“Well, almost,” she said, staring at her plate.
“No,” he insisted, “not even almost.” They gazed at each other for some time before Karl asked, “Is that lingonberry jam you have there, or are you not going to let me find out?”
“Oh! Sure . . . here!” She handed it to him. “But I didn't make it. Katrene did. She gave it to me.”
“Quit apologizing, Anna,” he ordered gently.
Unconcernedly, he garnished his pancakes with lingonberry jam and began eating, looking at her across the table with his shining face as placid as the surface of the pond. Never in his life had Karl had to force himself to eat like he did now. For all he cared, the goat could come in and eat up pancakes, jam and all, right off the plates, and it would not concern him one bit. But for Anna, he knew he must eat these pancakes, and ask for more.
She picked at her food with pitiful interest; Karl was much better at acting than she was. She jumped up gratefully to fry more, when he asked for them. By the time she brought the second batch, the candlelight was intimate and disconcerting, limning as it did every expression that passed their faces as they stared—silently, most of the time now—at each other, across the pancakes and lingonberries, the cups and rose hips, the asters and loosestrife, the gingham and sweet clover.
When he finished, he leaned back and slung one arm around the backpost of his chair. “You never told me, Anna, what you thought of my gifts.” Those blue eyes studied her in a way that turned her calves to the texture of Katrene's jam.
“I thanked you for the stove, Karl. I love the stove, you know that.”
“I am not talking about the stove.”
“The gingham?”
“Ya. The gingham.”
“The gingham . . . I love the gingham. It's really made the place cheerful.”
“I wanted to buy you a hat with a pink ribbon, but Morisette did not have any at this time of year.”
“You did?” She was surprised and warmed by his even wanting to.
“Ya, I did. But I had to get you the soap instead.”
She studied the tablecloth, picked at the edge of it absently with her thumbnail.
“I do like the soap, Karl. It's . . . it's very special.”
“It took some doing to get that out of you.”
“It took some doing to get that soap out of you,” she said softly, thinking of all those bitter words they'd said the day he ran off in such anger.
“The night I brought it home, you did not seem to care much about it.”
“I was saving it.”
“For tonight?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her lap.
“Like the eggs for the pancakes?”
She made no reply.
“How long have you been planning tonight?”
She only shrugged her shoulders.
“How long?” he repeated.
Her tear-filled eyes flashed in the candlelight as she looked beseechingly at him. “Oh, Karl, you came home that night and all you could talk about was Kerstin.”
“And I will perhaps talk about Kerstin often. She is our friend, Anna. Do you understand that? She made me see things, made me talk about things that only a true friend could make me see.”
Anna put her forehead in her hand and fought the tears. “I don't want to talk about Kerstin,” she said wearily.
“But to talk about us, I must talk about Kerstin.”
“Why, Karl?” She looked him squarely in the face again. “Because she's the one between us? Because she's the one you want?”
“Is that what you think, Anna?”
“Well, what am I supposed to think when ever since she came you have everything down the road you could have had if you'd only waited a few more weeks before bringing me here and marrying me?”
“Those are your words, Anna, not mine.”
“Well, they're true,” she accused with a touch of petulance. “Do you think I don't know how you feel when you're at their place? It shows, Karl. You . . . you're happy and smiling and talking Swedish and eating Swedish pancakes like you were back in Skäne again!”
Karl leaned forward, placing his forearms against the table edge, looking deep into her eyes. “Listen to me, Anna, and listen to yourself. You just said their place. That is what Kerstin made me see. It is their place that makes me happy. Yes, I am happy there, but it has nothing to do with Kerstin any more than the others there. But she made me see how it must look to you. That is why I must talk of her.”
She sat across from him with her narrow shoulders pulled forward as she clasped her hands tightly between her knees. “Karl,” she said plaintively, “I can never be Kerstin, not if I try for a thousand years.”
His heart seemed broken and healed at once, broken for all the insecurity he had made her feel, but healed by the love that had driven her so far as to try to become what she thought he wanted. “Anna, Anna,” he said with deep feeling, “I do not want you to be.”
Suddenly she seemed confused. “But you said—”
“I have said many things that were better left unsaid, Anna.”
“But Karl, she is everything you wanted for yourself, everything I lied about being . . . and more! She is twenty-four years old, and she can cook and keep house and raise gardens and talk Swedish and—”
“And wear her hair in braids?” Karl finished smilingly, raising his eyes briefly to her hair.
“Yes!” Anna answered wretchedly, “and wear braids.”
“And so you thought you would try to be like her and it did not work?”
“Yes! I didn't know what else to do anymore.” She sounded utterly miserable, felt utterly miserable. Karl was so tempting, sitting there in the candleglow talking all nice that way. Every time she met his eyes, she wanted to fly around the table and kiss him. Instead, she looked at her lap, clenching her hands tightly in bonds of pink gingham to keep them from reaching out to him.
“Did you think, Anna, that maybe it was not you who needed to change, but me?” he asked now, so softly.
