East (2 page)

My older sister Selme laughed. "Mother is still more than a month away from her lying-in time," she said. "And besides, everyone knows you can't just go pluck babies out of Askoy Forest," she added with a superior look.

But it turned out I was right after all.

When they finally came through the door, Mother looked very pale and sat down as soon as she could, holding the noisy thing on her lap. The others crowded around, but I hung back, waiting. When they'd all looked long enough, Father led me to Mother's side. When I gazed at the little scrunched-up face, I felt a peculiar glow of pride. Like I'd done something good. I knew it was Mother who'd brought this baby into the world (and she certainly looked worn out from doing it), but from that moment I felt like the wild little brownhaired baby was my very own gift—and that it would be my job to watch over her.

If I had known just how wild a thing she would turn out to be, I might have thought twice about taking her on. It's a funny thing. I think it was Mother and I who had the hardest time with Rose's wandering ways. But we both had different ways of living with it. Mother tried always to reel her in. To keep her close by. But for me, I knew it couldn't be done, so I just ached and felt sorry for myself when she'd disappear. That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door.

But you also get kind of used to it.

I
COULD SAY THAT
I
FELT
guilty and ashamed about the trouble I was always getting into when I was a child, driving my mother to her wit's end on a daily basis. But the truth is I never did feel either of those things.

I don't think it's because I was selfish or unfeeling. I just couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. What was a little spilled blood or a broken bone now and then?

I never set out to be disobedient. I just couldn't keep my thoughts, and then my feet, still. I'd see something—the azure flash of a butterfly's wing, a formation of clouds like a ship's mast and sails, a ripe yellow apple perched high in a tree—and I'd be off after it without a second thought.

Exploring ran in my blood. My grandfather Esbjorn was a mapmaker as well as an explorer. And my great-great-grandfather was one of the first Njordens to travel to Constantinople.

The only thing that gave me the slightest twinge of sadness was Neddy, with his exasperated, sorry-for-himself look when he found me after yet another time I'd run off without telling anyone.

"But I saw this rabbit with a tail so white
it glowed
" I'd try to explain (when I was old enough to put words to my feelings).

Neddy would just sigh and say that Mother wanted me in the kitchen straightaway.

"I'm sorry, Neddy," I'd say, wrapping my arms around his legs, watching the corners of his mouth for the smile I always managed to squeeze out of him. And then I'd go to the kitchen and Mother would scold me yet again.

T
O SAY THAT MY MOTHER
was superstitious would be like saying the great blizzard of 1539 was naught but a light snowfall.

Every single thing a body did in our house was charged with meaning. To sweep dust out the front door was to sweep away all your good luck. To sing while baking bread was to guarantee the arrival of ill fortune. To have an itch on the left side of your body meant certain disaster. And if you sneezed on a Wednesday, you would surely receive a letter—good news if you were facing east and bad if facing north.

Father liked to tell the story of how he first learned of Mother's "birth-direction" superstition.

When Father and Mother announced their engagement to her family, the first words to come out of his future mother-in-law's mouth were "But Arne, we don't even know what your birth direction is!" is

Father said that he gaped at her, totally bewildered.

"Yes, Arne, we must know right away, before you and Eugenia make any more plans."

"Oh, I'm quite certain he's a south, or a southeast," Mother said reassuringly.

"But we must know for sure," said her mother.

Father said he started to laugh then, thinking they were having some elaborate joke with him. But they weren't.

And Father would have us all doubled over with laughter as he described the pilgrimage to my grandparents' farm to interrogate them regarding the direction my father's mother was facing when she gave birth to him. It turned out that the direction his mother was facing when Father was born was southeast, which was a good thing according to Mother.

What wasn't such a good thing is that this turned out to be the last time Father saw his family. There had already been ill feeling between them that Father had hoped to heal during the visit. But if anything, the strange line of questioning from the "city folk" Father was marrying into seemed to make matters worse, and they parted with bad blood.

M
Y EUGENIA'S FERVENT BELIEF
in the birth-direction superstition was unusual to say the least. I have never come across anything like it during the course of my life, but it had apparently been handed down through many generations of Eugenia's family.

They believed that birth direction was of overwhelming importance. Not the alignment of the stars, nor the position of the moon, nor the movement of the tides, nor even the traits handed down from parent to child.

My theory was that this strange notion sprang from their preoccupation with mapmaking.

"And every child born in our family," Eugenia explained to me, "is given a name that begins with the first letter of their birth direction. So a north-facing baby might be called Nathaniel; a southwest-facing child, Sarah Wilhelmina; and so on. I myself was an east-facing baby."

"And what are the attributes of an east-facing baby?" I asked.

"Well, among other things, that I am tidy, a sound sleeper, and somewhat superstitious."

Somewhat?
" I countered with a grin.

It turned out that Eugenia went a little further with the birth-direction superstition than any of her forebears. On the night after we were wed, she announced to me that she wanted to have seven children.

"Seven is a good number," I replied. "But why seven? Is that a particularly lucky number?" I said with a teasing smile.

"No, it is that I want one child for each point of the compass," she replied.

Puzzled, I said, "But that would be four, or eight perhaps..."

"I have left out north, of course."

"Why not north?" I asked.

"Surely you know about pure northern children?" she responded in surprise.

"No," I said, refraining from reminding her that no one outside her family would even be engaged in such a conversation.

"Oh, they are terrible! Wandering and wild and very ill behaved. Northern people in general are that way. My own sister—surely I've told you this?—married a north-born (against the advice of our mother, needless to say), and he took off on a sailing ship when she was pregnant with their third child and has not been heard of since. I refuse to have a child I cannot keep my eye on."

I felt a sliver of worry at those words. "I hope you are not going to be an overprotective mother, Eugenia."

