One
Faith Alone
The day after her eighteenth birthday, Emmaline Nelson sat with her spine hovering a good two inches away from the straight, cold back of an oaken pew, her feet planted next to each other on the pine floor, knees pressed together as she'd been taught. Her wool serge skirt should have been cozy, but the nylon slip her mother had insisted she wear crackled like electric ice against her dark stockings from its contact with the charged January air. Her coat hung cold and useless out in the makeshift foyer, where her mother had made her leave it, even though the inside of the church was not much warmer than the air outdoors.
Emmy worked hard at achieving what she hoped would look like a good Christian demeanor-eyes focused on the front of the church, Bible open to the day's scripture reading on her lap, hands folded on the Good Book, mouth slightly open and whispering along with the Nicene Creed. She knew these words so well she no longer had to parse their meaning. She knew the service so well that she barely kept her thoughts on God. No, Emmy's mind was quite understandably drawn over her right shoulder, pondering instead the man who would soon officially become her betrothed.
The prayer over, Emmy cocked her head to the left and turned it just enough to steal a glance of Ambrose Brann. She could feel his steady gaze warm on her neck, even as the congregation stood to sing another hymn. It seemed as though Ambrose had always been there, somewhere, in and out of her memories of youth. They had played together when she was small, endless indulgent games of hide-and-seek at one farm or the other on Sunday afternoons while the grown-ups visited over coffee and her sister toyed with dolls on a flannel blanket stretched out in the grassy sunshine. At times inseparable, Emmy and Ambrose had walked through muddy spring-dense fields of ankle-deep black soil in order to place a penny on the railroad track down at the end of the farm's quarter section, returning later in the day to find the bright copper disc pressed flat and smooth. He had taught her how to hunt, to clean a gun, to shave a piece of soft wood into a palm-sized cross, and after Grandfather Nelson died when she was ten, Ambrose's economy of words had made her feel her loss less keenly, even though the few things he did share revealed little of his heart.
Ambrose was a good deal older-nearly ten years-and yet he never seemed to mind his young companion, always extending to Emmy a level of familial love that promised to keep her comfortable the rest of her life. She tried to imagine what the weight of his silence might feel like in the stretch of time about to be set before them, and an unexpected feeling rose against it, a slight hiccup of concern.
The Brann family's status was considered a significant step up from her family, with Delmar Brann's vast acreage of sugar beet fields and hundred head of fine beef cattle comprising the largest farm in the township. Unlike her Norwegian-born grandfather, Mr. Brann was second-generation American-a fact he frequently worked into conversation. Still, the two men had been the kind of friends who were more often seen together than apart, and it had been Grandfather Nelson's dying wish for Emmy to marry Ambrose. She could learn to live in a quiet house, she supposed, or fill it with the noise of children by and by.
Emmy waited to join in the singing a moment too long and felt a quick, sharp pinch delivered with dogged expertise to her upper left arm by her mother. As Emmy slowly stood, she took quiet note of the increase of her stature, for she recently had cleared the brim of her mother's hat by a solid three inches. Emmy's life up to now had been constrained by her mother's views, her instructions, her limits. Yet somehow, a strange miracle had happened in September: Her father moved them from a shack on her grandmother's farm near the sleepy town of Glyndon and into a small, tidy house in the much bigger city of Moorhead, Minnesota, across the Red River and in the shadow of Fargo, North Dakota. Emmy had entered her final year of high school surrounded by the kinds of ideas and knowledge that unfolded a crumpled sheet of possibility inside of her, and Karin's influence had started to pull away from Emmy like warm taffy. The move had revealed tiny windows that were now opening onto new opportunities.
On Emmy's right the bright singing of her sister, Birdie, cut through Emmy's preoccupations. Birdie had burst into the Nelson household three years after Emmy, a gift of uncomplicated grace and laughter among a previously glum trio. Sometimes Emmy wondered what would have become of them if Birdie hadn't been born. Emmy's own arrival had been less auspicious, coming as it had three months after their brother, Daniel, had died. With so much grief in such a small house how could anyone joyfully greet a red-faced, colicky girl? Instead, Emmy had slept in her grandmother's bed, fed from a bottle and carried around on the older woman's hip until Emmy was big enough to walk. When Karin had come home with Birdie, three-year-old Emmy eagerly accepted the role of mother's helper, happy to be useful and wanted. She couldn't remember much from those early years, and besides, she had quickly learned to appreciate the feeling of being needed more than loved. Now that she was eighteen, Emmy was ever more mindful of what kind of wife and mother she wanted to be, itching to cook meals the way she preferred, keep her own house, and create for her children a pocket of happiness that no one would fill with the pebbles of grim self-sacrifice. Marriage to Ambrose was not merely a promise to be fulfilled, it also seemed the only way forward, a destination she knew as well as any other, a place she could feel finally at home.
