by Mikael Niemi
I was about to go back outside when the pastor touched my arm. He pointed to a dip where the hay had been pressed down.
“Someone has been sitting there,” I said.
“Or lying.”
He viewed the hollow from various angles.
“Lie down over there, please,” he said, indicating a different pile.
I did as he requested and enjoyed a few moments’ rest in the soft hay that reached nearly to the roof. Then I had to get up so that he could consider the indentation I had made.
“Look!” he said enthusiastically.
I leaned forward.
“The first hollow is deeper than mine,” I said.
“And why might that be?”
“The person lying there was heavier than I am.”
“Lie down where you did before,” he said.
Once again I stretched out in the hay. Just as I was making myself comfortable he flung himself on top of me. He was heavier than I thought and I could hardly breathe. Instinctively I tried to push him away, but he caught my wrists and held me down. I caught the sour smell of his sweat, the tar, the grease on his scalp, and I could feel the rough stubble of his beard. And then suddenly, with no word of explanation, he let go.
“What are you doing, Pastor?”
“Look at that, Jussi.”
I was hot and angry and bits of straw were scratching my back, but he didn’t appear to notice. He leaned forward calmly and measured the dip with his hands.
“You see, Jussi?”
“No.”
“The hollows are the same depth now! Deduction: there were two people lying in the hay!”
I couldn’t understand his excitement. Two people who had gone to lie down during a break in the harvest. Admittedly, it might suggest fornication, an unmarried farmhand philandering with a maidservant. We both knew that sins of that nature were not unusual. Eagerly the pastor knelt down to inspect the compressed hay more closely. He dug up handfuls of sedge and examined the stalks in the filtered daylight. Before long something caught his attention. When I leaned over, I saw that a number of the blades of grass were discolored by something dark. The pastor spat on it, and gradually dissolved the dried-up stain by rubbing the saliva in with his thumb. He tasted it cautiously with the tip of his tongue. Then he held out his thumb to me. I remembered the butter on the earlier occasion. Without a word I tasted whatever was there.
“Do you recognize it?” he whispered.
I nodded. There was no doubt.
“Blood.”
He hummed as he put the tuft of straw into his pocket. With both hands he continued his meticulous search through the hay. He pensively held something up between his thumb and forefinger. It was invisible to me, as though he were clutching air. But when he let it hang in the shaft of sunlight coming through the gaps in the wall, it glimmered like gold. It was a lock of hair, wavy and blond, as long as his forearm. It was scarcely credible that he had managed to distinguish it from the hay.
“Hilda Fredriksdotter Alatalo was fair-haired, was she not? Long, fair hair?”
“Yes.”
“I found a strand of hair like this in the spilled milk at her resting place.”
At once I recalled the invisible thing he had picked up and wrapped in a cloth.
“Do you think Hilda has been here, Pastor?”
“There are several hairs together. What does that tell you?”
“Maybe she . . . I don’t really know.”
“When do you lose several strands of hair at the same time, Jussi? When someone pulls it. When someone tears them out by force.”
I had a sudden memory from a different time. Of the witch towering over me, yanking my hair, making me feel sick with the pain. I shut my eyes tight and cleared my throat until the nausea eventually subsided. The pastor seemed not to have noticed; with his magnifying glass raised, he was examining the strands.
“Hilda has a visitor at her resting place. Perhaps they’ve arranged the meeting in advance. Fired by temptations of the flesh, they hasten to the barn, where they can hide from the eyes of the world. Hilda lies down first, the man throws himself on top. In their aroused embrace, he tugs out some strands of her hair. Are we to believe that this is what happened?”
I couldn’t help blushing. The scene was all too vivid in the bestial sweat and agitation of my mind.
“You’ll recall that I looked at the milk pail, the one left at the resting place? I found marks on the rim where someone had drunk from it. Marks from not one mouth, but two, two different mouths. That was when I realized that Hilda had a visitor.”
“But—but what about the bear?”
The pastor didn’t answer. Instead, with remarkable patience, he carried on his search of the hay, laboriously changing position when his back began to ache. All of a sudden he swooped down and picked up something very small.
“How odd.”
It was a tiny stem, hardly a finger joint in length, and dried up.
“What does the pastor mean?”
“Cassiope tetragona. It’s unmistakable. Look at the leaves.”
I looked more closely. They didn’t have the appearance of leaves to me, more like small buds lying tightly one on top of the other along the stem.
“Arctic heather,” he explained. “Tetragona means having four corners. The leaves are patterned in rows of four.”
“Ah, I see.”
With great care the pastor placed the plant in his vasculum and made a note in pencil.
“And what’s so odd about it?”
“Use your brain, Jussi. Look around you.”
I noticed how the pastor appeared to revel in his knowledge.
“The Arctic heather is a relatively common plant,” he went on. “It’s a widespread low-growing genus. Look around you. Do you see it here?”
“It was in the hay.”
“Yes, among the sedge. But Arctic heather and sedge grow in different habitats. Arctic heather grows on the upland moors in the far north. Now, explain that if you can.”
“Maybe it’s growing nearby?”
