Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  “Birds carry the souls of the unborn and the dead,” her father had told her once. They were watching a large flock of starlings, a black cloud on the sky that changed shape, twisted, fell, picked up. There was a tic by the side of her father’s mouth. “A person has to know how to read the signs.”

  “What signs?”

  “Oh, there are so many.” He hit out with his hand. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

  She didn’t ask more. She had thought that later she would ask Jutta.

  Frederika stepped down from the chair. The crows didn’t move as she approached the window.

  At first she didn’t register. And then she realized what she was seeing and gasped. In among the trees there was a brown bear on his hind legs, his paws in the air.

  Her eyes leapt: barn, field, woodshed. Where was her mother? Where was Dorotea?

  Before she found her wits, the bear fell down on all fours and lumbered away.

  Frederika ran to the field. The sun was hot on the crown of her head. The space between the straight pine trunks in the forest was empty, and she went more slowly. By the barn she ran into a spider web and had to stop to brush her face with her fingers to remove it. And then, from inside the woodshed, something so unusual: her father chuckling. Through a slit between two wood planks she saw him embrace her mother. She hesitated and then tiptoed backward. She wanted this moment for her father. And anyway, the danger was gone.

  But later, at night, she thought about what she’d seen. She didn’t know what it meant, but one thing was clear: her mother was wrong. In some way Eriksson’s death had to do with all of them.

  And they had not found him. He had found them.

  “Has everything been done?” The priest slapped the back of a psalm book protruding from the low bookshelf by the entrance to the church hall.

  “It’s ready,” the verger said. Underneath his straight fringe, the thick, lifted brows gave his face a startled look that always managed to worry the priest, even though by now he knew the verger was unflappable.

  “The silver is clean?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll make sure the graveyard and the church green remain clear.”

  “Yes.”

  “No trade, no drinking.”

  “No.”

  The priest took one final look. The gold on the pulpit gleamed. There were new tallow candles in the holders underneath the cross. He sniffed the air. No odor from the cadavers under the floor. Good. Even if you’d grown up with the smell, you never got used to it.

  “And there will be no ringing of the bell,” he said.

  “No ringing of the bell.”

  The priest took the stairs up to the second floor two steps at a time. The stairway curved to the right. Pale wood shone through the dark brown paint on the places where people trod the most. There were no candles in the stairwell, and a dark corner loomed at the far end of each step. The church was already old. The once-black roof had oxidized and turned green. Nothing he could do about that—not without funds, not without a favorable King. And the church bell. Built during his short tenure, but what a problem. Three times already he’d sent for the bell-founder at the coast to come and rectify the issue. The first time the bell-founder came he had the verger ring the bell for a whole morning as he stood underneath the tower, his hands elevated and facing outward, his head bent—an image of a portly Jesus Christ in their empty square—to then declare the timbre of the bell “pleasant.”

  “It’s not,” the priest had said.

  The heavy man had nodded until his head almost reached his chest. “What is the problem?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The ringing is awful. Bleating. Not elegant.”

  The bell-founder kept on nodding.

  “It’s broken,” the priest said. “That’s it. Broken.”

  Then the bell-founder had taken his horse and disappeared for two days. On the third day he returned and declared that he had listened to the bell from all over the region, and its sound was harmonious and whole.

  But the bell jarred and jarred with the priest, and he sent for the bell-founder again. This time the founder spent time in the bell tower. He chipped away at the metal with a chisel. But the first Sunday after the bell-founder had left, it sounded the same.

  The priest sent a message again, but the messenger returned, saying maybe it wasn’t the bell that was the problem, but something else. Something perhaps to do with the priest.

  In the room on the second floor the Church Books were laid out on his desk. Two rapid steps, then he pinched the fall of the green velvet curtain so it fell straight. A glimpse of his own face in the window: drawn cheeks, sharp nose. Then, through it, horses and carriages on the church green. The bishop had arrived.

  The priest had met the bishop twice before: once when he himself was a rising star in the court and then, much later, when the bishop came to remove him. The priest couldn’t remember the bishop from their first meeting. The second time it was the bishop who had been acclaimed, raised to nobility by the King, instated as a member of the Privy Council. Then they had spent two weeks together traveling north, but on that occasion neither had anything to say. Nothing they were disposed to share with each other, that was.

  The priest took a deep breath, touched the edges of the ribbons to make sure they lay flat on his chest, then turned the iron handle. The wind swept his collar to one side, like a flag in a breeze.

  The bishop was standing beside his carriage, looking up at the bell tower.

  “Olaus,” he said. He had aged: the thin hair wafting in the wind was whiter, his stomach in the black robe, larger.

  The priest bowed. “Welcome.”

  “It turned out well, the tower.” The bishop spoke as a man who could afford to be unhurried by wind, untroubled by his aging.

  “Yes.” The priest turned his back on the structure. “We have prepared a meal for you.”

  The bishop waved with his hand. “Hungry wolves hunt the best. Let’s look at the inventories before we sit down.”

