In a gravelly spot next to the buttercup carnage a gentian stretched its open face of bright blue petals towards the sun. Charlotte dared not look away. As soon as the sun withdrew, the flower would close its petals. She lay down next to the flower and touched the white-tinged blue of its petals with the tip of her nose.
Henrik pulled on her sleeve. "Don't."
"I won't damage it, darling."
He balled both fists. "You'll scare away the hidden people."
She recalled his stories of how the hidden people had suddenly appeared in the mist, talked to him when he was lonely, helped him find the cows in the fog, led him home.
They let me stroke their tails.
"I want to marry one of the hidden people," he said.
Marry? He was five years old.
His eyes twinkled. "So I can see her tail fall off in church."
Henrik knew the songs of the hidden people. Last Christmas Eve he'd refused to sing To Us a Child is Born, had chanted instead from behind the sofa:
There's joy in every hillock
A song in every rock
"I saw her again," he said suddenly.
"Who?" But she knew.
"She wanted you. Said you're a—" He searched for the word. "—a midwife."
A cloud passed over the sun. The gentian withdrew its petals, hugged them to itself.
He wiped his buttercup fingers on a pad of moss, then climbed into her lap and took her chin in his hand. "She had a little girl with her," he said.
Charlotte tried to smile, the way people did with certain kinds of children.
"I recognized the girl," he said.
She held his thin body against hers for comfort—her own. His lips moved against her chest, as if he were speaking not for her ears but directly into her heart.
"I chased her, but she got away."
The child was still invisible. Even the best painter could not see her.
"Her eyes were the same as—"
She studied the top of his head, the place where the hair swirled around the cowlick.
"Same as?"
"Same as the eyes of the girl in Max's painting," he said.
"Market place painting?"
"No. The one with the man—he's got a knife. The girl's looking up."
Not a girl, she started to say. Isaac. Or was it?
"There was another time—" he said.
Many other times, she thought.
"It was foggy. A woman came towards me—calling me 'little boy,' and asking, 'Where's your Mamma?' I said, 'Home, asleep.' She didn't like that."
Charlotte touched her finger to his cowlick, traced a circle. How precious he was, and how little he got from her. Had the memory of Lena sucked the love out of her? The love that was his by right?
"The lady turned ugly," he said. "I started to run away, but she followed me. I ran as fast as I could until I tripped over a tussock and fell and hurt myself. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, she was gone."
The chasm between real and unreal widened underneath them.
"They had a cow," he said.
She thought of Skjalda.
"They called her Io."
Charlotte had told him the story of Io, how Zeus had loved her. His wife, jealous Hera, had transformed Io into a cow. Argos, with his thousand eyes, became the cow's jailer.
"When the fog got thicker, I ran away."
His body trembled, perhaps exhausted from containing his imagination.
"I saw the eyes in the fog."
Footsteps crunched the gravel beyond the rocks. A shadow passed over them. It was Ragnar, rubbing a tuft of hay between his hands.
"Just a couple of more turns," he said.
They followed him. As they approached the pasture, she took Ragnar's arm.
"I have something to tell you."
"Later," he said, pointing to the sun.
The sun was low in the sky when the hay was finally dry enough to pack into bales. Charlotte and Tryggvi pulled the ropes between them until the hay bale was tight. The horses waited patiently while Henrik and Tryggvi placed layers of peat on their backs. Then Tryggvi and Ragnar heaved the bales of hay onto the trusses. Charlotte stood in front of the horse, measuring the hay parcel with her eyes and hands until the hay hung down evenly on each side.
Tryggvi took the rein of the lead horse. He wore his father's overalls, rolled up at the ankles. As the horses swayed towards the barn, Charlotte took Ragnar's arm. "Let's go for a walk." He looked at her in surprise. They never walked together except for the times they'd midwifed the sheep.
"I know a hollow," she said.
He nodded, walking slowly, waiting to be led. If she wasn't careful, he'd spend his talk on cow stalls. Or he'd hang his words on his planned treat for her—the toilet. He'd already ordered the pipes. She walked quickly toward her secret place, the hollow. It started with her mother's first letters. She had to read them alone. I have a feeling that Lena is alive. I won't leave Berlin until I know. Send me a picture of the baby.
That was nine years ago. Tryggvi had been two years old. Lena would have been fourteen. Yet, lying in the hollow, she'd fallen asleep among the tiny wildflowers and heather, dreamt of Lena as a baby, not Tryggvi.
His large rubber shoes and broad hands looked odd in this sacred place. "Climb in," she said, offering him her hand as if to help him into a pitching boat. Seating himself, he crushed a cluster of violets. Then he lay back and rested his head on a tuft of moss. Charlotte placed her hands on the earth and felt its warmth.
