The Last Boat Home (17 page)

‘Thank your mother,’ he said.

Else ducked under his arm. A candle shone in the dining room window, guiding her to the farmhouse through the dark while, behind her, Valentin’s saw left the peace of the night in tatters.

The strong man left in good time before Johann was due home from the shipyard. In the kitchen Dagny fried more meatballs and peeled the skins from boiled potatoes, scraping the shavings that curled on her knife into the bucket under the sink. Else unscrewed the lid from a pot of lingonberry jam and put it next to her father’s plate on the table. She saw him through the window, a shape in the dark that could easily have been mistaken for a deer.

The front door opened and shut and she hurried to the kitchen to carry the potatoes through. She judged her father’s movements according to the corridor’s protests: the groan of the bottom step when he removed his boots, the floorboards that creaked when he crossed to hang his coat, the quiet when he paused to crack the tension from his back. By the time he arrived in the dining room, she and her mother had finished preparing the dinner table. They took their seats while he washed his hands and splashed his face in the kitchen.

His jumper was spattered with water when he joined them and heaped food onto his dish and mashed his potatoes with the tines of his fork. He poured the sauce and helped himself to several spoonfuls of lingonberry jam. Else watched him chew and thought of Valentin eating his dinner in the barn, sitting in sawdust as he swallowed meatballs without gravy. Her mother watched, too. Her jaw was hard, her knife and fork idle in her fingers. She blinked and seemed surprised to discover that nothing was on her plate.

‘About the barn,’ she said.

‘Now I’m tired,’ said Johann. ‘I don’t want to hear more about the barn tonight.’

‘Tenvik has loaned us a worker. He’s been here today. He’s made some progress.’

Johann’s eyes moved slowly. He spoke through a mouthful of
potato. ‘A worker?’ he said. ‘What the hell do you mean, he’s loaned us a worker?’

‘One of the men from his farm.’

‘The circus apes? He’s brought one here? And who’s paying for that? Hm? Who’s paying for that?’ He gulped down his food. ‘Send him away,’ he said.

‘The barn needs fixing.’

‘Send him away,’ he said. ‘I don’t need Tenvik’s goddamned charity.’

Johann speared a lump of meatball, raised it midway to his lips, then flung his fork onto his dish. He slammed a palm on the table top, sending a shiver through the crockery. Dagny flinched and shrank back in her chair. Fear froze Else’s breath to splinters of ice that numbed her lungs and pricked her throat. Through the window, the sky was moonless. The night gobbled the stars.

Her father was up and headed for the boathouse without another word about the barn. Else stayed where she sat and did not dare to look at her mother. After some minutes, Dagny stood and carried the plates into the kitchen. She moved to the oven to add a log to the fire.

‘I might go and lie down,’ she said and padded from the room, leaving Else to clear the rest from the table. She washed the dishes, dried them, dried the pots and glasses and put each piece in its place on the shelf.

HER MOTHER DID
not send Valentin away. Each morning when Else passed him on the road to Tenvik’s farm, she would nod her greeting and his eyes would skip from the fjord to acknowledge her. When she returned, her bucket full and her hand sore with lugging it, his saw would be grating in the barn, a hammer pounding. She never knew if her father had seen him
in her absence, if, face to face in the yard where the snow crushed itself in its thaw, they exchanged words. What would her father say? Whatever it might be, Valentin did not leave.

In the afternoons when Else came home from school, her mother would dispatch her with his dinner tray. She would wait until Valentin had eaten his meal, always arranging himself on the floor as he had that first night, blowing on a spongy cube of fishcake or dipping his bread into a stew. From her seat on the milking stool, Else would marvel at the barn’s transformation. A network of planks boarded up the ceiling. Three posts seemed to grow out of the ground to support the roof. She watched one evening as he manoeuvred a fourth into the sawdust and hoisted its other end to the swelling above, the tendons popping in his neck as he heaved without uttering so much as a grunt.

For some reason, she felt comfortable in the strong man’s company – perhaps because she seemed to concern him so little. He left her in peace, only speaking to answer her questions about the circus, or about his travels. He had driven through Europe, through Germany, East and West, seen Denmark and Sweden, the northern lights. The winters were too long up north, he said. Someday he would go south, he would settle in the sun.

