Wolf Winter (14 page)

The sky was low and closed. The black earth and the yellow grass glittered. He leaned back and stretched again.

Then he realized what he was seeing.

Oh no.

The priest ran down the stairs. He flew through the hallway, flung the door open, and jumped off the porch.

At the other side of the field the verger came running, coat flapping.

The priest slipped on the grass, caught himself before falling, continued running. At the white-rimmed field he plummeted to his knees. With shaky fingers, he pulled the thin seeds off a straw. They were frozen into small stones. Many of the heads were already empty.

The sky was a white lid above them, and he was gripped by a senseless urge to laugh. There would be no harvest.

“What do we have?” the priest asked.

A fire boomed in the fireplace. The verger sat with the books before him.

“The woodshed is full.” The verger followed the accounts line by line with his finger. “Three barrels of grain remain since last year. The barn is full of hay for the animals. There will be milk.”

“More?”

“There is salted fish, meat. The turnips ought to survive the frost. You have four cows and five sheep. Worst case, you can slaughter. You’ll manage well,” he said.

The priest remembered the local people—in Rawicz?—attacking the King’s army one winter when the famine grew unbearable. He saw before his inner eye flocks welling down the hills. “Do not kill,” the King had shouted. The soldiers had used the flat sides of their swords. But the aggressors came ready to kill with stones and sticks or their bare hands. They were mostly women and children. The images of their distorted faces—the face of hunger—would remain with the priest forever. “We are God’s envoys,” the King had said to the subdued company that evening. “If we don’t have food, we cannot do our duty. And these people need us to succeed. It’s hard, but we mustn’t forget this. From now on, we put guards around the supplies.”

“Are there locks on the barns?” the priest asked.

“No.”

“Arrange it. On the house too.” He walked to the end of the room again. “What about the vicarage? How is their position?”

“You’ll have to ask the widow about that.”

He would go over and see her. They might need to request backing from the peasants this year for both households to manage through winter.

From outside came the neighing of a horse and the rustling of carriages. The priest turned to the window. The verger walked close and peered from over his shoulder. “But the bishop was just here,” he said.

The bishop stared out over the frozen field.

“I wanted to see you again before winter, and now this.” He put his hand to the back of his head and held it there. “Third year in a row,” he said. “How will things be?”

“I’ll manage,” the priest said.

The bishop stared at him. He opened his mouth, then shut it.

“I was thinking about your congregation, Olaus Arosander,” he said. “The settlers, the peasants. Do you think they will be fine too? Your herd? All those who already have bled from the wars, the scarcity, the diseases?”

The priest wanted to tell the bishop about Rawicz. He wanted to tell him what the King had said, but even in his head, the words now sounded peculiar.

“Have you found out what happened to Eriksson?” the bishop demanded.

“We had a sermon yesterday where I addressed it.”

“You had a sermon.” The bishop’s voice was full of scorn. “I must not have made myself clear. I want to know what happened. I want a name, and you shall give that to me.”

The bishop grabbed the priest’s collar and stepped so close, the priest smelled the dung of his breath. “When I come back the next time, you shall tell me or, so help me God, you shall rot here and never leave.”

His hand on the priest’s chest was trembling.

The priest hit the bishop’s hand away. “You never liked me. You and the other bishops. From the beginning you were against me.”

The bishop sneered. “Why would we have been?”

“Because I was close to the King. You couldn’t wait to ruin it. I don’t know how you did it, but you did.”

The bishop shook his head.

“You made me fall out of favor. You had me removed,” the priest said.

The bishop was still shaking his head. “We didn’t remove you from the King,” he said, coolly now. “The King asked for it to be so. I said we’d take you, offer you a new position here.”

The words struck the priest harder than if he’d been slapped.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Olaus, you knew him,” the bishop said, and now there was something different in his voice. Pity? “Why wouldn’t it be true?”

Late autumn this year had violence in her hair, angry crimson, orange, and yellow. The trees wrestled to free themselves of their cloaks, crumpled up their old leaves and threw them straight out into the strong wind rather than just let them fall to the ground. Dry leaves ran across the yard with the crackle of fire.

Frederika’s mother held some frozen grains in her palm. Her hand seemed blue.

“I’ll have to go to the coast,” Frederika’s father said, “and find paid work. Come spring, I’ll bring back food and seeds for next summer.”

Her mother tipped her hand, and the grains fell to the ground.

“We have no money left to pay for lodging this time.” She was looking at the icy field.

“You’re right,” she said after a while. “The girls and I can manage with what we have gathered and with Mirkka’s milk.”

“I am not certain this is wise.”

Already her father didn’t like it. To separate: what a stupid idea.

“It’s the only way,” Maija said.

“There is still war,” Paavo said.

“There’s always war,” her mother said. She sounded tired.

Frederika’s shoes were scuffed and muddy. They looked like they belonged to someone else.

“Perhaps some of the others are going,” Maija said.

Her father looked up. Maybe he wouldn’t have to go it alone. Her mother throwing him a tidbit of hope, like you brush crumbs off a table pretending you are leaving a decent meal for the dogs.

