Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in
which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the
fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have
gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is
exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run
shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put
to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes
roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields
are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the
sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely
perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken
on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk
in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.
Alexandra has settled back into her old routine. There are weekly
letters from Emil. Lou and Oscar she has not seen since Carl
went away. To avoid awkward encounters in the presence of curious
spectators, she has stopped going to the Norwegian Church and drives
up to the Reform Church at Hanover, or goes with Marie Shabata to
the Catholic Church, locally known as "the French Church." She has
not told Marie about Carl, or her differences with her brothers. She was never very communicative about her own affairs, and when she came to the point, an instinct told her that about such things she and Marie would not understand one another.
Old Mrs. Lee had been afraid that family misunderstandings might
deprive her of her yearly visit to Alexandra. But on the first day
of December Alexandra telephoned Annie that to-morrow she would
send Ivar over for her mother, and the next day the old lady arrived
with her bundles. For twelve years Mrs. Lee had always entered
Alexandra's sitting-room with the same exclamation, "Now we be yust-a
like old times!" She enjoyed the liberty Alexandra gave her, and
hearing her own language about her all day long. Here she could
wear her nightcap and sleep with all her windows shut, listen
to Ivar reading the Bible, and here she could run about among the
stables in a pair of Emil's old boots. Though she was bent almost
double, she was as spry as a gopher. Her face was as brown as if
it had been varnished, and as full of wrinkles as a washerwoman's
hands. She had three jolly old teeth left in the front of her
mouth, and when she grinned she looked very knowing, as if when
you found out how to take it, life wasn't half bad. While she and
Alexandra patched and pieced and quilted, she talked incessantly
about stories she read in a Swedish family paper, telling the plots
in great detail; or about her life on a dairy farm in Gottland
when she was a girl. Sometimes she forgot which were the printed
stories and which were the real stories, it all seemed so far away. She loved to take a little brandy, with hot water and sugar, before she went to bed, and Alexandra always had it ready for her. "It sends good dreams," she would say with a twinkle in her eye.
When Mrs. Lee had been with Alexandra for a week, Marie Shabata
telephoned one morning to say that Frank had gone to town for the
day, and she would like them to come over for coffee in the afternoon. Mrs. Lee hurried to wash out and iron her new cross-stitched apron, which she had finished only the night before; a checked gingham apron worked with a design ten inches broad across the bottom; a hunting scene, with fir trees and a stag and dogs and huntsmen. Mrs. Lee was firm with herself at dinner, and refused a second helping of apple dumplings. "I ta-ank I save up," she said with a giggle.