Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  Then, of course, she saw in front of her what she had tried to push away all this time: a dead man’s mushy body. She sat up, tried to drive the image away, but when that didn’t work, she forced herself instead to keep looking, to see all of him in sharp detail.

  Inside a man there was nothing. She had thought a dead man would be different compared to a dead animal—she didn’t know in what way—but man was empty. Now, when she wrapped her arms around herself and bent forward, she could almost touch the void inside.

  She didn’t think anything had been eaten. Perhaps the predator had been scared off. It was a large wound, though. Needlessly violent. Men died from smaller ones than that.

  Her father came out of the woodshed and stopped, eyelids batting against the light.

  “And why are you sitting doing nothing?” he asked.

  Frederika shrugged.

  “Don’t sit for too long. It’s your turn to make dinner today.”

  “Mine? Today?”

  No, but hadn’t she cooked yesterday? And the day before?

  “Especially today. Come on.”

  They sprawled on the grass. Stomachs full, chores completed, a short rest before bedtime. Swallows hunted evening bugs. They dived, shrieked with joy or annoyance, looped and scaled, then dived again. Her mother had not returned, and they didn’t mention it out loud, but every now and then one of them stole a glance toward the yard. Dorotea lay beside Frederika, feet straight up in the air. She flexed them as if walking the sky. Frederika scratched her head, twirled her hair, made a face—it smelled of the goats. She turned onto her side.

  Her father’s black felt hat was covering his face. His arm was flung over it, but he wasn’t sleeping, she was certain.

  And then, all by themselves, her eyes slipped again to the empty yard. Never before had she felt her mother’s absence in this way. Like the cow must have felt the loss of her dead calves—the absence in itself physical enough to grate and nag against her flank.

  The forest in the valley was messy: birch, aspen, gray alder, their offspring and good-for-nothing weeds. The leaves shouted brighter than the green of the spruce. The birds were noisier. Invisible things bit, and Maija slapped and itched. “Go due south,” Elin had said. “One hour’s walk. Eriksson’s brother is the only settler in the valley.”

  Maija slapped her calf again.

  And the priest. Olaus Arosander, pfha! Olof, more like it. An Olof who, perhaps, had lived or studied in a town called Aros or similar. He’d told her as soon as they left Elin’s yard that he wasn’t coming. Couldn’t wait to leave, stepping from one foot to the other, that ridiculous cloak of his hovering above the ground.

  “Eriksson wasn’t killed by any animal,” Maija said. “He was killed by another human being.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  But she did.

  “A passerby, perhaps,” the priest relented. “A tramp.”

  The incision had been strong enough to cut bone, deep enough to slice the heart. “No,” Maija said. “Not a passerby. Not a stranger.”

  “We don’t know that,” the priest repeated. “But I’ll send a message to the authorities at the coast.”

  “Someone took his life. And who knows what will come of Elin and her children now.”

  The priest left anyway. Maija shook her head. This was not a priest who cared.

  Beside her, Jutta scoffed. “Name me a priest who does,” she said.

  And if anyone knew, it was Jutta. After all, she had been married to one.

  A dog barked, once, then several times. There was the breaking of branches, the ripping of bushes, and the dog emerged through the thicket in front of her, ears tight against its skull, strings of saliva hanging from its jaw. It bent its head toward the ground, not letting go of her with its yellow eyes. Growled. She didn’t mind dogs, but this one was different. More wolf than dog. She took a step forward, and the dog rose up, barked, held her where she was. She waited. Her heart pounded.

  A name was called: “Karo?” The dog hesitated, ears erect now, listening. Then it slipped back into the thicket. Maija paused before continuing to walk, heart still loud in her ears.

  A man waited for her in the yard. His face was thin and his eyelashes colorless. His ears stood out from his head. Lying down on the ground, pressed against his leg was the dog. It pulled its face back into a snarl, but there was no sound. Not now, submitted as it was to its master.

