Read The Reaper's Song for Free Online Page A

blouse with an air that commanded respect. Except from her young daughter.
    Baby Astrid raised the volume on her demands.
    Ingeborg bent to finish picking the row, feeling the seepage from her milk-laden bosom. Often she felt like one of the milk cows, but they let their milk down only twice a day, while she did every time she heard a baby cry. “Uff da,” she muttered again. Now she would have to change before dinner. “Little one, if you could have waited only a while longer.”
    “You mark my words, that one will never willingly wait for anything.”
    “She is impatient, isn’t she?” Ingeborg sent a smile to the other woman working across the bean rows. “So soon she’ll be racing after her brothers. They grow up so fast.”
    Astrid plunked herself back down in the row and buried her face in her skirts, the cries enough to break a hardened heart, let alone her mother’s.
    “This Dakota country, it grows everything fast.” Goodie Peterson set her basket of beans on the bench in the shade of the sod house, which had become home for her and her two children after the Bjorklunds had built the frame house that spring. Up till then, they’d all shared the soddy. Goodie had come to live with the Bjorklunds after her husband died the winter before. “You want we should dry these instead of canning them? My mother used to hang pairs of bean pods, hooked together by their stems, over a string above the stove. Called them leather britches and cooked them along with bacon or salt pork.” She held up two connected pods as an example. “You dry them before the beans inside get very big. Tastes a whole lot different than dried shelled beans.”
    Ingeborg looked at the bucket and basket, both full of slender bean pods. “I didn’t pick mine with the stems on.” While she talked, she picked up Astrid and carried her to the bench beside the soddy. Sitting down, she loosened her shirt and set the baby to her breast with one arm encircling the child, leaving her hands free. Ingeborg adjusted her pose to make Astrid more comfortable and reached for a handful of beans. “We can dry yours and snap mine. Leather britches, hmm.”
    “You want a drink of water?” Goodie shaded her eyes at a squeal from the barn. “Those two are playing in the haymow again.”
    “Yes, to the water, and can’t hurt about the children.” Ingeborg loosened the ties of the sunbonnet she’d finally consented to wearand let it fall behind her. Her wide-brimmed man’s felt hat shaded better than the calico bonnet, but the bonnet kept her hair cleaner. She’d finally succumbed to the pressure from the other women, and from Haakan too, to put away her man’s attire. A breeze tickled the damp hair on either side of her face. She sighed and leaned against the soddy wall.
    Just past four and large for his age, her younger son, Andrew, had assumed full charge of Goodie’s nearly four-year-old daughter, Ellie. The two were now responsible for feeding the chickens, and Andrew was teaching Ellie which were weeds and which were vegetables in the burgeoning garden. Between the two, they kept the sweet corn and potatoes weed free and collected potato bugs in cans of kerosene. Whenever loosed from chores, they headed straight for the hay-filled barn, sliding down the side near the trapdoor to the lower level. Goodie feared they might forget to close the trap, shoot right down to the rock-hard dirt floor below, and break an arm or leg in the landing.
    Ingeborg snapped beans, dropping the broken pieces into her skirt basket and listening to the contented guzzling of her baby. Astrid nursed as she did everything—with gusto.
    “Here.” Goodie handed Ingeborg the dipper of water, cold from their well, and set another basket on the bench. At a halloo from the road to their town of Blessing and the railroad siding at the southwestern corner of Bjorklund land, she shaded her eyes again. The heat of the golden sunlight shimmered around a man wearing a hat,