"Yessir." But the word was mumbled, James' eyes still set on the floor.
Anna stumbled through the remainder of the day in a blur of emotions. At first she avoided Karl's eyes, but then tried to catch his glance, only to realize he would not even so much as look at her. In the close confines of the cabin his careful withdrawal cut deeply, for he gave her wide berth, cautiously avoiding even the brush of her clothing against his. She knew self-disgust at having disappointed him so utterly.
By the time dusk fell, Anna's trepidation had spread its tentacles about her, squeezing the life from the small amount of self-confidence she'd slowly gleaned through her days as Karl's wife.
That night when his weight finally joined hers on the cornhusks, not so much as a single crackle sounded. Karl lay rigidly upon his back. After what seemed a lifetime he crossed his arms behind his head. His elbow brushed Anna's hair, and she felt him carefully move farther away to avoid even the slightest contact.
After lying beside his stiff form for as long as she could stand it, she realized someone must make the first move toward reconciliation. Gathering up her courage, she turned and lay her palm entreatingly along the underside of his biceps.
As if her touch were now a vile thing, he immediately jerked away and rolled to face the outside, leaving her stricken, with thick throat and flowing eyes.
Oh God, my God, what have I done? Karl, Karl, turn back to me. Let me show you how sorry I am. Let me feel your strong arms around me, forgiving me. Please, love, let's be like before.
But his withdrawal was complete. She suffered it not only that night, but also during the days and nights that followed. She suffered it in resigned silence, knowing she fully deserved this misery. The days were torture, but bedtime was worse, for the dark held remembrance of their former closeness, the joy they had given and found in intimacy, the passion foregone, gone ... gone ...
James knew it had been several nights since Karl and Anna had gone out for their late-night walk, so it surprised him to hear the door opening after they'd already settled into bed. Then he realized it was only Karl who'd gone out. Anna was still there. She turned over and sighed.
Sick at heart for having started this whole thing, James thought he would maybe be able to put things straight. Maybe if he went out and explained to Karl it was none of their fault what their mother had been, maybe if he told Karl for sure how Anna had hated knowing, how she'd vowed to James she'd see he had a better life, maybe then Karl wouldn't be so bitter about it.
James slipped into his britches and out the door. He crossed the clearing to the barn, but once inside, realized that the horses were still tethered outside where he himself had put them that afternoon. He was sure Karl would be with the horses.
He was right. Even from here he could see the outline of Karl, standing beside one of their necks. As he approached on the silent grass, he saw it was Bill by whom the big man stood. The moon picked out the marking on Bill's forehead, and the whiteness of Karl's hair in the night. James saw how Karl had his face buried in Bill's neck, his two fists clutching the coarse mane.
Before James could let Karl know he stood there, Karl's sobs came to him, sounding muffled against the horse and the night. Never had James seen a man cry. He didn't know men cried. He thought he himself was the only boy in the world who had ever cried. But now Karl stood before him, Karl whom he loved almost more than Anna, sobbing wretchedly, pathetically, gripping Bill's mane.
The sound shattered James' bubble of security, which had sheltered him with ever-increasing sureness since he had come to live here in the only home he had ever known. Fearful, not knowing what to do, he turned and fled back to the house, to his pallet on the floor to lie with hammering heart, swallowing back the tears he, too, now wanted to shed, waiting to hear the reassuring footsteps of Karl going back to his bed with Anna. But he didn't cry. He didn't cry. Somebody around here had to not cry.
Chapter Fourteen
Anna and James worked on the chinking. They made trip after trip to the pit for clay to mix with dry prairie grass. With this they packed the spaces between the logs. Their prairie dig got worse. Karl, meanwhile, continued to work on the roof, using smaller willows for the first layer. These were joined to the ridgepole by boring holes, pegging them in place with small lengths of saplings.
Since Karl had put forth his questions about Saul, there was no more pleasantry at bedtime to break the monotony and lighten the load of the hard-working days. James, ever aware of the distance between sister and brother-in-law, suffered under the strain as much as Karl and Anna. He lay on his pallet listening for the sounds of their whispers, their soft laughter, even for the sounds of the cornhusks trembling secretly.
In her spot beside Karl, Anna felt him turn away from her again and pretended to go straight to sleep. She came to expect the tears, which nightly became her companions, but she swallowed them back and gulped down the threatening sobs until Karl's breathing turned deep and even. Only then did those tears stream down her face, puddling in her ears before wetting the pillow case, until, desperately, she would roll over and bury her face, letting the racking sobs come.
Behind her, Karl was fully awake, his empty arms longing for the Anna he'd known before. But stony Swedish pride held him aloof and hurting.
It was not at all the way Karl had imagined it would be the day he cut the opening for the door. This, he'd thought, would be a time of great celebration--the day Anna and James and I walk into our house for the first time. But she was gaunt and tired, with purple smudges beneath her eyes. James was quiet and plodding, unsure how to act between the two of them. Karl himself was efficient, quiet and polite.
The doorway was opened, facing due east as Karl had promised. But when they stepped inside for the first time, it was not into bands of sun and shadow as before. The roof poles were in place now, and much of the chinking was packed. The only solid light penetrated from the doorway. Inside, Anna found the cabin dismal. Assiduously, she avoided going near the corner where she and Karl had stood kissing, or the spot where he had told her the bed would be.
James put on an interested air, walking around the confined space, exclaiming, "Wow! It's three times as big as the sod house!"
"More than three times with the loft, too."
James said, "I never had a spot of my own before."
"It is time we get back to work and stop daydreaming about lofts. There is much to be done before we come to loft-building. Are you ready to bring those stones in, boy?"