“On all my excursions I have never come across it in the region around Kengis. It must have come here with the man she met. Perhaps it had fastened onto his clothing while he was up there? Or it might have been on his shoes or in a pocket? And it came off here, while they were locked in their ardent embrace.”
“What about the blood?”
“Perhaps he hit her? Or else it shows that Hilda was a virgin and in their intimacy she lost her maidenhead.”
The pastor made no further comment, but I could still taste the blood in my mouth. When I thought about where it might have come from, I was obliged to steady my shaking legs by leaning against the log wall.
“What does all this tell us?” the pastor went on, apparently unmoved.
“The scent of blood!” I exclaimed. “The bear must have picked up the scent of Hilda’s blood. The creature was lying in wait for her when she left here.”
The pastor struggled to his feet and walked over to the opening, where he peered out at the bog pools.
“I wonder whether . . .” he said.
Without further explanation he bent down and began searching along the edge of the bog. He had the air of someone looking for plants, or a berry picker hunting for cloudberries. He asked me to help him search for anything out of keeping with the surroundings. Somewhat reluctantly I squelched out into the swaying swamp water and moved in wider and wider circles, trying to find the tracks of a bear’s paws.
But it was the pastor who made the discovery. Some distance out into the sagging swamp he let out an ear-piercing whistle, of the kind he had learned as a child in Kvikkjokk. I immediately hurried in his direction, water sloshing and splashing up to my thighs. As I drew nearer I could see the pastor bending over, his h
ead dangling and his hands supported against his knees, as though struck by a sudden attack of vertigo. He was pointing down into one of the pools. The water was pitch-black, and the gray tip of something that might have been a wetland spruce poked out above the surface. But as I looked closer I could see it was a piece of the hayrack timber from the barn. The post was pushed so far down into the mud that it was barely noticeable.
The pastor took hold of the post and rocked it back and forth. Something pale waved about in the dark sludge, something that looked like hay.
Then, to my unspeakable horror, I realized that it was hair.
10.
I was an animal. I lived like an animal, constantly trying to find something to eat. The woman who called herself my mother could see my hunger, see how I licked the handle of her sheath knife for the lingering taste of fish oil on it. But she just sneered at me, as she lay there on the deerskin, her eyes watery, the brandy keg clasped to her breast like a suckling child. I particularly remember one incident: she laughed at me when I sucked on some gnawed bones that were so dry and smooth they could have been stones, not even any marrow left inside, just sharp splinters squeaking against my milk teeth. She laughed at my despair and then she brought out her tit. She pushed up her bodice, pulled out her tit, and asked me if I wanted some. It was large and flabby, she held it like a damp mitten and waved the wrinkled brown nipple.
“Here’s something tasty,” she slurred. “Tasty, tasty . . .”
I saw her black teeth, the claggy white saliva. She coughed up some spittle onto her palm and rubbed it into the nipple to make it smooth and heavy.
“Tasty, tasty . . .” she tempted me.
And I was so very hungry. I was desperate for anything at all, for soil, or ash, or mud. So I got down next to her sour-smelling body, lay down beside her. Her hand closed round my neck like a claw and she squeezed me so hard I could scarcely breathe. And I put her limp tit in my mouth and sucked, and at first I thought something was coming out, a little fat. But then I realized it was only sweat and dirt. She laughed until she choked and the tit bobbed up and down, and although I had stopped sucking she wouldn’t let me go, she just squeezed me harder and harder as if she were trying to push me back inside her stomach, into her womb. And all I wanted was to recoil from this world and escape. In the end I bit her, bit hard with my milk teeth, and the witch let go then and punched me in the head, so I rolled away, a red blackness behind my eyes. An empty, red cavern.
* * *
—
When the pastor found me by the side of the road, I hadn’t yet become a person. But he registered me in the book. He created me, he joined me to a parish with his little squiggly lines. I existed after that. He patiently placed one of the schoolchildren’s writing boxes in front of me, a simple wooden tray containing fine-grained sand. With a stick he scratched a curved shape. With a similar stick, I had to reproduce the shape as closely as possible. It was difficult to make the hook at the bottom, to make it curl evenly without wobbles and spikes.
“J,” the pastor said. “It’s called a J.”
“J,” I said.
“J is a good letter. Like the J in ‘Jesus.’”
I didn’t understand, but I pronounced it after him. The next letter was U, its half circle awkward as well. Not to mention the S, twice, the winding snake that had to coil there in the sand without biting or sliding away. Last came the I, a relief, just a straight line. If it had been up to me, all the letters would have looked like that.
Time after time the pastor flattened the sand, and even that never ceased to fascinate me. First all the effort, all the curves and twists in the sand. And then with a gentle sweep of the arm it was brushed away and was gone. I was there just now, the pastor explained. It said “JUSSI” in there just now. And the next minute it was empty. Smooth, clean sand in which you could try again. The pastor wrote “JESUS.” “JESUS” had an E, another good letter, and I could already do J and S and U. “Jesus” was the second word I learned. The pastor wanted to carry on, and now it was my turn to choose a word. But I couldn’t think of one.
“What about ‘MOTHER’?” he wondered.
