Chapter Sixteen

RUTH ALWAYS KNEW she was adopted.

Her parents told her early on that her birth mother had been a young woman of Dutch heritage, with the last name of DeYoung or de Jong. She couldn’t recall how old she was when she first heard the story; it was simply part of her, like her curly hair or the freckles on her nose. Ruth didn’t consciously consider the story of her birth to be any different from those of her siblings. Her oldest brother had been adopted, the next two were not. They were all the same in her mind: the Nordsletten children.

At times, she’d think about the name her birth mother had called her: Betty Jane. It felt strange, like sliding her feet into someone else’s wrong-sized shoes. Ruth didn’t ask questions about her birth, but not because she feared knowing the truth or hurting her parents’ feelings. There simply were no gaps that needed filling. She didn’t think to ask for more details.

When her new parents had first seen Ruth at the Lutheran House of Mercy in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on July 1, 1929, they’d fallen instantly in love with her.

“You were such a sweet, lovely baby,” her mother would later say.

They’d arrived with a neatly pressed stack of cloth diapers, socks, and shirts, though little Ruth had already been dressed in a pretty outfit her birth mother had lovingly sewn, days before leaving the infant behind.

Ruth’s new parents were Reverend Peder and Olava Nordsletten, of Norwegian heritage. Six-year-old Kenny, their youngest son, came with them to Sioux Falls. He couldn’t wait to see his new sister and promised to watch over her in the backseat on the journey home.

After retrieving their baby girl, they returned to Jewell, Iowa, where Peder pastored a church. One of their first friends to visit was a Filipino missionary who was furthering his education in the United States. As the family discussed names, the visitor’s suggestion was met with the most enthusiasm. From then on, she would be Ruth Priscilla.

After three boys, Ruth was the easiest infant the Nordslettens had held in their arms. Perhaps it was having a girl, they mused, but others confirmed what a pleasant child they’d brought home. Their sons filled the parsonage with masculine energy every waking moment. But even the boys froze in their tracks at the sight of their tiny sister. She softened them with her bright-eyed stares and sudden smiles, and soon enough she was responding with coos and erupting into giggles at their antics.

In years to come as Ruth grew up, sang at church, hung a Christmas stocking over her bed frame, lost teeth, made friends, and moved through childhood and adolescence, she never imagined that across the miles a woman was writing letters, asking for any scrap of information about her. Ruth didn’t know that every May 22, while she was enjoying her birthday celebrations, this other woman was thinking of her and praying for her.

She didn’t know that her birth mother carried a single treasured picture of Ruth as a baby, simply inscribed on the back: “Sweetest little girl in the world —Betty J.”

* * *

By October of 1929, as Ruth was learning to sit up and grabbing at her brothers’ hair with her soft fingers, the Nordslettens packed up and moved from Jewell, smack-dab in the center of Iowa, to a small farm town in the northwest corner of the state.

Peder was appointed to a trio of churches in the region, with the main one, Five Points Lutheran Church, several blocks from the town center. The family moved into the parsonage on 2nd Street, kitty-corner from the church. It was a spacious, two-story house with an indoor bathroom, a separate dining room, and plenty of bedrooms. The boys’ eyes lit up at their first glimpse of the huge yard, with its wealth of garden space and a mature apple tree heavy with fruit. A weeping birch draped welcoming branches over the front walkway.

Before Ruth’s adoption could be finalized, the family received a handful of unannounced visits from social workers. The reports glowed with praise: The family impressed Worker very favorably. They seemed to her to be a wholesome, honest and sincere family. There were no concerns about the adoption; a better family could not be hoped for.

In this Midwestern town, Ruth learned to crawl, then walk and run. She had three brothers to keep up with. The garden behind the parsonage was like a jungle to the children. It woke their imaginations as they explored and uncovered every hiding place.

Though she usually followed her parents’ rules, Ruth had a secret vice.

She loved to climb trees.

They beckoned to her, branches waving in the breeze. While other young girls and boys considered professions that mirrored their parents’ —homemakers, teachers, and farmers —Ruth decided she would live in a jungle, climbing trees and swinging from vines. But first, she would need to practice.

There were plenty of trees to choose from, and Ruth planned to conquer each one. She’d bunch up her skirt, reach around the smooth bark of the tree, and pull herself up. She knew how to test a limb’s strength in her hand or beneath her foot before trusting her full weight to it. Ruth had figured out these skills on her own, without her brothers’ help.

She climbed on and on with patches of sky encouraging her upward until the branches thinned out and the view opened around her. Ruth found a secure perch, her heart beating fast as she saw how high she’d reached. She spotted the tall steeple of the brick church, the roof of the post office, some kids chasing their dog, and —beyond the one square mile of her town —the wide, flat Iowa farmland that rolled out like piecrust all the way to the sky.

Getting down was the challenge. Her dress would catch on the branches and tangle around her legs as she descended. Several times she made it down before anyone noticed. But one day, she heard the screen door clap shut and her name called out.

“Ruth!” her mother said.

Ruth stared at the ground far below, wondering how she might slide down quickly. If only there was a vine I could grab. She spoke brightly, hoping her voice would drop like a weight and bounce up from the ground instead of reaching her mother like a tap on the head.