  It was late evening when they at long last sat down for their meal, though still as light as day. The windows were wide open, curtains floating in an indiscernible flow of air.

  “I have no real observations to make on the building itself.” The bishop reached for more bread.

  The priest caught the eye of the verger at the back of the room. This needed to be written down in the Church Book.

  “Upkeep has been good, the interiors are orderly,” the bishop said, mouth full. “What is attendance like?”

  “Four households live in the town all year round: mine, the former priest’s, the night man’s and an old couple, but everyone comes as prescribed during the period between Christmas and Missa Candelarum, and again to the sermon on Lady Day.”

  For those few weeks the town was a town. The settlers, the tradesmen, and the Lapps came and settled into the purpose-built houses, and, by God, for that period the Church owned them limb and soul. They were preached to, taxed, and judged if necessary, all in the space of those weeks. Then they departed again, leaving behind them the priest and his verger, holding forth in this ghostly place of dark timber.

  The bishop leaned back and cleaned his teeth with his tongue. “No problems with the Lapps?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Anvar, the previous priest, did good work with the Lapps. And no issues with any … private sermons?”

  “Is that still ongoing?”

  “Even some of the priests are now in favor. The King takes every offense personally.”

  He would. The King had forbidden it—any self-made prayers, any attempts by common man to explain the scriptures or to proclaim some personal connection with God was a delusion and an affront to the one true relationship between the King and the Almighty.

  The bishop moved, and his chair groaned.

  “We have made much progress in the Catechetical hearings,” the priest said, forcing his mind back to the matters at h
and. “You’ll see it in the records. When I arrived, the lack of reading skills was the problem, but we have managed to increase school attendance.”

  The bishop burped.

  The priest nodded in the verger’s direction. “Tomorrow our verger, Johan Lundgren, will tell you about his work teaching the children on the mountains. We’ll show you the finances too.”

  “Yes, and the poor relief and your administration of the royal proclamations.”

  The ubiquitous King.

  “How is he?” the priest asked, though he had promised himself he wouldn’t. He wondered if the bishop would tell the monarch they had met.

  He looked up and found the bishop studying him. “Our ruler is well,” the bishop said. “He seems resigned to staying in Sweden after all those years away. He’s down south. Untiringly making new plans, of course.”

  With his inner eye the priest saw the royal, the tall muddy boots, his curly hair white from dust, his blue coat smelling of smoke and gunpowder.

  “There are rumors,” he said, “about how the new wars are going for us.”

  The bishop rose.

  “I’ll show you to your room,” the priest said.

  “I’m certain your maid can do that.”

  The bishop swept his black cloak around himself and left the room.

  The priest sat on the bench outside his house, his fingertips on the soft leather cover of the Bible in his lap. Across the green the door to the verger’s cottage was open. There was movement in the kitchen of the vicarage where the widow of the former priest still resided. A child ran from one of the further cottages to another.

  The roof ridges of the empty houses in each district, Settler Town, Trade Town, and, further away, Lapp Town, were dark toward the light blue sky. There was a smell of grass in the air. And here he sat, priest of nothing.

  The stone wall of the tall church was a compact white. By its entrance the iron bell hung still in its wooden structure. It seemed brooding. Foreign.

  “No bell,” the priest said to the verger in the morning.

  “Of course not,” the verger said.

  The priest didn’t have time to deal with the potential insubordination. Where was his Bible? He hadn’t slept well and had a headache. “Are the books out?”

  “Yes,” the verger said. “The bishop asked to see them.”

  “The bishop is already in the church?”

  “He said he always rises at dawn.”

  “God in heaven.”

  The priest pushed past the verger down the stairs. The verger should have woken him. Surely, that was obvious. He had forgotten his Bible. Had he brushed his hair? He couldn’t remember. He dragged his fingers through it and felt dirty.

  As he entered, the bishop was sitting in the priest’s own chair facing him, his large hands flat on the desk’s leather top, his index finger tapping.

  “Good morning,” the priest said. He lifted out the wooden chair opposite the bishop and slid onto it sideways.

  “You have not asked for any grain from the parishioners to support you over the past year,” the bishop said.

  Nothing like a surprise attack. The bishop would have made the King himself proud.

  “No.” The priest pulled his fingers through his hair again. The bishop was looking at him. “I am alone. I cleared land behind the provisional vicarage to sow barley.”

  “I was worried that, with the widow still remaining, the demand on the congregation would double,” the bishop said.

  “No, there was no need.”

  “Her year of grace will soon be over.”

  The priest nodded. The widow would have to abandon the vicarage and its lands.

  “It’s a shame they did not have any children.”

  The bishop flipped a few pages. “I see you managed to solve a dispute among the women about their seating arrangements.”

  “Oh, that.” The priest crossed one leg over the other. He nipped at his cloak to make it fall straight.

  “No, but how did you do that?” The bishop’s oval eyes did not blink.

  “I preached about why all Jesus’s disciples were men.”

