Blessing in Disguise Read online

  “Ja, I saw those two little ones of yours saying something in church last Sunday all by sign, mind you, and both of them giggling afterward. Made me want to know what they’d said.”

  “Isn’t it strange how God is taking what I, well, so many of us, thought was a tragedy of Grace not being able to hear and making it something beautiful. Well, strange isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.”

  “Amazing is more like it.”

  “I’ve started teaching Grace to say some words too. Her tongue and mouth work even though her ears don’t.” Kaaren reached behind and pulled up a chair. “I should be cutting rather than just visiting like this, but I have an interesting letter I want to read to you.”

  “Really?” Agnes squinted to get her thread in the needle. “Pshaw, this fool needle, the thread just won’t go in.”

  “Here, let me.” Penny took the thread and needle and, after one try, handed it back threaded. “It’s your eye’s, not the needle’s, fault.”

  “Don’t need to tell me that. Why do you suppose I sit in front of the window to sew nowadays?” She shook her head, shuddering at the same time. “Go on, Kaaren, read your letter.”

  Kaaren took the envelope from her apron pocket and extracted the thin paper.

  “Dear Mrs. Knutson,

  “It has come to my attention that you have learned of a way to help a deaf person communicate with those who can hear. My daughter was born deaf, and she is a handful, let me tell you. I feel so sorry for her and thought that we must prepare ourselves to take care of her all of her life. I am not complaining, mind you, just stating things as we see them. Would it be possible for you to teach us what you have learned? Sincerely . . .”

  Kaaren looked up from her reading.

  “My land.” Agnes paused in her stitching.

  “God is giving you a school.” Penny breathed the words, awe rounding her eyes.

  “A what?” Kaaren looked up from refolding the paper.

  “A school.” Penny’s voice grew more animated. “I can just see it—a school for deaf people to learn how to sign, adults too, not just children. Why, they would live right here in your school for a year, and then when they’ve learned it all, they’d go back home and teach others. Can’t you see it?”

  Kaaren sank down on a chair. “Oh, Lord, is this really what you have in mind?”

  “You always wanted to teach, and when Olaf took over the school, you were heartbroken. Remember?”

  “How could I forget?” Kaaren shook her head. “But that was a long time ago now. And I have all the children and Lars and the farm and teaching two afternoons as it is, and the . . .” Her eyes shone like fifty candles were lit behind them. “Oh, Penny, what if—” She choked on the words and started again. “What if this is really God?”

  Ingeborg and Agnes exchanged glances. “Who else would it be?”

  “But I don’t know anything about starting a school.”

  “Moses didn’t know anything about leading people either. He herded sheep.” Agnes took several more stitches in the quilt. “But we all know that if God is calling you to start a school, then you better keep your ears open and get your feet walking on the path so He can lead you. After all, if Bridget could get a boardinghouse, no reason why we can’t build you a school.”

  “That’s right,” Penny agreed. “It doesn’t have to be huge to start. And the students could help on the farm and with the cooking and all. That could be part of their training, just like in a real home. Say you started with only a couple of students. Right now the girls could teach them.”

  “Penny, you forget,” Kaaren objected. “Grace and Sophie are not even five yet.”

  “So, you been over to the parsonage to watch the little ones? Half of them can sign words already.”

  “And you have the schoolchildren learning to sign,” Ingeborg said. “God gave you a chance to practice. See, He’s been training you up, just like He promised.

  “What if . . .” Ingeborg paused, her eyes distant as she marshaled her thoughts. The others waited. “What if your school-age students could go to the regular school here, since the children will know how to sign?”

  “And the teacher will learn,” Penny said. “Pastor Solberg has already been learning with the children.”

  “Pastor Solberg will learn what?” Mary Martha joined their group.

  “To sign and to teach with signing.” Penny glanced up from her stitching.

  “Of course he will. Why?” Mary asked.