Once the blessing was given, Karin quickly slipped past Emmy's father in order to join the women serving coffee in the basement, and gave him a look that suggested he keep a close eye on the girls. Christian frequently deferred to Karin, even after their own small farm had failed when Emmy was ten, and they'd had no choice but to move into a three-room shack on Grandfather Nelson's farm. It had once been used by the betabeleros who took the trains north every spring to plant sugar beets and back down south to the Texas border once the harvest was completed late in the fall. The interior walls of the outhouse ten feet behind the shack were still papered in Mexican movie magazines featuring Rita Hayworth's toothy smile.
As much as she had wondered why they couldn't just live in the farmhouse with her grandmother, Emmy knew that there was some strength behind Christian's quiet pride. Rather than replace his newly dead father as head of the farm, Christian took a mechanic's job at the sugar factory. It took seven long years of taxing work, but Emmy could tell that Christian was never happier than when he unloaded their possessions into the small house in Moorhead that fall. Even so, they all continued to help Grandmother Nelson maintain what little was left of her enterprise: a handful of milking cows, a half-blind hunting dog, a dozen laying hens, and an old inedible hog named Sausage. Lida wouldn't hear of selling one feather of the place, and it had been made plain to Emmy that the farm would be given to her and Ambrose, finally joining the two families as Grandfather Nelson had desired.
Task-driven blood in her veins, Karin Nelson looped her arm through Grandmother Nelson's, helping the much older woman out of the pew and down the short aisle toward the stairs. Lida Nelson was the center of the church's universe. She had left her family early in order to create her own place in this loop of the river, and she took on the history of every parishioner as though it were her own. The Nelsons had all been baptized in this room, they would all be married here, and God willing at the end of their lives receive the blessing of rejoining their relatives in the attached graveyard of good Lutherans. Emmy touched the smooth pew, finding the slight dent where she'd cut her first tooth. She imagined what the low-shouldered country church must have looked like from the sky, set back from the meandering creek just far enough to stay high in flood years, close enough to hold picnic suppers in the late afternoon shade of early September harvests. Since she was very small, she'd been told stories about the great Norwegian settlers who had staked out this land and constructed a sod lean-to from the densely packed soil, slicked the sides with paint made from quicklime and chalk, and retained the services of a traveling preacher until they could afford a full-time recruit. Soon after, a suitable wooden building was constructed.
All that hard work was swept up into the spinning maw of a tornado in 1929, leaving only the organ untouched. Twice more, twisters had descended on them, the most recent coming late on a cloudless day the past June, when the deadliest cluster ever seen had ripped its way through a speckled swath of the county. One tremendous funnel that looked like an upside-down birthday cake had flattened areas of Fargo, while a group of three smaller spirals barely missed the little church as the storm made its devastating way into their valley, leaving pieces of houses from as far away as North Fargo scattered about the farm. Emmy had found a dollar bill, the wheel from a child's wagon, and the cracked head of a porcelain doll, among other displaced treasures. Even now, in the dead of winter, when the sky turned black, a shiver of trepidation would come over Emmy, reminding her of how scared she had been as they huddled in the disused coal bin, listening to the howling winds encompass her grandmother's home.
Emmy rubbed the gooseflesh from her arms as she stood between her father and Birdie in the crowded aisle. She gazed up at the stained-glass depiction of Christ ascendant, wondering what He thought of the poor souls from the Golden Ridge area of Fargo who had been killed in the storm. Had He opened his arms to the five Acevedo children taken alongside their mother? Did it make sense that God chose to leave behind the father and one son? She'd read their stories in the local paper, and had wept over the picture of the baby of the family being carried away from the wreckage by a fireman who had either lost or discarded his hat-his limp slant of bangs obscured the horror he must have felt-until her heart couldn't stand any more of it.
