Even when Charlotte knew the words, talking to Ragnar wasn't easy. His topics were sheep, cows, rake. Charlotte muttered them after him—kindur, kýr, hrífa.
In the cowshed, he grasped the cow's teat—speni, he said.
"Don't squeeze it right away. Wait until the milk comes in."
But his favorite topic was rain—rigning.
"He'll hang dry," he said on good days. Or, "It's wet as a dog's nose," when it rained. On sunny days, he raised his arms toward the sun. Sól. Sól. One evening, he scratched his head and sighed. At last, he took a crumpled paper bag from the chest under the bench, smoothed it with his hands, and wrote a poem on it. With the help of a dictionary, she discovered that a poet named Jónas referred to a weather-ruled man like Ragnar, who begged the goddess of drizzle to send him some sun.
And I'll sacrifice
My cow—my wife—my Christianity!
But on the few Sundays when the village church offered a sermon, the old woman did not attend. She did other things, like talking to the earth, rocking back on her haunches, waiting for an answer. On days when the wind died down to a breeze, the old woman stood on the farmhouse steps, pushed her shoulders back, raised her face to the sky, and sang.
During that first summer Charlotte heard a highpitched warble. She looked up at the gable of the shed and saw a thrush moving its yellow, black-tipped beak. Below it stood the old woman singing back to the bird, begging it to deliver a message to a sweetheart.
O greet most fondly, if you chance to see
An angel whom our native costume graces.
In Berlin, with Lena wriggling in her arms, she'd recited the names of all the birds they saw. When she saw a winter wren scurrying across the ground at Dark Castle, Charlotte shrieked mouse. But the bird's upright tail became suddenly evident. She heard its high tinkling warble just before it flew off and recalled the tiny rodent-like bird from her picture book.
During breaks on dry days, Charlotte walked the meadow until she found a hollow. Lying on her belly and breathing in the moss in the sun-warmed thyme, she dreamed of escape. Part of her vision involved her mother holding out her arms, the same mother with whom she'd argued bitterly until the day she waved goodbye from a train window in the station.
Mamma.
Now Charlotte took the scrap of paper and a pencil
from her pocket and began a letter.
Dear Mamma,
I love the hillside. The fog hangs over the meadows until midday. Sometimes the sun gets so hot you have to wear a straw hat. The farmer doesn't talk much, but I don't mind. The old woman brews leaves and twigs on the stove, makes teas for aches in the back and legs.
In the margins, she drew pictures of horses carrying hay bundles to the barn until her hand, the lower one on the rake handle, ached. She dropped her pencil and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she sensed that Lena's curls had brushed her nose.
The Second Time in Her Life
Each lady slipper that grew on the edge of the field contained a drop of water at its center that sparkled in the early morning dew. Sometimes Charlotte bent to touch the liquid with her tongue as she had seen Ragnar do. But today she walked, stiff as a robot, turning the hay with a methodical twist, counting eins, zwei, drei. By noon, her nose itched from the hay dust. She stopped and placed her hand on the small of her back.
Ragnar put his rake down and came to her. Working the last row, the old woman tilted her face toward the sun.
"Hold it like this," he said, gently rearranging her grip.
His warm voice soothed her. But the narrowest part of her back—the spot where the day's work settled—still hurt. Later, she struggled to pack the hay into bundles against the side of her foot. But she couldn't rake it tightly enough. He had a functional way of touching her. Kneeling, he caressed her ankle.
"Like this."
At night, she imagined his rough warm hands on her skin, his strong arms around her shoulders—strong enough to pick up a sick ewe. She'd seen him carry a sheep and croon into its ear.
One day toward the end of that first summer, Charlotte bent over the washtub in the cowshed. The sunlight from the open door played over her hands as she soaped Ragnar's long underwear and rubbed it over the grooves of the board. Her eyes measured the contrasts on her hands, the shadows and their opposites, adjusted the angry red of her skin to a delicate pink, placed her hands demurely in the burgundy silk-swathed lap of a 16 century Dutch dowager, all without releasing Ragnar's underwear.
The door should have led to a courtyard in Delft. But it opened onto the lush green hillside, brighter than any color from a tube. It went dark as Ragnar's large body filled the doorframe. He lingered there, gazing at her. She stopped moving her hands. He walked toward the tub, rolling up his sleeves.
"Can I help?"
Together, they twisted the underwear in opposite directions until the water poured out, thick and gray. Carrying the basket of wash with her to the clothesline, he said a few words, and she said nothing. But they both laughed at the underwear dancing in the wind between his pajamas and the old woman's socks.
He smiled shyly. "I was cutting hay—I want to show you— "
She tilted her head, closed her eyes. A concert—front row seats, with Max years ago. She nodded acceptance.
They walked in the bristly growth of the moorland without speaking. Ragnar bent to pick a small cluster of little white flowers, grass of Parnassus, that grew at their feet and held them out to her.
"Good for the liver—mother says."