The barn smelled of pelt and sawdust. There was a bucket by the pen. Frederika kicked it, and it hit the wood with a
clank.

She remembered another time, kicking a tree stump, Jutta watching.

“But she’s horrible,” Frederika had yelled. “She’s so … cold.”

Jutta sat down on the tree stump. She put her hands on its top beside her thighs, as if to appease what was hurt. The skin on her hands was wrinkled and see-through, the blue veins on her hand large and bubbly.

“Before your mother came to live with me, she lived with her father inland in a hamlet,” she said.

Stories. As if all that was ever needed was another story.

“Outside the hamlet there was
Näkki,
who pulled you down if you looked too deep;
Hiisi,
in crevasses and by boulders who attacked you if you came too close; and
Ajatar,
who made you sick if you ventured too far into the forest.

“But inside the hamlet was Maija’s father, Ari, and her four older brothers, who took turns to carry her around in a haversack they’d braided out of thin strips of bark.

“Now you wonder: why were they carrying her? You see, Frederika, your mother was born with thin legs, twisted like ropes, of no use at all.

“Your mother’s father had a brother who was traveling the seas. Whenever he came to visit, Uncle Erkki brought gifts. Once, there was a roaster grid from Turkey and small black beans in a leather pouch. They roasted the beans, made juice of them, and the hot black liquid banished sleep for several days. Another time there was a piece of cloth from Bengal, with sallow stars so delicate and beautiful, not even night did better. Then it was a yellow root from China. This was an important gift. They boiled the root and mashed it and put it on Maija’s stick legs, and they stared and there was stirring and pricking, but that was all. Maija’s father forced her to eat what was left of the root, and Maija vomited beside the porch.

“The last time Uncle Erkki visited, he brought a disease from Calcutta.

“Ten days after Erkki’s departure Maija’s brothers got a rash: small red dots on their foreheads. Maija and her father watched with
fascination and then fear as the boys grew thin, as if drained from the inside, and the bumps grew larger, until her brothers’ skin was covered by shining jellyfish. The jellyfish puffed up and puffed up and then they breathed out and deflated into dried sheets of skin. Pale fluid began to seep out. Her father lifted Maija up and shushed her onto the porch.

“Your mother sat on the porch night and day. At first the villagers came to ask how things were. Then they bent their heads when they passed. Toward the end nobody walked the road by their house at all. Sometimes Maija put her hands on the wooden railing above her and pulled herself up. She looked in through their window, but her father put his hands up: ‘no’—the disease whirling around him like a small storm. Later, jellyfish had her father also.

“One morning her father came out. His face was covered with so much dried skin it looked like thick bark. Maija saw eyes in there, round, blinking, but her father had turned into a tree. He fell off the porch. And that’s when I came to take your mother with me.”

Frederika took a step forward, close enough for Jutta to reach her. Her great-grandmother smelled of sweat, of love, perhaps of spring onion.

“She’s walking now though, my mother,” she said to the wool on the chest.

Jutta leaned back to look at Frederika. “And you know what? She did that all on her own.

“One day I found your mother staring at her legs. ‘As far as I can tell, there are two legs,’ she said.

“Well, undeniably, there were.

“I would watch through the window as your mother pulled herself up with the help of the porch railing and tried to move those shrimp legs of hers. Your mother would fall over, and I’d leave the windowsill. Then I’d come across her in the barn, kneading her legs like sour dough with her hands, knead and pull and twist.

“And your mother’s legs grew, thicker and straighter. Toward the
end of that summer your mother stood up. Before the snow fell, she walked.

“I asked her about it once. How she had known? She said that the most frightening part had been believing. Many people would have been happier not trying. Most people never try.”

Jutta patted the sides of Frederika’s legs with her hands.

“I don’t know any other way to describe it than to say that your mother healed herself. This is why she sometimes becomes … impatient with other people. She wants them to fight.”

“Hmm,” Frederika said, still unwilling to let go. “Not everyone is as strong as her.”

“That’s true. And your mother used to be more tolerant of others, but …”

Jutta interrupted herself and patted the sides of Frederika’s legs again—this time to tell her to stand up. Frederika rose.

Jutta bent over the tree stump and stroked its top. Her lips were moving as if she were praying.

There was a dull clang of bells, dogs barking, voices. Frederika ran out from the barn and across the yard at the same time as her mother opened the cottage door.

“Winter,” her mother said when Frederika reached her. She was squinting toward the forest. “This is winter coming.”

Men and women came walking out of the forest. Frederika counted five men, four women, children, and, with them, a herd of reindeer with tall antlers. The dogs yapped. The reindeer slowed and came to a halt. They moved to drink from the stream.

Two men left the others and mounted the slope toward them. The older had silver hair and a silver beard. His face was wrinkled and darkened by the sun. His coat was of leather patches sewn together with large tendon stitches. The younger was quite young. He couldn’t have been much older than Frederika. His black hair almost reached his waist. He looked at them down a straight nose.

Lapps.

“Greetings,” the older one said.

His voice surprised her. It was soft.

“So you are here,” Maija said.