I DISCOVERED LISA’S last name through Ragnild Ulseth, the second daughter of old Mrs. Bakkethun, a close neighbor of our grandparents. When I dialed the number, I felt some trepidation. Although Ragnild would certainly remember me, I recalled the sympathy card she had sent my mother after my father’s death. The note had been written in a shaky hand explaining that her current health made traveling to the funeral impossible. She must have been well into her eighties. She answered the phone with a creaky but determined voice. “You’re Lars’s son, how nice. How nice.” I made small talk for a couple of minutes before getting to the point. I didn’t mention the contents of the letter but told her that my sister and I wanted to identify my father’s correspondents if we could. “Do you remember a girl named Lisa? Fredrik thinks she worked for the Brekkes.”

“Oh, dear me, yes. I remember. I’m as right as rain in my mind, you know, it’s the rest of me that’s falling apart, and better to ask me about the old days than about yesterday. Yesterday can fly right out of my head, but not times from way back. You must mean Lisa Odland from Blue Wing. Was with the Brekkes maybe a year and came to us time and again. I was a little sorry for the girl, had a scar on her neck, but otherwise wasn’t bad looking really, a bit on the heavy side. They said she was wild, but I wouldn’t know about that. I never saw it. She was stubborn, if you ask me, and sad. Didn’t say much. Her parents came from somewhere in the Dakotas, I think, and moved to Blue Wing. There was some talk of trouble back where they came from. She disappeared, oh let me see, it must have been sometime in the summer of thirty-seven, but she turned up again in South St. Paul at Obert’s Lunch to see your dad. He was working there on Sundays as I recall.”

“To see my father?”

“I had it from Obert himself,” she said. “It’s funny. I didn’t know that Lisa was close to your dad. We all knew her, but she hung back, so we couldn’t count her as a friend, if you see what I mean.”

“Obert, my grandfather’s cousin.”

“Yes.” Ragnild’s voice softened. “They’re all gone now. Hardly anybody left. With your dad’s passing, well, it was sad, that’s all. He was a good man.”

“Yes, he was,” I said, almost in a whisper. It wasn’t the words she spoke as much as their sounds that moved me. The rhythm and music of another language haunted her speech, just as it had haunted my father’s.

“Do you know anything about Harry going to jail?” I said.

Ragnild made a noise into the phone. “Poor man, he drank. It might have been on account of the drinking.”