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:
