The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  *

  It was early February when I walked up to the flame-birch woods. Alone with an axe, no tobacco, no packed lunch. I chose the first one I came to, held the axe sideways and started to chop. A sprinkling of snow fell from the branches. I looked up at the sky, kept my eyes open and let the snowflakes melt on my cheeks.

  I stepped around the stem and made an even notch on the other side so that the birch balanced on a thin wedge, like a half-empty hourglass. I placed my hand on the tree and gently pushed it, as though I was teaching a child to dive, my hand on its back to show encouragement. With a drawn-out creak the flame-birch toppled, the deep drift gently welcomed it, and a muffled multitude of branches snapped beneath the snow.

  I limbed the tree, measured out lengths, chopped it up with a handsaw and fetched the old Deutz. By the time blue dusk arrived, I was towing eight logs. I drove out of the woods in a low gear and saw the farm open up before me. It was still encircled by a hazy winter light, the snow packed between the notched trunks of the log house.

  For three days I worked like this, with only an axe and a handsaw so I would not need ear protection. A cold, hard slog which held thoughts at bay. Some of the iron bands snapped as the birches fell, others I broke off with a chisel when I brought the trunks to the farm, and I gathered them in a jagged pile of scrap iron.

  On the fourth day I was as good as finished with the limbing and driving when a heavy snow began to fall. A swirling wind settled in, and through the flurries I glimpsed a pale-red flash between the tree trunks. She stepped onto the path I had made, her blonde hair turning chestnut-brown again.

  “The potatoes up early and the sheep down late. You are foundering as a farmer, Edvard Hirifjell.” She stopped five metres away. “But perhaps things haven’t been that simple for you.”

  “Thanks for helping with the sheep,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s me, Solvoll the veterinarian.”

  Her freshly oiled mountain boots turned the snow to slush. She climbed onto a birch trunk. The leather boots offered a sharp contrast to the white birchbark as she rocked and balanced, as though she were guiding it downstream.

  “Are you really going to chop down all the trees?”

  “That’s their destiny. And mine,” I said.

  “I’m not sure it’s your destiny,” she said, hopping down. “Look at which one you’ve left standing.”

  Hanne went to the large birch we had lain under the previous summer. The bark was furrowed and rough, the iron bands embedded. She ran her finger over the rusted metal.

  “You’re standing here in the same work clothes I’ve seen you wear so many times,” she said. “Yet you’ve changed completely. I don’t know whether I like you or not. And I really don’t know if I want to find out.”

  I let the axe fall into the snow.

  “I’m never going to be some poor girl who waits faithfully in the village. I’ve accepted a two-year internship in the north. So you’re not getting something for nothing, Edvard. But you don’t owe me either.”

  Two years. In some respects it was shorter than two months.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” she said.

  “I’m trying to think of something nice to say to you,” I said. “But there are too many nice things to choose from.”

  I picked up the axe by the end of its handle and let the head swing back and forth, drawing two connected circles in the snow.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  I asked myself the same question. Was it the sign for infinity? Or just a figure of eight?

  She twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “What happened to that other girl?” she said.

  I lifted the axe a little, still swinging it in the same pattern but above the snow. She could not have known what had happened. But I could tell her.

  “If you want to talk about her,” I said, “don’t call her ‘that other girl’. Call her Gwendolyn Winterfinch.”

  14

  THAT DAY OUT ON HAAF GRUNEY I HAD SWUM AFTER her, grabbed hold of her arm and tried to find purchase on the rocks. My entire body ached with a dull pain, my skin was stinging, and one hand was bleeding from having gripped a sharp stone to try to haul us ashore.

  It was impossible. I lost my grip and she was pulled out to sea again, unconscious. She was tossed back and forth in the waves like a rag doll, her hair spread in a fan, and she drifted off before the next swell lashed us once more against the rocks. She was thrust into my arms, I gripped her and swam on my back towards the sloping beach, trying to keep her head above water.

  A wave took us in, and I crawled with her onto the round stones. My sweater hung heavy, water ran from my hair. When we were further up I tried to revive her. Heart massage, just as they taught us in national service. Mouth to mouth. Firm pressure on her chest. She gagged, tried to raise her arm, but it fell limply, like a severed branch. I remember noticing with some surprise that Duncan Winterfinch’s watch was still working, attached to a lifeless arm.

  I manoeuvred Zetland out of the boathouse, carried her on board and went full throttle to the ferry dock at Yell. All I could think of was her funeral, that I would have to persuade her family to lay her to rest in the black coffin in the outbuilding on Haaf Gruney. The next thing I remembered was a large hand on my shoulder and two doctors tending to my injuries.

  Three days later she was conscious again. But by then she was already lost to me. It was as though she had been lifted out of our dreamlike world into reality, onto a sick bed, into the doctors’ embrace. She belonged to them. To them and to the family that encircled her bed, a wall of expensive clothes and anxious looks. They did not want to talk to me, only wanted to hear from the sheriff what I had said. They would keep it within the family, the story of how the thoroughbred broke free and spent the summer with a mongrel. I wanted to speak, and I wanted to hear them talk about her, about this person I only knew from my own impressions of her. But the doctors simply shook their heads and asked me to leave.

