Meantime as the days passed, he told Elaine of his life in Norway, of how he had been cheated out of his land, cast out of his country.
Her outrage was palpable. “How could the Rolfsons do that? It is inconceivable. Surely God will wreak a terrible vengeance upon them!”
“He is taking His time to do it, then,” responded Eric, in wry dejection. “As far as I know, old Adolphus still masterminds the enterprises from a palace in Oslo, and his disgusting son, upon whose countenance I have twice left my mark, lives a rich and celebrated life in New York with…”
He stopped speaking.
Eric and Elaine were sitting in front of the fireplace. A heavy black pot filled with stew for supper hung over the fire, bubbling slowly, sending its delicious aroma all around the house. Elaine was mending one of her father’s work coats, ripped on the sleeve by a nail, and Eric worked beside her, sharpening with a whetstone the axes and scythes of the farmstead, so they would be ready for work when spring came. Wilbur had gone off hunting into the woods, seeking deer, “although I’d settle for a reasonably fat rabbit,” he’d said. The warmth, their closeness, and Eric’s trouble-filled narrative lent to the day a certain contemplative unity, as if Eric and Elaine stood alone against the world. Against the Rolfsons. He had told her much of his life, but—although she had warily waited—never had he mentioned the Kristin of whom he had spoken in his delirium, to whom he had addressed the letter.
But now he had said that young Rolfson was living a great life in New York with…
“Kristin?” she asked, so softly he might not have heard her, save that those syllables were resounding in his mind.
He nodded.
“They are…the two of them are”—she could hardly ask it—“married?”
“Yes.”
Oh, praise God! Elaine thought “But life goes on,” she said, trying not to sound too cheerful.
She did not want him to start talking about this Kristin, whom he had obviously loved very much, and certainly she did not want him to start brooding about her right now.
“I know,” she cried, getting up. “Let’s do something special. I’m sick to death of needle and thread, and Father won’t be back until sundown. Let’s get out the cider and pretend it’s Christmas again.”
Eric agreed. There was no use in sitting here, burdened with gloomy ponderings, when nothing could be done about them anyway. He had seen Elaine’s face during his recital of the past. So attuned was she to his own experiences, the expressions on her face made it seem as if she, too, had shared his hardships, his little victories. She laughed with glee when he told her about tailor Leffert and the top hat, cried out in anger when he told of finding the newspaper scraps where his three hundred dollars ought to have been. This was a girl for some very lucky man to have. If, in fact she were later to marry someone who mistreated her, or played her for a fool, well, Eric would come all the way back to Gettysburg and thrash the wretch himself!
Come back from where?
What fantasy! Again, he was picturing himself a powerful and wealthy man, returning to set aright circumstances that had not developed as he would have wanted them to. Returning in triumph to Norway to reclaim his land, and his name. Returning in triumph to New York to reclaim Kristin and take her away from Rolfson forever. And now, returning to Gettysburg to thrash a man who did not exist for treating Elaine badly in a marriage that did not exist, either!
He might be able to whip that mythical scoundrel, but, in truth, what did he have to offer Kristin, were he to return to New York now?
Nothing.
The equations of life, ambition, desire, and revenge were getting all mixed up in his mind.
Kristin wanted nothing but him, and his love.
Elaine, now pouring the strong cider into mugs, smiling at him, wanted no more than to be loved in return for the love she so freely offered him.
Ah, yes, he wanted the other things, dominance and money and power and acclaim. But he did not have them yet, and so he could not give them, even had they meant anything to Kristin or Elaine. Only to a woman like Joan Leeds did they matter.
But Eric did have love to give.
Elaine handed him a mug of cider and sat down beside him. She touched her cup gently to his, and they drank, looking into the fire. The cider was powerful and mellow, aged in an oaken barrel. A few long swallows, a piece of time gone by, and the cares of life were not as burdensome as they had been.
