Out Stealing Horses (6 page)

'You'll have to look after Lars while I'm gone. That at least you can manage,' and he looked across at the steps where Lars had come out into the sun and stood blinking in the strong light. Their father ran a hand over his face, closed his eyes for a moment, then he cleared his throat and climbed onto the box, whipped up the horse and the cart began to move and turned out through the gate and down to the main road, up past the shop and then slowly the long way to Innbygda.

Jon took Lars out in the boat with him and down the river to fish, he could not think of anything else, and they were away for hours. What they talked about I have never been able to imagine. Maybe they did not speak at all. Maybe they just stood on the bank, each with his rod, fishing; casting and reeling in again, casting and reeling in, with a good distance between them, and nothing around them but the forest and a great silence. That I can imagine.

When they returned they went in the barn with their small catch and sat there waiting. Not once did they go into the house. Late in the evening they heard the sound of Bramina's hooves on the gravel and the cart rolling up the road. They looked at each other. They would really have liked to sit on there for a while longer. Then Jon got to his feet, and so did Lars, and they held hands for the first time since the twins were quite little, and went into the. yard and watched the cart come towards them up the drive and stop, and they heard Bramina's asthmatic breathing and their father's comforting words to the horse; kind words, gentle words, words they had never heard him say to a human being.

Their mother sat on the box in the blue dress with the yellow flowers on it, her handbag in her lap, and she smiled at them and said:

'Here I am, home again, that's nice, isn't it?', and she rose, put her foot on the wheel and jumped down.

'Where is Odd?' she said.

Jon looked up at his father, but he did not look back, he just stared at the barn wall and chewed as if his mouth was full of tobacco. He had not told her. The whole long way through the forest, just the two of them, and he had not told her anything.

The funeral took place three days later. My father asked if we should go and I said yes. It was my first funeral. One of my mother's brothers had been shot by the Germans when he tried to escape from a police station somewhere in Sorlandet on the south coast in 1943, but of course I was not there when it happened, and I don't even know if there was a funeral.

I remember two things about Odd's funeral. One of them is that my father and Jon's father not once looked each other in the eye. My father did shake his hand and say: 'Condolences,' a word that sounded completely foreign, and he was the only one who used it that day, but they did not
look
at each other.

The other thing was Lars. When we went out of the church and stood by the open grave he grew more and more restless, and when the priest was halfway through the ceremony and the little coffin was to be lowered down with a rope round each handle, he could not bear it any longer and tore himself free from his mother and ran away among the headstones until he was almost out of the churchyard, and started to run in a circle right over by the stone wall. He ran round and round with his head lowered and his eyes on the ground, and the longer he ran the slower the priest spoke, and at first there were just a few people in the black-clad flock who turned round, but gradually more did, until at last they had all turned to look at Lars instead of the coffin that held his brother, and it went on until a neighbour walked quietly across the grass, stopped at the edge of the circle, caught Lars as he ran by and picked him up. His legs were still running, but he did not utter a sound. I looked over at Jon and he looked back at me, and I shook my head slightly, but he made no sign in return, just stared straight into my eyes without blinking. And I remember thinking that we would never go out stealing horses together again, and it made me sadder than anything that happened at the churchyard. That is what I remember. Which makes it three things in all.

4

T
here were trees on the land
my father had bought as well as pasture. Mostly spruce, but pine as well, and here and there a slim birch was almost squeezed in between the darker trunks, and all of them grew right down from the river bank, where in some mysterious way a wooden cross had been nailed up on a pine tree that grew at the edge of the pebbles, almost overhanging the rushing water. Then the forest continued almost full circle around the yard and the cottage with the shed and the meadow behind it and on to the narrow road where our land ended. That road was really hardly more than a sparsely gravelled track through the rows of spruce with roots crisscrossing it, and ran parallel to the river some way away on the east side right up to the wooden bridge where it turned towards the 'centre' with the shop and the church. That was the route we took when we arrived on the bus at the end of June, or when some idiot had left our boat on the wrong side; east or west according to where we happened to be. As a rule the idiot was me. Otherwise we walked over Barkald's field alongside the fence and rowed across the river.

