Wolf Winter (17 page)

A woman sits by a table. She is folding clothes. How strange, she thinks. All this time, all these struggles, you think you have a new beginning and it proves to be an end.

The children are running around, chasing each other, shouting. They are too young. Too small. Too old, too large, too fast. They’ll do her no good.

The days become shorter. The dark from nightfall lingers on right through the day. Underneath the lowest branches of the spruce trees, it lurks and watches. By the river and the lake, it hangs in the air like a tinted haze.

The real cold arrives. The houses come alive. There is ticking and creaking. Wind and snow work on any painted area, and what is left will be a sheer memory of the original color: small, flaking squares in some places; minute, almost-colored droplets in others. When the settlers come inside after feeding their animals, their curls are silvered. You can break off hair that’s frozen like that, feel the tress come loose between your fingers and not hear a sound.

Her daughters have rubbed the last traces of food off the plates with their fingers. More poor or less poor, she tells herself. That’s all it’s ever been. She refuses to feel anything. As if not feeling would make a difference.

Her elder daughter is clearing the room, sorting laundry, folding clothes.

Find it now, come on. There you go: feel. What is that in your mother’s skirt pocket?

The girl hesitates, then her fingers close around it. She takes it out and holds it toward the light: a piece of coarse blue glass in her hand.

PART TWO

Maija didn’t hear the first shot, heard something perhaps, but didn’t make sense of the sound. She was in the barn seeing to the animals. The goats bleated, complained to her of the new cold.

The second shot could have been anything—a shutter slamming, ice rupturing, a tree breaking …

It was with the third that Maija recognized the sound. She ran out. Five shots in total echoed out, rolled against the mountain with the sound of a whip.

Southward from …

Elin,
she thought.
Or Daniel and Anna.

Maija ran as fast as she could, whispering with each step,
please
let me be wrong. The night was black, but the snow glowed and gave off light. Her shoes scraped as they struck the crust. When she came to the open area that was the marsh, she slowed down and made her way around it in a jagged half-moon.

At the edge of Elin’s homestead she stopped. Her nose and forehead ached. She was panting. The cottage lay dark in the middle of the empty yard. Nothing roused. All was silent. She abandoned the shelter of the trees and walked out into the open, her gait slow and careful. There was a thick drift of snow on the porch. She knocked and tried the handle, but the door was frozen shut. “Elin?” she said.

There was no response.

In the sparse light she couldn’t see a pick. She began stamping on the snow to break it into pieces. The sound echoed out over the yard and hit against the trees. She kicked the slabs down on the ground and tugged at the handle, but it didn’t move.

“Elin!” she called.

She fell down on all fours and dug in the snow with her hands. She rid herself of her mittens and edged her bare fingers underneath the door, pulled them under its frame, squeezing her fingertips a few
times against the palms of her hands every now and then to numb the pain. She tried the handle again.

“Elin?” she whispered into the hallway and took a few steps forward.

The kitchen was silent. Packed snow pressed against the window and threw a blue tint onto the sill and into the room.

It took time for her to be able to see. And then she could.

Spots, snaky traces, smears, rivers gleaming black.

She walked toward the bedroom. On the threshold she stopped.

They were clad in their nicest clothes, as if ready for a visit to the market in town—the boys in round-necked linen shirts, the girls in white, embroidered dresses—had it not been for those stains, those large brown cornflowers withering on chests and on arms. Their faces were already gray with frost, their vacant eyes shining light blue. They lay side by side on the bed. They must have been dragged there.

And their hands—oh God, their hands—positioned on each tiny breast in the symbol of prayer, arranged with the love and precision with which you fold a newborn’s shirt.

Elin herself lay on the floor across an overturned chair, her back in an impossible arc, her neck undone, the rifle beside her. She was no larger than the children on the bed.

Maija covered her mouth with her hand.
Why didn’t you come to us?
she thought, and her eyes filled. Why? Surely, there must have been another way!

The front door opened behind her and she turned. A cloud of white whirled in and down through the dark like a glittering mesh.

“Don’t,” Maija called. “Don’t come in.”

But the heaving sound told her it was too late.

Elin’s brother-in-law, Daniel, rested his head against his arm on the wall. He had vomited on the floor. Now he was still. Except his hand, which touched the doorframe as if caressing it, again and again. The gesture made Maija think of Dorotea, the way she was
after she had cried for something, when the emotion was gone and yet the tears kept coming because she was caught in it and didn’t know how to stop.

Maija stood just behind him, each of her breaths like a puff of ash falling through the dark.

Daniel cleared his throat, inhaled, and stood up straight. He wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, and without acknowledging her, he left. She felt his presence by the window, and then he was gone.

Maija thought she saw their souls beneath the roof: thin, restive veils. Her guts churned. She opened the two windows in the bedroom and the one in the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about where they would go. From this point onward this part of the forest would be considered haunted.

Her legs were at once so weak they could not hold her weight. She sank down on a chair. How could a mother kill herself and the offspring she had carried beneath her heart for nine months and in her heart ever since?

Her stomach wouldn’t settle and she focused on the small things. On the bed the blanket and the sheet beneath were folded down in a neat invitation. Small, tidy flowers were embroidered on the pillowcases in red. The sheets had gauzy patches where the cloth was worn thin. Around the window someone had painted a red, leafy pattern on the pallid logs. The window lacked curtains. Outside across a cast-off snowdrift, the branches of a black tree scratched the sky. She couldn’t see what this home might have been like while there was still life. She thought about two brothers. About a man and his wife. She stared at the timber walls as if they might open and tell her the stories smoldering inside, but they were silent.

What could make a mother kill her children?

Only madness. Not the enduring, dull, weakness of mind, no—an abrupt plunge into unspeakable darkness.

Night began to close. The windows ought to be left open for many days, but there were the wild animals, and so Maija shut them.
As she walked back, daylight broke. The small things that moved at dawn had already been. There were tiny footsteps and traces of joy in the sparkling snow, but they didn’t move her.
I guess people will be happy now that Elin is dead,
she thought.

Gustav was on the marsh testing the ice with a wooden stick. She wished it was someone she could have talked to; anybody but him. Most of all, she wished it would have been her husband.

The priest was in his study. The room was cold. His bones ached. All appropriate. He would write about the frost in the Church Book:

The killer frost of 1717. We knew we had to be brave.

 He tapped with his pen against the desk.

The killer frost of 1717. God’s wrath on our province for the third consecutive year. We knew we had to be brave.

His hand holding the pen, with every passing year, ever more like that of his father: the long back of the hand, the softness prompted by the flat knuckles, the tilted ring finger. He was even getting the same ridged nails.

He threw the pen on the desk, rose, and walked to the window.

It had stopped snowing. For three weeks they had been unable to go any further than the green. All the space in the north, yet cramped in the prison of a church green. He had imagined confinement would come easily to him. He remembered preaching once about Paul the Apostle’s imprisonment as a blessing: a time to still himself in prayer and meditation before the Lord. But while the housekeeper and the maid—even the verger—settled down and picked up chores such as spinning and knitting, the priest found himself pacing the hallway, feeling as if the wooden walls were about to topple him. The verger said that the snow was hard enough now to carry the weight of a man. Thank God, it was over. What a miserable parish. What a castigation.