, let’s have a last cup of coffee and some of Mrs. Hanson’s angel food cake. I think she has a packet ready to send with you, too.”

By the time Mary said good-bye to the family in the mansion, she could hardly hold back the tears. It wasn’t like she was going clear around the world or anything, but right now Fargo seemed years away.

The next morning was even worse. Daniel clung to her until they were both in tears. John finally took the child in his arms while Ingeborg hugged her daughter one last time. Mary smiled through her tears and ruffled Daniel’s hair while at the same time hugging her father. She went down the line, hugging each of her brothers and sisters. “Now, promise me, all of you, that when I ask your teacher at Christmastime how you are doing, he will have a good report for me.”

They all nodded and smiled at her.

“Hey, I’m not leaving forever, you know.”

“It just seems like it.”

The train blew its whistle, and the conductor announced, “All aboard.”

Mary stepped on the stool and up the stairs. She waved one last time and hurried inside so she could wave again out the window. Slowly the train pulled out of the station, and when she could see them no more, she sank back in her seat to wipe her eyes. Why was leaving so hard when she had so much to look forward to?

As the miles passed, she thought back to the last night she had seen Will. The small package she’d given him contained one of her treasures, the New Testament given her by her parents on her twelfth birthday. “Will you keep this with you to remind you always how much I love you and how much more God loves you?”

“I will keep it in my shirt pocket,” he’d replied, never taking his gaze from hers while he put the Testament next to his heart. “But I need no reminder.”

The kiss they’d shared had been only sweeter with the small book tucked between them.

At Grand Forks, two of Mary’s friends from the year before boarded, and they spent the remainder of the trip catching up on their summers. When Mary told them Will had gone to war, Janice said her brother had left, too. Dorie shook her head. “I can’t believe all our boys are going over there. What if they don’t come home? Who will we marry?”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Leave it to you to keep the most important things right out front.” The three laughed, but Mary felt a pang of fear. What if Will didn’t come home?

One evening, toward the middle of October, she returned to her room to find a message saying there was a gentleman waiting in the parlor. He wanted to talk with her. Mary flew back down the stairs, her heart pounding. Perhaps it was Will!

But when she slid open the heavy door, her father and Dag Weinlander sat in the armchairs facing the fireplace. From the looks on their faces, she knew.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” How could she say the words? Dead, what did that mean?

John shook his head. Dag cleared his throat. “We hope not.” He extended the letter bearing an official seal at the top.

Mary read it quickly, then went back to read each word one at a time.
We regret to inform you that Private First Class Willard Dunfey is missing in action and presumed dead.
The date was three months earlier.