The Last Boat Home

by Dea Brovig

  ‘But can it be true,’ Dagny asked, ‘that the trawler is beyond saving?’

  ‘It didn’t look good when we left her,’ Ole said. ‘If she’s stuck on a rock … With the sea as it is, it could do serious damage. She was listing badly.’

  ‘If there’s anything to be done, the insurance company will surely do it,’ Tom Ivar said.

  ‘But I don’t understand. How could this happen?’ Dagny asked.

  Tom Ivar and Ole shared a look that made Else stiffen. She knew from the set of her mother’s jaw that she, too, had noticed. In a strained voice, Dagny invited the men to coffee.

  ‘Many thanks,’ Ole said, ‘but we’d best be getting off.’

  Dagny saw them to the door and returned to the dining room to slump into a chair and stare into the oven with her fingers pressed to her lips. The glow from the fire made her cheekbones sharp. She let out a heavy breath that blew her hand into her lap.

  ‘Your father will contact the insurance company first thing on Monday,’ she said.

  ‘How much will they pay?’ Else asked.

  ‘Goodness knows,’ she said. ‘Enough for us to manage while he looks for work. Though I haven’t heard of anyone who needs a man on their trawler.’ She reached for the Bible she had left on the sideboard. ‘I’ve almost finished Ninni’s dress. Perhaps she needs another one.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Else said.

  Her mother forced a smile. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said and opened her Bible to the bookmarked page.

  They did not go to church the next morning and neither did Dagny attend the bedehus meeting that night. While Johann recovered in bed, Else and her mother tuned into the radio broadcast of High Mass from Glemmen church in Fredrikstad. They cooked a meagre dinner of fish dumplings with cauliflower and carrots, which her mother ladled into a bowl and took upstairs. In her absence, Else lowered the radio and peered at the ceiling. Try as she might, she could not decipher her parents’ whispered words through the floorboards.

  The first of their visitors arrived just after four, when dinner was finished and the plates and pots had been cleared away. Solveig Haugeli parked her car at the bottom of the hill and began to march her bulk across the yard.

  ‘Be quick,’ Dagny said, ‘and help me hide the sewing. We’ll put it in the Best Room and take coffee in here.’

  A gentle rain tapped the windows as Else gathered the fabric her mother had sorted on the dining table and bundled it across the hall. She placed it on a chair before shutting the door on the evidence of her mother’s Sunday industry. In the hallway she rubbed her arms and waited for Solveig’s knock, anxious to return to the dining room, where the oven burned the damp from the air. Her mother joined her in the moment Solveig hollered, ‘Hallo?’

  Dagny pulled the front door open. ‘How good of you to come,’ she said.

  ‘I brought a stew,’ Solveig said. ‘We’ve so much elk after Ole’s last hunt. What a weather! Is this rain never going to stop?’

  The pot was still warm from the hob when she passed it to Else and unbuttoned her coat, freeing the wool-clad breasts that dangled to her midriff like nosebags. Solveig raked the drizzle from her hair with her fingers and sniffed as her eyes darted up the stairs and between the coats hanging in the hall. They scouted the dining room when she followed Dagny to the kitchen, settling on the table and chairs and the fire smouldering in the oven, sweeping over the woodbox and the curtains and the sewing machine that Dagny had covered and shoved into a corner. Else wondered what she was looking for. She dismissed the idea that her father’s misfortune had tainted their home, so that the farmhouse and all that was in it spoke to their guest of calamity.

  ‘Can I make you a cup of coffee?’ her mother asked and held the kettle under the tap.

  ‘Please,’ Solveig said. ‘Now, tell me. How are you coping?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ Dagny said.

  ‘What a terrible shock you must have had. I understand from Ole that the trawler is unsalvageable.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ Dagny said.

  ‘And Johann? Isn’t he here?’

  ‘He’s resting. He’s caught a cold.’

  ‘Well,’ Solveig said, ‘if that’s all.’

  ‘It’s nothing that bed rest won’t cure.’

