The phone rang at noon, two longs and a short, the line back up, and it was Kirsten, who had heard about the barn from a nurse whose mother lived in Thedford, who had heard it from somebody on channel nine. He told her everything. He told her on the party line, with the clicks of the receivers going down the Mullen road one by one as the neighbors picked up, and he did not ask them to hang up. When he was done she was quiet for a long time, and then she said she had Easter off, and she would come up, and they would talk; about the place, and about Mom, and about everything. And he said yes. He said, I'd like that. He heard her breathe out on the line, a long way away, as if she had been holding it since Christmas.
Albin's leg would keep him in the chair for most of a week, and Dorit came for him that afternoon in Werner's pickup behind the plow. Before he went, Arne asked him one more thing. He asked it standing in the door with his hat in his hands, the way Albin had stood by the stock trailer in October, and it was harder to ask than anything he had said in the night.
"The whistles," he said. "Ilse's. I never learned them. I never thought I'd need to. Would you teach me?"
Albin, on the porch on Dorit's arm, looked at him. Then he looked at the dog on the step, her bandaged foot held up.
"She already knows them," he said. "It's you that's got to learn."
He showed him the first one there on the porch, the falling note, soft at the end. Arne tried it. It came out wrong, a thin wet sound with no shape to it, and Dorit Kasper laughed out loud, and covered her mouth, and then Albin laughed too, and Arne stood there with his face hot and found that he was laughing with them.
They drove away down the plowed road between the white walls of snow. Arne stood on the porch until he could not see the pickup any more. The meadow lay out past the creek under the snow, smooth and blank and blue in the shadows, and the windmill stood up out of it eleven feet over the line, turning slowly in what was left of the wind. He did not know what Albin would say, or Fenske, or whether the place would still be his next March, or what he and his daughter would find to say to each other at Easter. He did not know how to put up a barn at sixty-six with no money and one good knee. He knew that he would have to start in the morning.
He put two fingers to his lips and tried the whistle again. It was still wrong. But at the foot of the steps Fly lifted her head and turned her sky eye on him, and her folded ear came up, just a little, the way it did when someone she had been waiting for finally called her by the right name.