We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  “Warren,” she said, “she’s not with Jonas.” She hung up.

  At church he sat next to Pirjo and Warren. It turned out that Uppu was still gone. Her car was gone. But they were calm—she was a little headstrong but she always came home, and where could she go? Why would she go? This was Pirjo’s reasoning. Anyway you had to wait twenty-four hours to report anyone as missing, and besides, she was eighteen.

  He spent the day at the Rovaniemis’, at their kitchen table, eating the leftovers from the party, running load after load in the dishwasher.

  “They are the best of me, you know,” Pirjo said to him. “They are the best thing I ever did with my life, my nine.” Her face looked moist but it might have been the steam from the dishwasher. Each time the phone rang they all went for it, but Pirjo always won. Around dinner, at last, Uppu’s sister called, Tiina, the unbeliever, in New York. Uppu had driven through the night without stopping to Tiina and Perry’s place on the Upper West Side and now Tiina had given her two sleeping pills. Uppu was not coming home. Uppu was not going to the church college. Tiina would try to make her call later.

  “Well,” Pirjo said. She put her hand on Jonas’s arm. “I know this is hard.”

  He went home. He tried calling Uppu even though he knew it was no use. He left her a message each time, the same message, I love you. Please come home. It was all he knew to say. She didn’t call.

  The next Sunday he sat with Pirjo and Warren, but Pirjo bowed her head the whole time, and Warren asked the congregation to pray for Uppu, his voice choking, his forehead nearly touching the pulpit, and the Sunday after that Jonas sat in the back row near the troubled youths, who used pocketknives to drill holes into the backs of the pews, and for two years he stayed there next to the troubled youths, in the rightmost corner. When Beth Kariniemi began to talk to him too much after church, inviting him to play viola with her in the Christmas program, he began arriving late and leaving early, and each time before he opened the sanctuary doors he would think—she is going to be there, she is going to be there—but every week she was not, and every week he was full of a great grief, but every week he came back, and every week he was forgiven.

  WHISKEY DRAGON, 1847

  NO ONE WANTED to marry her. For years she had gone to Easter church, watching every last one of her enemies and then every last one of her friends walk proudly to the altar in their brightest clothes. She had eaten their meat, drunk their whiskey, but no man appeared at her family’s tent, his reindeer dressed in bells. After what had happened to her father, she was bad luck. Her family was bad luck. There had never been any other child but her, and she was plain, and then she had become old, and for many years it had been just her and her mother, their tent always farthest on the edge of the siida. But now Aslak had appeared to ask her to marry him—homely, crude Aslak, yes—and her hands shook with an intensity of joy.

  Her mother did not want her to do it. His family were famous drunks—his brother came to services with a bottle in his hand and mocked the priest from the back pew—and Aslak was reputed to be just as heavy a drinker, if quieter about it. But life had already shown her that there were worse things than whiskey, and so she had come outside to greet him. He was wearing his whitest furs, and she unharnessed his reindeer and took him into the tent, where they sat in silence for some time with her mother’s coffee.

  She was disappointed that her wedding morning felt so ordinary. Laestadius was marrying them, with his heavy dark hair and brow, with his dramatic airs. She had expected him to be grander about the service, the way he was when he gave his sermons, storming about at the altar, causing women to cry and roll their eyes, making girls faint from visions. But he was dressed in typical settler black, and his family sat watching on the bench, also in black, his wife Brita nodding and somber. Behind them very few had come to witness the wedding—there were some patches of red and blue caps, and an old woman who rocked back and forth. Laestadius kept his voice low, the sermon quiet. “Remember, dear ones,” he said, “the evil that threatens you even now on your wedding day, that threatens your children, that threatens us all.” He stopped abruptly, and his voice grew sterner, tighter. “The time of the whiskey dragon is at its end,” he called out. “You are murdering your children,” he said, “with every drop you drink,” and Gunnà wished he would talk about love.

