and Jozina; pass her gnarled hand over Roelf’s wide-staring tearless eyes; wipe the film of dust from the parlour table that had never known a speck during her régime.
“You can’t run far enough,” Maartje had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”
Well, she had run far enough this time.
Roelf was sixteen now, Geertje twelve, Jozina eleven. What would this household do now, Selina wondered, without the woman who had been so faithful a slave to it? Who would keep the pigtails—no longer giggling—in clean ginghams and decent square-toed shoes? Who, when Klaas broke out in rumbling Dutch wrath against what he termed Roelf’s “dumb” ways, would say, “Og, Pool, leave the boy alone once. He does nothing.” Who would keep Klaas himself in order; cook his meals, wash his clothes, iron his shirts, take pride in the great ruddy childlike giant?
Klaas answered these questions just nine months later by marrying the Widow Paarlenberg. High Prairie was rocked with surprise. For months this marriage was the talk of the district. They had gone to Niagara Falls on a wedding trip; Pool’s place was going to have this improvement and that; no, they were going to move to the Widow Paarlenberg’s large farmhouse (they would always call her that); no, Pool was putting in a bathroom with a bathtub and running water; no, they were going to buy the Stikker place between Pool’s and Paarlenberg’s and make one