She touched his ankle, moved her fingers under his pants leg, and rested her hand on the skin just above the sock. He seemed to be waiting for her to talk, but her words didn't come. Far away, the sea splashed on the shore. She felt the familiar tug in her chest.
"My mother didn't want me to marry Max."
It sounded wrong.
"It wasn't that she didn't like Jews. She was afraid. We were all afraid then. We thought if we kept saying YES, nothing terrible would happen. Some people divorced their Jewish spouses."
Ragnar squeezed her ankle.
"Did you ever think of divorcing him?"
"Never," she lied.
She'd hated him for being Jewish, for giving her a baby, for refusing to leave Germany, for being a jackass, for making love to her so exquisitely that her body ached for him long after he was gone. But divorce him? Never. If only because her mother wanted her to.
The old anger flared up inside her.
"Even when the Nazis wouldn't let him attend the academy any more, he stayed. He said stupid things like, 'I can't abandon my country. This will pass.'"
She placed her hands on her chest, pushed down to bring herself under control.
His voice was tentative, an admission.
"You fight with him at night—"
"Why didn't you tell me?
Silence.
"I didn't want to embarrass you."
Embarrass her!
He must have slept like a dead man the time she'd risen up from a dream, dressed herself, and run as fast as she could around the farmhouse, dodging haying tools in the dark— running, along the fence that marked the home field. Three times she'd passed the gable outlined against the winter moon before the dream had finally released her. At last, she'd lain in the frozen grass, her head burning.
Another night, she'd woken up sweating. She'd made her way outside, into the sheep shed, to the fields, into the cow ditch, to the ocean. He'd carried her back like a sick ewe, saying soothing words, then placing her in the bed. But when she tried to tell him what she'd seen, he hadn't wanted to hear it. Now she had him. She tightened her grip on his ankle and began.
"Lena looked like a frog at first. I wished she hadn't been born."
Silence from his end of the hollow.
"Two years after I brought her to the convent, I wanted her back. But I was too late. The curtains were blowing out of the open windows. Toys all over the garden. One good thing about that visit—"
She stopped, couldn't go on.
"What?" he asked. In their thirteen years together, it was his first what.
"I didn't see her bear in the convent garden among all those toys. Perhaps she took it with her to—"
Unable to go on, she sat up and hugged her knees. He extended his hand, pulled her to her feet. On the way back, the fog insinuated its way between them, yet he held onto her hand.
In the kitchen, Ragnar sat on the bench, his head bowed, shoulders sloped. She went to him, took his hands and rubbed udder cream into the hard places. That night, when he held her, she assigned Max to the back of her consciousness. Obediently, he stayed there.
A Weak Light Across the Snow
After the milking, the old woman stayed in the shed to mix her angelica archangelica digestive, and Charlotte found herself alone in the kitchen. She pulled out the letter from her mother.
I went to the Red Cross today. They told me about a couple of young women who'd come to Berlin from Poland, looking for their families. I became very excited, thought one of them could have been Lena. But it led to nothing. I was so disappointed, I didn't go out for 2 days. Still, these incidents raised my hopes. Every morning I tell myself, perhaps today. So you see, my dear, my trip to see you and your family will have to wait.
Her mood dropped. The faces. The dreams. They'd meant nothing. The old woman bustled into the kitchen, cradling herbs in her apron and singing to herself about cutting a warrior's throat. She scraped the scales off the salted cod and cut the fins. The boiling water steamed the room with the odor of fish. Finally the old woman skimmed the foam off the water.
When they sat down to eat, Charlotte stole glances at her sons. Ragnar wanted her to paint them with the old oils from Berlin. But she noticed something odd about the boys. They looked like sheep, especially around the nose and mouth. They smelled like sheep. And why not? Didn't they live in a wooly mutton world, cutting and drying hay for the sheep, then shearing and slaughtering them? Hadn't she spent one hundred winters on this farm untangling sheep's wool and knitting from it?
The old woman looked at Ragnar. Charlotte recognized the signs of an oncoming conversation. "How did the calving go at Nonni's?" the old woman asked.
"Lost it—breech birth," Ragnar said.
She helped herself to some more suet. "Should've called me. I've got something for that."
Ragnar turned to Charlotte, as if to include her in the conversation. "What about Skjalda's sore?"
The cow had cut her udder on barbed wire. They'd applied a poultice of chopped lady's mantle and dog sour leaves, but the cow had worried it with her hoof. Charlotte hadn't looked this morning.
"The sore?" he repeated.
She took a guess. "Better."
Ragnar started to say something, but Tryggvi interrupted in an excited voice. "Next fall Papa's taking me to the sheep round-up."
"You're being rude," Charlotte said.
They all looked startled at her tone.
She glared at Ragnar. "He's too young to ride through the mountains—all that drinking and rough talk with the men," she said.
"I'll ride Red—he's sure-footed," Tryggvi said.
