“The Gallows,” he said.
“Where they hanged the thieves and the murderers?” Ollie said, and shivered in horror.
Emily had obviously told him the story. Henry gave him a nod.
“I must go there,” Ollie said, suddenly excited. “It is most important!”
“Why?”
“Because bad things happened there,” Ollie said. “They need a poem.”
“Who?”
“The thieves and the murderers,” Ollie said, as if it was obvious. “And of course, all the little children,” he added in a lower voice.
So Emily had told him about that too.
“It’s important to spread poems over all the places where something bad has happened,” Ollie said in a serious tone.
Henry wondered for a moment what on earth had put such a strange idea into his head. Perhaps it was his way of dealing with bad memories, his way to erase the sadness from his mind by performing this strange ritual.
“I know just the right poem,” Ollie said with a smile. “It’s so long it could reach all the way out there and back again! The ‘Poem of the Sun.’ It’s perfect!”
“You can’t,” Henry said, and lowered his brows, trying hard to give the impression that he had some authority in the matter.
“Why not?”
That was a harder one. Firstly, if Ollie walked to the Gallows he might see the boat that they had hidden behind the two boulders. Then he’d begin to ask questions or tell Emily about it. Secondly, the pits and crevasses around the boulders were dangerous, and Emily would definitely not allow him to go there on his own.
“It’s forbidden. It’s dangerous,” he replied finally.
But Ollie just smiled, as if he knew very well that Henry wasn’t telling the truth.
“But you go there,” he said. “I’ve seen you many times. You and Mark.”
This came as a surprise. It probably showed on his face, for Ollie burst out laughing.
“That’s different,” Henry managed to say, racking his brain to come up with an explanation that Ollie would accept.
“Why?”
“’Cause we’re two. If something happens,” he finally said.
“Then you’ll come with me,” Ollie said, and his face lit up with sheer joy.
But Henry shook his head and grabbed the handles on the wheelbarrow.
“I’m busy,” he growled, and limped around the corner. Hopefully this would be enough to keep him away from the lava field, at least for the time being.
Back in the cowshed he could hear Ollie continue his recital behind the barn. That was a relief; he wouldn’t dare to go out there on his own.
Time working in the cowshed passed slowly for Henry. He was, once again, left alone with the milking. Now that Ollie was busy with his strange project of measuring the farm in poems, he had no time to hang around the cows, as he put it. Henry was pleased and a little sad as well. After all, he had become used to having Ollie sitting there reading his books, his tiny voice filling the cowshed with words and questions. Yes, now that Ollie was busy with other things, Henry couldn’t help feeling a little lonely. And the cows sighed with boredom, mooing, annoyed, as if they missed him as well, the little calf that used to give them so much attention.
That evening, when Henry had filled the home container, he dragged it outside and carried it across the yard. There was a raven sitting upon the Cairn of Christ, looking around as if searching for something. Henry let go of the container, raised his hands in the air, and waved them above his head to scare it off, for the little gray bird with the long black tail had made a nest in the cairn and Henry didn’t want the raven to discover it. The raven spread its wings, glided over the yard, and sat on the roof of the barn, croaking loudly as if mocking him. Henry grabbed the container, but then he noticed the silence in the yard. He looked around him, listening, but he heard nothing: no poems, no chirping in the lava, and no distant chatter from the birds in the cliffs, just the rumble of the surf and a gust of wind on his cheeks.
The raven croaked loudly as Henry limped toward the house, dragging the container with him.
Emily was preparing dinner in the kitchen: a spicy goulash with mashed potatoes, Henry’s favorite. John was setting the table in the dining room; Mark had just arrived from the village with the reverend. Mark had bought himself a beautiful hunting knife with the money he got at Christmas. It had an ornate handle, a huge blade, and a fine black leather holster. Emily wasn’t pleased that Oswald had allowed Mark to buy a knife.
