Wolf Winter (5 page)

Nothing, she thought. We are nothing.

Frederika sat on the porch, her legs stretched out in front of her. The wood was warm against her palms, the earth damp under the soles of her feet. She stuck the top of her index finger in a knag in the dull timber that probably had been there forever.

Dorotea was squatting by the barn, digging underneath it with a twig. Her father was in the woodshed restacking wood, organizing it according to type. The kind of work that doesn’t need doing but with which a man could fill many odd days if he liked. She imagined him, felt hat pushed low, hand hovering in the air, face grim. Birch, could he see any more birch? Yes, two pieces. He’d pull out two—one with each hand, throw them on top of his new birch section.
Chink, chink.

Her mother had not yet returned. Frederika shivered and put her feet up on the step beneath her, pressed her toes flat against the wood.

Her father wasn’t going to be good with the forest; that was clear already. The forest watched him but didn’t warm to him. Her mother had said once that her father’s element was water. That her father had been a fisherman, the best there was—fearless of any height of wave or beast of the sea. “He only laughed,” her mother said, and smiled at the images inside. “His hair was long and bleached, his skin battered, and still he laughed.”

Frederika tried to imagine her father with long hair, laughing on top of the bow of a ship, but it was difficult.

The smile was gone from her mother’s eyes before her lips followed.

“What happened?” Frederika asked.

Her mother shook her head. “It isn’t my story to tell,” she said. “Maybe one day he’ll tell you himself.”

Her story or not, Jutta told it anyway.

“It’s the Ranta great-great-great grandfather,” Jutta said. “He visits.”

Jutta and Frederika were sitting on a fallen birch by the lake, mending fishing nets. Nature around them was a flouncy green, but she gave nothing. The earth remained black no matter what they put into it. Their fingers working the nets were thin, like birds’ bones.

“Oh,” Frederika said. “But he is dead?”

Jutta looked as if she were sucking on something. “Not really,” she said. “Not enough,” she corrected herself.

Jutta picked at the net. “Poor people … forced to provide for the King’s men, though they hadn’t enough for themselves. When peace came, they still fed the soldiers, still clothed them and housed them. Then they rebelled. Fought with what they had: clubs and iron rods. Lost, of course.”

“What happened?”

“The army set fire to their farms and killed them. Men they had cared for in their own homes, attacking them.” She threw her head, and the tiny white braid on her back skipped. “As for Ranta’s great-great-great grandfather, they made his sons cut a hole in the ice. Then they bundled him together with other farmers and drowned them in the hole. And ever since he haunts the adult Ranta men, generation after generation.

“Happens close to water. They see this thin man, long hair like a horse’s mane. Eyes bluer than the sky in summer. He is tied at the waist with thick ropes to other men, and he wrestles to break out. The noises are the worst, they say. The same as by the rubble fields in the forest where the ice forced rocks and stones together. Grating. Screaming.

“Mustn’t try to free him.” The braid skipped again. “Must let him be. He can’t hear them—that’s how scared he is. Whoever tries to help gets dragged down with him.”

Frederika thought of her mother’s cool eyes, the way she stepped past her father, her movements brisk.

“Does my mother know this?” she asked.

Jutta nodded.

“It doesn’t seem that way.”

“Your mother knows.”

Jutta had looked as if she might say more, but then she pressed her lips together and bent her head over the nets.

A house-martin flew in and out from under a roof ridge above her.
Sirr, Sirr,
it cried. From far away on the mountain came the lone chiming of a bell. Perhaps Mirkka’s, their cow.

“Frederika,” Dorotea called from beside the barn.

“Yes?”

“Does Lapland have snakes?”

“Yes,” she called back. “Be careful.”

“Careful, careful. Always careful,” Dorotea muttered.

Did Lapland have snakes? Of course it did. It wasn’t far from Ostrobothnia. Yet it was worlds apart. When they arrived in Sweden, they had stayed by the coast for three long months awaiting spring. It was so close to their old home that if Frederika climbed the stone outside the cottage where they had stayed, if the weather was clear, she saw their past life across the empty white: another Frederika walking down to the pen to collect eggs, a Dorotea swinging the door open and yelling that she wanted to come, a father on the porch, wringing his hands, a mother passing with her back toward him, milk steaming in her pail. Then too sometimes the fires lit up—one, one, one—until the coast was a necklace of burning pearls. And if the wind held its breath, there it was—
thump, thump, thump
—the stomping of a thousand feet, growing stronger, making the earth spasm. Then the eggs were on the ground, broken, precious yellows on soil. Blue milk dripped from one stair down onto the next. She saw the family flee.

Her mother said it was no good, fantasizing. Her father didn’t want to talk. He worked cutting logs, left before dawn and returned after nightfall. Said they needed that money to buy seeds and goats.
Was certain they wouldn’t have enough to buy a cow. Lucky then that her mother convinced a merchant to give them one in exchange for their reindeer skins.

“Barren.” The merchant had eyed her mother. “Every calf she has dies as soon as it is touched by light. There’s no milk to be had from her.”

