Wolf Winter

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  She left the church and walked toward the Customs House. There was a light on inside. The tax man had already arrived and installed himself. As Maija walked around the corner, she collided with someone. They crashed into each other so hard, both women called out, and Maija grabbed the other woman’s arm to prevent her from falling.

  Blonde, curly hair, blue eyes. The widow of the former priest.

  Sofia stared at her, mouth open. She closed her mouth, white teeth making a clapping sound as they came together.

  “Maija,” she said, “if I remember correctly.”

  “Sorry,” Maija said. “I was on my way to see the priest …”

  Sofia looked at her as if evaluating something. At first it seemed she decided Maija was not worth whatever effort she was considering. Her lip curled. Then she changed her mind, and that might have had nothing to do with Maija at all.

  “I just spoke to someone about him,” she said.

  Maija waited. Sofia was about to tell her something.

  “We said it was interesting that there is no record of him anywhere.”

  Why would they have asked about the priest? Maija thought. Then she realized what Sofia was saying.

  “He was a court priest …” Maija said.

  “It seems that is the first time anyone had ever met him.”

  “Perhaps he studied abroad. Perhaps he lived and worked far away.”

  Even as Maija said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The world was small—that of the nobles, of those around the King, smaller. They had the same background, fathers and mothers who knew each other. No, someone would have known him in his earlier life.

  “Something big,” Anna had told her. Before Eriksson died, he had said he’d “found out something big about someone big.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Maija asked.

  Sofia looked tired. “Yes, why am I?” she said. “I really don’t know.”

  The blackest of nights, but cloudless. The priest pictured black spots welling down the lit snow of the mountain. He imagined the tramping of hundreds of feet. The settlers were coming. He strained, but could not see them.

  Someone cleared their throat and he swirled around.

  The night man? At his home? The priest felt cold.

  “Something is hanging in the bell tower,” the night man said.

  “What?”

  “Someone.”

  The blackest of nights. But cloudless. Stars. Plenty of stars. They were running. The body was visible from beneath the tower. It was hanging from the highest beam, back against the side of the bell, legs, from the knees down, slumped over the edge, swaying in free air. A small person. Neck at an impossible angle.

  Jesus Christ. “Get her down.”

  Why he’d said “her,” he did not know.

  The night man climbed the tower, past the shape of the bell, a black sprite. The priest grabbed the wood of the bell tower with both hands. He put his foot up on one of the beams and started the climb into that blackest of nights with plenty of stars. He hadn’t climbed since he was a child. Then his father had called him agility itself. He might have been proud of that.

  “Neck’s in a noose,” the night man bellowed.

  Then: “Knot is too tight.”

  “Hurry!”

  The priest reached the top, put his feet on one of the beams, and braced his back against another. He grabbed the legs and lifted.

  But the legs bent at the knees. He let go and climbed higher so that he came to stand with his head inside the bell. He leaned forward and grabbed the legs again. Stick-legs.

  “Higher,” the night man called.

  The priest leaned his forehead against the metal of the bell and lifted.

  “I have the knot now,” the night man said. “When I say, let go … now, let go.”

  The priest opened his arms and let her fall. The body sighed down in the air before him and into the snow with a thud.

  He lifted his head. Where his forehead had melted the frost, there was something on the inside of the bell. He stepped closer. With his mitten he wiped the inside of the bell. It was an inscription. He rubbed further. It read, Here lives a priest with dissonance in his soul.

  At first he didn’t realize, and then he did: the bell-founder.

  The night man had reached the ground. He was turning the body over onto its back.

  “He’s still alive.”

  The blackest of nights and not a cloud. An abundance of stars. One moon, no larger than a nail clipping.

  The priest threw his outerwear onto a chair. He washed his hands in the basin. The water was ice cold. He washed them again, scrubbed his hand with the nails of the other. But this dirt could not be washed off. It sat underneath his skin. He scrubbed until his hands hurt, and then he forced himself to stop and leaned with his hands supported on the basin, feeling the frail man’s body in his arms as he had hugged him, the slight weight as he had carried him home. The pain as the old man’s wife opened the door and screamed as she saw them. And all this for what?

  Then he realized he was not alone and stood up straight. White-blonde hair by the window, slight figure. Why was he not astonished to find Maija inside his house?

  She stepped out from the shadows. They stood looking at each other.

  “I am not a priest,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “So what are you?” she asked.

  “The son of a hangman.”

  She gasped.

  “I know. It is funny, isn’t it? The lowest of the low. The furthest down you can get.”

  “How?”

  “I had a good head. The local priest taught me. I became a soldier.”

  How could he explain it to her? That day with the air so thin, so high. That wild sunshine. That ecstatic frame of mind they were in after their victory, blood still on the cuffs and the fronts of their uniforms. How he’d begun to sing the psalm.

  Who, then, could tell what he was or wasn’t? Who cared?

  The King on his horse inspecting his troops, stopping there to listen. The King’s eagerness to forget where he’d found him. Perhaps the King had forgotten. Who else, then, would ask questions?

  “Eriksson knew,” she said.

  “He did,” Olaus said.

  “How?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps he made enquiries. Perhaps it was nothing more than a suspicion. He ventured a guess and I gave myself away. Had he lived, he would probably have made my life a misery. But I didn’t kill him.”

  She exhaled. The sound was as clear as a question: Why should I believe you? But the question she asked was, “Why didn’t you?”

  It threw him.

  “I’d acted the role of priest for so long, perhaps I believed I was one,” he said.

  In some ways there was relief now that it was over. Although he had no idea what would be left of him once you removed the priest.

  There were knocks on the door.

  “Open.”

  A child’s muted voice.

  “That’s Frederika,” Maija said.

  Olaus opened and Frederika fell in. There was a hump on her back. The hump rolled off her and sat up. It was her sister.

  “It’s Mr. Lundgren.” Frederika was still on all fours.

  “What?”

  “He has done terrible things to the schoolchildren.”

  Olaus’s outbreath, so long and slow, it filled the hallway.

  Maija’s voice sounded from somewhere far away: “No.”

  “Not with Dorotea, Mamma,” Frederika said. “But with others. Daniel’s Sara, for one.”

  When Olaus Arosander was ten years old, he was still Olof, the hangman’s son.

  His father hanged with confidence, he lit fires with speed, he beheaded with precision—in silence and with impossible poise. “It isn’t for us to judge,” he’d tell his son as they cleaned up afterward and buried the bodies. “God brought this man here to this place and to us. God only knows his journey.”

  One ni
ght, like so many other times, they were woken close to midnight by pounding on the door.

  “Get up!” the voice outside bellowed. “You’re needed.”

  It was the case of a father who’d abused his own daughter. He’d managed to escape, and the hangman and his son passed time together with the members of the jury. There had been a strange companionship among those who waited. Hatred was permitted and cheered.

  They’d caught the man, of course. “This one we don’t bury,” his father had said. “This one we throw to the dogs.”

  Olaus remembered it because it was the one time his father had had no mercy to show.

  It might also be that he remembered the night because it was the one time he and his father had belonged.

  He imagined it now: riders on horses, Lapps on skis. Johan Lundgren on the run. But before dawn they would have that devil.

  Together with Maija and her children, Olaus had gone to Sofia in the vicarage. There were questions they wanted to ask her. Sofia’s face was taut. She had pushed each hand inside the opposite sleeve, as if cold.

  “Your husband said he’d seen evil when he visited Blackåsen,” Olaus said. “He was traveling with the verger.”

  “Perhaps he saw something,” Sofia said. “Or one of the children told him …”

  “How did you know?” Maija asked her daughter.

  Her voice sounded flat. This had been a shock for her too. From what Olaus understood, it could have been her daughter.

  “There were carvings in the windowsill in the school. One day there was a new one, an S for Sara … Dorotea said that maybe the verger didn’t want to give her lessons because of her feet. I thought about how Lundgren once talked to me about flawlessness. It sort of fell into place,” Frederika said.

  Sometimes that was how the most important insights came, in drips and drops. You took a step back, and there it was: a waterway.

  “What were the other carvings?” Olaus asked.

  “There were so many,” she said.

  Olaus steeled himself.

  “There was a B and a U.” Frederika frowned as she tried to remember.

  Sofia put her hand in front of her mouth. When she spoke, her eyes were full of tears. “The two children who disappeared on Blackåsen,” she said. “Their names were Ulla and Beata. The first went missing not long after we and the verger had arrived here. We held wakes for them.”

  “A K, a J,” Frederika said, “and an A.”

  Olaus looked to Sofia, but she was shaking her head.

  “I haven’t known all the children by name,” she said.

  Olaus thought about the old priest who was said to have died when about to mend the barn roof. It would have been easy. A frail man, a mild push. In the midst of the lambs there had been a wolf.

  When he turned, Maija was staring at the floor, her forehead wrinkled. Connecting the dots in that mind of hers, he was certain, assembling the picture none of them wanted to see but one that she would spend time with until it was all crystal clear.

  “On Eriksson’s body I found marjoram …” Maija said. “Marjoram is said to kill the lust. Perhaps Lundgren was wearing an amulet with the herbs, and Eriksson snatched it off before he was killed …”

  They were silent.

  “Someone needs to tell Daniel,” Sofia said.

  The father. The bishop must be on his way to attend Lady Day sermon. Olaus could leave it to him to tell the father that a man of the Church had abused his position and their trust. No. He’d do it himself. This had happened under his watch. And then it would be his turn to face the bishop.

  “We need to leave,” Maija said. She was looking at her younger daughter.

  Dorotea’s cheeks were red. Her mother was right—she shouldn’t be hearing this. Olaus walked them out. The hallway was dark and quiet. Frederika opened the door, and Olaus felt the chill from outside.

  “Strange that the bishop didn’t know about the verger,” Maija said. “I can’t help but think that at some stage he ought to have suspected … with the first child disappearing so soon after the verger’s arrival … well.” She nodded to him. “Good night.”

  He reached out and touched her arm.

  Instead of stopping, she took a step toward him. She came to stand so close that he felt her against his chest. The top of her head was by his cheek. Olaus didn’t dare to move. He realized he was trembling.

  “The bishop will be here tomorrow,” he said in a low voice that turned into a whisper. “In view of … you know … me and …”

  Me and my past? Who I am? Who I am not?

  He swallowed and felt her hair against his Adam’s apple. “I am certain the bishop won’t punish you now. He will forgive anything he had against you. I’ll speak with Daniel, but perhaps it’s best if you talk to the bishop without me. Tell him he can find me in my home. I’ll pack my things, and I’ll be waiting for him.”

  She bent her head back to look him in the eye and reached up to put her hand on his cheek.

  “You’re my priest,” she said.

  Their eyes locked.

  “Mamma?”

  One of her daughters called her from outside.

  Maija held his gaze.

  “I don’t have anything to say to the bishop,” she said and pressed her hand to his cheek harder, as if to leave a mark.

  Then the old church bell above them started swaying, ringing in Lady Day. The dull clang tumbled from the bell tower, out of step, before finding its rhythm. Olaus stood chest to chest with Maija as the bell rang and rang, singing with its broken voice, heavier and heavier, making the air tremble long after it had stilled.

  Maija could hear the news about the verger being spread in Settler Town. The whispers grew to the crackle of fire. The verger. The verger! Oh God, the verger! Then the town turned silent, and it was not silence as much as absence, awaiting what was to come. Morning arose and, with it, a ruddy, harsh light that cut the corners of each house sharp, that turned every color shrill, that revealed flaws and shortcomings without mercy. The mountains were spared by the light, and in comparison with the town, they seemed at once soft and welcoming.

  There they were: the sounds of runners crushing snow, whips lashing. The calls of men.

  “You stay inside,” Maija said to Frederika and Dorotea.

  “But Mamma,” Frederika said.

  “You stay inside,” she repeated.

  Maija followed the stream of people with tar torches flowing toward the church green. The carriages had stopped at the middle of the square. The horses were snorting, moving, adrenaline pumping. The men jumped off the sleighs. Inside one of them was the verger, clinging to its side. There was a murmur in the crowd around Maija. The men dragged the man down in the snow. The verger was shouting something. The mumble of the mob grew into a mutter as it began to move forward.

  The priest came running. “Wait!” he called.

  Apart from Maija, nobody else seemed to hear.

  “Be careful,” she shouted to the priest and pushed to make her way toward him, but the mass of people moved as one man. They dragged and hauled the verger through the square and toward the gallows on the hill. On the hillside the snow was deep. The snow and the cold should have brought the slow advancement to a halt, but even they could do nothing. The crowd advanced as if driven on by the Devil himself, faces black with hunger and hatred.

  There was a shot. The priest stood on top of one of the sleighs, a raised shotgun in his hands.

  Maija’s chest ached from breathing the raw air. The square and the hill were still.

  “Every man has the right to a trial,” the priest said. “No matter how awful the crime. Every man must be allowed to speak and be heard.”

  One of the men who stood by the verger let his hands fall. A woman beside Maija wiped her nose.

  “I didn’t do it,” the verger said. “I didn’t kill Eriksson.”

  Oh no, no, Maija thought. Be quiet. But it was too late, the mob was growling.

  �
�He will be sentenced,” the priest called. But people were no longer looking at him; they had turned back to the verger. “There will be justice. For every sin he has inflicted upon one of our young ones, there shall be punishment.”

  There was a second blast. Maija startled. The priest was craning his neck. He didn’t shoot, she thought. He is trying to see who did. But the people had pulled together into a wall, protecting whoever had fired the shot.

  When there was a gap in the crowd, she saw the verger lying face down in the snow.

  The parishioners waited in the pews in the church. Lady Day Mass was two hours late by the time the priest walked in and, following him, the bishop. The bishop passed the priest and climbed the pulpit so forcefully the structure shook.

  Maija tried to see the priest through the crowd, but couldn’t.

  “In view of the circumstances it shall be me who gives today’s sermon,” the bishop said. “By the mercy of God, the evildoings of Johan Lundgren have been discovered. Olaus and I have spent time going through the events, but it is impossible for us to tell who pulled the trigger, and no one has come forward. Perhaps it was, after all, an unfortunate accident.”

  Maija moved closer to Dorotea, put her arm around her, and now she could see him. The priest stood underneath the pulpit, and though his face was drawn, his poise was assured and priestly. The bishop doesn’t know, she thought, and felt relief. It wasn’t tenable, of course. Sooner or later the priest’s past would become known. Unless he stayed here, with them. Perhaps they could convince Sofia to leave things be …

  The bishop kept talking, about how common man was not allowed to take justice into his own hands. The worshippers sat immovable. One of us shot Lundgren, Maija thought. Others among us saw. But no one will ever talk. Her eyes caught on Daniel and Anna, a couple of benches in front of her on the other side of the aisle. Their children weren’t with them. Nobody sat beside them. It was as if their faces had been cut in stone. Maija’s eyes filled. Thank you, God, she thought and felt guilt and gratitude mingle to something exceeding the space in her chest. She pulled Dorotea closer.

  They had packed up, and it was time to leave for Blackåsen. Maija had made them late. First, she was convinced they had forgotten to pack the alcohol she had bought to wash Dorotea’s feet, and they had to unpack the bag to find it. Then she wasn’t certain whether there had been a key to the cottage and whether she ought to have locked it and returned it. As she closed the door behind them she had to admit to herself that she had hoped the priest would come and say good-bye. How stupid; they were just members of a flock.