“You?” Her head snapped up and she laughed a little too harshly. “Why, you're so perfect, Karl, any woman would be a fool to want you to change. There's not a single thing on this earth that you can't do or won't try or can't learn. You're patient, and you have a . . . a grand sense of humor, and you care about things so much, and you're honest and . . . and I have yet to see you defeated by anything. Why, I haven't found a single thing you don't know how to do.”
“Except forgive, Anna,” he admitted before the dusky room grew silent.
Flustered, she reached for her cup only to find it empty. But Karl captured her hand for a moment, then she pulled it away, clutched it between her knees again while she said, “Even that, Karl, you would not have had to do if you had waited for Kerstin. I'm sure of it.”
“But I did not wait for Kerstin. That is the point. I had you, and I could not look past the one and only thing you could not change and try to forgive it. I have held onto my stubborn Swedish pride all these weeks, long after I could see that until I forgave you that one thing, you would not find pride in anything else you did.”
“Karl, I can't change what I did.” Her luminous eyes looked to him in supplication, which he knew she should not need to be feeling.
“I know that, Anna. It is something that Kerstin made me see. She made me see that I was wrong to hold it against you all this time.”
“You . . . you talked with Kerstin about that, too?” she asked, aghast.
“No, Anna, no,” he assured her. “It was about other things that we talked. About things like blueberry cobbler and an Irish girl who wants to have Swedish braids. She made me see you were trying to make up for things that did not need making up for, you were trying to be things you do not need to be. She made me see you were trying so hard to please me, you even try to be Swedish for me.”
He arose from his chair and came to bend on one knee beside hers. “Anna,” he said, putting both hands on her knees, “Anna
, look at me.” When she wouldn't, he put a finger beneath her chin and raised it. He saw into the wide, brown eyes with the luminous teardrops quivering on their rims.
“Tonight you have done all this to please me. All the pretty gingham curtains and the flowers and this dress.” His hand rose to her collar, and he took it between two fingers. His eyes rose to her hair, and an infinitely tender tone crept into his voice. “And these terrible braids that do not suit you at all because you have beautiful whiskey-hair that wants to curl its own way, flying free like it should be. All of this you do to win what was yours by rights from the first. Only I was too stubborn to give it to you. Do you know what that is, Anna?”
She thought he meant the right to his body, his lovemaking, but could hardly answer either of those. Instead, she remained silent.
“It is your pride, Anna,” he went on. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
She shrugged her shoulders in a childish way.
“I am saying that when I walked into this cabin today I felt small and guilty at what I have made you do here. You have tried in all the good ways that make you my special little own Anna, to please me. All these weeks you have tried. But I make you do a thing like this.”
“Don't . . . don't you like it, Karl?”
“Oh, Anna, my little Anna, I like it so much that it makes me want to cry. But I do not deserve it.”
“Oh, Karl, you're wrong. You deserve so mu—”
He reached to cover her lips with his fingertips, stopping her words. “You are the one who deserves, Anna. More than I have given. It is not enough that I have taken up my axe and cut trees to build you a home and that I have cleared land and raised food for its table and bought you a stove and a bar of soap. A home is only a home because of the people in it. A home is only a home when it has love. And so if I give you all these things, what does it matter when I withhold myself?”
In his own fiercely honorable way, Karl kept his eyes glued to her face while he said all this. When a man speaks of things which mean much to him, he does not hide it from showing in his face. There, before Anna, all the pain and longing and want of Karl Lindstrom lay naked in the expression of his eyes upon hers, of his lips as he spoke, even in the hands that now stroked her hair, her collarbone, then the gingham skirt draped upon her knees.
“All these months, Anna, while I have planned this log house, I have dreamed about this first night in it and how it would be. I have thought of having you here and sitting with you at our table, and talking about things the way we would do after our supper was done. And always I dream of a fire in my hearth, and of loving you before it. Now, Anna, I find I have, by my own foolishness, almost lost all those things I worked so hard for. But I want them, Anna. I want them all, just like it is tonight. This beautiful table you have set, and you in your starchy little dress, and—”
But this time it was Anna who placed her trembling fingers over his lips, stilling them. “Then, why do you talk so long, Karl?” she whispered, her voice soft and quavering and yearning.
The hunger in his eyes spoke passionately, even before he reached to take her face between his two hands and bring it slowly toward his own. Lips parted, eyes closing, he touched her mouth hesitantly with his own while she sat too stunned to move.
“Forgive me, Anna,” he whispered hoarsely, “forgive me for all these weeks.”
Into his azure eyes Anna gazed wonderingly, wanting this moment to draw on into the forever of their years. “Oh, Karl, there is nothing to forgive. I'm the one who should be asking.”
“No,” he uttered, “you asked long ago, on the night you picked blueberries for me.”
Still kneeling, he took her hands apart and lowered his face into them where they lay on her lap. He needed so badly to be touched by her, to be assured of her forgiveness now. She looked down at the back of his head, at the blond wisps that waved into the shadowed hollow of his neck. Her love surged in devastating swells that overflowed from her eyes, blurring Karl's image before her.