  Finally he made them recite the words—Aslak had to try several times, for he was already a little drunk—and all in all it had felt like any other spring Sunday, even the eating and drinking. She had wanted things to feel different, she had wanted to be a different Gunnà, recognized by all as something of a prize, but she knew, watching the whiskey dribble down his hairless chin, watching him wipe at the dribble with the back of his hand, that they were nothing but a foolish pair, Gunnà and Aslak, the bad-luck charm and the no-good drunk, her rough, wide face and his chapped cheeks. Even his hand in hers felt clumsy, and when they went outside after the ceremony to exchange reindeer she saw that her choices were fine and white and his were stunted, with short legs. But she would not let herself be disappointed in him; she would not let herself begin, so soon, to define the grievances of a lifetime.

  * * *

  They passed the spring in her family’s siida. At night her mother came to visit and Gunnà cooked her coffee and they listened to the men working, the sound of their axes against the hard crusts of snow, the sound of the reindeer shuffling behind them as they lipped at the uncovered moss.

  Spring was always a hard season, because they had to prepare for the migration north to the sea, and it was harder now with Aslak’s herd, too—their herds were not used to mixing together, and they balked at the presence of the additional bulls. The worst was that Aslak did drink heavily, it was true. When he drank he came home and reached for her in a way that she knew was meant to be affectionate but made her nervous, how he became desperate, pawing off her clothes. It was an ugly side of him, and she didn’t want to see it.

  But sometimes he went into the church-village and did not come home at all. Her mother would come visit her in the tent. She would say nothing, just sew small things—boots, mittens, things for the baby Gunnà was not pregnant with—and click her tongue. The dogs would crawl into the tent with her—they followed her mother everywhere, because she gave them bits of fat—and Gunnà would sit and hope desperately for the sound of Aslak’s sledge outside, but then night would come and she would sleep alone under the furs. In the morning she would emerge to find that he was not yet there, and she would go out herself to watch the herd, returning to the tents at night to find the barkeep and Aslak in the corral, Aslak putting his knife into the throat of a young male reindeer, the reindeer stumbling for too long before it finally stopped. Gunnà balked at the shame, of a husband who could not kill a reindeer quickly, of a husband who drank so much it cost an entire head.

  Her mother shook her head sadly. “You should take him to church,” she said. “I heard that’s what Inger did, but then all of those Maggas are even worse.”

  Gunnà said nothing. She worried that her mother would mention Laestadius in front of Aslak again. He hated him—he hadn’t even wanted to be married at the church, but these days there was no other way to do it.

  “Laestadius himself is a drunk,” Aslak always said. He insisted on all the old ways, all the old superstitions, always pouring out a bit of his coffee or whiskey for the earth-Haldes, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in three tongues when he spied a wolf track. He said someone in his family had once been a shaman, a few generations ago, but Gunnà did not believe this.

  At night she asked him, softly, if he could stay with her at the tents, and not take the sledge into the church-village anymore. It was very costly, she said.

  He said nothing. He was carving something—it was one thing he was good at, and he would carve some supple, small deer but then throw it straight into the fire.

  “I’m the one who watches the herd,” he said. “Sometimes all night.”

  “But,
” she said, though she was not sure it was entirely true, “I need you here, for what’s coming.”

  He kept carving, but she saw on his face that he was surprised. That night when they lay down to sleep he put his nose on the back of her neck, and she felt its cold tip. She did not smell whiskey, only him and the hay of the waning fire.

  * * *

  It took them three weeks to move the herds north to the sea, but the travel was easy, and Gunnà discovered that her suspicions were right—she would give birth in late autumn. When they reached the sea the days had lightened fully, and even in the tent sunlight seeped through at night, and she covered her eyes with the furs to sleep, but she was anxious with happiness—it crept up in her throat and kept her from sleeping. She would awake, brimming with fullness, and pace outside, watching the reindeer curled up like dogs in the distance on the fells, some of the calves awake, idle.

  She loved the reindeer that summer, even the loud rush of lowing all the calves made at once, even the frantic pace of marking the calves, the men with their lassos, the herd running in its endless circle away from the singing ropes, the calves crying as the marks were cut into their ears. At night Aslak went out to fish and in the evening they sat in the summer light of night and beat mosquitoes from each other’s backs and ate sweet, sharp berries.