  ‘He’s lucky then, by the sound of it. Ole said that the boat was half-sunk when they found him. Before I forget, I have greetings from church. Karin especially asked me to send you her best. And Pastor Seip remembered you in his sermon.’

  ‘How nice,’ Dagny said.

  While the coffee brewed, Else was dispatched to the Best Room to collect two of onkel Olav’s cups from the cupboard. She wiped the dust from their bowls and, as she smoothed a finger and thumb around each rim, imagined the talk in the churchyard that day. She pictured Ole and Tom Ivar among the graves, shaking their heads as they had done the night before and describing her father’s crash and rescue, while a crowd that included Lars, Petter and Rune thickened around them and muttered its horror at the news. Not for the first time since the two men delivered her father home, she remembered their discomfort when answering her mother’s questions. Her face and neck grew hot when she thought about it, though she did not understand why she should feel ashamed.

  Else was glad to be excused from going to school the following week. During that time, her father rarely stirred from his bed. On Monday afternoon, when Alv Knudsen arrived from the sheriff’s office to take Johann’s statement about the night of the accident, he stepped into the dining room swaddled in a blanket, his eyes red and his skin scored with wrinkles like ski tracks through snow. Now and again Else would come upon him in the corridor on his way to or from the bathroom, or when his shouts for water were not answered quickly enough. Coughing spells and rumbling snores betrayed his presence to guests, who stopped by bearing food and condolences. Dagny thanked Ninni Tenvik for a fish pudding and Sigrid Aaby for a walnut cake before serving her the last of their coffee. Else wished they would stay away. She took to hiding in her room until their visitors had gone.

  On Thursday morning, the rain finally stopped. After tending to the cow in the milking barn, Else tramped over the grass, gripping the handle of her pail and watching the Iselin glide inland on the fjord. A sliver of sun caught on the boat’s trawl doors when she turned on the glassy water towards the Dybdahl pier. Else started to run, but had to slow her pace when milk spilled over the rim of her bucket.

  She set the pail on the floor of the farmhouse’s hallway. ‘Mamma?’ she called. ‘Ole and Tom Ivar are back.’

  ‘What is it now?’ her mother said.

  Else hurried after her into the yard, her galoshes sliding in the soil to the pier, where Ole was putting in the trawler.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘And how is Johann?’

  ‘Much better,’ said her mother. ‘Isn’t Tom Ivar with you?’

  ‘It’s only me today,’ Ole said. ‘I thought Johann would want to see the wreckage, now that the weather has cleared.’

  ‘He isn’t home,’ Dagny said.

  ‘That’s a pity. Well. Perhaps you’d like to come instead? It isn’t far. It needn’t take too long.’

  Dagny shook her head, but bit her lip before replying. She glanced over her shoulder at the farmhouse, whose black windows gave nothing away.

  ‘Now that I’m here,’ Ole said. ‘So that the trip isn’t wasted.’

  ‘Else,’ said her mother, ‘go and get my coat.’

  Else raced to the farmhouse to fetch their winter coats and hats and to exchange her galoshes for a pair of boat-worthy shoes. As she buttoned her clothes, she listened for clues that her father was moving in her parents’ bedroom. She expected him to appear on the stairhead at any moment and to demand to be told what was going on. The house was silent when she slipped outside and returned to the pier, where Ole was helping her mother onto the trawler.

  Else did not wait for an invitation before clambering on deck. She joined them in the cramped qu
arters of a wheelhouse that smelled of banana and pipe tobacco and bided her time until her mother ordered her ashore. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s brow furrow. Her jaw was stern with worry and it occurred to Else that perhaps she wanted her there. Still she hugged the extra layers that she had carried to her chest and kept quiet so as not to disturb her mother’s thoughts. The motor thudded as Ole swung the trawler’s wheel. He prodded the throttle and navigated the boat into the fjord.

