Chapter 8

The TV babbles in the living room. Toivo’s at the computer, a relic hand-me-down. His face glows as job postings fly by. When he sees something interesting, he jabs at the computer keys with his pointer fingers. Once in a while, he looks up and asks me questions: “Fernny, do you think I could be a dentist’s receptionist? How about a bank teller? Here’s one! A professional dancer in a reputable establishment! Can you see me working there? Shaking my moneymaker?” He stands up and wiggles around. The boys join in, wiggling their arms and legs like they’ve been stung by hornets.

For years, Toivo worked as a mechanic at the auto plant, until the company moved the operation to Mexico. After that he tried work as a janitor, until the office building closed. Then as a truck driver, until he couldn’t pass the written test. He did a stint as a laborer at a hog farm, until the operator started hiring immigrants because he could pay them practically nothing. He got a job as a gas station attendant, until the manager hired a teenager who would work practically for free. Then as a bartender, until the bar owner couldn’t afford to pay the liquor tax and the place got shut down. Then he was a small-engine repairman, until the work got so slow that he got laid off. These days he does odd jobs for cash.

I set aside the beechnuts I’ve been shelling. “Okay, boys. Now let’s get this homework done.”

Mikko and Alexi scurry under the kitchen table. They curl into balls and take turns covering each other as though I’m a monster who’s going to eat them.

I lean over and peer under the table. “Come on.” I swipe my arm at them. “Come out from under there.”

“You can’t make us,” Mikko says. He purses his lips.

“I don’t even have any homework,” says Alexi. He sticks his tongue out at me.

“Baloney!” I shout.

My patience is short. I have to think up a project for the STEM fair, and I’m starting to get nervous about it. Maybe if I had a $250 prize, I could pay somebody to babysit the boys once in a while. Maybe, just maybe, if Grandpa heard that I won the STEM fair, he’d start to understand that Toivo and the boys and me are doing just fine here.

Well, almost fine. I haven’t told Toivo about Alexi’s teacher, and I haven’t given him the note she said she put in his backpack.

Toivo calls over his shoulder, “Boys, you better listen to your sister, or I’m gonna get you!” He says it in a lighthearted way, which tells the boys he’s being playful. But I know what he’s got on his mind besides finding a job and proving to the court that he’s a fit father.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Mom and Matti’s accident.

I wonder if we all feel it. If even the boys instinctively know that tomorrow is the day and that’s why they’re acting up even more than usual.

“I’m not in the mood, guys,” I say to my brothers. “You better sit down right now and do your homework before I get mad.”

I’d like to yell at them and tell them that if they don’t shape up, we’re all going to be taken away like Mark-Richard and Gary and have to live with Grandpa. But I don’t.

“I’ll make you a beechnut butter sandwich if you do your homework,” I bribe them.

“With honey?” asks Alexi.

“Sure.” Making beechnut butter is easy, but it takes a lot of time. I know that if I make the butter, I won’t have time to get started on a STEM fair project.

“Beechnut butter!” says Toivo. “I haven’t had that in ages. I’ll take one, too, Fernny.” He returns to his job hunting on the computer.

I just decide that I’ll get up extra early and work on my project in the morning. I always like the mornings anyway.

Toivo and the boys sit piled in a recliner in front of the TV. They shovel piece after piece of beechnut butter sandwiches into their mouths. Their evening show is interrupted with a news brief. A reporter, standing in front of our school, checks her earpiece. “Am I on?” she asks the camera. Her face hardens and she says, “A Colter teacher has filed a petition to stop further development by Kloche’s Hydraulic Fracturing Company. In the petition, Mr. Marcus Flores claims that Kloche’s fracking company has a history of environmental violations across the state and destroys natural resources, pollutes groundwater, and causes irreparable damage to the environment. About his petition, Mr. Flores, had this to say…”

Mr. Flores appears on the television.

“Turn it up!” I shout. “That’s my science teacher!”

Mikko punches the volume on the remote control.

“Fracking will level the last stand of old-growth pine left in this state and ruin the habitat of animals and plants,” says Mr. Flores. “Fracking is known to pollute drinking water and is even suspected of causing earthquakes. We need to prohibit Kloche’s from further development until the truth about fracking’s effects can be revealed to Colter.”

