Had Paavo been here, this wouldn’t have happened. He would have known better. She should have known better. But she was reckless. She was dangerous.
“It’s not your fault,” the priest said just then. As if he read her thoughts.
He was packing his bag. He pushed his black book down at one side. She walked to the window. Outside, the sky was an after-storm bright blue. Early that morning they had removed the snow from in front of the barn door. The new snow had already frozen, and it had been hard. When they finally got the door open, the goats had taken one look at them and gone back to sleep. They’re like weeds, she thought. They’ll always flourish.
“I was the one who convinced you to come,” the priest said. “If anything, this is my doing.”
Her throat stitched up.
The priest pulled his bag shut and fastened the leather strap. The room looked empty without his belongings. She could perhaps ask him to leave his collar. The thought made her want to laugh amid all the misery.
“Maija.” The priest was looking at her. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but please come with me and see Daniel. Now that we know what we know about him and Elin …”
She shook her head. She had done enough damage already.
“The bishop demands that I find out what happened to Eriksson. I think … it might be easier for the settlers to talk to one of their own.”
She shook her head again. Then she thought of Anna. Hopefully they had weathered the storm all right. It was hard giving birth on your own or with only your husband for support. But Daniel would know what to do if things happened, wouldn’t he? Of course he would.
She had taken a vow. She had pledged always to help women in their difficult times like she had been helped in hers.
Dorotea was sleeping. Beside her Frederika met her eyes. Her elder daughter nodded.
“All right,” Maija said.
Daniel had already shoveled a path from the cottage to the barn. When they arrived, he was throwing snow against the walls of the house with the spade as if he were trying to bury it. Strange. The sound of him scooping was muffled. They stood for a while before walking closer. The sunshine changed the landscape into one of fairy tales. The thick, white trees threw blue shadows on the glimmering snow. Hard to imagine this was the same Blackåsen of a few days ago.
As they approached, Daniel stood up straight, pulled off a mitten, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His eyelashes and brows were white with frost. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Some storm,” the priest said.
Daniel nodded.
“Is this weather normal?” Maija couldn’t help but ask.
“No,” Daniel said. “Can’t remember anything like it.”
She felt the priest’s gaze. Told you, it said. You couldn’t have known.
“Elin came to Blackåsen with you, not Eriksson,” Maija said, though that was not at all what she had come for.
Daniel stared at her. She was certain he was weighing his alternatives: speaking now, or risking her raising it again, with Anna present. Maija hardened her expression. Daniel clenched his teeth, his jaw turned rigid.
“We were promised to one another,” he said then.
“What happened?”
“My brother.”
They waited. He threw a glance toward their cottage, then continued.
“I left Blackåsen after the forest fire. The fire set something loose in my brother that might always have been there, but that he’d, so far, kept in check. He enjoyed it. There’s no other way of putting it. He didn’t care if anyone got hurt or died. He loved the way fire was uncontrollable, loved putting himself up against it, loved being a part of it. After that it didn’t feel safe to stay.
“I worked down by the coast. Thought I’d join the army … I did join the army, but just as I was supposed to depart, I met Elin.”
Daniel’s nose was red and he wiped it.
“We had saved money to get married when my father came to find me. He was feeling his age, he said, and wanted me back on the mountain. He didn’t want to leave Eriksson there on his own. I don’t know what my father thought I could do about my brother. I don’t know what I thought I could do. But it was an old man’s last wish. Elin and I decided to get married later. I thought we could settle in the valley, where the ground would still be easy to clear after the fire.”
Daniel shook his head. “It was in his gaze. … It was in how he looked at her. But I trusted. Her, not him. And then she left.”
“Why?”
“Who knows why anyone does anything? Maybe he forced her the first time. Maybe she felt she had no choice. Maybe she loved. She never said. One day she was gone.”
“The Church could have helped,” the priest said. “A promise like that is binding.”
Daniel shrugged, but Maija remembered the woman in the whore stool. You still loved Elin, she thought. You didn’t want to see her punished.
“Was that why she killed herself?” she asked and made her voice soft. “Because he died?”
“I can’t imagine that being the reason for her killing her children,” Daniel said.
“She would lack means for them.”
“Poverty didn’t scare Elin.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t know why!” He hit out with his hands.
No, no despair for the future, no regret for the past, could be as strong as to drive a woman to the deed. Elin had not been right in the head when it happened.
“I ought to have killed my brother,” Daniel said, “but I didn’t.”
“Not many men would have let it pass—a brother stealing a woman,” the priest said.
“I am not going to become like him,” Daniel said. “Never. Besides, if I was to kill him, don’t you think I would have done it then, rather than wait for seven years? No, no. I married Anna. Tried to get on.”
It’s all we can do, Maija thought. Try to get on.
The priest too was nodding to himself.
“Where is she?” Maija asked. “Anna?”
“She’s emptying the traps,” Daniel said.
Emptying the traps? That work was too hard.