Charlotte examined the five petals, marked with delicate green lines, and smelled the sorrel on his breath. He stepped back, as if retreating from a line he hadn't meant to cross.
She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth, pronouncing her thanks just right. Takk. Every time Max had brought her red and white roses, she'd scrambled to find a pitcher to hold them. Up ahead, the farmhouse seemed very small.
"Here, on the hillside…"
She waited.
He pointed to a post.
"…we call that a staur."
Words tumbled from him—steinar, girðing—rocks, fence. He opened his arms—sól, himinn—sun, sky. Repeating the words, she laughed at her own pronunciation. His ears reddened as if he'd said the words wrong in the first place.
Years later, after their conversation had calcified into monosyllabic exchanges or hand signals across the fields, she would realize that their early verbal giddiness had resembled the bucking of the cows in the early spring—the tumult that preceded the dull grazing pattern of the rest of the summer— the rest of their lives.
They climbed higher, and the grass gave way to small pebbles. Charlotte was breathing quickly now. He lowered himself to the ground and pulled her down next to him.
"Smell the lamb's grass," he said, pointing to a tussock covered with tiny pink blossoms.
She buried her nose in the flowers. The earthy sweetness stirred a sadness in her. Just beyond the next knoll, the fog rolled like surf all the way out to the mountain. At last they found the place where he'd left his scythe that morning. He gripped the handle, so that the blade extended over his shoulder. They walked in silence to the farmhouse.
The next day, he taught her how to walk sideways into sheets of rain.
Rigning. Vindur.
Rain. Wind.
She moved her lips around the words, imitating the way he spoke, probing the speech pattern of the hillside. At night in bed, she strung together nouns and verbs. One morning, after weeks of this, she decided to say a whole sentence. She came up behind him in the cowshed, stood in the stall gutter, and spoke carefully.
"Will we turn the hay before the rain?"
He turned around and smiled. His pride warmed her. The old woman's eyes were on her, wanting something too. Charlotte hadn't had a real conversation since she'd traveled with Gisela. Things unsaid knocked about in her head. She thought for a moment, then pursed her lips.
"Skjalda's milk is blue today."
The old woman's face cracked into laughter.
That night Charlotte reached across the distance between the beds to nudge the old woman out of a snore. But she wasn't sleeping. In a voice of stifled laughter, she repeated Charlotte's words, "Skjalda's milk is blue today."
After that, Ragnar often walked with Charlotte, teaching her new words, sometimes touching her. She wrote to Gisela:
I've learned to milk a cow and rake hay. This is an interesting agricultural experience for me. But I'm still thinking of moving to the city even though it's very beautiful here, and I think the farmer's mother likes me. How's the farmer's brother? Hah. Hah. Please write. I can't speak properly yet, and I've never been so quiet in my life. Any word from home? Charlotte.
It was a sunny day, and she was in the tool shed, searching for a rake that had all its teeth. Through the sunlit crack in the corrugated iron, she recognized his overalls and boots as he approached the shed. He stumbled a little in the dark. His arms circled her waist. She caught her breath, and even before he spoke, his deep voice sang inside her.
"Let me help you," he said.
She placed her hands on his and leaned back against his chest. Somewhere between her shoulder blades, his blood made a thudding sound. Aside from pressing up against strangers in bread lines in Berlin, she hadn't been close to a man since—
Stepping out of the shed, she trembled in the warm sun.
All morning, they turned the drying grass, the old woman bringing up the rear. Each time they came to the end of a row, Charlotte tilted her face toward him, so that his gaze could brush her cheek.
During the dry spell, they worked furiously to get all the hay into the barn. Then, as black clouds scudded across the sky, they baled and bound the hay to the horses' backs. Holding the bridle of the lead horse, Ragnar looked ready for a long and difficult journey. The barn was ten minutes away. Charlotte saw the change in his face, like the trembling of the track before the train arrives. She waited.
"Is it alright then?" His look said he meant her—and him.
"Yes," she said for the second time in her life.
The buttocks of the last horse quivered as the hay bundles swayed on its flanks.
Next day, she sat on the milk stool, and he stood above her.
"Did you learn to rake hay in Berlin?" he asked.
The question made her laugh until she had to wipe away tears. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone and Skjalda was studying her. The swirl of hair on her flank blurred into a vision of the years of raking, digging, and milking that lay ahead.
Take it Off, Petronella
When Charlotte entered the kitchen, Ragnar and his mother went silent. The old woman stepped into the pantry. Charlotte glimpsed her through the crack in the door, climbing up on the chair, stretching to the top shelf. She brought down the canister of bearberry leaves and berries. Charlotte knew the old woman used them to ease her straining over the hole in the outhouse. Several times a week, after dosing herself with bearberry tea, she'd disappear into the outhouse for an hour or two, old newspapers under her arm.
Ragnar's brown homespun suit lay in a rumpled heap on the table. The old woman emptied the canister into the big pot on the stove, added water, and fed the suit into the mixture. Soon the simmering liquid resembled thin brown tar.
