The Endearment

by LaVyrle Spencer

  “I think I was right the first time when I took you for a whelp still wet behind the ears, Anna. Look at you. No wife of mine could look like that, sitting there in her britches with sawdust all over everything.”

  But the way he smiled at her, she knew she was forgiven for last night. Making a face at him, she asked, “Can we go down right now, Karl?”

  “Right now?”

  “Right this very now!”

  “But we should trim and buck this tree first, and—”

  “And by that time you will have to bury me! Please, let's go now. I'm starving, Karl, starving!”

  “All right,” Karl laughed, pulling his axe from its slice in the stump, extending it toward Anna. “Let's go.”

  She squinted up at this husband of hers, his tanned, smiling face framed by damp, unruly curls near his temples. She wondered how she'd managed to get so lucky. Her heart tripped in gay excitement at the very sight of him, holding the axe in his powerful grip, with that blue-eyed smile slanting down at her. With a coy smile of her own, she grabbed the cheeks of the axe with both hands, and he tugged her to her feet in a shower of woodchips. She came flying to land lightly against him, and he caught her with his free arm, pulling her up against his hip, then laughed down into her eyes as she peered up at him.

  James smiled, watching them, then scampered off, saying, “I'll get Belle and Bill.”

  Karl dropped his arm, but raised his eyes to Anna's hair, then reached out to pick a piece of pine from it. “You are a mess,” he said smilingly, and flicked the fragment away.

  She touched her index finger to his temple and followed the track of a bead of sweat that trailed downward at the edge of his hair. “So are you,” she returned. Then she put the finger to the tip of her tongue, her brown eyes never leaving his, which widened a little in surprise before she coquettishly whirled away.

  They started down the hill, the five of them, Anna declaring that the team had never moved this slow before; surely she would fall dead in her tracks halfway to the table if they didn't hustle. But Karl reminded her with a smirk that for safety's sake the horses must not be hurried. She strode half a pace ahead of Karl with impatient steps, making sure her hips swung a little come-hither message into the bargain.

  “What are you cooking for supper?” asked the husband behind her.

  She fired him a withering look over her shoulder, then faced front again as she scolded, “Don't be smart, Karl.”

  “I think it is someone else who is being smart here, and if she doesn't watch her teasing she will end up doing the cooking yet.”

  Anna turned around and skipped a few steps backward while pleading in her most earnest voice, “I'd do anything for a decent meal cooked by somebody else for a change.”

  “Anything?” he questioned suggestively, stretching his steps to gain on Anna, who suddenly whirled around, ignored his innuendo, continuing to march vigorously toward supper.

  “Come back here, Anna,” he ordered mildly.

  “What?”

  “I said come back here. You have sawdust on your britches.”

  She stuck her rear out to inspect it as best she could while still downhilling it. But Karl caught up to her, and she felt his hand swipe her seat, sending little shivers of anticipation through her belly and breasts. Then, his sweeping done, Karl left his hand around her waist, pulling her lightly against his hip. With the axe swung over his other shoulder, they walked down to the clearing.

  That night they splurged on precious sliced ham because it was the fastest thing Karl could think of. He plucked it down from the rafter of the springhouse where it had been hanging upside down like a bat. He showed Anna how to make red-eye gravy of flour and milk. With it they had crystalline boiled potatoes, which she managed to peel quite nicely for Karl—this first small domestic success filling her with pride.

  During the supper preparations, Karl warned her, “We're almost out of bread. Tomorrow I think I must show you how to bake more.”

  Disheartened, she wailed, “Ohhh, no! If I couldn't handle pancakes, I'll for sure kill the bread!”

  “It will take time but you must learn.”

  She threw out her hands hopelessly. “But there's so much to remember, Karl. Everything you show me has different stuff in it. I can't possibly get it all straight.”

  “Give yourself time and you will.”

  “But you'll be sick and tired of me ruining all your precious food when you have to work so hard for every bit of it.”

  “You are too impatient with yourself, Anna. Have I complained?” He raised his blue eyes to hers.

  “No, Karl, but I only wish I could learn quicker so you didn't have to do it all. If I could get things right the first time, you could leave me without worrying I'll burn the house down and your supper with it. Why, I still haven't got the spider clean from dinner!”

  “A little sand will work it clean,” he advised, nonplussed.

  The sand worked beautifully, and she displayed the rejuvenated pan with pride. But later, when the ham was spitting and smelling unendurably delicious, Anna stopped in the door, clutching the bowl of potato parings against her stomach.

  “Karl?”

  He looked up to find her playing with a curl of potato peeling, twisting it around an index finger distractedly.

  “What is it, Anna?”

  She studied the peeling intently. “If I knew how to read, you could write things down for me so I'd be able to cook stuff right. I mean . . .” She looked up expectantly. “I mean, then it wouldn't matter if my memory's not so good.” Again, she dropped her eyes to the bowl.

  “There is nothing wrong with your memory, Anna. It will all smooth out in time.”

  “But would you teach me to read, Karl?” Her eyes wandered back to his. “Just enough to know the names of things like flour and lard . . . and saleratus?”

