Her mother’s all-consuming expression does not change.
“Let me help, Mommy.”
Joann is curt. “No.”
Her mother’s unpredictable moods and preoccupations make no sense, but Saffee knows when to be quiet. She retreats to her bedroom with a book under her arm.
As she works, Joann is at first pleased with the effect. The glossy shine of wet paint holds promise. The conductor strokes carefully, rhythmically, for almost twenty minutes. Then the smell begins to bother her. “Noxious.” She speaks the word, rolls it around in her head.
Last night’s dream troubles her. The North Dakota farmhouse and barn had in fact burned to the ground. There had been suspicion that her pa had arranged the fire and collected the insurance money. How else had he been able to purchase the fishing resort? She doesn’t want to think that her brothers had had something to do with it. She doesn’t want to think that it was arson at all. Arson was criminal. Rolf and Lars were just pathetic boys. Uneducated, overworked, buffoonish boys.
She plunges the brush into the paint too deeply. Paint rises up to the handle, irritating her. She lets it drip a moment over the can, but is too impatient to wait long enough, choosing instead to slop the excess onto the table, smearing it around into a thick mess. She tries to smooth it over with wider strokes. Like a flash of black lightning, the fire and smoke of last night’s dream return. Brushing becomes erratic. Perhaps, after today, there will be no more nightmares. When the tabletop is completely covered with its coat of gray, she kneels to slap the brush back and forth onto the legs. Ample and thick. Smelly. But with promise.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PSYCHOLOGY
It takes three days for the paint to dry, and for three days Joann studies its effect. It had been a bold thing for her to do, paint the Norway table, but she had felt a distinct compulsion to do so. And for two nights her sleep has been dream free.
It’s past time to find a place for the supplies. Again she pushes down on the cover of the remaining paint and carries it with the cleaned brush and canvas drop cloth to the basement. She will put them with Nels’s collection of assorted necessities on the shelving near his workbench.
She notices his rows of tools, neatly categorized, and is grateful that he is handy, can fix almost anything. It pleases her to know that her in-house repairman loves her, adores her. Or does he? Lately, ever since she told him she wants another baby . . .
Her train of thought is interrupted as she searches for a space to store the paint can. On the highest shelf there are a number of medium-sized boxes. She recognizes that two of them store Nels’s war mementos, but a third one startles her. An old wooden box, about the size of a bread box, tied with twine. How could that box turn up in her basement? Surely it isn’t . . .
Her heart thumps as she lifts it down. She unties stubborn knots and removes the slide-off lid. Newspaper clippings, receipts, bills of sale, tintypes of people she doesn’t recognize. She cautiously thumbs through until she finds a yellowed envelope. Scrawled across the front is “Certificate of Death, Clara Isabelle Kirkeborg.” In spite of painting the table, or perhaps because she painted the table, suddenly Joann fears more than ever that the certificate inside foretells her own fate. She pulls her hand away from the damning piece, as if it were on fire. She does not need to read it. She hastens to return the box to the highest shelf and covers it with the drop cloth.
Wouldn’t having another baby, a final baby, prove her stability, change her fate? Unlike what happened to her mother, this baby would not be taken away. And then the words hysteria and acute mania or words like them would never condemn Joann, would never blaze across her death certificate.
Lodging for newcomers is scarce in Miller’s Ford, so the Kvaales’ upstairs apartments bring in a steady income. The main floor share-the-refrigerator apartment is harder to rent until, just before the first snowfall, a shy, dithering gentleman named Henry Clement comes and stays for six months.
Mr. Clement is rarely seen, except at suppertime, when the family is seated at their new kitchen’s “breakfast” bar. Most evenings, after the “God is good, God is great, we thank Him for our food. Amen,” their tenant enters the kitchen with apologetic noises. His slight frame squats before the open refrigerator. He contemplates the items on his designated lower shelf while annoyingly clucking his tongue. It’s not clear whether he speaks to himself or to the Kvaales when he inevitably says, “I just can’t decide what to have for supper.”
From where Saffee sits, she can see there is usually little for Mr. Clement to choose from—perhaps a package of bologna, a carton of eggs, butter, and maybe a head of aging lettuce. As a rule, on his first exploratory visit, Mr. Clement chooses nothing and returns to his apartment, only to reappear once or twice before making a selection.