But the reverend said, “Well, boys are fond of knives; it’s always been like that.” It sounded as if the reverend was trying to make up for the past, somehow.
“What on earth are you going to use that for?” Emily asked Mark.
“Don’t know. Hunting perhaps,” he said.
“For hunting you’d need a rifle first,” she said.
“I would have gotten one, but they didn’t have any rifles,” Mark replied.
Henry stood by the kitchen door and put down the container. Emily turned and looked at him. “Where’s Ollie?” she asked.
Henry shrugged. He hadn’t seen him since the morning.
“He said he was going to be with you,” Emily said.
“He’s not,” Henry replied.
Emily checked upstairs, but Ollie wasn’t there, so she ran into the yard, calling his name. But the only reply she got was from the raven on the barn roof.
They searched the barn and the sheep sheds, the church and the smithy, but Ollie was nowhere to be found. Emily was becoming hysterical.
“He’s your little brother,” she cried at Henry. “You should have looked after him!”
The reverend tried to calm her down, but she pushed him away and set out at a run to the edge of the field, shouting Ollie’s name.
The raven spread its wings and glided overhead. Henry followed it with his eyes and saw it fly toward the Gallows. It perched upon the higher boulder, sharpening its beak on the rock. Then Henry noticed a flock of seagulls circling high in the air above the two boulders.
At once he realized what had happened.
He limped across the yard as fast as he could, kicking up the gravel as he went, suddenly in a panic, suddenly full of guilt. Was it his fault? Was he to blame if Ollie had come to harm? He had warned him; he had told him it was forbidden, that it was dangerous. Had Ollie followed Spine Break Path, to right all the wrongs that thieves and murderers and all the little children had suffered in ages past?
As Henry reached the path he was almost running. He stumbled and fell and hit his head on a sharp rock, but he jumped up immediately and kept on going. He heard the shouting of the others behind him, calling for Ollie, but his heart was thumping loudly in his chest, the noise of his heavy breathing filling his ears.
The sun hung low in the cloudy sky, the evening breeze growing stronger and colder. The deep rumbling of the ocean below the sea cliffs was threatening; the surf hissed angrily, accusing him: Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
The gulls were circling above the pitch-black crevasse by the Gallows, the deep hole where Henry had once seen the tiny bones. He threw himself down at the edge, searching the pit with his eyes in the growing dusk. Soon it would be too dark to see anything down there.
Ollie seemed so tiny and fragile, lying there facedown at the bottom of the dark pit, his arms spread out as if he were embracing the cold black rocks. One of his moccasins had fallen off his foot, and it struck Henry how strange it was to see his toes, so white and small against the rubble of black lava rock.
The raven croaked angrily upon the boulder, fluttering its wings, frustrated to see the humans coming closer to take the feast away.
Mark and John stumbled over the green moss toward the edge and stopped beside Henry.
“How do we get down there?” Mark said, breathing hard.
Henry shook his head. “We can’t,” he said.
Suddenly Mark gasped and ran behind the boulders.
John turned around and ran back up Spine Break Path toward Emily and the reverend, but Mark began tearing up the moss, hurriedly trying to cover the white hull of the boat. Henry lay still, looking down at the body at the bottom of the crevasse. It was his little brother. And he had failed to protect him.
The search-and-rescue team was crowded around the crevasse, dressed in orange jackets, with flashlights on their helmets. They had put up big lamps, which flooded the pit with pure white light, and were fastening a line at the edge so two of them could climb down along with a doctor and a stretcher. An ambulance waited in the yard, its blue lights turning in circles on its roof, cutting through the dark evening fog like two laser swords. The ambulance would take Ollie to the city, either to a hospital or a morgue, nobody knew for certain.
Emily had stopped crying. Now she knelt on the edge, wrapped in a warm woolen blanket, the reverend kneeling by her side, his arm around her shoulders. Her hair was drenched from the fog, but she looked indifferent. Her face was hard and cold, and her eyes were fixed on the small body in the pit, illuminated by the strong white floodlights.