  A soft, understanding smile broke across his face. “Anna, I will not send you packing because you have forgotten the leavening in the pancakes. You should know that by now, little one.”

  “I know. It's just that you can do everything so good, and I can't do anything without you watching every move. I want to do better for you.”

  He wanted nothing so badly as to step to the doorway and pitch the bowl of potato parings aside and take her in his arms and kiss her until the ham burned.

  “Anna, do you not know that it is enough for me that you wish this?”

  “It is?” Her childish, large eyes opened wide.

  “Of course it is.” He was rewarded with her smile.

  “But would you teach me to read anyway, Karl?”

  “Perhaps in the winter when time grows long.”

  “By then I will have burned up all your valuable flour,” she said mischievously.

  “By then we will have a new crop.”

  She turned with her bowl to leave, happy now.

  “Anna?”

  “What?”

  “Save the parings. We will plant those with eyes and see if the season is long enough to give us a second crop. We will need it.”

  She turned to study him thoughtfully. “Is there anything you don't know, Karl?”

  “Ya,” he answered. “I do not know how I will make it till tomorrow night.”

  That evening he showed Anna how to make yeast from the potato water, which he saved from supper, and a handful of dried hops. To this he added a curious syrup, which he said was made of the pulp of watermelons, a plentiful source of sugar. The maple sugar, which he harvested, had too strong a flavor for bread, he said. So instead he boiled watermelon pulp each summer and preserved it in crocks by pouring melted beeswax over it.

  With the yeast ingredients set in the warm chimney corner for the night, they all enjoyed cups of the remaining watermelon nectar, a treat Anna and James had never known before.

  “Can I have more, Karl?” James asked. Karl emptied the jug into the boy's mug.

  “It's delicious,” Anna agreed.

  “I have
many more delicious things to introduce you to. Minnesota knows no end of such delights.”

  “You were right, Karl. It really does seem to be a land of plenty.”

  “Soon the wild raspberries will be ripe. Then you will have a treat!”

  “What else?” James asked.

  “Wild blackberries, too. Did you know that when a wild blackberry is green, it is red?”

  James puzzled a moment, then laughed. “It's a riddle in reverse—what's red when it's green.”

  “But when it is ripe, it turns as black as the pupil of a rattlesnake's eye,” Karl said.

  “Have you got rattlesnakes here?” Anna asked, wide-eyed.

  “Timber rattlers. But I have not seen many. I have had to kill only two since I am here. Snakes eat the pesky rodents in the grainfields, so I do not like killing a snake. But the rattler is a devil, so I must.”

  Anna shivered. They had not gone for their swim before supper because they'd been in too much of a hurry to eat. Karl suggested a swim now, but the mention of rattlesnakes made Anna opt for the washstand instead. James, too, agreed for this one night he'd put off their swim.

  When they were tucked in bed, Anna spoke first, in a whisper, as usual.

  “Karl?”

  “Hm?”

  “Have you thought any more about a stove for the new house?”

  “No, Anna. I have been busy and it slipped my mind.”

  “Not mine.”

  “Do you think a stove will make you a better cook?” he asked, amused.

  “Well, it might,” she ventured.

  But Karl laughed a little.

  “Well, it might!” she repeated.

  “And then again, it might not, and Karl Lindstrom will have spent his good money for nothing.”

  A little fist clunked him one in the chest.

  “Perhaps we make a bargain, you and I. First Anna learns to cook decent, then Karl buys her the stove.”

  “Oh, do you mean it, Karl?” Even in a whisper her voice was enthused.

  “Karl Lindstrom is no liar. Of course I mean it.”

  “Oh, Karl . . .” She grew excited just thinking of it.

  “But I will be the judge of when your cooking is decent.”

  She lay there smiling in the dark.

  “I'm going to make good bread tomorrow. You'll see!”

  “I am making good bread tomorrow. You are watching me make it.”

  “All right. I'm watching. But this time I'm gonna remember everything,” she vowed, “just like James does. You'll be going off to buy that new stove before the month is out, you'll see.” She imagined how it would be to own an iron stove, and how glorious it would be to find cooking not a hateful job, to have things turn out right.

  “Karl?”

  “Hm?”

  “How do you bake bread without an oven?”

  “In a kiln in the yard. Have you never seen it?”

  “No. Where is it?”

  “Back by the woodpile.”

  “You mean that mound of dried mud?”

  “Ya.”

  “But it has no door!”

  “I will make a door by sealing up the hole with wet clay after the loaves are inside.”

  “You mean you want me to goop around with wet clay every time I make bread, for the rest of my life?”

  “What I want is for you to come over here and shut your little mouth. I said I would think about the stove, and I will. I grow tired of talking about bread and clay and stoves now.”

  So she found a spot to nestle in Karl's arm, and she did what she was told: she shut her mouth. When his kiss found it, she refused to open up. He backed off, tried again in his most persuasive fashion, but could only feel her smiling with lips sealed.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “I'm only doing what I promised to do. I vowed to obey my husband, didn't I? So when I'm told to shut my mouth, I do it.”

  “Well, your husband is ordering you to open it again.”

  And she did. Willingly.

