FROM THE STORM COUNTRY

CHAPTER ONE

November blew cold, flinging a tatter of storm clouds across a dirty gray sky.

“Looks like God’s wife is hanging a lot of ragged clothes out to dry,” Pauline Volkenborn remarked, looking at that sky through the window of the Volkenborn kitchen one Saturday. An expanse of winter-blighted fields; grandeur of space undulating to the horizon met her eye. The North Dakota landscape inspires little poetic imagery, especially on a gray winter day when the wheat has been harvested. Of the descriptions that come to mind grandeur of space is perhaps the most flattering.

A half-mile from the weather-beaten ranch house of the Volkenborn family, the weather-beaten ranch house of their relatives—Carl and Sophie Richter presided over a quarter section of wheat land adjoining the Volkenborn acres. Beyond the Richter ranch, on the edge of the horizon, lay the town of Goshen.

“God doesn’t have a wife,” Pauline’s sister, Betty said. She was sitting at the kitchen table working out problems from the algebra book, which her aunt Sophie had given her.

“How do you know he doesn’t? He had a son, didn’t he? If God had a son he had to have a wife,” the thirteen-year-old Pauline reasonably maintained. She moved closer to look over her sister’s shoulder. “Why are you always studying? You don’t go to school, but you study more than I do.”

“You know why I don’t go to school.”

“You have to stay home and take care of mother because she’s sick. Well, not so much sick as—what?”

“Diabetes,” said Betty shortly. “It plays mean tricks on her, and I don’t mind staying home missing school since Aunt Sophie has undertaken my education.”

“That’s a fancy way of saying she teaches you at her house. Sophie being a schoolteacher before she had her baby makes it handy for you.”

“I’d rather go to school, if the truth be known.”

“You can probably go next semester. Mama’s sure to be feeling better by then.”

“I hope so,” Betty said, but privately she doubted that her mother would ever live a normal life free of pain and weakness.

Once she had cooked for the harvest crews when they came to the Volkenborn ranch to thresh the wheat. Betty remembered her singing as she rode horseback around the three hundred acre ranch. She seldom sang anymore.

“Aunt Sophie says I can probably graduate in June if I go back to school next term. All I’ll have to do is pass the mid-term exams.”

Roland’s the lucky one with that nifty clarinet,” Pauline said. “Do you know what Roland wants to be when he grows up?”

“An Orchestra leader?”

“He wants to be a minister.”

“A minister? I thought he wanted to be a musician.”

“He told Elden and me that he thinks he’s got a call from God to be a minister,” Pauline stated. “Elden just laughed at that. He said that Roland just figures that being a preacher is a nice easy job where you get to talk to a lot of people dressed up in their best clothes, and they can’t argue back at whatever you tell them.”

“I think he’s got more talent for music than for preaching,” Betty said.

“Maybe he can do both.”

The door opened before Betty could reply. Her teenage brothers, Roland and Elden, entered the warm kitchen. Both boys went to the stove to heat the chill from their bones. In fur hats and sheepskin coats, both looked larger and bulkier than they really were, and in that economy of weight and height the boys conformed to the family pattern.

“Dad’s out there drinking in the barn, and I saw where he hid his whiskey bottle. Here it is.” Roland drew from his coat pocket a flat bottle half full of amber liquor and held it up to the light. “This filthy stuff,” said Roland wrathfully. “This poison! This is the stuff that drives him half crazy. Well, this is one drink he won’t get.” He went to the sink, unstoppered the bottle and poured the contents down the drain.

The girls watched, somewhat horrified and a little frightened at what he had done. To Pauline it was tantamount to a pupil at school kicking the principal.

“Roland, you’ll get in bad trouble with Pa.”

“I don’t care. I’ve seen what it does to him. It’s for his own good I poured it out. I wish the law would arrest that bootlegger of his and throw him in jail. No wonder the law forbids people drinking this stuff.” He dropped the bottle into his pocket. “I’ll throw it in the trash.”

Betty said calmly, “Roland, you know how Dad is. He’ll be looking for that bottle where he stashed it. If he suspects that you took it he will beat on you, you know he will.”

“Okay then.” The boy turned to face her. “Maybe it’s time I stood up to Dad—and ran.”

“Very funny.”

“What else can I do but run if he finds out I poured out his precious hooch? I can’t fight him, and I sure won’t let him beat on me.”

“Why can’t you fight him?” Elden said.

“Oh, Elden,” Betty said impatiently.

“No, I mean it.”

