We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  She lay back down and pulled the skins tight around herself, tucking Little-Bell in next to her. The fire was down to cinders when she felt Aslak crawl in beside Little-Bell, and felt his hand cross over Little-Bell to her stomach, felt his hand finally relax into sleep.

  * * *

  When she woke Little-Bell was not moving. Little-Bell was not breathing. Her eyes sat back in her head like a dead reindeer on the trail.

  “Aslak,” she screamed, “Aslak!”

  She shook him violently. Aslak did not stir, so heavily did he sleep.

  She screamed again. She shook Little-Bell again.

  Her mother rose finally, and came over, and began to scream, and Aslak awoke. He saw the baby—her head was turned horribly to one side, like it was broken. Her mouth and eyes were frozen open.

  Her mother screamed and screamed. Gunnà screamed. “Little-Bell,” she said. She bent over her. She ran out for snow, and brought it back, and rubbed it on her, like she did for frostbite. She kneaded it again, and again, onto Little-Bell’s face, onto her arms. “Little-Bell,” she said. Her tears fell onto Little-Bell’s face, onto the small tunic her mother had so neatly sewn for her, and her tears began hardening into ice. From the other tents Aslak’s cousins came running, their boots not yet stuffed with hay. They looked in—What is it, they said, what is it, but Gunnà could not bring herself to say. She looked at Aslak, his bleary eyes, his heavy body. She did not want to think what might have been true, what it might have been that had killed Little-Bell, the heavy, drunken weight, the unfeeling mass of her own husband.

  * * *

  Aslak sang to her. Her mother sang to her, about a child who drowned in the sea. For many days she did not move, and the dogs sat at her feet and did not move, at Aslak’s command. They licked her exposed ankle. Still she did not speak. She lay on hay spread over the skins in the tent and drank melted snow, and reindeer’s milk. Sometimes she chewed on a small piece of cheese. They were supposed to have taken Little-Bell’s body to a graveyard, they were supposed to carry her body with them on the sledges to the church, but she would not allow it. She made Aslak wrap the body in birch bark and leave it on an islet, beneath the whitest birch. Everything of Little-Bell’s she burned. The clothing, the cradle, even the small husk of doll Aslak had made for her.

  Sometimes she sat inside the door to the tent and looked out, watching Aslak come home from tending the herd. She would not sleep on the same side of the tent with Aslak anymore. She wished there was a way to keep him from the tent forever, and when he came in and she smelled whiskey she rolled over onto her side.

  While he slept was the only time she went out. She took her skis and went out in the dark to the herd, where she skied around them and watched them sleep. She looked for wolves. She watched the reindeer, how simple their lives were. What did they think of? Where the moss was, how thick the snow was.

  * * *

  It was the darkest part of winter when they all set off for town, as they did every winter, for the church service. She did not want to go, but it was the law and they could not afford the fine. They rode in their nicest sledges, and they put bells along the reindeer, and they made the many-hour ride, the snow smoking up from the reindeers’ hooves, the snow sticking to everything, even her eyelashes, so that she hardly saw it when the church-village appeared, its haven of four wooden buildings and its steeple, the clusters of church-tents set up and being set up, the other sledges drawn and tied to the trees, reindeer shaking their heads, kicking at the packed snow—but as they approached they heard men shouting, they saw women standing to the side, pushing children away and trying to steer them toward the church.

  “What is it?” her mother called. “Can you see?”

  When their sledges had stopped they climbed out and made their way to the crowd. A man all in black—Laestadius, she saw, who had married them—was dumping large barrels into the snow. Whiskey, she saw, she could smell it; even in the cold, it carried to her nose. At his feet and puddling down the small hill whiskey was pooling, turning the snow a deep brown, and men scattered at his feet, on their knees, eating the snow with their hands.

  He lifted men from their knees, making them stand. “Are you an animal? Are you not made in the very image of God?” She looked to see what Aslak was doing. He stood, watching, sullen, not with the shouting men or the quiet women, just watching, like he did not quite get what was happening. “Animals!” the priest said, and without speaking he began to walk, briskly. When he began to move others began to move, and the men on the ground did look like animals, worse than animals.

  She turned to look at Aslak. “Are you coming?” she said.

  “He can go to his hell,” he said.

  “The fine,” she said. She did not want to beg him in front of the crowd.

  “He doesn’t tell me what to do,” he said, and the men near him patted him on the back, and she walked with her mother up the small incline to the church, with its drafty wooden walls and its hard benches, full now of the red and blue caps of women, women desperate to hear this man, who would fix their men, who might make them reindeer watchers again. They were singing already, and there was nowhere to sit—it was full—and at first she stood in the back, but her legs were tired and so she made her way up the side, her head down so no one could look at her too long, and she sat in the front row and a woman in black made room for her. When she sat down she realized it was his wife, Brita—she realized the children were his children. Their faces were all so narrow, and they watched their father with admiration.

  Laestadius was speaking, Laestadius was raving. She felt it, the anger. She felt the way he called at her, was saddened at her and at Aslak. She was not saved. She had not accepted Jesus Christ as her savior. She had not asked and called upon the man on the cross to save her from all she had done. It was her own sins that had led her to such a life, her own sins that had let her choose such a husband, a husband who drank like it would save him. She had been vain and she had been hopeful and the wages of sin was death.