  Even her mother, always moody near the sea—never liking to remember her father’s drowning—was cheerful. She was cheerful about Gunnà’s baby, and she was kinder to Aslak, going to extra lengths to sew his things or dry a new pelt.

  Once even Gunnà walked late at night with Aslak, her hand in his. They walked to a turn in the cape, where they could see out across the sea, where large plains of ice still sat, frozen, drifting on the water.

  “It was like this,” she said. She recalled, evenly, the sight of her father far off on the floe with the hundreds of heads of reindeer, where they had run to escape the mosquitoes, and where her father had gone to chase them back, before the ice had given way. She had been just a small girl and her mother had keened, shrieking as the reindeer had struggled, the tessellation of their antlers briefly visible above the water, her father’s hat visible for a moment, but they were so far out to sea, so small, and it had looked like a dream, almost a beautiful dream, the sea suddenly still as if nothing had been called under.

  Aslak took her hand. Things now, she felt, were different—that was the luck of the past. She wasn’t even sure if she believed in things like luck, and she decided she would not worry; she decided, staring out to the sea, that from now on everything was different, and she turned to look at their herd, in the distance, eating calmly on the fells, safe, safe.

  * * *

  They delayed the migration south for three days, and then they could delay it no longer. Around them the other herders had already set off, the sound of their bells long gone. Aslak worried, though, that the walking would make the baby come.

  “She won’t be the first woman to have a baby on the walk,” her mother said, but Aslak sent her to the back of the herd, where she would be able to rest when the reindeer rested, instead of leading the strings with the draft reindeer, which carried all of their clothes and slaughtered meat and tents.

  They had hardly crossed the third river on the fourth day when she felt the first straining of muscle inside her. She took the stick she was carrying and beat at the reindeer closest to her, to pass on her pain to something else, anything else. Near her Aslak’s cousins urged the herd on, the dogs biting at their ankles. She called to the nearest boy, and he came and helped her set up a small tent near an outcropping of rock. He found a dog and tied the dog to a tree. She lay beneath the tent and he gathered food, and skins, and water.

  By the time the baby was born she felt she understood those who wandered out into the tundra and let the cold kill them. Around her the hay was full of her blood and feces and the thick liquids of afterbirth. She was proud that she did not want to vomit. She had always been like that, fearless when she was supposed to cook the reindeers’ brains, or ladle their blood into the pots. “Let me do it,” she would say when her father went to slaughter the bulls. He let her watch. “I don’t know how you do that,” her mother would say. “You’re nothing like me.” Now, though, her mother cut the cord with her knife and washed the baby in snow she had carried down from higher on the mountain. How small the baby was, how red, how angry. Gunnà was wild with pain, she felt delusional from the pain, and she wiped desperately at herself with snow, and her mother gave the baby a bit of reindeer fat to suck on, and Gunnà tucked the baby in her tunic, against her skin, to quiet her.

  For two days they sat and she rested. Her mother washed the baby three times a day in the snow, and she pampered Gunnà, mixing her sour milk and herbs, giving her the softest furs to lie on. But they could not wait, and on the third day Gunnà stood and they packed the small tent and began the walk. As they walked Gunnà sang. Voia, voia, voia, nana, nana, nana, my poor witless husband, she sang, voia, voia, voia, nana, nana, nana, what will become of us, when will we reach the reindeer, when will come the end of this suffering?

  * * *

  She grew sick. Every movement hurt, and she was so tired she could hardly eat. Her mother fed her, but she threw up the meat and drank only small cups of milk. She heard them talk of sending for the highlands shaman, whom everyone knew had raised the drowned boy from the dead—but the most important thing, she knew, more important than her, than the baby, was to get the herd to the wintering place, before the days grew completely sunless and they had to travel in the dark. She worried ceaselessly over the baby, though she could see that it was healthier than she was. The baby hung in the pack off the lead reindeer, only her eyes showing out amid fur, but still Gunnà worried. Once a sparrow had nearly landed on the hood of the cradle and she had gone mad, trying to beat it away. When they stopped to rest her mother brought her the cradle and she opened her tunic and let the baby feed, though her breasts froze and felt numb.