  “Daniel? My name is Maija. Maija Harmaajärvi.”

  By the house a woman was watching them, kerchief low, arms crossed.

  “I am afraid I am coming with bad news,” Maija said. “It’s about your brother, Eriksson. Your brother is dead.”

  She didn’t know if he heard, if he understood. Then he took a step out to the side and stood broader legged, seemed taller. He stroked his chin.

  “Your brother is dead,” she said again.

  And then he laughed.

  They sat behind Daniel’s cottage. The air smelled fruity, of turned earth. By the garden patch were picks and a sack of seeds. They had been planting when she came. There was a field beyond the garden. Over a hundred square meters they had opened up amid the broad-leaf trees. Maija could not begin to imagine the work involved. Four children, two boys and two girls, were in the field digging up stones. They cleared and cleared, but the earth this far north was evil. Stones emerged when you thought you were down to the bare bone of the land; brushwood shot forward on ground already liberated. If she listened hard at night, she heard it—faintly—but it was there, the chewing up of land.

  “So he’s dead.”

  Each time Daniel said it, his voice was full of something: wonder, thoughtfulness, something else she could have sworn was glee.

  His wife was making a fire, her back to them. There was a copper pot beside her. Her dress was taut over her shoulders, her shoes muddy. “Anna,” Daniel had said, and nodded toward her when Anna half-turned to lift the pot. The woman broke off in her movement and pressed the heel of her hand into her side.

  “Elin says the funeral will be in winter,” Maija said.

  Anna put the copper pot down on the stones, hard. Maija waited, but there was nothing more. The woman turned toward them and her eyes were light, brown or green—seawater through the slats of a dock. She had a plump nose, and the hair that stuck out from under the kerchief was brown. There were a couple of tiny pockmarks on her cheek—not pox scars, they were too small.

  Daniel sat on an overturned bucket, elbows on his knees, feet steady on the ground.

  “You were born here?” Maija asked him.

  “Yes. Me and my brother grew up further north, by the river.” Daniel indicated with his head. “Only us and the Lapps were here at that time.”

  Anna was studying her husband. Perhaps he was one of those men who discovered words in the presence of outsiders.

  “I can imagine it must have been very different,” Maija said, but thought to herself it must have been the same.

  Daniel turned to spit at the ground.

  “And you have just arrived now?” he asked.

  “A few days ago. We’ve taken Teppo Eronen’s land.”

  She hesitated, but she had to ask. “Do you know when Teppo left Blackåsen?” She tried to make the question sound ordinary.

  “Four years ago,” Daniel said. “Right, Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  Four years … how could Uncle Teppo not have told them this? The homestead could have been taken by somebody else in the meantime, and then what would they have done?

  “How did Eriksson die?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maija said.

  Daniel’s look grazed hers and moved away.

  “There was a large slit in his stomach,” she said.

  “Some animal then,” Daniel said.

  “It was as if he hadn’t tried to defend himself.”

  Daniel shrugged.

  His wife had turned again and was hunched over the fire. Secrets,
Maija thought. Shielding secrets.

  “Don’t just stand about,” Daniel called out. The small figures in the field rotated at the sound of his voice.

  “We can’t get this stone up, Father,” one child shouted.

  Daniel muttered something. He rose and headed toward them with long steps in the mud.

  “I’ll have to leave,” Maija said.

  Anna stood up too.

  “How far along are you?” Maija asked.

  In sunlight Anna’s eyes were a clear green. “One month or two. He doesn’t even know.” She tilted her head toward the man.

  “I am an earth-woman, so it’s easy for me to tell.”

  “It’s not going well this time. I’m sick.”

  “May I feel?”

  Anna nodded, and Maija stepped closer, her back to the others. She put her hand on the rounding and felt the usual pinch inside of longing. She herself had wanted more. At least one or two. They had tried, but it wasn’t to be. She focused on the small bulge underneath her hand. It was too early. She couldn’t feel anything. She shook her head.

