Wolf Winter (48 page)

“Did Eriksson ever say anything about Gustav?” she asked and looked for Anna.

Anna didn’t meet her gaze.

“Why would she know?” Daniel said.

“Anna?” Maija said. “Please.”

“Don’t answer her,” Daniel said to his wife.

“Please,” Maija said again. “Anna, please.”

The other woman lifted her head. The room was quiet.
She won’t answer,
Maija thought.

But Anna said, “I think they were friends.”

Everybody was looking at Anna.

“Why do you say that?” Maija asked.

“I saw them once. Gustav and Eriksson. Gustav was on his knees.” Anna’s voice went to incredulous as she remembered. “It was like he was hugging Eriksson’s legs and Eriksson was patting Gustav on his head. … It was strange. I thought Gustav might be begging for mercy. And then Eriksson slapped him. Gustav fell down. And he just crawled back and hugged Eriksson’s legs again.”

Gustav wouldn’t have had any problems slaughtering Fearless’s reindeer, Maija thought. He had that raw strength about him and he was a hunter. He was a soldier too. He might well have spent time in Russia, where he would have grown used to their customs, their practices.

“Maija won’t stop until she has destroyed all of us,” Daniel said.

Not him. Don’t let him distract you. Henrik. Speak to Henrik.

“Gustav returned from the wars a broken man,” Maija said. “Eriksson knew how to recognize that which was damaged. God only knows what he did to this man.”

Henrik was frowning. Think about your wife, Maija sent the thought to him. Think about her having good reasons to remain fearful for the rest of her life. For the rest of your life.

“As long as you are not certain what happened,” she said, “you’ll doubt. You’ll always be frightened.”

The settlers walked on the lake ice. It was to be the last run across, Maija thought. Already, at places, there was water. Spring was coming, but late. Fearless was studying the ice too. Their eyes met. He knew.

Dorotea.

Maija sent the thought across the mountain. In her mind she tried to see Frederika, but couldn’t.
See to your sister,
she thought nevertheless.
Please go and find her. I didn’t have time to make sure she was all right.

There was something like a faint pulse in the air. Maija’s ears felt blocked by pressure, like they did when she was on top of a high mountain.

“Can we come in?” Henrik asked when Gustav opened the door.

Gustav hunched, stretched. “Why?” he said. His scar pulled his mouth too large.

Henrik didn’t answer. Gustav hesitated, then walked backward and they followed him.

Henrik looked to Maija. She wished he would have asked Gustav questions. She was too blunt.

“Gustav,” she said. “Tell them what you did.”

His back was working so much that a whining sound emerged from his throat. They were all watching him now with the pity or disgust you reserve for someone sick.

“You’ll feel better if you do,” she said. “It will be over. It wasn’t your fault.”

And it really wasn’t. Eriksson had played on Gustav’s past as he had Elin’s. He had used and mistreated a man who was already broken. At some point it had gone too far.

She shook her head to show she meant it. Gustav’s shoulders fell a little, then more.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said.

“I know.”

He moved forward, and the others stepped away from him, but he didn’t look at them, but at her.

“I didn’t know.”

“I know,” she said again.

“And the fire got out of hand.”

Fire? What fire?

She shook her head, but he was staring at her, not letting go.

“I heard them scream. I tried to reach them, but the fire spread. I couldn’t get to them.”

He searched with his eyes, took a step, and fell on his knees on the wooden floor before Fearless. “I had just arrived,” he whispered and looked up at the Lapp. “I wanted to clear land for myself. I didn’t know how fast it could spread. The fire was everywhere. And then I didn’t know what to do with their bodies, so I buried them in the marsh.”

The forest fire? Fearless’s wife and child? But then what about Eriksson?

Fearless’s eyes were black.

Sound no larger than the tapping of a fingernail against wood, but growing stronger.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

In town a woman has washed, put on a new dress, and braided her hair. As she crosses the green, there it is, that sun in the sky. Small, but impertinent, it reaches for her cheek. The woman mistakes the feeling for happiness. She sighs.

“I need to speak with the priest,” she says when she reaches the house across from her own and the door has opened.

“I told him,” the fleshy woman inside says, wringing her hands. “I told him, spring was coming and he risked being caught at the coast.”

Drum. Drum. Drum.

