The Painted Table, page 1
© 2013 by Suzanne Field
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Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Other Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013949986
ISBN 978-1-4016-8970-4
Printed in the United States of America
13 14 15 16 17 18 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my Father
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
PSALM 23:5 NIV
CONTENTS
The Beginning
Prologue
1. The Draft Notice
2. War
3. San Francisco
4. Shore Leave
5. The Baby Sister
6. The Homecoming
7. St. Paul
8. The Highway Man
9. Discontent
10. The Table
11. Remodeled
12. The First Coat
13. Psychology
14. Up and Down
15. The Sewing Club
16. Tree of Life, Tree of Evil
17. Nancy Drew
18. Palm Sunday
19. April
20. Mr. Mason
21. Voices on the Stairs
22. Rags to Riches
23. Gone with the Wind
24. Cottonwood Point
25. Respectfully Yours
26. Speaking Truth
27. The Catapult
28. What’s in a Name?
29. Sapphira
30. Thanksgiving
31. Rotten Apples
32. Taste and See
33. Jack
34. The Valentine
35. The Cocoon
36. Loyalty
37. Floating Free
38. The Wedding
39. Legacy
40. Weeds
41. Softball Religion
42. Girl Talk
43. The Wooden Box
44. Newly Wed
45. Tendril Tangle
46. Joann’s Notebooks
47. Stuffed Ribs
48. Rainbow Heart
49. The Wedding Gift
50. The Stroke
51. Christmas
52. Waiting
53. Kite Lessons
54. Redeemed
Reading Group Guide
THE BEGINNING
1858
Metal teeth rip through the rough, mottled bark and bite into white cambium. Steady strokes saw forward and back, grating, rasping. Two hands push, grate; two hands pull, rasp, lacerating the ring of yellow sapwood. The blade advances, traverses golden heartwood, more sapwood, more cambium, then needs merely to touch the last of the bark.
The sacrificial birch tips, then plummets; its startled branches cry out, rudely raking upright brothers. Severed from stump and root, the tree crashes onto the rich Valdres Valley soil—a brutal amputation, but necessary to be rendered a gift of love.
A gift that will one day be abased, and another day redeemed.
PROLOGUE
1921
A damp, colorless dress, pinned to the clothesline, tosses about in the blustery prairie wind. Arms outstretched, Joann lets the fabric flap against her thin, seven-year-old frame. She aches for her mother’s hands that will never again extend from the empty sleeves that twist and turn about her head, caressing her face.
“Momma . . . Momma.” The wind snatches away her whispers.
The dress belongs to Joann’s oldest sister now. Evelyn began wearing it last month when her own tore beyond repair. It is an ill fit for her; Evelyn at fifteen is more plump than Clara had ever been. Seeing the dress stretching across her sister’s frame is a daily offense for Joann. Joann’s dress, and four others of various sizes, each faded and threadbare, flutter nearby.
Not far from the line, Evelyn, Maxine, and Dorothy bend to pick stunted vegetables. Their pa warned that the well might go dry if they watered the patch more than every few days. The heat of August is fast approaching and it hasn’t rained on the North Dakota prairie since June.
Life on the prairie farm is at once strong and proud, fragile and impoverished. “Not much here today,” Evelyn says. “We’ll make soup again, plenty of broth.” Their buckets hold a few turnips, onions, carrots, and shriveled pole beans. The potatoes are not ready to dig.
Pa and Lars and Rolf have a second pair of work clothes to wear on washday, overalls, faded and patched. But the girls, until the laundry dries, each wear only a chemise undergarment, stitched of muslin by their mother, modest enough to wear in the presence of brothers and Pa. Evelyn pins a shawl over her shoulders to conceal her already ample torso. Pa turns a deaf ear to her embarrassed, whispered requests for a brassiere from the mercantile in Steele.
In the house, carefully folded away in the big black steamer trunk, are six white batiste dresses. They were supplied by generous neighbors so the sisters had “something decent to wear” for their mother’s funeral four months earlier. Shortly thereafter, Uncle Jergen, a circuit pastor, came and insisted that all his brother Knute’s children be baptized at once. So the “good” dresses were worn a second time.
Beneath the tossing clothing, Joann sinks down onto prickly grass, unaware of a long, black rat snake coiled near the clothesline pole, its yellow eyes trained on her. She watches her pa’s two work horses fifty yards away searching in vain for green shoots. Beyond them are fields of parched crops and boundless miles of dry grass. She shields her eyes from the sun and watches the white chickens strut daintily in the barnyard. Once, and only once, Joann had playfully imitated their jerky gait on her rickets-bowed legs.
“Look at me!” she demanded of Maxine. “I’m pretty-walking, like the chickens!”
Maxine snickered. “Those legs of yours will never walk pretty, Joann.”
Lars chimed in, “Cluck-cluck-cluck, Joann.”