The old woman fished up a sleeve of the suit on a wooden spoon and shook her head. She took the coal bucket and a small shovel from behind the stove. In a few minutes, she came back, straining under the weight of the bucket.
"Ragnar—your suit," she called.
He emerged from the bedroom, his eyes puffy. Had he lain too long silently in the dark? Some people were like that. He picked up the bucket and emptied the black clay into the pot.
The old woman peered into the pot. Occasionally she stirred the suit with the spoon. When the bubbles in the thick black soup began to pop, she sat down, crossing one leg tightly over the other, wrapping a gray-socked foot around an ankle.
Charlotte placed her hands on her chest as if to protect herself from the old woman's scrutiny. A foreigner, was she good enough for her son? Later, the black suit frolicked on the clothesline like an imp out of hell. The bits of fleece on the barbed wire blew horizontally in the wind. Nothing was ever still here. Between shifts in the wind, she'd said yes. Now her dread deepened.
The old woman looked sideways at Charlotte. "And what will you wear?"
Not the black dress she'd worn the first time, so many years ago. Later, in the bedroom, Charlotte held up a wrinkled black skirt and a hand-knitted red sweater. The old woman batted the air and disappeared upstairs.
Minutes later, she returned, unfurling a yellowed bed sheet.
"This is what you need."
The old cloth smelled musty.
But the old woman hopped around the kitchen, chattering about sleeves and waists. Even on the hillside, mothers went funny about weddings. Holding the sheet against Charlotte's chest, she pinned the fabric and cut it with the same scissors they'd used to shear the sheep. Then, wedging herself between the stove and the kitchen table, she began to sew. Under her breath she sang about a blunt sword named Dragvendill:
My teeth solved my troubles
And tore out his throat.
***
Next day the sheet resembled a garment. "Try it on," the old woman said through the pins between her lips. Charlotte shivered in the dusty fabric. Her armpits hurt. The old woman stepped back. "Sleeves too tight?"
Then Charlotte saw the stains across the front of the dress. How old was the sheet? Had the old woman and Ragnar's father come together on it in the ancient ritual of love? It was a fertility gown, the earth goddess's cast-off skin. The old woman dropped the gown into the big pot, took a handful of lichens from her jar, and strewed them over the liquid.
She looked up. "Yellow or red?"
Charlotte recalled Petronella, the top can-can dancer in Berlin, how the audience had sung Take it Off, Petronella as her red dress whirled. In the same show, a young woman, perspiring under the watchful eye of a stormtrooper, had struggled to keep her crotch cover from slipping off.
"Red"
The old woman went to the cowshed and brought back a jar of urine. She placed it next to the bowl of lichens. Later that evening, she poured off the lichen brew, added the urine, and set the pot on the floor to soak. For two nights in a row Charlotte woke up to the sound of the old woman pouring off the urine, adding more, and setting it to soak again.
Three days before the wedding, the old woman left the farmhouse early in the morning. When Charlotte got up, Petronella's earth mother gown hung like a scarlet flag on the clothesline. By the time the fog had burned off the hillside, the old woman returned with her apron full of leaves, roots, and berries. A pink spot colored each of her thin gray cheeks.
"Makes good babies," the old woman said, pushing a bowl of grass milk at her. Her eyes crinkled in laughter.
Charlotte was warm with desire for Ragnar. But a baby? She'd done that already and misplaced it.
Singing to herself, "headache, rheumatism, bladder, and liver," the old woman minced motherwort, raspberry leaves, and seaweed then scooped the plant scraps up from the cutting board in her small, dry hand and dumped them into a pot of water simmering on the stove. A smell like sweet fish oil filled the room. Leaning over the pot, she washed her small, sunken cheeks in the steam. At last she poured the light brown liquid over a cloth filter into a jar.
At dinner, three envelopes lay on Charlotte's dish. Picking up the first one, Charlotte met the old woman's shy smile. On the back of the envelope was a drawing of a hand covered with warts. Inside were dried daisies, tree bark, and dandelions. The second one featured a freckled woman and contained a rosette of reddish basal leaves. The last one bore a sketch of a wrinkled old woman with scraggly hair. Inside she found a stalk of dried yarrow.
The old woman's eyes twinkled. "Everything you need for married life."
Free of warts, freckles, wrink
les, and thanks to this fragile knower of mysterious things, she'd be happy on the farm. Charlotte almost fell over her chair as she reached for the old woman. Embracing her thin shoulders, she caught a smell of moist earth.
It was the day before the wedding. When Charlotte went to the cowshed for more milk, she saw the flicker of an oil lamp in the window. Inside, she discovered the old woman stripped to the waist and leaning over the washtub, her hair loose, her shoulders bare. She was pouring urine on her head and rubbing it into her hair. A row of empty jars stood on the shelf. Remembering how the old woman had reached for a jar each time a cow peed, Charlotte filled her pitcher from the milk canister and hurried out.
Later the old woman sat at the kitchen table. Her long, gray hair shone under the lamp.
Seal Woman Page 3