When the two men and the doctor finally reached the bottom, Emily stood up and the blanket fell from her shoulders. The doctor examined Ollie quickly, and the two men from the rescue team moved him carefully onto the stretcher. The men on the edge began to pull the stretcher upward, and Emily hid her face in her hands.
The doctor put an oxygen mask on Ollie, and four men carried the stretcher along the path toward the ambulance. As they pushed the stretcher inside, Emily went in and sat by Ollie’s side, next to the doctor. Reverend Oswald stood in the yard, looking at her, holding the rain-soaked woolen blanket in his arms. She didn’t look up; she saw no one but Ollie. Then someone slammed the doors and the ambulance drove off at full speed. Henry saw the blue lights flashing for a moment on the grave faces of Mark, John, and the reverend. And for a long time the wailing of the siren could be heard through the thin night air, until eventually complete silence took over.
If there ever had been a real reason to say a prayer at breakfast it should have been now, but the reverend was silent and looking very tired. None of them had slept much. They had all been sitting in the living room, waiting for a phone call from Emily. The boys had dozed off where they sat, but Henry and the reverend had stayed up most of the night, silent, waiting.
It was late in the morning now, closer to lunch than breakfast. The three of them sat at the table while the reverend made some porridge. He put it in a bowl and placed it on the table with a jug full of milk. He didn’t sit down to join them; he just stood there, staring at the floor, lost in his thoughts.
The silence was broken when the phone rang, the sound filling every room in the house, loud and demanding. The reverend went to his office and answered it. When he came back his face was even paler than before.
“He’s still unconscious,” he said. “The doctors are not very optimistic, I’m afraid.”
Henry felt a sudden chill go through his heart. The other two lowered their heads.
“I’m going to the hospital to be with Emily. I will have to trust you all until I come back tomorrow morning.”
Henry glanced at Mark and knew at once what he was thinking.
The reverend continued. “Tomorrow I’m expecting the whole countryside for the first mass in the new church. Perhaps the Lord will grant us a miracle. We should pray for Ollie and not give in to despair. The Lord works in mysterious ways sometimes, and we don’t always know what his plans are; we’ll just have to hope for the best, won’t we?”
The reverend looked at the boys’ glum faces. “You know where everything is,” he finally said, “and I’m sure you’ll manage to cook something for yourselves tonight.”
When the yellow Volvo had disappeared up the road, it was time to prepare for the voyage. Mark gathered tin cans from the pantry and told John to fetch some meat from the freezer. But Henry had to milk the cows. They wouldn’t be leaving until the low tide that evening anyway.
The cows chewed on the hay, happily purring. The spark had returned to their eyes: maybe the summer hadn’t just been a dream in the winter darkness, but a reality that would possibly repeat itself before too long.
As Henry scraped the dung canal, he had an eerie feeling that Ollie was sitting up on Noah’s fence, making his way through one of his books. But when he turned around there was no one there.
Henry worked slowly, leaning his dizzy head against Brandy’s soft belly while pulling at her teats, the milk streaming white and warm into the bucket with that familiar sound. His thoughts fluttered about in his mind with great speed, like screeching birds, inches from colliding into one another. Emily’s angry accusation about him not having looked after his brother; then his own justification, a whining voice in his head: I warned him it was dangerous. I told him it was forbidden. Then Ollie chanting poetry rushed forward in his mind, his silly rhymes, his serious voice saying, “It’s important to spread poems over all the places where something bad has happened.” Then the dark voice of the roaring ocean followed: Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
He had to get away; he couldn’t stay here any longer, knowing that he was to blame. Emily would never forgive him either. Nothing would ever be the same again. He felt the punch on the inside: the fist of the anxiety troll clutching at his heart. They would sail out on the vast ocean, row their little boat in the path of a huge freighter. He would throw the rope with the iron hook and catch the ladder, which Mark had assured him was welded onto the side of the boat. Having climbed on board and hidden in one of the large containers, they would be on their way to Spain, where the sun always shone and the weather was nice and warm, just like in the picture that hung on the wall in his room.