Pa and the brothers unload lumber from the wagon, stacking it beside the barn. They returned last evening from a fifty-mile trip to the Valley City lumber mill. The horses had done well to pull the heavy wagonload and had earned their extra oats. Knute is proud of these black muscular giants. “A stronger pair I never seed,” he often declares, his English marked by the undulant accent of his native Norwegian.
The unloading is strenuous work for Rolf and Lars, only thirteen and twelve, and small for their age. Every day tests their young muscles. But their pa, an immigrant farmer trying to survive, cannot coddle them. God saw fit to give him only two sons among seven daughters.
Knute Kirkeborg does the work of several men, in spite of one short, lame leg, but the stubborn prairie always asks for more. At times he can be a harsh man, appearing to be angry at the world, when mostly he is angry at himself. He shouldn’t have taken his friends’ dare to jump from the roof when he was twelve. The mishap caused his right leg to stop growing. Yet he knows it also prompted him to become clever and resourceful.
As a Norwegian boy of seventeen, he heard about earning passage to America by working in the bowels of a freighter. He could have a new life in that promised land across the Atlantic where so many Norwegians had fled. There he could till virgin flatland and grow fields of grain like Norway’s mountainous terrain never could. There he could prove himself whole. His godly family was more sorrowful about their oldest son’s bitterness over his short leg than his leaving. Leaving for America they could understand. They gave him their blessing.
Knute was handsome and could be beguiling. High cheekbones and an aristocratic nose distracted women from his limp. Making his way west, he met young Clara in Minnesota and quickly won her over. Part French and third-generation American, he deemed her a prize. She accepted his dreams as her own, gathered her belongings into a cedar-lined trunk, made arrangements for her treadle sewing machine to follow, and together they headed out to break the rude soil of central North Dakota.
There, in spite of ever-increasing demands of motherhood, Clara tended well to her domestic tasks. Her food preparation was in the French manner, ingredients chopped finely, not left in chunks common to Scandinavian dishes. Whenever possible, her meals had flavor and color, and she considered lefse a poor substitute for bread.
Knute has long talked of building an addition to the barn. Now that he has the lumber, he will need to hurry so they can store extra wheat and oats for the animals come fall. Extra, that is, if it rains. He needs more fodder; he’s added a third cow.
As the three lug and pile the rough boards, they pay no heed to a mother partridge rapidly scuttling her young through tall brown grass not fifteen feet away. Neither do they no
Suddenly, there is a bawling. The cows, head-to-tail, are plodding determinedly toward the barn. Why? It’s only been a short time since morning milking and many hours until the next. Knute notes the cows, then the frantic chickens. On his good leg, he whirls to the west. Smoke! An evil ribbon of black along the horizon stretches as far as can be seen to the north and south.
“Fire! Prairie fire!” he shouts. “Lars! Put da cows in da barn! Rolf! Run get da horses! Hurry!”
Rolf takes off running. Knute and Lars prod the cows. “It’s still far off, but dere’s a stiff wind!” Pa shouts. “We’ll get dem horses harnessed, put ’em to da plow!”
Lars, pale and shaking, gathers up leather harnesses from their place in the barn. “Get da blinders,” Knute barks. “Can’t let ’em see da fire.”
The girls in the garden, and Joann under the clothesline, hear the commotion and see the smoke. Color drains from each face. “Prairie fire! God, spare us!” Evelyn entreats. “Maxine, Dorothy, we’ve picked enough, we better go to the house.” She can only pretend to be calm. “Joann! Joann!” she calls. “Come along now.” At an early age, these prairie children learned to recoil when adults spoke of flames, hideous flames, approaching from afar, licking up all creation in their path.
Joann rises from the ground and lunges awkwardly toward the others. Her legs tremble, her heart pounds like a hammer in her chest. The rat snake races past her, slithering purposefully from west to east. Joann sees it, screams, and spurts ahead to grab Dorothy’s skirt.
The washtubs and scrub boards outside the house remind Evelyn of the laundry. She thrusts her vegetable pail toward Maxine. “I’ll go back for the dresses,” she says. “Can’t let ’em . . .” She almost says burn. “Girls, go in the house,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Check on Helen and Francis and then stay inside.”
She snatches clothing off the line with an eye on the smoke that now ascends into pillars. Not heeding instruction, the younger sisters gather into a tight huddle, mesmerized by the ominous horizon edging the flatland. Their chatter is high-pitched and nervous. Five-year-old Francis scampers out of the house and Maxine scoops her up. Evelyn hurries toward them, her arms full of laundry. She deposits it in the house and returns to stare wide-eyed with the others. Joann moans with fright and buries her face at Evelyn’s waist.
Knute and the brothers manage to catch the horses’ unwilling heads, strap on the blinders, and hitch the muscular animals to the plow. They whinny and paw the ground with mighty hooves. A quick check confirms that the wide leather bands are secure. Knute climbs up and stands astride. He slaps the reins and pulls right. “Haw! Haw!” he commands.
