Wolf Winter (4 page)

“What will happen now?” the Finn woman asked.

She sat down opposite him. The mounting light that came in through the window turned her blonde tendrils into the gold Crown of the Righteous. “Will you go and see her now? The widow?”

He took a cloth from his pocket and wiped his mouth. “Of course,” he said, biting down around the words.

“Then I’ll come with you,” she said. “She might need the company of another woman.”

The air was cold, but the priest was soaked with sweat. His cloak caught on twigs and branches. Elin would bury the body of her husband in a temporary grave. The coffin would be dug up and sent to him for its proper burial in the graveyard in town in October or November, when the snow allowed for transport. This whole venture was unwarranted. He should have just said no. He stepped wrong and imagined the Finn woman sneering behind him. He slowed down until they were level, and they continued in silence on the trail.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

“Eriksson? Why do you ask?”

She looked at him.

“Of course, I did,” he said, annoyed. “Member of the congregation.”

“It’s interesting, he’s called by his last name.”

The priest shrugged. Eriksson was the kind of man from whom others kept their distance.

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. All of you come here fleeing someone or something, and so you avoid talking of the past.”

“We didn’t,” she said after a while.

“Didn’t what?”

“Flee.”

The priest looked to the sky.
I like them better broken,
he thought.
Broken, humbled, ready to face the cross.

“How many people live here?”

“There are five settlements on and around Blackåsen Mountain. Six now, with yours.”

Six other mountains in his parish. And in the middle, an empty town.

“And the Lapps,” he added.

“The Lapps?” She sounded hesitant.

“They spend winter on Blackåsen,” he said and felt almost fatherly. “Bring the reindeer down from the high mountains so the animals can eat. You’ll meet them in church at Christmas, if not before.”

“Henrik’s son seemed frightened,” she said.

The children on Blackåsen were.

“And Gustav is …” she hesitated.

Well, yes. The priest too didn’t know what to call it. She nodded, as if he’d said something out loud.

“Uncle Teppo didn’t tell us much about what to expect,” she said with a little smile, as if they were sharing a joke.

“I didn’t know your uncle. I’ve only been here a year.”

Not even. Two hundred and thirty three days.

She was staring at him. “But when did our uncle leave?” she asked.

“If I remember rightly from the Church Books, four, five years ago.”

The priest stopped to wipe his forehead. By the side of the path a small mound of stones were built into a pyramid. In their midst a fat stick pointed to the sky. A signpost of some sort. He wiped his hands. There were black dots in the lines of sweat on his palms. He wiped them again, put the kerchief back, and flattened his collar with two fingers.

“What will happen to them?” the Finn woman asked.

“To whom?”

“Eriksson’s wife and children.”

“Oh. That I don’t know,” he said.

A lone woman with four children couldn’t manage a homestead. It would either be the poorhouse by the coast or they’d have to go on the pauper list, the rota, spend a few days on each farm. The peasants would protest, though. Say there were already so many. He wasn’t going to talk to the widow about it now. She’d still have hope, he told himself, but knew he was procrastinating. Come winter, when they took the body down, he’d have to arrange for them to take the widow and her offspring as well.

There was a woman in among the spruce trees ahead of them. She was pale and thin. Her hair was frizzy reddish brown—it almost didn’t look human. She stood with her head lifted high and waited for them to reach her.

“Elin,” the priest said.

“Please see him, before we bury him.”

He shook his head.

“I really want you to see his body,” she said.

The priest shook his head again before he realized Elin wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the Finn woman.

The long skirt of the woman in front of her brushed the trail. Henrik’s son had said there had been problems with Elin. Maija thought about his father silencing him. The words had been harsh, but it hadn’t been a rebuke, she thought. No, Henrik had pleaded.

Elin made a sound and said, “It’s good that you’re not from here.”

“Oh,” Maija startled. “Yes?”

Behind her the priest stumbled.

On the porch sat four thin children, side pressed against side. Maija’s breath slowed. The priest’s face was indifferent.
Here, man is nothing,
she thought.
In these lands, we will pass unnoticed.

Elin turned to her. “Henrik said it was bear.”

“Elin,” Maija said. “I was there. I’ve seen the body of your husband.”

“But did you see?” the other woman asked. She stressed the word “see.” Pointed out there were more ways to see than one.

The priest was shifting his weight on his feet, back and forth. “The dead must be given their rest,” he said.

“Please,” Elin said.

As they followed her toward the barn the children on the porch still had not moved. Maija felt their eyes chill her back.

There were no animals in the barn. The silence was so present, it felt loud. The roof was full of openings through which daylight floated to blend with dust in white, still ducts. Elin lifted the lantern off its nail on the wall. She lit it, and Maija could no longer avoid looking at the shape on the table, wrapped in canvas and tied with mucky ropes. “Be bigger than yourself,” she had said to her daughter the other morning when her fourteen-year-old’s lip trembled as she
woke from a bad dream. “For your little sister’s sake, for the sake of all of us. Be bigger.”

What stupid advice. She would never give it again.

Elin handed her the lantern and turned to loosen the ropes and fold the canvas aside. Its insides were stained brown, and the smell of decay struck Maija again, filled her mouth with a coppery tang, as if she tasted the man’s blood. The priest covered his face with his arm. Elin tucked the canvas underneath the edges of the body. Holding together. She was trying to hold together what had once been a husband and a father, a life.

