Chapter Three
“Father Pierrot, I must speak to you as a friend as much as a priest. I have a problem regarding Anna.” The two had settled in Father's little sitting room at the rear of the school building, companionably smoking fragrant pipes of Indian tobacco.
“Ah, Karl, I could tell you were troubled as soon as you arrived. Are you having last-minute thoughts?”
“Ya, I am, but not in the way you might think.” Karl sighed. “You know how many months it has taken to get Anna here. You know I have prepared a good home for her, and I have plans for an even better one. I have been much more than ready for a wife for some time now. All this time I have dreamed of her coming. But I think I have been a little foolish, Father. I dreamed her to be something she is not. I find out today she has lied to me about many things.”
“Was it not a risk you took, courting her by letter?”
“Ya, a risk it was. But still, not a good way to begin married life. I think I do not want a wife who is a liar, yet I want a wife, and she is the only one available.”
“About what has she lied, my friend?”
“The first is a lie of omission. This brother James was a complete surprise to me today. She did not tell me of him. I think she knew I would not want a lad of that age living with us when we are newly married.”
“Would you send them back because of this?”
“I threatened to do just that, but I do not think I could stand the loneliness for another year while I try to find another wife. Forgive me, Father . . . I should perhaps not speak of it, but I am already twenty-five years old. I have been alone since I left Sweden, two years already. I am eager to begin building a family. There have been times, especially in the winter when I am snowed in for days at a time with nobody for company when I . . .” Karl cupped the bowl of his pipe in a big hand, rubbing the glossed wood with a large thumb, watching the slow curl of smoke rise from it. He remembered only too wrenchingly the emptiness of those winter nights.
He looked up to find the eyes of his friend upon him, and laughing sheepishly, Karl leaned his elbow on a knee and rested his chin in his palm. “You know, Father, sometimes I bring the goat inside to keep her from freezing in the bad blizzards and so I have somebody to talk to. But poor Nanna, I think she grows tired of hearing her foolish master pining for human companionship.”
“I understand, Karl. You need not apologize for your needs. There is no dishonor in wanting a wife for long winter nights, and for beginning a family. Neither is there dishonor in wanting to begin married life with time to get accustomed to each other in privacy.”
“But I feel small for resenting the boy.”
“What man wouldn't?”
“You would not, Father, if you were in my place?” Karl was reluctant to think a priest could feel such human failings.
“I think perhaps I would. On the other hand, I would weigh it against the boy's value to me in this wilderness. He could be more than a helper. He could, in time, be a friend, perhaps even a buffer.”
“What does this mean, Father—buffer.”
“Let me put it to you this way, Karl,” the priest said, sitting back with a philosophical air. “Do you think that if you marry Anna, all your troubles will be magically over and she will be all those things you dreamed she'd be? I think not. I think that—beginning as strangers, as it were—the two of you will cross swords many times before you truly know and accept each other for what you are. Sometimes in the crossing of swords it is good to have a third party to act as conciliator or mediator, or as I said before, just a plain friend.”
“This I had not thought of before, but I see you are wise. It is almost like you heard Anna's temper flare today, to say nothing of my own.”
“You had words, you two?”
“Ya, words. But the lad was there, so I think we both said less than we maybe thought.”
“Aside from the fact that the lad came unannounced, what do you think of him?”
“He seems eager to learn and has promised to work hard.”
“The boy could do worse than end up with you as a teacher, Karl. Under your tutelage I believe young James would learn quickly. Had you thought there might be reward in teaching him, too?”
The two puffed at their pipes in companionable silence again. Karl thought of all the priest had said about the boy. The idea of having the lad to teach, to nurture, became an inviting challenge. Karl thought of the log house and all it would take to erect it, imagined himself and the lad working side by side, bare-chested in the sun, imagined the first . . . then second, then third . . . tier of logs going up, and the two of them bantering as they worked side by side skidding, notching. He could teach the lad much about building and about woods, just as his papa had taught him.
“Karl?” A lazy curl of smoke floated upward with the word.
“Hm?” Karl replied absently, quite lost in thought.
“There is something I must ask, but I ask it to make you think realistically about all of this.”
“Ya, well ask, then.”
“Have you been considering sending the girl back because you are disappointed in what you saw when she arrived? I think you must consider this aspect of marrying her equally as much as all the others. You brought her here sight unseen, with high hopes. If you find her repugnant, it could bring much difficulty to your marriage. You must look at this realizing you are a human being, Karl. As such, you are subject to doubt and skepticism. Maybe even outright dislike. I think you are a man whose principles would speak louder than his dislikes, though, and would keep her with you out of duty, if you thought you were obliged to do so.”
Karl was learning a new side of Father Pierrot tonight, a human side that Karl deeply needed. “Oh, no, Father, I truly do not find her unattractive, only a little thin. But her face . . . she . . . I . . .” It was difficult for Karl to express to this priest the feelings that had swept over him when he'd first seen Anna, when he had taken her hand in his to help her down from the wagon, or the feeling of her slim hips and waist as she jumped down. It was difficult for Karl himself to equate those feelings with anything but lustfulness. Naturally, he did not wish to appear crude before his friend, this priest.