“Be right there, Mom!”

Then Ruth’s eyes met her mother’s through a break in the leaves. From her mother’s open-mouthed gape, the wring of her hands, and the sudden bolt back toward the house, Ruth knew this wasn’t going to turn out well.

Her mother called again, this time louder and directed indoors.

“Peder!” she screamed.

The porch door creaked and slammed. Through the open windows of the parsonage, Ruth heard her mother’s frantic voice.

“What is wrong?” Hard footsteps came running from the second story and down the stairs.

“Peder, Peder, Ruth is at the top of the tree!”

Ruth slowly made her way to the ground, trying not to snag her dress and avoiding the stern expressions on her parents’ faces. She was punished, but she would continue to climb trees for years to come. She couldn’t help it. Eventually Olava tried ignoring her daughter’s penchant for treetops, hoping she’d soon outgrow it.

When Ruth’s feet were firmly on the ground, she worked in the garden with her father. With the double-fisted blows of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, a green thumb and gardening space within distance of a well were as valuable as gold. Ruth could soon identify the weeds that needed pulling and the plants that needed room to roam or a frame to climb. She learned to tell when the fruits and vegetables were ready for harvest. She picked peas, filling the skirt of her dress with them and flopping down at the edge of the garden to snap the sweet pearls from the pods and pop them into her mouth.

Olava dressed Ruth with ribbons and frills and sent her off to the two-room schoolhouse, where she learned to read and do figures, and where she’d get tricked by a boy into touching her tongue to the frozen chain of a swing.

One state away in South Dakota, Minka would have savored these images of Ruth’s contented life. She had hoped Betty Jane’s parents were attentive and loving. She would have loved knowing that her daughter had siblings to play with. But without detailed answers from Miss Bragstad, Ruth’s first mother was left to imagine —and continue praying.

* * *

By 1935, the year Minka would meet a handsome fruit salesman named Roy, America was in the grip of a financial catastrophe. But for many farmers throughout the Midwest, the trouble had begun many years earlier. The government was no longer guaranteeing top prices for livestock and crops, as it did during the First World War. Farmers were overextended, unable to pay bank loans or to sell, as land prices would not cover their debts. Banks closed their doors in ever-increasing numbers. In 1920, Iowa had 167 banks fail; the next year, the number was 505.

The tiny hamlet of Wallingford sat apart from the main routes west, which were miles north in Minnesota and farther south in Iowa. Along such roadways, caravans of desperate families who’d lost most everything drove trucks and jalopies with people, pets, farm animals, and precious belongings piled high or hanging off the sides. They mostly traveled west, to cities, towns, or lettuce fields, following rumors of a Promised Land, only to find that no place seemed untouched by calamity.

Peder listened to the grave news crackling from the radio beside his rocking chair.

“What are they talking about?” one of the boys asked his father, who had tuned in to one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.”

“Quiet. We talk afterward,” Peder said to the children. He leaned close to hear the president’s assurances that change was coming, that there would be relief for the needy and financial reform for the country.

Parishioners and the occasional traveler needed hope, and Reverend Peder Nordsletten scoured God’s Word looking for it. Bending his tall frame over his Bible and yellow pad of paper, he put together sermons that might offer comfort and, more importantly, reveal God’s truths.

People wondered, Why is God punishing us? Aren’t we God-fearing people who attend church and give what we can? They wanted to know how to bring the rain. How to bring back topsoil stolen by billowing dust storms. How to bring back their boys from faraway muddy trenches. They sought out the wise reverend, whose mind was a deep well of quotes and Scripture.

To Ruth, Peder was simply her father. Her relationship with him would always be woven together with her understanding of God.

On the inside flap of the English Bible he bought before her birth, Peder had written his name in a distinct script, recognizable from innumerable sermon outlines stacked on his desk and from the ledger where he kept a precise accounting of every purchase he made. Ruth watched him pore over the pages of that Bible until he knew where every Scripture and story was located.

Ruth would open the book as the years passed, even long after he was gone. She read his notes and records.

Peder Nordsletten

Aug. 5, 1923

After this, Peder had written the dates when his worn-out Bible was taken to a bookbinder and returned with a new cover.

Rebound Feb 1928

Rebound Feb 1938

On an inside page he kept track of how many times he read the Bible through from beginning to end. He’d learned English as a young man. As he’d struggled to perfect the language, it helped to read God’s Word in the tongue he would mostly preach in.

Finished reading first time Sunday, May 1, 1927

Feb 17, 1929 - I started to read this Bible through a second time.

Finished Sun. Aug. 27, 1932

Started third time April 2, 1942

Lord, deepen my faith as I read it.

Completed third time, Sunday, March 19, 1944

Praise God

In addition to pointing parishioners to the Scriptures he knew so well, Peder had a repertoire of quotations he loved to trot out. While offering a hearty handshake he’d say, “A grip of steel to make you feel you’re not in the world alone!” Another favorite admonition was from Sir Walter Scott: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”

Anchored in his deep heritage of faith, Peder appeared unbending as a man, unharmed by the storms of life. But his faith had been forged in the fire of loss.

It would be many years before Ruth would discover just how grievous that loss had been.