The Alpine Obituary (13 page)

Vida was getting into her car when I suddenly remembered my appointment with Max Froland. I rushed out of the house, shouting and waving my arms.

“Do you want to join us?” I asked after explaining my plans for the rest of the morning.

Without hesitating, Vida said she’d be at the office in half an hour. It was almost ten o’clock, and she had some errands to run.

I arrived at the office ten minutes early to make coffee and clear some space on the table in the newsroom. Vida and Max joined me within a minute of each other. Max was carrying photo albums and a shoe box.

“How is your mother?” Vida inquired as soon as we were seated at the table.

“She’s sleeping a lot,” Max replied, accepting a mug of coffee from me. “Whatever Doc Dewey gave her has certainly knocked her out.”

“Just as well,” Vida said as I handed her a mug of hot water. “Now tell us what you have so that we can complement it with articles from our files.”

Max tapped the album that sat on top of at least three others. The one he indicated and the one under it were smaller and older, with black covers and black pages. The two underneath were larger and newer.

“These are family photos from both sides,” Max said. “A few of the pictures go back to my maternal greatgrandfather’s day.”

“That would be Trygve Iverson?” Vida put in.

Max nodded. “His daughter, Karen, was my grandmother.”

Vida moved backward in Scott’s swivel chair. “I started a family tree,” she said, then quickly added, “I often do when a longtime resident passes away. Let me make sure I’ve got it right, and to make additions you may have.”

Vida propelled herself a few feet to the coat closet where she’d put the family tree. Scooting back to the table, she unrolled the big sheet of paper in front of Max, who studied her notations in silence.

“This is right—as far as it goes,” he finally said. “You’ve got a gap here under Trygve and Olga Iverson’s children.”

Vida leaned over the paper. “You mean I don’t have wives or descendants for Jonas and Lars?”

“Yes, but . . .”

Vida swung the family tree into her purview. “Do you have names, dates?”

“Lars was married just before the crash in twenty-nine,” Max said. “It was an old family joke—his wife, Alice, had been very extravagant, and Great-Uncle Lars was a tight-wad. He insisted his bride quit spending so much money. The rest of the family claimed that Alice’s sudden thrift affected the economy and caused the Depression.”

“Alice . . . ?” Vida bestowed a coaxing look on Max.

“Gough,” he said, then spelled out the name. “They’ve both been dead for several years. They were Uncle Jack Iverson’s parents.”

“Oh, yes.” Vida made the appropriate notations. “They lived in Wenatchee, didn’t they?”

“They’d retired there,” Max agreed. “They wanted to be in a larger town. Medical resources, transportation—all the usual reasons older folks sometimes have for moving out of a place the size of Alpine.”

Vida gave Max a sharp glance. “Most stay here.”

As an expatriate, Max seemed aware of how defectors were viewed. “That’s true. My own parents stayed in Alpine.”

Vida accepted the statement as an apology and resumed looking at the family tree. “That takes care of Lars for the moment. What about Jonas?”

“That’s what I was going to say earlier,” Max said, looking away. “He’s a bit of a mystery.” He removed the lid from the shoe box. “I haven’t gone through all of these postcards and letters yet.”

Vida gazed at Max from over the rims of her glasses. “Who else in your family is interested in a newspaper piece?”

“Uncle Jack and Aunt Helene,” Max responded. “My cousin, Fred, and his wife, Opal. My other cousin, Doug, over in Leavenworth. They thought it’d be appropriate. It’s a new century, so much has changed, especially in the timber industry. The fact is, as far as the Froland part of the Iverson descendants goes, the line ends with me.”

Vida offered Max a sympathetic look. “You still could remarry, Max. You’re only—what?—fifty?”

Max smiled faintly. “I never wanted to be married to anyone except Jackie. Even after almost fifteen years without her, I still don’t.”

“That’s a shame,” Vida declared, then added, “I was somewhat older when I was widowed. But I must confess, I always felt that if I found someone else, it would be like replacing Ernest. Somehow, I couldn’t do that.” Abruptly, she turned away.

I intervened to change the subject. “Why don’t you leave the letters and such here, Max? Vida and I can sift through them later to see what might be usable for the article. We’re not going to muckrake, I promise.”

Max grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t really think you were.”

“It’s a reflex reaction on our part,” I explained. “Journalists always jump on a story’s worst aspect, especially if there’s any mystery to it.”

“I understand,” Max said. “Let me show you some of the photos. Assuming, of course, you’d want to use any of them.”

“Oh, we love family pictures,” Vida asserted, once again her usual self. “Our readers do, too. Let’s see them.”

Max opened the first album and turned it so Vida and I could study the photos. “Some of these are quite old,” he said. “I don’t know how they’ll reproduce.”

“Buddy Bayard can work with old pictures,” I said. “He’s very good at tweaking them to register well.”