  I took Zetland back to Haaf Gruney and waited there for someone to claim the boat back from me, threaten me with lawyers, hold me responsible. But nobody came and the house grew dark.

  The next morning I sat on a rock looking at Patna. The same current that carried driftwood to Haaf Gruney had brought it into the shallows, where the tide abandoned it like a stranded whale. The keel was scratched, it looked like a cadaver and smelled of tar and salt water.

  I could bear it no longer. I went back to Lerwick, to her hospital bed, and found her alone.

  “Is it you?” she said, adjusting a plastic tube stuck with a plaster to the back of her hand.

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  She looked towards the window. They had cut her hair short and shaved it around the wounds to stitch up her scalp. A dressing ran from her ear to the base of her neck. Two large plasters.

  “I will make things right again,” I said. “I’ll follow you wherever you want to go. Just let me make things right again.”

  Her eyes were glazed, her lips cracked. There was a pervasive smell of antiseptic.

  “Do you need anything,” I said. “Water? Something to eat?”

  “Why don’t you ask if I need you?” she said drowsily.

  “I’m asking you that now.”

  “I need you. But I can never have you.” She coughed, then paused to collect her strength. “When I lay here alone, I hoped you would come and say these very words. But no. You’re a wounded animal. When you’re back to full health, you’ll run off and I’ll never be able to keep up with you.”

  “Don’t say that. Please forgive me for doubting you.”

  “Dear Edward, I meant everything I said in the boat. But in the end, it was the adventure that kept us together. Let me be spared that vile day when I realise our relationship won’t work out.”

  She reached out a hand and placed it on my forearm. My skin tingled.

  “Do you know what I’ve been most afraid of all my life, Gwen?”

&
nbsp; She shook her head faintly.

  “That I would turn out cold. Emotionless. That I would never feel anything, or grieve for anyone. I am no longer afraid of that.”

  “Then we feel the same,” she said and closed her eyes.

  I took her hand and held it until a nurse asked me to leave.

  *

  Back on Haaf Gruney I slept until I was woken by the cold. It was a bright, clear morning, and through the window I saw Patna capsized in the shallows.

  What would I have done if Gwen had drowned? I might have doused Patna with petrol and set it alight. They had been real, my feelings for her. Real and true. Because I was able to imagine the two of us, later in life. Hopeless, but true nonetheless.

  I cried so hard that my stomach hurt, my tears falling onto the dust. I was angry with her for not wanting to try, angry at myself for not throwing myself in after her straight away and letting Patna fill with water. I imagined her with other men and wondered how she would tell them about me.

  We had been hard on each other. Not hard in the sense that we lacked feelings, but what each of us carried inside was hard. I remembered a paragraph from one of Einar’s letters in which he described how they amused themselves during their lunch breaks at Ruhlmann’s workshop. They would compete to cut two blocks of wood so straight that a drop of water would hold them together. Maybe that is how it was between Gwen and I. Close to each other, locked in place by surface tension.

  I walked down to Patna. The water was still dripping out of it. The wind carried a bitter, raw cold. Out at sea, a shower was on its way.

  The dead gathered around me and said:

  The time has come. What are you going to do now?

  *

  It was Bestefar I listened to. The man who would come home to listen to Bach after spending an entire day digging up rocks.

  The wood came from the earth. It was like failing to harvest corn. Or neglecting to bring in the sheep. Or not digging up the potatoes.

  I thought back on the two of us. The harvest was our time. Between withered potato vines that had absorbed light and nutrition for the crops in the darkness beneath the earth. The droning of his two-wheeled tractor. My hands in the black earth that got under my nails, my knees damp as I picked out the potatoes and placed them in the wooden crates, while Bestefar walked ahead, sharing the same silent satisfaction. Our sheltered world, harvesting potato after potato and setting aside the best for Christmas.

  The memory ended, and I began.

  I fetched the saw and crowbar from the workshop and tried to prise off some of the planking. But it was hard as iron and refused to give. My ribs stung where I had been injured, and for an entire day I failed to reverse any of Einar’s meticulous boatbuilding. Each length of wood was nailed and coupled to withstand collisions and the unrelenting sea. Patna had a locked and sealed construction, a pyramid with no entrances, and if I was too rough with the crowbar, the wood just chipped.

  The next morning I felt Einar’s cabinetmaking begin to talk to me. The hull of Patna creaked and moaned, until at last I loosened a couple of boards and knocked apart some of the planking. I was less heavy-handed and haphazard than I had been the previous day, trying to think as he would have thought.

  From then on Einar was with me, his hands became my hands, his plan became my plan, his thoughts entered my brain, and soon I knew where to place the crowbar to unlock the joints and pull away plank after plank. I soon grasped that the frame, the boat’s ribs, consisted of several joined half-metre lengths of wood. They stretched symmetrically into the centre, black and rough.

  For five minutes I just stood and stared. And then I broke loose two gunstock blanks, perfectly cut and covered with tar.

