Ch 146
Hilda grinned at me for the duration of breakfast taken around their dining room table. Every time I looked up or took a bite of food, she murmured my grandson with more pride than I had ever imagined anyone feeling toward me.
My grandmother's freely offered affection reminded me of Meg and how she had always responded to Alex from the first moment she had held my son. I thought of the way she kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, cuddling him on her lap as if he were the most precious child she'd ever seen.
It was not uncommon for me to walk into the parlor and find Meg simply gazing at Alex while he hit a kettle with a wooden spoon or otherwise entertained himself.
"You eat," Hilda insisted, nodding at both me and my brother.
"We are," Phelan said, making quite the production of lifting his fork to his lips.
Bright sunlight filtered in through the lace curtains and cast a warm glow into the dining room, revealing the details on the polished oak table. There was a pattern carved into the middle of the wood, consisting of a wreath of snow flakes, pine cones, ivy, and flowers.
"Did you make the table?" I asked Toke, noting the fine woodworking.
"He did," Hilda proudly answered, reaching across the table to touch her husband's hand. "From a tree he and his brothers cut down on his family farm."
"A long time ago," Toke added. "When I was good with my hands."
"A wedding gift that took a year to complete," Hilda told me. "I love it more every day."
"How long have you been married?" I asked.
"Forever," Toke answered under his breath.
Phelan looked across the table at Hilda and Toke, then me. He remained silent, and I assumed it was because he couldn't follow the conversation.
"Do you know how long they've been married?" I asked.
Phelan took his time chewing his food. Breakfast consisted of several types of bread, some sweeter than others, with various spreads and soft cheese, red grapes, and the largest sausages I'd ever seen, cooked and seasoned to perfection.
"I would wager they've been married since the beginning of time," Phelan said.
"Sixty-five years," Hilda proudly answered.
"Sixty-five years?" I said in German.
"As I said, forever," Toke replied.
"Precisely as I thought, little brother. Since the beginning of time," Phelan said.
Their replies, although spoken in different languages, amused me, and I couldn't help but think that my brother had continued to visit our grandparents twice a year simply because speaking to our grandfather must have been like speaking to an older version of himself–when they could understand one another clearly.
"What are you smiling about?" they both asked in their preferred dialect.
"You," I said to Phelan. "You are both quite similar."
My brother made a face. "Hardly."
"You and my brother share many qualities," I said to Toke.
The old man grunted. He attempted to hold onto his frown, but couldn't help but smile at my observation. "He is quite fortunate to take after me."
I nodded in agreement.
"Why are you nodding?" Phelan asked me.
"You take after our grandfather."
"I am much more agreeable," Phelan said. "Isn't that so, Grandfather?"
Toke looked up at Phelan and grumbled into his cup of tea.
"They are both stubborn, my dear husband and beloved Phelan," Hilda said to me. She stabbed a large fork into one of the sausages on a platter in the middle of the table and shoveled it onto my plate.
Phelan furrowed his brow. "Hilda, why are you stabbing a sausage while saying my name?"
Hilda merely smiled at my brother. "Heads made of stone, hearts made of precious gold."
"Are you conspiring against me, Kire?" Phelan questioned.
"Nothing of the sort," I answered.
"You are a good man," Hilda said in German to Phelan. "Same as your grandfather." She stood, grabbed the same fork as before, and rolled another sausage onto Phelan's plate.
"I could not possibly eat another bite," Phelan said as he sat back and patted his stomach. "My tailor will want a word with you as to why he must let out my trousers every time I pay you a visit."
"Eat anyway, make your grandmother happy," Toke said, gesturing for Lan to continue.
"I'll be sick. You'll have to confine me to the cow room," Phelan dryly answered, pointing at the curtain behind us, to which Toke nodded and chuckled to himself.
"My grandson is happier," Hilda said to me in Danish. "Happier than the last time he visited in the spring. I think he has found someone special," she said, giving me a knowing look.
"He stayed for a month in the spring," Toke grumbled. Despite his harsh tone, he didn't appear upset by the length of time my brother had stayed. "Fixing everything."
Phelan pushed his plate away and sat back, stretching his arms over his head. "Yes, because the window in the back was broken thanks to a nosy ko and the door was no longer properly fitting in place as the hinges needed to be replaced, and then there was the pump where a screw had fallen out and the handle was loose, rendering it useless as water sputtered out practically one drop at a time."
I blinked at my brother, surprised by his ability to follow the conversation.
"Reparere," Phelan said before I asked. "Close enough to French. I figured out the rest on my own."