The feel of her father's hand on the middle of her back brought Emmy's thoughts around to the sturdy brick church, and she let her questioning melt away, as she often had when the wall of God's reason seemed too high for her to scale. Christian roped his other arm around Birdie's shoulders and engaged Ambrose's father as he moved out of his own pew.
"Good morning, Del," her father said, offering his hand to the dark-suited gentleman. Delmar Brann, reed thin and yet a good head taller than Christian, took the slighter man's hand in both of his as he grunted a greeting. An older, squatter, and unfamiliar man moved out of the pew, nodding solicitously at them as he slid past and broke into the line waiting to greet the pastor at the door. Emmy noticed her father's look of irritated surprise before she cast her eyes to the floor, while Birdie used the moment to sprint out from under her father's arm and rush off to join her friends at the back of the church. There was something in Mr. Brann's stature that always made Emmy feel small, insignificant: almost breakable. He was closer in age to her grandfather than to Christian, and had been married late, but widowed early, to a woman rumored to have come from a wealthy Chicago family.
"Good morning," Mr. Brann said, and moved in a lanky shuffle along the aisle. "What are you hearing in town about Burdick's attempts to get into Congress?"
"I prefer not to talk politics in church," Christian said, forcing a friendly enough laugh, but Emmy sensed discomfort in her father as he tipped his head in her direction.
Mr. Brann turned brusquely to Emmy, sliding a rough knuckle under her chin. She resisted taking a step back. "How's our girl?" He leaned closely enough for her to see a fleck of pepper between his top teeth. "The winter cold enough for you?"
"Oh, you bet," Emmy replied, an embarrassed shade of red prickling her skin. Karin had told her that after Sunday dinner at the Branns', matters would be discussed between the two families, and from Mr. Brann's solicitous smile, Emmy could tell that her position in his favor had risen. The obvious downside of a marriage to Ambrose was the eventual, continual proximity to his father, though Emmy knew that there was no fairness in comparing Ambrose to Mr. Brann. She was nothing like her mother, and Emmy's blush began to rise up to her ears with the notion of Ambrose setting them in the same frame. Her mother was cold and firm, hardworking and driven, serving Jesus with her every breath. Emmy loved Jesus but found less of her soul compelled to model his mission. She wanted to do good works in her life, but she also wanted to look up and out at the world, rather than stare deeply into a pair of prayer-folded hands, whispering words of devotion and salvation. What was the point of being saved if she never did anything that required the risk of being lost? Her mother lived within the limits of this room, even when she was outside of it. Emmy's view was drawn to the horizon, and whatever might lie beyond. How she would incorporate this yearning into a marriage to the farm boy next door she had no clue, but she hoped her brand of faith would lend more guidance than her mother's had.
Emmy gave her head a little shake to clear the muddling thought and quickened her step to leave the older men behind. She slipped her hand into the crook of Ambrose's arm. He smiled down at her.
"How's the farm?" Emmy asked, feeling the heat of his body through the layers of clothing, hot like an ember in the grate. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow and Emmy had to quietly wonder whether he might be ill. Clearly she wasn't the only one nervous about what the day would hold for their future.
"A dozen hens are off their lay," he said.
Emmy laughed, then darkened her tone. "That sounds serious."
"You'll see," he said, a small smile pulling at one corner of his mouth.
"Yes, I suppose I will," she said, her attempt at merriment waning as they approached Pastor Erickson where he stood in the entryway, shaking hands and listening to the needs of his flock with a look of either deep sympathy or abject senility. He was a perfectly square man with straight, feeble lines of white hair laced atop a face that was always bright pink, regardless of the weather or circumstance. Emmy had loved the pastor when she was a small girl, but as she'd filled out her Sunday dresses over time, his lingering eyes had made her increasingly uncomfortable to the point of slouching.
"Good morning, Emmaline," he said as he took both hands and held them out to her sides. His touch was oddly damp and dry at the same time, like washing taken in from the line five minutes too early. "You're looking especially pretty today." Emmy broke her own sweat, which she could feel collect at her temples and underneath her gray wool hat, where her scalp began to itch.
"Thank you, Pastor. You're very kind to say so," she said as Ambrose stepped between them, saving her from further discomfort.
"Yes, she's a pretty one, sir," Ambrose said as he shook the pastor's hand. "Wonderful sermon, I especially enjoyed your thoughts on Nadab and Abihu. I had never considered how their punishment related to the great flood, or Gilgamesh." Emmy looked at Ambrose, surprised by how much he had to say, as though the coal of Isaiah had touched his lips when she wasn't looking.