  The Iselin’s hull sliced through the water, transporting them past the shipyard and along the ferry’s route until she broke towards the sea. Seagulls trailed after them in a dirty cloud that matched the tones of the recovering sky. They screeched their hunger at the empty net coiled at the trawler’s stern, continuing their pursuit when she passed into the Skagerrak. Ole steered them north and, as they followed the coastline, Else looked from the dials of his instruments to the rifle that hung over the wheelhouse door. She realised she had been a child when she had last boarded the Frøya. Now, she never would again. She brushed her mother’s arm.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like your coat?’ she asked.

  Her mother blinked. She sank her hands into the sleeves.

  ‘We haven’t much further to go,’ Ole said.

  When the Iselin dipped behind a knot of islands, he eased back the throttle and pointed. ‘There she is,’ he said.

  Else moved to the counter by the portside window. She trawled the water with her eyes but did not see what she knew must be there: no floating timber, no glint of steel. Then she noticed a shadow darkening the waves like a sea creature. She focused on its shape, on its beginning and end, while the counter trembled with the engine, shooting a shudder through her stomach and thighs.

  She glimpsed a wooden flank. The metal base of a mast. The awkward angle of a trawl door.

  ‘The engine room must have flooded,’ Ole said. ‘That may be why she capsized. The keel will be badly damaged, too. She’s for scrap, I’m afraid.’

  Else stared at what was visible of the Frøya’s remains and felt her insides silting up. She imagined her smashed parts – broken glass, kinks of metal – scattered over the seabed or rolling with the tide towards Denmark. The boiling vat and sorting tank would have taken root in sediment to collect sea cucumbers in their basins and wait for the day when tufts of seaweed would slither through their rusting joints. Somewhere beneath them her father’s net had caught on the rocks that had been the trawler’s ruin, or else it wafted loose, stretching wide, snatching fish and hauling with it Norges jars tangled in its cords.

  The thought of her father’s decanting jars brought a sudden understanding of what no one had said and what her mother must already know. The whole town must know, either from Ole or Tom Ivar or, more likely, from both of them. Her father had been drunk. She wondered what Lars would say. She remembered Solveig telling her mother that Pastor Seip had mentioned them in his sermon.

  ‘It’s time we headed back,’ Ole said, but he allowed them some minutes more before piloting the Iselin around. The trawler set off the way she had come, tracking the scrape of oil from her motor that silvered the water’s surface.

  To Else’s relief, Lars did not mention either her father or the Frøya. On the morning of her return to the Gymnasium, she sat in Paulsen’s classroom through maths and natural sciences and jotted notes while Hjerde read aloud from their New Norwegian textbook. The break brought her outside and across the schoolyard to the caretaker’s shed, where Lars twined his fingers with hers and volunteered a wry smile.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said and that was enough. More awkward were Petter’s efforts at commiseration. Standing by the door to the shed with Rune, whose upper lip was fat with chewing tobacco, Petter wrung his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘about what happened. The crash. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Lars and led Else inside.

  It was the start of the month and Lars’s father had given him a rise in pocket money. Each afternoon when school was done, the boys would climb down Elvebakken to Arnholm’s kiosk and choose salt toads, sour bombs and tins of hockey powder. Else waited for them outside, her nose dripping while she scanned the street and ducked her head if any acquaintances strolled by. She saw the ferry drift into town and out again and ignored the whisper in her ear that told her it should be taking her home.

  Her father had rallied over the weekend, while she and her mother were at church. They had hurried off down Dronning Maud’s gate as soon as Dagny had shaken the minister’s hand and assured him that Johann was almost himself again. When they returned to the farmhouse, her father was gone. Her mother searched for him in every room, in the bathroom and Best Room and finally the cellar, before storming to the old outhouse and the milking barn at the end of the yard. From the dining room window Else watched her approach the boathouse, where her firmness of purpose seemed to falter. She scaled the stairs with an old woman’s deliberation, pausing to knock on the door before pushing her way inside.

