Free A Cozy Country Christmas Anthology by LLC Melange Books

Minnesota farm. A fascinated Betsy had spent hours
studying pictures of faraway places.
    “I’m sorry, Papa,” she apologized again,
scurrying to the stove. “I can scramble eggs now and I’ll do the
baking as soon as I get home from school.”
    Karl slammed his hand down on the oak
harvester table. “You have no time for school. Things must be done
around here, today.”
    Betsy almost dropped the iron skillet. “No
school?? But, Papa, I have three more years until graduation—”
    Her father’s cheeks looked as ruddy as Mrs.
Jeppson’s Sunday hat. “No school!” He spat the words in her
direction and stomped out of the house.
    Her head pounding, Betsy ordered Erik
upstairs to finish getting dressed and followed him up to get ready
for the day. Back in the kitchen, she lit the stove and toasted
bread. After they’d eaten a hasty breakfast, she set him to work
sweeping the hearth and polishing the fireplace andirons with a
soft rag torn from an old sheet.
    As she cleaned the kitchen, Betsy wondered
why she’d been so foolish. This wasn’t the first time she’d
neglected her chores, but she’d never dreamed of Papa becoming so
angry. Her stomach ached at the memory of his declaration regarding
school. Why had she stayed up so late last night?
    As she got out the washtubs and lye soap,
Betsy blinked back tears, her eyes burning from the strain of hours
of reading by the kerosene lamp. Papa had a right to be so angry. A
man needed a full belly to strip corn from the stalks by hand under
the hot September sun.
    Filling the tubs meant many trips to the pump
in the yard. Anyone who did the laundry developed strong arms doing
the washing and hauling water. With each pail she heated on the
stove and poured into the tubs, Betsy felt as if she were drowning
her dream of becoming a teacher.
    With her mother gone, Betsy lost all support
for higher education or even finishing high school. Papa had been
indentured as a farm hand at the age of eleven when he arrived in
America from Norway and had difficulty reading a newspaper in
English. He didn’t understand his daughter’s passion for
knowledge.
    Betsy put the sleeve of another work shirt
into the wringer and turned the crank. If only she hadn’t neglected
her household duties in favor of the glorious escape of reading.
Now Papa would ban her Saturday afternoon visits to the library in
town and she would never get to finish the serial in her favorite
magazine. A tear splashed into the rinse water as Betsy squeezed
out one of Erik’s shirts, remembering just in time that the buttons
would never survive a trip through the wringer.
    The clothes line stretched like a tightrope
between an elm and a maple tree in the back yard. Papa and Mama had
taken her to the circus once when it came to town. She’d never
forgotten the winking sparkles on the performers’ costumes and the
scent of roasted peanuts. Her favorite memory, however, was hearing
Mama’s giggles and Papa’s deep belly laugh at the clowns and their
silly tricks.
    She couldn’t remember hearing him laugh since
Mama... Betsy sighed as she lugged the basket of damp clothing and
the tin can filled with clothes pins to the end of the clothes
line.
    Lefse, an orange and brown barn cat named for
his exploit as a kitten of sneaking into the house and devouring
half dozen of the flat pastries, wound around Betsy’s legs and
mewed complaints of starvation.
    “You’re plump as a market hog,” she scolded
him. “Go guard the grain and earn the milk Papa squirts into your
mouth each morning at milking.”
    The thought of never going back to school
gnawed at her like the sharp teeth of a varmint chewing through a
feed sack. She stretched on her toes to hang a pair of Papa’s work
pants by the legs. The wind pounced and shook the pants as Lefse
would shake a mouse to break its neck.
    Lonesome for company, Erik wandered outside
to join her. After rubbing Lefse’s belly, he looked up and Betsy
smiled at the black