The Caregivers by Nell Lake

Author:Nell Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

At Last

Like Daniel, Inga has memories that younger people marvel at. She was born in 1939, but her childhood could be from a still-earlier time. She grew up in a wood-frame farmhouse “out on the windswept prairie of North Dakota,” on her father’s family farm, which they’d acquired under the Homestead Act. Until Inga was in high school, the house had no running water and no bathroom. The family used an outhouse. Inga remembers hauling water from a well in the backyard and washing dishes in a basin in the kitchen. She was the firstborn; her three siblings came along in the following sixteen years. Inga’s paternal grandmother cooked for the household. Inga’s mother made meals, too, and did housework and worked with Inga’s father on the farm—out in the fields, and in the barns feeding chickens and hogs.

Inga was educated in a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie. In winter, the roads covered with snow—most of the school year, in other words—her father took her to class by horse and sled. In spring, when the roads were thick with mud, Inga had to skip school. Sometimes, the roads clear, her father took her and her siblings by automobile. Inga remembers that one day in her eighth year, she had been told that her father would be late in picking her up from school. She would need to wait for him. But Inga decided she didn’t want to. She started home on foot, south on a long, straight road. Her house was three and a half miles away.

Before long, she spied a figure trailing alongside and slightly behind her in a field. A wolf. Inga slowed, and the wolf slowed. Inga hurried, and the wolf sped up. Inga kept on along the road; the wolf ran behind.

“My small heart beat, I tell you, so fast.” Inga didn’t want to turn back for school because she didn’t want to be seen a coward. She kept watching that wolf out of the corner of her eye. Finally she reached a crossroads and turned west toward home. The wolf kept running south, away from Inga, toward the place where, Inga knew, a river flowed. The wolf had not been stalking her, she realized, just heading toward water. Maybe it was curious, too. She would never find out—nor walk home again.

Inga remembers her grandmother’s strong hands, their large blue veins sticking up like ridges on a plain. The matriarch developed dementia late in life and continued living with Inga’s parents until, in the latter stages of her disease, she moved to a nursing home. Inga had moved fast through school and graduated high school at the age of sixteen. She enrolled at the University of North Dakota. She wanted to study chemistry, but chose a field considered more suited to her gender: home economics. During college she met a local man who worked for a construction company. He asked her out. They married when Inga was nineteen. After she graduated from the university, she and her husband moved to a small Minnesota town, and Inga taught school.

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