“Before I leave,” he said to her, “I will do the spring planting for your father. In return for the care you have given me.”
Elaine would usually have suffered inwardly at his mention of leave-taking, but the warmth of the fire, the cider, Eric’s proximity had painted her mood in bright colors.
“I know,” she said, leaning close to him, “a better way to repay.”
There were her lips, soft, smiling, slightly parted, and the perfume of her shining black hair. Had she been an experienced woman, her striking jewellike eyes would have been used enticingly against him. Enticement he might have been strong enough to resist. But Elaine was young, and the desire of her body glowed in her eyes in a manner more playful than provocative, more needful of gentleness and cuddling than of lust. Without thinking, Eric leaned toward her, and their lips met, for the first time in all these months. And, from the instant the kiss began, it was as if they had both been waiting all these months just and exactly and absolutely for this moment.
Eric reached out and put his arms around her, drew her to him. She came willingly, still locked in his kiss, then greedily, wildly, they kissed and clung to each other. He felt her body all along the length of his own, not losing himself gradually in passion, but suddenly, like a flash, a shot a streak of raw nature not to be denied its due. Elaine said nothing, nor did he, as he carried her to the quilt-covered bed, in which he had suffered and regained his strength, to which now that strength of manhood led him. They were one body, one will, before even they were joined in love, he stripping away some of his clothing, some of hers, she taking the rest from him and herself, too. It was as if there were nothing anywhere: no sun, no snowscaped land, no blasting light; no fire, no house, no anything. Just each other and the other and each other and the two of them again, as they lay down upon the multicolored quilt which bore so many fragments of designs and patterns, as now it bore the design of their riding bodies and the pattern that their bodies made upon the living fabric of this earth.
“Iiiiiiiii,” she gasped, or something like it, when he opened her, and “Iiiiiiiii!” she cried, gasping, when he took her for himself. He trembled, shivered, his breath was shuddering as he entered her, full to the end of himself. She writhed beneath him exultant to be taking him, conscious of that exultation, but conscious, too, of a keen and piercing pleasure, never before known, a pleasure so great no one else could ever have experienced it before.
In Elaine’s mind, as sensation grew to take her, take her all away, there was nothing but love and desire, desire and more love. To Eric, everything was need and pleasure, and the need of pleasure so long held in abeyance it could barely be recalled. He felt himself inside her, felt her moving beneath him, as if she were drawing his entire self out of the husk of his body. She sobbed into his ear, and her body sobbed against him. He felt within himself the moment pleasure touched her, took her, shook her, and when he felt that, when he felt her enjoying what he had given her, there was no way on earth for him to hold back. Far away along the ephemeral horizons of consciousness, he saw another face, another time, another promise. He tried to grasp at those things, to save himself for a promise made to Kristin long ago. But it was too late. From the base of his spine, up through the curves and moldings of his nature, the blasting force of his need and essence rose, coursing from him to her in throb and ebb and throb. She clutched him with her arms, her body, rising against him as he throbbed, receding as he ebbed, the two of them shaking, shaken, glowing and transfigured. Eric, who had known love both holy and profane, with K
ristin and Joan, now knew another kind: simple and pure and very, very good.
Elaine was limp beneath him, and stayed so for a long time. Eric regained his breath, was puzzled that Elaine had not. Then he realized that she was weeping.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”
“Oh, no.” she sobbed. “How could you say that? It was beautiful. I did not know such a feeling existed. But…”
“But?”
“But we ought not to have. It wasn’t…right…”
“It was as right as anything I’ve ever known. There, don’t be troubled.”
Outside the farmhouse, not too far away, they heard the blast of a weapon.
“Father!” cried Elaine, leaping from the bed and grabbing up her clothes from the floor.
“Is that it? You’re worried about what he might…?”