Then the camera cuts to a woman in a gray suit. She looks like a lawyer. The reporter asks her to respond.

“The fracking industry provides hundreds of high-paying jobs and rejuvenates communities. Kloche’s is committed to providing affordable energy and a safe and clean environment. Thank you.”

The reporter comes on again. “One thing’s for sure, Ed. This fight over fracking in the small town of Colter is not over yet. Back to you.”

Toivo pops the boys off his lap. They fall onto the floor and immediately begin wrestling.

“Very sneaky,” he says. He goes to the window and looks out at all the trees. “Why weren’t there town meetings or news articles about it? Did they mean to sneak in here and get fracking before anyone could protest?”

“Can they do that?” I ask. “Come and frack wherever they want to? Are they going to destroy our grove?”

“Looks like it.” He scruffs up my hair. “Well, it’s not our grove, you know. Most of it belongs to Millner.” Toivo chews on the side of his fingernail. “He doesn’t mind that you’re out there, I don’t think. If he did, he’d have said something by now.” He goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a beer.

“Millner’s a murderer,” I say.

Toivo pops the tab, and beer foam bubbles out and down the side of the can and onto the floor. He takes a long drink. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down, three, four times.

“I don’t want to talk about that much.” His eyes get watery. I don’t know if it’s from the carbonation or from thinking about Mom and Matti. Then he points at me with the beer. “But don’t be too hard on Millner.”

On the day they died, Mom was driving into town to drop off Baby Matti at daycare and go into work to catch up on some grading. Horace Millner, coming from the other direction, fell asleep at the wheel. He’d just gotten off a fourteen-hour shift at one of Grandpa’s factories, where he worked. He crossed the center line. Mom swerved, lost control, and flipped the car.

Grandpa fired Horace Millner.

Toivo was beside himself. But he never blamed Millner.

“Will Millner sell?” I ask. “Will he let the trees be cut down?”

Toivo adjusts the hearing aid in his ear. “Will he sell, did you say?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “I don’t know.” He sets down his beer can, already empty, and picks at a blister on the palm of his hand. “I don’t think so. But he might not have a choice. The county can annex that land to allow Kloche’s to frack it if they want to.”

“They can’t!” I shout.

“They can,” he says. “I’ve seen corporations convince governments to do lots of crazy things.”

“Like what?”

A lone coyote howls. The boys jump up and race to the door to catch a look at the animal.

“Hold it!” Toivo shouts at them. “Never mind,” he says to me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“Bath time!” Toivo calls to the boys.

Both boys growl in pain, but it sounds like they’re faking it.

“That’s enough!” Toivo shouts, like he’s really mad. But then he opens his eyes real wide, starts making snarling noises, and lifts his hands into claws. He dives down to the floor with the boys, playfully wrestling them.

He pretends to chew their necks and eat their feet. “I am a hungry coyote!” He tickles them and rubs a knuckle back and forth over their heads. They shriek with glee.

I stand above all of them with my hands on my hips. “You boys need to stop that this instant. You have to take a bath!”

“Rarrr!” Toivo growls, and swipes at my legs, so I decide to jump on top of all of them and grapple, too.

Cleaning up and job searching will have to wait.

When Toivo gets winded, we stop wrestling, and he gives each boy a soft smack on the bottom. “Go brush your fangs and take a bath, and I’ll put on Charlie Brown for us to watch.”

Toivo feels around on the floor for his hearing aid, which fell out in the skirmish, and pops it back in his ear. He heads to the fridge and fishes out another beer, and I follow him.

“What can we do about the woods?” I ask, determined to continue our earlier conversation. “I mean, what would we do without it? Lots of our food comes from out there. And where will the animals go?”

“I know it.” He yawns and stretches. “But some of those fracking jobs pay pretty good, I imagine,” he says.

“Who cares?” I wonder if Alkomso saw the news, and what she thinks about her dad’s new job.

