Racing Home by Adele Dueck

them.
    When Lars, Olaf and Erik got back to town with a second load of lumber, the house was in its spot, looking just like the store it was now going to be. Erik looked proudly at the building, the first in the new town of Green Valley.
    The auction was over, but people still milled around, ignoring their wet clothes. Builders laid out lumber on some of the lots. The ring of hammers was heard from several directions. The lumber Erik had helped stack earlier was gone. Some of it might already be part of a new building, he decided, liking the thought.
    He reached to help Olaf unload the second wagonload just as a stranger laid his hand on the board. “We’re building today,” he said. “I need to buy this whole load.”
    A man talking to Mr. Haugen looked up. “Sorry,” he said, “I just bought most of it.”
    “Then I’ll take the rest,” said the first man.
    Olaf stopped unloading and leaned against the wagon. “So where do we put the lumber?” He grinned at Erik. “No reason to load it again if we don’t have to.”

    Lars hired Erik for several days to watch the store while he and Mr. Haugen built a lean-to onto the back of the former house. Olaf and Rolf worked non-stop, hauling the lumber piled outside town to the new lumberyard. Olaf drove Lars’s wagon and horses while Rolf used his own wagon and oxen. When they drove into the yard, Erik joined them outside to help unload.
    Aunt Kirsten was in the store, too, but she hung sheets to divide the space so she could spin or bake out of sight of the customers. “I’m not going to live in a lumber shop,” she told Erik. Erik knew his mother would have said the same thing, but he liked the smell of the sawdust and the look of the milled lumber.
    He sold other supplies, too, almost anything people needed to build. He counted change from the big wooden cash register and weighed nails. Every time a customer walked into the store, he practiced his English and learned new words.
    Most of the people Erik saw were men, though he knew there were women and children on the farms. He expected the men would bring their families to Green Valley when the businesses were built.
    One day Kirsten sent Erik to the general store for eggs, giving him a chance to walk through the town. The store was in a tent, run by a Norwegian named Nilson. Erik looked at all the supplies, seeing what he could buy with the twenty-five cents Uncle Lars gave him each day. It would be food for sure, that’s what the family needed most. He could buy three tins of pork and beans for fifty cents, but it didn’t seem like much for two days’ pay. Like the nails he was selling, they were expensive because they were heavy and had to come to Hanley by train and then to Green Valley by wagon. Potatoes might be better. Mr. Nilson sold half a bushel for fifty cents, but Erik wondered if a local farmer would sell for less.
    It was hard to believe what he was seeing as he walked back to the lumberyard. A week ago this was a field, and now it was a town. Wooden buildings rose in every direction, but businesses weren’t waiting for them. A bank and a real estate office were working out of tents. An implement shop was almost framed across the street from the lumberyard, and a hotel was going up on the corner. Everyone was working. Even Jim pounded nails on Pete’s new livery stable.
    Several times a day, Erik stood in front of the lumberyard, watching the town grow. Coming from a country where most of the buildings were old, it was exciting to be part of something so new.
    In their hurry to finish, the carpenters kept going after sundown by the light of kerosene torches. At night, when Erik rolled up in a blanket behind the counter in the store, he could see the flickering light of the lamps through the front window, and when he drifted off to sleep it was to the pounding of hammers.
    Gunnar Haugen needed to get back to the business in Hanley, so he and Lars worked long days on the lean-to. As soon as the