Around noon our cottage was shaded from the sun for a couple of hours by the dense forest to the south, and I wondered whether that was the reason for my father's decision to chop the whole creek of shit down and sell it as timber. I am certain he needed the money, but I had not realised it was so urgent; and that we had travelled up to this river at all, and for the second time in a row at that, it was my thought that he was in need of the time and the peace to plan out a different life from the one that was behind him and that he had to do this in a different place with a different view from the one we had where we lived in Oslo. We're at a crossroads now, he had said. I alone was allowed to go with him, and that gave me a status my sister could not boast, because she had to stay on in town with my mother, although she was three years older than I was.

'I don't want to go anyway, I would just have to wash up while you two were out fishing. I'm not stupid,' she said, and she was probably right there, and I thought I understood what my father meant, and I heard him say more than once that he could not think with women around. I never had that problem myself. On the contrary.

Later on I have thought that maybe he did not mean
all
women.

But it was the shade he talked about; that bloody shade, he said, after all, it is holiday time, damn it, and he cursed as he sometimes would when my mother was not present. She grew up in a town where she claimed they swore the whole time, and now she did not want to hear any more of that. Personally I thought it was fine to be free of the sunshine for some time during the hot hours when the forest held its breath in the strong light and produced scents that made me sluggish and drowsy and could make me fall asleep in the middle of the day.

Whatever the reason, he had made his decision. Most of the trees were to be felled and the trunks hauled to the river and floated down on the current to a sawmill in

Sweden. I wondered at that because Barkald had a saw only a kilometre downstream, but it was just a farm saw and was maybe too small and not able to cope with the quantity we would be sending. The Swedes though were not willing to buy the timber at the spot, as the custom was, but would only pay for what arrived at the timber yard. Nor would they take responsibility for the rafting. Not in July, they said.

'Maybe we should just take a little at a time,' I suggested. 'A little now and a little next year?'

'I am the one who decides when my timber is to be felled,' he said. That was not what I meant, whether it was his decision or not, but I left it there. It was not important to me. My concern was whether he would let me join in the drift, and who else would be there, for it was heavy work, and certainly dangerous if you did not know what you were doing, and as far as I knew my father had never done any logging before. And he probably hadn't, I can see that today, but he had so much self-confidence he could take on almost anything and believe he would succeed.

But first it was time for haymaking. It did not rain much after the thunderstorm, and the grass dried out in a couple of days, and one morning Barkald came over to us with his hair newly brushed and his hands in his pockets to ask if we might consider putting in a few days with the hayfork. He was sure that last year's hay would have gone down the drain had it not been for the muscle my father and I had put into it, mine in particular, I was to understand from his flattering words, but I was old enough to realise that what he was really after was free labour. But he was right, of course. We had worked hard.

My father stroked his bearded chin, squinted at the sun for a moment before he glanced sideways down at me where we stood on the steps.

'What say you, Trond T.?' he asked. Tobias is my middle name, but I would never use it, and the T. only turned up when my father wanted to sound a tad serious and it was a signal to me that now there was room to fool around a bit.

'Ye-e-es,' I said. 'There might just be a possibility there.'

'We do have some work of our own to see to as well,' he said.

'That's true,' I said. 'We have a few things to get out of the way, it's not that, but maybe we could squeeze in a day or two, we might just about manage.'

'We might, but it won't be easy,' said my father. 

'Yeah, it will be hard,' I said. 'One would have to say that a barter in kind would probably come in handy.'

'You're right there,' said my father, looking at me with curiosity. 'Bartering surely couldn't be a bad thing.'

'A horse, with harness,' I said. 'For a few days of next week or the one after.'

'Just so,' my father said with a broad smile. 'Right to a tee. What do you say to that, Barkald?'