“What father might think? No,” she explained, both agitated and sorrowful at the same time. “Not him so much. It’s just that he’s tried to teach me the right way in life. And…and I know I love you…but…but it still seems wrong. Now. It seems wrong now. Somehow, it didn’t before. Not while we were…”
She was trying to fasten her bodice, with trembling fingers. Still naked, he got up from the bed and went to her holding her tightly.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re very young. There is no one right way to love, just as there is no one right way to live life. I am here, as I was here before.”
Elaine quieted, letting him hold her. As you will always be here, she thought.
They dressed, and went back to the waning fire. Eric added more logs. “Look,” cried Elaine, peering out the window. “A storm’s coming in from the west.”
Eric was used to the snows of Norway, the icy remoteness of his home mountains, but still he was amazed at the progress of this sudden storm. Black clouds boiled to the west, riding the sky, and in moments he and Elaine felt the first rush of bitter wind testing the walls of the house, sucking at the chimney and the eaves. It seemed suddenly colder, in spite of the fire, and outside the darkness deepened even as they watched.
“I wonder where father—?”
“He can’t be far. The shot we heard was less than half a mile away.”
He had meant to sound encouraging, but in a heavy storm, a half mile might as well have been a hundred. Blinding, swirling clouds of snow came down, hard and sudden as a punch; all landmarks were erased; the very sense of direction was stolen in an instant from man as well as beast. With the snow came freezing, gripping cold, that reached inside a man’s shirt, and closed its icicle fingers around his heart. Fear and freezing were companions for a time, but finally a man was alone in the storm.
“I don’t know…” said Elaine, worrying, watching at the window.
In two minutes the tree line disappeared behind an advancing sheet of snow.
One minute later the wall of white poured up out of the pasture, and closed on the barn.
Then the barn was gone. And the barn stood only fifty feet from the house.
And then, lastly, all sight itself was shut off, erased, obliterated by the frenzied pelting of icy flakes against the windowpane.
“He must have seen it coming,” Eric assured her, not at all certain of the truth in his own words. “He had plenty of time to reach the barn, anyway. He’s all right.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I seem to feel…something.”
There was nothing to do about it now. Only a fool would have stepped outside. Eric and Elaine waited. The storm did not subside by nightfall, but rather increased in fury. They supped, with little appetite, on the stew that had smelled so fragrant earlier in the afternoon, and went early to separate beds, but in the night Eric felt Elaine move in next to him, shivering there beside him in fear and uncertainty. In a while he wanted her, and she took him, gladly, and then trembled no more, but lay beside him unsleeping until the dawn.
When they awoke in the morning, the snow had ceased, and the day was cold and clear. The very shape of the earth seemed transformed, newly born, with a sharp sense of expectancy in the air. Drifts in strange shapes swung from the fields into the yard, long arced eddies of ridges and turrets, funnels and peaks. Elaine made coffee, toasted bread. Any minute, it seemed, Wilbur Nesterling would make his way from the barn to the house, grumbling at his ill luck in failing to make it back to the fire the night before.
But he did not return.
By midmorning the task was clear.
“We’d better go look for him,” Eric suggested, in a tone so artificially casual he winced upon hearing his own voice.
“I guess we’d better, ’’agreed Elaine brightly.
They bundled up and left the house, stopping at the shed for snowshoes. It was very cold, but there was no wind. Striking out across the pasture toward the tree line, they made good progress. But what could be found, with blinding, glittering banks of snow bracketing the earth?
“He might have reached the Ordways?” suggested Elaine, hoping.
Hoping against hope. The Ordway farm was at least two miles away through the trees.
“If we could only find some tracks.”
They walked into the forest, where the snow was hard and tightly packed. Elaine cried out, fell sprawling face first into the drifts.
“Oh,” she cried, laughing when she found herself uninjured.
“What happened?”
“Caught my snowshoe on this branch.”
Eric reached down, brushed away a bit of snow, and grabbed the offending twig. It was hard in his hand, and heavy.
The barrel of a gun.
