But now Mama looked at me over the heads of her guests. The children’s tutor had brought her harmonium and we all gathered around the fireplace for some carol singing. Given Mama’s look, I sang the loudest. I have a good tenor voice and I sent it aloft to turn heads and make the La Villers smile. I imagined decking the halls with boughs of holly until there was kindling and brush enough to set the whole place ablaze.
JUST AFTER THE NEW YEAR a man appeared at our door, another Swede, with his Gladstone bag in his hand. We had not run the Wanted ad all winter and Mama was not going to be home to him, but this fellow was the brother of one of them who had responded to it the previous fall. He gave his name, Henry Lundgren, and said his brother Per Lundgren had not been heard from since leaving Wisconsin to look into the prospect here.
Mama invited him in and sat him down and had Fannie bring in some tea. The minute I looked at him, I remembered the brother. Per Lundgren had been all business. He did not blush or go shy in Mama’s presence, nor did he ogle. Instead, he asked sound questions. He had also turned the conversation away from his own circumstances, family relations and so on, which Mama put people through in order to learn who was back home and might be waiting. Most of the immigrants, if they had family, it was still in the old country, but you had to make sure. Per Lundgren was closemouthed, but he did admit to being unmarried and so we decided to go ahead.
And here was Henry, the brother he had never mentioned, sitting stiffly in the wing chair with his arms folded and the aggrieved expression on his face. They had the same reddish fair skin, with a long jaw and thinning blond hair, and pale woeful-looking eyes with blond eyelashes. I would say Henry here was the younger by a couple of years, but he turned out to be as smart as Per, or maybe even smarter. He did not seem to be as convinced of the sincerity of Mama’s expressions of concern as I would have liked. He said his brother had made the trip to La Ville with other stops planned afterwards to two more business prospects, a farm some twenty miles west of us and another in Indiana. Henry had traveled to these places, which is how he learned that his brother never arrived for his appointments. He said Per had been traveling with something over two thousand dollars in his money belt.
My goodness, that is a lot of money, Mama said.
Our two savings, Henry said. He comes here to see your farm. I have the advertisement, he said, pulling a piece of newspaper from his pocket. This is the first place he comes to see.
I’m not sure he ever arrived, Mama said. We’ve had many inquiries.
He arrived, Henry Lundgren said. He arrived the night before so he will be on time the next morning. This is my brother. It is important to him, even if it costs money. He sleeps at the hotel in La Ville.
How could you know that? Mama said.
I know from the guest book in the La Ville hotel where I find his signature, Henry Lundgren said.
MAMA SAID, All right, Earle, we’ve got a lot more work to do before we get out of here.
We’re leaving?
What is today, Monday. I want to be on the road Thursday the latest. I thought with the inquest matter back there we were okay at least to the spring. This business of a brother pushes things up a bit.
I am ready to leave.
I know you are. You have not enjoyed the farm life, have you? If that Swede had told us he had a brother, he wouldn’t be where he is today. Too smart for his own good, he was. Where is Bent?
She went out to the yard. He was standing at the corner of the barn peeing a hole in the snow. She told him to take the carriage and go to La Ville and pick up half a dozen gallon cans of kerosene at the hardware. They were to be put on our credit.
It occurred to me that we still had a goodly amount of our winter supply of kerosene. I said nothing. Mama had gone into action, and I knew from experience that everything would come clear by and by.
And then late that night, when I was in the basement, she called downstairs to me that Bent was coming down to help.
I don’t need help, thank you, Aunt Dora, I said, so astonished that my throat went dry.
At that they both clomped down the stairs and back to the potato bin where I was working. Bent was grinning that toothy grin of his as always, to remind me he had certain privileges.
Show him, Mama said to me. Go ahead, it’s all right, she assured me.
So I did, I showed him. I showed him something to hand. I opened the top of the gunnysack and he looked down it.
The fool’s grin disappeared, the unshaven face went pale, and he started to breathe through his mouth. He gasped, he couldn’t catch his breath, a weak cry came from him, and he looked at me in my rubber apron and his knees buckled and he fainted dead away.
Mama and I stood over him. Now he knows, I said. He will tell them.
Maybe, Mama said, but I don’t think so. He’s now one of us. We have just made him an accessory.
An accessory?
After the fact. But he’ll be more than that by the time I get through with him, she said.
We threw some water on him and lifted him to his feet. Mama took him up to the kitchen and gave him a couple of quick swigs. Bent was thoroughly cowed, and when I came upstairs and told him to follow me, he jumped out of his chair as if shot. I handed him the gunnysack. It was not that heavy for someone like him. He held it in one hand at arm’s length as if it would bite. I led him to the old dried-up well behind the house, where he dropped it down into the muck. I poured the quicklime in and then we lowered some rocks down and nailed the well cover back on, and Bent the handyman he never said a word but just stood there shivering and waiting for me to tell him what to do next.
Mama had thought of everything. She had paid cash down for the farm but somewhere or other got the La Ville bank to give her a mortgage and so when the house burned, it was the bank’s money. She had been withdrawing from the account all winter, and now that we were closing shop, she mentioned to me the actual sum of our wealth for the first time. I was very moved to be confided in, like her partner.
But really it was the small touches that showed her genius. For instance, she had noted immediately of the inquiring brother Henry that he was in height not much taller than I am. Just as in Fanny the housekeeper she had hired a woman of a girth similar to her own. Meanwhile, at her instruction, I was letting my dark beard grow out. And at the end, before she had Bent go up and down the stairs pouring the kerosene in every room, she made sure he was good and drunk. He would sleep through the whole thing in the stable, and that’s where they found him with his arms wrapped like a lover’s arms around an empty can of kerosene.
THE PLAN WAS for me to stay behind for a few days just to keep an eye on things. We have pulled off something prodigious that will go down in the books, Mama said. But that means all sorts of people will be flocking here and you can never tell when the unexpected arises. Of course everything will be fine, but if there’s something more we have to do you will know it.
Yes, Aunt Dora.
Aunt Dora was just for here, Earle.
Yes, Mama.
Of course, even if there was no need to keep an eye out you would still have to wait for Miss Czerwinska.
This is where I didn’t understand her thinking. The one bad thing in all of this is that Winifred would read the news in the Chicago papers. There was no safe way I could get in touch with her now that I was dead. That was it, that was the end of it. But Mama had said it wasn’t necessary to get in touch with Winifred. This remark made me angry.