Out Stealing Horses (19 page)

The door to the living room was open, as was the outside door, and if I propped myself up on my elbow I could see the sunshine slanting in on the glossy scrubbed floor. There was a smell of breakfast in the cabin and I heard my father and Franz talking in the yard. There was a calm, subdued, almost lazy note in between their words, and if the day before they had had a disagreement, they certainly had none now, but may have reached an understanding as to how important this logging job was to my father, and so they were taking their chances and had agreed that this was what they were good at, taking chances, though to me it seemed perfectly feasible to let the timber wait for a month or two or even until spring. Anyway, there they were in the yard standing in the sunshine and unhurriedly laying out a plan, so I could tell, for what they wanted to accomplish together that day, as they may have done so many times before when I knew nothing about it.

I lay back on the pillow and tried to think out what it was that made me feel so heavy and so weary, but nothing came to mind; no words, no images, merely a mauve tinge behind my eyelids and a dry sore feeling in my throat, and then I thought of the piled-up timber beside the river that would be going off any moment now, and I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to see the avalanche of logs hit the water, and watch the river bank emptying, and the smell of food from the kitchen alcove gave my stomach a sudden hollow feel, and I called through the door:

'Have you had breakfast?'

The two of them out there started laughing, and it was Franz who said:

'No, we're just hanging about here waiting for you.'

'Poor old men,' I called back. 'I'll be with you in a sec if there's food to be had,' and I decided that I was actually in fine fettle after all, and light as a feather. I pulled myself together in a flash and jumped out of bed as I usually did, with my hands gripping the side of the bunk, taking off by the bum, my legs swinging right from the top down to the floor in a telemark landing. But this time my thighs went on strike and my calves took the impact, and my right knee hit the floorboards and I fell over on my side. My knee hurt so badly I almost cried out. The two men outside must have heard the sound, for my father called:

'Yoii alright in there?' but luckily he stayed where he was with Franz. I squeezed my eyes tight and called:

'Oh sure, everything's fine in here,' although that was not how it felt. I managed to get up on the chair by the bed and sat there with both hands round my knee. It did not feel as if anything was broken when I touched it, but the pain was almost unbearable and made me slightly desperate and dizzy and somewhat confused, and getting into my trousers was difficult, because I had to keep my right leg stiff, and I was on the point of giving up and climbing back into bed, if such a move had been possible.

But I got my trousers on at last, and then the rest of my clothes, and limped out into the living room and sat down with my leg straight out under the table before my father and Franz were done talking and came inside.

When we had finished our late breakfast the two men started washing up at once, because my father wanted to have a clean slate when he came home tired, he said, and not walk straight into slop and mess, and I did not know why but they just let me sit there although it was normally my duty to help with the dishes when my sister had not come with us from Oslo. In any case, I had nothing against being left alone.

They stood with their backs to the table, chatting and fooling around and clattering the cups and glasses, and Franz piped up with a song he had learned from his father about the wolverine that hung from the top of a tree. As it turned out my father knew that song too and had learned it from
his
father, and they bellowed it out in unison waving their dishcloths and washing-up brushes to the beat, and I
saw
that wolverine dangling helplessly from the top of a spruce, and my head felt so heavy and hard to hold up I seized the opportunity to rest it in my hands on the table in front of me, and sitting like that I may have dropped off for a few moments. But when my father said:

'Now we really can't mess about here any longer, we must get going, isn't that so, Trond?' I heard him clearly and replied with my mouth full of saliva:

'Yes, that's it,' and I lifted my head and wiped my mouth, and suddenly I did not feel too bad after all.

I walked behind them across the yard to the shed, trying to limp as little as possible, and from among the tools I picked up a pike pole and hung a coil of rope over my shoulder, and my father took a pike pole too and two axes and a sheath knife, and Franz took a crowbar and a freshly sharpened saw, and all this we kept in the shed and more too: saws and hammers and two scythes and clamps and two planes and chisels of different sizes, and various files hung from nails in rows along the wall, and there were angle-irons and a good many tools whose use I did not know, for it was a well-equipped workshop my father had in that shed, and he loved those tools and sharpened them and polished them and soaked them with different oils so they would smell good and keep for a long time, and each and every thing had its appointed place where it hung or stood and was always ready for use.

My father closed the shed door and put the peg in place, and then the three of us walked in line carrying the tools under our arms and on our shoulders along the path to the river and the two piles of timber with my father first and me at the rear. And the sun was shining and flashing in the river, which was running high after several days of rain, and it would have been a perfect picture of that summer and the things we were doing together, if I were not still hobbling badly on one leg, and because inside me, not far from where my soul was, as I saw it, there was something worn and tired that just now had made my ankles and thighs too weak to carry the weight they normally would have done.

When we arrived at the river bank we put our tools down on the stones, and my father and Franz walked around the first pile and stopped side by side with their backs to the sparkling, swollen river, and with their heads cocked and their hands on their hips they studied the heavy timber stacked up against two strong, vertical bars. The bars were held in place by slanting logs securely set into the ground, and the idea was that when the slanting logs were removed the bars would fall straight down, and the pile of timber slide with a rush and all the logs roll forward over the bars lying like rails and on down into the water if the distance and incline were correct. And according to my father and Franz, everything was correct. What they did next was to kneel down and dig away the gravel and stones from around the ends of the slanting logs to make them easier to pull away. When that was done, they picked up their ropes and they each fastened theirs round a log and backed well out to the sides of the pile with the rope end in their hand as they did not want to get in the way of the moving timber. There were many ways of doing this, and this variant was Franz's patent. He had never managed to get all the timber out into the water in one slip, he said, and nor did he think he would succeed this time for there had to be a very special slope for that, and accordingly a really substantial weight, and it took bars and stays as strong as hell to do it and a lot of luck too, and then it all would be pretty risky. But of course, if you want a life of leisure, you have to take a big risk once in a while, according to Franz.