He pulled it from the snowbank, and looked at Elaine. She was staring at the weapon. “It’s father’s,” she said. Then, already screaming, she fell to the snow and began frantically to claw it away.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll do it. Maybe you’d better not…”
Better not look, he meant to say, but it was too late. Her mittened fingers found a hard, round object buried in the snow, and she brushed away the icy coating within which it was shrouded. Then she stopped screaming, too numbed, too broken, for speech. Eric bent to get a closer look. The blank, icy eyes of Wilbur Nesterling regarded him without expression. His soul had gone to God.
Elaine was never the same after that.
She managed to get through the funeral, two days later, and saw Wilbur’s coffin lowered into a grave that had had to be chopped inch by inch out of the frozen churchyard, the same place where she had once kissed boys and let Vance Trumbull caress her. Eric took her back to the farmhouse, hoping that grief would do its work, would pass. But she seemed to grow more removed from life, and then she began to get physically sick. He summoned the local doctor.
“Everything’s fine,” the man concluded rolling down his sleeves after examining Elaine.
“Fine? How can that be?” Eric demanded. “She used to be a vibrant girl. Now she barely moves, hardly speaks…”
“Simple melancholy, son. She’s lost her father. But she’ll soon have a new lease on life.”
“I don’t understand. How can you be so sure?”
“Son, I’m a liberal man,” the doctor told him. “I’ve seen a lot of life. I know how it goes, and I don’t blame nobody. But for Elaine’s good name, and yours, too, I suggest you ride up over to see Preacher Tarnower one of these days and make the arrangements.”
“What?”
“Son, I hope you turn out to be a better farmer than the mathematician you seem to be right now. One and one make three. Or can you figure that out?”
It was January 1864.
VII
Kristin was looking at herself when the pains began.
She was reclining on a long couch of mauve velvet in the drawing room of the Park Avenue mansion Gustav had purchased, and staring up at her portrait, which Percy Phipps had completed. So stunning was the portrait, so skillful Phipps’ work, that it seemed as if her body and soul had been captured by his brush.
Then
why did the image on the canvas not feel her pain?
Kristin reached for a small silver bell on a table next to the couch, and shook it twice. A maid appeared.
“Yes, Miz Rolfson?”
“Kathleen, perhaps we’d better summon Dr. Konrad.”
“Yes, Miz Rolfson. Oh, Miz Rolfson! Do you mean…?”
“This is my first time. But I think so. Yes.”
“And you’ll want Mr. Rolfson called from his office too.”
That’s not necessary, Kristin thought. “If you wish,” she managed.
Another wave of pain hit her. The face in the portrait, regarding her across the gloom of this January afternoon, was regal and unperturbed. In October, Phipps had shown the painting for the first time, at a special gathering in the hall at Cooper Union, and after that it seemed everyone in New York wanted to meet her. “I said I would make you famous,” Phipps had cried. Indeed, he seemed to have done so. Even Matthew Brady, pioneer in the new art of photography, had come to capture her, time and again, with his camera. “Your picture will be all over the country, my dear,” Brady had said. “You will be recognized everywhere, like Helen of Troy. America does not have a goddess yet, but I think we need one.”
Kristin smiled, lying there on the couch. If goddesses felt pain when they were having babies, then maybe she was one after all. But she did not smile for long. The contractions, mild at first, came at long intervals, and there was time to recover from the last, to prepare for the next. But by the time Dr. Konrad appeared, just before six in the evening, the pains were less than five minutes apart, and very severe. Konrad was a gruff, peremptory man, but Kristin trusted him, and he brought with him two nurses, older women, who were matter of fact and imperturbable. Mrs. Ratcliff went immediately to the kitchen, ordering the staff there to boil water, fetch towels, sheets, blankets. Mrs. Dentley moved about the bedroom, to which Kristin had withdrawn after the pains began, inspected it with a professional eye, and set about reordering it to her liking.
Dr. Konrad made an examination, and seemed satisfied.
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