A Dream to Follow Read Online Free PDF Page A

cogitating on. If only he could stay awake long enough tonight to write it down.

    “Pastor Solberg and Mary Martha are coming for dinner with Manda and Deborah,” Ingeborg announced in the wagon on the way home from church the next morning. “I thought since it is so warm we could have a picnic.”
    “Down at the river?” Andrew glanced up from watching the lines his dragging stick made behind the wagon. He, Thorliff, and Trygve had claimed the tailgate, leaving the girls to chatter, with both mouths and hands, in the wagon bed. Now that there were so many pupils at the deaf school, they had to take three wagons to church.
    “No, I was thinking of the south side of the house, by the cottonwood trees. That one we planted when we built the house is big enough to make real shade this year.”
    “Tante Penny and Onkel Hjelmer coming too?” Andrew asked over his shoulder.
    Thorliff elbowed him.
    “No, just Kaaren and Lars with the schoolchildren.” While the two families used to share most meals, now with all the students at the deaf school, Ilse and Kaaren did most of their own cooking there. Students helped with the cooking as well as the cleaning and farm chores. Part of the program was to help the deaf learn to live normally like everybody else. Too many people figured that if someone couldn’t hear, they couldn’t think or see or do much else. Grace and Sophie changed lots of people’s minds as they talked with their hands, a skill all the local students and many adults had learned in the regular school too, now taught by Pastor Solberg but started by Kaaren after Grace was born deaf.
    And I thought I could spend the afternoon writing . Thorliff sighed. Perhaps he would be able to sneak off for a bit, but he’d be expected to help entertain the young ones. Of course with the diamond already laid out in the short pasture, everybody would be out to play baseball, even the men and women. He watched the furrow carved in the dust by Andrew’s stick. That’s the way he felt at times, like the stick or the furrow, not the one holding it.
    “We’ll have enough for two teams.” Andrew poked his big brother. “Won’t we?”
    “More than enough.”
    “Not if we don’t let the girls play.” Trygve hunched his shoulders.
    “You’re just jealous ’cause Astrid hits better than you.” Now Andrew poked his cousin.
    “No, I ain’t.” Trygve pushed back.
    “Are too.”
    “Not.”
    “Are.” The two nearly fell off the tailgate, pushing and shoving.
    “All right you two back there, jump off and walk.” Haakan looked over his shoulder.
    The two boys leaped to the ground and raced up the road.
    “Oh, to have that kind of energy.” Ingeborg shook her head.
    “I’ll put ’em to chopping wood. That oughta take care of the push and shoves.” Haakan tipped back his fedora. Already he’d been out in the sun enough that he wore the telltale sign of a farmer—a tanned face and a white forehead.
    “If we weren’t having company, I’d take the shotgun out this afternoon.” Ingeborg looked up at the V of ducks flying over. “A couple of geese would taste mighty good.”
    “I heard Baptiste’s gun this morning. He might have got a deer. They sure aren’t as plentiful as they used to be.”
    “Pa!” Andrew came running back. “That sow’s farrowing.”
    “You go watch her. Don’t let her lie on the babies.”
    Andrew tore off again.
    “Change your clothes first,” Ingeborg hollered after him. A raised hand said he heard her.
    Haakan clucked the horses into a faster trot. “At least she isn’t having them in the snow like she did last year.” The sow had chosen to farrow outside, and a freak snowfall had them carrying baby pigs to the house to warm on the oven door to keep them alive. All in all she’d lost only three, but Haakan often remarked she wasn’t the smartest sow in the herd.
    “I should have stayed home. I knew she was making her nest.” Haakan stopped the team by the back door of