To Anna came the intrinsic understanding that he must have the words she alone could give. Karl. Karl who in all ways was good and loving and kind. Karl needed her absolution from a transgression of her own making. She felt his flesh upon her palm and moved her other hand to twine her fingers in his hair. “I forgive you, Karl,” she said softly, knowing utter fullness at the words, at the look in his eyes as he raised them to her face again.
Then the expression on his countenance changed, beautified, intensified. He rose to his feet and grasped her upper arms to draw her inexorably up, up, too. He pulled her to his chest, leaning to kiss her, clutching her arms like they were his salvation. Then, suddenly he freed them, placed them around his neck, hungry for the clinging to start.
She came against him in a grasping, wild, tumultuous kiss that touched his body from nose to knees. Within her open mouth his tongue tasted salt tears mingling with the kiss, and he took them from her, stroking her tongue with his, swallowing the salt of her sadness, taking it into himself, that she should never again know tears because of him.
“Don't cry, Anna,” he crooned, covering her face with kisses, holding the back of her head in both hands, as if she might slip away. “Never again, Anna,” he promised, wiping away tears with his lips, then seeking the warmth of her neck, bending to her again, his face in the hollow of her gingham breasts now. Downward he kissed until he knelt on one knee with his face pressed to her stomach, drowning in the fragrance of camomile.
“Anna,” he said against her, “I have loved you longer than you know.”
She leaned her head back and her eyes slid closed as he cradled his head against her and held her with one arm while he ran a hand warmly, firmly, possessively, from the hollow of her back to the hollows behind her knees, then up again.
“How long, Karl?” she asked greedily, drifting in sensuousness while his hands played over her. “Tell me . . . Tell me everything you dreamed of telling me long before I came to you.” Her voice was a joy-wracked whisper as his hands continued their reacquaintance with her curves.
“I have loved you when I did not know you existed, Anna. I have loved the dream of you. I have begun loving you before I left my mother's arms. I have loved you while I find this land to which I would bring you and while I cut its timbers to build this home for you and while I reap my grains for you and build my fire for you . . . I know all my life you are waiting somewhere for me.”
“Karl, stand up,” she whispered, she begged. “I have been waiting so long to feel you against me again.”
He rose to his full height, running his hands up her legs, up her hips, up her ribs. She was waiting with seeking mouth for his return.
Together they clung and touched: faces, hair, shoulders, breasts, tongues, hips. Even the hollow of his spine was hers at last as she ran her hand down inside the back of his pants. “I can't believe you are letting me touch you at last,” she said breathily, her voice a strange thing in both their ears: aroused, eager, throaty.
“Never ask. You never have to . . . Never, Anna.” His eyes were closed, his breathing strained.
“Karl, how I used to watch you when you would lean to build the fire, and think of running my hands over you this way.”
“And I watched you in those britches and wanted to put my hands here . . .” He fondled her breast, her stomach, “and here . . . and here . . .”
“You never have to ask either, Karl,” she whispered, while his hands made free with her.
“Anna, I want to build a fire now. Do you want to watch me lean to build a fire?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Always have I dreamed of a fire.”
“Yes . . . yes . . .” she whispered, the waiting now a joyous agony.
“But I do not want you to ask anything while I do it.”
“I won't ask, Karl,” she whispered against his lips. “Go build your fire for me, but if I cannot ask, you cannot either.”
“Only one thing, Anna,
but now . . .”
Instead of asking what, she moved sinuously against him, blending her curves against his while her body promised what her words did not.
“Pull in our latchstring, Anna, and close our curtains that I did not think we needed.”
He had to put her from him, turning her toward the door while he went to the fireplace and knelt before it. He shaved golden curls from the hardwood logs. And he heard the swish of one curtain after another whispering upon their willow withe curtain rods. He leaned to touch steel to flint and heard the gentle rap of the hazelnut swinging upon its string against the sturdy oak panels of his door. Keeping his face to the hearth he laid kindling to the growing flame, hearing the rustle of cornhusks behind him, then a strange brushing sound that whispered along the floor. But he gazed into the fire, kneeling upon one knee until her hand slid slowly down from his neck onto his shoulder, then down, down across his back and into the back of his pants to pull his shirttail up. She caressed his warm skin there, fanning her fingers upon him until he closed his eyes to the fire, basking instead in the heat of her touch.
“How I watched these shoulders in the sun,” she whispered, raising his shirt as high as it would go, riding her hands up his back, then lowering her lips to the warm skin near a shoulder blade. Hunkered there on one knee, an arm cast out loosely, he dropped his forehead onto his biceps as she touched her tongue to his exposed back. “How I watched them, you'll never know.”
He pivoted to face her then, finding her on both knees behind him, kneeling upon the heavy buffalo robe she had dragged over from the bed.
His hands moved onto her hips, pressing seductively. “Did you watch them like I watched these hips, bending over in those britches?” Now his hands swam upward along her ribs to her breasts again. “And how I wondered if I was mistaken about what was inside that shirt of your brother's.”
She pressed against his palm, heat rising everywhere through her body now. “Were you mistaken?” she asked.
He had a handful of her firm breast, yet he answered, “There is only one way to find out when memory is dim.”