The Endearment

  “You really gutted that bear, Anna?” Karl asked in admiration.

  “I hated every minute of it!” she snapped coldly. “I never want to smell another bear as long as I live!”

  Confused by her abrupt chilling, he went on, “You will have to smell this one a little longer. Tomorrow James and I will have to take care of the meat. Then there is still the melting down of tallow to be done before we can make winter candles.”

  “I guess that means you won't get to making the door for the cabin yet for a couple days. How long will it be, Karl?”

  “Tomorrow I will work with the meat. It will take a day to put the windows in. And perhaps another day to make the door and put up the stove. And we have to move things out of the sod house, too, and I will have to make the new rope beds, and I promised you that dresser for the kitchen.”

  Anna had climbed down from the fence and was brushing off her seat as she curtly stated, “Well, you can skip the dresser. Just get me out of that sod house as fast as you can. I'm sick to death of that stinkin' fireplace and living like a badger in a burrow!”

  Bewildered, Karl could only stand wondering what had so suddenly changed Anna while she sat on that fence. She had been almost too sweet to resist when they had first come outside. And she hadn't mentioned anything about the package he'd brought her.

  When he went in to bed she was already there. He wanted desperately to turn and take her in his arms and put an end to their enmity. But she lay far over on her side. Seeking to soften her, he whispered, “Anna, how did you like what I brought you in the little package?”

  “Oh, I haven't had time to open it yet,” she said brusquely. And Karl withdrew the hand that had been planning to touch her back.

  Anna could smell the aroma of Karl's pipe still in his hair. She lay miserably beside him, listening to the long-eared owl who sat with his yellow eyes and rusty face, on a limb above the woodpile, calling in a slurred whistle, “Whee-you, whee-you.”

  When Anna could no longer stand pretending she was asleep, she fluffed over onto her back like Karl.

  It was then that the question came.

  “You made dinner for Erik then?” he asked.

  Anna's heart kicked up its pace, pattered in double time like the owl's.

  “Well, Erik had helped with that bear. What else could I do?”

  But some new welling of hope was reborn in Anna. Karl, it seemed, was jealous.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next morning Karl and James left the house to set up a butchering slab near the spring. As soon as they were gone, Anna took the package and pulled it open with anxious fingers. Inside was what she had hoped for. She found a length of delightful pink gingham, several hanks of thread and a bar of camomile soap. The material was wrapped around the bar, and when it dropped out Anna caught it in a surprised hand. She raised it to her nose. It smelled of flowers and freshness and femininity. She raised the gingham to her nose and it, too, smelled of these things.

  She looked down at her britches. She glanced out the door at the new log house. She thought of the new glass windows and wondered if Karl meant the material for curtains when he said necessities. Who was there to look into the windows out here in the wilderness except an occasional raccoon or a passing swallow?

  Anna was honestly torn by what Karl had meant the material to be used for. She wanted very badly to think the fabric was intended for something personal. Remembering Karl's last comment last night, the way he'd asked about Erik staying for supper, she could have sworn Karl was jealous. Yet, why was he so all-fired taken with Kerstin if he could be jealous of Erik? It didn't make any sense.

  There was no denying the personal implication of the scented soap. And, after all, Karl had given her the material without putting any restrictions on it. Maybe she could put them both to use to end this breach between herself and Karl once and for all. She was the one who had coldly snubbed his gift, and thereby snubbed him. Could it be possible he waited for her to make the first move?

  A plan formed in Anna's head.

  Excitedly, she flipped the length of gingham out across the bed and began measuring it by scant yards—nose to outstretched hand equaling one yard. She found there were more yards of the stuff than she'd guessed. Enough for both curtains and a dress? Smiling to herself, she thought: Goodness! If there is, I will look like my windows!

  Karl saw Anna cross the clearing and go into the log house. He wondered what she was doing in there. Maybe admiring the stove, he thought hopefully. He had been so proud of the fact he bought her that stove. With it he sought to win her favor back again, to tell her he accepted her. At first she had seemed very gratified by it. But later, out there by the garden, something had happened. He remembered Anna's eyes, as big and round as a cocker spaniel's when she'd first seen him unloading the stove. He remembered the hard edge on her voice later and knew his gift had not done the trick.

