Chapter Nineteen

IT WAS the longest month of Ruth’s life.

She stared at the bedroom furnishings in a house that wasn’t her own, listening to her toddler daughter and family members moving around in other rooms. She longed to feed eighteen-month-old Deb, to comfort her when she cried, to see every moment she was missing. She wanted to do anything but be alone in this room. But the doctor was emphatic: complete bed rest.

The problems had come almost immediately after Ruth found out she was pregnant again. The independent young woman was now at the mercy of everyone else for companionship, for snatches of time with her active daughter, even for meeting her most private needs. It took all her resolve to keep from hopping up to help. Ruth appreciated her mother-in-law’s dedication to caring for her, but she wanted her own room, her own house, her normal life.

The doctor’s words kept her in bed. More than all those other things, Ruth wanted a healthy baby.

Ruth missed her own mother, who was too sick to take on caregiving or babysitting. She longed for Olava’s beef vegetable soup, and the soft touch of her mother’s hands on her forehead or shoulders as she tucked in the covers around her.

Ruth knew that Olava had once lost a newborn son, but now it was made real to her. How painful that must have been for Olava and Peder. She touched her stomach, and dread coursed through her. Would she know such pain as well?

The month finally ended, and Charles took her back to the doctor. The sky had never looked so bright nor the air smelled so clean. Ruth felt like an inmate released on good behavior, and her usual cheerful disposition returned. Surely her obedience of the strict orders would be rewarded with a positive report. But the doctor’s words were hard to hear.

“I don’t know if the fetus is still alive. But let’s get you to the hospital and make sure you’re okay.”

Ruth put her hands over the slight round of her stomach. The baby just had to be alive. At the hospital, Charles called the family, asking them to get on their knees and pray for the child.

The doctor pronounced Ruth well enough to go off bed rest, but they would have to wait to find out about the baby. The Doppler fetal monitor wouldn’t be invented for another six years, and it was still too early in the pregnancy to hear the baby’s heartbeat on a regular stethoscope.

About a month later, Ruth finally felt the first sweet stirrings deep inside —proof that her child was still alive.

That August of 1952, Ruth delivered Mark Charles, a healthy 9 pound, 9 ounce baby boy. In later years, she’d remember those days in bed and think, What we would’ve missed had we lost him.

Motherhood had woken Ruth to a joy she’d guessed at, a love she’d only thought she knew. It was deeper and more marvelous than she could have imagined. But this was her second challenging pregnancy. The labor and delivery had been excruciating with both Deb and Mark, and Ruth’s recovery was slow each time.

While she adored her children, Ruth was rethinking her dream of having six of them.

* * *

In 1954, Charles took a job at a mink ranch, where thousands of the animals were raised in long rows of chicken-wire pens and sheds. The young family moved into a small farmhouse on the property, which they would later have to expand. Ruth’s days were busy with caring for her brood, tending to her house, and going to church on Sundays at her father’s parish. The Lees added a third child, Brian Michael, on a frozen day in late January 1957.

Although this pregnancy had also begun with a stay in the hospital, things swiftly turned around. It would prove to be her easiest pregnancy, and the delivery was quick, with no real labor pains at all. Ruth’s spirit was renewed and along with it, her desire for a large family.

Sometimes Ruth believed her brother Ole had passed down the mischief gene to her children, even though her adoption meant that he wasn’t a blood relative. Her little ones were full of imagination and pranks.

One afternoon Ruth paused in her cleaning and noticed a peculiar stillness to the house. Even with little Brian down for his nap, it was too quiet. That was a sure sign of trouble in a house with young children.

Ruth crept through the house, peering into rooms in search of Deb and Mark.

She went to the back room, where two-year-old Brian was asleep on a long davenport couch. His head was covered with his beloved football helmet, a plaything he wore so often that it wasn’t unusual to find him napping in it.

But Brian wasn’t safe from his siblings even with a helmet on his head. Bent over the toddler, eight-year-old Deb and six-year-old Mark were intent on their prey. First Deb, then Mark, took turns leaning in. They carefully lifted one of Brian’s eyelids. When he twitched or his eye fluttered, they jumped back, curling up into fits of soundless laughter, openmouthed, while Deb motioned for quiet. Then they did it again. Random snickers slid out as they collapsed against the davenport.

Ruth struggled to keep her own chuckles silent, but she soon pushed the door open just enough to allow the creaking hinges to announce her arrival.

Deb and Mark jumped away from Brian, faces guilty as criminals’.