"Heart of gold, see?" Hilda said, smiling at Phelan. She blew him a kiss to accentuate her feelings toward him.
"I was here for five weeks because someone had to show me how he would have repaired everything." His gaze slid to our grandfather.
"Me?" Toke jabbed his finger at his own chest. "No. You." Toke said, shaking his crooked finger at Phelan. He made several vocalizations that I thought were meant to imitate the sound of tools before he struck the table with his palm. He feigned insult and shook his head. "Hilda. Tell him."
"Be calm, Grandson," Hilda said gently to Phelan.
Phelan took a deep breath and cut off another piece of sausage. "I am eating sheerly out of anger, and I want everyone to know that."
Once my plate was half-empty, Hilda attempted to refill my portion, but I shook my head.
"You have filled my heart and my stomach, tenfold," I said.
My words delighted her. "My sweet grandson," she said as she struggled to stand and began collecting our plates. She teetered back and forth, groaning as she walked around the table. "You are too kind."
I frowned as I watched her balance one plate on her forearm and add cups and silverware to her burden. She was short in stature, but strong from her sixty-five years of working on a dairy farm with daily chores and upkeep. The decades of labor, however, had clearly taken a toll on both of them, and watching her struggle made me wince.
"Sit," I insisted. "I'll clear the table."
Hilda gasped. "No, my beloved, no you must sit and rest. I will gather the dishes."
"We've done nothing but rest for thirty-six hours on a train," I assured her. "I am fully capable of cleaning the table in gratitude for the meal you served. Please."
"I do not need gratitude," she replied. "You are my grandson. I care for you, as a grandmother is supposed to do for her family."
She attempted to take my plate from my grasp, but I shook my head and grabbed my grandfather's plate as well as my brothers. "I will carry them to the kitchen for you. I insist."
At last she conceded and motioned for me to follow her into the kitchen where she had me scrape the remaining bits of breakfast into two metal dishes. She cracked two eggs and tossed them–shells and all–into the metal bowls along with some other scraps she had on the butcher block.
"Here," she said, opening the back door. With a single whistle, two exceptionally large and shaggy white dogs raced from the barn toward the house where they paused, tails wagging as they waited for their food.
"Sif and Frya," my grandmother said, placing the dishes onto the ground. The chickens lingering around the back door scattered, pecking the ground further away as they squawked in protest of the intrusion. "Our loyal girls."
Within seconds the dogs gobbled up the offered meal, slurped water from a dented metal bucket, and raced back toward the barn while Hilda placed their dishes along with the rest of the items cleared from the table into a wooden bucket of soapy water.
"I am capable of caring for my family, Grandson," she said with her back to me as she tied her apron into place. "You may return to the table."
My lips parted and I feared my attempt at offering assistance was misconstrued as making her feel helpless or unneeded.
"My wife Julia," I said. "Long before she ever considered marrying me, she would serve tea and sweets for us to enjoy in the parlor. When she cleared the plates and cups after our meals, I sat in the parlor alone and listened to her working in the kitchen."
Hilda looked at me from over her shoulder. "A woman's place is in the kitchen."
"More so than mine," I agreed. "But my place was not sitting in the parlor staring at the wall, either."
Hilda furiously began scrubbing the dishes in the bucket with a rag. "This is my duty. I do not need your help, Grandson."
"Neither did Julia five years ago when we first met or even now if I am honest, but for reasons that are selfish, I still dry dishes almost nightly." I stepped toward her and grabbed a larger towel from a hook above the bucket and motioned for her to hand me the cleaned dish.
Hilda hesitated. Soapy water dripped from the dish and her aged hands. The veins protruded, her skin thin and wrinkled from a lifetime of use. She continued to scrub the plate that was no longer in need of scrubbing, avoiding my gaze.
"I do not understand. How is doing your wife's work selfish?"
"I dried dishes because I wanted to spend more time with Julia, not because she needed me or asked me to assist. And by standing beside her at the sink, rinsing and drying every cup, spoon, and plate, I acquired fifteen more minutes of her time that otherwise would have been spent sitting alone. To this very day I don't think she has suspected the true reasons behind my desire to dry cups and spoons."
Sometimes we worked together side-by-side in silence, simply enjoying each other's company. Other times she told me about the letters she had received from her sisters or how one of the neighbors shared a new recipe with her that she wanted me to sample. It didn't matter what was said or left unsaid; I cherished each minute Julia allowed me by her side–and once I began following her into the kitchen, I was certain by the way Julia smiled that she enjoyed my company as well.
Hilda looked up at me. "There is a stool," she offered.
