Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  Beyond the hill, in town, God’s soldier has gone to see his verger.

  “I am going to have to travel to Blackåsen,” he says.

  The verger is sitting down. He’s sewing on an altar cloth, head tilted, legs and scrotum hidden underneath sacred fabric. “That won’t happen now,” he says. “We call this period the time of decay. The first snowfalls. The frost needs to go into the deep of the ground before the snow becomes hard enough to carry the weight of a man. Until then the mountains are unreachable. We’ll have to stay here.”

  God’s soldier looks out. All he can see is his own reflection in the window.

  North: a settler stands by his window. He watches the snow fall. Behind him the woman he used to find so beautiful; a gift to him from the gods, asleep in their bed. Her breathing grates.

  “Half a meter,” he says to himself. “Before tomorrow morning, at least half.”

  The woman coughs and he stiffens. So die then, he thinks. Die.

  He waits without turning around. No. Sleeping. Still sleeping.

  By late afternoon the snowflakes that float in the air above the mountain are as big as Lapp mittens, as soft as the wool closest to the sheep’s heart. Snow settles on the trees’ branches. It covers the rocks by the river. By the lake you can no longer see across to the other side.

  A few perennials shed their last leaves. Life twines itself downward along roots and bulbs. The annual plants prepare to die, knowing their seeds are buried in the earth, thinking thus they shall return. The animals are still. All is quiet.

  By the lake a man stands on a porch, hands flat by his thighs. He stares at the sky falling down around him. He leans his head against the cold of the house, lifts his hands and places them on the timber, and breathes. Then he whacks his forehead against the wall as hard as he can. He grabs new snow off the railing and presses it against his forehead. Feels pain turn to water in his hand.

  Day after day the snow falls—to reach a meter on day three. The snow floats and drifts with the wind. Restless, but not light. The branches have to give under its weight. One after another, they squeal, fold, snap, and let the snow fall to the mountain’s surface with a dull, achy sound. On the river crystal sticks to crystal, making floating islands. The ice by the lakeshore creeps further out on the open water. The marsh is white.

  On the roofs of the few houses snow lies in thick bulges. In the windows there are lit candles. Lit, for the light has mellowed. A small change, but darkness is on its way. Inside there is already dimness in the corners of each room.

  Here someone is telling tales. His wife is baking knäckebröd—crispbread. She’s learned this and more since they came. With the help of her sons she has hung a pole in the roof on which the bread will dry.

  “To turn wild reindeer into a herd, the Lapps first need to castrate one reindeer.”

  He speaks as if he knows this by experience. Let him, his wife thinks. Whatever keeps him occupied.

  “They put a cloth around its testicles and bite them off with their teeth.”

  Their children are too old for this kind of story, yet they moan.

  “That reindeer becomes forever calm. He can be led by a rope. But the most important one is that which follows the first. He is still wild, a leader, and he brings with him a large following.”

  “Why does the second one follow?” one son asks.

  “That depends on its character,” he invents. “Perhaps it is out of loyalty to the castrated one. Perhaps it feels forced.”

  His wife is making porridge. Her steps are heavy. It’s the child inside slowing her down. He remembers his mother saying that porridge calmed the nerves. He’s not certain it calmed hers, his father a drinker and with sons like the two of them.

  His woman hangs the iron pot on its hook. She stirs in it. She lifts the vessel off the fire. While the meal cools, she sits down to wait. There is the whine of the spinning wheel. Never resting. She’s a good woman, this one, stoic. At once his whole chest stitches up and makes it impossible for him to breathe.

  It is like that, missing. It comes in waves.

  Warmer, colder, warmer again. The snow thaws and refreezes and mellows and turns grainy. The floating islands on the river catch each other. Across the lake there is a thin sheet of ice, clear as glass. The marsh is asleep now under meters of snow. The trees have doubled in size. At dawn the crystals on the branches catch the remaining light and shine like a million tiny stars.

  A woman sits by a table. She is folding clothes. How strange, she thinks. All this time, all these struggles, you think you have a new beginning and it proves to be an end.

  The children are running around, chasing each other, shouting. They are too young. Too small. Too old, too large, too fast. They’ll do her no good.

  The days become shorter. The dark from nightfall lingers on right through the day. Underneath the lowest branches of the spruce trees, it lurks and watches. By the river and the lake, it hangs in the air like a tinted haze.

  The real cold arrives. The houses come alive. There is ticking and creaking. Wind and snow work on any painted area, and what is left will be a sheer memory of the original color: small, flaking squares in some places; minute, almost-colored droplets in others. When the settlers come inside after feeding their animals, their curls are silvered. You can break off hair that’s frozen like that, feel the tress come loose between your fingers and not hear a sound.

  Her daughters have rubbed the last traces of food off the plates with their fingers. More poor or less poor, she tells herself. That’s all it’s ever been. She refuses to feel anything. As if not feeling would make a difference.

  Her elder daughter is clearing the room, sorting laundry, folding clothes.

  Find it now, come on. There you go: feel. What is that in your mother’s skirt pocket?

  The girl hesitates, then her fingers close around it. She takes it out and holds it toward the light: a piece of coarse blue glass in her hand.

  PART TWO

  Maija didn’t hear the first shot, heard something perhaps, but didn’t make sense of the sound. She was in the barn seeing to the animals. The goats bleated, complained to her of the new cold.

  The second shot could have been anything—a shutter slamming, ice rupturing, a tree breaking …

  It was with the third that Maija recognized the sound. She ran out. Five shots in total echoed out, rolled against the mountain with the sound of a whip.

  Southward from …

  Elin, she thought. Or Daniel and Anna.

  Maija ran as fast as she could, whispering with each step, please let me be wrong. The night was black, but the snow glowed and gave off light. Her shoes scraped as they struck the crust. When she came to the open area that was the marsh, she slowed down and made her way around it in a jagged half-moon.

  At the edge of Elin’s homestead she stopped. Her nose and forehead ached. She was panting. The cottage lay dark in the middle of the empty yard. Nothing roused. All was silent. She abandoned the shelter of the trees and walked out into the open, her gait slow and careful. There was a thick drift of snow on the porch. She knocked and tried the handle, but the door was frozen shut. “Elin?” she said.

  There was no response.

  In the sparse light she couldn’t see a pick. She began stamping on the snow to break it into pieces. The sound echoed out over the yard and hit against the trees. She kicked the slabs down on the ground and tugged at the handle, but it didn’t move.

  “Elin!” she called.

  She fell down on all fours and dug in the snow with her hands. She rid herself of her mittens and edged her bare fingers underneath the door, pulled them under its frame, squeezing her fingertips a few times against the palms of her hands every now and then to numb the pain. She tried the handle again.

  “Elin?” she whispered into the hallway and took a few steps forward.

  The kitchen was silent. Packed snow pressed against the window and threw a blue tint onto the sill and into the room.r />
  It took time for her to be able to see. And then she could.

  Spots, snaky traces, smears, rivers gleaming black.

  She walked toward the bedroom. On the threshold she stopped.

  They were clad in their nicest clothes, as if ready for a visit to the market in town—the boys in round-necked linen shirts, the girls in white, embroidered dresses—had it not been for those stains, those large brown cornflowers withering on chests and on arms. Their faces were already gray with frost, their vacant eyes shining light blue. They lay side by side on the bed. They must have been dragged there.

  And their hands—oh God, their hands—positioned on each tiny breast in the symbol of prayer, arranged with the love and precision with which you fold a newborn’s shirt.

  Elin herself lay on the floor across an overturned chair, her back in an impossible arc, her neck undone, the rifle beside her. She was no larger than the children on the bed.

  Maija covered her mouth with her hand. Why didn’t you come to us? she thought, and her eyes filled. Why? Surely, there must have been another way!