Now they tightened the rope from each end and dug their heels firmly into the ground, and then they counted aloud in chorus: Five, four, three, two, one, now! And they pulled with all their strength so the ropes crackled and the veins stood out on their foreheads and their faces darkened. Not a thing happened. The bars stayed where they were. Franz counted down once more and shouted: Now! And they pulled again and groaned in rhythm, and nothing moved except the features of the two men, who ground their teeth and narrowed their eyes to slits. But whatever the grimaces they made, it did not help, nor when they pulled with their uttermost strength. The bars stood firm.

'Shit,' my father said.

'Flaming hell,' said Franz.

'We'll have to cut them with the axe,' my father said.

'That's risky,' Franz said. 'We could get the whole slag-heap on our heads.'

'I know,' my father said. And then they went and picked up their axes from the stack of tools and went back to the front of the timber pile and laid into the slanting stays with arms and bodies almost bursting with irritation at not succeeding with their plan at the first try, for they were spoiled in that way, and Franz shouted 'Flaming hell' again, and then he said:

'Let's chop in time.'

'So we will,' my father said, and they changed rhythm and synchronised their strokes, and the sound of the axe blows was like one sharp crack each time. I could see they liked doing this, for Franz suddenly smiled and laughed, and my father smiled, and I wished I were like them, that I had a friend like Franz I could swing my axe with and make plans and use my strength with and laugh and cut logs with by a river like this one, which was always the same and yet was new, as now, but the only possible friend had disappeared and no-one talked about him any more. Of course I had my father, but it was not the same. He was a grown man with a secret life behind the one that I knew about, and maybe even one behind that, and I no longer knew if I could trust him.

Now he went faster with the axe while Franz followed suit, and then my father too began to laugh and swung his axe with added strength, and then I heard a creak from where the axe struck. He yelled:

'Run like hell!' and turned on his heel and threw himself out to the side. Franz laughed aloud and did the same. The stays broke almost simultaneously. They overlapped and the bars fell forwards perfectly according to plan, and then the pile began to slide with the sound of a hundred heavy bells that positively sang out across the water and into the forest, and at least half the trunks went tumbling off and almost leaped into the river. The spray boiled up, there was an impressive chaos of logs and water, and I was glad I was there to see it.

But there was still a lot of timber left, and it all had to go. The three of us set to work with our pike poles, and we hauled and pushed and pulled, and sometimes we used the crowbar to pry the logs apart when they were stuck fast, and sometimes the rope to pull them free when they were tangled up, and one by one they gave way. We rolled them, two of us at a time, with the pike poles out into the river, and then there was a splash, and they suddenly drifted off with dignified calm on the current down through the valley, on their way to Sweden.

I soon felt myself getting tired. The special feeling I was waiting for that would lift me and intoxicate me and give me that extra strength for the work, and swing me so easily from grip to grip, never took hold of the muscles in my legs or my arms or anywhere else as I had hoped for. Instead I felt heavy and drained and had to concentrate carefully on doing one thing then the next to prevent the others from seeing the state I was in. My knee hurt, and I was relieved when my father finally called out that it was time for a break. Most of the timber had been launched, only a few small trunks were left, but we had one more pile to send off. I crept over to the pine tree with the wooden cross on its trunk that Franz had put up one winter night in 1944 because a man from Oslo wearing far too thin and baggy trousers had been killed there, by German bullets, and I lay down in the heather under the cross, resting my head on one of the big roots, and fell asleep at once.

When I woke up, Jon's mother was kneeling over me with the sun behind her head and a hand in my hair, and she had the blue cotton dress on with the yellow flowers and a serious look on her face, and she asked me if I was hungry. For a second there I was the man with the baggy trousers, who was not dead after all, but who had come to himself and looked up at her still standing at his side, but then he slipped away and vanished. I blinked and felt myself blush and immediately realised that it was because I had been dreaming about her, and I did not remember what, but there had been an intense and strange warmth in the dream I could not admit to now with her eyes in mine. I nodded my head and trying to smile I began to push myself up on one arm.

'I'm coming,' I said, and she said:

'Fine, come along then, food's ready now,' and she smiled so unexpectedly I had to look away, look out across the water that was swelling by behind her back to the other bank where suddenly two of Barkald's horses were standing by the fence at the top of the field staring over at us with their ears pricked and hooves stamping, like two ghost horses sent here to warn of disasters to come.

She rose from her knees to her feet in one gliding movement as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do and went over to the crackling fire my father or Franz had made in the empty space where the first pile had been. There was a smell of roasting meat and coffee in the air, and the smell of smoke, and timber and heather and sun-warmed stones and some special scent I had not noticed anywhere else than by this river, and I did not know what it was made of if not a combination of all that was there; a common denominator, a sum, and if I left and did not return I would never be able to experience it again.

Not far from the fire, Lars sat on a rock beside the water. In his hand he had a bundle of coarse twigs, and he broke them into equal lengths and stacked them in a pile right down by the river on a grassy slope beside the rock, and at the front of the pile he had fixed two sharp twigs for bars. He laid all the twigs up against them. It looked really good in miniature, like a proper pile of logs. I went over to him and squatted down. My leg felt much better now after the rest, so maybe I would not be crippled after all. I said:

'That pile looks really great.'

'It's just a few twigs,' he said, and his voice was low and serious, and he did not turn round.

'We-e-l l,' I said, 'maybe it is. But it's great all the same. Like the real thing, only in miniature.'