"Anna ... Oh my God, Anna," he spoke into her hair.
She sobbed, followed by frightful spasms of quaking.
"It is all right, Anna. I have killed it."
"Your axe, Karl," she wailed senselessly.
"Yes, I killed it with my axe. Don't cry, Anna."
James was running up the hill by this time, alerted by Anna's scream, which had carried through the still air over the clearing like the shriek of a screech owl.
"Karl, what's wrong?" he called.
"There was a timber rattler, but it is all right now. I killed it."
"Is she okay?" James asked, frightened instantly.
"Ya, she is safe." But Karl did not relinquish his hold on her.
Anna continued to mutter senselessly something about Karl's axe while he attempted to soothe her. He tried to take her over to the woodpile and set her down, but she was too panicked to go near it.
"Your axe," she cried again.
"Anna, the snake is dead now. You are all right."
"But, K ... Karl ..." she sobbed, "your axe is ... is in the dirt ... your axe is in the d ... dirt."
It was. Karl's precious honed steel, which never touched anything but worthy wood, had half of its poll buried in the earth. He looked at it over Anna's head, then squeezed his eyes shut and held her trembling body against his chest.
"Shh, Anna, it does not matter," he whispered.
"But you ... s ... said-“
"Anna, please," he entreated, "shut up and let me hold you."
There was no question of trying anything intimate with Anna that night. She was in such a shaken state when Karl tucked her into bed, he would have felt guilty even to lay a hand on her.
He and James sat up examining the rattles the boy had cut off the carcass. When James asked why a rattler would show up this late in the season, Karl explained that contrary to popular belief, they could not stand the hot sun. During the height of the summer they hid beneath their stone piles. But when the autumn sun grew less fierce, they came out once again to warm themselves, as if storing up
heat before hibernating.
"They are getting ready for winter, too," he ended, glancing at the bed where Anna tossed fitfully.
"Like us, Karl, huh?"
"Ya. Like us, boy."
James looked at Anna, too, then asked, "Karl? When will we move into the cabin?"
"How about tomorrow? I must put up the stove and finish putting in one more window and make the door. But I can do that if you will wash the hides and get them ready for stretching. I think it is time we get Anna into a wooden house."
* * *
But they did not get everything finished the next day, though each worked like a dynamo.
Something told Karl that tonight was not the right night to make his final peace with Anna. One more night ... one more night and they would be in the cabin for the first time. Then, then he would do what he now longed more than ever to do.
During that day and the next, he looked up often to find Anna watching him, whether from across the clearing, or from across the cabin, it was always the same. He knew that she, too, was waiting for the first night they would sleep in the house they had built together.
She brought him a drink again while he sat in the sun of the cabin door, smoothing the planks for the door. She stepped inside and after she'd been in there quietly for some time, Karl turned around to find her standing there, unmoving, studying the new floor of the loft above her, white and sweet-smelling and with its own ladder that rose to the hatchway across the way.
During that last day Karl put the stove up. It fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but Anna did not rejoice over it as he thought she would. She remained almost timid now since he had killed that rattler and held her while she cried and trembled.
James worked at stringing the ropes for his own bed while Anna worked on those for her and Karl's bed. Karl showed them how to weave and splice the tough fibers of the prairie grass into tough, thick-gauged rope.
Once when James' fingers got tangled up and his weaving slipped loose, he asked Anna how she could do it so smoothly.
"Don't ask me," she answered. "Ask Karl. If anyone knows his way around a bed rope it's Karl." But she never glanced up, just kept weaving away at her own rope, sitting cross-legged in those britches in the middle of the cabin floor. Even James might have suspected a play on words had Anna looked amused or sprightly. But she only pulled her lip between her teeth, concentrating hard on her chore.
* * *
Meanwhile, Karl finished the door. He used the undauntable oak, which took more work splitting than any other wood because of its hardness. Karl worked away patiently, shaping and rubbing the panels smooth, then fashioning cross braces onto which the panels would be pegged.
In the early afternoon James and Anna began carrying their belongings from the sod house into the log house. They lugged dishes and bowls and barrels that were half empty, leaving the full flour barrels for Karl to fetch. Karl watched them parade past him, while he hinged the door, then tightened the final wooden pins. Then he set about tying the loosely placed ropes that needed only fastening to become beds.
Anna, a little withdrawn, sometimes almost shy, continued carrying their goods to the log cabin. Once, as she paused across the way to stretch her back after a heavy load, Karl watched her tuck her shirt into her britches, pulling in a deep breath and thrusting her breasts forward, standing that way, unaware that he watched her. Then she looked as if she sighed, though he heard no sigh from this distance, and she ran her hand deeply into the recesses of those pants, both front and back, ostensibly tucking in her shirttails again. She did all this in full profile to Karl. Just when he began to ask himself if Anna knew that he watched her, she looked up and discovered him with his hands idle upon his work, his eyes busy on her silhouette. She snapped almost guiltily away and fled into the sod house.
After she was gone, Karl contemplated what he had seen. When had her sharp-boned thinness mellowed and molded? How long had this contoured woman been hiding in boy's britches? Karl smiled, thinking of Anna's cooking, realizing she'd done all right eating it herself, in spite of all the self-criticism she heaped upon it.
Anna watched James taking down the blanket that had served as her dressing room ever since they'd lived here. He stepped off the trunk and she offered, "Here, I'll help you fold that."
