Out Stealing Horses (7 page)

We walked up through the grass to the mower and greeted Barkald and his wife, and Jon's mother shook hands with us and thanked us for joining them at Odd's funeral. She was solemn and slightly swollen around the eyes, but not defeated. She was tanned in a nice way, her dress blue, and her eyes were blue and glittering, and she was only a few years younger than my own mother. She was simply shining, and it was as if I saw her for the first time in a clear light and I wondered whether it was because of what had happened, whether something like that could make a person stand out and be luminous. I had to stare at the ground and across the meadow to avoid her eyes, and then I went over to the pile of stakes where the tools were and picked a hayfork to lean against while I looked at nothing and waited for Barkald to get started. My father stood talking for a while, then he came up too, picked a hayfork from the grass between two rolls of steel wire, drove it into the ground and waited as I did while we avoided looking at each other, and Barkald, who sat on the mowing machine seat, urged on the horse, lowered the cutters and began to move.

The field had been divided into four sections, into each of which would go a rack, and Barkald cut the grass in a straight line along the middle of the first section. A few metres from the edge of the meadow we knocked a strong peg into the ground at an angle with a sledgehammer, secured the end of one roll of wire around the peg and fastened it firmly, and then it was my job to lift the reel by the two handles shiny with wear and unroll the wire while I held it taut and walked backwards in the section Barkald had cut. It was heavy, after a few metres my wrists began to ache, and my shoulders hurt because I had to do three things at once with the heavy reel, and my muscles were not warm yet. As the wire gradually unrolled it became easier, but by then I was that much more exhausted, and there was suddenly an opposition to everything that was physical and I grew mad and did not want anyone there to see I was such a city boy, particularly while Jon's mother was looking at me with that blinding blue gaze of hers. I'd make up my own mind when it should hurt, and if it should show or not, and I pushed the pain down into my body so my face would not give me away, and with arms raised I unrolled the reel and the wire ran out until I came to the end of the meadow, and there I put the reel down in the short stubble of newly mown grass, the wire taut, all as calmly as I could and just as calmly straightened up and pushed my hands into my pockets and let my shoulders sink down. It felt as if knives were cutting my neck and I walked very slowly over to the others. When I passed my father, he raised his hand casually and stroked my back and said quietly:

'You did good.' And that was enough. The pain vanished and I was already eager for the next thing.

Barkald had finished mowing the first part of the field and had cut the first swathe of the next, and now he stood by the horse waiting for us to do the rest. He was the boss, and according to my father he was one of those who worked best sitting down and rested standing up, that is if it didn't go on too long, for then he had to sit down again anyway. If there was anything he needed a rest from. I wasn't so sure about that. Driving that horse wasn't exactly exhausting. It had done the job so many times before it could do it with its eyes shut, and was bored now and wanted to move on, but was not allowed to, for Barkald was systematic and had no plan to mow the whole field in one go. It was one section first and then the next, while the sun was shining from a cloudless sky and promised more of the same. The day was so far advanced now that we could feel the backs of our shirts getting soaked with sweat, and each time we lifted a heavy load it ran from our foreheads. The sun was right in the south and there was hardly a shadow in the valley, the river, sparkling, wound its way along, and we could hear it rushing down the rapids under the bridge by the shop. I picked up an armful of poles and carried them out, distributing them at suitable intervals along the steel wire and went back empty-handed for more, and my father and one of the men from the village measured out lengths and with a crowbar made holes every two metres along the line, alternately on each side of the wire and thirty-two in all, and my father was down to his singlet now, white against his dark hair and his tanned skin and his smooth shining upper arms, and the big fencing crowbar went up and then heavily down with a sucking sound in the damp earth, like a machine, my father, and happily, my father, and Jon's mother in tow planting the stakes in the holes the whole way along to the point where the steel wire reel was and a new peg was going down to keep the rack standing, and I could not stop watching them.

She stopped once and put the stake down and took a few steps to stand with her back turned and look down at the river with shaking shoulders. Then my father straightened his back and waited, gloved hands round the crowbar, and then she turned with her face alight and tear-stained, and my father smiled and nodded to her, his hair falling over his brow, and he lifted the crowbar again, and she smiled soberly back, came over and picked one stake up, and with a twisting movement she wedged it into the hole so that it stuck. And then they went on, in the same rhythm as before.

Neither Jon nor his father had come, although I had been certain they would, because they had been there the year before, but maybe they had other things to do, things of their own, or they just could not bring themselves to come. That
she
could was strange, in fact, but when I had watched her working for a while, I thought no more about it. Maybe my father would invite all three of them to the logging. That was not impossible, because Jon's father did have much experience of it, but on the other hand how would things go, if they went on as they had up to now, and could not look at each other?

