Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  “Ah.” He nodded. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Frederika grabbed the rope to the sledge and began to pull. As soon as they were in the forest she stopped and rolled up her sleeve. It was too dark to see and she raised her arm toward the light of the moon. Midarm, the lesion gaped black. Her body was holding back the blood for now, but it would soon relax, and then the bleeding would start again. It was a bad injury.

  She felt tears rising and clenched her teeth. Eriksson was crazy. She needed help. She couldn’t tell her mother. Her mother wouldn’t listen. Besides, she had enough on her mind.

  Perhaps she could speak with the teacher? She turned to look back toward the lights of his house. But what would she say? I was cut by a dead man?

  “What’s wrong?” Dorotea asked, a voice in the dark.

  “Nothing,” Frederika said. “I hurt my arm coming back from the river.”

  She pulled her sleeve down and bent to pick up the rope tied to the sleigh.

  The mountain was no longer silent. Dum. Tataradum. The darkness around her seemed to pulsate in rhythm with the drumming in the air. Frederika had never felt more alone.

  “Sofia is not at home,” the maid said. She curtsied so her linen bonnet fell over her eye. “The missus.”

  “I understand,” the priest said. “I asked when she would return.”

  “Oh, but I don’t know. She’s gone to the coast. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow, or the day after.” The maid curtsied again.

  To the coast? That was a long journey.

  “I saw her not long ago,” the priest said. “She didn’t mention she was going away.”

  “It was sudden,” the maid said. “Six days back. I had to pack at once.”

  The priest walked down the steps of the vicarage porch. Winter was no time to travel if you could avoid it. And you didn’t make long journeys on impulse. Purchases were planned long in advance. If you needed anything, you borrowed until the market time. Illness in the family, perhaps?

  It was dark as he crossed the church green. It wasn’t the sky but more as if darkness hung in the air itself. The verger’s lodging was without light. The priest wouldn’t have minded speaking with him.

  Back home he resumed his place in front of the fire. Tomorrow he’d confer with his farmhand, see how the animals were doing. He’d speak with his housekeeper too for an update.

  The walls of the temporary vicarage creaked. He wondered how Maija and her daughters were faring. If only their house had been better built. But the cold sneaked in through the slits and the gaps, and the window panes were thin. Thick glass, in his mind, was linked to wealth. He remembered it crunching underneath the soles of his borrowed shoes as a child. The whole of Stockholm knew that on a night out, the King and his friends used to throw stones through the windows of people they liked. Their idea of a joke.

  One night on his way home after work, he’d seen them. They’d come toward him, dressed in colored silk jackets with wide sleeves of velvet. Two of them wore hats. The King seemed to have lost his. They were walking arm in arm. Pushing each other. Laughing. Yelling. He had stood there on the shards of glass. Covetous, he realized now. Already then he had so wanted to be one of them. One of the King’s friends had caught his eye and left the others. He stood swaying in front of him before bending down to peer into his face. His coat had silver buttons. The man had stuck out his tongue.

  The priest had run the whole way home.

  Perhaps they never really saw him as one of them. He’d thought the others had accepted him, and not only for the sake of the King. What if it was the King that had asked to have him removed? No, he didn’t believe that.

  The room felt bigger this night. The fire didn’t manage to light up the far corners. The bright chairs shouted about being vacant.

  The housekeeper might still be up.

  There was a smell of boiled cabbage in the dark corridor toward the kitchen, and he wrinkled his nose. He pushed open the door. A woman screamed and recoiled. There was a loud crash—

  “I am so sorry,” she said. It was the young maid. She was blonde and small. Childlike. She bent down to pick up the pieces of a plate and put them in her apron. “I didn’t expect you here. Normally you don’t come to the kitchen …”

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “I just wanted …”

  What—company?

  “I need something to eat,” he said.

  She curtsied. “At once,” she said.

  The rest of the evening the priest walked from window to window, without being able to see a thing. Still, he didn’t have the peace of mind to sit back down.

  The widow returned the following day.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me,” she said. “I came back late last night.”

  The priest gestured for her to sit down. She did so and took off her fur. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a lace collar. Her hair was tied behind her neck. A fire blazed in the fireplace. The room felt small and warm this day, and the brightly colored chairs, welcoming. Funny how things seemed different in the daylight, he thought. Or perhaps it was having other people around.

  “Did you have a good journey?” he asked.

  “As good as journeys can be.”

  They chuckled.

  “So you were by the coast? Family matters?”

  The widow smiled. “And how was your journey?”

  “Not fruitful. We traveled to the Lapps.”

  “We?”

  “Maija Harmaajärvi accompanied me. She and her daughters did. You know, the new settlers from Finland.”

  The widow’s smile was somewhat cooler now. “I know of them.”

  “Fearless claimed that none of his people had anything to do with Eriksson’s death, and I believe him. To think that they would go to such drastic measures for land doesn’t seem plausible.” He paused. “They did, however, tell us about Daniel and Elin. Did you know that Elin came here with the brother—with Daniel—not with Eriksson?”