“My eye is pleased, truly, Father, but I have tried to use good reason. It should not matter to me if her looks please me, I should instead—”
“But of course it should matter!” the priest interrupted, jumping to his feet. “Karl, don't turn fool on me now. If you do, it will be for the first time since I've known you. You will look at the woman for many years if you marry her. What fool would not want to be pleased with what he sees?”
Karl laughed. “You surprise me, Father. In the time I have known you I would not have thought you to be a man with such sympathy when it comes to matters of the heart.”
Father, too, laughed. “I was a man first, a priest second.”
Karl now looked his friend straight in the eye, all laughter faded. “Then I admit to you I am pleased by her appearance. I am perhaps too pleased. Perhaps I will not use good judgment about her other lies.”
“Tell me,” the priest said simply, sitting down again.
“She is only a child. I was expecting a full-grown woman of twenty-five. But Anna lied about this, too. She is only seventeen years old.”
“But did she not make the choice of her own free will to come here and be your wife?”
“Not exactly. I think she and the boy were destitute. I was their last resort. Yes, she came to be married, but I think it was the lesser of two evils.”
“Has she told you that?”
“Not exactly in those words. She has begged me not to send them away, but while she is begging I see how very young and scared she is, and I do not think she realizes all that is entailed in being a wife.”
“Karl, you are placing a burden of worry on yourself that perhaps is not necessary. Why not let her be the judge of whether or not she is old enough to marry?”
“But seventeen,
Father . . . She has admitted she knows almost nothing about being housekeeper and cook. There would be much I would have to teach her, too.”
“It would be a challenge, Karl, but it could be fun with a spirited girl.”
“It could also be a mistake with a spirited girl.”
“Karl, have you considered why she lied? If she and the boy came to you as a last hope, I can see why she felt the need to lie to get here. I do not condone the lies, Karl, not at all. But I think perhaps they are forgivable, perhaps her circumstances make them so. I think you must ask yourself if she could not, underneath, be an honest woman who was forced into lying by her circumstances. Perhaps, Karl, you are judging her too harshly for your own good.”
“You leave me much to consider, my friend,” Karl said, rising and stretching. “All my life I have been taught what is right and what is wrong, and I have been warned that the path runs narrowly. Never before have I had to consider circumstances that lessen the degree of wrongness. I think you have helped me tonight to look at things from another person's viewpoint. I will try to do this.”
He paused, glanced across the room toward the doorway. “Anna and the boy have had plenty of time to get themselves settled for the night. I think I will join them and finish my considerations there.”
“Sleep well, Karl,” the priest wished.
Karl scraped the ashes from his pipe. “You know, Father,” he said thoughtfully, “she has assured me these are the only lies she told, and made me the promise never to lie to me again. That promise is worth something.”
Father Pierrot smiled, placed a hand on Karl Lindstrom's shoulder and understood how a man of his nature would be torn by uncertainty at a time like this. Most men who had lived alone for two years on the frontier would not stop to think of anything but their own need for a woman, both in and out of bed. But Karl was a man of rare quality, rare honesty. Anna Reardon would be a lucky woman to marry such a man.
It was dark, dusty and dry in the schoolroom. Karl found his empty pallet and stretched out on his back with both hands behind his head. He thought about all Father Pierrot had said, and for the first time, and guiltlessly now, would have allowed himself to consider Anna as a woman. But he could not do this; he found he thought of her as a child instead. She was tall, but so thin it gave her a look of almost boyish callowness.
Her wide-eyed fright at times today made him think of her as a green young girl who perhaps did not even know what was the duty of the marriage bed. In some ways this pleased him, but in others it frightened him, too. It was one thing to take to bed a woman of twenty-five who knew what to expect. It was quite another to bed a child of seventeen whose luminous dark eyes might burn up at him in fear when she learned what was expected of her. She seemed so frail her little bones might snap were he even to hug her against his chest.
But even as he thought this, the hair on his chest prickled teasingly. He ran his hand over his shirt, sliding it across the breadth of his chest. It was a wide chest. His arms were thick and fully muscled from using the axe all his life. His thighs were heavy, long from knee to hip. He had the tall, muscular stature of his father. Always before, he had taken for granted what women thought as they looked at him.
Now, for the first time, as he thought of Anna, he realized that to a girl, perhaps his size seemed frightening. Perhaps he did not please her. It struck him quite suddenly that tonight he had been selfishly concerned with what he, Karl, thought of her, Anna. Perhaps he should have given equal time to wondering what she thought of him! Yes, she had pleaded with him not to send them back. But had she pleaded with him out of fear? Penniless and scared, what else would the girl do when threatened with abandonment in the middle of the wilderness?
He thought once again of his sod hut, of the bed he had prepared for her with the most honorable intentions. He tried to imagine what she would think when she saw that sheaf of sweet clover. His own heart hammered with uncertainty now. Perhaps it had been a stupid blunder to prepare the bed in so obvious a manner for her coming, as if the only thing on his mind all these months was getting her into it! She would see the full, plump tick, the freshly stuffed pillows, the clover meant as a welcome only, and she would shy away like a foolish spring colt shies from a rabbit, never knowing the rabbit could not and would not do it harm.