“What are you kids doing?” Ruth asked, as if she hadn’t been watching them.

“Nothing,” they said in unison, shrugging and glancing around the room.

“Were you lifting Brian’s eyelids while he’s sleeping?”

“Nooooo,” Deb said.

“No, we didn’t,” Mark seconded.

“But I saw you.” The smile she’d fought to hold back was now gone.

They denied it still.

The humor of their prank was destroyed with the lie. If Ruth hadn’t seen their childish antics with her own eyes, she might have believed them. She knew she couldn’t let it pass. One of her father’s favorite quotes came to mind, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

“You two come with me. Now,” she said, motioning them behind her, away from their sleeping brother. She took them to the bathroom for a lesson on how to clean the lie from their mouths with a touch of soap.

“Don’t ever lie again,” Ruth said firmly as Deb and Mark wiped their eyes. They glanced at one another, grimacing at the bitter slivers on their tongues.

“We won’t,” Deb said. Mark nodded his head in agreement.

Ruth knew they would probably lie again. They were children, after all, and children had to be encouraged toward good character —it didn’t come without guidance.

* * *

Olava had been fighting it for years, but now she was sinking beneath disease. Her doctor would later reveal to the family that she’d had leukemia, in addition to her rheumatoid arthritis and asthma. By the time the doctor realized it, she was beyond treatment.

Her love of family kept her fighting so long. Olava’s children and grandchildren brought joy to her pain-filled world. She cherished their visits, the sound of a full house, the stories and laughter and memories. Her grandchildren seemed to have limitless energy —it was hard to imagine she’d once been that strong.

For Deb, Mark, and Brian, trips to both sets of grandparents were always met with excitement. Grandma and Grandpa Lee, Charles’s parents, lived on Main Street in Viroqua, across from Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. The house had a big porch, where the family would gather for the Memorial Day parade, watching for Charles’s twin brother, Chester, a national guardsman, who almost always marched.

From the Lees’ place, the children could go through backyards and a bit of woods and end up at their other grandparents’ house.

At the Nordslettens’, the children raced through the parsonage with its circular route of downstairs rooms. When they were too rambunctious, Olava and Ruth set the children at the table and strapped them into chairs. While the kids ate a snack, the women regained their energy before setting the youngsters loose again.

Ruth watched how her mother’s face glowed when she brought her children over or when her brothers and their families came to town. They’d all laugh together, tell well-worn stories, try to catch up with new tales.

No wonder, then, that Olava didn’t want to leave her family. But her failing body drew her ever closer to the other side of eternity, the side she’d approached when she’d almost drowned in a river so many years before.

When Ruth discovered she was pregnant a fourth time, she reluctantly kept it a secret from her mother. Why pain Olava with the knowledge of a new baby she’d never get to bounce on her lap, velvety cheeks she’d never get to kiss? Why remind her of all that she would miss in the years ahead? Even though Olava had been ill for more than a decade, Ruth could not yet imagine life without her mother.

In Olava’s final days and hours, Ruth stayed at the hospital with her every moment she could. Her belly had not yet rounded out, but the tiny baby was there with them, growing inside. She felt torn between the two extremes: joy and grief, anticipation and dread, life and death.

Six months later, on December 2, 1960, when Ruth delivered Timothy James, it was with bittersweet wonder. She had a new life in her arms, but her own mother would never hold her newborn son. Olava had gone to be with Jesus.

* * *

Ruth grieved her mother’s death and worried about her father, now living in the parsonage alone. She wished to call Olava to share news about Tim’s first tooth or tottering first steps, and every childhood marker that Deb, Mark, and Brian were passing: report cards, Christmas programs, and the funny stories that filled their home.

Ruth and Charles carried on her parents’ values and traditions as if they were woven into their genes. God, family, and church shored up their lives. Ruth sang in the choir, and for fifty years she would be part of a women’s quintet. She and Charles both taught Sunday school.

Five years after Tim, fifth baby Carrie Ann came along in February 1965, and then Jay Parker just over a year later. Jay arrived so close on Carrie’s heels that people teased Ruth and Charles, asking if they’d figured out how pregnancy happened. There were fifteen and a half years between oldest Deb and youngest Jay. But true to Ruth’s original plan, a total of six children filled their house.

For the first time, Ruth had two children in diapers. It seemed that if she wasn’t changing diapers, then she was washing them, scrubbing the flannel fabric, hanging them to dry, and barely getting them folded before needing them again.

