Wolf Winter (24 page)

A few days later and the storm was abating. The beats of the shutter that had been banging in the wind came slower.

Maija met his gaze. She had noticed it too. By the fire her daughters were asleep.

The priest listened for the noise.

And there it was: stillness. One more faint wind push. Silence.

And silence.

Was it really over? The priest almost didn’t dare to believe it.

But everything was indeed still.

Maija exhaled. She pushed back her hair, and he thought her hand might have been trembling. The priest realized he was holding his breath. He wasn’t certain for how long they could have managed. They were physically worn out from shoveling and not eating properly. Things had become somewhat better once they’d been able to enter the food store, but as they didn’t know when the storm would end, they had had to ration the food.

What day was it? He didn’t know. Monday, Wednesday. In hell every day is the same. He could preach about that at some point.

In town they must be wondering what had happened to him.

“Why you live here, I don’t know,” he said.

She began to laugh. He stared at her, angered. Then he saw and joined her. What else was there to do on a Monday or a Wednesday evening in hell? They laughed and laughed.

She laughed with her mouth open wide and her eyes in small slits. The locks of her hair shook. She had a small dimple high up on one cheek, or it might have been a scar.

“I imagined Blackåsen wasn’t much different from home,” she said when they had quieted, and that set them off again. Maija hit the table with the flat of her hand. The priest laughed so much, he had to lean forward and hold his stomach.

He wiped his tears. He’d seen it many times in the war: the extraordinary giddiness ensuing from a battle. Your mind needed it, you felt strong and wild, ready to embrace any insanity, set to try anything before rationality returned and you realized who you were and where you were and why you were …

Both of them sat up straighter at the same time. They sat for a while in silence. She sniffed.

“Well, I guess I’d better get some sleep,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good night.”

She didn’t respond.

He slept better than he had done any night since he first set out on his journey.

When Maija and Paavo were children, there was once a great storm. This was still how it was referred to back in the village in Ostrobothnia: “The Great Storm,” voices low, as if the mere mention of the tempest might bring it back. The odd thing was that there had been no signs. In the morning, when the men set out to hunt gray seal, the sky was blue and there was a delightful summer sun. Much too wonderful—they should have known, some said later, but they were just trying to be clever. The truth was, it was the perfect day to hunt; if anything, there was not enough wind. The boat’s sails were limp, and the vessel was only jolted forward by the occasional breeze, and so there were no large conversations that morning, and nobody turned up to wave good-bye or embrace the departing men. “Bring us silver fur,” was all they said. “Hey ho, bring us silver fur.”

At the beginning the men sailed well. They were aiming for the rocks far out in the young sea where they knew the grays were sunning themselves, shedding, pups in the water, playing.

And then, at once, the storm was over them. It was so sudden, it might as well have stepped right out of heaven and onto their boat.

At first they attempted to outride it—brawny—the skipper was a young man, but it was faster than them. Then they tried to ride it, but soon that ship was tossed about like a piece of driftwood in the towering waves. It was only a matter of time before they would lose control and the water break the boat.

It was Pekka Sihvola who grasped the fact that this was no normal storm. He was standing middeck watching the wind, despite the others shouting at him that they needed his help. Rather than blowing at them from the side, the wind seemed to be bending. Was it blowing around itself in a loop? Wind needed room to keep up speed. In the center, Pekka thus reasoned, it might be different.
Perhaps there the wind was less powerful. But to get to that place they had to sail into the tempest rather than away from it.

Pekka Sihvola pushed the skipper aside and gripped the rudder, and then he sailed that ship straight into the eye of the storm. And when they were all certain the end had come and they would die—they found a vacuum. They navigated that nothingness until, around them, the storm died.

As the men told their story to the elders that night, still trembling from the power of their journey, the villagers were amazed. Thanks to one single man, the full crew of ten had survived: that was ten husbands renewing vows to their wives that evening, ten fathers holding their children close …

“Reason,” the elder said when they had finished. He nodded. “What you had was an apparition.”

The skin on Jutta’s arm that pressed against her own had been cold. Paavo had been on Maija’s other side—even back then, he always seemed to be near her. At the time of the Great Storm she still thought these men and women in the circle, all of them, to be of the same blood and marrow as her own. She thought she was one of them.

“The circular wind is life,” the elder said. “What was yesterday comes again tomorrow. It runs from place to place and returns. But in the midst of disorder is reason. And if you can hold to reason, you shall be safe.”

“Are you then saying that there’s no changing things? That we have no choice?”

It was Ari Sihvola speaking, Pekka’s younger brother. Later he’d be among those who died in the Great Northern War.

“There is little choice,” the elder said. “And yet the acts we undertake have repercussions.”

For some his words were a relief. Others found them disturbing. Maija didn’t think the elder was right; she believed in man’s ability to
have an impact on things, but she took away with her the significance of reason.

And now, having survived her first storm on Blackåsen Mountain, she was appalled at herself. She had set out with two young children into the forest, without any preparation, without any further thought. What had she been thinking?

