Be Still the Water

by Karen Emilson

  I came to know Leifur better and liked his wife Sigrid. It turned out she’d been raised in Swan River, a revelation that caused me to listen carefully whenever she talked about the place. I overheard her mention Bjorn’s Katherine once; that must have been August, after word had filtered back to Siglunes that they’d married in July.

  Winter would blow in on us soon and a few decisions loomed, but we skirted around them, hoping they would miraculously resolve.

  There was a position opening in Lundi at the doctor’s office. The doctor’s wife, also his nurse, was expecting her first child. If I wanted the job, I needed to act quickly.

  The second decision concerned Setta, and that was the more difficult of the two, having already been put off by a year. I came outside one afternoon to see Leifur and J.K. standing on the road in conversation.

  “I don’t have the courage to do it,” Leifur said.

  J.K. wrapped his arm around my brother’s shoulder. “There are worse things to be ashamed of, my boy. I have a horse who is too old to be useful anymore. I feed him the best oats, and brush him most days. Someday I will have to call on you, but neither he nor I are ready yet.”

  J.K. took the gun from him and gently patted Setta, long strokes across her back. Leifur’s head dropped and he turned away. The sight of his broad shoulders heaving pierced my heart. In all the years I’ve known Leifur this was the only time I ever saw him cry.

  “Come on, girl,” J.K. said softly, coaxing Setta up.

  Her tail drooped as she slowly stood, obediently following him towards the bush, looking back to see if we were coming.

  I couldn’t watch any longer. I ran to the house, flung open the door and took the stairs to my bedroom two at a time, falling heavily on the bed, covering my ears. I didn’t hold back the tears; in fact I cried as loud as I could, needing to drown out the sound that I knew would come, but couldn’t bear to hear.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  All should be told to a friend.

  —Egil’s Saga

  Eleven years is a long time in a woman’s life.

  It is a long time to be in the same job, in the same town. It is a long time to live alone. Had I not been kept incredibly busy, I may have been unhappy. With all the traumas, disease, and sickness sandwiched between birth on one end and death on the other, few people escaped their lives without coming through our door.

  The office took up two back bedrooms in the doctor’s rambling two-storey house that backed onto the river that meandered through town. To find it was simple enough: cross the bridge on Main Street, turn right at the grocery store, four houses down on the right. A young elm tree grew tall where the doctor’s wife had planted it along the driveway.

  Sometimes, patients made the mistake of knocking on the front door, but most knew to follow the path the length of the house to the back. The doctor owned a Model T that he’d purchased shortly after the war ended, but, due to the road conditions around Lundi, he still kept his horse, buggy, and sleigh for those times of just-in-case.

  Me? I walked pretty much everywhere. For five years I boarded at the doctor’s house, until his wife gave birth to their third child and my room was no longer considered spare. I moved in with an elderly couple across the street. The old woman died first, then the man, highly irregular in those days. If a woman survived her childbearing years, the dubious reward was usually outliving her husband.

  I turned thirty-four that year and decided that, rather than move, I’d buy the house. What I liked most about it was the front verandah. In the evenings I’d sit out there and read, covered with a blanket, spring and fall. Later on, I hired a local carpenter to screen it in to keep out the mosquitoes. The house was boxed in on three sides by lilac and caragana bushes, a lovely mix of soothing lavender and sweet yellow in springtime. I kept six hens and grew a large garden out back.

  Buying when I did was a fortuitous decision as the Great Depression lurked right around the corner, though none of us could anticipate the coming hardships. After it hit, I worked for the next ten years with little pay since our patients could barely afford shoes for their children. Mostly the doctor was paid in kind—wood for the stove, fresh milk, meat, and fish. My house was a blessing that I believed was God’s way of rewarding me for promises kept. That house enabled me to keep right on doing His work.

  Thora and I corresponded by letter regularly. I knew immediately by the change in her tone when she’d met the man she was destined to marry. He was a soldier who spent a month at the convalescent home. They married shortly after that and bought a little house on Pine Street. She mothered five children and occasionally, when they came out to visit, she would take me with them to Siglunes.

  It was on one of those car rides, as I sat in the back seat with her second born on my lap, that she told me Finn had moved to England. After the war ended he’d spent a year in France as a volunteer who moved the bodies of fallen soldiers into the cemetery at Flanders.

  “He is married now,” she said, over her shoulder. “To the British nurse. The one he met while in hospital there.”

  I never forgot how she said it, offhandedly, as if the revelation would mean nothing to me.

  I sensed she thought it romantic that Finn and his British wife had met under the same circumstances as she and her husband. She told me that only a woman who’d witnessed what the soldiers endured could ever truly understand how war changed them.

  Now I am flown back to the battlefield: Ypres, April 1915, minutes after the gas attack.

  Finn immediately recognizes the smell of the gas and, since his mind always processes faster than everyone else’s, scrambles up out of the trench, hollers to the men around him to do the same, and then unfastens his pants, urinates on a rag and holds it up to his face. Simple chemistry. Uric acid neutralizes chlorine gas. He waves his arms like a man possessed. The ones who understand his brilliance follow his lead, climb out of the trenches where the heavy gas is settling and are saved.

