They were still discussing it around the wash table outside the mud porch when we got to the house. Bestefar was dipping water from a pail into the washbasin, and as he rolled up his sleeves, loosened his shirt and started to scrub the dirt off he said, “Peter, I think Otto’s got a point. The problem with you is you ain’t got brains enough to know when you’re smart.”
Papa folded his arms and twisted his mouth. “You know how many men try that sort of thing every year and lose their shirts?”
“Ja, some of them fail. But none of the ones who don’t try, succeed,” said Bestefar, lathering his arms with a cake of soap. His hands were red-brown as an Indian’s to the wrist, the arms paint-white from there on up. “Look at me. If I hadn’t been willing to take a chance, I’d still be fishing sild in Norway.”
“You tell him, Ole,” said Otto.
“You look at Hans Nielsen Hauge,” said Bestefar, climbing up to his preaching voice. “You’d think that spreading God’s Word in a land that had forgotten it would be enough calling for a man. But no, Hauge knew he had an obligation to use all his gifts to help his neighbors. So he taught farmers better ways to plow, and showed them—ʺ
“I know about Hauge,” said Papa. “I’m not Hauge.”
“That’s not the point—ʺ
“You’re making a big thing out of nothing.”
Bestefar threw his panful of black water out on the ground. “It ain’t nothing, Peter, and you’d see that if you had the sense of a day-old calf. Sometimes I wonder what I did to raise a boy with so little grit.”
“I’ve got plenty of grit,” said Papa, as Otto took his turn at the basin. “Most of it’s in my ears.”
“Ja, with you everything’s a joke.” Bestefar stomped inside and slammed the screen door behind him.
We had roast beef and roast pork, done in a single pan so their mingled juices made the best gravy in the world. We poured the gravy over mashed potatoes white as whipped cream. And there was fried chicken, and fresh baked buns, and sweet corn and asparagus, and fresh sliced tomatoes, and pickled beets, and—well, I may be getting meals from other threshing seasons mixed up in my memory, but if it wasn’t exactly those things it was as many, and just as good. And for dessert there was apple pie, I think. Eighteen of us sat around the big table, so Mother and the hired girl had plenty to do. I think Miss Margit was there to help, but Miss Margit always came and went so quietly that I have trouble saying whether she was around any particular day.
“Suppose I went along with this,” Papa said over the pie. “I’m no businessman. Who’d see that I didn’t get skinned?”
“Talk to Jim Lafferty at the bank,” said Otto. “He’s an honest fellow for an Irishman. I bet he’d be glad to help, and do himself some good in the bargain.”
Papa said, “I don’t know.”
Mother came in from the kitchen and said, “What are you talking about, Peter?”
“Nothing,” said Papa.
“Nothing my eye,” said Bestefar. He had the palsy and his hands trembled, and now he slopped coffee over two sides of his cup. “Your husband has invented a new self-feeder for a separator. It’s the best one any of us ever saw. He’s got a whole new way of setting the cutting knives, and the angle the bundles come–ʺ he set his cup down and tried to demonstrate by making his fingers mesh, elbows in the air, but gave it up “—well, take my word for it it’s mighty clever. Now Otto and me and the fellows say he ought to take out a patent and start a company, but he says he’s afraid he’ll get swindled.”
In a moment the weariness fell from Mother’s face. She was a small, blonde, buxom woman, and when her blue eyes lit, as they did now, everyone paid attention. The roomful of threshers went suddenly quiet.
“Is there money to be made in this?” she asked.
“Lots of money, God willing,” said Bestefar.
“Then you must do it, Peter,” said Mother.
Papa said, “I’ll think about it,” and concentrated on his pie crust.
We had to go back to work then. There was lunch at 3:30, brought out by the hired girl—sandwiches and cold water in sweaty glass jars, and cookies and cake. Then more work until around 6:00, when the field crews started jockeying to get their last loads in and head home before the others. We finished around 7:00. The wagons rolled home, horses tugging at the reins. We fed the stock and had supper. Afterwards Papa and Fred and Bestefar milked the cows while I bumbled around at their heels (it was also my job to turn the crank on the cream separator). Bestefar was selling the farm to Papa and was officially retired, free to travel as a lay preacher for the Hauge Innermission. But though he was often away, he couldn’t resist putting a hand in when he was home and work was to be done, especially when somebody was doing it wrong, which was most of the time in his opinion.
Milking had been women’s work in the old country, and Bestefar and Papa took some ribbing from neighbors whose wives still followed tradition, but nobody ever seriously imagined that Mother would work in the barn.
