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 woodpile, 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 in
tended 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 bine 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.
James came back from a trip to the wagon with a basket. “Did you get one up?”
“Yes, Karl helped me.”
“It probably won't grow for you if it didn't grow for him,” James returned.
James' heedless opinion made Anna feel like crying. He's probably right, she thought. Still, it cut her to the quick to realize James was so devoted to Karl he scarcely spent time caring about what she felt or boosting her spirits like he'd always done in the past.
Karl returned with moss, packed it around the root, then arose, saying, “It is best you take two, Anna.”
“Two?”
“Ya.” He seemed self-conscious all of a sudden. “Hops grow in both male and female plants. The one you picked is a female, but if you take one male, too, you will have a better crop if they decide to grow.”
“How do you know this is female?” she asked.
His eyes met hers momentarily, wavered away, then he stepped nearer to show her the remaining few cones that hung on the mother plant. “By the catkins,” he explained. Reaching out a fingertip he touched the nubbin. “The female's are short, only a couple inches long.” He stepped to another plant that clung to a nearby tree and reached to stroke a panicle remaining there. It was about six inches in length. “The males are much longer.” Then quickly he turned, picked up a basket and left her to dig up a male bine by herself, if she would.
Resolutely, she freed the second bine and took it to the wagon, carefully avoiding Karl's eyes. She wrapped it in the moss with the female, while Karl waited patiently for her to board the wagon. Come hell or high water she would make those two plants grow!
When they had traveled more than halfway home, Karl pulled the horses to a stop. “I have made up my mind to have cedar shingles,” he announced. “Although the trees are not my own, I do not think this land is owned by anyone else, so I would be taking nobody's timber. It will take no more than a single tree to make shingles for the entire house, and I will have it down in no time.”
To Anna, all conifers looked the same. But once Karl started chopping, she smelled the difference. The cedar fragrance was so heady she wondered if one might become intoxicated by it. Again, she was watching the beauty and grace of Karl's body as he wielded the axe. She had not seen him do any felling since they had become estranged. It moved her magically, creating a longing in the pit of her stomach for this fence to be mended between them.
Suddenly, she realized that Karl had slowed his axefalls, changed the rhythm somehow, which was something he never did!
He took two more swings, and each was answered by an echo. But when he stopped chopping, the echo went on. He stood alert, like a wild turkey cock at the cluck of a hen. He twisted his head around, thinking he was hearing things, but the chopping continued somewhere off to the north.
Anna and James heard it, too, and poised in alert.
“Do you hear that?” Karl asked.
“It's just an axe,” James said.
“Just an axe, boy? Just an axe! Do you know what this means?”
“Neighbors?” ventured James, a smile growing on his face.
“Neighbors,” confirmed Karl, “if we are lucky.”
It was the first genuine smile Anna had seen on Karl's face in days. He hefted the axe again, this time forcing himself to keep his own measured beat, forcing himself not to hurry, which tired a man and only slowed him down in the long run.
The answering echo stopped momentarily. The trio imagined a man they had never met, pausing in his felling to listen to the echo of Karl's axe making its way through the woods to him.
The far-off beat joined Karl's again, but this time as a backbeat, set evenly between Karl's axefalls, and the two axemen spoke to each other in a language only a man of the woods understood. They measured their paces into a regularity that beat out a steady question and answer, back and forth.
Clack! went Karl's axe.
Clokk! came the answer.
Clack!
Clokk!
Clack!
Clokk!
The wordless conversation drummed on, and Karl worked now with a full smile on his face. When he stepped back to watch the cedar plummet, Anna felt the same exhilaration she'd felt the first time she witnessed the spectacle.
Karl's eagerness affected her, too. When the roaring silence boomed in their ears, his eyes were drawn to her, as always. He found her beaming in the scented silence and could do no less than smile back.
Into their silence started the other woodsman's axe.
“He heard!” James said.
“Get a basket and take the cedar chips,” Karl said, “while I buck the tree. Cedar chips are good for keeping the bugs away. A few in the trunk will keep the moths out. Hurry!”
Never since she'd known him had she seen Karl Lindstrom hurry. But he did now. She hurried, too.
While she was picking up the chips, Karl again surprised her by suggesting, “Try sucking on a chip.”
She did. So did James. “It's sweet!” Anna exclaimed, amazed.
“Yes, plenty sweet,” agreed Karl, but he was thinking of the sweet sound of the distant axe.
It took little doing to find the source of the sound. There was a new road carved in such a way that the hazelbrush had hidden it from view when they'd passed it earlier in the day. Now, approaching it from the other direction, it was clearly visible. Led, too, by the sound of the axe as they neared, they were as metal shavings to a magnet.
And so it was that they came upon a stocky, middle-aged man working his stand of tamarack along his newly cleared road. They pulled the wagon to a halt while the man let his axe poll slip down to rest against his hand, just like Karl did when he stopped chopping. He pushed back a small woolen cap much like the one Karl owned. Then, seeing Anna, he removed the cap and came toward the wagon.
Karl alone alighted, walking toward the man with hand already extended. “I heard your axe.”
“Ya! I heard yours, too!”
Their two outsized hands met.
Swedish! Karl thought.
Swedish! Olaf Johanson thought.
“I am Karl Lindstrom.”
“And I am Olaf Johanson.”
“I live perhaps four, five miles up this road here.”
“I live a few hundred rods up this road here.??
?
Anna watched in amazement as the two greeted each other with disbelief at finding another Swede so close by. They laughed aloud together, pumping those big, axemen's hands in a way that raised a response of happiness within Anna, for she knew how deeply Karl had missed his countrymen.
“You are homesteading here?” Karl asked.
“Ya. Me and my whole family.”
“I hear other axes.” Karl looked off in the direction of the sound.
“Ya. Me and my boys are clearing for the cabin.” Johanson's Swedish accent was far more pronounced than Karl's.
“We have been raising our cabin, too. This . . . this is my family.” Karl turned to the wagon. “This is my wife, Anna, and her brother, James.”
Olaf Johanson, with hat still doffed, nodded his head repeatedly, coming to shake their hands before donning the little wool thing again.
“Oh, my Katrene will be happy to see you-u-u! She and our girls, Kerstin and Nedda, have been saying, “What if there are no neighbors or friends?' They think they will die of loneliness, those three. How could a person die of loneliness in a big family like ours?” He finished with a chuckle.
“You have a really big family?” Karl asked.
“Ya. I have three overgrown boys and two daughters, maybe not so overgrown, but pretty big girls, I tell you. We will need a big cabin, that is for sure.”
Karl laughed, overjoyed at the news.
“Come, you must meet my Katrene and the children. They will not believe what I am bringing home for dinner!”
“You will ride in my wagon.”
“Su-u-ure!” Johanson agreed, climbing aboard the load of cedar. “Wait till they see you! They will think they are dreaming!”
Again Karl laughed. “We cut down a cedar tree for shingles, but I think we have cut it from your land. I did not know you had settled here or I would have asked first.”
“What is one cedar tree among neighbors, I ask you!” Olaf boomed vibrantly. “What is one cedar among so plenty?” His hand swept, gesturing toward the woods.