"Yessir."
"Good! Then hitch up Belle and Bill, and I will walk out with you and show you where the pile is."
With a sense of doom, Anna set out with the two of them to help James load rocks onto a carrier bogan, which Karl told them was the bunk and runners of his wintertime conveyance, the bobsled. Karl showed them where his rock pile was, east of the cleared grainfields, then returned to the cabin, leaving them to struggle with their morning's drudgery. Yes, that's what it seemed to Anna today-- drudgery. All the beautiful meaning had gone out of their work.
When James drove the bogan back to the clearing with Anna trailing beside, they were both tired and sore.
She dragged herself into the clearing, then to the door of the cabin. It was brighter inside now, for Karl was chopping out a hole for a fireplace.
Sensing she was behind him, he turned and found her staring at his handiwork.
"You're building a fireplace then, Karl?" she asked.
"Ya. A house should have a fireplace."
And a bride should be a virgin, she thought. Is that it, Karl? So she was doomed to cook and heat water and boil soap and boil clothes using only a fireplace for the rest of her life. So Karl, whom she had not guessed could be vindictive, was getting even with her. She longed to cry out, don't do this, Karl! I had no choice, and I'm sorry ... so sorry!
Karl, heart swollen in hurt, returned to his chopping, recalling how he'd always thought of the joy of building this fireplace. How he had thought to bring his Anna to it, to lay her before it in the deep of winter when the flames blazed high,
to toy with her, to take her body against his, to wrap them both in the buffalo robe later and fall asleep uncaringly, there on the floor.
The stones of the fireplace went up, one by lonely one.
The day came when Karl announced they must drive back to check the wild hops. He announced it to James. He spoke little to Anna now, although when he did, he was always polite. Politeness was not what Anna wanted. She wanted the Karl who had teased and cajoled and been so vocal about her disastrous cooking. Now, though her cooking was no better than before, he made no remarks about it, just ate it stolidly, arose from the table and left with his axe or his gun over his shoulder. He continued teaching her the things she needed to know, but all the playfulness and mirth had gone from the lessons.
So it was to James that Karl announced, "I think we must go to the wild hops and check them again. If we want bread next winter, we had best go now."
"Should I hitch up Belle and Bill?" James asked eagerly. These days he tried to do
anything he could think of to make Karl smile, but nothing did the trick.
"Yes. We will leave as soon as you have finished milking Nanna."
When the time came for them to leave, Anna sensed they were not simply heading out to skid a load of building supplies into the clearing. The horses were pointed toward the road for the first time since she had arrived. She stepped to the doorway, staying back in the shadows so Karl couldn't see her. She wondered where they were going. Suddenly, she feared they might leave her here alone, for nobody had said anything to her. Karl had fetched willow baskets and put them in the wagonbed. She saw him turn to James, then James came toward the sod house at a trot. Anna backed away from the door.
"Karl says it's time to go check the wild hops again. He says to see if you're coming, too."
Her heart sang and cried, both at once. He did not mean to leave her then, but neither did he come to invite her himself. She dropped the scoop in the hod and went with James, hesitating only long enough to close the door behind her. When she reached the wagon, Karl was already perched on the seat. He glanced back at the house, and Anna's hopes that he would reach a hand down to help her up were dashed. Instead, while she climbed aboard one side, Karl clambered down the other, walked back to the wood-pile, got a stout log and braced it against the door.
"Why didn't you remind me, Karl?" she asked, wondering if she would ever learn to be the kind of wife he needed. She couldn't even remember a simple thing like bracing the wood against the door.
"It does not matter," he said.
Dismally, she thought, no it doesn't matter. Nothing matters any more, does it, Karl?
The wild hops were ripe this time. The heavy stems clung to their supporting trees with hooked hairs, each vine twining in the clockwise direction peculiar to the hop plant, which Karl explained was one way to identify it. The yellow-green flowers were crisp, papery, sticky, bearing hard purple seeds. They all picked, filling the baskets until they had harvested what they needed and more.
"We'll be eating an awful lot of bread this winter, from the looks of it," Anna said.
"I will sell most of the hops. They bring in fair money," Karl explained.
"At Long Prairie?" she asked.
"Ya, at Long Prairie," he answered, giving her no clue as to when he intended to make the trip.
When the baskets were overflowing and the three were ready to go, Anna bent to touch a newly sprouted growth, stemming up near the mother plant. Karl had called the sprouts "bines."
"Karl? Since there are no hops on your land, why don't we try taking a vine and starting some there?"
"I have tried it before. They have not lived for me."
"Why don't we try it again?"
"We can, if you want to, but I brought nothing to dig it up with."
"What about your axe? Couldn't we chop it out with that?"
Karl's expression was horrified. "With my axe?" He sounded appalled at the thought of his precious axe digging into the dulling grains of the earth. "No man willingly sets his axe in the soil. An axe is made for wood."
Feeling stupid, she looked at the bines, saying, "Oh," in a small voice. But she knelt down, determined to get a plant some way. "I'll see if I can dig one up with my hands then."
Surprisingly, he knelt beside her, and together they tunneled, trying to reach the bottom of the root. It was the closest they had worked together in days, and each was conscious of the other's hands, burrowing and scraping to free the root of the hop bine. There was in Anna a desperate need to please Karl in some small way. If the root were to take hold and grow, she knew it would be like giving Karl a gift.
"I'll water it every day," she promised.
He looked up to find her kneeling there with other promises in her eyes. Then he looked away, saying, "We had better pack this root in some moss or it will dry up before we reach home." He went in search of moss, leaving Anna with the promise dying in her eyes and her heart.