the old woman had to give her an ointment for the insides of her cheeks.
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