Else parcelled up these trifles to present to Lars in the caretaker’s shed, where he would kiss her for her troubles.

‘Find out more,’ he would say. ‘Find out if he needs anything. How much homebrew can he handle, anyway?’

A blizzard swept in from the northeast, wiping out the mud a milder temperature in recent weeks had laid bare between cakes of ice. On Else’s journey home from town, snow clouded the ferry’s windows, mottling the view of the coastline to the shipyard. She stepped onto the pier at the public dock and battled her way to the farmhouse through whirling flakes, her legs plunging into powder, pulling her in as far as her calves.

Else’s eyes were streaming when she arrived at the yard. Wind scoured her cheeks as she struggled past the barn, where Valentin’s hammer thudded softly under the howl of the weather. She thought of him there in the lantern’s light, warming his hands in his own steamed breath. His coat was not thick enough for this cold. His toes would be frost-bitten in his boots.

Else did not go straight to the farmhouse for his dinner but instead stole to the edge of the garden, hiding behind the bowed branches of the redcurrant bushes in case her mother should happen to glance from the dining room. On the fjord, the pier jutted out of the ice, a bleached gangplank into the storm. She mounted the boathouse stairs and shoved its door until it yielded. The snow shrugged a grey light onto the room, onto the ropes and nets and the rectangle of the trapdoor, onto fenders that hung from hooks in the wall over
Norges
jars and cans of oil. Else climbed over the rowing boat’s oars splayed on the floor and set down her satchel beside her father’s makeshift bed. With the mute distillery as her witness, she unbuckled the straps of the satchel.

She fished out the flask she had used that day to carry Ninni’s Tenvik’s blackcurrant squash to school for her lunch. She took off her gloves, rubbing the worst of the chill from her fingers before she unscrewed the flask’s cap. From her father’s
Norges
jars, she chose one that was three-quarters full of his clear, stinking liquid and decanted three centimetres of homebrew into the dregs of her drink.

The flask sloshed its contents in her coat pocket as Else ploughed to the farmhouse under the white crown of the morello cherry tree and through the back door into a heat that scalded her skin. She shook her hat and brushed the snow from her arms.

‘Mamma?’ she called.

‘I’ll be right there,’ her mother said.

Else stamped her boots on the doormat. Her mother laughed when she saw her.

‘Go on,’ she said, passing her Valentin’s tray, ‘stop soaking my floor and get back outside with you.’

Else carried the tray to the barn, her eyes slits against the snow. Valentin opened the door when she knocked, letting her in to melt a stream into the sawdust. The space was bitter with a draught that seeped in from the window and through the cracks between the door and its frame. A new fence closed off the cow’s stall. Else deposited the tray on the milking stool.

While Valentin finished up with his hammer, she poured a measure of homebrew into the mug of chicory. Her fingertips tingled as she tightened the flask’s top. She had placed it back in her pocket before he stopped his work to eat.

‘It looks good,’ Else said, pointing at the fence as he sank to the ground and reached for the tray. He clasped the mug in his palms and she waited for him to drink but, after some moments, he put it down and considered his dish. Dinner tonight was a vegetable casserole – a recipe Solveig had given her mother after the last
bedehus
meeting. Valentin extracted a carrot chunk from a pool of white sauce and popped it into his mouth.

‘I suppose,’ Else said, ‘you’re almost done with the barn.’ Valentin nodded, his focus still on his meal. ‘How much longer will you need?’

‘Two days,’ he said, ‘no more.’

Else thought of the cow snug in Tenvik’s barn. Poor animal, she thought, to be forced from relative comfort to return to her old quarters. For her part she would not miss the morning walk, especially now with the fresh snowfall, although, in truth, she had not minded it so much, had not minded coming home to the scrape of Valentin’s tools. Yakov had left her alone the few times she had seen him shuffling in or out of the pig barn. Once she had glimpsed him running from the henhouse, his hands nests for what she assumed must be pilfered eggs.

Valentin shovelled the last of the casserole between his lips and
sighed at his empty plate. He picked up the water glass and drained it in a series of short gulps. Again he lifted the mug, cradling it in his palms, resting the curve of the porcelain against his chest as if to warm his heart. He closed his eyes and breathed the vapour through his nose. His eyes opened and found Else’s face.

