Wolf Winter (43 page)

“Stay here, Dorotea,” Maija said. Dorotea was lying down on one of the beds. “Or do you want to come?”

“My feet look better and better, don’t they, Mamma?” Dorotea said.

“Yes, baby, they do.”

“I am tired. I think I’ll stay here.”

Maija walked outside. Twilight was turning night. She stopped outside. It had felt better when they were sharing a cottage with Daniel and Anna. But they would be living somewhere else this time. She leaned her head back toward the wall.
It is me,
she thought.
I have driven everyone away from me.

Dorotea. Her baby wasn’t tired. Her baby was in pain. What would they do? Maija pushed off the wall and began to walk down the street. Half of Dorotea’s toes were already gone, and still there was more darkening of the flesh. Maija couldn’t do the cutting that was needed.

“We don’t always understand the ways of the Lord,” Jutta said beside her.

The flash of anger was so sharp, Maija had to stop.

“Don’t you ever, ever talk to me about God’s will,” she said.

Enough,
she thought. They needed help. The priest might be in the church. He was their priest. Surely, if she begged him, he would know what to do and be compassionate.

The church hall was dark.

“Hello?” she called.

Nobody answered. She walked the stone floor toward the figure of Jesus on the cross and waited for a while beneath the yellow plaster body.

But his head was turned to one side: Jesus studying his own wounds.

She left the church and walked toward the Customs House. There was a light on inside. The tax man had already arrived and installed himself. As Maija walked around the corner, she collided with someone. They crashed into each other so hard, both women called out, and Maija grabbed the other woman’s arm to prevent her from falling.

Blonde, curly hair, blue eyes. The widow of the former priest.

Sofia stared at her, mouth open. She closed her mouth, white teeth making a clapping sound as they came together.

“Maija,” she said, “if I remember correctly.”

“Sorry,” Maija said. “I was on my way to see the priest …”

Sofia looked at her as if evaluating something. At first it seemed she decided Maija was not worth whatever effort she was considering. Her lip curled. Then she changed her mind, and that might have had nothing to do with Maija at all.

“I just spoke to someone about him,” she said.

Maija waited. Sofia was about to tell her something.

“We said it was interesting that there is no record of him anywhere.”

Why would they have asked about the priest?
Maija thought. Then she realized what Sofia was saying.

“He was a court priest …” Maija said.

“It seems that is the first time anyone had ever met him.”

“Perhaps he studied abroad. Perhaps he lived and worked far away.”

Even as Maija said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The world was small—that of the nobles, of those around the King, smaller. They had the same background, fathers and mothers who knew each other. No, someone would have known him in his earlier life.

“Something big,” Anna had told her. Before Eriksson died, he had said he’d “found out something big about someone big.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Maija asked.

Sofia looked tired. “Yes, why am I?” she said. “I really don’t know.”

The blackest of nights, but cloudless. The priest pictured black spots welling down the lit snow of the mountain. He imagined the tramping of hundreds of feet. The settlers were coming. He strained, but could not see them.

Someone cleared their throat and he swirled around.

The night man? At his home? The priest felt cold.

“Something is hanging in the bell tower,” the night man said.

“What?”

“Someone.”

The blackest of nights. But cloudless. Stars. Plenty of stars. They were running. The body was visible from beneath the tower. It was hanging from the highest beam, back against the side of the bell, legs, from the knees down, slumped over the edge, swaying in free air. A small person. Neck at an impossible angle.

Jesus Christ. “Get her down.”

Why he’d said “her,” he did not know.

The night man climbed the tower, past the shape of the bell, a black sprite. The priest grabbed the wood of the bell tower with both hands. He put his foot up on one of the beams and started the climb into that blackest of nights with plenty of stars. He hadn’t climbed since he was a child. Then his father had called him agility itself. He might have been proud of that.

“Neck’s in a noose,” the night man bellowed.

Then: “Knot is too tight.”

“Hurry!”

The priest reached the top, put his feet on one of the beams, and braced his back against another. He grabbed the legs and lifted.

But the legs bent at the knees. He let go and climbed higher so that he came to stand with his head inside the bell. He leaned forward and grabbed the legs again. Stick-legs.

“Higher,” the night man called.

The priest leaned his forehead against the metal of the bell and lifted.

“I have the knot now,” the night man said. “When I say, let go … now, let go.”

The priest opened his arms and let her fall. The body sighed down in the air before him and into the snow with a thud.

He lifted his head. Where his forehead had melted the frost, there was something on the inside of the bell. He stepped closer. With his mitten he wiped the inside of the bell. It was an inscription. He rubbed further. It read,
Here lives a priest with dissonance in his soul.