Lying in bed that night beside Fred (who always fell asleep long before me), the top sheet rumpled under our feet because of the heat and our skins sticking to the bottom one, I could hear Mother and Papa talking in the kitchen below, through the warm air register in the floor.
“You remember the axle, Peter,” Mother said. Her voice was low. I had trouble making it out.
“You keep throwing that axle in my face. It was a coincidence, that’s all—as simple an idea as that was—ʺ
“Coincidence! You showed your work to that rat-faced implement salesman, and he was crawling around underneath the wagon in his good suit, like a snake in the grass.”
“Now Signe—ʺ
“Don’t now Signe me. The very next year we went to the county fair and there it was, the new Hubbard wagon with the patented miracle axle. Hubbard made a fortune off your idea—and what good did it do us?”
“It was such an obvious alteration—ʺ
“You make me want to tear my hair, Peter! You think because a thing is easy for you, it’s easy for everybody! It’s not! The things you can do are special—they’re precious gifts from God, and you throw them around like pearls before swine. Even your father says the self-feeder is good—when did he ever talk that way about anything you did? If it was only yourself, it wouldn’t matter—you could go around giving fortunes away to every gypsy drummer who rolled into the yard. But you have me and the boys to consider. What about us? What about our welfare?”
“Don’t I care about your welfare? Haven’t we got a good home? Don’t we have plenty to eat? Don’t I make an honest living? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to grow up! Do you think God gave you this gift so you could play with it?”
“You talk as if I didn’t work hard.”
“You don’t have to work hard, Peter! There are other lives besides farming! It’s fine for you, and fine for Fred, I suppose, but what about Christian? What will his future be? Do you expect him to farm?”
I pulled the pillow over my head, in spite of the heat. I didn’t want to hear any more. I must have slept, eventually.
I dreamed of hundreds of black buggies and wagons, all drawn up and parked around our farmyard. I didn’t know why all the people had come, but certainly they were up to
no good.
We got one unscheduled break the next day, when the separator caught fire, but Bestefar and Otto smothered it with dirt, and it didn’t happen again.
We finished threshing our own place on the third day. We were separating the last wagonload when a handsome black buggy pulled into the driveway, our Black Labrador Truls nipping at the horse’s heels. It drew up outside the barnyard fence and Jim Lafferty from the bank got out, stout and elegant in a gray suit and black derby hat. He stood and watched us at work, smoking a cigar, one thumb in a vest pocket. Papa looked hard at Bestefar, but Bestefar pretended not to notice.
Fred and I were set to watering the horses while most of the neighbors headed home. Bestefar showed Mr. Lafferty the new self-feeder. Papa stood by, glum, answering their questions with short words (but in English, so as not to be entirely rude).
Fred and I sneaked back to listen when our job was done.
“Now you know me, Pete,” said Lafferty. “I’m not gonna do wrong by you. We’ll make up a contract. You can get your own lawyer to draft it. I’m willing to invest personal capital—I’ve got some I’d like to put to work just now, and I have friends who’ll come in with me I’m sure, but you’re guaranteed 50% ownership. All I want from you is your know-how. We hire a patent attorney, pay $75.00 for a search, and if the patent’s clear we file. Then we’ll find a place to set up shop and we go into business. Nothing’s certain in this life, but I think we’ve got a better than good chance here. I’m willing to risk it.”
I can still see Papa in the evening light, his tall, thin shape shadowed in an eastward stretch over the dry ruts and manure of the barnyard. He took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I just don’t know,” he said.
“Pete, listen to me.” Lafferty took his spectacles off and polished them with a handkerchief. “You’re a good farmer, but you’ve got it in you to be more than that. You can make a better life for yourself, for your family—and what’s more you can make jobs and prosperity for your neighbors. That’s the American way, Pete. That’s what your people and my people came over the water for.”
“And it all depends on me?” Papa smiled wryly.
“We can do it together. But without you it won’t work. Could you sleep at night, knowing you’d had a chance to do good for others, and you didn’t do it?”
Papa turned toward the orange sun. His face, with the Anderson lantern jaw we all shared, except for Mother and Bestefar, looked weathered and rusty. There was dust in its creases.
Lafferty pointed at Fred and me. “What about your boys, Pete? The one’s OK, he’ll do all right—take over the farm, carry on if that’s what you want. But what about the other? Where’ll he go for work? Without a good education, what’ll he do in this world? Will you be able to send him to a good school, on what a farmer makes?”
I bolted into the barn then and found a corner in one of the stalls. I curled up in the straw and cried.
Because I knew my father was going to let them push him where he did not wish to go. He would let them because he loved me. Because he needed money for me, and did not have the freedom to refuse an honest opportunity.
Because I was a cripple.