"All right," he said. They each took two corners and stretched them out; there was scarcely room to do so in the cramped sod hut.
"James, I have a favor to ask you."
"Sure. What is it, Anna?"
"It's a very selfish one," she warned.
"Don't kid me, Anna. I know you better than that." He angled her a knowing smile.
"Oh, but it is! Especially because I ask it today, of all days."
"Well, ask!" he demanded brightly.
"I want you to ask Karl if you can take the team and ride over to the Johansons as soon as all the work is finished."
"You mean tonight?"
"No, this afternoon," Anna declared, feeling uncomfortable at this suggestion, for surely James would guess her intentions.
"What do you need from over there?"
They came nearly chest to chest, folding the blanket.
"I don't need anything from over there."
"Well then, what am I going for?"
"Just to get away from the house for a while." Her face went pink.
"But, Anna-“
"I know, I know. Today we're moving into the log cabin and everything. I told you it was selfish. You'd have to miss our first supper on the new stove and our first meal in the cabin together."
"But why?" James balked, and Anna despaired of ever enlightening him without drawing pictures.
"James, things have been--I need some time alone with Karl."
"Oh," he said shortly, the light suddenly dawning. "Well ... in that case, sure. I'll be gone just as soon as I can."
"Listen, little brother," she said, reaching out to touch his arm, "I know it's unfair of me to ask it tonight, but believe me, it's got to be tonight. Karl and I have to straighten out some differences between us that have been festering for too long already. I'm afraid that if we don't get things ironed out now, they may drag on forever, and I couldn't stand-- Oh, James, I feel just awful asking you tonight." She suddenly plopped down on the bare rope bed and looked at the floor dejectedly. "I know you've been looking forward to moving in just as much as we have. Believe me, I wouldn't ask if it wasn't absolutely necessary. I can't explain it all, James ..." She looked up beseechingly. "But it's got to be today, tonight."
"What should I tell Karl? I mean, I never asked to take the team out alone before."
"Tell him you want to go calling on Nedda."
"Nedda?" James' Adam's apple did monkeyshines.
"Am I too far wrong in thinking you won't mind?"
"Go calling on Nedda?" James seemed thunderstruck by the idea, even though he, himself, had been toying with it ever since Nedda suggested it herself. "No! No, I won't mind a bit. But do you think Karl will let me?"
"Why not? He made you a teamster himself. He trusts you with Belle and Bill. Anyway, you went to Johansons the night I got lost in the woods, and made it just fine."
"I did, didn't I?" He remembered how proud Nedda had been of him then.
"That's not all I need you to do, James."
"What else?"
"I need for you to get Karl away from the house first, for at least an hour, longer if you can."
"How can I do that? He won't want to leave the log house."
"Make him go to the pond with you for a bath. Try to get him playing like we used to do all together, remember? That should keep him there a while."
"What are you going to do while we're gone?"
Anna arose with the blanket folded over her arm. She ran her hand over it with a little look of slyness. Then she smiled at her brother in a way he was soon to learn meant some fellow was going to meet his match. "James, that is a woman's secret. If you're old enough to go calling on Nedda, you're old enough to know a man doesn't ask a woman to tell all her secrets."
James colored a little, but he was unsure of something and didn't know what to do but ask about it.
"Anna, do I--should I ask the Johansons if I can stay all night?"
"No, James, I wouldn't ask that of you. I know how you've been waiting to sleep in your own loft for the first time. There's no need for you to stay out long past mid-evening. We'll be looking for you to come back then."
"Okay, Anna."
"You'll do it?" she asked breathlessly.
"'Course, I'll do it. I'm sorry I didn't think of it myself. From now on, if Karl lets me go this once, I'll go more often. I like visiting at their place. Besides," James added, hooking a thumb in his back pocket, gazing down at the floor almost guiltily, "I'd do darn near anything to see you and Karl the way you were before. I know things've been sour between you for a long time and I hate it. I just ... I just want us all to be happy like before."
Anna smiled and reached to lay her hand on the long hard forearm and force him to take his hand from his back pocket so she could hold it. "Listen, baby brother, if I haven't said it for a long time, it's been my fault, not yours ... but, I love you."
"Gosh, I know that," he said with a sideways smile lining his face. "Same goes for you."
Anna put her arms around him, taking the blanket into her hug as she pressed him to her. She had to reach up now to get her arm around his neck, he was so tall. She could sense James' having grown up not only physically but also emotionally this summer, for he made no attempt to pull away in embarrassment. He allowed himself to be hugged, and returned the pressure with a silent wish that whatever Anna had planned for tonight, it would work.
She pulled away. "Thanks, baby brother."
"Good luck, Anna," replied James.
"You, too. That's one stubborn Swede out there, and if he decides he doesn't want to go to the pond, you'll have your work cut out for you getting him away from the clearing."
The hanging of the freshly hewn door was symbolic to all of them, but mostly to Karl. When it swung on its wooden hinges at last, he stood in its opening, looking first into the cabin, and then out of it.
"Due east," he said, glancing contentedly off across his cleared grainfields to the rim of the woods, which waited yet to be cleared.
"Just like you always said," James confirmed.
Karl turned to rub his hand over the panels of the door. "Oak," he said, "good, tough oak." And he gave the door a slap.
"Just like you said, too."
"Just like I said, boy, and do not ever forget it."
"I won't, Karl."
Karl now looked at Anna. "And you have not forgotten you made me promise to let you be the first to pull the latchstring in."