  The bishop burst out laughing, a deep laughter that made his stomach hop. The priest hadn’t heard one of those for a long while. The bishop shook his head. “We have such a problem. All over Sweden. The country is being torn asunder, and the women fight against their status, striving to sit underneath the pulpit. God help us.”

  The bishop looked up to the roof as if he expected God to lift it off and intervene at this precise moment. “Very well,” he said. “What about the parishioners?”

  “Twenty-two new children since last year—all baptized. Ten of them are Lapp children who were given new, Swedish names. Last winter there were twenty-eight funerals, this spring eight. There are four bodies buried at different locations that will be transported to the church when there is snow: two from the area of Storberg, one from Vanberg, and one from Blackåsen.”

  “From Blackåsen?”

  “A settler. Eriksson,” the priest said. “Wolf,” he added.

  “Eriksson is dead?”

  The priest nodded.

  “Wolf had him?”

  The priest hesitated. “One or two people seem to think otherwise.”

  The bishop got to his feet with astounding agility for a man of his age. He walked to the window. His large frame blocked out the light. “What do you mean ‘otherwise’?”

  “A new settler woman, a Finn. She thinks Eriksson was killed by someone. Everyone else says wolf.”

  The priest wasn’t certain why he said so much. It was a fine balance between not neglecting to tell anything you’d later be blamed for concealing and giving your senior too much say in how to manage your congregation. It was one of the predicaments with being in such a remote place: you lost your astuteness.

  “Where on Blackåsen was he found?” the bishop asked.

  “On the top.”

  “Close to what they call the Goat’s Pass?”

  “I believe so.” The priest hadn’t realized the bishop knew Blackåsen that well. The bishop had been in the district much longer than himself, but still, to know such detail …

  The bishop turned around. “Your judgment worries me,” he said, with early thunder in his voice, a low rumbling the priest felt rather than heard.

  “Anything, anything at all regarding Blackåsen and in particular regarding the Goat’s Pass is of highest priority.”

  “I don’t understand,” the priest said.

  “I know your predecessor died before you arrived, but you ought to have familiarized yourself with your parish by now.”

  “I have read the Church Books.”

  “Not everything is in the Books. Especially not what concerns the Prince of Darkness and those who are with him in pactum.”

  The Prince of …

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a hearing against Eriksson’s wife, Elin.”

  “That, I know. For acts of sorcery. You resided over the inquiry. She was found guiltless, fortuitously.”

  “Guiltless.” The bishop swung his large head. “She didn’t deny anything—claimed to have received her sagacity from God. No, I deemed we couldn’t afford rumors of sorcery on Blackåsen, and so I closed the hearing down.”

  The priest looked away, to give himself time to arrange his features. It was as if the bishop were telling him he believed in magic. But they knew that the trials of the previous century had been misguided. The bishop had turned back to face the window.

  “Blackåsen is full of the old,” he said. “The old and the ugly. The Lapps used the mountain for their worshipping. In one of the missionary’s stories he tells how he came upon them after they had raised a pillar toward the sun—I have read the account myself. What isn’t written down, but what people believe, is that during the tumult that followed, one of the old Lapp women pushed the pillar so it fell. It hit the mountainside and the mountain split open. She reached do
wn and pulled the Devil out by his tail, tied it around one of the boulders inside the crack, and put a spell on him so he couldn’t leave the mountain. ‘You think your god has all powers?’ she is supposed to have said. ‘Let’s see then how strong he is.’ They burnt her at the stake.” The bishop turned to face him. “That’s how the name ‘the Goat’s Pass’ arose. And now, whenever something happens on the mountain, people claim it is the Devil. They say that on that mountain God does not rule. They say that whatever is said on the mountain will echo for generations.”

  “There is talk of some … disappearances? I’ve heard it said that children disappear?” The priest tried a chuckle.

  The bishop tossed his head. “I looked into that when I first came to the district. Two children have gone missing over ten years. It’s no more than anywhere else. Most likely they got lost or there was some accident their parents want to hide, but it’s enough to keep the fear alive.”

  The bishop interrupted himself. “I want to know with certainty what happened to Eriksson,” he said.

  “I will send a message to the law enforcement officers by the coast.”

  The bishop hit the desk with his fist. It was so sudden, the priest jumped. The bishop remained so, leaning on his knuckles on the desk.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want fear to spread. I want you to find out what happened, but discreetly. You report back to me.” He rose. “Anvar’s widow, Sofia, could have told you things like this. She was her husband’s right hand. Nowhere else have I seen a woman contribute as much to the service of the Lord. Have you made her acquaintance?”

  “Yes, of course.” The vicarage was just across the green.

  “I mean really made her acquaintance,” the bishop said. “It is not normal for a priest your age not to be married. It would make it easier on the funds of the Church as well if there was one vicarage instead of two.”

  And then, above them, the old church bell started swaying. The priest rose in disbelief. The dry clang bellowed from the bell tower, hammered body and soul. The priest opened his mouth, but his voice drowned in the sound.