“The child was born dead during the storm.”
Oh no, Maija thought. Not that.
Daniel was looking at the priest. Maija’s eyes filled.
“We didn’t have time to baptize it,” Daniel said, and his voice broke. He looked away, then he inhaled. “It was a boy. His soul will be damned now.”
The muscles on the priest’s cheeks were working. “Perhaps God is more compassionate than we think,” he said.
When she came home, Frederika was pale. Maija looked toward the fire and the bundle on the floor in front of it.
“She is sleeping now,” Frederika said.
Maija walked close to her daughter and gathered her hair in one hand. “How are you?” she asked.
“I can’t bear her screaming,” Frederika whispered.
“I know,” Maija said.
“No, I can’t bear her hurting, but I also can’t stand the sound.”
“I know,” Maija said. “The sound of pain is difficult to listen to.”
She looked at Dorotea. Lord, please let her keep her feet, she thought. What would they do if Dorotea lost her feet? She had to close her eyes. This was not good. We try to go on, she repeated to herself, took a deep breath, opened her eyes again, pushed her chin forward, as if she could take herself through the angst, through and out on the other side.
Frederika took out something from her pocket. It was the blue glass piece Maija had thrown away.
“Antti, one of the Lapps, said he gave this one to Nils,” she said.
In the weeks after the storm Frederika and her mother worked harder than ever. They’d seen the face of Blackåsen Mountain, and both knew they’d misjudged it. Frederika hovered close to her mother, fretful about being on her own, anxious for things to be said out loud, but her mother was silent. Though that could have been because
there was so much to do: They needed to bring in much more firewood and build a food store in the snow by the wall of the cottage. They had to make new skis. They would make more snowshoes. The shutter had to be mended, the broken window covered up.
The mountain was still. For now, it was silent. And the days passed. Frederika found she liked the cold. She liked what she became in it: her brain worked well. As she blew her breath out and watched the pillar of steam rise above her head, she felt the way she did after a nightmare: while the memory of the storm made her shiver, she also felt silly. But Dorotea’s feet spoke of the gravity of what they’d been through. The tips of her toes blackened and dissolved. Her mother cleaned them, lips pressed together. She pulled skin off in strips, lifted off small pieces of tissue, dabbed away buttery slush.
Two weeks after the storm it was time for Dorotea to start school. When Frederika came out, her sister held a large branch in her hand.
“A walking stick.” She grinned. She was wearing her mother’s large shoes, unable to fit her wrapped feet into her own, and had acquired a rolling walk, not to put weight on her toes. With both hands she dragged the stick after her in the snow.
“Much too heavy,” Frederika said.
Her sister scrunched her mouth up to one side.
“I’ll find you another one when we come back,” Frederika promised. She took the branch from her sister and stuck it in the snowdrift close to the porch. Her sister sat down on the sledge they’d made, and Frederika grabbed the rope and began to pull. It was harder than she’d thought, and she had to lean forward.
“So are you excited about going to school?” she asked.
“So-so,” Dorotea said. “They don’t teach you much.”
“That’s not true. You’ll learn to read and write.”
“I can read. But there isn’t anything to read.”
That was true.
“Why don’t you go any longer?” Dorotea asked.
“I am too old.”
For a while Frederika had dreamed of becoming a teacher. She’d tried to get noticed by her tutor, hoping he’d say she was unusually gifted and convince her parents to let her stay in school. But her mother needed her. At least she hadn’t been sent away like most girls, to start working for some other family.
The roof of the schoolteacher’s house sagged under the snow. But there was smoke coming out of the chimney and the porch was cleared.
She helped her sister off the sledge and up the steps. Mr. Lundgren greeted them in the hallway. Four children sat by the kitchen table—three boys and one girl. The girl’s braided hair was loosening, hair sticking up all over her head like a hedgehog. Two of the boys had red hair, the other one, black. Their noses were snotty.
“Welcome,” Mr. Lundgren said. “What weather we’ve had.” He pointed to some hooks on the wall. “You can hang your outerwear there. Will you be staying with us?”
The question was aimed at Frederika.
Frederika shook her head. “I’ve got chores,” she said. “I’ll pick Dorotea up after school.”
Mr. Lundgren watched as Dorotea limped to the table, but he didn’t comment.
“We will begin with the basics,” he said as Frederika shut the door. “I will question you on the Ten Commandments and Luther’s explanations of them. We will do reading too.”
“Not yet,” Eriksson said. “The ice doesn’t carry yet.”
Frederika inhaled. Eriksson had appeared by her side. He was looking out over the waterway. Her heart was pounding so loud, she was certain he could hear it.
“Please,” she said, “please don’t do that.”
Eriksson laughed and winked at her. “Sorry,” he said.
After a while she asked, “So when will we be able to start fishing?”