  “Many women are sick during this period,” she said.

  “Never been with the others.”

  When Maija walked back home, she felt how tired she was. I will have to sit down, she thought, and I might have to sit here until they come for me. But she didn’t. Instead, she caught sight of Blackåsen’s mountaintop and tried not to think about feet that ached and pained. Tall grass wisped against her legs under her skirt. She stopped to look at a strange oak tree whose mighty trunk swirled and then came out on top as four separate trees. “So what are you?” she asked. “One tree that had enough and split into four, or four trees that decided to grow up together for support?”

  The tree didn’t answer. She reached out to touch its side and ended up leaning against it. A wife who doesn’t care that her husband is gone for three days, a man who laughs when he finds out his brother is dead, and a priest who doesn’t want to know.

  She thought of Henrik’s son saying the mountain was bad and remembered the piece of wood set up to point to the sky that she had passed with the priest. She had seen similar things before, a long time ago. Before it was forbidden to worship anything else but the Church’s one God.

  And Uncle Teppo. She tried to remember what he had been like when he came to see them. He had been all large gestures, blustering and joking. But his eyes … she remembered them staring at her mouth, not meeting her own eyes. Had he been frightened?

  She became aware of the cold from underneath the pine trees against her legs.

  “Well, now you have overdone it,” she scolded herself, “if you let yourself get scared. Uncle Teppo might have decided to travel for a while. Perhaps he set up a settlement somewhere else. And as for Eriksson’s death, apart from Henrik’s son, none of the others were upset. The priest was certainly not disturbed.”

  But beside her, Jutta pursed her lips.

  Just as if they had discussed it and agreed, which Frederika doubted, as she was always with them, neither her mother nor her father talked about the dead man in the days that followed. Her father chopped wood and worked on filling the woodshed until late each day. Her mother fished and gave the girls their chores to do around the homestead. The evenings were light and warm. On the little field the grass grew a strong green and the water in the stream rippled clear, topped up by the melting snow from the high mountains.

  Midsummer’s Eve occurred at the end of June, the evening before the birthday of John the Baptist. Six months before that of King Jesus. And the most magical time of the year.

  “Seven different flowers under the pillow,” Jutta used to say every Midsummer’s Eve. “Put seven different kinds of flowers under the pillow tonight and you’ll dream of the one you’ll marry.”

  Maija’s face would become hard. Jutta’s face too, but from fear, not anger. Jutta had said it wasn’t solely good magic that was about on midsummer. The coming night was when the trolls were at their worst.

  Today they were going to the river. All that was fabric had to be washed. Whites, blacks, blues. Dresses—shirts—carpets—curtains. It was the day to rid yourself of the old. Middle of summer. Before winter turned around and started his journey back to them.

  “Wait,” Frederika said. She pointed. “You’re putting the clothes in with the bed sheets.”

  “Oh.” Her mother pulled up a blouse, put it in a new sack. She pushed her hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand, pulled up another piece of clothing, then shoved it back and got up. “We’ll sort it at the river,” she said. “When it’s all out in the open.”

  Her mother was like that: everything at once and in the open. The river was dark blue, its surface dotted and streaked. It ran fast, although it was still a long way to the rapids.

  They lit a fire, filled the large wooden barrel with water, and placed it over the embers. When it boiled, Maija emptied into it the sack containing the birch ashes they had brought to make lye-water. And then she began to put in the laundry. She let it simmer for a while before she swirled the hot fabrics around with a wooden stick, heaved them up and threw them down on the flat stone in the river. Frederika and Dorotea beat the washing with sticks. Clap. Clap. Clap. Out with the old.

  The day was brisk and airy. Frederika’s hands were cold. Still, better than washing clothes in winter when they had to melt snow for water, boil the clothes in the big iron pot in the barn, and carry the wet laundry to rinse it in a hole cut in the ice. And each piece of clothing had to be rinsed three times. By the time they finished, their skirts were frozen solid to the ground and they had to break them loose.