A wave of nausea or sorrow flooded Maija, and she had to open her mouth wide. She handed the lantern back to Elin, took off her kerchief, and tied it around her nose and mouth. The skin on the dead man’s face hung loose. There was a bundled-up rag under his chin to keep his mouth closed, a stone on each eyelid. Death came in many shapes. Though bad, this was not the worst Maija had seen it.

She sensed the woman on the other side of the table.
I don’t know what you want me to do,
she thought. Wolf attacked and … she stopped. Elin nodded. Maija stepped closer. With her finger, she picked Eriksson’s frayed shirt out of the wound and bent to look.

“Do you have water?” she asked. “And a cloth.”

Elin put the lantern on the table and disappeared from its circle of light. She came back with a bowl and a rag. Maija washed the dry blood off the skin on both sides of the open cavity. She paused. She lifted Eriksson’s heavy hands, first one and then the other, looked in the coarse palms. There was a small red mark, like a burn, on the side of his right index finger; otherwise nothing. She pushed what was left of his shirt up to see his shoulders and his throat. She removed the stones from his eyelids, signaled to Elin, and they pushed the body onto its side. The back of his neck was black from the blood that had settled there. But the shirt on his back was whole.

They lowered the body down. Maija lifted his right hand again to see the mark on his finger. She looked at Elin. Elin shook her head; she didn’t know. No, it was an everyday wound. The kind that normally wasn’t noticed. Some seeds had caught on Eriksson’s shirtsleeve. Maija scraped them down into her hand. They looked almost like dry pine needles, but denser and with a grayish tint. She smelled them, and even amidst the odor of death, these managed a scent fragrant enough to prickle her nose. Herbs? She took one between her front teeth and bit it. Its taste was sharp, bitter.

Elin bent to see. She took a couple of the seeds, rubbed them, and smelled her fingers, then shook her head again. “Not from here around,” she said.

Over Elin’s shoulder Maija’s eyes met the priest’s blue ones. She nodded to Elin and stepped away. Elin handed her the lantern and folded the canvas back over the body.

Once, back in Ostrobothnia, Maija had seen gray-legs attack. It was winter, in the middle of the day. She’d been fishing for pike through a hole in the lake ice. She tugged at the fishing line with small jerks, willed the fish to bite. There was sun. It was quiet. On the other side of the lake a deer skipped across the ice. Maija dropped the line and stepped on it before it slipped down the hole. When she squatted to pick it up, they came. Five of them, a leaden streak over snow. Yellow teeth, footsteps within footsteps, total silence. Then one of them dived in, head low. The deer staggered. The others leapt in. She remembered her surprise when the sound of flesh being torn was no louder than that of cloth being ripped.

And as for bear …

Elin bound the ropes around the remains of her husband, and Maija stood there and knew that although she had never seen a man dead from a bear attack before, she wasn’t looking at one now either. This body lacked the marks of a man protecting himself. There were no tears from claws or teeth, only this clean, vertical rip. Even to her untrained eye, this was not a bear’s kill.

They were sitting on the porch. The priest had gone to wash his hands. Elin’s face was pale. Maija could not see the children. Toward the right side of the yard birch trees grew in a group. Too close together—they ought to have cleared them out. With the grown ones taking up that much space, there wasn’t going to be enough light for the saplings.

“Bear didn’t do this,” she said.

Elin stared ahead. Her face was vacant. It was as if she herself had gone somewhere else now that Maija had seen what she wanted her to see.

“How would the seeds have ended up on his sleeve if they are not from here?” Maija asked.

Elin moved her head a little. “I don’t know,” she said.

“When did he go missing?”

“He was going to the marsh. He’d talked to Gustav about trying to harvest it further out in the wet areas this year. Three days ago. Perhaps it was three days ago.”

“Weren’t you worried?”

Elin lifted her shoulders a fraction, let them fall again. “He was often gone for long periods.”

“Doing what?”

“He traveled to the coast to trade. When he was here, he did whatever it is our men do. Hunting, fishing.”

The wound had not been the hacking gash made by an axe. It had been lengthy, narrow. The kind made by knife. No, not knife. Not stabs. Something swung by force. Rapier. The others would have known too. As soon as they saw the body.

“Did anything happen before he left?” Maija asked. “Anything unusual?”

“No. Nothing unusual.” Elin met her gaze and her voice became sharp. “He was going to the marsh.” The moment of strength was gone and her shoulders sank.

A faint wind drew over the yard. High grass bent as in prayer. The priest returned, wiping his mouth with a cloth. His tall figure
and the long strides were too decided for the stillness; his profile too sharp. He tugged with his hand at his brown hair. He is young, Maija thought. Younger than you might think at first.

“His brother …” Elin’s voice waned.

The priest had reached them. In the corner of her eye Maija saw him shaking his head.

“If you tell me where he lives, I can speak with him on my way home,” she said. She hesitated. “What will you do now?”

Elin didn’t answer.

As they left, Maija turned around once, and now she saw the children. They were in the cluster of birch trees, flitting between the pale tree trunks like ghosts.