I shook my head vehemently. Not “MOTHER.”
“I know what. We’ll do “MARIA.” She was Jesus’s mother. Can you imagine? Even our Savior, Our Lord Most High, had a mother.”
So we did “MARIA.” Yes, it was a good word. All straight letters, more or less.
11.
There was great consternation when it was revealed that the farm girl Hilda Fredriksdotter had been found dead. The pastor and I summoned the people living nearby, and along with a handful of curious hangers-on we dug the corpse out of the slime. The girl was laid on a stretcher made of poles and carried back to Heikki Alalehto’s farm in a macabre procession down the trails. I saw the silt drip from her sludge-soaked hair. Her head rocked from side to side and seemed almost alive, as if she were shouting, “No, no!” at us all. No one spoke during the short pauses we took to catch our breath and change bearers and everyone avoided looking at the body. It was with enormous relief that we finally reached the farm. I felt dirty somehow, sullied, and I noticed that all those who had touched the body rinsed their hands thoroughly at the well. For the time being the body would lie in the sauna. The neighbor Elli-Kaarina was called, a thin old woman who looked after the dead. She had the girl moved to the bier and heated water to begin the job of washing off the mud. As she was making her preparations, I felt the pastor give me a discreet nudge. Together we entered the sauna and stopped her.
“We have to wait for the sheriff first,” he said.
The woman looked at him quizzically but didn’t object. There was really no hurry. She disappeared inside the cabin for a bite to eat while the pastor and I remained.
It was a gruesome scene. And yet the dead woman was still attractive. Her mouth was open, her eyes, wet with marsh water, stared up at the roof, and her complexion had an unearthly violet tinge, her arms spangled with purple patches.
But her hair was like an angel’s. It fell in waves across the bier. I reached out my hand and touched it lightly with my fingertips. A woman’s hair. The same as my beloved’s, just a little fairer. So this was what it felt like. I tried to save the memory of the softness, the silkiness, for my dreams. The pastor moved my hand away. He took a step back and viewed the body from all angles, especially her hands and fingers and then her dirty feet and the thick skin on her soles. It was obvious that she was a cow-girl: there were scratches and scabs on her ankles where her bare legs had forced their way through the tangle of willow shoots. Her face was sunburned and there was a paler stripe at the top of her forehead where she usually wore her headscarf.
The pastor took several deep breaths. Then he removed his coat and rolled his shirtsleeves up over his elbows. He took some writing paper and a pencil out of his bag and made several quick notes before handing them over to me.
“You write it down, Jussi.”
I stared at him. But he was serious; his eyes were sharp, his upper lip tight. I hastily wiped my hands on my thighs until they felt clean and dry enough to carefully receive the white sheet of paper. It felt so light, almost like chicken down. If I let go it would stay in the air, floating free. The pencil was made of wood and had a gray lead core. With a trembling hand I lowered the point toward the paper, but I didn’t have the courage to let them touch. Holding the pencil felt like directing the blade of a knife at exposed skin.
“And we won’t say anything about this, Jussi. Is that completely clear?”
I nodded and swallowed, though my mouth was dry. It was only the muscles in my throat convulsing, pounding like my heart.
The pastor quietly closed the sauna door through which the daylight had been streaming, and fastened it with the handle of a broom so that nobody could open it. He found a tallow candle, which he lit and placed on the sauna bench next to the girl’s head. T
hen he cleared his throat and sank to his knees. At first I thought he was praying. But then I saw him start to stroke the top of her head. He parted the hair down to the roots and scrutinized every section from the temples backward, turning the skull to get to the back of the neck and continuing in this manner all the way round.
“Here.” He pointed.
I saw a tiny mark where the scalp was damaged.
“This is where her hair was pulled out. Write: damage to left cranium, two inches above right ear.”
Would I really be capable of writing this? I broke out in a sweat and wiped a drop from the end of my nose before it could fall. Then I put the piece of paper down on the bench. I cautiously pressed the point against the white fibers and watched the black appear, watched the first little dot extend into a shaky, crooked line. It felt like dirt, as if I were soiling a bleached bedsheet. I made my handwriting as small as possible, but all the same the letters seemed to widen out, becoming large and ungainly. Now the letters were standing there like elk grazing on long, straggly legs. No! I’d made a mistake as well! Streaks of black like pieces of straw shot across my vision as I struggled to correct it.
The pastor folded back the girl’s collar. Her neck was an awful purplish black where the bear had gone for her throat. He brought the candle flame nearer and studied the wounds, then he took hold of her shoulders and lifted. He felt the dress, the hooks and eyes at the neck.
“They’ve been ripped off. What does that suggest?”
“Shall I . . . shall I write that down?”
“Note everything I say, Jussi. The girl was probably trying to defend herself. She must have been fighting for her life. You don’t need to look now.”
He took hold of the hem of her skirt between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it up over her thigh. I closed my eyes tight. But still, I wanted to see.
At first her thighs appeared to be white all over. But when he examined the backs of them we saw the signs of livor mortis. A large blue discoloration ran down the side of her left thigh. The pastor was shaken and pale and his voice wasn’t entirely steady when he asked me to note the bruise.