Fervent Charity Read Free

urine-soaked rags, the unwashed body, the hunger that seemed always to gnaw at them—to a place where death seemed like an invitation to something better. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.
    Mary told Gustie how she crossed the slough. “It was Babka’s good luck that it never got too deep. The water was never above my knees. Mostly it was just mud squishing around my ankles. I liked it best in the winter, though, when I could walk on the ice.” Besides Walter, Gustie was the only person who knew about her babka. Augusta Roemer was the only friend Mary had ever had.
    Hail Mary, full of Grace...
    “When Babka died, I took her rosary and her prayer book. It’s in Polish. I can’t read it.” Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us... “ Babka said that flowers bring life. When she first came to this country as a girl, she said, the prairie was quiet. There was just the tall grass—grass as high as a pony’s back—and the wind. All grass, no trees...no birds except during migrations. Everybody said it was the grain crops and then the trees that brought the insects and birds and the life to the prairie, but Babka said it was the flowers. Only flowers, with their color and perfume, could do that.”
     

Chapter 2: May 1900
    A lvinia was favored with light blue eyes and corn silk hair, traits she had given to each of her children. She was sixteen when she gave birth to Betty, her first child. Leaving her comfortable Minnesota home at fifteen to traipse off with Carl Torgerson had been a reckless and foolish thing to do, and Alvinia had not regretted it for a moment. Carl had been the hired man on her father’s farm and five years her senior. When her parents found out that Alvinia and Carl had gotten married at the city hall, they carried on so, that the newlyweds started west, with Carl working whenever he could. It took them two years and two children to get as far as Charity, South Dakota. Elef Erdahl, the butcher, hired Carl and, more or less, adopted the young family as his own. When Elef, an old bachelor, died, he left his business to Carl who made the most of it.
    Carl Torgerson was a man with no education who had been taught to read and write by his young wife. He was an orphan who treasured his family, a man with no prospects who had turned a modest butcher business into a prospering enterprise. The first in Charity to avail himself of electricity for profit, he installed freezers, which he rented out to people to keep their meat. With his freezers came ice cream. In the last year, he had added on to his establishment a comfortable parlor where people could enjoy a hot cup of coffee and a cold dish of ice cream served up by one of the smiling Torgerson children.
    Alvinia had seen in this quiet, unremarkable looking man, a vein of gold. He had never told her he loved her. But she felt loved. His reticence complemented her ebullience, and their children fell in between their two extremes of temperament. Alvinia was also aware of how simply lucky she had been. Every young woman marries a man in whom she has high hopes. Not every man is able to fulfill those hopes as well as Carl had.
    Lena, nursing her baby in the chair across the room from Alvinia, was a case in point. Will was a hard-working man. And a hard-drinking man. Lena had certainly not bargained for that when she married him. But things happen and people change. An accident at a drilling site lost him an eye in the same year that an altercation with his brother Oscar robbed him of the hearing in one ear. Those two disabilities coming upon him all at once started him on the drink. He hadn’t been able to leave it alone for long since.
    Lena’s home was tiny. Alvinia, used to larger spaces, felt like she was in a doll’s house. Lena’s immaculate housekeeping and her skill with a needle didn’t conceal her poverty. Will made a decent living, but most of his money ended up with Leroy, the local tavern