  Her lips parted and exposed small white teeth. “I did,” she said.

  “But … why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I worried it might have been spoken of in confession. Anvar was not always as careful with what he told me as he perhaps ought to have been. It was up to me to be cautious. You do understand, don’t you?”

  Some priests spoke too much. The priest could understand the loyalty of a woman toward her husband. Toward the Church. In actual fact it was commendable.

  She leaned forward and touched his arm. “Elin belonging to Daniel was so long ago. If I thought I knew anything that might shed any light on Eriksson’s death, I wouldn’t keep it from you.”

  Her hand was warm.

  “Irrespective of the circumstances under which it was told.” She looked him in the eyes. He nodded.

  A delightful woman, he thought when she left. A pleasure to be around. Distinguished, virtuous, able.

  Someone cleared her throat. The housekeeper. Officious woman. Though nothing would work without her.

  “Yes?”

  “I understand there was some bother with Beatrice last night,” she said.

  Beatrice?

  “The maid,” she said.

  He still didn’t know …

  “Clumsy, by nature,” the housekeeper said, “drops things all the time.”

  Oh, that. He waved it away with his hand.

  “Beatrice needs her employment, see. Her father and mother are both poorly. They stayed here because she has her work.”

  The priest nodded.

  “Otherwise I would have let her go a long time ago. Not that there are any replacements.”

  The priest felt a twinge of irritation. The housekeeper made to leave.

  “Wait,” he said. “How long have you been in the priest’s service?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “There can’t be much you don’t know about the parish after fifteen years.” He smiled. His face felt stiff.

  “I guess not.�
�� She nodded.

  “Did you know that Daniel and Elin were … together?”

  She was torn now, he could tell—struggling between some vague notion of the delicacy demanded by her employment and the chance to gossip with the priest. But she was not a delicate woman.

  “They exchanged wives,” she said. “Daniel and Eriksson.”

  “I didn’t think Eriksson had anyone,” he said, aghast.

  She puckered her mouth. “Maybe not,” she had to admit. “But at least Elin came to town first with one, then with the other.”

  “What did the old priest say about it?”

  “I am not sure he noticed.”

  Of course he would have noticed. The old priest had let it be. Perhaps he too had been afraid of Eriksson.

  “There was a case in the Books many years ago. It was written down as K against the church. Do you know what that might have been about?”

  The housekeeper shook her head. Her eyes flickered and she licked her lips. The priest could imagine her dismay at possibly having missed something. So whatever the claim against the church was, it hadn’t been gossiped about, he thought. The old priest had kept that matter close to his chest, not even sharing it with his wife.

  I don’t know what I am looking for, he thought then. It’s like fumbling in the dark. He remembered what the widow had said about her husband’s state of mind just before he died.

  “Do you remember the last time the old priest went to Blackåsen Mountain?”

  She nodded. “He and the verger went for the Catechetical hearing.”

  “What was he like when he returned?”

  “Sat in the same chair you are sitting in right now and cried,” the housekeeper said.

  “Cried? Are you certain?”

  She nodded again. “‘Sweet priest, what’s wrong?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘Oh, my dearest Lydia,’ he said, ‘how can I do otherwise, after what I have learned.’”

  The priest didn’t quite believe the exchange had happened that way, but waved for her to continue.

  “‘Tell my farmhand to prepare the horses and the carriage,’ he said, ‘I must travel south.’”

  “Did he tell you what had happened?”

  The housekeeper shook her head. “‘I wouldn’t want to tarnish the purity of your mind, dear Lydia,’ he said when I asked him.”

  Oh God.

  The housekeeper sighed and looked to the ceiling. It was one of those sighs that shivers a little in the middle.

  “Right. Thank you,” the priest said.

  She curtsied, mouth reverting to its habitual pout.

  “Now that the widow … Sofia … is back from visiting her family, I’d like to invite her over for a meal one day.”

  “Of course.” She curtsied again. “Though Sofia doesn’t have any relatives.”

  It was such a throwaway remark, he almost missed it.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “She’s an orphan. Old priest said she had no one but him, his Sofia.”

  “Did you ever see the dead?” her elder daughter asked.

  “Of course not,” Maija said.

  Maija was sitting by the table. It was morning, but night still floated in and out of the window. Frederika was standing, looking out. There was something in her face that Maija neither recognized nor liked.

  “Don’t stand in front of the window,” Maija said. “I don’t know what you think you can see.”

  Her daughter sighed and moved to sit down opposite her.

  “The Lapps see murdered souls in the Northern Lights,” Frederika said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I think you said it.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that at all.”

  “Why did you say it if you didn’t believe it?”

  “Perhaps I needed to believe it then,” Maija said, irritated. “I don’t know.”

  “The priest would say seeing them is wrong.”

  Maija stood up. “Frederika, we don’t have time for this. We have a lot of work to do. You and your sister are going to spin wool, and I am going to set traps.”

