Madsi’s 1st
Madsi’s 1st Truth:
When your family refuses to talk about something sad, that something grows and grows until it’s the biggest thing in the room.
Griddle-cake days are the best ones of the year. My older sister, Lisbet, and I would gobble down those cakes faster than the neighbor’s wolf dogs snapping at table scraps. But if Lisbet were here now, she’d say that these ones I have sizzling—all right, scorching—in the pan look like something those dogs chewed up and spat back out.
I’m trying. But no matter what I do, every cake I pour into the three-legged iron pan burns. With the little shovel, I scrape more hot embers from the fireplace onto the stone hearth, then set the pan back over them. The next batch is runny inside when I cut into them. Then, after one cake finally cooks through properly—betrayal! When I take a bite, it’s as bitter as medicine.
“Goat droppings!” I hiss, then stomp toward the kitchen table, reaching for the sugar and flour sacks to make another batch.
“Madsi, you’ve used enough of my sugar,” Mamma calls from the other side of the log cabin. She’s sitting by one of our two windows, using the last of the daylight to finish a skirt for me. The one I’m wearing has started showing more of my ankles than is proper. And this new skirt has long stripes of blue and yellow—my favorite colors. When I saw that fabric, I gave Mamma the biggest hug.
But right now, I wish she’d kneel here at the hearth and help me make more griddle cakes.
“These cakes need to be perfect,” I say while measuring barley flour along with a little sugar, just enough for flavor, into a wooden bowl.
Mamma pauses sewing. Purses her lips at me. “You’ll eat them however they turn out. We can’t waste food.”
“The griddle cakes aren’t for me,” I say.
Today is my sister Lisbet’s fifteenth birthday. And birthdays mean griddle cakes. I don’t want today to be different… even though everything is.
Mamma puts down my skirt on her lap. Draws a long breath through her nose and lets it out through her mouth. I wait for her to look back at me, but she doesn’t lift her head. Only stares at my skirt, squeezing that blue-yellow wool in her hands.
I peer toward Pappa, slouched in the far corner of the cabin beside our other window, hoping he might say something to convince her.
In our tiny cabin, he has to hear us. Small spaces are easier to keep warm, he always says. But they don’t keep many secrets. He doesn’t look up, though, or even glance toward us. He’s slumped in his chair beside the carving tools dangling from pegs in the log walls. Those tools are getting dusty. Pappa’s looking dusty. He sits with his whittling knife in hand—the only tool he picks up anymore—but he’s not carving. He just hacks off slivers from the wood in his hands until he’s left with nothing.
That’s all I’ll have, too, if I don’t get some decent griddle cakes out of this pan.
Mamma opens her mouth, but no words come. I know what she’d say anyway: Lisbet isn’t here anymore.
It’s all wrong, this day coming without my sister. I kept hoping I’d wake to find her snuggled beside me in our cozy box bed built into the log wall. But if I make these griddle cakes—she’ll know it, right? She’ll see that I haven’t forgotten her.
She’ll see that I’m sorry.
“Please, Mamma.” I step around the kitchen table toward her. Beneath my thick socks, the floorboards groan and moan like I’m the biggest bother. But I keep walking to Mamma’s side.
“Be a good girl, Madsi.” Mamma avoids my eyes again. I’m not sure if that’s because she’s about to cry or yell. She never did much of either until… well, a few months before Lisbet disappeared.
I should listen to Mamma. Should go back to the hearth, scrub out the three-legged iron pan, and warm up mutton and pickled cabbage for supper. If this were any other day, I’d do just that. Be Mamma’s Good Girl, like she wants.
But that isn’t today’s story.
“Mamma.” I reach out a hand, touch her shoulder.
She doesn’t look at me. Only hunches over the almost-finished skirt, brushing a fingertip along the deep blue and yellow crossing stripes—so, so pretty, like spring has come early. And Mamma looks like the queen of spring, with her golden hair in a perfect braid crown, all glowing in the amber sunlight leaking through the window. Pappa used to stick flowers in her braid crown during spring and summer. Fire-colored leaves during autumn. And in winter, sometimes he’d stick icicles in her hair, then spin her around until she laughed.
Will we ever be happy like that again?
“Mamma. Please.” I let go of her shoulder and reach for her hands clutching that skirt.
She stands so quickly, I stumble back. “We need water. From the well,” she says. “Before the sun is gone.” Dropping my beautiful new skirt onto the chair, she slips on her sheepskin boots by the door, then snatches the wooden bucket with the rope handle. I barely have time to throw her green wool shawl over her shoulders before she’s gone.
Pappa glances up as the door thumps shut, then turns back to the wood he’s carving—if it can be called that. We used to look for stories hidden in the wood, me and him. Sometimes he’d start with a plan in mind—an item one of our neighbors had asked him to make. Usually, though, he’d let the wood guide him, carving and whittling with long pauses in between.
“There’s a story hidden inside every piece of wood,” he’d tell me. “Our job is to find that story, help the wood become what it was meant to be.”
All I know right now is that our flour and sugar are meant to become griddle cakes. But when I turn back to the table and pick up a wooden spoon, I realize we haven’t got any eggs left. Going without them will only ruin these cakes, too.
After tying on my sheepskin boots and wrapping my shawl around me—it’s getting thin in places, but I love it for the tiny gray rabbits woven on each corner—I hurry outside. Maybe one of our neighbors has eggs to share.