  “Because Kaaren is going to start a school to teach deaf people how to sign,” Penny said, as if all the plans were in place and everyone already knew all about it.

  “I think I may have to faint.” Kaaren leaned her head back against the chair. “Oh, Lord, what are you getting me into now?”

  By the time the quilters broke for dinner, all the discussion centered around the school.

  “We got a sack house to ship grain, a community bank, a school, a church, a boardinghouse, and an elected member of the Constitutional Congress. Now God is giving us a new direction.” Hildegunn Valders looked around at the seated women. “We women can do anything He sets us out to do. Now just to get the men to agree.”

  “Oh, they’ll agree all right, just might take some talkin’.” Mary Martha smiled and raised one eyebrow. “And ah know who to start with.” Chuckles rippled around the room.

  “Whoever would have thought God brought us all together for something like this?” Mrs. Magron’s voice held the awe to be seen on the others’ faces.

  “And I thought it was all because of the good farmland.” Ingeborg raised her hands shoulder high and shrugged.

  Kaaren leaned forward. “I know one thing for sure. We all better do a heap of praying about this . . . this vision we’ve been given. I mean, just think of it. Three hours ago all we wanted to do was make quilts, and now we’re thinking of starting a school for the deaf. Have you thought about where we are going to get the money and everything else we would need?”

  “God says He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Maybe we should ask Him to donate some.”

  “Better make it a whole herd, then.”

  “Or at least a prime breeding bull or two.” Ingeborg arched one eyebrow, her smile gathering a flock of chuckles from around the room.

  Chapter 11

  The Ranch

  September 3

  And I thought I was safe with this man! Augusta fled to the farthest wall.

  Kane pulled his pants on and turned to face the woman across the room. “Look, I know this must be sudden for you, but after all, we are married. What did you think would happen?” He stared at the face before him, the eyes round with horror, the mouth gaping like a fish trying to breathe out of water.

  Augusta tried to stifle a sneeze but failed. The second was worse than the first. And the third . . . If only I could understand what he is saying. Why isn’t he leaving the room? Oh, God, my God, what kind of trouble have I gotten into? You said you protect the lost, and right now I feel so far lost I don’t know if I’ll ever be found. When she sneezed this time, it felt as though the top of her head had blown right off. Her eyes ran, her nose ran faster, and she realized she had a headache that reached clear to her toes. Where in the world would she find a handkerchief? She took her gaze off the man to search for her carpetbag. And her trunk—where was her trunk?

  The sight of her open carpetbag by the side of the bed almost brought her to tears, if there were any way to differentiate between tears of sorrow and fear from the drops raining from her eyes and making her sneeze again.

  “Look, I’m going to leave now, but somehow we will find a way to talk with each other. In the meantime, I’m going to let you have this room, and I’ll sleep in the other if that will make you feel any better.”

  Augusta looked at him as through a veil of running water. What in the world was he saying? What difference did it make? She darted to her bag and dug in the side for a handkerchief. The fine cotton squa
re she pulled out had her initials embroidered in the corner, worked so carefully and with so much love by her mother. She choked back a sob and blew her nose. When would she ever see her mother again?

  The questions came as fast as the tears running down her face. No matter how hard she fought, they continued. When she heard the door close, she crawled back into the bed and sobbed into the pillow.

  A gentle hand smoothed her hair back and handed her a cup of water. The gesture to drink made perfect sense, and she did as told, gazing through bleary eyes into the dark depths of those of the Indian woman. Augusta drained the cup. “Mange takk.” She laid her hands together under her cheek and fell into a vortex that sucked her down into oblivion.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Kane said to Morning Dove out in the kitchen. “You’d think I attacked her the way she shrieked.”

  “I heard.”

  Yes, I imagine you did. They probably heard in the ranch ten miles south too. Kane sipped his morning cup of coffee and shook his head. “If I could only talk with her. Somehow I guess I just figured she’d speak English. After all, her letter was written in English. And look at her. I know she’s coming down with something, not surprising considering all she’s been through.”

