by Ane Riel
I spent weeks using tins and logs for target practice before Dad let me shoot mice in the twilight. When I finally hit one it squirmed so much that I started to cry. My arrow had gone through its bottom, right above its tail, and whenever the mouse moved the arrow and the goose feather would scrape against the ground in small jerks. Dad soon killed it completely dead with a stick. He said there was no need for me to cry, I should think instead about how pleased the fox would be to get such a meal.
We went stag hunting when the moon was out because then it was dark and light at the same time. It meant that we could see and the stag wouldn’t suffer. The darkness took the pain away.
The first time I came along, the stag stood in a field right below the full moon. It had its side to us and Dad’s arrow went straight into its heart. But the stag didn’t fall to the ground immediately. It turned its head and looked at us and then took a few steps towards us before it knelt down in front of us. It moved slowly and it seemed quite calm. In fact, its death was one of the most peaceful things I’ve ever seen. I’m sure that it looked me right in the eye and that it wasn’t angry.
‘It was an old stag,’ Dad said. ‘Now there’s room for one of the younger stags and we have food for several days. It’s as it should be.’
‘But doesn’t it have children to look after?’
‘They’re big enough to look after themselves now.’
‘When will I be big enough to look after myself?’
‘Given your skill with the bow, not long.’ Dad smiled, and for a moment I felt very proud and happy. But only for a moment.
‘But what about you?’
‘What about me?’ He made a strange pause. ‘I’ll be with you even when you’re a grown-up and can look after yourself. I’m not going to die anytime soon.’
‘Not before your hair is white, right?’
‘No, definitely not before my hair has gone all white.’
At that time I didn’t know about Grandad and the lightning.
One of Dad’s and my favourite activities was finding books for Mum because she got really happy whenever we came home with a pile of them. You wouldn’t believe how many books people keep in cardboard boxes in their outhouses, and I often felt that they had never read them, or were ever going to. Eventually Mum had a mountain of books and she was definitely going to read all of them. Most were in the bedroom and in the white room, where Dad had built a big, fine bookcase for them. It’s true that over time many other books and things were stacked in front of the bookcase so you couldn’t see it any more – but we knew that it was there, and that was all that mattered, as we were fond of saying.
I liked books too. Mum had taught me to read and write well before my granny moved to the Head. She used to say you’d think I’d learned how before I was even born and just needed to brush up. It came easy to me, and it got even easier when I discovered how happy me reading aloud made her.
And that was why it didn’t matter that my grip on the pencil was a bit odd. I held it like an arrow I was about to launch, and I simply couldn’t get my head round the curved grip with my finger that Mum showed me. Finally we agreed that it was better that I held the pencil wrong and wrote right than the other way round. And if you think about it, it was lucky I didn’t hold the arrow like I was meant to hold a pencil, or I wouldn’t have hit my targets as often as I did.
One morning when I was practising with my bow and arrow behind the house I noticed that Mum was watching me across the laundry she was hanging up.
‘I know which story we’ll read next,’ she said out of the blue.
Now it wasn’t often that Mum said anything unless she was reading aloud from a book or trying to explain something to me. I don’t think she really liked talking, but she definitely loved reading, and I loved to listen to her when we sat in her bed with a book she had chosen. In fact, I don’t really know what I loved more – the stories or Mum’s voice.
Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference. Sometimes I forgot the voice and disappeared into the story; other times I forgot to listen because I was lost in her voice. She didn’t speak very loudly, but loud enough for a person to disappear into her voice. There was air in it. Back then.
Later, I noticed that the air disappeared. Her voice grew weaker until it was only a whisper and my name became a snatched intake of breath.
I’m glad she had time to teach me the alphabet before her voice found consonants such a problem that she could no longer use them. ‘I’ was the last thing she called me: ‘I’. I started going to her bedroom, which she could no longer leave, and I’d read aloud to her from a book I had chosen.
One day the vowels stopped too.
I couldn’t understand why she had lost her voice. She had taught me not to swallow my words when I spoke. But perhaps that was exactly what she ended up doing herself. Perhaps she ended up eating her own voice. First the air, then the sound. She ate so much.
It was Robin Hood she was thinking about behind the laundry.
Dear Liv
I’m sure you must have wondered about my voice. I can’t explain what happened to it other than the words got stuck in my throat. It felt as if they filled the space on their way up and I didn’t have the strength to push them the final stretch. Finally, it was easier not to try.
It was like having a throat infection that you constantly try to soothe by eating hot soup and food that is easy to swallow. That was how it felt. The less I was able to say, the more I had to eat.
In time, a big mass of unspoken sentences was stuck in my throat. Broken words that had nothing to do with one another, interrupted beginnings, unfinished endings, lines with no air in between all piling up.
My grief was lodged there too. And I didn’t want to pass it on to you. Or to your dad. He had his own to deal with. So I kept it inside me. It was my way of protecting you both.
Your dad had other ways.
All my love,
Mum
The Darkness and the Mess
Jens Horder took only what he needed from nature and nothing more – except when it came to resin.