Pastor Erickson narrowed one eye. "You're a great study, Ambrose. You should consider taking the cloth yourself, you know. We could use more men like you."
"So you always say." Ambrose bowed his head. "But I serve the Lord through faith alone."
"His Grace be with you," Pastor Erickson replied, turning back to Emmy and casting a rheumy glance down the length of her frame.
"And with you," Ambrose said, moving Emmy along toward the basement stairs. The smell of percolating coffee and the clattering of the church women setting out cups pointed up the silence that rested between the young couple. In the few moments it took them to descend, Emmy sought a topic of conversation to begin, but nothing came to mind. She certainly hadn't listened closely enough to the sermon to engage him on the topic of divine retribution-or whatever it was the pastor had spent so much time talking about. If it wasn't damnation, it was likely wrath or some other brimstone subject. The gamut Pastor Erickson ran was as small as that of a penned-up rooster, and nearly as nonsensical, but she knew better than to speak her mind on to Ambrose. It seemed to her at times that she was the only person who noticed the paucity of words and ideas coming from the pulpit, so eager were the parishioners to have Pastor Erickson's holy approval.
"School's going well," Emmy said, feeling the awkwardness in Ambrose's lack of response. She wanted to tell him all about her new life in Moorhead, and what an adjustment it had been for her, going from the immigrant shack her father had improved as much as he could, to the slightly larger, faintly more comfortable two-bedroom house situated in what Emmy had quickly learned was the poor side of the big town, on the lesser bank of the Red River. To the west across that river lay Fargo, which, in the early days of both settlements, had claimed a much bigger stake with the railroads than its little twin sister, Moorhead. Emmy was only beginning to understand the myriad effects of this dynamic, though, and worried that if she tried to express her impressions of it Ambrose would wave away her insights like slow-moving attic flies.
When they reached the wide, warm basement the young couple wordlessly parted ways, Ambrose to join the men gathered around the coffee table, and Emmy to the kitchen and a sink of soapy water. Her mother passed with a plate of her homemade doughnuts, which were always hard and dry but somehow the most popular Sunday-morning hospitality item. Emmy slipped into the bustling kitchen, quietly past the women swarming there, and out the back cellar door.
Once outside in the cement-lined structure at the foot of the stairs, Emmy let out a long sigh and climbed to the top, where she sat hugging her knees for warmth. She found an instant comfort in the solitude of the moment. Behind the church a number of young boys ran around in the snow, impervious to their reddening hands and dripping noses. Emmy smiled at their predictability-boys had been like this when she was young, and they would be like this when she was old. One of them stole another's cap, and the shock of white-blond hair made Emmy wonder if her son would look like so many of the children who had passed through this yard. Her own hair still held its childhood brilliance-a gift from her grandfather, along with the blushing skin-while Birdie's had darkened to a tawny brown.
The basement door opened and out popped Svenja Sorenson, her russet-colored looped braids catching the morning sunshine and her pale blue eyes slicing up to meet Emmy's in a squinted, freckle-splattered smile.
"Oh, Emmy! Here you are!" Svenja dashed up the steps and squeezed into the smaller space to Emmy's left, rather than take the two feet of empty stair to her right. Emmy scooted over.
Emmy turned one palm up. "Here I am."
"Tell me everything-what's happening in the real world?" Svenja asked, smelling of strawberry jam. "Oh, how I would die to live in Moorhead, away from the gophers and milk cows and hay-smelling boys." She propped her dreamy, round face in one hand. "What are the boys like in your school? Have you made a new best friend?" Svenja was an only child with poor prospects who, Emmy imagined, would choose a life like so many of the women in the basement below, settling down with a local farm boy and losing her beauty slowly over time to successive babies and the layers of flesh they'd drape around her ample figure. Emmy had watched this progression plump the older girls in Glyndon, and she couldn't deny that marrying Ambrose might seal for her a similar fate. Emmy felt a sliver of solidarity as Svenja pulled her into a confidential hug. "You know, when we graduate this spring, I might just join you there," Svenja whispered.
"Oh, I don't plan on being in town for that long," Emmy said. "I'll be back around here for good before you know it."
Svenja shrugged, playing with a loose button on her threadbare cotton coat. "Don't you ever wish there was more than this?"