As he emptied the last bucket of milk into the container, he glanced at Ollie’s books on the windowsill. Ollie wasn’t one of the wicked boys. Henry knew that now. Ollie was just a little boy who needed someone to read for him so he could fall asleep at night. That was all he needed. He had thought ill of him, hated him even, but that was just because he had won Emily’s heart so easily, so she cared for nothing and no one but him. And now Henry regretted it terribly, because somehow the little boy had found his way to Henry’s heart, and he didn’t understand how it had happened.
And now Ollie was dying, perhaps already dead.
Henry took a book from the windowsill and looked at the cover. It was a thin book with a drawing of a funny-looking little boy standing on a planet or something. It looked familiar. He suddenly realized it was the very same book that Emily had given to him, the one he had thrown into the ocean so long ago. Now, as if by a miracle, it was back in his hands.
Beads of cold sweat sprang up on his forehead. His legs gave in and he had to sit down by the wall. He sat there for a long time, staring at the cover, unable to move. Suddenly all was quiet in his head.
The lava field was lined with silver under the moon as they eased the boat over the edge and slowly lowered it down the cliffs. The clouds were black against the purple night sky, but dense clusters on the horizon cast a dark shadow on the ocean far away.
The air was cold, almost freezing, as if the promise of spring had been an illusion or a lie, and winter still ruled the world.
The boat seemed rather small, sitting on the sand below. Mark carried a backpack on his shoulders crammed with stolen food from the kitchen. John carried a wooden box with bottles of milk and water. The chain rattled uncomfortably loudly in the stillness of the night as they eased their way down the cliff wall toward the bank.
The sighs from the undercurrent suggested that it was gradually growing stronger. The waves moved farther out, hesitated a little longer each time, and then fell back with increasing force. The tide was coming in, and they had to hurry.
John climbed on board, and Henry handed him the backpack. He noticed that a large iron hook had been tied securely to a
long rope and now lay wound up by the gunwale. John sat down at the back and took a deep breath. The moon was above him, and two stars shone between the clouds: two candles, lit for their journey.
“You go on board,” Mark said. “I’ll push the boat.”
Henry shook his head. “You go,” he said.
Mark looked him in the eyes for a second, and then he climbed on board.
Henry leaned forward to push the boat, but Mark grabbed his arm and stopped him.
“Aren’t you coming?” he whispered.
The few words that had been exchanged between them that night had been whispered. It was a tense night filled with unspoken anxiety. For a long time now, Henry had had the feeling that this was Mark and John’s journey. He’d never been completely convinced that he had really been a part of the plan in the first place, even though Mark had spoken as if it was all settled. Somehow, he had suspected that when the time came, he wouldn’t be welcomed on board.
But Mark held his arm so tightly and looked so intensely into his eyes that he hesitated for a moment. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“But your freedom?” Mark said.
“I’m free enough,” Henry replied.
“There’s nothing for you here,” Mark whispered.
Henry hesitated for a moment, trying to find a simple reply, for his real reasons were far too complicated to put in words.
“The cows,” Henry said. “I can’t leave them.”
Mark let go of his arm and sighed. Perhaps he understood, but maybe he was just glad to be rid of him. It was difficult to tell. Henry leaned forward and pushed the boat into the water. Mark raised his hand, and the moon lit up his pale face.
“I’ll send you a postcard from Spain, Henry. I promise,” he said, and Henry thought he saw a little smile play on his lips.
The boat glided gently from the bank and the keel cut a soft line on the surface. Henry watched the boat move past the wreck, and the undercurrent sighed deeply inside it. Mark hit the water with the oars and rowed steadily toward the open sea, while John raised his hand in a final farewell. Henry turned and climbed the steep path all the way up the edge of the cliff.
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