Barkald had been standing there in the yard with a bewildered expression on his face as he listened to our contorted dialogue, and now he stepped right into the trap. He ran his hands through his hair and said:

'Yes, well, I don't see why not. You are welcome to have Brona/ he said, and I could see he wanted to ask what we actually needed the horse for, but he felt he had somehow lost his track and the last thing he wanted was to make a fool of himself.

Barkald said he would start mowing the following day when what little dew there was had dried off, we should just turn up in the north meadow, and then he raised his hand in farewell, obviously glad to be off, and made his way down to the river to board his boat, and my father put his hands to his sides and looked at me and said:

'That was brilliant, how did you come to think of that?' He had no idea how carefully I had been over the logging operation in my mind, and as I had not heard him mention anything about a horse, I put my oar in, for I knew we could not drag the tree trunks to the river with our bare hands. But I did not reply, just shrugged with a smile. He grabbed a tuft of my hair and shook my head gently.

'You're no dimwit,' he said, and he was right. I had always thought so: that I was no fool.

Four days had passed since Odd's funeral, and I had not seen Jon since then. It felt strange. I woke up in the morning listening for his footsteps in the yard and on the steps, and I listened for the creak of oars in their rowlocks and the slight bump when his boat hit the stones on the shore. But each morning all was quiet, apart from the birds singing and the wind in the treetops and the sounds of bells when the cattle from the summer dwellings north and south of us were driven up into the hills behind the cabin to graze all day on the green hillside until the milkmaids came out on the meadows and walked up to the road to sing them home at five o'clock. I lay in my bunk by the open window and heard the crisp metallic clanging of the bells change with the changing terrain thinking I would not wish to be anywhere else than in this cottage with my father, no matter what had happened, and every time I dressed and Jon was not there at the door, I sensed a flash of relief. Then I felt ashamed, and there was a soreness in my throat, and it could take several hours before that soreness disappeared.

And I did not see him by the river, did not see him with his fishing rod along the bank or in the boat on his way up or down, and my father did not ask me whether we had been out together, and I did not ask my father whether he had seen him. That's the way it was. We just had breakfast, put our working clothes on and went down to the old rowboat that had been included in the purchase of the cottage, and rowed across the water.

The sun was shining. I sat on the stern thwart with my eyes closed against the light and my father's familiar face as he rowed with easy strokes, and I thought about how it must feel to lose your life so early. Lose your life, as if you held an egg in your hand, and then dropped it, and it fell to the ground and broke, and I knew it could not feel like anything at all. If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realised then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I
wanted
to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids, and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certainly there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was. When I opened my eyes, the feeling stayed with me. I looked across the water towards the far bank, and it was still there. I looked at my father's face as if from a place far off, and I blinked several times and drew a deep breath, and perhaps I trembled a little, for he smiled enquiringly and said:

'How goes it with you, chief?'

'I am alright,' I said, after a pause. But when we came alongside the bank and tied the boat up and walked along the fence over the meadow, I felt it somewhere inside me; a small remnant, a bright yellow speck that perhaps would never leave me.

When we came up to the north meadow there were already people there. Barkald himself stood by the mowing machine with the reins in his hand, ready to get on. I recognised the horse, my crotch still felt sore after our ride together, and there were two men from the village and a woman I had not seen before, who did not look like a farmer's wife but might be a relative of the people living here, and Mrs Barkald stood talking to Jon's mother. The two had put their hair up in loose topknots and wore faded dresses of flowered cotton, which clung to their bodies, and bare legs in calf-length boots, and they held rakes with handles twice as long as they were tall. We heard their voices all the way down on the track through the morning air, and Jon's mother was different out here in the meadow than at home in their cramped house, and it was so palpable I saw it at once, and my father obviously noticed the same thing. Almost unwillingly we turned our heads and exchanged glances and recognised in each other's eyes what the other had seen. My face grew hot and I felt tense and at the same time ill at ease, but I did not know if it was due to my own surprising thoughts or because I saw my father had thought as I did. When he saw me blushing he laughed, softly, but not patronising at all, I'll give him that. He just laughed. Almost with enthusiasm.