sat down behind his desk again. “Remember that what you have will go to your own children some day. Do this for them. Handle this right, and all my railroad interests will go to you. Mark will handle everything else. I’m talking millions of dollars and a lot of responsibility, Jude. Do this not just for me, but for yourself.”
Jude studied his father’s eyes, trying to find love there. He saw a spark of it, but always it was mixed with a strange doubt. It was that doubt that had always made him long for approval and affection from both his parents. Here was a chance to find favor in his father’s eyes, and he longed to accomplish that.
“When do I leave?” he asked, already dreading the job.
“Within a week or two, after Corinne’s spring social. Your mother would never forgive me if either of you missed the event of the year.” Jefferson smiled, his mood lighter again.
“Ah, yes, the spring social,” Mark mused. “Mother’s time to shine.” He looked at Jude. “And your chance to make all the young girls swoon,” he added snidely. “When do you think you’ll marry one of them, big brother? Or do you plan to just keep breaking their hearts?”
“I prefer not to marry someone just for status and to add to my wealth,” Jude interrupted, rising.
Mark’s gaze darkened. “That’s not why I’m marrying Cindy.”
Jude glared at him. “I know you too well, little brother. You don’t fool me one bit. You’re about as capable of loving someone as a lion is capable of loving a lamb.” He walked out, not caring to get into a full-blown argument or to listen to his father defend Mark. He truly wished he could get along with his brother, but Mark’s jealousy and spoiled, immature determination to be the favorite made that impossible.
He decided his assignment to go to Omaha wasn’t so bad after all. At least he could get away from Mark’s incessant whining and insults, and from his mother’s petty lifestyle. Maybe he wouldn’t even stay for the all-important spring social. His mother’s deliberate and gaudy display of wealth and importance was not something he enjoyed. Nor did he look forward to the fawning of the available young women who attended, obviously hoping to marry into the Kingman wealth. He wanted something more in a woman than her being among the proper “class” for a Kingman. He wanted honesty and integrity. He wanted strength tempered with compassion. Most of all he wanted a woman who would love him for himself, not his station in life, or his money.
Such a woman would not be an easy find, which was why at twenty-nine years of age he was still single. He vowed never to end up married to a woman anything like his mother. Thanks to her, he wasn’t even sure how real love was supposed to feel.
Chapter Two
The hem of Ingrid’s dress hung heavy with mud, and she dreaded the mess her worn, black, high-top shoes would be by the time she finished gathering eggs and feeding the pigs. According to her diary entry of one year ago, Nebraska experienced a freak snowstorm this time last year. This spring was just the opposite. Although she did not doubt more cold weather was ahead, today was unusually warm and humid. Only partially thawed, the ground beneath her feet was a quagmire. In some places she literally had to yank her feet out of the mud.
Basket in hand, she made her way to the chicken coop, glancing first at a larger shed to see her ten-year-old brother throwing pebbles into a mud puddle. “Johnny Svensson, you are supposed to be milking the cow!” she shouted.
Looking startled, the towheaded boy turned and ran back into the shed.
“When will that boy learn to stay with one job until it is finished?” Ingrid muttered.
She stooped to enter a small sod chicken coop, wanting to hurry with her own chores so she could get breakfast started. Her father, always the first one up and out, was checking the fields to see if he might be able to plow some furrows to prepare for planting.
A farmer’s work was never done. Even in winter Albert Svensson was out in the barn every day sharpening tools, sorting baskets and taking care of other endless winter chores in preparation for spring planting and a long, hot summer of farming. In spite of a painful back problem that had plagued him the past two years, her tall, strong father never shunned work and considered it the only way to heaven.
“Perhaps it is,” she said to the chickens. Hard work kept a person busy, with no time to think about, let alone act on, sinful ways. She remembered her mother telling her that when she was just a little girl.
Hens pecked at her hands as she shooed them away from their nests so she could collect their eggs. She laid the still-warm eggs in her basket, glad to find plenty to cook a big breakfast.
She ducked out of the hen shed, enjoying the warm morning sun. It was times like this when she missed her mother the most. Yolanda Svensson would have gloried in a morning like this. Although she’d died ten years ago when Johnny was born, Ingrid still had vivid memories of the strong, brave woman.
She headed back to the family’s soddy, where coffee was still warming on her proudest possession, a Concord cooking range ordered from Pennsylvania through Grooten’s Dry Goods in nearby Plum Creek. In winter it warmed the house much better than their stone fireplace ever had. How her mother would have enjoyed that stove!
Before she reached the house, the long wail of another Union Pacific locomotive cried out through the morning air. That would be the 7:00 a.m. She’d never ridden a train—couldn’t afford it—but she could time her day by their regularity.
She went into the house and set her basket of eggs on a small table near the entrance, being careful not to get mud on the wood plank floor. After her father had laid that floor last year she’d felt as though she were living in luxury. The soddy’s mud-plastered walls were now whitewashed, and two real glass windows let in sunlight. The sod roof had been replaced two years ago with real wood beams, wood planks and shingles, so she no longer had to hang blankets under the ceiling to catch dirt and bugs, which pleased her greatly.
She turned around and made her way to the cowshed, stepping inside to see that her brother had collected enough milk to garner a good amount of cream for making butter.
“Good job, Johnny,” she praised him, taking the bucket. Together they headed back to the house, the disappearing locomotive still wailing in the distance and leaving a trail of smoke on the horizon.
“Ingrid?” Johnny asked.
“What is it?”
“What if I don’t want to be a farmer when I grow up?”
Ingrid stopped walking and faced him. “Of course you will be a farmer, Johnny. That is why Far is building up this land,” she reminded him, affectionately using the Swedish term for father. “This farm will be yours someday.”
Johnny looked across the flat expanse of farmland at the lingering smoke in the air. “Maybe I’ll want to be a locomotive engineer, or ride the caboose. Maybe I’ll just get on a train and go as far as it will take me.”
Ingrid could just imagine the picture of adventure trains conjured up for a boy of ten, the whistle beckoning a child’s spirit to explore a faraway land. “When you are older you will see what is truly important, Johnny. Honoring your father is important. Working the land is important. Perhaps you might leave for a while, but this is your home, and you will always come back.”
Johnny