  He recounted visiting a woman on one of his journeys, a Lapp named Maija. She came from a poor family, he said, and her stepfather had wanted her to marry an old man. Maija did not want to marry this man, and she had refused, and her stepfather beat her. He had beat her before, many times when he was drunk, but this time, she pushed him, and he fell against the fireplace. She worried what might have happened to him. She knew that those who did not honor their parents were condemned, and she worried about the devil, coming for her even then. But she determined to run away. She set off in a boat, knowing her stepfather was drunk, but still he came for her, and brought her back and promised her she would not have to marry the old man. But he lied to her. The next day they brought the old man to her. He threatened to mark her with his knife if she was not quiet, but her brother heard her scream and came for her.

  So Maija fled. She did not know where to go. What is sin? Maija wondered. What is right and what is wrong? Maija found a ride in a sledge, but in talking about her worries and her sins and her hate of her stepfather’s drinking, she found out the people in the sledge themselves were sinners, sinners and drinkers. They said she was a bore, and they abandoned her in the wilderness. She nearly died, but she walked, Laestadius said, and she made her way to a minister. And this minister—Laestadius was speaking quietly now—this minister taught her about her sins. He taught her that any evil in her, any sin she had ever committed, could be washed away in the blood of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And from this woman, this simple Lapp, he had learned his own unrighteousness. He had been saved from his own eternity of hell. He paused for breath. He wiped some spittle from his mouth. “Believe and follow the bloody footsteps of Jesus,” Laestadius said, “from the garden to the hill of Golgotha. Hasten to gather drops of atoning blood into your polluted vessels before death overtakes you!”

  Around her, women rose from their seats and raised their hands. Women clutched at their necks. A whining, strangled sound s
welled through the hall. Behind them a woman rose and stood on the pew. She pulled her kerchief from her head and pulled at her hair. “I confess,” she cried, “I have sinned.” Women reached up around her and touched her hem. “Believe,” they said, nearly as one, weeping their encouragement. Brita turned to Gunnà and put a small, worn hand on Gunnà’s knee.

  “Do you want to be forgiven?” Brita said. “Do you confess your own unrighteousness?”

  “I don’t know,” Gunnà said.

  “Be saved,” Brita said, “as he saved me.” Gunnà looked at Brita, at her face, tired and smoothed as driftwood, the hair white along the temples.

  “My child is dead.”

  “God also called one of our own,” Brita said, nodding. Sudden tears sat along her eyelids but did not fall. “But you can be comforted, as I was, knowing your child has been taken into heaven.” She leaned forward.

  “Heaven,” Gunnà said.

  “The upper world,” Brita said helpfully.

  Gunnà thought, briefly, of the vision she had heard the shamans describe, people drifting on their stomachs through the sky, dead people floating down rivers in the sky.

  “God will give again,” Brita said.

  “When I woke she was already dead.”

  “God is merciful. God hears even your prayers.”

  “Then He will not give me any more,” Gunnà said. She rose and made her way past the grieving women and past the staring women, down the aisle and out of the church, into the cold, into the dark. She could not see the sledges, her sledge. She could barely make out the smoke rising from the church-tents, where everyone would eat tonight, where there would be more sermons and more praying and more singing, more men biding away their fury about the whiskey.

  She walked down to the inn, where the whiskey had been spoiled. Inside, men sat around a table and laughed angrily. They stopped talking when she came in.

  “Aslak,” she said, “let’s go home.”

  “I’m talking,” he said. Somehow he was drunk.

  She went back outside. She looked up at the church at the top of the hill. Through the windows she could make out the unsteady candlelight. She heard the sound then of singing, not like the wandering songs of the Lapps but like a slow, steady melody with a straight point and a clean end.

  She went to their sledge and patted the thin fur on one of the reindeers’ antlers. She climbed into the sledge and flicked the reins. For a moment they stirred but did not move, uncertain. She flicked at them again with the reins and they began to run, the snow kicking back into her face, onto her hands. Voia, voia, voia, she sang, fly fast as the sparrows. Voia, voia, voia, nana, nana, nana, she sang, take me to my Little-Bell, take me to her home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written with the support of the University of Michigan MFA Program and Helen Zell, and with the invaluable counsel of Peter Ho Davies, Michael Byers, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco, Stephanie Grant, Amy Williams, Gillian Blake, John Weinstock, Ian Pylväinen, Emily McLaughlin, and Miriam Lawrence. In addition, I am indebted to the encouragement of Mary Elise Johnson, Marin, and Sammy Sater, and to the long-suffering readership of Ilana Sichel, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Helena Pylväinen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HANNA PYLVÄINEN is from suburban Detroit. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a Postgraduate Zell Fellow. She is the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  Henry Holt® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2012 by Hanna Pylväinen

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pylväinen, Hanna.

  We sinners / Hanna Pylväinen.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9533-3

  1. Religious fiction. 2. Middle West—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.Y55W4 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2011045670

  eISBN 978-0-8050-9534-0

  First Edition 2012