  “Listen,” Aslak said at night, “do you think you can walk yet?” Every day he asked. Every day she rose to show him and nearly fell.

  “It’s something in the blood,” his cousin said, and they bled her, but she felt worse than before.

  Aslak sat at night in the tent, his forehead furrowed. “Aren’t I worth it?” she said to him, her voice low so her mother would not hear. She put her nose to his nose.

  “Ah,” he said tiredly. He sighed. She ladled him the coffee her mother had cooked, but he did not drink it. He took out a bottle and gave it a long sip.

  “Aslak,” she said.

  “How’s Little-Bell,” he asked. It was her name for the child, because she made so much noise with her babbling that it reminded Gunnà of the smallest reindeer’s bells. Her mother looked at Little-Bell, asleep in the cradle.

  “She eats,” her mother said. “At least one of them eats.”

  He stood up and left.

  “When winter comes,” her mother said, “you must watch him. He will drink away the herd.” Gunnà listened for the sound of his steps outside but he was already gone.

  * * *

  By the time they reached the wintering place, the reindeer were already too thin. They were worn, from working too hard to get at the moss along the way, and they had lost several calves in the river crossing, and three to a wolf, despite the dogs setting upon the wolf, the snarls of which Gunnà could hear even from her sledge at the front of the string, even across the tundra full of their hundreds of heads of reindeer.

  “There are no good omens,” her mother said. “I don’t like it.”

  Aslak thought her mother’s talking was a bad omen. He was moody now, and never in the tent, always coming in long after the dark had fallen, his cheeks cracked from the cold, so that Gunnà rubbed and rubbed reindeer fat onto his face but still his cheeks bled in places.

  “Did you sew today?” he said. The skins had rotted in the damp of the migration, and there was much that had to be done, before the true c
old of winter set in and their hands would be too stiff for the work.

  “Ha,” her mother said.

  “Soon,” Gunnà said. It was true she did not yet feel herself, but also true that she could have done much more now. Her mother was always the one with Little-Bell, dangling beads in her face so she laughed, so the Uldas would not come and replace Little-Bell with one of their own ugly children. For herself she was afraid to spend too much time with Little-Bell, afraid that her illness would spread somehow, and anyway her mother handled the baby so much more capably.

  At night she smelled Aslak behind her, the stink of his sweaty skins, the stink of whiskey.

  “Why?” she said.

  “It keeps me warm,” he said, “it keeps me awake. So the wolves don’t—so the wolves don’t make me sleepy,” he said. He smiled at the tale, she could hear it as he talked.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not ready yet.” She could not bear the thought of her body being touched again, of her body being used again. It still hurt to walk, and to sit, and especially sitting in the sledge was painful, the way it bumped over the hardened snow.

  “Gunnà,” he said, and he nuzzled behind her.

  “I’m resting,” she said.

  “You’re always resting.”

  Her mother hissed, from across the tent.

  He rose and sat in front of the fire, laying the wood carefully.

  She pretended to sleep, but she watched him drink. He drank it like it did not hurt his throat. He sucked at the bottle. He poured some of the whiskey onto the ground, muttering, and she knew it was a prayer to the earth-Haldes. The fire grew very hot, so she could feel the frost on the inside of the tent turn to fog. Her cheeks grew moist with the fog. Next to her, Little-Bell stirred, whined, and she sat rolled over to feed her. Her breasts hurt, but at least in the warm fire it was not so bad as before. She felt Aslak’s eyes on her as she fed Little-Bell.

  “Voia, voia, voia, nana, nana, nana,” he sang, “there is my beloved, there is my fox fire, voia, voia, voia—” He stopped suddenly. He drank more. “Nana, nana, nana,” he started again, “who says there is love, who says there is this thing…”