  *

  I worked for the next three days, one in rain, the following in the sun, the third in snow. In the last of the afternoon light, with the gulls shrieking from the nesting cliff on Fetlar, I carefully tore loose the last timbers. Patna was no more.

  All that remained was a pile of stock pieces. Twenty high, sixteen across. Using a hand plane I scraped off the outer layer of tar, fetched some sandpaper and rubbed down to the wood.

  A light flurry came in from the east. I lifted my face to the sky and allowed the flakes to cool my forehead. The snow settled on the walnut and melted, and within seconds the wood had absorbed the moisture and brought out the colours and pattern.

  I transported the walnut across the sound in Zetland and let myself into Quercus Hall. I walked through the long corridors smelling of mildew and old furniture polish, and carried the wood up to Duncan Winterfinch’s office. I stood there for a while, breathing in the stale smell of Balkan Sobranie. I studied the wide photograph of the Black Watch and looked out over the crowns of the trees in the arboretum, now leafless and naked.

  I turned to the walnut one last time. I could see centuries of the Daireaux woods, the meandering black and orange forms. Only then, in the half dark, did I notice that the wood was faintly luminous, like the hand of a watch that releases the daylight it slowly measures throughout the day.

  It was as if the pattern displayed everything the trees had witnessed for four hundred years. But it also offered a glimpse of something endlessly deep within, shades of colour so unpredictable that they were not of this world.

  It was the light that shone from the kingdom of the dead, which they had all stepped inside.

  The soldiers of the Black Watch, Isabelle, Einar, Duncan Winterfinch, Bestefar, Mamma and Pappa.

  V

  Isabelle

  THE YEARS PASSED. YEARS OF BLIGHT, YEARS OF RECORD harvests, years of drought. The new tractor became the old tractor, the old tractor was relegated to the barn.

  We lived with the earth and the seasons, with plants that blossomed and withered. But within me a slower cycle rotated, a maturing that needed many years to come into bloom.

  One day, at the end of a warm May, I realised that the time was ripe. I was up by the county road surveying Hirifjell. The post had not arrived, I had listened for cars, but everything was quiet, just the faint roar of Laugen in the valley and the wind whistling through the trees.

  It was time. I took the shortcut past the stinging nettles and into the workshop, where I pulled out a box wrapped in sailcloth.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, text messages flying back and forth. “I have something for you,” I said. “But you’ll need better shoes.”

  We walked through the gate, through the potato fields, past ground newly planted with summer cabbage, up to the flame-birch woods. I still called them that, even though only one of the trees was birch. Around it grew walnut trees, sixteen in all, from the nuts I had collected in the Daireaux woods. They had germinated in pots and should have withered the first winter after I planted them out, but somehow they survived. They swayed in the wind but held their own up here, on the sunny side on the inside of the far side.

  *

  My last act before leaving Haaf Gruney had been to drag Isabelle’s coffin out from the peat, wipe it clean and polish it. In Lerwick I had asked at the funeral parlour whether they could look after it until it was needed.

  When Agnes Brown died some years later, she was buried in Norwick, next to Einar, the psalms struggling to be heard above the gusts of wind. We were a small gathering. Inside the church, the coffin was surrounded by orange tulips and white lilies identical to those Einar had carved. Only I knew that Agnes would be buried in a coffin intended for my grandmother, and that it held a woman who had loved Einar, at last. He had been a living ghost, a man who restlessly hunted for a level of perfection only achievable at the carpenter’s bench. As we lowered the coffin, I hoped that he, in another time, in another place, could reciprocate what Agnes had wanted to offer him. Just as in another time, in another place, Gwendolyn Winterfinch and I could have been together.

  As we stood by the grave I saw her figure coming down the path from which you could see the lighthouse on Muckle Flugga, and I noticed she was carrying flowers.
She sat on the hillside and followed the ceremony from a distance.

  I hoped that the last verses of “Kjærlighet fra Gud” would be carried to her on the sea breeze, and that the words would apply as much to her as they did to Agnes, and that they should apply to everyone who came after us.

  *

  And the words would prove to do just that. Because now, standing in the flame-birch woods, I unwrapped the sailcloth from the chest and handed it to my daughter. She said nothing for a long time. It is one of her many qualities, to allow her reactions to ripen fully before revealing them to the rest of the world. As she held the chest up to the light, sunbeams penetrated the amber-yellow wood and revealed the infinite threads in the pattern.

  “It’s flame-birch, from these very woods,” I said.

  “Really! Is it a jewellery chest?”

  “The chest is not the present. You have to look inside.”

  The sound of the lid opening drifted through the tree trunks. Inside there was a radiance from a wood deeper and wilder and older than the flame-birch. It contained a package in grey silk paper.

  She knelt to rest the chest on the ground and opened the package. When she stood up again, her movements unfolded a shimmer of navy blue.

  “A dress?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said and took the chest, which now felt strangely empty.

  “So pretty,” she said, holding the dress in front of her. “Where did you get it?”

  “It has always been in the family.”

  She held it up to the sunlight and walked amongst the trunks to the old birch, wide enough to get changed behind.

  When she reappeared, she had filled the dress with life.