  He turned back to his butchering but kept an eye on the log house to see when Anna left it again.

  Inside, Anna was measuring the glass panes as they leaned against the fireplace wall. Marching back across the clearing, she saw Karl stop his meat-cutting to look her way. She braved a little wave of hello and continued on into the sod house to begin cutting curtain lengths. When Karl and James came in for lunch there was gingham all over everything. She had two lengths cut for each window and was busy with needle and thread.

  “Thank you for the necessities, Karl,” she said with renewed sweetness. “They will make lovely curtains.”

  Karl felt his heart fall. Curtains? Out here in the middle of nowhere? But he could not say to Anna that he'd meant her to have the gingham to use for dresses. If he said so, she would only feel like she'd disappointed him again by already cutting the fabric into pieces for the windows. He returned to his afternoon's work gravely disheartened. Would he have to look at her in those britches for the remainder of the winter then? Or could he find time for another trip to town before the snow flew?

  As soon as Karl and James were gone, Anna found the pieces of the dress she'd been tearing apart to use as a pattern. She would follow it loosely, adding to the height of the neckline, making the sleeves looser, more serviceable, making the skirt less clinging, more like the dresses Kerstin and Katrene wore. During the afternoon she got the pieces of the new dress all cut out. But whenever Karl entered the house during the next few days, all he saw was his wife stitching curtains. She hid the dress pieces, easily camouflaged, beneath the plain panels on her lap.

  For Karl and James there was not only the butchering to be done, but also the processing of the two hides. Karl showed James how to flesh out the hide, draping it over a felled tree, lying at an angle, still attached to its stump. Together they removed all the fat and sinew. They scraped away with their fleshing tools while Karl warned James not to puncture or score the hide, nor to expose the hair roots. It was a malodorous and tiring job. By the time the hides were placed in a lye solution to soak for two days, both Karl and James were well ready for a bath in the pond.

  Anna refused their invitation to go along. She said she'd stay behind and get their supper ready. Karl, with disappointment threading his veins, wondered how to get her to do any of the things they used to so enjoy. He wanted to ask Anna if she had found the soap in the gingham, but was afraid she might think he was intimating she needed it. So Karl said nothing about camomile soap, and neither did Anna. But he detected the smell of their homemade lye soap, and figured she spurned the scented bar and used the stuff she still adamantly called “lardy” just to spite him.

  Still, the next day, Karl thought he detected something about Anna, which he chose to think of as “saucy.” It was as if she was teasing him about something he didn't quite catch. She walked around with an undeniable air of self-satisfaction. About what, he could not guess.

  That day he began inserting the windows. It was a delicate job, requiring great accuracy when Karl cut each hole. If the openings were cut too large, it meant
losing tightness when the weather caused the frames to expand. But if they were cut too small, it meant broken panes when the frames contracted. After Karl cut the first opening, he went to where the yellow poplar billets were stacked on the skid trail. Although the autumn air was crisping, Karl loosened his shirt, for it was warm in the sun. Finding his axe needed sharpening, he took out his oilstone and was working the steel upon it when Anna came out of the springhouse with a dipper and started up the hill toward him. He watched her approach, paying only cursory attention to the honing of the blade. He wondered what it was that made Anna tick these days. At times she seemed to be artfully flirting with him. Yet when she hit the bed last night, she'd been first to turn on her side away from him. He was terribly confused about what she wanted out of him. Now here she came, up the hill with a dipperful of water, wearing those abominable britches again. Karl was getting mighty tired of those pants.

  When she neared, she handed him the dipper, saying, “Here, Karl, I thought you might be thirsty out here in the sun.” She raised her wide eyes coyly to assess his beaded brow and the damp tendrils of hair across it.

  “Thank you, Anna, I am.” He took the dipper, studying her across the lip of it as he raised his head and drank. “How are your curtains coming?” He handed the dipper back to her.

  “Fine.” She hooked the dipper over her index finger and swung it like the pendulum of a clock, with her other hand still resting on her cocked hip. “So how are your windows coming?”

  “Fine.” He had all he could do to keep from smiling.

  She looked around innocently, glancing at the billets, his axe, the pile of chips. “What are you working on up here?”

  “I am splitting window edgings from yellow poplar.”