“For one thing it’s not respectful to fight one’s own dad,” Roland explained. “Besides, he could beat the pants off me with one hand tied.”

“Getting licked in a fight and getting licked like a little kid isn’t the same at all,” Elden averred.

“Elden, you’re getting mighty brave about what I should do. Why don’t you go sit down while I try to figure this thing out?”

“There’s nothing to figure out,” Betty said. “You did the one unforgivable thing that will make Dad tear you limb from limb if he finds out you did it. But maybe he won’t find out. No way he can really know what happened to the bottle.”

“If he asks me pointblank, I’ll tell him what I did with it,” Roland said calmly.

“Oh that’s crazy.”

“He’d know someone took it. He’d take it out on all of you if I didn’t confess. Anyway, I didn’t do something to be ashamed of. He’s in the wrong, not me. He’s in violation of the law having that whiskey on the place. And we could eat better if the two bucks he spends every week for whiskey went for food instead.”

“We eat good enough,” Betty said in all fairness.

“We could eat a lot better.”

“I guess Dad figures he deserves his liquor for all the hard work he does.”

“So you’re on his side now?”

Elden spoke up, “Anytime now he’s going to bust through that door yellin’ who stole my drinkin’ likker?” The boy parodied a wrathful roar and charged at his brother. “Roland you dirty rat, you stole it! I’m gonna beat on you until you howl like a dog.” He produced a menacing growl and wrestled with his brother.

Roland fended him off, half laughing. The other kids watched with glum smiles and weak snickers, but the ominous situation was too real to be dismissed so lightly.

“Okay, okay,” Roland pushed his brother away. “Now look, all of you. He may not look for that bottle until late tonight when he goes to get a snort before bedtime. When I tell him, I want a clear escape route to the door. I’ll go stay at Uncle Carl’s tonight and won’t come back until I’ve had a talk with him and he promises not to lay a hand on me.”

Their mother came into the kitchen. “What’s going on? All the talk. I could hear it in the bedroom.”

“Sorry if we disturbed you Ma,” Roland said. “If there’s any trouble tonight with Dad don’t worry about it. It’ll work out okay.” He left the kitchen.

She looked after him. “What did he mean by that?”

The others exchanged withdrawn looks.

“Nothing, Mom,” Betty said. “He did something Dad might not like. Has to do with a bottle of whiskey Dad had stashed in the barn.”

“You’ll hear about it later when they get into their big argument,” Pauline added.

“It’s one argument Roland is going to lose,” Elden murmured as he left the kitchen.

Betty gave Pauline a nudge. “Don’t tell,” she whispered.

Ben looked for the missing bottle shortly after supper. Not finding it behind the board where he had hidden it, he knew exactly why it was not there. “One of the kids took it.” He walked in barely contained wrath across the yard and into the house.

Pauline and Betty were washing and drying supper dishes.

“I’m going to ask you both one question.” Father Ben swept the girls with a scathing look. “And I want a straight answer. Did either of you take my bottle of liquor from the barn?”

Betty gave him a carefully rehearsed answer. “No, Pa, I didn’t take it.”

“Pauline?”

“I didn’t—I didn’t take it.”

“Do you know who did?”

Both shook their heads mutely.

“Roland! Elden! Come in here!” Ben bellowed his summons.

In the front room, Roland looked at his brother. “Go on, tell him. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll go stay with Uncle Carl and Aunt Sophie tonight.”

At the Richter house Roland explained to his relatives, “Dad’s been drinking on and off yesterday and today. You know how he gets when he’s drinking. Snarling and sarcastic and giving us a rough time. It started out like that today so when I saw where he’d hid his bottle in the barn, I just decided we’d taken enough of it from him. So I smashed the bottle after pouring out the whiskey. And now he’s mad at me. Very mad.”

“You did the right thing, and you did right not staying there to take any abuse. Ben’ll cool off by tomorrow. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t lay a hand on you. ‘Fraid I can’t protect you from a tongue lashing, but a few hard words never hurt anyone.”

“Elden suggested I fight back if he started beating on me, but I can’t do that. Better to run from him that fight back.”

“That’s right. You must never hit back at your father. Besides, you wouldn’t have a chance. Wait a few years before you take on Ben Volkenborn.”

It was early in the evening when Roland came to the Richter house, and it promised to be a long one. It was the first occasion Roland had spent any length of time in his uncle’s house since Carl’s son, Luther, had gone back to school. Roland found himself at loose ends, tense and restless and worried. No regrets for his impulsive action with the whiskey entered his thoughts. He had poured his father’s liquor down the sink because it had seemed like a good thing to do. He declined to weaken the integrity of that act by regrets.

