Grandpa Arne raised one finger from the arm of his wheelchair, and the whole kitchen of the farmhouse outside Fargo went quiet. A pan of bars cooled on the counter, and nobody reached for it, which in a Lutheran family tells you everything about the moment. I am Caleb Eriksen, thirty four years old, and I was standing by the stove with a dish towel over my shoulder, because my cousin had asked me to help serve the coffee. My mother had just walked out of the room with her jaw set and her coat over her arm. The screen door slapped behind her. Grandpa waited for the sound to stop. Then he said, in his thick Norwegian way, “I have one more thing to say.”
The family had gathered to hear who would take over Eriksen Hardware, the chain of eleven stores that Grandpa had built from a single shop on Broadway. For months, everyone had assumed it would go to Tanner, the older son of my Uncle Per, who wore the good suits and talked about growth. I had worked the loading dock for twelve years and had not been asked to say a word. Now Grandpa looked around the table at his children and their children, and his old blue eyes landed, at last, on me.
“The vote is mine,” said Grandpa. “I have carried it eighty nine years, through three blizzards, two recessions and the day the Walmart opened, and I will cast it now. I vote for Caleb.” The silence broke into a clatter of chairs. My mother, who had stopped at the doorway to the porch, had gone as white as the tablecloth. Tanner shot to his feet. “Grandpa, that is crazy,” he said. “He runs a forklift.” Grandpa looked at him mildly. “So did I,” he said. “And I know what the register tape says about you, Tanner. So does your cousin.”
A finger raised at a kitchen table gave one old storekeeper the morning to bring his family back together outside Fargo.
I gave my terms, because Grandpa asked me to, and because I had been practicing them in my head for weeks without knowing it. “I will take the stores,” I said, “but I will not take them alone. Per and Tanner stay as managers, if they want to, with every dollar counted twice. The stores keep their old names, and the old prices, and the old rule that no one is ever fired at Christmas. And whatever the register tape says, we are going to talk about it here, as a family, before anyone calls a lawyer.”
My mother came back across the kitchen floor, and her voice shook. “Caleb, I covered for him. Tanner came to me last year with the mortgage on his house two months behind, and I paid it out of the store account. I told myself it was a loan. Then it was twice, and then it was ten times.” She turned to Grandpa. “I am so ashamed, Papa. I let a mother love for the wrong son.” Grandpa reached for her hand. “Anna,” he said, “you did what mothers do. Now you can do what honest women do.”
It was then that Tanner, purple with shame and rage, darted to the sideboard where the roll of register tape lay unfurled beside the plate of lefse, snatched the original, and ran for the back door with the paper streaming behind him like a ribbon. He barreled through the mud room and out onto the porch, past the boots and the snow shovels and the old dog, who lifted his head and put it down again. At the top of the steps stood three of the longest serving clerks of Eriksen Hardware, who had come for the coffee, in their red vests with the name tags still pinned on. They stood shoulder to shoulder. The tallest crossed his arms.
Tanner halted, wheezing. The tape fluttered from his hand onto the porch boards. The oldest clerk, a woman of seventy named Marge, who had worked the paint counter since 1983, bent down with great dignity and picked it up, rolling it neatly around two fingers. “Mr. Tanner,” she said, “you owe me a case of the good brushes.” Behind me, in the kitchen, with the wind rattling the storm windows, I heard Grandpa begin to laugh, a rusty, wheezing, delighted laugh, and then every other voice in the room joined in, even my mother, through her tears.
The money consequences were drawn up in a week. The chain, worth three million, three hundred thousand dollars, came to me in a trust with an independent board, and Per and Tanner kept their jobs under a new set of books. Tanner repaid the money he had taken, forty one thousand dollars, over four years, and entered a counseling group for gamblers in Moorhead. My mother resigned from the store accounts. She now works the front counter on Saturdays and says it is the happiest she has been in years.
In the name of my grandfather Arne, who passed this past winter, I started the Arne Eriksen Fund. It pays for apprenticeships in the hardware and building trades and for gambling counseling for families, in Cass, Clay and Richland counties. In the first year we placed thirty two apprentices at stores and lumberyards and sent nineteen people to counseling. One was a young man from West Fargo who had been sleeping in his truck, and who now manages the lumber yard at our store on Broadway.
On the first Saturday of December, the family gathered at the store on Broadway for the annual Christmas open house. Tanner, ten months well, stood by the door in a red vest and handed out candy canes to children. Marge ran the paint counter with her usual iron hand. And in the front window, where it had always hung, I put up the picture of Grandpa, the one with the forklift. Under it a card in my own hand read, he cast the last vote, and it was for all of us.