  She glanced around, spied the pile of rocks nearby, then asked, “Do you mind if I watch for a while?”

  For the life of him he couldn't figure out why she would want to, but he nodded. He used two wedges and a small wooden sledge. She sat on the rock pile left over from their chimney, watching as Karl worked. It was disconcerting having her sitting there with that innocent look plastered all over her face. He wished that he knew what she was up to.

  He picked up his axe, drove it into the edge of a billet, inserted the wedge, watching carefully for knots, which could make the cleavage go awry. When the first board fell free, Karl picked it up, looked at Anna and said, “Yellow poplar splits smooth as anything. The only thing you must remember is to watch for knots where branches grew before.”

  Anna lounged casually upon her rock, knees crossed, one foot swinging. “I'm not James, Karl,” she said in a voice as smooth as warm honey. “I won't be needing to learn the art of board-making. I just came out to watch, that's all. I like to watch you work with the wood.”

  “You do?” Karl asked, his eyebrows lifting in astonishment.

  She swung a foot, and let her eyes wander over him in a most suggestive fashion. “Yes, I do. It seems there's nothing you can't do with wood. I like to watch your hands on a piece that way. You sometimes look like you're caressing it.”

  Karl dropped his hand from the newly hewn plank as if it had suddenly developed nipples. Anna laughed lightly and settled more comfortably onto the rock pile, leaning her elbows back so her breasts thrust forward.

  “Don't your shoulders ever get tired, Karl?”

  “My shoulders?” he parroted.

  “Sometimes I watch you and I can't believe how long you can work with an axe without tiring.” Somehow she was toying with her hair, lifting it off the back of her neck and letting it flop back down repeatedly.

  “A man does what must be done,” Karl said, trying to concentrate on his board-making.

  “But you never complain.”

  “What good would complaining do? A job takes so many hours of work, complaining will not shorten those hours.”

  Her eyes followed his every flex of muscle as he worked—every movement sinuous and inviting as her voice rippled on provocatively. “But with you, Karl, I think there's no complaining because you like what you're doing so much.”

  He kept his eyes and hands busy with the poplar, but a giddy sensation was tingling his nerve endings. He knew now that she was playing him like a northern pike on a long, strong line. He had avoided being caught by her for some time now, but this was the first she had ever retaliated with such obvious flirting.

  She leaned back and studied him from behind half-closed lids awhile longer before murmuring in a low tone, “It's like watching a dancer when I watch you with your axe. From the first day I saw you with it, I thought so. You make every motion smooth and graceful.”

  The only thing Karl could think of to say was, “That's how my papa taught me. That is how I teach the boy.” He wondered if his face was as red as it felt. He continued working while she just sat there, stretching in the sun, lazing, eyeing him up and down until he thought he'd lose control of his own axe.

  At last she sighed. Then she clenched both fists and stretched her arms straight out at her sides in one last sinuous pose. “Oops!” she squeaked with a little giggle, for she'd knocked one of the rocks off the pile behind her and it went tumbling, taking a couple others with it. She stood up, bracing hands on knees and thrusting out her breasts and derrière, sighing, “Well, I guess I'd better get back down to—”

  “Don't move, Anna!” he whispered, a fierce warning in his voice. His eyes had veered down to the base of the rock pile. They remained glued to the spot while he reached blindly, feeling for his axe.

  The rattler had not made a sound, had given no indication it was sunning itself on the rock pile. But when the stones became dislodged and went rolling, the snake was suddenly exposed. Startled, the reptile curled into its fighting coil, raised its neck into the sharply oblique bow that warned of an imminent strike.

  Anna looked down, following the path of Karl's gaze just as the stout tail began its warning buzz. Her stomach tightened and her limbs tensed as she confronted the snake's sulphur yellow eyes with their demonic elliptical pupils.

  It happened so fast Anna scarcely had time to become mesmerized by shock. Karl's blind hand found the axe handle, and the next second the timber rattler was in two pieces, each leaping and coiling while Anna screamed, unable to take her eyes from the streaks of dark brown and yellow that writhed through the air in grotesque death twirls. Before the severed snake fell lifelessly to the earth, Karl's arms were around Anna, one of his big hands cupping the back of her head as he picked her up that way and set her away from the rock pile.

  “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 whispere
d.

  “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.