The Painted Table(33)

Your life will be different.

Saffee lives within a colorless present that has evolved from her lackluster past. She has never been creative enough to imagine a future that would be any different. But tonight she dares to think that God has.

Minutes pass. She studies April’s fully clothed, sleeping form. She slowly pulls up blankets to cover her.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO



RAGS TO RICHES





1954





While a second load agitates in the humming Maytag washer, together Saffee and Joann match sheets corner to corner and pin them to the taut rope lines Nels has rigged between basement rafters. This morning’s threat of rain prevents them from hanging clothes out of doors.

Joann demonstrates the art of pillowcase hanging. “First, be sure to shake out all the wrinkles,” she says, giving her sample a smart snap. She limps to a chair to adjust the unsightly rag bindings that have slipped to her ankles. Only because her varicose veins are “killing” her today did she enlist help. Saffee whips a pillowcase through the air as shown and glances at her mother’s ropy, swollen legs, then down at her own. She remembers a short, unexpected visit a year ago from Joann’s second-oldest sister.

“Saffee, you’ve certainly got your mother’s legs!” Maxine had chortled as she surveyed the hapless girl. Saffee’s eyes had narrowed. Why did Aunt Maxine, a virtual stranger, sound delighted by her observation? Was Saffee doomed to hobble around like her mother, legs tied with rags?

Maxine had been horrified when she saw the Norway table of her childhood sporting splotchy paint. The older sister demanded to know why Evelyn had passed the table on to Joann when she had expected to get it herself. “I never would have painted . . . Who would want it now, completely ruined?”

Saffee pins laundry to the line, hoping for a rare mother-daughter conversation as they work together. “Mom, I’m reading your book, Giants in the Earth,” she ventures.

Joann is busy rehanging crooked pillowcases. “I guess life was pretty hard back then.” Joann nods her head in agreement but does not elaborate. Saffee is hesitant to ask a pressing question—did Joann know anyone like the book’s character named Beret? Isolated Beret, tragically gripped by elements of a dark spiritual world until she was driven insane. Instead, she asks why her mother’s family left North Dakota for Minnesota.

Before answering, Joann circulates items in the rinse water with a stout laundry stick and begins to feed heavy wet towels between the washer’s slowly rolling black cylinders. “I guess mostly because of the prairie fire,” she says. “After that, the prairie was . . . inhospitable.”

Casting for safer ground, Saffee asks about washing clothes “back then.” She’s willing to talk about any neutral subject with her mother, but right now one seems hard to find.

“Well, let’s see,” Joann says. “I’m not sure if Pa and the boys took their clothes off at all in winter. Of course the girls . . . we did ours more often.” She picks up a basket of wrung towels. “Those awful brothers . . .” Her voice trails off . . .

“I tell you, I saw it. It was all over some ol’ rags she had! I think she was bleedin’ ta death or somethin’!” “Lars, you peekin’ at the girls in the outhouse agin? Don’tcha know nothin’?” “Sh-sh! Crazy Joann’ll hear. She’s unner da table down there . . .”

“What about your brothers?” Saffee asks.

“Well . . .” Joann pauses a moment, as if she’d rather not explain what she is remembering. “We’d hide our red-stained rags on thorn-bushes in the brush until they dried . . . could never get the stains out. The boys would find those rags . . . run after us with them, yelling and teasing. It was . . . so embarrassing.”

For a moment, Saffee is puzzled. When understanding dawns, she stares at her mother with incredulity. Her sense of modesty, even around her mother, prevents her from speaking.

Red rags? Oh, Mother. There will be no rags in my life. I will be different. Different.




As fall approaches, Joann once again becomes irritable. She is increasingly oversensitive to even the subtlest adversity, such as tenants “tramping overhead.” She fuels her suspicious nature by complaining, “Sometimes I see them lingering behind the French doors, peering through the lace curtains into our living room. I’m absolutely shocked at the things they say about us.”

While at her sewing machine, making opaque shades for the doors, she is heard to mutter, “Watching me . . . all the time, watching me . . .” At her insistence, Nels installs additional locks throughout the house.