The Last Boat Home (26 page)

Beside Else, her mother wiped the tip of her nose. Her lips moved over the invocation without making a sound.

They buried him in the cemetery. When Pastor Seip had finished preaching, six men strode forward from the nave – among them Knut Tenvik, Ole Haugeli and Tom Ivar Lund – and shared the weight of the casket between them. Pastor Seip followed the coffin down the aisle, while Else fell into step with her mother behind the minister. Pew by pew, the mourners joined them to see Johann out of the church.

The cemetery smelled of the thawed and rotting seaweed that the wind blew up from the harbour. Spring rain collected in puddles on the path which left a gritty film over Else’s patent leather shoes. She held an umbrella over her and her mother’s heads as they walked with arms linked to her father’s plot. The hole looked too small for his coffin. Even so, the pallbearers laid it in the straps
of the pulley and, with a yank of the winch, the casket began to drop. It scraped the grave’s sides, screeching in protest as it went. Else half expected the noise to wake her father up.

‘O death, where is thy sting?’ said Pastor Seip. ‘O grave, where is thy victory?’

After the burial, they served coffee and cake. Tenvik drove Else and her mother the short distance to the
bedehus
, where Ninni and Solveig helped them bring the sugar cake and raisin Bundt from the kitchen up to the hall. The mourners filled their cups with real coffee and cream, while Else and her mother accepted commiserations from whosever hands were free.

‘Condolences,’ said Trygve Christensen.

‘A fine man,’ Esben Omland said.

Else tried to smile while her palm was pinched and shaken. Pastor Seip sat at the table beside her, wearing a pained expression as he nodded his acknowledgement of the well-wishers.

‘A tragedy,’ said Ingrid Bull.

‘Such a waste,’ said Gjertrud Sundt.

The women lingered for a moment, their eyes searching Else’s face. The scabs on her cheek itched where her mother’s needle had picked out the splinters. She felt exposed, stripped naked and turned out for all to see. She knew the rumours about the strong man had already started. Upstairs in the gallery, Lars had found a seat with Rune behind the rail. Petter had not come to the funeral.

Else stared at the coffee cup on the table in front of her and sucked a mouthful of air through her teeth. She burped behind her hand.

‘Are you all right?’ asked her mother across Pastor Seip. Else dabbed a handkerchief over the sweat that beaded her forehead. She swallowed her nausea and let the next mourner take her hand.

By four o’clock, most of those present had offered their sympathies to Dagny and Else. The rest hovered close to their table,
waiting their turn to fulfil their Christian duty before going home. Else’s coffee had grown cold. She had not eaten her cake. She felt sick and hot under the layers of her clothing, her skin rubbed raw by buttons and seams and wool made tight by perspiration. She thanked the people whose hands rattled the bones in her arm. When Haakon and Karin Reiersen stepped forward, the room began to spin.

‘Dagny,’ Reiersen said. His fingers closed on her mother’s palm. ‘Our condolences, once again.’

‘Thank you,’ Dagny said.

‘How are you bearing up?’

‘As well as can be expected,’ she said.

‘A sad business,’ said Reiersen. ‘If there is anything we can do …’

He glanced at his wife, who blushed and leaned forward to kiss Dagny’s cheek.

‘Condolences,’ she said. She did not look at Else. Behind her, Lars stood with his hands in his pockets. He blinked at the floor. He followed his parents to the other side of the room.

‘Condolences,’ said Randy Fodstad.

‘Condolences,’ said Arne Kvinge.

The Reiersen family withdrew into the rain. Through the window, Else saw the Cadillac backing into the road.

The news of her romance with the strong man began in a whisper, like the rustle of leaves in a mounting wind. Else had been sneaking to the circus man’s trailer for weeks. She had contrived to have her parents hire him for their barn work; some said she had sabotaged the roof herself. More details emerged with the passing days to be exchanged at the fish market, at Berge’s bakery, in the churchyard after the Sunday service. Pastor Seip no longer spared a nod for her in the street. Twice, Lars’s mother crossed the road to avoid her.