Ruth handled the chaos of a house chock-full of children well, but the work could wear out even an “atomic” personality. Ruth kept two long quotes taped to her cupboards for decades, until the paper became tanned with age. Every single day, she’d steal away to read the bolstering words of Walter Wintle’s poem “Courage”:

If you think you are beaten, you are; If you think you dare not, you don’t;

If you’d like to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost a cinch you won’t.

And when she wanted to remind herself of what her children needed most, she read the admonition of Ronald Russell:

A child that lives with encouragement

learns confidence.

A child that lives with truth

learns justice. . . .

The Lees worked hard from early dawn to after dark, and as the children grew old enough, they were assigned farm chores. Work and family time, school and sports activities kept them constantly on their toes. Everyone reconnected at the dining room table, even if it was later in the evening. The kids were expected to be in their seats before the supper prayer: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let this food to us be blessed.”

At one such dinner, Charles offered one of his frequent challenges.

“Okay, does anyone have a riddle tonight?”

“I do,” Brian said, passing a bowl of mashed potatoes on to Deb.

“Go on, what is it?” Charles asked.

The table fell silent except for the scrape of forks on plates and the chewing of food. The circle of faces waited, wondering what Brian had dreamed up.

“What has windows and walks?” The gleam in Brian’s eye piqued his family’s interest.

They looked around, seeking the inspiration for the riddle.

“Um . . . the cuckoo clock?” someone said.

“Nope,” said Brian.

Seven pairs of eyes sought an object around the room besides the glass of the windows, which clearly didn’t have legs.

“A car?”

“No.”

They studied the smug look on Brian’s face, tried again and again, soon tossing out answers that couldn’t possibly be right. No one in the Lee family liked to be duped by a riddle. The older two siblings especially couldn’t allow their younger brother to beat them. Even little Jay tried babbling out words that he couldn’t quite put together.

Dinner grew cold. Ruth knew it was time to end it.

“We give up,” Ruth said, winking at her middle son. He beamed triumphantly and took a bite of his meal.

“What’s the answer?” Tim asked. The entire family was waiting.

Brian looked up from his plate, eyebrows raised as he scanned the table.

Someone shouted in dismay. “He doesn’t have an answer!”

Guilt flushed Brian’s face.

“What? You don’t have an answer to your own riddle?” Charles asked his son.

“I . . . no, I don’t.”

The room roared with groans and laughter in equal measure. The story of “What has windows and walks?” became legendary in the Lee family. Brian would never live it down.

Grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were constants in the Lees’ lives. Ruth’s father, Peder, retired from his pastorate in 1962, though he continued to lead special prayer meetings and fill in for other pastors when asked. He also delivered clothing to Native American families in the Dakotas. Eventually arthritis and knee surgery slowed him down, and for the rest of his life he walked with two canes.

Brian often did chores for his grandpa Peder, like mowing the lawn and taking out the garbage, for which he was always paid. Peder would pull out fifty-cent pieces from the Old Spice deodorant decanter where he kept his change and hand them to Brian.

“You paid me too much,” Brian once said.

“When I’m gone, I don’t want you telling people your grandpa Peder was stingy,” Grandpa responded.

Once each summer, Peder treated the entire Lee brood to dinner at Hokey’s South Lawn drive-in, an outing the kids looked forward to every year. As they spread out over several picnic tables, they liked to retell some of the cherished family stories.

“Remember when Tim was four or five years old, and he followed his dog Duke down the frozen creek? We couldn’t find him for the longest time. . . .”

“Remember when Brian got his finger bit by a mink, and then another one bit his rear end, not once, but twice!”

“What about the story of the Magic Carpet Ride? Dad shaking that rug over the second-story railing in the garage, and the rail breaking. Mom walked by at that very moment, and it seemed like Dad rode the rug down, landing unharmed on the ground with the rug still in his hands.”

“How about when Mom and Deb went shopping when Carrie and Jay were really small, and the saleswoman at J. C. Penney thought Mom was the grandmother? Deb said when they left, ‘See, Mom, I keep telling you to color your hair!’”

All the children did well in school and kept busy participating in extracurricular activities and playing on sports teams. Ruth would pack up the younger children to hurry off to the various events: cheerleading, wrestling, track, baseball, scouting. Naps were often interrupted, dinner served late, schedules juggled. Charles would watch from the stands still dressed in his work clothes. But he and Ruth never missed a game.

The Lees could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting. They were the epitome of a rural American family, with sons joining the military and each of the children earning college degrees. The family was garnering one accomplishment after another.

And there was one among them who reached for the stars and captured the sky.