“Well, if getting a job with Kloche’s was the one way I could convince the stupid court that I should keep you and your brothers, wouldn’t that be worth it for us?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He sits down at the computer and opens a search engine. He types in “Kloche Hydraulic Fracturing + jobs.” Then he’s clicking and scrolling and scrolling and clicking while I start the dishes.

I clank all the milk glasses into the soapy water, rinse them off, and toss them on the drying rack.

Toivo miraculously hears my racket and turns around to give me a stern grimace.

“Yeah,” I begin, “but what about the trees?”

He puts his back to me again.

The more I think about it, the madder I get. I don’t want fracking near my house. I don’t want a wastewater pond taking over my woods.

He doesn’t hear me. Or if he does hear me, he doesn’t show it.

Next, I swipe all the plates into the sink at the same time. A big swoosh of suds spills over the sink and splashes onto the floor.

Again, Toivo turns around.

“Or the coyote? Or the bears? Or the birds?” I ask him “Where would they go?”

“What?”

“The birds.” I articulate each word slowly. “Where would they go?”

He exhales. “Fern, I’m not saying I’m for fracking, but maybe we all have to think about how we live our lives,” he says in a staccato delivery I’m not used to.

This time, I turn my back to him and scrub the pots and pans. He keeps talking, going on about how fracking for natural gas might be better than drilling for fossil fuels and junk I don’t care about right now.

“That war they sent me to wasn’t really about much more than oil. I could see that with my own eyes. I lost my dang hearing in one ear for it.”

I don’t know how he’s making connections in his head. I’ve noticed that adults sometimes do this thing where they don’t answer the question a kid has asked and instead start going on about something they’re comfortable talking about instead.

He’s still talking when I decide to interrupt him. “Yeah, but what about Mom?”

“What?” he says. “What do you mean, ‘What about Mom?’”

“Mom!” I yell at him. “Those are her woods!”

Then, out of nowhere, Mikko dashes in with a toothpaste ring around his lips and his toothbrush hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

“Fern cut a duck off Millner’s dog today,” he says, spitting sudsy saliva. “She did!”

“Mikko!” I shout. I flick soapy water at his face.

Toivo spins around on his chair. “Oh, Fern, did you do that?” He shakes his head. “Millner has a right to teach his dogs not to kill his ducks.”

I scoff. “Ranger didn’t do it on purpose.” I wipe my hands dry on a dish towel and then slap the cloth onto the counter.

“Ranger?” says Toivo. “Who’s Ranger?” He opens his eyes wide with understanding. “You named one of Millner’s dogs? Fernny, those aren’t your dogs.”

“Millner doesn’t deserve him. He doesn’t deserve those woods, and he doesn’t deserve Ranger! He deserves to be sad, sad, sad.”

Toivo sighs. “I think you’ve had a long day. Maybe you better go to bed.” His chin is tucked tight into his neck.

“I’m not tired,” I state. I lift my chin up. “Mom loved those woods! Millner killed her and Matti, so the least he could do is not sell the woods!” I eyeball Toivo.

We stare at each other this way for a few seconds. I’m tall and confident as a pine tree, ready to counter whatever he comes up with next.

But instead of fighting, he relaxes his shoulders, his arms, and his face and looks away from me. “I get it,” he says to the wall.

Sometimes the despair is so crushing that I wish that Toivo, Alexi, Mikko, and me had all been in the car when sleeping Millner in his pickup truck crossed the dotted yellow line on an early-morning two-laner in the middle of nowhere just as my mom happened to be on the road with my sleeping baby brother tucked tight in his car seat. I sometimes think it would have been better if we had all gone together.

I am not a crier. But right now in the back of my head, a force builds like a broken dam of rushing misery. My eyes wet with the pressure.

Toivo moves toward me. He grabs me with his right arm and presses me tight against his chest. He holds me there for a minute, and he hiccups trying to control his own sobbing. Him being close to crying makes me want to cry. I hold my breath to prevent it.

Once he steadies, he says into the top of my head, “I think Millner is about the saddest soul I ever knew.” He squeezes me until I have to exhale. “He didn’t do it on purpose, either.”

When I finally compose myself, he says, “One of these days, you’re going to have to cut the duck from Millner’s neck, too.”

Chapter 8

Beechnut Butter