"Oh no, Arne," she reassured me. "It's just that norths are particularly wild. Always into trouble. But that is not the only reason I will not have a north bairn. There is another, of much more importance."

"And what is that?"

"Some years ago I went with my sister to a
skjebne-soke
."

Though
skjebne-sokes
were scarce in our region, I was not surprised that someone as superstitious as Eugenia had managed to find one.

"She was very gifted, this
skjebne-soke.
Why, she predicted to the day when Karin Tessel would have her first bairn! And she told my sister that she would lose her husband to the sea..." Eugenia trailed off, then fell silent.

I studied her face. "The
skjebne-soke
said something about you having a north bairn?"

She nodded, then said in a low voice, "She said that if I were to have a north-born, that child would grow up to die a cold, horrible death, suffocating under ice and snow." She shuddered and instinctively I drew her close to me. Because avalanches were not uncommon during die winter in our country, especially on the seven mountains that surrounded Bergen, I could see that Eugenia took this ominous prediction quite seriously.

I myself considered such prophecy and superstition to be nonsense, and perhaps if I had tried to reason with Eugenia, taken a stronger stand against her many superstitions right from the beginning, I might have averted much of the ill fortune that later befell us. But I did not. I saw her ideas as harmlessly eccentric, even charming at the outset, and I indulged her. I, too, wanted a large family, and seven seemed as good a number as any....

But even Eugenia's own mother thought that methodically
planning
the birth directions of each of her children was ill advised. Before she died she had cautioned Eugenia against it.

"'Tis meddling in the affairs of God and fate, and only disaster can come of it," she had said.

Eugenia herself had been born due east. Her mother went into labor unexpectedly on a boat that was traveling down the Rauma River, which was notoriously twisty. Fortunately, Eugenia's mother had had a
leidarstein
and needle with her (she carried both with her at all times during her pregnancy), and the owner of the boat brought a pail of water. While his wife labored, Esbjorn magnetized the needle and floated it in the water, so it turned out that they were able to calculate the birth direction without much difficulty. "To think I might have been a north, had the boat taken a sudden turn!" Eugenia would mutter darkly.

Eugenia began our family with northeast, Nils Erlend. Her reasoning was that she would tackle the most difficult direction first, when she was youngest and most vigorous; and the next most difficult (Neddy Wilfrid) at the end, when she was at her wisest and most experienced as a parent.

It all went just as Eugenia had planned, from northeast to northwest.

Nils Erlend, who liked to roam but had a frugal, organized side.

Elise, the quiet, perfect east; practical and obedient.

Selme Eva, who was comfortable and kind.

Sara, a strong-willed, passionate girl.

Sonja Wende, who was good with animals and a little bit prescient, farseeing.

Willem, capable and decisive, who also had an easy hand with the farm animals.

And Neddy Wilfrid, the only one with dark hair, though his eyes were as blue as his brothers' and sisters'. Neddy had been Eugenia's easiest birth yet, and he was a dear, quiet babe, smiling far more than he cried, which was seldom.

Seven children in seven years. With a sigh of relief, Eugenia put away her supply of the herb feverfew (which eased morning sickness and the pains of childbirth), as well as her voluminous childbearing shift, which had seen her through the seven pregnancies.

But then Elise, who at eight was our second-eldest child, died suddenly.

Elise had never been a strong child, but Eugenia had had a special fondness for her, partly because she was an east-born like herself.

There is no pain deeper than that of a parent losing a child, but there were still six children who needed our care, and slowly, time healed the sharpest of our grief. Yet even as it did, the empty space at the east point of the compass began to gnaw at Eugenia.

F
ATHER TOLD ME THAT
he first began to design wind roses when he was engaged to Mother. As part of his apprenticeship, my grandfather gave him piles of maps to study. And he quickly noticed a symbol on almost every chart, usually in the bottom left corner.

Father told me that the symbol was called a wind rose because it bore a resemblance to a flower, with thirty-two petals, and it had long been used by mapmakers to indicate the direction of the winds. Some were simple and some elaborate, but all used a spear-point fleur-de-lis as the northern point of the rose. He also said that mapmakers would paint their wind roses in brilliant colors, not just because they were prettier that way but also because they were easier to read in the dim lamplight of a ship's deck at twilight.

I loved learning about the history of mapmaking. I dreamed that when I grew up, I would go to one of the big cities and study with distinguished scholars on a wide range of subjects, including maps and exploration. Or else fd be a poet.

I wrote one of my first poems about a wind rose:

The spear points north, south, west, and east,
Wind always shifting, a wandering least.
A beacon to sailors on the high seas,
Journeying afar on the wind's soft breeze.

The best that could be said of it was that it was short.

O
NE PROBLEM WITH MY
being a mapmaker is that I hated to travel. ("A born southeast," Eugenia would say.) And I blamed myself when the mapmaking business failed. In fact, it had already been on shaky ground, but when Esbjorn and his wife died in an influenza epidemic and the business fell to me, it soon became clear that I couldn't make a go of it. It didn't help that two of Esbjorn's biggest customers had also died in the epidemic.

Eugenia had already worked her way through half of the compass points, so there were four children at home but not enough food to go around. When a distant cousin of Eugenia's offered us a small plot of land to farm, we seized the opportunity and moved the family to a remote pocket of northern Njord.

The cousin was generous, charging only a nominal rent, and all went well, for a time.

Until Elise died.

I
CAN'T REMEMBER WHEN
I first learned that I was born as a replacement for my dead sister, Elise. It was just one of the things I knew, the way I knew other things—like the story of the stormy circumstances of my own birth, the unending catalog of Mother's superstitions, and my father's skill at drawing wind roses.