  Else stamped her feet on the pavement by Arnholm’s shop and reflected on what she thought was a kind of duplicity, when she caught the boat to town and endured lessons and kissed Lars as if everything was as it had been before. She did not know when her father installed himself in the boathouse, only that he was there in the afternoons when she arrived home. Often, her mother was at the bedehus. Apart from Sunday gatherings, there were meetings during the week if they had a visitor – a travelling preacher, a song evangelist, the representative of a mission who passed around photos and crafts made by foreign hands – as well as Friday’s choir practice, and now, she said, she would help organise the Christmas bazaar and Christmas tree party. Else spent the early hours of the evening alone with the radio turned up until her mother shuffled in, when they would work together on the sewing pile and keep wordless watch on the lantern that burned in the boathouse window.

  A pink glaze on the horizon narrowed under a dull, swelling darkness. Else checked the time: it was half past three. She wriggled her toes in her boots as she glanced at the fjord, where a lonely skiff with a sagging tarpaulin was docked at the Elvebakken pier. Her knuckles were winter rough. She brushed the coarse peaks across her lips before tucking her fists under her armpits. She wished she had remembered her gloves. She would have to be sure to bring them tomorrow.

  When she squinted up the road and noticed Yakov Bezrukov, it was too late to steal into the kiosk unseen. The circus performer seemed not to care about the woman hunched in her coat who gaped when he closed in on Else.

  ‘I thought we would have met again before now,’ he said. ‘Have you been ill?’

  ‘No,’ Else said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Then why haven’t you been to the paddock with your boyfriend?’

  The kiosk door opened, spilling a hot coffee smell onto the street. Petter and Rune followed Lars out of the shop. He clapped Yakov on the shoulder as if greeting a friend.

  ‘And here he is,’ Yakov said. ‘The man who knows about things.’

  ‘How’s work?’ Lars asked.

  ‘Not good. We’re thinking of moving on.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Lars said. He tore open a packet of Prince and offered it to Yakov. ‘Do we still have a deal for Saturday?’

  ‘We do,’ Yakov said.

  He helped himself to two cigarettes, balancing one behind his ear before biting the other between his teeth. He levelled his gaze at Rune for the seconds it took him to produce a matchbook from his pocket.

  Once Rune had lit Yakov’s cigarette, Else returned to her study of the road. She was not convinced by Lars’s plan to smuggle homebrew to the circus men, however infectious his excitement might be. The risk of being found out was too high, and what would her mother do then? The weeks since the accident had been hard enough. Else thought of her bent over the sewing machine, her eyes on the cloth and her slipper steady on the foot pedal as if the back door had not just crashed open and her father was not reeling
down the corridor. When his snoring began, her mother would snip the thread with her scissors and tidy away her sewing box before joining him in their bed.

  At the top of the hill, a man wearing a lusekofte emerged from the grocery. Else measured his descent and lifted her rucksack over her shoulder.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘But I bought gum,’ said Lars. ‘Don’t you want any?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Petter said.

  ‘Are you catching the ferry?’ asked Yakov. ‘Well, so am I. I’ll walk you down.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Lars said.

  Yakov snorted two jets of smoke through his nose and he and Lars accompanied Else to Havneveien. They matched her strides while Lars reviewed the details for Saturday night: how much liquor to bring, when the boys would arrive at the paddock. Else surveyed the harbour before bolting under the ash trees that lined the pavement. At least there were not many people about. The thought of sitting with the circus man all the way across to the public dock made her mouth dry. She hoped the ferry would be empty. She hoped it would be full.

  At the base of the Longpier, Lars’s hand grazed her elbow. ‘Stay a little,’ he said. ‘You still have time.’

  Yakov grinned and sucked a long breath from his cigarette. He tossed it into the water and climbed aboard the ferry.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Lars, ‘of where we could go, now that the paddock’s been taken over. Can you meet me on Friday?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Else said.

  ‘I’ll be at the bus depot at seven.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said and again her eyes swept the harbour to check if anyone was watching. She was about to refuse, but saw herself sitting alone once more in the dining room when she could be with Lars. Why shouldn’t she meet him? No one would miss her. It would be easier than it ever had been before.

  ‘Where would we go?’ she asked.

  ‘Somewhere warm,’ Lars said. ‘I’ll make sure it’s comfortable.’