Anna, he thought, what should I do with you? How can I send you away? Yet how can I ask you to stay? And if I do, how far we have to go together, and how much we have to learn of one another.
He awakened in the morning when the sunlight was but a promise. It was the time when day hesitates before nudging the night away, the pale light tiptoeing into the room with scarcely the strength to threaten the shadows that lay heavily upon Anna as she slept on her side, facing Karl. She had an arm tucked beneath her ear, her chin tucked down childishly upon her chest. She wore a look of such innocence, that again he wondered if he were doing the right thing.
But his mind was settled. He had thought well and long about what was right, for both of them, and within the heart of Karl Lindstrom beat the conviction that together, he and Anna and the boy could make this thing work. They must make a marriage in which this unfortunate beginning was forgotten. If it took patience on his part, it would take courage on hers. If it took forgiveness on his part, it would take humility on hers. Each of them, he was sure, would need to have strengths the other lacked, for this was the foundation of a marriage.
Anna had, so far, shown the kind of strength many women lacked. Just coming here, braving it the way she had, with the boy she was responsible for, meant she had determination. A quality like that could be priceless here.
Karl rolled from his pallet, fully dressed, and knelt down on a single knee beside Anna. He had never before awakened a sleeping woman, except for his sisters and mother, and wondered if it were too intimate to touch her arm and shake her gently. Her arm lay relaxed over the buffalo robe, thin and long. He could see pale freckles upon the back of her hand. Despite the thin light, he saw more freckles dancing across the bridge of her nose, across her cheeks. Childishly she slept, unaware of how he studied her, and he thought it was somehow an unfair thing of him to do.
“Anna?” he whispered, and saw her eyelids move as if she were dreaming. “Anna?”
Her eyes flew open. In the instant she awoke they took on the look of startled wariness already so familiar to Karl. She stared at him for a moment, gathering her senses. He could tell by her expression the moment in which recollection stirred and she remembered where she was and who he was.
Because she looked so young and helpless and wary, he asked, “Did you know you have sandman in your eyes?”
She continued to stare at him as if surprised speechless. She blinked and felt the grit grinding against her eyelids, knowing it was there because she had been crying last night before going to sleep.
“It is time you get up and wash them out. Then I want to talk to you,” Karl said.
The boy awoke at the sound of Karl's voice, so the man stood and spoke again. “Time to get up, boy. Let us leave your sister to get herself together.” Then he stalked from the room.
“Anna?” James croaked, a little disoriented, too.
She rolled over to look at him. “You sound like a bullfrog this morning,” she teased.
But he didn't smile. “Did he say what he decided?”
“No. He said he wants to talk to me. That's all. He's coming back as soon as he gives us time to get up.”
“Hurry, then, let's get ready.”
But although James scurried from the room, Anna lay for a moment, hesitant to leave the warm protection of the buffalo robes, wondering what Karl planned to do with her and James.
She thought of the curious words he'd used as he awakened her. They were gentle words, those used with a child. Perhaps he was usually a kind man whose temper had been tested in an extreme way yesterday by all her and James' revelations. Perhaps, given the chance, given time, Lindstrom would be less fierce and fault-fin
ding, perhaps even gentle, as he'd been a moment ago. But when she thought of awakening in the same bed with him where he could note more than just the sandman in her eyes, Anna shivered.
She arose and tried to whisk the wrinkles out of her dress, rinsed her face and tied her hair back. A knock on the door told her Karl had returned, and she glanced up from where she knelt, gathering up the heavy buffalo robes.
He apparently had washed his face and combed his hair. He wore his little strange cap again. He came to stand beside her, gazing down at her wide, brown eyes that always wore that too open look whenever he came near.
“How did you sleep, Anna?”
“Fi . . .” But her voice croaked almost as James' had, and she cleared her throat before trying again. “Fine.” Her hands lay idle on the furs, as if she'd forgotten what she was about.
His simple question was meant to put her at ease, but he could see she was tense and apprehensive. It broke his heart to think that she might be this way because of him. He knelt down on one knee upon the buffalo robe she'd been folding. “Anna, I did not sleep so well. I spent a long time thinking. Do you know what I learned while I thought?”
She shook her head no, saying nothing.
“I learned that I thought only of myself yesterday, and of what I wanted in a wife. Selfishly, I did not consider your opinion of me. All the time I think only of what Karl thinks of Anna, never what Anna thinks of Karl. But this is not right, Anna. Today, this must be a decision that both of us make, not just me.”
She studied his golden arm braced across one upraised knee, knowing he studied her face while he spoke.
“We start out backward, Anna, yes? First we agree to marry, and it is only after this that we meet each other. And when I meet you, all I can do is get angry because you have lied to me, without considering why it was you lied. Father Pierrot made me see I must understand your side and realize you had to get out of Boston where things were bad for you and the boy.” He studied the freckles on her cheeks and saw the pink glow beneath them, and could feel the thrum of his heart in strange places in his body. He wished she would raise her eyes. It was hard to read her feelings when she avoided looking at him.