CHAPTER 1

Terpsichore Johnson Cooks Dinner

November, 1934—Little Bear Lake, Wisconsin

IT WAS BECAUSE TERPSICHORE WAS THE ONLY UNMUSICAL Johnson that she dragged a hatchet across the yard toward a pumpkin as big as a pickle barrel. She stumbled over an icy hillock of mud where her mother’s roses had been uprooted to make way for potatoes. The wind howled and whipped her skirt around her knees. It snatched notes from her sisters’ piano duet, which escaped through the crack in the parlor window and swirled up to meet the chimney smoke. If Terpsichore had not made that foolish bargain with her mother, she could have been inside with her sisters, warm. She would not have to attack that monster pumpkin like a lumberjack.

She raised the hatchet over her head and heaved it down with the full weight of her seventy-three pounds behind it. The strike vibrated up her arms and clear through her shoulders to her jaws. After several more blows, she finally hacked off a section light enough to carry into the kitchen.

Terpsichore’s father said she was a wizard with pumpkins. After all, she could turn a hunk of pumpkin into pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin custard, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin fritters. A good thing, too, because pumpkin was about all that was left to eat.

By the time she’d boiled the pumpkin long enough to make it edible, though, everyone was too hungry that night to wait for her to turn it into muffins or fritters. Instead, she just mashed it and decorated it with a sprinkle of parsley from her mother’s window garden.

“Yuck, Trip! Pumpkin mash?” Polly poked her fork at the mound of pumpkin on her plate. Cally poked her mound, too.

Terpsichore’s ears cringed at hearing the twins’ nickname for her that announced to the world “This girl’s a stumblebum!”

“You’re not a baby anymore, Polly. You can say my whole name: Terp-sick-oh-ree! And if you don’t like pumpkin mash, don’t eat it, fancy fingers.” She shot the twins what her father called her piercing basilisk glare, a glare so intense that it usually bent them to her will, at least for a little while. “Let’s see how good you are with a hatchet.”

“What’s a hatchet got to do with dinner?” Cally poked her mash again.

“I’m sure Terpsichore worked very hard to make us this nourishing dinner,” Mother said. She spooned a bite of pumpkin into baby Matthew’s mouth. With a flick of his tongue, the pumpkin oozed back out of his mouth, dribbled down his chin, and sat in a blob on his bib.

Terpsichore poked her own mound of pumpkin mash. She had bargained herself into the role of family cook to get out of piano lessons. Mother had always made time for Terpsichore’s lessons, even when baby Matthew kept her up most of the night. One day last summer, after fumbling through the first few bars of “Für Elise,” Terpsichore had slammed her palms down on the piano keys and said she would rather cook dinner for the rest of her life than practice one more hour at the piano.

Before one more ticktock of the metronome, Mother said, “Deal!” And that was the day her mother gave up trying to make a musician out of Terpsichore.

“I’ll make pumpkin pancakes tomorrow,” Terpsichore said. “It’s just that everyone was so hungry . . .”

Pop reached over to squeeze Terpsichore’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault we’re reduced to eating pumpkin for dinner.”

Even though her father had dug up nearly every square inch of their yard and replaced her mother’s flowers with plants you could eat, there was never enough food. The rhubarb leaves had grown big as elephant ears, but they were poisonous. The stalks were red as strawberries, but without sugar, they were more lip-puckery than a pickle. The pole beans were long gone—since Mother was not up to canning after birthing Matthew, they ate those beans fresh until their eyeballs turned green. They ate the zucchini last month before it went moldy. Her father had made sauerkraut out of the last of the cabbage just before frost.

This month they were eating their way through pumpkin before it went soft. Then they’d have to face the sauerkraut.

Pop rolled up his sleeves, exposing new muscle earned by gardening instead of working as a bookkeeper at the mill. He balanced his knife on his forefinger and gently seesawed it up and down. Terpsichore watched the knife tip one way, then the other, as if her father were weighing choices.

Pop cleared his throat. “The Olsons got the paperwork about President Roosevelt’s new Matanuska Colony project. They’re going to apply.” He was talking to her mother, but he was staring at his knife.

Mother laid her knife and fork slantwise on her plate.

“What Matanuska Colony project is that, Mr. Johnson?”

“It’s where the government has set aside land in Palmer, Alaska—forty acres for a family.” Her father finally looked up and let the knife topple so he could throw out both arms to show them how big forty acres was. “And you get a loan of about three thousand dollars to get started on your own farm.”

“Alaska?” Terpsichore let out a horrified squeak as she thought about icebergs and endless winter.

Cally and Polly echoed “Alaska” one beat behind her. They exchanged goggle-eyed glances.

Mother clutched Matthew tighter on her lap.

Pop filled the silence. “With forty acres we could grow crops and still have room for your roses.” He reached for Mother’s arm, but she shifted on her chair, just out of reach.

“We could have pigs, a couple horses, a milk cow, and a few sheep.” He forced a grin and looked around the table for answering grins, but there weren’t any.

“You can’t take a baby to the frozen wilderness!” Mother nuzzled Matthew’s head.

Terpsichore edged forward on her chair. “Can we take pets with us? I won’t go without Tigger!”

“How could we afford to get back home if we don’t like it?” Mother asked.

“I’m not living in an igloo!” That was Cally, shaking her head in horror, which made her ringlets bob.

“I’m not eating whale blubber!” That was Polly. Her ringlets bobbed too.

“The piano would go out of tune!” Mother looked through the archway between the dining room and parlor toward her prized Chickering upright grand. Her voice cracked. “Would we even get to take the piano?”

Of course Terpsichore wouldn’t miss the piano. What made her heart flutter anxiously was the thought of the stack of library books she kept beside her bed. She couldn’t sleep whenever the stack of unread books became too low. Would there be a library in Alaska? And this house, how could they leave the house that her father had built for them—the plate rail with her mother’s wedding china ringing the room, the built-in cupboards and buffet along one wall, the solid brass electrified chandelier overhead?

Pop heard them out, but when their reasons for not going to Alaska petered out, he took up his rebuttal. “First of all, I’m not saying we’re going. After all, they’re only choosing a few families in this county to go. But I do think Alaska would be a good chance for us. This is the Matanuska Valley, not the Arctic Circle. It won’t be any colder there than here in northern Wisconsin. In the summer the sun hardly sets and it gets up to eighty degrees. I hear they grow pumpkins so big it takes four men to lift them.” Her father winked at Terpsichore.

Judging from the worry lines in Mother’s forehead, she wasn’t sold. “You already have your answers, don’t you? You’re not just going for information tomorrow, are you?”

“Competition will be tough. If I have to move fast to get us one of those slots, I will.”

“Even if I refuse to go?”

“Jiminy,” he said, as he threw his napkin down on the table. “We have to face facts. We’re one step from starving and I won’t go on government relief and have church ladies coming around with charity baskets.” He rose from the table and looked out the window, his back to the rest of the family.

Was their situation really as desperate as her father was saying? He had always told Terpsichore this was the land of opportunity. That if a person was willing to work, he’d never starve. But hard work wasn’t always enough when there were hard times all over the country. They had worked hard and they still faced a winter with almost nothing left to eat but sauerkraut. Maybe Pop was right now. They would have to go to Alaska.