“Then we’ll name her Mirkka,” her mother had said, “‘Sea of bitterness,’ because that is surely what she must carry inside.”

Spring came. The snow began to melt, the other Frederika paled, home blurred, and Ostrobothnia shrank until it was so small, it slipped into the sea.

That’s when they set out into the Swedish forest. They had arrived here at Uncle Teppo’s abandoned cottage four days ago.

Frederika stuck her nose in her lap. She wasn’t sad. Not sad, more like … empty. The niggling kind of emptiness you feel when summer is over, before winter tops you up, or alone in the evening when everyone else has gone to bed.

The wool in her dress smelled white. Her feet were dirty, though, her toes a dusty black. She was older now; she ought to wear her shoes, but she liked feeling the path under her feet, coarse and soft at the same time. Springy, perhaps like walking on bread.

Then, of course, she saw in front of her what she had tried to push away all this time: a dead man’s mushy body. She sat up, tried to drive the image away, but when that didn’t work, she forced herself instead to keep looking, to see all of him in sharp detail.

Inside a man there was nothing. She had thought a dead man would be different compared to a dead animal—she didn’t know in what way—but man was empty. Now, when she wrapped her arms around herself and bent forward, she could almost touch the void inside.

She didn’t think anything had been eaten. Perhaps the predator had been scared off. It was a large wound, though. Needlessly violent. Men died from smaller ones than that.

Her father came out of the woodshed and stopped, eyelids batting against the light.

“And why are you sitting doing nothing?” he asked.

Frederika shrugged.

“Don’t sit for too long. It’s your turn to make dinner today.”

“Mine? Today?”

No, but hadn’t she cooked yesterday? And the day before?

“Especially today. Come on.”

They sprawled on the grass. Stomachs full, chores completed, a short rest before bedtime. Swallows hunted evening bugs. They dived, shrieked with joy or annoyance, looped and scaled, then dived again. Her mother had not returned, and they didn’t mention it out loud, but every now and then one of them stole a glance toward the yard. Dorotea lay beside Frederika, feet straight up in the air. She flexed them as if walking the sky. Frederika scratched her head, twirled her hair, made a face—it smelled of the goats. She turned onto her side.

Her father’s black felt hat was covering his face. His arm was flung over it, but he wasn’t sleeping, she was certain.

And then, all by themselves, her eyes slipped again to the empty yard. Never before had she felt her mother’s absence in this way. Like the cow must have felt the loss of her dead calves—the absence in itself physical enough to grate and nag against her flank.

The forest in the valley was messy: birch, aspen, gray alder, their offspring and good-for-nothing weeds. The leaves shouted brighter than the green of the spruce. The birds were noisier. Invisible things bit, and Maija slapped and itched. “Go due south,” Elin had said. “One hour’s walk. Eriksson’s brother is the only settler in the valley.”

Maija slapped her calf again.

And the priest. Olaus Arosander,
pfha!
Olof, more like it. An Olof who, perhaps, had lived or studied in a town called Aros or similar. He’d told her as soon as they left Elin’s yard that he wasn’t coming. Couldn’t wait to leave, stepping from one foot to the other, that ridiculous cloak of his hovering above the ground.

“Eriksson wasn’t killed by any animal,” Maija said. “He was killed by another human being.”

“We don’t know that.”

But she did.

“A passerby, perhaps,” the priest relented. “A tramp.”

The incision had been strong enough to cut bone, deep enough to slice the heart. “No,” Maija said. “Not a passerby. Not a stranger.”

“We don’t know that,” the priest repeated. “But I’ll send a message to the authorities at the coast.”

“Someone took his life. And who knows what will come of Elin and her children now.”

The priest left anyway. Maija shook her head. This was not a priest who cared.

Beside her, Jutta scoffed. “Name me a priest who does,” she said.

And if anyone knew, it was Jutta. After all, she had been married to one.

A dog barked, once, then several times. There was the breaking of branches, the ripping of bushes, and the dog emerged through the thicket in front of her, ears tight against its skull, strings of saliva hanging from its jaw. It bent its head toward the ground, not letting go of her with its yellow eyes. Growled. She didn’t mind dogs, but this one was different. More wolf than dog. She took a step forward, and the dog rose up, barked, held her where she was. She waited. Her heart pounded.

A name was called: “Karo?” The dog hesitated, ears erect now, listening. Then it slipped back into the thicket. Maija paused before continuing to walk, heart still loud in her ears.

A man waited for her in the yard. His face was thin and his eyelashes colorless. His ears stood out from his head. Lying down on the ground, pressed against his leg was the dog. It pulled its face back into a snarl, but there was no sound. Not now, submitted as it was to its master.

“Daniel? My name is Maija. Maija Harmaajärvi.”

By the house a woman was watching them, kerchief low, arms crossed.

“I am afraid I am coming with bad news,” Maija said. “It’s about your brother, Eriksson. Your brother is dead.”

She didn’t know if he heard, if he understood. Then he took a step out to the side and stood broader legged, seemed taller. He stroked his chin.