  The night had been bitterly cold, but it had been calm. Without the wind, the timber of the house squeaked and ticked. It was hard to make yourself go outside. The body protested as if, this time, it might be allowed to have a say. But the conversation with her daughter drove her on. She found her skis where she’d placed them against the wall of the house, pushed them to the ground, and placed her feet in the straps.

  Did you ever see the dead? What a question. Maija didn’t know when it had started, this … tendency of Frederika’s. It might have been when she and her sister had found Eriksson’s body. Maija needed to speak to her. She would put a stop to this right now, explain why it was so vital they stuck to reason. She might have to tell her what could happen when people didn’t. Maija summoning up Jutta in her imagination was different. That was a bad habit. Jutta used to say that the older you got, the more present your past became, and that might be true.

  Did you ever see the dead? Pfha. She was her father’s daughter all right.

  That was terrible, and it wasn’t true. Frederika was the one most like herself, and she was strong. Even as a newborn, Frederika had known what she wanted, how much she was going to eat and when. She had never needed Maija in the same way as Dorotea did. It was strange. Frederika was the child Maija had expected she would have, the one that looked like her and had her character. Dorotea didn’t resemble Maija in the least. Her features were so neat and pure, they made Maija think of glass. Her bones were fine. Maija used to think of Dorotea as her hand-out child. She hadn’t expected she would have a daughter like her—she was a gift. And yet it was Frederika that Maija had never had. If Maija got close to Frederika at night, she woke up and moved away. Dorotea still liked to lie close to you, thin fingers twitching, touching your arm or your side. “Wandering fingers,” Maija and Paavo used to joke as they fought for the spot closest to Dorotea in bed. Her feet would move up yours to seek warmth, feeling like small, cold frogs.

  Dorotea’s feet … there was still blackening and blistering, but her daughter seemed better. She couldn’t walk for long but managed short stretches. She bore the agony well, apart from when Maija cleaned her feet. Then the pain took over, Dorotea cried, and there was nothing Maija could do to ease it for her. Nothing. Then Maija’s helplessness turned to rage, and she seethed with anger that they had to go through this on their own.

  And not one letter had they received from Paavo.

  They were supposed to be the weaker ones. He was supposed to worry about them—not the other way around. Before they married, it had been different. She’d had to pry anything about how he himself was out of him. They’d been equals. She assumed that at some stage she must have given him the permission to lean on her for strength. She knew women who wouldn’t have taken it. Though she also knew women who’d had to take a lot more.

  There was a slight wind now and some brightening of the sky. Snow drew in sleepy veils along the slope in front of the house. She would set a couple of snares by the river, some midforest, and then a few more by the marsh. She’d gone through it in her head many times already: how much meat and fish they had in storage. It wasn’t enough to take them through winter. There was plenty of hay for the goats; if necessary, they could slaughter, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Animals provided milk and clothes. Slaughtering them was the beginning of a downward spiral that was difficult to break. When the river froze solid, they’d start fishing again. In the meantime she’d try to catch a rabbit or a bird. It might have been this that drove Elin insane—the prospect of not having enough food.

  The memory of the recent storm was a dark cloud in the corner of her mind, but you had to go on, keep moving, find new ways, look again. They’d manage. Though it had felt better when the priest was with them. Someone to share things with—even if it was despair.

  The river ice looked thick. She imagined i
t working, thickening, underneath the snow. In a few more cold days they’d be able to walk on it. She found rabbit tracks in the forest on her way to the marsh and set two traps close by. She tried to visualize the animal hopping along its habitual path, almost as if she could make it happen.

  Did you ever see dead people? she thought again as her hands pressed down the jagged iron mouth of the trap. She tore at the snow to remove enough of it.

  She set one more trap south of the marsh and then skied onward toward the bog itself.

  Once again he was in the middle of the otherwise empty field. She took a big step on her skis, bringing her closer to one of the fir trees so that he wouldn’t see her. Gustav was poking with a large stick in the snow. But why? She didn’t think there were any fish in the marsh, so what was he looking for?

  He began to run. Maija sat down. He ran with heavy steps in the deep snow. As he came closer, she heard him wheeze and whimper. He fell down on his knees in the snow and howled to the sky until his voice broke.

  She was shaking. A grown man’s screams were awful to hear.

  The war. It hadn’t occurred to her that the soldiers too could become damaged. She’d only thought about the pain and agony they inflicted wherever they went. Perhaps before, Gustav had been normal.

  She was tired when she got back to the homestead and stuck her skis in the snow by the porch. There was a thick branch, and she reached for it.

  “Don’t take it,” Frederika said. She was coming from the barn with a bucket in her hand.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to use it later,” Frederika said.

  Maija was tired and cold. She didn’t ask.

  When the priest arrived, the widow was cutting her maid’s hair, her own blonde hair gathered into a knot at her neck. She was laughing, her cheeks were red.

  “There.” She pulled the towel off the maid’s shoulders. “Like new.”

  The girl touched her bare neck and curtsied.

  The widow smiled at the priest. “It had to be done. Now you.”

  She nodded to the chair in front of her. “Might as well while I’m at it. Can’t have a priest who looks disheveled.”