"Sometimes." Emmy looked Svenja in the eye. They had been baptized on the same day and confirmed together fourteen years later, but had very little else in common other than parallel time lines pointing forward from the step on which they were huddled. "Of course there's more out there, but there's plenty here as well. Do you?"
"Me?" Svenja shook her head with a light laugh before a cloud passed over her expression. "Can you keep a secret?"
"I'd rather not."
Svenja took her hand and leaned closer, though Emmy hardly thought that possible. "My mother says that I should marry John Hansen. Apparently he's been asking about me."
"That's good, right?" Emmy said, trying to sound cheerful. John was even older than Ambrose, and a longtime bachelor who lived with his aging parents on a disheveled sheep farm that smelled in a way that made Emmy roll up the window of the car on a hot day whenever they drove past. It didn't smell much better in the winter with them closed.
"They do have quite a few acres of beets. Enough to afford a field hand, who comes all the way from Texas every spring." Svenja attempted a hopeful aspect.
Out of kindness, Emmy chose not to speak the obvious-everyone knew John to be slow of thought, and beyond hiring himself out to work with the Branns' cows, his prospects were slim.
"I know he's not as worldly as Ambrose." Svenja sprang to her feet. "But I suppose there are far worse fates. I'm going in. You?"
"It's quiet out here, and too hot in there," Emmy said, pointing at the door.
"Okay, then. You know where to find me." Svenja sat on the iron handrail and slid down the length of it, just as they had done over and over again when they were small.
"God be with you," Emmy said as Svenja slipped through the cellar door. Soon enough Emmy would have to follow, tie on her apron, and clear cups, as she did every Sunday. Then they would all get into the car and drive the half mile to the Brann farm, make the polite small talk, eat the over-done roast, and wait for the details of her fate to be decided. How could she not at least try to take a step in another direction, one small step to know what she might be missing? Emmy found great comfort in her life with her family, but she felt as she sat and looked out on the graves of people she had known, and people who had known her whom she didn't even remember, that the distance between where she sat and the rectangle of earth awaiting her had precipitously shortened. Her foot itched and her stomach growled. The inertia of passive solitude stretched within her as a deep shiver began to rack her body. A scrim of dread descended as she imagined the next ten minutes: rejoining Ambrose, having another chat about the weather with Mr. Brann, and saying a ten-minute good-bye to the pastor as he slowly worked his hot, damp hand from her elbow up to her shoulder while he talked about the Apostle Paul. The one time Emmy had tried to evade his lavender-smelling breath, Karin had lectured her for no less than a week on the shame of having a daughter who couldn't show respect to a man of the cloth in God's own house.
The door below her opened again, and Ambrose stuck his head into the cold, smiling tightly up at her. "You're blue," he stated. "Come in."
Hearing his reined impatience, Emmy was startled to see that the Ambrose who stood at the bottom of the staircase was no longer the maypole that her childish imagination had wound itself around. Where once was a companion running, fishing, and hunting alongside of her, now there was a partner of a new sort: one whose lead expected a follow. His expression softened and he extended his hand with a coax of his fingers, a gesture whose familiarity pulled her away from Svenja's romantic whisperings of more out there. Emmy turned the wheel of doubt back one click in Ambrose's favor, took up the braces of her expected routine, and let the capricious notions of youth drift behind her in their gathering cloud.
* * *
"Are you nervous?" Birdie whispered to Emmy in the backseat of their father's old Coronet. The seats were threadbare, and the heat was so paltry that the girls had to spread horse blankets both under themselves and across their shared lap, causing a prickling sort of nonheat that they suffered without complaint. Emmy slipped her gloved hand into Birdie's and nodded.
"Terribly," Emmy said, looking out the window at the bleached monotony of the barren sugar beet fields. She swallowed hard against the dryness in her throat and took a deep, purposeful inhale, as though she were preparing to go underwater for an undetermined amount of time. Her parents sat on either side of her grandmother on the wide front bench seat, three bobbing heads in three different hats. As usual, Grandmother Nelson's tiny frame was draped in layers of black fashion from the late 1940s, the absence of color or style marking her desire to be deep in the ground, next to her husband of fifty years. Emmy tried to imagine what that amount of time would feel like, how she would look at her grandmother's age. Would she likewise shrink down like an apple-headed doll left for days in the sun? It was very possible that Emmy would outlive Ambrose, that she too would mete out her days in the middle of a son and daughter-in-law, being driven from one day to the next, and left to wander the rooms of an overlarge house with only the ghost of her dear dead husband to comfort her.