It all began with his curiosity. His father had introduced him to the golden balm of the trees and told him about its properties. Shortly before his unexpected demise, Silas Horder had even demonstrated to his son how to tap the sap from a pine tree by removing a small patch of bark from the trunk. Below the patch he made a V-shaped spout which funnelled the sap into a cup which he attached below the tip of the spout.
Jens soon discovered which trees were best suited for this purpose, and in time he started tapping them regularly. He always went about it carefully because the tree should not suffer from his intrusion. It should be milked tenderly, just like a cow.
He knew that he was inflicting injury on the tree, but it felt necessary, for reasons he couldn’t explain. Perhaps the resin was a kind of pine-scented high, an aromatic stimulant he couldn’t do without. Or perhaps Jens genuinely believed that he would one day find a use for all the coagulated resin he kept in his workshop – a big, dark mass of irregularly shaped lumps that were reluctant to let go of one another. The sight brought back memories of a bag of stuck-together liquorice-flavoured boiled sweets that he had once shared with his father in a coffin. Nothing had ever tasted more wonderful than the sweets that night.
By experimenting, Jens had discovered a method for removing impurities from a lump of resin. He would place it on a piece of tinfoil which he stretched out over a metal tin and pierced tiny holes in. Then he melted the resin by holding it over a flame. To this end, he had made a delicate construction of iron rods and horseshoes on which the tin could stand. The impurities remained on the foil while the clean resin gathered at the bottom of the tin. Once the resin hardened, he would store it – clean resin in one barrel and discarded impurities in another. That way he could always take some and melt it again for whatever purpose he had in mind. And he had several. Resin had antibiotic properties and, with the right preparation, it could be
made into soap or an excellent type of glue. It could even serve as a source of fuel. If he smeared impure resin on the top of a stick, he would have a torch that would burn reliably.
In his pocket he kept the small ant preserved in its amber universe. It looked as it had done all those years ago when Silas had first shown it to his sons on the north beach. And it looked as it had done millions of years before that. It had been that ant’s task to drag tiny pieces of dried resin back to the anthill to guard it against diseases. However, it was the ant’s fate to be trapped in and choked by the sticky substance and thus lose its life, if not its body.
There was something about resin which fascinated Jens Horder. It could heal, protect and preserve. But it could also kill.
For a time, the resin barrels represented the only element of order in his workshop. The eye of the storm, you could say. They were lined up next to one another like three litter bins, yet they contained the one thing he could least do without. In the middle of this chaos of cardboard boxes, sacks, tools, engine parts, rolls of fabric, cables, food scraps, newspapers, plastic bags and items of every kind and every material, the resin barrels served as a reminder that, once, all he had cared about were the trees.
But in time even the barrels drowned under things and became impossible to spot in the workshop. Jens, however, could always find his way to them, because he navigated effortlessly through his stuff. His view of order differed from the one which might prevail among the few people who opened the door to the workshop and looked inside. Eventually no one but his wife and his daughter were allowed in. And his wife never tried.
Jens Horder’s world wasn’t governed by the same systems and rules that people normally subscribe to. He didn’t know about dividing things up and organizing them. He knew about feelings and memories. A rasp wasn’t necessarily kept beside other rasps. If the rasp was one he had dug out of a pile at the junkyard once, its natural home might end up being next to the oil lamp and a uniform jacket found in the same location. It had a logic of its own.
The scythe had its regular spot up against the big map of the island on the wall behind the lathe because its shape reminded Jens of the headland that stuck out north-east of Korsted and formed a small bay. The map was almost hidden behind some boxes now, but he knew it was there and that was all that mattered. Only the north beach could still be made out in the darkness.
Before the map became obscured, Jens had spent many hours studying it with his father. Back then the island had seemed enormous to him. Together they had concluded that it was the shape of a man’s body. It had amused them to imagine Korsted as the man’s heart and the junkyard as his backside and that, if they let the trees grow wild on the Head, then this man would get even wilder hair and a beard. But the man was bald on the top of his head, where the beach was. The island was a body undergoing change, and they could change it. Into a wild man.
But while the world tends to grow smaller as you yourself grow bigger, the world outside the Head only ever grew bigger for Jens. As an adult he found it increasingly overwhelming and alien as new people arrived on the main island and different types of shops, businesses and machines appeared.
Sometimes people would come to the Head and tell him that the place needed cleaning up. That the dirt was piling up. That there were too many things around him. And why didn’t he start getting rid of all the rubbish?
And they would smile as they said it. That was almost the worst part.
The outside world became a threat, one which intruded on him and began to take over his life.
One day two women appeared in the barn and told him that he lived in an unforgivable mess, and yet there was hope because God was willing to help. God would tidy up, if Jens would love him like a father.
Jens was speechless, but he had stared hard at them and threatened them with a dung fork.
When they left, they were no longer smiling.
Jens saw something they didn’t. When he studied his landscape of objects, he saw no mess or dirt. He saw an unbreakable whole. If he were to remove a single item, he would wreck the picture.