Else waited for the ferry each morning as before, looking at the shipyard from the public dock while steeling herself to the other passengers’ stares and murmurs. Once aboard she stayed on deck where, as often as not, the weather would preserve her isolation. She stowed herself in a corner by the guardrail, welcoming the rain that pattered the canvas of her raised hood. At the Longpier, she disembarked. Hands shielded mouths; heads inclined to lips.
The Devil is in her.
She hurried along the harbour, her eyes on her boots all the way to school.

Lars wasted no time in taking up with Gro Berge. They met at the caretaker’s shed at the start of the school break and reappeared at its end with rumpled clothes and sheepish grins. Else paced alone around the Gymnasium and kept her focus turned inwards. Sometimes Petter would desert Rune by the gate and join her for a round, ignoring the taunts that were aimed at his back. She wished that he wouldn’t. She greeted him with silence, wary of the fresh speculations his company would bring. Their classmates giggled when they walked by. Petter endured their ridicule, though she had not asked him to.

The snow had all but melted by May. At the edge of the schoolyard, the last of the ice clung like lichen to the asphalt. Else sat in Paulsen’s classroom and peered out of the window. Along the road, new leaves filled out the branches of the trees. Paulsen’s monotone dwindled to a hum in her ear, while her eyes strayed to a fragment of sun by the caretaker’s shed. The light seemed to seep into her vision, bleaching foliage and bark the colour of aging paper. She felt her brain cooking, then her stomach wrenched. Someone had eaten herring for breakfast. She could smell vinegar, onions and fish. She clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘Else! Where in the world are you going?’

Paulsen shouted after her when she ran from the room. At the
end of the corridor, she burst into the girls’ toilets and dropped to her knees in the first cubicle. Tears dripped from her eyes into the cistern as she retched up that morning’s bread and jam. A new bout of nausea stirred her gut. She heaved and heaved.

She flushed the toilet when she had finished. She blew her nose and wiped her lips and rested her forehead on her arms until she was herself again. Her legs were leaden underneath her when she ventured from the cubicle. She moved to the sink and let the water chase the heat from her palms. Else splashed her face, rinsed her mouth and rubbed her neck with wet fingers. Her eyes glared back at her from the mirror, their whites tinged pink around the irises. Her skin was sallow, as pale as her father’s had been when they pulled him from the fjord.

At ten minutes past twelve, the Gymnasium’s students poured from their classrooms into the hallway. Else listened through the door to the current of footsteps that carried them into the yard. When the building’s hush had been restored, she crept from her hiding place to Paulsen’s classroom. He was liberating a packed lunch from a sheet of greaseproof paper. He looked up from his desk when she knocked.

‘I’m sorry for leaving in the middle of class,’ she said.

Paulsen pursed his lips at the goat cheese on his bread slice. Else remembered the squeeze of his hand after her father’s funeral. ‘I think I’m getting the flu,’ she said.

‘Get out with you,’ he said.

She turned away and drifted down the corridor, feeling dazed and unsteady on her feet. A blast of sun met her full in the face when she opened the door to the schoolyard. She shielded her eyes until her vision cleared and the caretaker’s shed came into focus. Else crossed into the shadow that stretched over the ground on the other side of the Gymnasium. At the rear of the building, she sank onto the steps by the staff entrance. The stone was cold through the cloth of her trousers. She kneaded her belly as she
gazed down Elvebakken to the fjord. It was the second time that week she had vomited.

Else stiffened when she saw Petter, who approached and sat on her step. He leaned his back against the door and rested his hands on his knees.

‘Were you sick?’ he asked.

He scratched his chin and started again.

‘I heard you were sick,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ Else said.

‘You should have seen Paulsen’s face when you bolted.’ His laugh was thin on his lips. He bounced his heels in a frantic rhythm.

‘I’ve been meaning to say.’ His knees grazed his palms. ‘That night, when I came for you at your house. I guess your parents must have known about the strong man. They found out, didn’t they? That’s why they locked you in your room.’

Petter touched her arm when she did not answer.

‘You said you wanted to go into town, but I took you straight to him. I made things worse, didn’t I? I shouldn’t have interfered.’

‘No,’ Else said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

His body sagged as if she had elbowed him in the gut. She felt better at once and then she felt worse. Petter stood and walked away, finally leaving her alone.