Carl suddenly laid aside the magazine he was reading.

“Look. Roland, let’s get this over with tonight. If you put it off until morning you’ll just worry about it all night. It’s like putting off a visit to the dentist.”

“Will you go over there with me?”

“Of course I will. I’ll explain your side of it and I’ll make him promise to leave you alone. Most likely he’s cooled off by now.”

While Carl went for his hat and coat, Sophie gave the boy an encouraging smile. “It’ll be all right, Roland. You were in the right.”

The door opened. Betty and Pauline entered the kitchen.

“Dad wants you to come home now,” Betty explained. “He says he won’t punish you—at least not physically—for pouring out his whiskey, but he wants to talk to you about it.”

“He promises not to beat on me? He said that?”

“Yep. He was holding your clarinet when he said it.”

“Why did he have my clarinet?”

“I think he’s not going to let you play it for awhile.”

“He practically said so,” Pauline said.

“I am eighteen years old,” Roland said grimly. “And he’s still treating me like I am ten. I think maybe it’s time I got out on my own. If he takes my clarinet from me I’ll tell him so. Instead of milking cows and planting his wheat, I’ll be far away making music.”

“Dream on, boy,” Betty said. “No, I don’t mean that. I’m sure you could make it just fine on your own. But don’t do it, don’t throw that up to Dad. You won’t will you?”

He shrugged and pulled on his coat. “Let’s go see what he has to say.”

Carl and Sophie looked at him with sympathy and concern.

“One thing I won’t do is apologize,” Roland added as he and his sisters went into the cold night.

“I think he did just right in pouring out the liquor from Ben’s private stock,” Sophie told her husband. “It’s not only illegal to have stuff but it’s a stupid waste of money. Thank God you have never acquired a taste for it.”

“You’d have been on me like the county sheriff if I dared to take a snort of two,” Carl said. “Between the two of you, I have managed to stay sober.”

“You’ve been sober all your life, Carl.”

“Not quite. I never did tell you about the celebration of my division on Armistice Day and night, 1918. That was a carouse I’ll never forget.”

“Well, you had a good excuse that time,” his wife conceded.

In the Volkenborn dining room, Betty, Elden, Pauline and their mother watched anxiously as Roland emerged from an angry session with his father in the kitchen.

He walked past them without a word, slamming the door behind him as an expression of his displeasure. Betty hastened after him.

He was in his room. She entered quietly. “How did it go? What happened?”

His angry reply burst upon her sympathetic ear. “Dad says I can’t play my clarinet until Christmas. He’s got it under lock and key.”

“I’m sorry, Roland. But didn’t I tell you that you’d get in trouble with Dad if you made free with his booze? I warned you, Roland.”

***

In mid-December, the weather took a sudden turn for the worse. The temperature dropped, the bleak gray skies came closer to the bleak, whitened fields, it seemed. Unceasing winds howled. A walk into the wind was physical effort, a leaning into it as if hundreds of miles of prairie pushed the buffeting pressure.

“It’ll be a white Christmas,” said Betty, looking at a slanted drive of the season’s first snow.

“It’ll be a windy one, too,” Pauline said.

The Volkenborns and Richters milked cows as a source of additional income. Carl and Ben jointly owned a Hereford bull names Sam When they had purchased Sam, Carl had taken care to pay more than half of the full price, thereby giving himself nominal control of the animal.

Sam was 1500 pounds of bullish animosity toward everything alive except a cow. The bull was usually boarded at the Richter place. When one of his milk cows came into heat in mid-December, Ben knew that he would have to make up with Carl if he wished to obtain the services of Sam.

The winds had relaxed to the pressure of a strong breeze. Betty and her uncle stood at the fenced-in pasture. “Sam’s a pretty old bull, isn’t he,” she said to Carl, watching the big animal on a long chain.

“Not too old. When he gets too old to do the job he was made for we’ll just get rid of him.”

Betty blew her nose on her handkerchief. Everyone had colds in this winter weather. “Cold feet is better that a cold heart,” Margaret said. Betty’s heart was warm enough, but her feet were as cold as the day she ventured in.

“Did you hear about the difference between a young bull and a old bull?” her uncle asked.

“No.” Betty looked at him warily. Bull jokes were usually risqué or downright obscene. There was something about the bull’s services that brought out the ribald in men.