  Chapter Eleven

  The bread-making was a larger undertaking than Anna had imagined, made so mostly by the fact that they were to make fourteen loaves at once, enough for two weeks.

  In the morning the hop tea had turned into a crock of effervescent bubbles, which had to be strained through a horsehair strainer into the hollowed-out black walnut log with legs, which Karl called a dough box. Water and lard were added, and much, much flour. Anna got into the act at this point by kneading, elbow-to-elbow with Karl. Before the flour was all mixed in, her arms ached as if she'd been wielding Karl's axe instead of his bread dough. The dough box had a concave cover, also made of hollowed-out wood, and when at last it was in place, the whole thing was left beside the fireplace where it was warm and the dough could rise.

  “And now you know how to mix bread,” Karl said.

  “Do you always make so much?”

  “It is easier in the long run than having to mix dough more often. Are your arms tired?”

  “No,” she lied—a little white lie—not wanting him to think her too weak for such a task.

  “Good, then let us go see about that tamarack we left lying on its side yesterday.”

  The day was different from any so far. Between Anna and Karl there was none of the light banter. There was, instead, a concerted avoiding of eyes, of touch, even of speech.

  For this was the day!

  They mounted the skid trail behind Belle and Bill. Today Karl took the reins instead of turning them over to James. The familiar reins felt comforting in Karl's palms. The familiar rumps of the horses were good to set his eyes upon when they felt like wandering to Anna. The words of command flowed in gentle but gruff tones to the horses, though Karl found little to say to his wife.

  He was attuned to her every motion, though. He need not even look her way to sense each movement, each sound she made. The sigh of her pant legs through the damp morning grass, the quick tilt of her head at the bark of a pheasant, the accented swing of the basket she carried, the natural swing of her hips, the perk of alertness when a gopher caught her eye, the way she watched the small animal as she walked past it, the determination in her stance as she set to work on the branches, the way she raised the jug to her lips when she broke for water, the way she backhanded her mouth after taking the drink, the curl of her back as she bent to fill the basket, the way she put the first chip to her nose before dropping it in, the pause to push her hair back when the nape of her neck grew warm, the way she smiled reassuringly at James when he seemed to be questioning silently, why this sudden change between you and Karl?

  Anna, too, knew a sense of content with Karl, as if suddenly, a tuning fork had been struck in her body and its vibrations matched his as they played out this new movement of a symphony started two weeks ago.

  That first movement, with its light allegrolike gaity, echoed and was gone now, high among the tamaracks. It was replaced by this sensual adagio that caught them in its slowly measured beat. Even Karl's axe seemed to match that slower rhythm, its mellow thud counting away the minutes until nightfall. It was if Anna stood beside Karl, elbow-to-elbow, as she had earlier.

  She knew his every movement, though she never looked squarely at him the entire morning. The brush of his hand upon Belle's haunch, the way it absently eased down to her thigh, the pat on her shoulder before leaving her in favor of curved ash, the squaring of shoulders and that last gaze skyward before hefting the axe for the first time that day, the great breath, the way he held it in his thick chest before that initial fluid swing, then the symmetry of motion, the flash of yellow hair back and forth in the sun as he nodded into each stroke, the rise of chin at the measure of trembling tree, the squint of eye as the bark cracked, the near shudder of satisfaction as it plunged, the one-handed way he unbuttoned his shirt, the rolling backward of shoulders to be free of it, the axe handle leaning upon his groin as he shrugged from the confines of cotton, the shirt flying through the air, his hands flexing wi
de before taking up the axe once more, making it sing, the sudden silence when James pointed wordlessly, Karl walking with catlike stealth to reach for the rifle and raise it, aiming at the squirrel who perched in mesmerized silence waiting to be their supper, the recoil that scarcely rocked Karl's shoulder, his look of amazement as the butt of the gun slid down to rest beside his foot while the squirrel scampered free, untouched.

  And for one of the few times that day, Karl's eyes meeting Anna's, hers falling away, her head turning so she could smile at his missed shot without his knowing.

  And all day long their thoughts ranged over parallel themes.

  “What will she think of me?”

  “What will he think of me?”

  “Will she come along swimming?”

  “He will want to go swimming.”

  “I had best shave again.”

  “I had best wash my hair.”

  “I wish I had better than lye soap to offer.”

  “I wish I had better than homespun to wear.”

  “Supper will seem endless.”

  “I'll hardly be hungry.”

  “Shall I go to the barn?”

  “Shall I go to bed first?”

  “When have two days been this long?”

  “When have two days been this short?”

  “Will she resist?”

  “Will he demand?”

  “She is so slight.”

  “He is so big.”

  “What do women need?”

  “Will he be gentle?”

  “Will she know it is my first time?”

  “He will know it's not my first time!”

  “I must wait till the boy sleeps.”

  “James, fall asleep early!”

  “She will sure want the fire low.”

  “James will see in the fireglow!”

  “Blast those cornhusks!”

  “Oh! Those crackling cornhusks!”

  “Should I take off her gown?”

  “Will he take off my gown?”

  “My hands are so callused.”

  “My hands have grown rough.”

  “What if I hurt her?”