A forlorn smile pulled at Emmy's lips and she immediately fought it down as the car turned off the main road and onto the long, narrow drive edged with plowed banks of gravel-studded snow that led into the Brann farm. Towering skeletal oak trees marked the property on four corners, connected by stands of bushy spruce planted as protection from the relentless year-round winds that would aspirate fine layers of topsoil straight into any open window, impervious to screens and sometimes even silting its way right through solid windowpanes.
At the top of the drive, the path curved into a circle around two tangled box elder trees, the spot where Emmy had spent many a warm Sunday afternoon, either on a sturdy, gnarled limb or in the shady grass below. She could almost picture her own children up in these trees, spying on pirates or Indians, or maybe even little green men from Mars. This thought helped with the notion that she might someday be the lady of the enormous white Victorian house looming before them, the neatly trimmed green shutters and bare front porch giving Emmy the same old feeling of a thing untouched by love. Christian stopped the car in front of the big white slope-shouldered barn across the circle from the house, and Emmy crossed her fingers and made a quick wish: Please let me be happy here.
They were greeted at the door by Maria Gonzales, who had been both housekeeper and cook for the two men since Mrs. Emmaline Brann had died from consumption the summer before Emmy was born. It was from this tragedy that Emmy got her name-a sign of respect for the dead woman who had been Grandmother Nelson's best friend. Maria was the smallest grown woman Emmy had ever seen, and the tightly wound bun of hair at the crown of her head had gone completely white in the years since Emmy had first looked up at it, and then gazed down on it, fascinated by its pristine roundness. Before Emmy was born, Maria had been a betabelero alongside her husband and five sons, splitting the beet roots in the muddy spring fields and thinning the rows by hand, stooped to the ground for hours on end. Moving out of the field and into the house was a rare but fortunate event for a migrant, and Maria's cooking for the Branns bore none of the spice or color that Emmy had on occasion seen her take to the team of Mexican laborers who worked under Pedro on the immense Brann acreage.
Emmy removed her coat and slipped out of her snow boots, replacing them with the low-heeled church shoes that she had worn once a week, in every season, since her feet had reached their full size. The tight little group of Nelsons moved together into the formal dining room, where the table was set and Mr. Brann spoke in excited tones to the unfamiliar man Emmy had seen at church. She glanced at Ambrose, who stood behind a chair, ready to pull it out for her.
With the delicacy of a china teacup, Lida walked over to where the two older men sat, her arms extended in a warm welcome. "Why, I can't believe my eyes," she exclaimed, a childlike look of wonder brightening her face. "I didn't notice you at church."
The man stood and gently took her hand. "Dear Lida, you haven't aged a minute."
"Mr. Davidson was sitting in our pew," Mr. Brann said, a proud smile of ownership on his narrow face.
"Please everyone, call me Curtis," the stranger said, looking in particular at Lida, who seemed confused by his request. "With God's help, I've begun my mission anew." Emmy had never been invited to call a man of Mr. Davidson's age by his first name, and certainly knew better than to do so in front of her mother. His teeth gleamed in a way that nearly glowed, small in size, but straight and neat between his thin, moist lips. Emmy assumed they were false.
"We're glad to have you back with us," Lida said, looking as though she might topple over. "God knows your heart." She lifted one hand out to the room while holding fast to Mr. Davidson with the other. "You know my son, Christian, and his wife, Karin, of course. These are their girls." A small sound clipped her speech and she pressed her smile into a frown for a brief moment, the ghost of some lost memory haunting her face. "If you will excuse me, we'll go see what we can do to help Maria."
"Naturally," Mr. Davidson said, turning to Ambrose. "Which of these young ladies is Emmaline?"
Ambrose extended his arm toward Emmy, and she moved to his side. "Emmaline, I'd like you to meet Mr. Curtis Davidson," he said. "A good friend of our family."
Emmy glanced at her father, who stood watching from the foyer doorway, hat turning slowly in his hands. She felt coltish and clumsy as she walked closer to Mr. Davidson. He was slightly taller than Emmy, with a puffy face and deep-set eyes under thick brows, and thinning gray hair streaked with an unnatural yellow that he had combed back in slick rows. His suit was made from a brushed wool fabric that was fine and well fitted to his oddly shaped frame. As he lifted her hand in his powerful grip, a thick silver ring of diamonds set in a small cross shape on its flat surface flashed.