In those days, her mother prayed with the urgency of a convert, as if she were making up for lost time. She kept the radio on and turned it up for the morning’s Bible reading, often opening her own Bible to examine the verse in its entirety. Else would wake to the sound of her bumping in the bathroom and would picture her bent over the laundry, sorting through her clothes and gnawing her cheeks as she checked the gussets of her daughter’s underwear. When Else was alone, she pounded her stomach with her fists. Still the bleeding did not start.

She stayed at home on the Sunday when the new class of confirmands was due to answer to the minister in church. She milked the cow and marvelled at the thought that, only two years ago, it had been her turn. Dressed in a white gown with a crucifix stitched over her breast, Else had stood at the altar while her parents watched from their pew. Afterwards, there had been a party at the
bedehus
. Rune had eaten a piece of each of the six cakes donated to the cake table.

May slipped into June. Apart from her journey into school, Else did not venture far from the farmhouse. She confined her walks to the fields nearby, where bluebells and buttercups sprang from the grass and the air was warm with the smell of horses. Daylight hours won out over the night, flushing the horizon in vivid colours that yielded to darkness for a few hours and no more. Else and her mother hung summer curtains in their bedrooms. In the yard, the green tops of onions and carrots nudged through the earth. Stacks of tinder – worn-out traps, used-up tables and chairs, sawn-off branches and hacked-up tree roots – appeared on rock flats that dipped into the water as their neighbours prepared for Midsummer bonfires. Else picked redcurrants from the bushes in the garden, looping her belt through the handle of her pail while she worked. The juices stained her fingers and she sucked them clean with a hunger that surprised and terrified her.

On Midsummer’s Eve, she rowed the skiff into the fjord and pulled a coalfish from out of the water. It was a fine weight, a good two kilos, she guessed. She laid it down in the hull and rinsed her fingers and rowed home.

In the kitchen she tied an apron around her waist and, after retrieving a knife from the cutlery drawer, sliced off the fish’s head and poked its belly with her blade, jerking it downward to the creature’s vent. Her tonsils burned with bile as she slid her fingers into the gash. She wound them in its entrails, which plopped
pink and brown onto the counter. When she held up her hands, they were shiny with blood. The smell hit her, doubled her over. She fled into the garden through the back door.

Her mother found her in the grass on her hands and knees. She had not made it to the outhouse in time. Dagny knelt on the ground at Else’s side and combed the hair away from her face. She held it in a bunch at the nape of her neck while she rubbed circles over her daughter’s back. Else groaned and gagged and sobbed until the nausea subsided.

Afterwards, her mother brought a cup of chicory to settle her stomach. They had carried two chairs from the dining room into the garden, where they sat by the vegetable plot, which smelled spicy and rich in the sun. A seagull perched on the roof of the boathouse like a weathervane in the windless air. The knock of the skiff on the tide drifted up from the water. Else swallowed her chicory in quick sips.

‘We’ll pick the blackcurrants next week,’ her mother said. ‘There are so many this year, we’ll have squash and jam to last through the winter. How are you feeling?’

‘Better,’ Else said.

Her mother nodded at the shipyard. The glare of the sun sharpened the new wrinkles around her mouth. ‘Ninni Tenvik has asked if I’ll sew her a dress.’

‘That’s good,’ Else said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is good.’

Else lifted her cup and choked on the fish stink that came off her fingers. No matter how she scrubbed them, it would not wash away.

‘I could do with your help,’ her mother said. ‘It’s just as well that school has finished for the year.’

‘Yes,’ Else said.

‘And next year. Well. We’ll be busy with other things then, won’t we?’

The seagull spread its wings and took off from the boathouse roof. Else watched it fly until it disappeared. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said.

‘Hush,’ said her mother. ‘A baby is a blessing.’

When their chicory had been drunk Else carried the cups into the kitchen, where she washed them and put them away. Her mother changed her clothes and finished cleaning the coalfish before returning outside. From her seat in the cool of the dining room, Else glimpsed her moving through the window, scurrying back and forth in front of the pier. She tried to concentrate on the sewing. She chose a pair of trousers from the pile and considered the hems her mother had pinned up. She threaded her needle with dark blue cotton and pierced the wool with its tip. In and out she sewed, though the garment was old and shabby and beyond rescue.