  He searches frantically for Stanley, finds him lying in the mud at the bottom of the trench, gasping for air, drawing the deadly gas into his lungs with every breath, and pulls him up over the top then falls to his knees, covering Stanley’s mouth with his rag; he can do nothing but hold Stanley in his arms and watch him die. It is an agonizing death that Finn will spend the rest of his life reliving.

  One afternoon, as I was arranging the adoption of a baby born in Winnipeg to a childless Lundi couple—our office did such work for Dr. Bjornsson—the door opened and Pabbi came in with Magnus on his arm.

  “In here,” I said, pushing open the examining room door.

  “Elskan? Is that you?” Magnus rasped as Pabbi helped him into a chair.

  “How are you?” I asked, feeling like a girl again, as if none of the years since I’d met him were spent.

  “Not good,” he said, coughing a bit. He reached out his crooked old hand to grasp mine. “Asta, my favorite. How have you been?”

  The doctor understood my request. He and his wife said they would manage without me for however long it took. I was granted a leave of absence and returned to the castle to care for my dear old friend.

  Pabbi and I helped him into Amma’s wheeled chair then pushed him up the ramp. The smell of stale fish greeted us inside the door where his thick coat hung on a hook, boots directly underneath a high-backed chair. I imagined Bergthora’s voice welcoming us from somewhere in the magnificent old house.

  “Your Mother and I will come by for a visit tomorrow,” Pabbi said to me once we had Magnus settled in his bed, which had been moved into the front room so he could rest by the fire.

  I walked outside with Pabbi and stood squinting into the bright sun. The image of him standing beside the car he’d bought a few years earlier is one that comes to mind every time I think of him. The way he savored the moment, eyes filled with love.

  “I don’t think I ever
thanked you for finding Freyja,” he said. “Because of you, your Mother and I know the truth.”

  That night, when Magnus was comfortable, feet facing the fire, I helped him sip medicinal tea from a cup and eased his strained breathing with a hot plaster.

  “Bjorn and the boys were here,” he rasped with a hint of sadness. “Last week. I do not imagine they will come again. Swan River is so far.”

  I coaxed him to eat a bit then pulled one of the heavy chairs to the side of his bed so I could read to him from the book of John. That seemed to bring him comfort.

  The next afternoon he asked that I take him outside.

  “What if you slip?” I asked when he refused to get into the wheeled chair.

  He took my arm. “You will not let that happen, já?”

  We shuffled down the long hall, through the door onto the verandah. He sat down heavily on a thick wooden chair and I covered his lap with an old wool blanket and we looked out over the water. Flocks of noisy geese traveled towards their winter home. Soft gusts of wind rose up like a song, rolling the amber fallen leaves across the grass. The air was crisp with still a bit of warmth to it.

  We sat listening to the silence until finally I summoned enough courage to ask something I’d always wondered.

  “Do you believe that I brought a curse to Siglunes?”

  I’d expected he might be either embarrassed or insulted, but he was neither.

  “Some of the old ways I still believe, but no, I never thought that.” He saw my relief. “Bjorn told me what happened when you stayed here and I am sorry,” he said. “Shortly after moving to Swan. A way to relieve his guilt, I suppose.”

  “He told you everything?”

  Magnus nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the lake. “Young men make mistakes.” He reached across to take my hand. “Mistakes they have to live with for the rest of their lives. What Einar did I could never forgive. As for my son, God wasn’t punishing him. Bjorn punished himself. And now it is time you let go of it as well.”

  So there it was. Our secret finally out in the open.

  “I was in love with him,” I said.

  He showed no surprise, just let his mind drift back to those days, eyes smiling in remembrance. “Your Amma told me. She was a fine woman, so full of life I hardly knew what to expect from her,” he said. “She challenged me in ways I’ve never properly understood.”

  “Was it you who bought her that stove?” I asked.

  He chuckled softly to himself. “Já, and the house. It was the only thing she asked of me in exchange for the nights we spent together.”

  My suspicions, confirmed. The keeping of these secrets, so important then, now was irrelevant.

  “I asked her to marry me, but she refused.” He laughed. “Said I was only after her money. She told me that Leifur needed it more. She’d made a promise to him that she planned to keep.”

  The irony in the moment was more than I could stand. I went to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a cup of coffee. His hand wavered as he took it.

  “Did you ever regret coming here?” I asked, settling into the chair beside him.

  “Never,” he said. “This lake is much like a love affair. It took from me, that is true, but it gave so much more in return. I cannot imagine my life without it.”

  “Did you ever blame yourself for what happened?”

  “At first. But not for the reason you may imagine.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “It is said that God does not give us more heartbreak than we can endure,” he said, blowing into the cup before taking a sip. “I felt responsible in a way. It took a few years, but eventually I was able to forgive myself. The son who survived is the one I could not bear to lose.”

  “Why do we love some more than others?” I asked, thinking of Freyja.