  The front door opened behind her and she turned. A cloud of white whirled in and down through the dark like a glittering mesh.

  “Don’t,” Maija called. “Don’t come in.”

  But the heaving sound told her it was too late.

  Elin’s brother-in-law, Daniel, rested his head against his arm on the wall. He had vomited on the floor. Now he was still. Except his hand, which touched the doorframe as if caressing it, again and again. The gesture made Maija think of Dorotea, the way she was after she had cried for something, when the emotion was gone and yet the tears kept coming because she was caught in it and didn’t know how to stop.

  Maija stood just behind him, each of her breaths like a puff of ash falling through the dark.

  Daniel cleared his throat, inhaled, and stood up straight. He wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, and without acknowledging her, he left. She felt his presence by the window, and then he was gone.

  Maija thought she saw their souls beneath the roof: thin, restive veils. Her guts churned. She opened the two windows in the bedroom and the one in the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about where they would go. From this point onward this part of the forest would be considered haunted.

  Her legs were at once so weak they could not hold her weight. She sank down on a chair. How could a mother kill herself and the offspring she had carried beneath her heart for nine months and in her heart ever since?

  Her stomach wouldn’t settle and she focused on the small things. On the bed the blanket and the sheet beneath were folded down in a neat invitation. Small, tidy flowers were embroidered on the pillowcases in red. The sheets had gauzy patches where the cloth was worn thin. Around the window someone had painted a red, leafy pattern on the pallid logs. The window lacked curtains. Outside across a cast-off snowdrift, the branches of a black tree scratched the sky. She couldn’t see what this home might have been like while there was still life. She thought about two brothers. About a man and his wife. She stared at the timber walls as if they might open and tell her the stories smoldering inside, but they were silent.

  What could make a mother kill her children?

  Only madness. Not the enduring, dull, weakness of mind, no—an abrupt plunge into unspeakable darkness.

  Night began to close. The windows ought to be left open for many days, but there were the wild animals, and so Maija shut them. As she walked back, daylight broke. The small things that moved at dawn had already been. There were tiny footsteps and traces of joy in the sparkling snow, but they didn’t move her. I guess people will be happy now that Elin is dead, she thought.

  Gustav was on the marsh testing the ice with a wooden stick. She wished it was someone she could have talked to; anybody but him. Most of all, she wished it would have been her husband.

  The priest was in his study. The room was cold. His bones ached. All appropriate. He would write about the frost in the Church Book:

  The killer frost of 1717. We knew we had to be brave.

  He tapped with his pen against the desk.

  The killer frost of 1717. God’s wrath on our province for the third consecutive year. We knew we had to be brave.

  His hand holding the pen, with every passing year, ever more like that of his father: the long back of the hand, the softness prompted by the flat knuckles, the tilted ring finger. He was even getting the same ridged nails.

  He threw the pen on the desk, rose, and walked to the window.

  It had stopped snowing. For three weeks they had been unable to go any further than the green. All the space in the north, yet cramped in the prison of a church green. He had imagined confinement would come easily to him. He remembered preaching once about Paul the Apostle’s imprisonment as a blessing: a time to still himself in prayer and meditation before the Lord. But while the housekeeper and the maid—even the verger—settled down and picked up chores such as spinning and knitting, the priest found himself pacing the hallway, feeling as if the wooden walls were about to topple him. The verger said that the snow was hard enough now to carry the weight of a man. Thank God, it was over. What a miserable parish. What a castigation.

  The King couldn’t have asked for him to be removed. The priest had belonged in this little group of men who stood shoulder to shoulder around the King. He could feel the weight of the King’s hand on his arm, as it had been that time the priest and his horse had fallen into a river and he didn’t change his clothes when they fished them out, even though it was on the brink of freezing. “Just like me,” the King had said.