Max gave a nod. “This,” he said, pointing to a portrait that took up the album’s first page, “is my grandparents’ wedding photograph. Trygve met Olga in his hometown of Trondheim, Norway, when she was only fourteen. He came to America to work in the Minnesota north woods. By the time he’d saved up enough money to go back to Norway and marry Olga, he’d decided they should move further west, to Washington State. This picture was taken in Trondheim where they were married in 1891.”

In the sepia-tinted portrait, Trygve Iverson—or Iversen, as he was then known—was a bear of a man with a heavy beard and piercing eyes. Olga, who was seated in front of her groom, looked as if she might have been pretty when she smiled. But people didn’t smile much in photos of that era. Olga appeared sturdy enough to out duke a musk ox.

“That’s a lovely veil,” Vida remarked. “Handmade, I should think.”

I sensed that Vida was hard pressed to give a compliment. The white veil and the bouquet of lilies were the only indications of wedding finery. Olga’s dress was dark and quite plain. The suit that Trygve wore looked too tight for his husky frame. Judging from their expressions, the couple looked like they had scheduled back-to-back root canals instead of celebrating a wedding.

“What do you remember about them?” I asked as Max flipped the page to a grouping of old snapshots.

“Nothing.” Max wore a half-smile. “They both died long before I was born. Grandpa Tryg wasn’t much older than I am now when he passed away. Grandma outlived him by over twenty years. It’s family lore that they both died of broken hearts.”

Abruptly, Vida looked up from the photos she’d been studying. “How so?”

Max shrugged. “I’m not sure about Grandpa. With Grandma, it was Uncle Burt’s death during the war in North Africa. She died a year to the day that he was killed.”

“That was Burt Iverson,” Vida said softly. “He married a woman named Foster, didn’t he?”

“Aunt Jo,” Max responded. “She’s still alive. I think she moved to a nursing home in Port Angeles where their daughter lives. Marjorie—I don’t know her married name—was not quite two when Uncle Burt died. Aunt Jo remarried one of the Bergstroms.”

“Yes,” Vida said. “I knew that. But your aunt wasn’t from Alpine, was she?”

Max shook his head. “No. She was from Everett, I think. I didn’t know her very well. For some reason, my grandmother never liked her.”

“Why not?” Vida asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Max replied, casting a wary eye on Vida.

I was looking at the pages of old snapshots. I saw Tryg and Olga standing in front of a small frame house with tulips and daffodils blooming by the picket fence. Olga held a baby draped in a fringed blanket. Someone with fine printing skills had labeled the photo with a gold pen. “Per Iversen, two weeks old, May 14, 1892.”

“I think,” Max said, following my line of sight, “that was taken in Port Townsend. My grandparents lived there until they moved to Alpine many years later.”

“In 1914,” I said, remembering the mention of the Iversons’ arrival in Alpine. I took a last look at the picture of the young couple with their baby. Vida had told me that Olga never really learned to speak English. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to come to America but couldn’t resist Trygve’s entreaties. It couldn’t have been easy for a girl probably still in her teens to leave the familiar circle of family and friends behind in Norway. I wondered if she’d been happy in her new life.

Max looked surprised. “So you’ve been reading up on the family already?”

“Well,” I replied, trying to recover from my slip of the tongue, “we often do background checking when an old-timer like your father dies.”

“Tell me,” Vida said, leaning her elbows on the table and addressing Max, “why did the family change the spelling of their last name?”

Max looked blank. “It was always Froland. F-r-o . . .”

“No, no,” Vida interrupted, shaking her head. “The Iversons. It was originally spelled with an
e
.”

“Oh.” Max rubbed at his beard. “I found Pa’s birth certificate when I was going through his things the other day. His mother, Karen Iverson, had spelled it with an
o
.”

“I’ve always thought,” Vida continued in a musing tone, “that the s-o-n was more of a Swedish spelling than Norwegian.”

“Generally, yes,” Max said, “but there are exceptions. Border crossings, and all that,” he added with a wink.

I’d resumed looking at the photos. They were typical— adults posing in their Sunday best, more babes in arms, kids riding horses, kids playing ball, kids under a Christmas tree. The second album started out the same way, though there were no new babies and the kids were getting bigger. Trygve and Olga were bigger, too.

Halfway through the snapshots, the backdrop changed. Now they were in Alpine. I could see Mount Baldy in the background, a small frame house above the railroad tracks, the bunkhouses below. One large photo was familiar. It showed the entire population of Alpine on the mill’s loading dock with the American flag they’d won for selling the most Liberty Bonds per capita in the state of Washington.

I turned the page. Three men identified as Per, Lon, and Oscar stood in front of an enormous fallen cedar tree. Per, I assumed, was Trygve and Olga’s firstborn. He was a tall, strapping young man, and unlike his parents in their wedding portrait, Per was grinning at the camera.

There were more photos taken in the woods, but it was the one on the facing page in the lower right-hand corner that grabbed my attention.

It was a snapshot of a rope dangling from a railroad trestle.