When all the stakes were standing in a jagged row across the field, the steel wire had to be stretched at thigh height between them with a loop alternately to the right and the left so the wire would lie straight in the middle. The two men from the village took care of that job; one was tall and the other was short, and that was plainly a good combination, because they had done it before and were brisk and efficient at getting the wire to stretch taut as a guitar string right down to the last stake and lashed securely around the peg that Barkald had knocked in at the other end. We others picked our rakes up and walked out fanwise with the right distance between us and started to rake the grass from all sides towards the rack, and it was obvious at once why the handles were so long. They provided radius enough for us to cover the whole space together, and not so much as a straw was left behind, but it was tough on our palms with the rake rubbing forwards and backwards a thousand times, and we had to wear gloves to save the skin from being torn and prevent burns and blisters after one hour only. And then we filled the first wire, some with hayforks and balance and great precision, others with their hands, like my father and I, who did not have the same experience. But that went well too, and the inner side of our bare arms turned slowly green, and the wire filled up, and we fixed up another one and filled that one too, and then another, until we had five wires crammed full one above the other, and the top one with a slightly shallower layer of grass hung down like a thatched roof on each side, so when the rain came it would just run off, and the rack could stand there for months and the hay would be just as good right under the outermost layer. Barkald said it was almost as good as having it dry in the barn, that is if everything was done properly, and as far as I could see nothing was wrong. The rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it. I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plastic white cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.

5

I did not recognise him the first few times I saw him, so I just nodded when I passed by with Lyra, for my mind was not running on those lines, why should it be? When he was outside his cabin stacking piles of firewood under the eaves and I was on my way along the road thinking of other things entirely. Not even when he told me his name did it register. But after going to bed last night I began to wonder. There had been something about that man and the face I had seen in the wavering light of our torches. Now suddenly I am sure. Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he's past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I've read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.

Not that it changes anything. It doesn't change my plan for this place, doesn't change how it feels living here, all that is as before and I'm sure he did not recognise
me,
and that's the way I would like it to continue. But of course it does make
some
difference.

My plan for this place is quite simple. It is to be my final home. How long that might be for is something I haven't given much thought to. It is one day at a time here. And what I have to work out first is how I shall get through the winter, if there is a lot of snow. The road down to Lars' cabin is two hundred metres long, and there's another fifty on to the main road. With this back of mine it will not be possible to clear that stretch with a shovel. I could not have done it with my back as strong as it ever was. There wouldn't have been time for anything else.

Snow clearing is important, and a good battery in the car if it gets really cold. It is six kilometres to the district Co-op. And enough wood for the stove is important. There are two panel heaters in the house, but they are old and probably eat up more electricity than they give out heat. I could have bought a couple of modern oil-filled radiators on wheels, the type you can plug straight into the power point and pull around as required, but my idea is that the heat I cannot produce myself, I will have to do without. Luckily there was a large pile of old birchwood in the outhouse when I came here, but that is not nearly enough, and it's so dry that it will burn up fast, so a few days ago I cut down a dead spruce with the chainsaw I bought, and my current project is to cut up the spruce and split it into usable logs and stack them all on top of the old wood before it is too late. I have already dug deep into that birchwood pile.

The chainsaw is a Jonsered. Not that I think Jonsered is the best brand, but they only use Jonsereds round here, and the man I bought it from at the machine workshop in the village said they wouldn't touch any other make if I brought him a broken chain and wanted it repaired. It's not a new saw, but it has been overhauled recently and has a brand new chain, and the man seemed quite determined. So Jonsered rules here. And Volvo. I have never seen so many Volvos in one place; from the latest luxury models to old Amazons, more of the latter than the former, and I saw an old PV model too, in front of the post office, in 1999. That ought to tell me something about this place, but I'm not sure what, except that we are quite close to Sweden, and to inexpensive spare parts. Maybe it's as simple as that.

I get into the car and drive off. Down the road and across the river, past Lars' cottage and out onto the main road through the forest, and I see the lake sparkling through the trees on the right until suddenly it is behind me, and then it's across an open plain of yellow, long-since harvested fields on both sides. There are large flocks of crows flying over the fields. They make no sound in the sunlight. At the other end of the plain a sawmill lies beside a river, wider than the one I can see from my house but flowing into the same lake. Formerly it was used for rafting, which is why the sawmill is situated where it is, but that is long ago, and the sawmill could have been anywhere, because timber is all transported by road nowadays, and it's no joke to meet one of the heavily laden trucks with trailers on a bend in a narrow country road. They drive like the Greeks do and use the horn instead of braking. Only a few weeks ago I had to drive into the ditch, the colossal brute thundered past me well into my lane, and I just wrenched the wheel over, and maybe I closed my eyes for a second for I thought my hour had come, but only the glass of my right indicator was smashed on a tree-stump. I sat there a long time, though, with my forehead against the wheel. It was almost dark, the engine had stopped, but my lights were on, and when I lifted my head from the wheel, I saw the lynx brightly outlined only fifteen metres in front of the car. I had never seen a lynx before, but I knew what it was that I was looking at. The evening was perfectly still around us, and the lynx turned neither to right nor left. It just walked. Softly, not wasting energy, filled with itself. I can't recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the road again and drove on. Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin.