11. Jacob
Jacob
Harmony Lake, Minnesota
“Mat-ri-mony,” Pa said, as if he’d invented the word. “Is what you best be getting about.”
Conversations like this made me want to throw away his dictionary. We lingered in the front room of the farmhouse. Jo finished her evening reading and the rest of the family headed to bed. I blamed Pride and Prejudice for putting the idea of marriage into Pa’s head tonight. Blazing Jane Austen.
I slid a sturdy arm under Pa’s shoulder and boosted him up from his fireside chair. We shuffled the short distance to my parents’ bedroom at the rear of the house in a rhythmic nightly dance, his weight familiar against my side.
“I mean to walk the south forty in the morning,” I said. “Alfalfa might be ready for the first cut.”
“Less farming, Jacob, my boy, more chasing pretty girls.”
“No time for chasing anything, Pa,” I answered more sharply than intended. But it wasn’t simply that I spent too much time on farming. The last thing I wanted was the responsibility of a wife. I already had enough holding me back.
I settled Pa onto the edge of the bed and crouched to pull off his boots, then tucked them under the side table.
“You need to pri-or-i-tize,” Pa said. “I can hold down the farm if some pretty young lady catches your eye and you need to go a courtin’. Is what a handsome young man like yourself ought to be doing.”
Before I could comment, Ma whisked in and took over the nightly routine, bending to help with Pa’s buttons. I pecked her on the cheek.
I squeezed Pa’s shoulder. “How about I hold down the farm and leave the pretty girls to you?”
I climbed the narrow stairs two at a time and found Erik snug in bed, close to sleep.
“Night, Jake,” he mumbled.
“Sleep well, little man.” Although fifteen was hardly little.
I maneuvered onto my narrow bed in the room Erik and I shared. My head grazed the headboard. Yet I kept forcing myself into a bed that didn’t fit, a life that didn’t fit. I curled up on my side with my knees tucked in.
The creaking floorboards from Jo and Beth’s room across the hall soon quieted.
Stillness settled over our dark house. Dinner sat like a rock in my stomach, and I cursed my ingratitude.
This was a good life—just not the one I wanted.
All the wanting in the world wouldn’t change things, not now.
Tomorrow, I promised, I’d be a better son.
Then someday—maybe.