  “She sleeping now.”

  “Good. Maybe when she wakes up, she’ll feel more like talking.” He snorted at his own words. “Sure, she’ll talk Norwegian, I’ll talk English, you can throw in some Mandan, and Lone Pine can add Kiowa. Then no one will make any sense whatsoever.”

  “She come around.” Morning Dove set a plateful of steak, eggs, and fried potatoes on the table. She went to the door and called her husband, then carried two more plates to the table, added a stack of toasted bread, and sat down. “You eat.”

  “Maybe I should take a plate in to Augusta.”

  “She sleep, you eat.”

  At Morning Dove’s insistence, Kane followed Lone Pine out the door after eating, and within minutes they were involved down at the corrals, where the man had been breaking the younger horses since finishing with the oat harvest.

  “Did you get a hailstorm here?”

  Lone Pine shook his head. “Rain, but grain is shocked, so not so bad.”

  “I asked Wilson to bring his thresher by when he can.” Kane studied the horses in the corral. “Let’s team that sorrel up with Queenie and get her going good under harness. Most of the rest I think the army will pick up. How many more to saddle break?”

  “Three. Not more’n green broke, though.”

  “I know, but Major Grunswold wants them before winter. Let him feed them instead of us.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  Kane shrugged. “Usually makes it around the first of October.” Kane studied the herd some more. “That makes three teams, four if we can get that sorrel ready, fifteen head for saddle—”

  “Sixteen. The paint is broke too.”

  “Okay. Then we can send the rest out to range. Anyone come by for that bay mare?”

  Lone Pine shook his head. “You want to winter her over? Might make a good broodmare.”

  “I guess.” Kane turned his back on the horses and looked toward the house. Is she still sleeping? Is she getting any sicker? “Think I’ll go work with the filly. Call me if you need me.”

  Kane spent an hour or more brushing the filly down, picking and trimming her hooves, and riding her out in the field beyond the barns where he could let her run, stop, turn, and lope again. By the time he finished with her, she wore dark patches of sweat on shoulder and flank, but she seemed to enjoy the work as much as he did, her ears flicking back and forth listening to his commands.

  When Morning Dove rang the triangle for dinner, he stripped off the saddle and hung it on the corral bar. The filly trotted around the enclosure, head up, neck arched, seeming to float above the dust. “Yeah, you’re the perfect lady’s horse, you know. I wonder if Augusta knows how to ride?” With that thought in mind, he headed for the house. If she didn’t know how to ride, he would find great pleasure in teaching her. Perhaps this afternoon he’d bring her down and introduce woman and horse.

  “She running fever,” Morning Dove announced when he raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough. I give her willow bark tea. She coughing.”

  “I got some whiskey in the medicine box. That with honey and hot water might help.”

  Morning Dove nodded. “You eat. I care for her.”

  “In a minute.” Kane quietly opened the door to the bedroom where Augusta lay sleeping. Sweat had curled her hair around her face, a face flushed with fever. While she’d thrown back the covers, now she lay shivering, so Kane pulled the sheet and quilt up over her shoulders. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he laid the back of his hand against her cheek. Hot, all right.

  Augusta moaned and jerked in the spasm of a cough.

  Kane picked up the water glass from the stand by the bed and, burrowing his arm around her shoulders, lifted her upright. “Drink this. It will help.”

  She opened her mouth when he touched the glass to her lips and obediently swallowed, all without opening her eyes. He found himself wishing to see the blue of her eyes, see again the laughter he’d caught several times on the trip home. Why hadn’t he just holed up and not let her get so soaked in the rain? He snorted and laid her back down. Hindsight. How often had he wished foresight was as wise.

  Back at the table he joined his two friends and the three hands. “We need to bring the cattle in from the hills so the major can take the steers too.” He chewed without paying attention to what he ate.

