The Painted Table(75)

Sitting on the floor, she shuffles through mementos that mean little to her now.

She finds her sixth-grade report on the Battle of Gettysburg, with Mr. Mason’s affirming inscription, “You made me feel like I was there!” The words still make her feel warm. She replaces the paper and pushes the box under the bed.

She finds that the second box is mislabeled. Perhaps once it did hold April’s keepsakes, but now it contains her mother’s spiral notebooks. Over a dozen of them, filled with poems, short stories, and who knows what else. It was logical that her dad left what he thought was April’s box with Saffee’s. Reading the notebooks would be a journey into both her mother’s joys and angst. Someday. She shuts the box and shoves it, too, under the bed.

The third box is the one made of wood they had found in the basement. Inside are newspaper clippings, turned brown, dating from the 1920s and ’30s. Beneath them, dating from the late 1800s and into the next century, is a pile of yellowed papers, most of them legal documents.

She finds several birth certificates, vaguely recognizing the names of her mother’s siblings. One is for Joann Mabel Kirkeborg, born March 4, 1913. There is a manifest from a cargo ship that lists her grandfather, Knute Kirkeborg, age eighteen, as a worker on board.

And here is her grandparents’ marriage license.

She opens an envelope that contains her grandmother’s certificate of death.

“Clara Isabella Kirkeborg . . . Cause of death . . . exhaustion from hysteria and acute mania. Place of death . . . State Hospital for the Insane, State of North Dakota, May 4, 1920.”

Saffee’s heart thumps. Hysteria? Acute mania? Hospital for the Insane? The words glare like neon lights. Her mother and her grandmother? Insane? What was that term she learned in psychology? Evolutionary lineage. For an instant, for only an instant, her chest tightens.

But God.

God has promised her—her life will be different. She must believe that this box contains a view into other people’s lives, not hers. At the same time, she is saddened to learn about her grandmother. Exhaustion would be expected after bearing, how many children? Nine? Maybe there were also miscarriages. Joanne had told her that her mother’s last baby, a girl, was given away. What happens to a mother who carries a baby within her body and then it is taken from her? What might she be driven to? In her grandmother’s case, it seems to have been mania.

Another question burns within Saffee. Had her mother ever looked into this box? Had she read the “Certificate of Death of Clara Isabella Kirkeborg”? She probably had. If so, maybe she concluded that mental illness was very likely her destiny also.

Saffee goes to the kitchen, pours a glass of iced tea, and sits for a while on the back step. Perhaps Saffee’s grandmother Clara was at wit’s end trying to love and care for all of her brood. She thinks about her mother’s decline into darkness and kinship with the table. By default, perhaps Joann was unloved, or at least felt so. What could give greater pain? Pain so deep it could never be covered over, least of all by paint.

Painting was Joann’s intentional action, as Jack calls it, against powers that beset her. But painting the table hadn’t spared her from mental illness. Has Jack been wrong?

Words of comfort from the past return. I will lead you and guide you with my eye upon you.

Saffee concludes that action in and of itself is not the answer. It must be the right action. Her mother’s painting was done in torment. It created ugliness—for the painter, and for the painted. Saffee’s work, in contrast, is to search for goodness and to restore beauty.

Her perspective renewed, she goes back to the bedroom, wondering what else is in the old wooden box. In a yellowed paper folder, she finds six fragile pages printed in Norwegian that look to have been torn from a magazine. A faded photograph of a weathered, somber-looking man and woman appears on the first page. The names beneath are Anders and Maria Kirkeborg. She recognizes them as the names burned into the underside of the Norway table, her grandfather Knute’s parents. Another generational jump backward, to what?

Saffee looks into the rugged face of the man who, in a sense, she already knows. A sensitive artist, the skilled craftsman who many years ago labored to make a table. She hopes that the wife beside him was a good woman, a woman of strength and wholeness. The pages appear to be biographical. If only she could read them.




Seated at the circulation desk, Saffee looks up to see a graduate student she recognizes in line. She rightly assumes that Leif Bergstrom is waiting to check out research materials on plant pathology, as he often does. She’s been hoping for days, ever since she opened the old wooden box of papers, that he would show up again. It’s Saturday morning, a time she usually doesn’t work, but today she agreed to substitute for a coworker and now is glad she did. The folder, with the article featuring her great-grandparents, is in a paper bag at her feet.