“In a few more weeks. Three at the most.” He nodded to himself and continued: “Gustav once walked the ice too early. It was the year he came—that man didn’t know anything when he arrived. He was way up there,” Eriksson nodded toward the bend in the river. “Took one step and he was gone. Current caught him. I was standing here. The ice gets stronger here quicker—there are fewer rocks. I ran out and cut a hole in the ice with my axe. Gustav managed to swim toward the light. I caught him like you catch a fish.” Eriksson laughed. “He was lucky. Came up, though, and was insane. Couldn’t get one clear word out of him. Seemed he was afraid of that—of being caught, unable to get out.”
Frederika thought of her own fear of being snatched, and shuddered.
“I need to go,” she said. “I am to pick up my sister from school.”
“I’ll walk you.”
Frederika thought about what Antti had said, that Eriksson’s blood needed vengeance.
“Is it to find out who killed you?” she asked as they walked. “Is that why you’re coming to me?”
He shrugged. “Seems to me that journey is as good as any other.”
“Can’t you just tell me what happened?”
He shook his head. “This is not my journey to make. It is yours.”
They had reached the bend of the river and he stopped. “Look at these trees,” he said.
Two large oak trees grew there on the bank, side by side. The trunk of one of them was twisted, as if the tree had rotated while growing. The trunk of the other was bumpy but straight. Their crowns were intertwined.
“The wind comes fast here around the bend of the river,” Eriksson said. “It hits these trees straight on. Both of them have faced the same hardship, but they have responded in different ways.”
“Both of them are damaged, though.”
He bent toward her and looked her straight in the eyes. “I am growing to quite like you. You are clever.”
Frederika felt her breathing become uneven. Eriksson stood up straight and began to walk again.
“I gave you a hint last time I saw you,” he said after a while. “What did you do with it?”
Now she was embarrassed. “Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“There was a storm.”
“You don’t have to hurry for my sake. I have all the time in the world. This is for you. You hear them, don’t you? How long do you think they’ll wait for you? I am warning you, Frederika. I am not the most dangerous thing around.”
“So how am I supposed to find out what happened to you?”
“Those of your sort have gifts. Elin saw things in her mirror. She had dreams. Find your gifts. Practice. And learn fast.”
He bent under a branch and held some others to the side for her.
“They say you argued the trial against your wife for sorcery should go ahead,” Frederika said.
Eriksson spat in the snow. “Nils told you,” he said.
Frederika didn’t correct him. “Why?”
“Oh, she was never at any risk. That wasn’t about her. I was trying something out. An idea I had.”
“You were trying out an idea?”
They were arriving at the school. They stopped just short of the yard, in among the trees.
“Nils,” Eriksson said again. “Those nobles think they’re better than everybody else. But the only thing that’s different about them is that they were pushed out from the private parts of some woman wearing silk. We bowed and scraped to him. My brother too. Shunned me. Treated me like you treat a flea. You’d be horrified if I told you some of the things those people did to me …”
“You did things too.”
He fell silent.
“You stole Elin from your brother.”
There was a pause, then his arm shot out toward her. She cried out, bending from the pain. Blood? That was blood dripping on the snow. Frederika hugged her arm to her chest.
Eriksson’s eyes were as pale as the river ice. He wiped the knife blade against his trousers and put it back in its sheath.
“You can’t touch me,” Frederika said. Her voice shook. “You’re dead. You can’t.”
“Says who?”
Her arm was pulsating.
She walked backward, away from him. “You can’t,” she said again.
“Oh, trust me, I can do worse than this. Remember that, Frederika. Remember it well.”
“Frederika, could you come here please?” Mr. Lundgren called.
The door to the teacher’s house had opened, and the children were coming out. Mr. Lundgren was standing on the porch saying good-bye.
“Begin with what is damaged,” Eriksson hissed, and again, he was gone.
“Frederika?”
“Yes.”
There was blood on her front. She couldn’t let Mr. Lundgren see it. How would she explain it? She didn’t know how bad the cut was. Frederika ripped off her scarf and wrapped it around the gash, crossed her arms, and pressed them against her chest, as if cold.
In the yard she passed Dorotea. Their eyes didn’t meet. Dorotea hobbled to the sledge and sat down facing the forest.
Frederika stopped beneath the stairs. “Yes?” she said to the teacher. Her arm hurt. Mr. Lundgren was looking past her at Dorotea.
“I’ll have to talk to your mother,” he said and shook his head. “Or you could speak to her for me. Dorotea doesn’t have enough Bible knowledge. She ought to be reading better too.”
Dorotea sat motionless on the sledge. If she didn’t move soon, she’d become cold.
“She’s going to need more schooling than the rest of you.”
“I’ll tell her,” Frederika said.
“Tell your mother not to worry about the cost,” the teacher said. “Dorotea can stay behind after school once or twice a week, at no charge. I’ll make sure she won’t have problems with the priest, come the Catechetical hearing.”
“Thank you. I’ll tell her,” she said again and half-turned away from him.
“Frederika, is everything all right?”
She’d been too eager to leave.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want my sister to get cold.”
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