I took the plate from her and dunked it into the clean water. "Would you like a stool to sit on while you wash the dishes?" I offered.
"No, the stool is for you. You sit, Grandson, and keep me company if you wish."
"I'll stand," I replied, drying the dish thoroughly before placing it onto a wooden rack. I waited for her to wash the next dish, and with a sigh, she scrubbed the next one and reluctantly handed it to me.
Three dishes in and she remained silent, furiously scrubbing each cup and plate before reluctantly handing it to me without so much as lifting her gaze.
I imagined Lisette and Apolline had taken my place drying the dishes for the week, the two of them giggling and chattering about dolls and frocks and whatever else little girls fancied. Knowing Lisette, she had probably made Apolline shriek with stories of bats and worms as well, topics I was certain the little rabbit of a girl would find unappealing.
Perhaps Claude had offered to wash the pots and pans, allowing Julia time to rest while in her delicate condition. Together, they would keep the household running smoothly in my absence.
"Your wife allows you to help her?" Hilda asked.
I smiled to myself, thinking of how amused Julia would be by my grandmother's words.
"She does. She has even allowed me to hang sheets on the line in our garden. Quite the scandal in Paris, I assure you."
At last my grandmother relaxed and handed me another cleaned dish without me needing to wrestle it from her.
"Men in the kitchen and laundry room," she said with a shake of her head. "The big cities of Europe are foreign to me. Too modern for my taste."
"You would greatly dislike the World Exhibition," I commented.
"What is the exhibition?" She blushed when she questioned me.
"Inventions of everything you could possibly imagine to make every day life easier." I glanced behind me and Hilda did the same. "There was a washing machine on display."
"What is a washing machine?" she asked.
"For laundry," I explained. "They are machines that scrub and mangle clothing so that it doesn't need to be done by hand. Instead of dedicating an entire day to laundry, the task takes several hours."
Her eyes lit up. "How…interesting. But unnecessary," she added quickly.
"I do hope there is no invention that would replace washing and drying dishes," I said lightly.
The conversation trailed off and we stood in silence beside one another. The soapy basin became clouded and I removed it, dumping the contents outside before new water was added with lye, the scent of the fresh mixture overpowering and acrid. She added a few drops from an amber bottle–distilled water with lavender, that helped make the smell less unpleasant.
"Gyda," Hilda said at last, keeping her voice so low that at first I thought I had imagined hearing her speaking. I thought of what Toke had said to me when we were in the parlor alone: they didn't speak of their three children.
"Gyda disliked helping with the dishes," Hilda said. "She said that she didn't like the way the water felt against her flesh. Too cold, she would say, and the bits of food floating around made her physically ill. One time she purposely broke all of the plates after super so that she didn't have to clean them." Hilda nodded toward the broom by the back door. "She learned her lesson, acting like a demon. I even made her wash every broken piece after she swept the floor with the broom I used to punish her."
My breath hitched and I swallowed, staring at the soap-filled cup my grandmother had handed me. I silently wondered how Julia would have punished Lisette if she had refused to help in the kitchen, if my wife would have raised her hand at our daughter, reprimanding her physically as my grandmother had done to my mother.
It was rare that Julia raised her voice and I couldn't imagine my wife striking any of our children with her hand let alone a broom. Quite frankly, I would not have allowed it within my home.
"I found Gyda in the barn hours later, cleaning the holding pens, which she seemed to enjoy," Hilda said, her voice quite even. "She had made herself sick from sobbing for hours and when she saw me, she collapsed and begged that I not make her wash the pots and pans left over from supper. I realized she was not attempting to be relieved of a chore she disliked, but she was physically incapable of performing. And I had punished her for it, for something that she could not control."
I could not recall ever seeing my own mother set a table or clean the dishes. The cupboards were always bare and I saw very little of her outside of her rocking chair, which made me doubt that she had ever made a meal for herself, let alone the rest of her family. She was a mystery to me, a puzzle box I'd never discovered a way to open. Part of me wondered if she had never made food for herself or her family because of how much the food stuck to the plates and floating in the water repulsed her.
"Your eyes remind me of her," Hilda said. She smiled to herself as she untied her apron and placed it onto a hook near the sink.
I wiped down the last of the silverware and returned the towel above the sink, unsure of what to feel, much less say in regards to what my granmother had told me.
Hilda snaked her arm around me and kissed my shoulder.
"My beloved grandson. I am glad to see Gyda raised such fine men," she said.
oOo
While Hilda decided to feed the chickens, I returned to the parlor where my brother and grandfather were making a list.