  “Tomorrow we go?”

  He thought about the sick woman in the bedroom. How he hated to leave her. A sigh worked its way up, only to be drowned in a sip of coffee. He’d never been a sighing man—until now. She had traveled clear across the ocean, then across the United States, only to be felled by illness once she arrived, thanks to his carelessness. Maybe she was sickly and had kept that a secret.

  He shook his head. No, she was the picture of health, tired but blooming when she stepped off that train. The hail and rain and pushing hard, that’s what done her in.

  By nighttime she was worse instead of better, thrashing about and mumbling in her sleep. Together he and Morning Dove bathed her, changed the sheets, and bathed her again, anything to cool the heated flesh. They forced liquids down her throat, laid cool wet towels across her body, and made her drink again.

  “I’ll take the first watch.” Kane moved the chair closer to the bed.

  “Call me.”

  “I will.” Kane stayed beside her, changing the cloths when they heated up, spooning liquid into her mouth whenever he could get her to take it.

  Sometime later Morning Dove appeared at his side. “My turn. You sleep.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Go.”

  When he woke in the early hours of the still-dark morning, she was no better, but then she was no worse either. She slept on. At Morning Dove’s insistence that she could handle the sick woman and Lone Pine’s admonition that they needed to bring in the cattle, Kane rode out with his hands and spent the day in the saddle rounding up strays.

  Roundup was something he’d hoped Augusta would enjoy too. The filly would have carried her mistress over the hills and down into the washes and valleys with a surefootedness born of growing up half wild. As usual, some of the cattle carried either no brand or a brand of one of the neighboring ranches. They brought them all in anyway, finishing the last miles in the wash of moonlight that gilded the ranch and tipped the horns of the cattle with silver.

  “She ’bout the same.” Morning Dove answered Kane’s question before he could ask.

  He washed up, then took over the chair by the bed. Augusta seemed to be wasting away before his very eyes. Her cheeks and eyes were sunken, leaving bones white against alabaster skin. When he took her hand, the fingers clenched his, hot and burning. He disengaged his hands and dipped the heated c
loths in cool water to lay them across her body again.

  Like this he had cared for his mother those long years ago. He felt the years slip away, and he was again fourteen, too old to be a boy and not yet a man. And his mother lay dying. His father had never returned from the war.

  Morning Dove broke his reverie. “You go eat. I care for her.” She gave him a gentle push toward the door. “Then you sleep, and I watch.”

  Good thing he could eat without thinking because his mind refused to stay in the present. While it had taken months for his mother to cough her life away, the final days went swiftly. Was this to be his reward for seeking a wife? Watching another woman die? What kind of God would allow that to happen?

  “Father God.” He buried his face in his hands, his knees planted on the rug beside the bed. “I believed you brought her to me, and now she is so sick. Please, I beg of you, come with your healing power and burn out the disease.” He could hear her coughing. All those days, weeks, and hours he had heard his mother coughing as she lay dying. The memory matched the sound from the other room. “Please, Jesus, be merciful to me, to her. I beg of you, be merciful.” He pulled his Bible from the shelf above the bed and began reading, searching for the promises that spoke of God’s healing power. “And with his stripes we are healed,” “Ask, and it shall be given you,” and “Lo, I am with you alway.”

  He fell back on his knees. “I believe, Lord. Help thou my unbelief.” He listened to the coughing, hearing Morning Dove murmur as she cared for the sick woman. Fear tasted like the most bitter of dregs. “Lord, you said ‘fear not,’ yet I am consumed by fear. Please forgive me.”

  He knew he slept when he awoke with a cramp in his thigh from kneeling so long. With a groan he pushed himself to his feet, glancing out the window as he tiptoed back into the other room. Must be the dark before the dawn, it was so pitch black outside. Not even starlight to brighten the darkness.

  “How is she?” He stared at the pale face of the woman in the bed, no longer flushed with the fever. Was that good or bad?