The beasts jolt forward and Knute guides them to the western edge of his cleared property, one hundred or more feet beyond the barn. He yanks the lever to lower the plow, and the pull begins. The curved metal teeth dig through the dry earth. He urges the reluctant horses to their full speed and the plow begins to cut a wide swath of ground for a generous distance north, and then south. Back and forth, back and forth he drives them, yelling, straining at the reins with all his might each time they reverse direction. The hard soil looks darker when turned, once again fertile.
Periodically Joann dares lift her head for a quick look. Each glimpse prompts an impassioned wail. “Stop! Fire, go away!”
Dorothy grips the sides of her face. “The barn and the shed,” she despairs, “they’d . . . they’d burn up so fast.” She doesn’t dare speak of the house. Knute built the few wooden buildings with his own hands, finishing the clapboard house only four years before, so his family could finally move out of the sod house. Clara had insisted that raising children in a house of mud and grass was not civilized, even after he limed the inside walls white, hoping to placate her. He had often reminded her that sod houses don’t burn.
The boys rush to join the clutch of girls and all stand close, paralyzed. The wind has increased, snatching up and whirling particles of earth. The girls feel the itching sting of dry dirt against their faces and through their thin clothing.
“What’s Pa doin’?” demands five-year-old Francis, eyes wide with fright as she struggles in Maxine’s firm hold.
Although they are huddled close, Lars yells to her over the howl of the wind, “He’s plowin’ a firebreak!”
“So we don’t burn up,” Rolf adds. The boys’ voices, which mimic their father’s “old country” speech patterns, crack with fear. Rolf is the first to note a sinister stripe of bright orange in the distant sky beneath the black smoke.
“Looks ’bout a mile out,” he shouts. “Maybe closer. An’ the wind’s blow’n’ mighty, straight outta the west.” In spite of their plight, Rolf, the older brother, sounds proud to announce the information.
It isn’t long until the dreaded odor of smoke whips its way across the flatland. They cover their noses. What were whimpers from Joann and Francis are now terrified sobs. Evelyn puts her arms around as many sisters as she can to prod them into the house. She doesn’t try to corral the boys, who suddenly, with buffoonery and false bravado, whoop and leap, mimicking the horses, dismissing from their minds that unless the firebreak works or the wind shifts, voracious flames may devour them.
Joann tugs desperately at Evelyn’s arm. “We need to run away,” she shouts. “Come on, Evelyn, we need to run away!”
“No, Joann, hush now, don’t pull on me. There’s no place to run,” she says.
Joann, in the vise of fear, breaks away from the others and darts into the house. She scuttles across the floor and dives beneath a great sturdy wooden table that dominates the room. She hunkers down on the plank flooring, surrounded by a protective barricade of rough wooden benches. Knute had made the benches crude but serviceable, like the other pieces of rudimentary furniture in the house. Not like the table, with its ornate vine motif carved into the entire length of its apron.
In the doorway, Evelyn casts a last fearful look toward their pa as he cracks his whip in the air. In spite of the blinders, the sweating horses toss their heads indignantly as they strain forward.
“Go! Faster! Faster!” she hears Pa yell.
Evelyn quickly shuts the door and turns to tend to her sisters. Although she is only fifteen, they have been her responsibility since early spring when Clara, their precious, almost continuously pregnant mother, finally proved not strong enough for homestead life. When the ninth baby came, Clara’s health gave out.
Evelyn sees that sixteen-month-old Helen is still asleep in her box bed. She considers, for a moment, that she and Dorothy should prepare the vegetables for soup, carry on as if great danger were not rushing toward them. But the smell of smoke is seeping into the house, and with it, panic. Chopping vegetables is out of the question.
“God, save us!” Maxine implores.
Beneath the table, seven-year-old Joann hunches, arms tightly hugging her legs. She repeats the words in a whimper, “God, save us.”
The boys tumble into the house, slamming the door behind them. Helen awakens, senses tension, and screams. Evelyn picks her up and paces back and forth, jostling the child on her hip.
From her floor-level view, Joann watches Evelyn’s worn brown shoes traverse the room. Always, but at this moment more than ever, Joann craves to be held. But Evelyn, try as she may, is still a girl herself and, like her mother before her, can only do so much.
Maxine, Dorothy, and Francis shove aside the long benches in order to invade Joann’s space. Perhaps their awkward runt sister has found some inexplicable safety there where she spends so much time. Joann covers her head with her hands and tries to make herself smaller, although there is room for all. The table is extended by three generously sized leaves.
The girls have noted an aura of mystery around this ancestral table that Uncle Jergen brought to them all the way from Norway some years ago. It had come by steamship, then train, then wagon. They heard Pa tell their mother he hadn’t wanted to accept it. Perhaps it reminded him of things he wanted to forget. Only because his brother had come such a long way had he felt obliged to keep it.