At first he didn’t realize, and then he did: the bell-founder.

The night man had reached the ground. He was turning the body over onto its back.

“He’s still alive.”

The blackest of nights and not a cloud. An abundance of stars. One moon, no larger than a nail clipping.

The priest threw his outerwear onto a chair. He washed his hands in the basin. The water was ice cold. He washed them again, scrubbed his hand with the nails of the other. But this dirt could not be washed off. It sat underneath his skin. He scrubbed until his hands hurt, and then he forced himself to stop and leaned with his hands supported on the basin, feeling the frail man’s body in his arms as he had hugged him, the slight weight as he had carried him home. The pain as the old man’s wife opened the door and screamed as she saw them. And all this for what?

Then he realized he was not alone and stood up straight. White-blonde hair by the window, slight figure. Why was he not astonished to find Maija inside his house?

She stepped out from the shadows. They stood looking at each other.

“I am not a priest,” he said.

“No,” she said. “So what are you?” she asked.

“The son of a hangman.”

She gasped.

“I know. It is funny, isn’t it? The lowest of the low. The furthest down you can get.”

“How?”

“I had a good head. The local priest taught me. I became a soldier.”

How could he explain it to her? That day with the air so thin, so high. That wild sunshine. That ecstatic frame of mind they were in after their victory, blood still on the cuffs and the fronts of their uniforms. How he’d begun to sing the psalm.

Who, then, could tell what he was or wasn’t? Who cared?

The King on his horse inspecting his troops, stopping there to listen. The King’s eagerness to forget where he’d found him. Perhaps the King had forgotten. Who else, then, would ask questions?

“Eriksson knew,” she said.

“He did,” Olaus said.

“How?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps he made enquiries. Perhaps it was nothing more than a suspicion. He ventured a guess and I gave myself away. Had he lived, he would probably have made my life a misery. But I didn’t kill him.”

She exhaled. The sound was as clear as a question:
Why should I believe you?
But the question she asked was, “Why didn’t you?”

It threw him.

“I’d acted the role of priest for so long, perhaps I believed I was one,” he said.

In some ways there was relief now that it was over. Although he had no idea what would be left of him once you removed the priest.

There were knocks on the door.

“Open.”

A child’s muted voice.

“That’s Frederika,” Maija said.

Olaus opened and Frederika fell in. There was a hump on her back. The hump rolled off her and sat up. It was her sister.

“It’s Mr. Lundgren.” Frederika was still on all fours.

“What?”

“He has done terrible things to the schoolchildren.”

Olaus’s outbreath, so long and slow, it filled the hallway.

Maija’s voice sounded from somewhere far away: “No.”

“Not with Dorotea, Mamma,” Frederika said. “But with others. Daniel’s Sara, for one.”

When Olaus Arosander was ten years old, he was still Olof, the hangman’s son.

His father hanged with confidence, he lit fires with speed, he beheaded with precision—in silence and with impossible poise. “It isn’t for us to judge,” he’d tell his son as they cleaned up afterward and buried the bodies. “God brought this man here to this place and to us. God only knows his journey.”

One night, like so many other times, they were woken close to midnight by pounding on the door.

“Get up!” the voice outside bellowed. “You’re needed.”

It was the case of a father who’d abused his own daughter. He’d managed to escape, and the hangman and his son passed time together with the members of the jury. There had been a strange companionship among those who waited. Hatred was permitted and cheered.

They’d caught the man, of course. “This one we don’t bury,” his father had said. “This one we throw to the dogs.”

Olaus remembered it because it was the one time his father had had no mercy to show.

It might also be that he remembered the night because it was the one time he and his father had belonged.

He imagined it now: riders on horses, Lapps on skis. Johan Lundgren on the run. But before dawn they would have that devil.

Together with Maija and her children, Olaus had gone to Sofia in the vicarage. There were questions they wanted to ask her. Sofia’s face was taut. She had pushed each hand inside the opposite sleeve, as if cold.

“Your husband said he’d seen evil when he visited Blackåsen,” Olaus said. “He was traveling with the verger.”

“Perhaps he saw something,” Sofia said. “Or one of the children told him …”

“How did you know?” Maija asked her daughter.

Her voice sounded flat. This had been a shock for her too. From what Olaus understood, it could have been her daughter.

“There were carvings in the windowsill in the school. One day there was a new one, an S for Sara … Dorotea said that maybe the verger didn’t want to give her lessons because of her feet. I thought about how Lundgren once talked to me about flawlessness. It sort of fell into place,” Frederika said.