"You needn't shout," Phelan said. "The volume of your voice doesn't make it any easier for me to understand you."
Toke sighed to himself and repeated his words while looking at me.
"He said there are a few bricks in the chimney that need to be replaced or repaired, but the ladder isn't safe," I said to Phelan.
"What happened to the ladder?" Phelan asked.
To my surprise, our grandfather slouched in his chair with his arms crossed, appearing almost childlike in his seat.
"May I ask what happened?" I gently inquired.
He sneered and remained silent.
"Toke," Phelan firmly said. "What happened to the ladder?"
"The ladder broke when I climbed down," he said in Danish to me.
"You fell from the ladder?" I asked, quickly informing my brother in French.
Phelan was immediately on his feet. Hands on his head, he stormed off and muttered to himself. "You cannot be on a ladder, Toke, you are now eighty-six years old and it's too dangerous."
"What is your brother complaining about?" Toke asked me.
I sighed. "He is not complaining. He is concerned for your well-being, as am I." I said as diplomatically as possible.
Toke grumbled to himself that he didn't need our concern.
"When did you fall?" I asked.
He looked from me to Phelan. "Two weeks ago."
"How far up on the ladder were you?" I asked.
"Halfway," he answered.
My breath hitched. "Were you injured?"
He glared at me, his nostrils flared, and touched his elbow again. I immediately turned my attention to the part of his arm he gingerly touched and assumed he had injured his arm.
"You fell on your left side?"
"I caught myself. I am fine. Do not tell your brother. He will be angry."
I inhaled. "If I do not tell him, he will be angry at both of us."
"Kire," Phelan said. He stood with his arms crossed behind our grandfather's chair and nodded. "Tell me."
"Don't tell him," Toke said through his teeth.
"Kire," Phelan insisted.
Either way I chose, I would not win their favor. I sighed to myself.
"He fell two weeks ago," I mumbled. "Halfway up the ladder and onto his left side."
My grandfather groaned and my brother threw his hands in the air and muttered to himself.
"You are impossible," Phelan said. "Absolutely impossible."
"Do not tell your grandmother," Toke warned, shaking his finger at me.
"Do not tell me what?" Hilda asked as she walked into the parlor from the kitchen. She stared at the three of us and nodded to Phelan, asking him the same question in German.
Toke struggled to his feet and shuffled across the length of the room and out the front door, which he slammed behind himself.
Once he was gone, neither of us said a word and Hilda shifted her weight, her expression filled with disappointment.
"The ladder, yes?" she asked me.
"You were aware?"
"Of course," she answered. "I saw him on the ground, writing around. He was only two steps from the bottom when he fell."
"He said he was halfway up," I said. I relayed the new info to my brother, who still shook his head.
"No, he was almost to the bottom and the wrung broke. It was cracked already and he knew better. And of course he didn't know the distance and acted as if he had fallen from the roof of the house."
"You checked on him, then?" Phelan asked.
Once I translated my brother's inquiry, Hilda shook her head.
"No?" my brother and I asked, both of us aghast.
"No, Sif and Frya sniffed him and didn't seem concerned."
Phelan's eyebrows nearly shot into his hairline. "The dogs were your only evaluation? Have you gone mad?"
Hilda shrugged. "He was on his feet a moment later. It was an old ladder–almost as old as Toke," she said. "His pride was hurt more than his bones."
"He should not be on a ladder," Phelan firmly said.
I nodded in agreement. "We do not believe it is in his best interest to continue climbing ladders," I said.
"And the physician should have been called at once to make certain he didn't crack a rib or his skull. The two of you are absolutely impossible and I implore you both to think before you dismiss something as gravely serious as falling off a ladder," he said, spitting out each word.
I'd never seen my brother as furious as he was standing several feet away with his arms crossed and a vein in his forehead protruding. His posture was rigid, his eyes the dark gray of smoke, and features contorted. For the brief time I stared back at him, I was stunned by how he looked exactly like our father in a moment of unbridled rage.
"Lan," I said under my breath, taking an instinctive step away from him.
Phelan blinked. He inhaled a sharp breath and dropped his shoulders. "Tell her what I said. Please," he said without looking at me.
I paraphrased his words in an attempt to keep the conversation civil and asked Hilda to nod in agreement, which she thankfully did.
"His skull is fine," she assured me. "And tell your dear brother that he knows there is no controlling that man," she said.
I repeated her words with a bit of reluctance and Phelan rolled his tongue along the inside of his mouth.
"I've heard enough. I am stepping outside," he announced before he stalked toward the front door and disappeared.