Ragnar slumped in his chair. "I told him he could hold the sheep's horns, help pull them from the pen."
The bond between father and son filled the room, leaving her no space to breathe. Her head hurt. In the outhouse, she stood over the hole, tore her mother's most recent letter into tiny pieces, and watched them flutter down where the waste covered the paper's whiteness. She thought of her mother's words in a letter from long ago, the letter she had saved for so many years. I have a feeling she's alive. It's just a matter of time. Lies. Her muttony boys, Henrik and Tryggvi, were her new life. Her baby with the curls that smelled of pine was gone forever. Even if she wasn't, she'd be a grown woman now with swinging breasts and crow's feet on her grown-up skin. The loss stung Charlotte's eyes.
The short, dark days arrived, the period when the sun barely rose above the mountain before it set again. When the electric light machine ran out of fuel, the Aladdin lamp flickered unsteadily over the table. Each day Charlotte rose reluctantly from her bed and often spent all day trying to shake her desire to crawl back into bed.
Every winter since she arrived, the hillside winter seemed darker than the year before. Traveling between farms on a starless, moonless night was like being blind. You tripped over tussocks and fell over rocks. Last year, the cow had bellowed in pain. The old woman couldn't shift the calf's position, and Ragnar was at Butterdale. Charlotte had set out in the darkness and had walked into the barbed wire fence and ripped her clothes. By the end of November, a sliver of light separated the black morning from the gray afternoon. Life was a cave so deep it hardly seemed worth it to get out of bed. Daylight was a dream too soon over.
It was three in the afternoon. A snowstorm had canceled today's daylight. Charlotte had had enough. She climbed the stairs to the loft and came back, holding a red candle. She lit it and set it on the windowsill. Its tiny glow raised her spirits.
"Keep that up, and the Christmas witch will get us," the old woman said from the sofa, where she sat knitting.
"Just one," Charlotte said, moving as close as she could to the yellow glow without singeing her hair.
"You said that yesterday," the old woman said cheerfully.
Charlotte admired her good disposition, how she always seemed happy. And Ragnar was at peace with his existence in a way she could never be. At night she cuddled up to Ragnar, welcomed his large hands, his hungry stroking, his abrupt thrusting. Afterwards, she often felt despondent for hours while he lay sleeping beside her.
She treasured every word he said, knowing that he was drawing on a small collection.
"So soft," Ragnar said one night, stroking her hair.
Max had played endlessly with her hair, buried his face in it, talked to it, wrapped it around his cheeks. On canvas, he'd transformed her brown hair to a blend of auburn, chestnut, and apricot, showed it flying like an orange pinwheel around her head. Sunshine glinted off wild red curls that danced on her shoulders.
"Touch my hair again," she said.
Ragnar obeyed.
"Repeat the word."
"Soft," he said huskily.
He'd used the same tone when they bought Red with his thick flaxen mane and forelock.
The next day, she found herself talking to Skjalda, telling the cow that they wouldn't ever slaughter her, salt her meat, and eat it with turnips, the way some farmers did. They would eat the cow at Butterdale instead. She told Skjalda the story of Io.
"For a long time Io had horns—"
Tiny fingers walked her spine. Henrik. "Everyone laughs at me for talking to myself. But you do it," he said.
She gave him a serious look.
"Tell it again," he said.
This time she told it louder, assigning different voices to Io and Zeus, singing nonsense verses in between. By the time the milking was done, Charlotte felt a rosy glow, a promise that spring would one day return with its long, bright days.
But by early afternoon, when she sat alone in the dimly-lit living room, threading elastic into the waist of the boys' underwear, her mood sank. Snow covered the home field, and darkness lay thick on the window. The old woman was in the kitchen chopping and grinding. Ragnar and the boys were in the shed. Charlotte reached for Ragnar's new socks that the old woman had just slipped off her needles and pulled them on.
"I'm going for a walk along the fence," she called gaily into the kitchen.
Outside the snow blew into her face and refreshed her. Her boots sank deep. Walking downhill, she soon wearied from pulling her feet up out of her own tracks. She heard the crash of the ocean. The blood pulsed in her veins. She ran down the hill, stumbled then stopped, remembering her promise. But she just wanted to look at the ocean. That couldn't hurt. Carefully she trod the path to the village.
The lights came into view. She passed them and kept on walking until she ca
me to the coarse sand at the shore. The blood throbbed in her ears when the water came into view. At last she stood at the water's edge. The cliffs, the sand, the ocean—black as coffee. The waves roared. They crashed at her feet echoing in the cliffs. She stretched out her hands and threw back her head. The snow had stopped, and the clouds parted. The moon lit up the crest of the waves. Warm now, she took off her boots and the thick socks, held them in her hands, and stepped into the water. A hand touched her shoulder.
Christmas
Seal Woman Page 17