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Updated: June 20, 2025
IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people. Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable.
It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the bodies of his wife and baby.
'Well, he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend? Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't have a thing to say.
Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night." All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook.
The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity. "Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well " Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of pulling a forelock.
And and Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and " There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it. She knew. She had always happened to be there.
The universal sign of winter was the town handyman Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He was the one democrat in town.
Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train.
Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh my!" and kept his coffee cup filled. He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl.
He stood erect, his hands in his side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six, perhaps. "How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled. She recalled him the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at the beginning of winter. "Oh, how do you do," she fluttered. "My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."
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