Number the Stars by Lois Lowry Ch 8
There Has Been a Death
Through a haze of dreams Annemarie heard Henrik rise and leave the house, headed for the barn with his milking pail, at daybreak. Later, when she woke again, it was morning. She could hear birds calling outside, one of them close by the window in the apple tree; and she could hear Mama below, in the kitchen, talking to Kirsti.
Ellen was still asleep. The night before, so shortened by the soldiers in the Copenhagen apartment, seemed long ago. Annemarie rose quietly so that she wouldn't wake her friend. She pulled on her clothes and went down the narrow, curved staircase to find her sister kneeling on the kitchen floor trying to make the gray kitten drink water from a bowl.
“Silly,” she said. “Kittens like milk, not water.”
“I am teaching this one new habits,” Kirsti explained importantly. “And I have named him Thor, for the God of Thunder.”
Annemarie burst out laughing. She looked at the tiny kitten, who was shaking his head, irritated at his wet whiskers as Kirsti kept trying to dip his face to the water. “God of Thunder?” Annemarie said. “He looks as if he would run and hide if there were a thunderstorm!”
“He has a mother someplace who would comfort him, I imagine,” Mama said. “And when he wants milk, he'll find his mama.” “Or he could go visit the cow,” Kirsti said.
Although Uncle Henrik no longer raised crops on the farm, as his parents had, he still kept a cow, who munched happily on the meadow grass and gave a little milk each day in return. Now and then he was able to send cheese into Copenhagen to his sister's family. This morning, Annemarie noticed with delight, Mama had made oatmeal, and there was a pitcher of cream on the table. It was a very long time since she had tasted cream. At home they had bread and tea every morning.
Mama followed Annemarie's eyes to the pitcher. “Fresh from Blossom,” she said. “Henrik milks her every morning before he leaves for the boat.
“And,” she added, “there's butter, too. Usually not even Henrik has butter, but he managed to save a little this time.”
“Save a little from what?” Annemarie asked, spooning oatmeal into a flowered bowl. “Don't tell me the soldiers try to—what's the word?— relocate butter, too?” She laughed at her own joke. But it wasn't a joke at all, though Mama laughed ruefully. “They do,” she said. “They relocate all the farmers' butter, right into the stomach of their army! I suppose that if they knew Henrik had kept this tiny bit, they would come with guns and march it away, down the path!”
Kirsti joined their laughter, as the three of them pictured a mound of frightened butter under military arrest. The kitten darted away when Kirsti's attention was distracted, and settled on the windowsill. Suddenly, here in this sunlit kitchen, with cream in a pitcher and a bird in the apple tree beside the door—and out in the Kattegat, where Uncle Henrik, surrounded by bright blue sky and water, pulled in his nets filled with shiny silver fish—suddenly the specter of guns and grim-faced soldiers seemed nothing more than a ghost story, a joke with which to frighten children in the dark.
Ellen appeared in the kitchen doorway, smiling sleepily, and Mama put another flowered bowl of steaming oatmeal on the old wooden table.
“Cream,” Annemarie said, gesturing to the pitcher with a grin.
All day long the girls played out of doors under the brilliant clear sky and sun. Annemarie took Ellen to the small pasture beyond the barn and introduced her to Blossom, who gave a lazy, rough-textured lick to the palm of Ellen's hand when she extended it timidly. The kitten scampered about and chased flying insects across the meadow. The girls picked armfuls of wildflowers dried brown, now, by the early fall chill, and arranged them in pots and pitchers until the table tops were crowded with their bouquets.
Inside the house, Mama scrubbed and dusted, tsk-tsking at Uncle Henrik's untidy housekeeping. She took the rugs out to the clothesline and beat them with a sticky scattering dust into the air.
“He needs a wife,” she said, shaking her head, and attacked the old wooden floors with a broom while the rugs aired.
“Just look at this,” she said, opening the door to the little-used formal living room with its old-fashioned furniture. “He never dusts.” And she picked up her cleaning rags.
“And, Kirsti,” she added, “the God of Thunder made a very small rain shower in the corner of the kitchen floor. Keep an eye on him. '” Late in the afternoon, Uncle Henrik came home. He grinned when he saw the newly cleaned and polished house, the double doors to the living room wide open, the rugs aired, and the windows washed.
“Henrik, you need a wife,” Mama scolded him.
Uncle Henrik laughed and joined Mama on the steps near the kitchen door. “Why do I need a wife, when I have a sister?” he asked in his booming voice.
Mama sighed, but her eyes were twinkling. “And you need to stay home more often to take care of the house. This step is broken, and there is a leaking faucet in the kitchen. And—”
Henrik was grinning at her, shaking his head in mock dismay. “And there are mice in the attic, and my brown sweater has a big moth hole in the sleeve, and if I don't wash the windows soon—” They laughed together.
“Anyway,” Mama said, “I have opened every window, Henrik, to let the air in, and the sunlight. Thank goodness it is such a beautiful day.”
“Tomorrow will be a day for fishing,” Henrik said, his smile disappearing.
Annemarie, listening, recognized the odd phrase. Papa had said something like it on the telephone. “Is the weather good for fishing, Henrik?” Papa had asked. But what did it mean? Henrik went fishing every day, rain or shine. Denmark's fishermen didn't wait for sunny days to take their boats out and throw their nets into the sea. Annemarie, silent, sitting with Ellen under the apple tree, watched her uncle.
Mama looked at him. “The weather is right?” she asked.
Henrik nodded and looked at the sky. He smelled the air. “I will be going back to the boat tonight after supper. We will leave very early in the morning. I will stay on the boat all night.”
Annemarie wondered what it would be like to be on a boat all night. To lie at anchor, hearing the sea slap against the sides. To see the stars from your place on the sea.
“You have prepared the living room?” Uncle Henrik asked suddenly.
Mama nodded. “It is cleaned, and I moved the furniture a bit to make room.
“And you saw the flowers,” she added. “I hadn't thought of it, but the girls picked dried flowers from the meadow.” “Prepared the living room for what?” Annemarie asked. “Why did you move the furniture?”
Mama looked at Uncle Henrik. He had reached down for the kitten, scampering past, and now held it against his chest and scratched its chin gently. It arched its small back with pleasure.
“Well, girls,” he said, “it is a sad event, but not too sad, really, because she was very, very old. There has been a death, and tonight your Great-aunt Birte will be resting in the living room, in her casket, before she is buried tomorrow. It is the old custom, you know, for the dead to rest at home, and their loved ones to be with them before burial.”
Kirsti was listening with a fascinated look. “Right here?” she asked. “A dead person right here?”
Annemarie said nothing. She was confused. This was the first she had heard of a death in the family. No one had called Copenhagen to say that there had been a death. No one had seemed sad.
And—most puzzling of all—she had never heard the name before. Great-aunt Birte. Surely she would have known if she had a relative by that name. Kirsti might not; Kirsti was little and didn't pay attention to such things. But Annemarie did. She had always been fascinated by her mother's stories of her own childhood. She remembered the names of all the cousins, the great-aunts, and -uncles: who had been a tease, who had been a grouch, who had been such a scold that her husband had finally moved away to a different house, though they continued to have dinner together every night. Such wonderful, interesting stories, filled with the colorful personalities of her mother's family. And Annemarie was quite, quite certain, though she said nothing. There was no Great-aunt Birte. She didn't exist.