  “Bjorn reminded me so much of his Mama that it was like having her around,” he said as we watched a family of ducks paddle close to shore. “First love is like that. It tarnishes all love that comes later.”

  That I believed was true. That I still believe.

  “Nei, we cannot blame the lake for what happened,” he said, resting the cup on his lap. “My sons grew complacent. So did Stefan. It is the way of young men. Fortunately, Bjorn’s luck held out, somehow he learned a man cannot just take. Something is always expected in return.”

  I asked him to explain.

  “I see my life’s events reflected in the lake. Never take the still water for granted. Storms come without warning, ice thaws unevenly. At times there is too much water, and at other times too little. It births life then steals it away. The lake teaches us to appreciate when times are good, and that carries us through the stormy weather.”

  A long silence followed as I thought about my own life. I had loved Finn, but our love had been like ice in the springtime, whereas my love for Bjorn was solid as the bay in the dead of winter.

  “It takes a special kind of woman to forget herself and think only of others,” he said, taking a sip. “You and Bergthora are the same that way.”

  My heart swelled at the compliment.

  “She is still here you know,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Sometimes I hear her footsteps in the kitchen. Waiting on me I suppose.”

  His last days began as so many final days do. One morning, following a period of semi-consciousness, his body came alive again and he spoke as if his soul knew time was short. His eyes took on an especially beautiful quality and, like others I’d seen, his body woke with an energy that tricked loved ones into thinking that the dying were not dying at all.

  That is how it was for Asi who visited that afternoon.

  “You are a remarkable nurse.” He grinned. “I hope someday you will do the same for me.”

  He understood the truth only after I took him aside to ask that he send for Bjorn.

  Asi ran home the moment the door closed behind him, then rode hard to The Narrows to place a telephone call to Swan River.

  The next morning a car sped up the drive.

  I felt a shiver as I realized that I was standing in the exact same spot as when I’d first seen him. Except this time he wasn’t a carefree teenager but a middle-aged man, although he looked as he always had—as pleased to see me as I was to see him.

  “Asta, thank goodness you are here.”

  “Of course,” I whispered.

  His expression held tremendous hope. “How is he?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  He softened with relief, touching my shoulder as he hurried past, stepping into the front room. I rounded the corner after him to watch them from the doorway. Magnus was on the bed propped up with two pillows. He faced the window, big hands folded across his chest. A beam of sunlight filtered in through the branches of an oak with such intensity it looked as if it was coming straight from God to illuminate his weathered face.

  “How are you feeling?” Bjorn said softly as he inched around the bed.

  I adored the simplicity of it, thinking how everyone said pretty much the same thing to their dying loved ones. A whole life of love, anger, expectation, disappointment and pride summed up in four words.

  Magnus croaked a reply I couldn’t hear; Bjorn followed his father’s line of sight out the window.

  It was a glorious morning, one of those perfect fall days those who live by the lake spend their entire lives anticipating, remembering. Wishing for.

  The window was open an inch, letting in the cool air, and a magpie squawked, dancing across the ground. It picked up an acorn with its beak then flew into the tree, calling for its mate who suddenly appeared. They bent their necks, looking in the window, but it was unclear if they could see us or merely their own reflections.

  Bjorn pulled a chair in front of the window and sat in the Godly light. He talked about everything Magnus wanted to hear again; how
the boys were enjoying school, profit margins at the store, fishing. I interrupted, coaxing Magnus to take a few sips of water, then brought Bjorn a plate of food that he balanced on his knee.

  “Elskan, come eat,” Magnus said.

  Sympathy pains wracked my chest when he started to cough, a raspy, suffocating ordeal that went on far too long.

  I sat opposite Bjorn, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of Magnus’s chest as Bjorn described with pride how a team of Icelandic boys from Winnipeg had won Canada’s first Olympic Gold medal in hockey. It was an eight-year-old story by then—the rest of their recollections even older than that—but Magnus reveled in it as if hearing it all for the first time. There was no future left, only memories.

  Magnus reached out over the edge of the bed. I took one hand, Bjorn the other. Bjorn’s eyes met mine.

  Magnus sighed. “Why do women always want to cover up the windows?” he rasped, and we laughed.

  He fell asleep shortly after that. Too nice a day to be cooped up, so Bjorn and I went out onto the verandah. We didn’t sit right away but walked across the yard to the water’s edge. He stood there with his hands on his hips, breathing in the lake air, as much for his dying father as for himself.

  “He looks better than I’d expected,” he said. “By the way Asi spoke . . .”

  “Magnus is not getting better,” I said gently. “He is getting ready to say good-bye.” My voice caught on the last few words. “It is good that you came.” I took my own deep breath, holding it until I was forced to let go.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” he said.

  I pretended not to notice his lip quivering. We both shook off the tension, laughing a little as we strolled along the uneven shore.

  “You cut your hair,” he said. “I think those soldiers in the car—remember in Winnipeg? ‘Get a haircut’—they meant me.”

  I laughed. “Will you ever?”

  “Everyone keeps telling me to, that this is out of style, but I am so used to it.”

  “I like it long,” I said. “It suits you.”