The Painted Table(82)
“That would’ve been impossible, and I bet it won’t be long ’til they laugh about it.”
Encouraged more than he will ever know, Saffee smiles in the dark.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
RAINBOW HEART
By late August, fall threatens an early appearance. The garage floor feels chilly. One day the cap from the paint remover can slips from her stiff fingers and rolls under the table. Retrieving it, she catches a glimpse of the words burned into the underside. She gets a pencil and tablet and carefully copies them. More Norwegian that needs translation, but Leif Bergstrom has not reappeared.
That evening she and Jack carry eight discarded cement blocks from the back property line into the garage. Jack, with Bill’s help, lifts the table onto the stacked blocks. Saffee watches them, disappointed that her project is going so slowly. At least now she can work from a chair rather than the floor.
While Bill and Jack are discussing the upcoming football season, Saffee hears the phone ring and hurries inside to answer. She learns that Mary Scott is sick. Can Saffee teach the Bible lesson to the fifth graders on Sunday? She feels obligated to say yes, even though she too will be ill, from nerves, long before the class begins. So far, she has only helped by playing the piano and assisting with crafts.
Each morning during the remainder of the week’s tedious work on the table, she has plenty of time to think about teaching the Old Testament story of Joseph. The thrust of the lesson, according to the teacher’s guide, is forgiveness, and Joseph had a lot to forgive. She runs through the injustices he suffered: sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused of assault by his employer’s wife, thrown into prison for years, forgotten by man—but not by God.
She considers the summary points she’ll make: Joseph persevered in hardship and was greatly honored; he forgave his brothers; he understood that his trials were part of God’s plan for the preservation of nations.
Saffee wants the children to know that God can give them, like Joseph, a good future. That with Him good things can come from bad. Or, as the lesson book says, beauty from ashes.
As she slops more chemical remover on a paint-encrusted area, she thinks of the blessings that have come into her own life. This table, for example. It could have become ashes when flames whipped across the prairie. If it had burned, her mother would not have survived, and she and April would never have been born. The table endured considerable misuse, yet, like Joseph’s honor, its former beauty is being restored.
By the time Sunday morning comes, Saffee has thought a lot about Joseph the overcomer.
Warmer weather returns. Gail sits in her usual place in the late summer sun. Saffee realizes she’s never told her neighbor about the words inscribed on the table’s underside. She crawls beneath and tries to read them out loud. The foreign sounds make them laugh, and they wonder about their meaning. Saffee says when she was young she imagined the words chronicled Viking conquest and buried treasure.
“No way,” says Gail. “It’s prophetic. It says”—she puts her hands around her mouth like a megaphone—“‘There will be eight Andrews children eating at this table.’”
“No way yourself, Gail, but I guess it’s no surprise you think like a mother,” Saffee says, glancing at Gail’s ever-growing belly that at the moment has a naked baby doll perched precariously on its slope. Jenny Rose, the doll’s barefoot owner, scampers after yellow butterflies in the grassy front yard.
In privacy, Saffee has catalogued the reasons she feels negative about having a child. Her baby sister, April, had taken Saffee’s place in her mother’s heart. In various ways, babies had complicated Joann’s life. Her mother suffered an early death because of the tragic circumstances of her last baby. Then there was Saffee’s distasteful memory of Joann begging Nels for a baby, long after there was hope of offering another child a normal home. No, having a baby holds little appeal, but there had been no reason to share why with Gail, or even Jack.
Suddenly Jenny Rose bounds into the garage, throws her arms around Saffee’s neck, and proclaims, “I love you, Miss Saffee!” Saffee, kneeling on the cement floor, wire brush in hand, is so startled she sinks backward onto the cement and the little girl settles into her lap.
“Oh! Jenny Rose!” Saffee has never held a child before, never felt a child’s hug. The little girl is warm and soft and smells of fresh air. “Oh my!” is all Saffee can say. As quickly as the little sprite had come, she is off to twirl and play in the summer sun.
Gail wears an amused expression, then nods toward the table. “Saffee,” she says, “when I look at this big wonderful table, I can’t help but think about what its future will be like.”