  “The water is dirty,” their mother called.

  Frederika poked at her knees. They were white and lumpy, bitten by grit.

  “Stand beside me,” Maija said. “Watch your feet.”

  They pushed the barrel until it toppled. The frothing water pierced the earth in hot rivulets, striving to join the larger body below.

  They waited for new water to boil. The river smelled of mud and angry stone.

  Midmorning Frederika showed Dorotea how to make a small fire. Their mother sat down beside them. Her hair twirled around her forehead. When she closed her eyes, her eyelids looked like the blue-pink petals of chicory that shut overnight. Across her mother’s top lip was a wrinkle, fine, like a hair. Frederika had never seen it before, but in the daylight it was as clear as a scar. Was her mother getting old? Jutta had been old, her head stooping further and further until she came to resemble a little iron hook. Toward the end they had been the same height, Frederika and her, and Jutta had had to turn her head sideways and up to see her when they spoke.

  I don’t want you to die, she thought, without knowing that notion had been inside her, and she felt a pain cut so deep, it was almost good. She held onto the thought of her mother dying until it didn’t feel good at all any longer.

  “Dorotea can boil water.” She found her mother watching her. “And you can make bread.”

  Frederika leaned forward and poked at the embers with a stick. They were still unreliable: thin, skipping all over.

  “It wasn’t wolf, was it?” she asked.

  Her mother glanced at Dorotea. Her sister was filling a pot with water, tongue steering. “No,” she said.

  “What happens now?”

  “It’s with the priest now. He’ll find out what happened.”

  Frederika divided the dough into pieces and patted them straight onto the embers: Glödhoppor, emberjumpers.

  “I know it was awful to find him, but this has nothing to do with us,” her mother said.

  Frederika picked at the breads, flipped them over with her fingers.

  “We must not become frightened,” her mother continued. “In Ostrobothnia you used to know the village and the forests around as if they were part of you. Don’t you think you can make Blackåsen your own too? When you are ready?”

  They snapped the breads off the embers and covered
them with a thick layer of bright yellow butter. Their fingers became black from the charcoal. On the opposite shore Blackåsen Mountain was a muted block of gray. Frederika licked each finger and tasted the fat.

  Mirkka mooched when they returned. Frederika sat down on the stool in the barn. She pulled on the firm teats. She was wet and cold and wanted it done, and then of course, the cow couldn’t. The cow turned her head and looked at her. Her watery nostrils trembled.

  “It’s like when you’re in a rush to wee,” Jutta had explained. “You want it too much and then it doesn’t work. Think about winter calm, how the snow falls.”

  Frederika did what her mother had done when she taught the cow to milk. She leaned her forehead against the animal’s flank and hummed a song and felt like a fool, but both she and the cow relaxed, and the warm milk squirted down into the bucket.

  She carried the trough to the cottage. Further down the slope Dorotea and their mother were hanging clothes on the line. The kitchen was silent. They had removed the moss between the logs for the cottage to breathe in summer air, and the light that seeped through the whitened wood made her feel as if she were in a dream. The room smelled irritated from the lye. Her mother and Dorotea had hung their dresses on the iron rack in the roof to dry. Water dripped from them onto the floor below. Frederika didn’t like the look of them empty.

  The timber was cool and smooth against her feet. She pulled off her dress and let it slap down on the floor. She examined the sores on her hands made by the lye-water. But now all the old was out. And Midsummer’s Eve was soon over. The day had passed, and all was still well.

  She grabbed her dress and stepped on a chair to hang it over the drying rack beside the others. She tried to flatten it out. Otherwise it wouldn’t dry, and you’d be sorry tomorrow.

  There was a knocking. She covered herself, but nobody entered.

  There it was again.

  A black crow sat on the window ledge. The bird tapped on the pane with its beak. A second crow flew and sat beside the first. Then they both pecked on the glass. Tock-tock-tock. As if they wanted to come in.