The Painted Table

CHAPTER ONE



THE DRAFT NOTICE





1943





Joann looks down two stories from behind her gauze-curtained window. She watches absently as a twenty-ton behemoth snorts, grinds gears, and backs onto the sidewalk below. She often stands here, hoping to catch a cool breeze and eager for the first glimpse of her husband returning from the dairy. Even when it’s too early, just seeing the street that will carry his ten-year-old Chevrolet comforts her.

Two sooty figures hasten to guide a shiny chute toward an open basement window. The beast revs, squeals, and tips its midsection high into the air. Black lumps of coal rumble, plummet, then crash through the chute. Only when lusty screams come from the nearby bedroom does Joann return to the moment and realize that the scene below is odd. A coal delivery in June? This war! Nothing is normal anymore.

She rushes into the bedroom to shut the window beyond the crib. The frightened face of her almost-two-year-old pushes against the slats. Her mother snatches her up, holds her awkwardly.

“Don’t be afraid, Saffee. It’s just coal to keep Daddy’s little girl warm when winter comes.” She speaks without mother-to-baby nuance. The screaming does not abate. Joann places her on the double bed, sits down nearby, and bounces. “Sa-ffee, Sa-ffee, Sa-ffee.” The baby is not quieted.

She stops the bouncing and tries reasoning. “Maybe the coal men have to come now. They might be off to war by winter, just like . . . just like . . . your daddy.”

The next afternoon when the child awakes, she screams again. Sweat-soaked, she buries her head in her mother’s shoulder, hiding her eyes from the window, even though now the shade is pulled and the limp curtains drawn shut.

Why is her baby crying? “Sapphire! Stop!”

Joann hadn’t desired a baby. She had never been fond of babies. But she had wanted Nels—and having a baby came along with having him. Neither gave a thought to the fact that he would be a father who had been essentially fatherless, and likewise, she a mother who had been essentially motherless.

The nurse had pestered her to declare a name for the birth certificate. From her recovery bed, Joann thought about it for three days, until the evening she peered out at a deepening blue summer sky, its first stars twinkling.

Sapphire, that’s it. Like the sky. Or even better, Sapphira.

“What could be more romantic than being named for the wild beauty of a night sky?” she had gushed to Nels. He arched one eyebrow and scratched his head.

“Oh, Nels, you just don’t have a flair for the dramatic like I do.”

She was right. He was used to down-home names like those of his sisters, Bertha, Ida, and Cora. No highfalutin names, those. Still, he gazed at her with tenderness and pride, his wife-become-mother.

“You name ’er whatever you want, honey,” he said. “Just so you like it, that’s the important thing.”

The nurse wrinkled her nose. “Sapphira? Isn’t that someone in the Bible?”

“Oh yes! I think so. Probably a beautiful queen!” Joann chortled.

“No, Mrs. Kvaale, I sort of remember maybe she was a bad person.”

The hospital chaplain confirmed that the nurse was correct.

Later, when Joann noticed her baby’s eyes were indeed blue, and not knowing they would soon turn to hazel, she settled on Sapphire Eve. “It was meant to be,” she said. “When I saw that blue evening sky, I just knew.”

The ink was hardly dry when she regretted the choice, but couldn’t say exactly why. Perhaps it was the “fire” sound of it. Later, as she leaned over the bathtub, scrubbing stubborn stains from diapers and flinching at hungry cries from the crib, she decided that Sapphire was too fine a name for this baby. The beauty of an evening sky, indeed. She began to call her Saffee.

Every morning Nels leaves their small apartment before dawn to deliver glass bottles of milk door-to-door, returning in the late afternoon. The dairy job alone would be enough to cover their expenses, but the apartment building’s aging owner had inquired if Nels might assist with caretaking in exchange for rent. “It’ll just mean keepin’ the furnace stoked in winter an’ the front grass cut in summer, an’ a few other things. Nothin’ much,” Mr. Resslar said. Nels agreed, even before asking about the “few other things,” which turned out to be shoveling snow, burning trash, and trimming the front hedges.

Stoking the furnace only sounded easy. Every cold morning, which in Minnesota is almost every morning of fall, winter, and spring, Nels hurries into coveralls at 4:00 a.m. and heads for the basement. He shovels out yesterday’s clinkers from the gaping boiler belly and shovels in new coal until it again belches heat. The task takes almost an hour. He barely has time to clean up, slip into his whites, eat breakfast, and get to the dairy by 5:45 a.m.