We could have died.

But we didn’t.

Was it flattery in that the priest thought she was of this world? Was it the excitement of a potential answer to the question of Eriksson’s death?

She had underestimated the mountain, seen its plump shape, and in her head she’d likened it to one of the benign hills in Ostrobothnia. Blackåsen was nothing like home. She had been foolish and proud, and now her daughter paid. Each of Dorotea’s cries took a slice from her heart. Each scream vibrated in her mind until Maija had to grab her head with both her hands for it not to splinter. And the thought she’d had during their journey had taken root inside her: it was not given that they would survive this winter.

Had Paavo been here, this wouldn’t have happened. He would have known better. She should have known better. But she was reckless. She was dangerous.

“It’s not your fault,” the priest said just then. As if he read her thoughts.

He was packing his bag. He pushed his black book down at one side. She walked to the window. Outside, the sky was an after-storm bright blue. Early that morning they had removed the snow from in front of the barn door. The new snow had already frozen, and it had been hard. When they finally got the door open, the goats had taken one look at them and gone back to sleep.
They’re like weeds,
she thought.
They’ll always flourish.

“I was the one who convinced you to come,” the priest said. “If anything, this is my doing.”

Her throat stitched up.

The priest pulled his bag shut and fastened the leather strap. The room looked empty without his belongings. She could perhaps ask him to leave his collar. The thought made her want to laugh amid all the misery.

“Maija.” The priest was looking at her. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but please come with me and see Daniel. Now that we know what we know about him and Elin …”

She shook her head. She had done enough damage already.

“The bishop demands that I find out what happened to Eriksson. I think … it might be easier for the settlers to talk to one of their own.”

She shook her head again. Then she thought of Anna. Hopefully they had weathered the storm all right. It was hard giving birth on your own or with only your husband for support. But Daniel would know what to do if things happened, wouldn’t he? Of course he would.

She had taken a vow. She had pledged always to help women in their difficult times like she had been helped in hers.

Dorotea was sleeping. Beside her Frederika met her eyes. Her elder daughter nodded.

“All right,” Maija said.

Daniel had already shoveled a path from the cottage to the barn. When they arrived, he was throwing snow against the walls of the house with the spade as if he were trying to bury it. Strange. The sound of him scooping was muffled. They stood for a while before walking closer. The sunshine changed the landscape into one of fairy tales. The thick, white trees threw blue shadows on the glimmering snow. Hard to imagine this was the same Blackåsen of a few days ago.

As they approached, Daniel stood up straight, pulled off a mitten, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His eyelashes and brows were white with frost. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Some storm,” the priest said.

Daniel nodded.

“Is this weather normal?” Maija couldn’t help but ask.

“No,” Daniel said. “Can’t remember anything like it.”

She felt the priest’s gaze. Told you, it said. You couldn’t have known.

“Elin came to Blackåsen with you, not Eriksson,” Maija said, though that was not at all what she had come for.

Daniel stared at her. She was certain he was weighing his alternatives: speaking now, or risking her raising it again, with Anna present. Maija hardened her expression. Daniel clenched his teeth, his jaw turned rigid.

“We were promised to one another,” he said then.

“What happened?”

“My brother.”

They waited. He threw a glance toward their cottage, then continued.

“I left Blackåsen after the forest fire. The fire set something loose in my brother that might always have been there, but that he’d, so far, kept in check. He enjoyed it. There’s no other way of putting it. He didn’t care if anyone got hurt or died. He loved the way fire was uncontrollable, loved putting himself up against it, loved being a part of it. After that it didn’t feel safe to stay.

“I worked down by the coast. Thought I’d join the army … I did join the army, but just as I was supposed to depart, I met Elin.”

Daniel’s nose was red and he wiped it.

“We had saved money to get married when my father came to find me. He was feeling his age, he said, and wanted me back on the mountain. He didn’t want to leave Eriksson there on his own. I don’t know what my father thought I could do about my brother. I don’t know what I thought I could do. But it was an old man’s last wish. Elin and I decided to get married later. I thought we could settle in the valley, where the ground would still be easy to clear after the fire.”

Daniel shook his head. “It was in his gaze. … It was in how he looked at her. But I trusted. Her, not him. And then she left.”

“Why?”

“Who knows why anyone does anything? Maybe he forced her the first time. Maybe she felt she had no choice. Maybe she loved. She never said. One day she was gone.”

“The Church could have helped,” the priest said. “A promise like that is binding.”

Daniel shrugged, but Maija remembered the woman in the whore stool.
You still loved Elin,
she thought.
You didn’t want to see her punished.

“Was that why she killed herself?” she asked and made her voice soft. “Because he died?”

“I can’t imagine that being the reason for her killing her children,” Daniel said.

“She would lack means for them.”

“Poverty didn’t scare Elin.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know why!” He hit out with his hands.

No, no despair for the future, no regret for the past, could be as strong as to drive a woman to the deed. Elin had not been right in the head when it happened.