He tasted the brew and his jaw softened as the liquid slipped down his throat. He raised the mug and took another mouthful. Else looked away, ashamed to feel so pleased.

‘I thought you might be cold,’ she said.

‘So I was,’ Valentin said. He drank again and relinquished the mug to Else. ‘You look cold yourself.’

She hesitated, but accepted the mug. She sipped and a firework went off in her gullet. She swallowed air whose scent of damp pine and woodchip she had come to associate with Valentin. With a shy smile, she handed him the chicory and pulled the flask from her pocket. She refilled the mug with the remaining liquid, then waited for the strong man to drink it down.

By the time she left the barn, the tracks that testified to her expedition to the boathouse had almost vanished. The snow had filled them in like cement. Still it was the snow that gave her away.

That afternoon’s dinner was punctuated by a faint pattering that came from the barn. Through the meal, Johann’s eyes snapped up from his vegetables to glower at the flakes that danced in the sweating window. In spite of the moonshine that warmed Else’s belly, her nerves were pricked. She was restless in her chair. She stopped herself from jumping each time her father barked at her mother from the head of the table.

‘When will that ape be done out there?’ he said. ‘I’m sick of listening to his damned hammering.’

‘Soon,’ Dagny said. ‘In a couple of days.’

‘What in hell is this I’m eating? Why haven’t you cooked any meat?’

Johann picked his way through half a portion of Solveig’s casserole before stalking outside to the boathouse. Else was sitting by the oven reviewing the sewing pile when he burst through the front door, his coat still buttoned to his chin. Her mother leapt from her seat as he barged into the dining room.

‘That circus ape,’ he said, ‘is a thief. He’s been in the boathouse.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Dagny said. ‘He’s been in the barn all day.’

‘There are puddles on the floor. He’s been in there, all right. Someone has.’

Else’s heart lurched. Her fingers pinched her needle.

‘Unless it was you?’ her father said. ‘Why would you go in there?’

‘I haven’t,’ said her mother.

Johann moved into the room. His stare pinned itself on Dagny, who backed away.

‘I didn’t,’ she said, ‘I swear.’

‘Father,’ said Else.

‘Why would you go in there?’

‘Johann, no.’

His teeth were bared when he lowered his face to his wife’s. She screamed when he grabbed her hair and struck her head against the wall.

‘What were you doing in there?’ he said. ‘Were you checking on me?’

‘Johann, please!’

He knocked her head harder. ‘Spying on me in my own house?’

‘Father,’ Else said and was on her feet.

‘Why were you there?’

Her mother’s sobs tore through her pleas.

‘Father, stop! It was me!’

Before Else knew it her father had her by the throat, his fingers pressing her windpipe. He lifted her off the ground and she was sailing across the room and falling and crashing to the floor. A
wild cry erupted from somewhere behind the pain that shot from her ribs and up and down her side. She could not breathe. Her mother shrieked, her father closed in. Then a banging behind her startled his charge.

Valentin was at the window, his face visible through the glass that rattled when he thumped it with his fist. A vein bulged under the skin at his temple. He pointed a finger at Johann.

‘You,’ he said.

Johann ran from the room. His footsteps pounded the stairs and then came the smack of a door through the ceiling. Else tried to sit up, but the ache in her side sent her back to the floor. Her mother was next to her.

‘Else,’ she said.

She felt hands on her shoulders, her mother’s palm on her cheek. She let her terror melt to tears and buried her face in her mother’s lap.

‘Oh, Else,’ she said, ‘what have you done?’

Else touched her fingers to her neck. Only then did she remember the needle whose line had imprinted her thumb. When she looked at the window, Valentin was gone. The snow spun and billowed and flitted away.

V
ALENTIN NEVER RETURNED
to the Dybdahl farm. It fell to Dagny to settle matters with Tenvik. She arrived on Tuesday morning to collect the cow and explain that the circus man’s services would no longer be needed. Tenvik nodded without argument and she led the cow home through the snowbank, gripping the forelock of the head which swayed from side to side. There would be no getting rid of the draught in the barn but, even with it, the conditions for the animal had far improved.