"Hello," she said, and he brushed the back of her hand with his lips, a gesture that drew a bright shock of carpet light between them. "Oh," she said, rubbing her fingers. She hadn't expected such strength from a man who had to have been almost as old as her grandmother, even though his corpulence gave him the features of a well-fed babe.
"You favor her," he said with a nod to the kitchen door. This surprised Emmy, as she had never been told that she looked like anyone in particular, and certainly never her grandmother, whose complexion and hair had been dark, like Birdie's. Perplexed, Emmy moved to her chair on the other side of Ambrose and smoothed her skirt across her lap, feeling the warmth of the heating grate under the table begin to melt her icy feet. She wondered why this man in particular would be invited on a day that had been intended for her and Ambrose. The stranger captivated the men, and Emmy couldn't help wondering if his cursory glances at her were some sort of measurement that she would somehow fail, or if he had the kind of influence over the Branns that would result in her having to prove herself worthy in ways she couldn't begin to attempt. If only the wedding could happen this May instead of next, then her feelings of being on uneasy ground might lessen. That kind of thinking was useless in the face of her mother-ordered schedule. Karin deemed a year-long engagement the most appropriate; abandoning any part of the plan was unthinkable.
The conversation among the men shuffled through Mr. Davidson's assessment of how the county had changed in the years he'd been away-apparently very little-which made Emmy wonder where he had been and why he seemed so curious about their family's small piece of Moland Township. Eventually, the topic turned to the usual Sunday dinner speculation of when the earth would thaw and the beet seeds would be sown, what the Farmer's Almanac had to say on the matter, and just how many cows on both farms were likely to give birth soon. Emmy fought the itchy sleepiness that comes from wearing layers of wool in an overheated house, drifting into the middle of the very important subject of calving.
"I've got a good deal of them here," Ambrose said. "We're going to be busy."
"We've only got the two, the dam and the heifer," Christian said, speaking for the first time since they'd arrived and causing Emmy to take careful note of the way he leaned back in his chair, while the three other men leaned forward. He picked a piece of lint from the tablecloth and rolled it between his fingers as though he found it more interesting than anything being said.
Lida entered on the tail of his words, her hands in quilted potholders carrying an oblong dish. "He's been after me to sell that heifer," she said to Mr. Davidson in a lilting voice, setting the steaming yams pooled with butter beside Christian's plate and speaking over his head. "But I tell him she's our fortune, the first piece of rebuilding our herd. We'll fatten up that calf and sell it for two older dams." Christian lifted his milk glass, but instead of drinking from it, he turned it slowly in the air.
"You always did know your cattle," Mr. Davidson said, drawing a finger across the edge of his chin. He looked at Emmy and then at Christian, who set down the glass without further comment as Lida patted at the back of her tightly braided and wound hair, as though she were wishing it had been set and combed for the occasion. Something about Christian's demeanor hung heavily in Emmy's mind, a subtle aloofness in his aspect that she hadn't specifically noticed before but felt quite certain had always been there, like a doily on the radio, or a layer of fine dust on a high shelf. It was almost as though he disliked the very idea of farming, and yet here he sat, pretending that its dissection was worthy of his consideration.
"Well, I think she's already showing signs of discomfort," Emmy said, attempting to assert a standing modeled after her grandmother's. If Emmy were to be the wife of this household, she wanted her voice to be heard. Her father met her gaze and raised an eyebrow in what looked like mild amusement. Mr. Brann cleared his throat.
"What have you heard about the new leadership in Indiana?" he asked Mr. Davidson. "Will you be heading down there?"
"Ah, yes," he replied, aligning his fork and knife. "They've got some fine ideas." He watched Lida disappear into the kitchen. "But I think the Lord needs me to tend his flock here, begin again."
Mr. Brann rubbed his hands together. "God willing, your voice will reach many eager ears," he said, and picked up a small silver bell, ringing it sharply. It was the first time Emmy had seen him do such a thing, and it made her wonder what else might happen in the course of dinner. He set down the bell. "Until then, please make our home your own."
"I thank you for the kind offer, brother," Mr. Davidson said, looking around the room as though he'd already unpacked his bags in the main bedroom upstairs. "I've always felt at peace in Minnesota."