  Another recollection: wintertime. Stuck in a camp outside Minsk in whitest Russia. Waiting to war. Sluggish soldiers with thin faces. No food. No water. Just the eternal wait, while thinking about the fact that you had no food and no water.

  One night the priest was lying awake when footsteps drew near the tent. There was a moment’s silence, then the fabric parted and a shadow sneaked in. The silhouette squatted by their clothes. There was a grating noise as their belongings were being elevated and searched. As if there were a rat with them in the tent.

  No, the priest remembered thinking this. I’m wrong—this is a rat.

  Enough.

  He shot up and gripped his rapier. Whoever steals from our King steals from God. He stretched to his full length, and with the weapon still in its holder, he whacked the thief on the side of his head. The man fell backward. The priest struck him again.

  “More soldier than the soldiers themselves,” the King will say about the priest later when they bury the traitor.

  And the priest knows it is true. Any lingering trace of the dead has been purged in the marches with the Swedish army. He is a new being; one of them. No, the King wouldn’t have asked for him to be removed.

  The priest remembered the bishop’s hand trembling on his breast. He couldn’t stay here; he had to go somewhere he’d be seen by the King. The King had so much on his mind, but if he just saw the priest, he would intervene and restore him; he was certain of it.

  The bishop had not visited the parish one single time for almost a whole year, and then he had come twice in a row. He’s worried, the priest thought. Eriksson’s death matters to him. Perhaps, if the priest did find Eriksson’s killer, the bishop would become more generous. Perhaps even support his request for a new post down south.

  The priest walked to get the old Church Books. He put them on his desk. The thick leather was cold against his fingers. He threw two more logs on the fire and sat down.

  The previous priest had filled four volumes during his tenure. The priest opened each to look at the dates. He placed them in chronological order. He had skimmed the books upon arrival, considering what then seemed of significance. He pulled the first tome toward him and opened it, feeling the dryness of dust on his fingers.

  His predecessor had not been wordy. Spring 1705. Arrived. Recruited verger. 1706. Child lost on B.å. mountain.

  Blackå
sen’s forest fire the following year had, in the eyes of the Church’s man, become: Fire on B.å. mountain. Nothing about the extent of the damage, although the priest had heard it was vast. Later: Vera Fearless and child missing. A few lines down: VF and child not found. Yes, this too the priest had heard about. Someone had said that for months Fearless was seen wandering around Blackåsen, searching for his wife and child before finding solace and reason in God.

  1710. Reports of plague in the south. Many dead. Well, that was an understatement. A third of the population had perished.

  The priest pondered his predecessor. Coming here was one thing, but staying—he calculated on his fingers—ten years? What drove the man? Priests in locations like this—it was either the adventure or a sense of righteousness, a feeling of being called. He suspected that with the old priest it had been the latter.

  In 1710 Eriksson had married Elin. Three years later another child disappeared on Blackåsen, and soon thereafter Elin’s hearing took place. There were no more details. Elin Eriksson. Examined for acts of sorcery. The next entry was the arrival of Nils Lagerhielm, wife: Kristina, sons: Petrus, Erik, and Jacob. Then, written with different ink and in large letters, as if to exclaim or, perhaps, complain: ELIN—INNOCENT.

  The priest had been astounded when he first saw the entry. There were still the sporadic accusations of sorcery, and the Church took them seriously—had to take them seriously—but he couldn’t even remember the last time that allegations had led to an actual hearing.

  The same year as Elin’s hearing, in the autumn, a complaint had been lodged against Eriksson by the Lapps. They accused him of burning more forest than he was able to cultivate and not leaving them enough winter fodder for the reindeer. It didn’t say who had made the grievance. The priest flipped forward a few pages—births, deaths, births, deaths. The following year the same dispute around the same time. And this time the accuser was mentioned by name: Antti. The priest saw before him black brows, a young, long-haired Lapp staring at him in church with scorn on his face. Fearless unwavering in the bench beside him, balancing out the young firebrand.