Touches the Sky by James Calvin Schaap

Author:James Calvin Schaap
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441204820
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Seven

When the weather finally turned cold, I thought our problems would be over. So did Dalitha. Dakota winters are no time to dance. It had been—and I know I’ve said this before—a remarkably warm fall and early winter; however, that was not terribly unusual either, for when the winter winds slide down off the Rockies in the far west, often as not those winds keep us warmer than the farmers east of the Missouri and in Iowa. But suddenly in December, the temperature dropped to near zero, and I remember thinking that the newly arrived winter cold was an answer to prayer.

When we returned home, there was another letter from my father, announcing his arrival across the river on the 11th. “We,” he wrote, and I assumed he meant himself and my mother, which somewhat surprised me, because it was difficult to imagine her—an upper-class Dutch lady, after all—coming out to the edge of the frontier. He mentioned nothing else, really, except to say that they wanted to see me and my new wife.

The only clue I had about what was to happen was suggested by the single word need: “We need to see you,” he wrote, which I found puzzling. And he’d written in English for some reason, not in Dutch, probably for Dalitha’s sake, and I simply assumed he meant it the way it sounded. “We will look for you then,” my father wrote. “We need to see you.”

I knew it could not be a pleasure trip; not in his life did my father ever embark on something so frivolous as a vacation. At that time, he was still hard at work trying to establish a new church and new denomination, attending to his flock in a little church in Noordeloos, Michigan, somewhere along the lakeshore, somewhere not far from where my first wife and our little girls were buried.

Something in me wanted to go back to Friesland on my own. I didn’t know for sure that Dalitha did not want to go along, but I knew that at this time, going another whole day east, away from the reservation, would be difficult for her.

On the reservations just west of the river, things had quieted some, although a few Sioux parents told Dalitha that their children would not be coming to school because they had gone to church. They meant the dancing, and the reason they gave was not a lie. They were telling the truth as they saw it, because the messiah in whom they’d come to believe was as real to them as Jesus was to those most fervently praying for his coming across the river in Friesland, and farther east in Douglas County, in Harrison and New Holland.

With school to attend to and children to teach but with Anna Crow unaccounted for somewhere and pregnant with the child of a father already buried for more than a month, Dalitha remained very anxious and suffered from cabin fever. Always there were rumors of unrest, even though the reservation was full of bluecoats.

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