Emmy cleared her throat. "I've never been to Indiana," she said, only to find her second attempt at entering the conversation treated with the same maddening silence from the men, and a discreet tap on the knee from Ambrose that caused embarrassed heat to flow into her cheeks.
Karin hurried into the room with a platter of roast beef, carved and ladled with thick brown gravy. She went directly to Mr. Davidson and served him first, treating him with the kind of reverence that made Emmy wonder whether Mr. Davidson might be a minister of some sort. Emmy looked at her father, who was tracing a faint pattern on the tablecloth with his fork. The other women bustled in with an assortment of side dishes, then retreated to the kitchen to fetch more. When Emmy stood to help, Ambrose placed a firm hand on her shoulder and guided her back into her seat without stopping the flow of detailed information regarding the scientific timing of animal insemination that he was in the process of imparting. She sat and clenched her teeth, filling her plate with whatever food was passed her way. If she wasn't going to be allowed to talk like an adult or help like a child, she could at least occupy her mouth with something that might keep her from spitting in frustration.
"Curtis, you will honor us with a devotion?" Mr. Brann asked once all the food had been dispersed, the women seated, and hands folded in practiced anticipation of a blessing.
Mr. Davidson stood and motioned for the rest of the table to do the same, grasping a hand on either side of him. An awkward moment passed as the Branns and the Nelsons took up hands. Emmy closed her eyes and bowed her head, Ambrose's palm moist on one side, Karin's cold and dry on the other.
"Our Dear Lord," Mr. Davidson broke the silence with a sonorous voice that sent a chord humming in Emmy's chest. "When King David prayed for You to 'wash him whiter than snow,' he knew that he had to first come to You with the cleanliness of repentance and hope of forgiveness for his multitude of sins. For we are all sinners in Your eyes until we know what we have done and repented for it. Show these Thy children in this loving home how to be whiter than snow on the inside as You wash them in the purity of Your love and in the Life Everlasting. For without Your glory and the promise of Your home in Heaven, we are but ants in the field. Bless this food we are about to enjoy through Your bounty, and the bread that we break in the name of Your Son, through Whom we are promised the Divine Retribution at the end of our days. Please let us be thankful for this great country in which we live, founded on Your behalf, and protected by our tireless patriots. Let us not take for granted our roles as protectors of God, country, women, and our religion, for there are those who would want us to cast aside Your mercy and Your ways for their own selfish needs. In Christ's name we pray. Amen."
Though she was used to far longer devotions, when Emmy opened her eyes she had to blink against the sudden brightness of the white tablecloth set with white dishes and napkins, the good silver, and the crystal glassware filled with fresh milk. She took her seat and watched her own hand lift the glass and felt the cool liquid as it passed her lips, but for the rest of the meal she neither relished the food nor attempted to interject her thoughts on the rumbling conversation, which centered mostly on the sugar beet harvest that had only just wound down from its early winter frenzy. How they could enjoy such endless minutiae on an annual topic-yield gains, soil astringency, labor contracts, upgrading of the discs and drills and tractors-bewildered Emmy, but it also made it easier for her to concentrate her efforts on chewing and swallowing. It became increasingly clear to her that the strange visitor's arrival had taken precedence over her own affairs, and as the ticking of the clock became ever louder in her mind, she felt a curdled mixture of relief and dismay that the day was no longer about her betrothal. The minute the last bite of food was eaten, three of the men stood and moved off into the parlor, which Maria went toward, carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. Christian lagged behind and turned to the foyer, pulled on his coat and walked out the front door. As the other women took the food into the kitchen, Emmy stood, stretched the nerves in the small of her back, and held still for a moment, trying to hear the men's conversation drifting through the open parlor doors, wondering what they were talking about instead of her and Ambrose.
"This new mayor over in Fargo," Mr. Davidson said in a deeper, less polite tone than he'd used at the dinner table. "Is it true that he's a Semite?"
Emmy stilled further, the tone of Mr. Davidson's voice raising the flesh on her arms.
"It is," said Mr. Brann. "We always said it would happen, but no one would listen."
"Emmaline!" Karin said, grabbing Emmy's arm hard and spinning her around. "You're needed in the kitchen."
Emmy's hands shook as she quickly lifted the emptied plates and utensils and retreated to the overheated kitchen with a well-practiced resignation settling over the uneasiness that was simmering in her soul.
Copyright © 2015 by Amy Scheibe