“I’ll tell you,” Carl said. “An old bull, he comes into the pasture kind of slow and sleepy but full of ambition. His intentions are what they always were, but it’s mostly in his mind. He looks at the herd and says, ‘I think I’ll have me a cow—right after I eat some grass.’ So he eats the grass and stands thinking about it. But then he feels pretty sleepy, so he says, ‘I’ll lie down and sleep a bit, and then I’ll have me a cow.” So he takes a snooze for the rest of the afternoon, and when he wakes up, he’s forgotten all about having a cow. And that’s the way it is with an old bull. But the young bull comes snortin’ and rarin’ into the pasture, and he looks at the herd and says. . .”

Betty smiled. “I get it. He says, ‘I think I’ll have me two cows before breakfast.”

“Un huh. Tell your dad he can come get Sam anytime he likes.”

They turned back to the house. What are your Christmas plans, Betty?”

“Pauline is in a Christmas program at school and I’m in a play at church.”

“The usual nativity play, I suppose.”

“Hmn?”

“The three shepherds, the Christ child in the manger, Mary and Joseph, you know.”

“No. This play we’re putting on is different. It’s called ‘A Great Rushing of Wings.’ Sort of a modern version of the nativity story. The shepherds are three cowboys in the Wild West. I’ve got a good part in it. Practically the second lead.”

“Second lead; that’s movie actor talk. Would you like to become an actor?”

“Luther asked me the same question when I told him about this play I’m in. He told me I’m getting sophisticated.”

“I guess you’ll be glad to see him when he comes home for Christmas.”

“Sure, Luther is supreme.”

“I reckon he’ll do. Betty, I hope you can go back to high school next term. It’s very important that you get a high school graduation diploma.”

“I know that, but what can I do? It’s up to Mom and Dad, especially Mom. If she gets better and is able to do the housework and all, I can. If not, I can’t. Anyway, I’m following the same course of study that the junior class is taking. I’m studying out of the same books they have. Aunt Sophie is as good a teacher as any of them. I’m doing all right.”

* * *

Midwestern States College

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dear Betty, (said Luther’s letter}

Thanks for your recent letter.

We put on MacBeth as a pre-Christmas play. Really it’s not a Christmas play at all. We only put on four scenes giving talented thespians a chance to emote. Me among them, naturally.

I was also appointed property master, and had to hustle around to find props like four moveable trees, a collapsing dagger and such like.

There’s a line in it, “Out damn spot,” spoken by Lady MacBeth in her sleepwalking scene. She’s having a nightmare thinking about her husband whom she paid some assassins to murder. What she refers to is bloodspots. Anyway, this being a very Christian school, that word, “damn,” was not allowed—censored by the dean. So what to do? We talked it over and finally settled for, Out cursed spot,” as a substitute.

“I wonder why he ever chose such a religious school,” Betty said. “And Free Methodist, not even Lutheran.”

“Maybe there aren’t any Lutheran colleges,” Pauline said. “Anyway, it’s all the same religion, so what is the difference?”

“How come where he goes is called a college?” asked Elden. “Luther is only in high school. He can’t go to no college.”

“Luther told me it’s a high school and junior college combined. It’s only got a small enrollment—three or four hundred. It must be nice to go there,” Betty added with a sigh.

“If it’s any help to you, I won’t be able to go to high school,” Pauline remarked. “Dad told me an eighth grade education is enough for any girl including me. I think he expects me to go out next year and find a job instead of going on to high school.”

“Dad is going to have a bunch of ignorant kids on his hands, I can see that,” Betty said.

“But money-making kids,” put in Elden.

“If I can find a nice family to work for I wouldn’t mind working for hire,” Pauline said. “But you are still determined to finish high school and make something of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Thanks to all the help Aunt Sophie has given, I’ll probably graduate in June.”

“Mama didn’t want you to quit school to take care of her when she was feeling poorly. It was Dad who insisted on it,” Elden said. “Anyway, she’s feeling a lot better now.”

Christmas was moving closer day by day. Betty shared a feeling with many another that preparations and the heralding of it was the best part of Christmas. The day became an anticlimax when it finally arrived. There was a warm and glutted sense of peace and goodwill around the Christmas tree and a sense of loss and wistfulness when the day had passed. It is like closing the door to a warm and cheerful room and stepping back into the cold routine of the workaday world.

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FRANK W, LAMBERTON

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FRANK W, LAMBERTON

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CHAPTER ONE