On the river and the lake the snow begins to open. A spruce tree lets fall on the white below the seeds she has hidden in her cones.

Underneath the snow, on the ground, there are things, things long thought dead: flowers in knots, whole branches held in tight buds. They start to tingle and stir.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

North: a settler stands by the window. Daylight, he thinks. Would you have thought it? Daylight again, this year too. It has begun to drip from the roof, and he stares at each clear drop as it grows and takes on colors, quakes, and then falls.

Behind him his woman coughs. He walks to put one hand underneath her frame and the other on her shoulder, feels her bones hard and thin as jail bars underneath her dress. He turns her onto her side.

He looks down at the shriveled being in the bed. Has a sudden vision she’ll survive him.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

In a clearing on the mountain’s west side the snow moves. It’s being torn away from below. A paw breaks through, and a litter of bear cubs peer out from their den.

There’s a fluttering in the air. It’s the small creatures that dare to return: tits and starlings. They dart through the air, hoping to find last year’s nests still intact.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

South: a settler can’t look at his youngest daughter. What could he possibly say?

In the corner of his eye he sees her on a chair beside him, legs not quite reaching the floor.

“Stop staring,” he tells her.

She doesn’t.

“I said, stop staring!”

He stands up and walks out.

He stands for some time outside the door. Then he steps off the porch. The surface of the snow breaks under his weight and he slips right through it down to his knee.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

Ice on all the branches, eyes on black twines. Underneath roof edges, close to the walls, the snow has become clear and is forming tall spears.

Water. Rippling, dripping, flowing. The sun turns the lake into a field of fallen stars.

Sounds: stirrings and awakenings. By the river the white is covered in black spots. It is moving. Thousands of stoneflies crawling, looking for something to eat.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

The snow is leaving. The mounds sink and settle, pour out and down. It’s already down to its first layers: coarse and grainy, so transparent the ground is almost visible right through.

The river tries to break through her lock. She groans. Down by her outflow she begins to gnaw at the lake ice. Then she pushes through with a scream. Her whole center starts slipping downward, slowly at first, then tearing down.

In the lake, water warms up and rises.

Only the marsh is still frozen solid.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

Springwinter. Reindeer calving. Births of the new. The Lapps are hurrying to make it out. The high mountains await them.

Their leader is not with them.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

The days lengthen, going toward everlasting. The snow has gone, and what has rotted underneath lies bare. There should be a foul smell, but there isn’t. No, the air is unmoved. There’s a whiff of something like plain wet earth.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

By the lake a settler stands on his porch staring toward the water. By the shore, in the last remaining air pockets, perch and bream will be hovering, desperate for the ice to break. Yet he doesn’t go fishing. Not much time now, he thinks. And: once spring breaks through, then all this will be over.

He goes inside. As he pulls his curtains shut, he relives how his screams echoed their every one. How, when he tried to carry them, they fell apart in his hands. He crumbles.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

And then, without warning, the water from the mountains breaks through … a tidal wave of the melted and dead.

The river scrambles its banks. The lake swallows its shores. Water gushes into the forest until the trees are knee-deep.

And now the marsh too begins to bubble as she thaws.

PART THREE

The church was white against the blue skies, the color so bright it hurt his eyes to watch, the spire so tall it seemed it might just offer the physical tie between heaven and earth. Olaus imagined that was why they were built thus: to impress onto the peasants their divinity—the Church as all knowing, all seeing.

After his conversation with the bishop Olaus had tried to return to the Lappmark. He hadn’t got far. The thaw had set in. He had returned and spent the days on his knees in the barren room in the bishop’s residence, in agony, facing choices, unable to pray, unable to do anything else, and it wasn’t until toward the end of his stay that he had felt something, someone, and he wasn’t going to say it had been the voice of God, he wasn’t even going to say it had been a God, but he had felt compassion amid the pain. Finally the roads became passable, and he had returned home two days ago.

A warm breeze brushed his hair, and he tilted his head at an angle to catch it on his face. A flash of memory of another imprint there on the skin of his cheek, as warm and bright as the sun, followed by a sharp sting of pain. He didn’t know how Maija was faring. He didn’t know what, if anything, had happened on the mountain. He shook his head to himself. Reminded himself that it wasn’t for him. She wasn’t for him.