People didn’t understand that everything he had accumulated had a place, a value – and a purpose. A yellowing newspaper which had served as wrapping for a clay vase could contain information which he might one day need, although he never read newspapers. An old harness reminded him of the time he had driven a horse and cart to Korsted. The torch would come in handy once he had repaired it. He had piles of batteries, and some of them must work, surely. The audio-cassette tapes definitely did. They had been taken from a pallet behind the radio shop and still lay in ruler-straight piles held together with shrink-wrapped plastic, which in turn could undoubtedly also be used for something. Tinned food was always good to have, should they ever fall on hard times, and he had never believed in ‘best before’ dates anyway. The smoothing plane had belonged to his father and worked impeccably. He would need the hats, should he ever wear out his grandfather’s cap. The candlestick was beautiful in its symmetry; it just needed polishing. You could always use umbrellas and so never have too many of them, and he was sure that he could mend the broken ones. That someone had once thrown away a sackful of disposable cutlery seemed incomprehensible to him. Nothing was ever for single use only and one day he was going to wash it all. The sacks of salt that he had taken from a farmer’s barn – the farmer tasked with gritting the roads – he would also find a use for. A better use than just chucking it on the roads.
Jens felt a deep sense of responsibility to preserve things. To keep things as they were. And he experienced joy, an emotional bond, with every single object he took into his care. This sense of connection stimulated him. And it exhausted him whenever someone tried to break it. It even frightened him.
And indeed it had gone wrong on the occasions when, for the sake of others – first his mother and later his wife – he had tried getting rid of something. He couldn’t do it; it broke his heart. His mother had never understood. Nor had his beloved Maria, but she accepted him as he was and knew that it could be no other way. His father would have understood everything.
In time, a particular fear began to haunt Jens: the notion that he might inadvertently discard something irreplaceable. Something hidden among other things, underneath or inside another item. Even after everyone had stopped asking him to clear up and throw things away, this fear continued to grow. Objects and fear merged together in dreamlike scenarios and he had nightmares about overlooking a baby bird newly hatched on a piece of orange peel, a small, helpless life which would be lost were he to throw out the peel. Later, in those nightmares, the bird became a baby.
No, nothing was surplus. Despite what he taught Liv, he knew from his father, from his brother and from his son that whatever left him would never come back. And thus nothing could be allowed to leave him.
Additions, however, were frequent. For a long time they consisted of things which he himself collected; later, also things that his daughter brought home when she had been down on the main island to pick up food and other essentials. He would have preferred to go with her so that he would never have to let her out of his sight, but eventually he was forced to trust that she would always come back.
And she did.
They had an unbreakable bond, the two of them. He knew that Liv would never leave him.
An hourglass was wedged in place horizontally in one of the carpenter’s benches. Silas Horder and his younger son had found it in a barn once, brought it home to the workshop and turned it over and over and over as they counted seconds and breaths and observed the time flow quietly but steadily through its narrow neck. For decades it had sat there in the hole, the sand evenly distributed across both sides, the dark wood and delicate glass buried under dust and memories.
Jens had watched Liv as she studied the trapped hourglass. She knew that she wasn’t allowed to touch it. Once, she had asked why they didn’t use it. She so wanted to see the sand flow.
But Jens knew that ti
me had a way of running away from you. And he couldn’t bring himself to teach his daughter that lesson. Not just yet.
December
I’m not sure how long my granny stayed with us, but I think it must have been a whole month. It was definitely in the time leading up to Christmas because she taught me to make paper hearts and to sing carols about Mary and Jesus, who I kept calling Jens. I still wasn’t clear about who Jens’s dad was, but I liked the idea of him being born in a stable. At night.
When I asked Mum when Carl and I were born, she replied that it must have been in the afternoon, that there had been a lady to help, and that giving birth to us had been fairly painful. I wished that she had waited until it was dark, but I was glad that at least Carl and I had been together. I’d never liked being alone.
Perhaps that explained why I liked looking at the drawings of Carl and me. They hung from a nail over the bed in the master bedroom. Dad drew them. He drew us every year when the honeysuckle blossomed, and you could tell from our faces how we had changed and yet continued to look alike. The new drawings were put on top of the old ones, so that you could flick back and forth and see how we looked as babies. I liked posing, sitting still as Dad drew me, because I could watch him and keep an eye on his hair and his beard, which was growing bigger and bigger.
Dad had also drawn Mum once. That drawing was on a wall in his workshop in a fine little clip frame. I’ve never seen other drawings of her. But I’ve also never seen a more beautiful drawing of a beautiful woman.
Although my granny had moved into the room behind the workshop, it felt as if she had taken over the main house. Carl could sense it too, but to begin with we thought it was so exciting that it never crossed our minds it might also be dangerous.
When my granny came to the bedroom and sat with me on the bed that morning, it was the first time that I spoke to an outsider, I mean properly, where it was just the two of us. For some strange reason I wasn’t scared at all. Yes, to begin with, of course I was, because Mum was in the laundry room behind the barn and Dad was out by the Christmas trees, so neither of them would be able to hear me if I screamed.