And Johansson kept his faith to himself. He never said a word if others had a drink, for instance. Many of his Laestadian brethren dared to do just that. They might be a guest in someone else’s home, decline a swig but then glare indignantly at those who accepted the bottle. “That shot will soon feel lonely,” they’d preach. “It wants company, so they get to be two. Then they start arguing and a third is sent down to intervene. And then it’s boozing.”
No, Johansson wasn’t like that. He left others to their own. Bäckström felt an urge to smack his young assistant.
But the assistant soon got going again. Talked a blue streak about all the hypocrites and liars and drinkers among the Laestadians. Everyone knew it. There were those who went to prayers and asked forgiveness of God and their brothers just to keep sinning as usual come Monday. And really: What, if not strong drink, could make a man sleep so deeply while seated in a sled?
His harangue was interrupted when the horse suddenly stopped dead. She shied backwards a step. Her neck stretched and her eyes rolled back.
“Easy, girl,” the assistant cooed.
“What’s gotten into her now?” Bäckström wondered, swinging his whip.
The horse didn’t move. Her nostrils widened. She snorted. Muscles hard as steel wire under her skin.
The hauler’s assistant put a hand on Bäckström’s arm to stop him from delivering yet another lash with the whip.
“Lintu is a good horse,” he said softly. “Sir shouldn’t whip her in anger. If she stops like that, there’s a reason for it.”
He was right. Erik Bäckström dropped the whip, fumbling for his rifle under the box. Wolf pack is what he was thinking now. Or a bear that had been wakened from its winter sleep.
He prepared himself for the mare suddenly kicking over her traces. Turning round to bolt. Maybe tipping the sled over. And if he fell out of the sled and was left alone with the wolves, he sure wanted his gun for company.
“Is there anything up there?” the hauler’s assistant said, peering through the falling snow.
“What?” Bäckström said. He couldn’t see a thing.
“It’s a man! Wait a moment.”
The assistant jumped out of the sled and ran on for a few paces. Now Bäckström too could see that there was something lying across the road.
The assistant ran, but then stopped himself and walked slowly the last few feet to the body lying across the middle of the road.
“Who is it?” Bäckström called.
The body was lying on its stomach, face down in the snow. The hauler’s assistant bent down low and looked from the side.
“It’s Oskar Lindmark,” he called to Bäckström, who was now standing in the sled, peering up ahead. “And I think he’s dead.”
Oskar Lindmark was mailman Johansson’s twelve-year-old errand boy.
“What do you mean?” Bäckström called back. “Has he fallen from the sled and broken his neck, or what?”
“No, I think . . .”
The handyman leaned down over the body and fell silent. Was it blood, all that black stuff? All colors disappeared in the faint, weak moonlight. Snowflakes fell in the dark puddle and dissolved.
“Hey, there,” he said, putting his hand on Oskar Lindmark’s back.
Then he resolutely turned the body. Pulled on an arm until Oskar Lindmark flopped over on his back. Still thinking that Oskar might not be dead. That he needed air.
Oskar’s face was as white as the snow itself. Eyes open, mouth as well.
Is it blood? the hauler’s assistant wondered, pulling his mitten off and touching the black on Oskar’s forehead.
Yes. Maybe. It was wet. He looked at his fingertips. Rubbed his index and middle fingers against his thumb.
Suddenly Bäckström was standing beside him.
“Is he dead?” the assistant asked. “I think he is.”
“Oh Lord,” Bäckström said in a choked voice. “Of course he’s dead. Can’t you see that his skull is completely smashed in?”
And that’s when the hauler’s assistant saw. He stood up quickly. Backed away from the body.
Bäckström turned in the direction of Jukkasjärvi.
“Johansson,” he called desperately into the forest.
The snow caught his voice. It carried nowhere. They could stand there yelling in the forest to their heart’s content.
“Put the boy in the sled,” he said to his assistant, who was shaking with terror, steadying himself against a birch tree so as not to fall down.
“I can’t,” the assistant trembled. “He’s all covered in blood. I can’t touch him.”
“Get a grip on yourself, boy,” Bäckström roared. “We have to turn the sled around and catch up with the mail run.”
Then together they dragged the dead boy and laid him on top of the grouse. Bäckström thought that the blood would seep through the sacks and stain the white birds. Then he thought that the restaurant keepers down in Stockholm never needed to know what kind of blood it was.
In the Kiruna police station, county sheriff Björnfot and his acting parish constable Spett were sitting at opposite sides of a desk. Outside, snow was drifting down in the glow of the electric street lamps. The police station was equipped with a proper tile stove and Spett had been feeding it birch logs all day. On a rag carpet on the wooden floor, his dog Kajsa was chewing on an elk jawbone.
Sheriff Björnfot was writing up the day’s events in his log. It didn’t come to many lines. He was the older of the two men, had served for a number of years in Stockholm, where he had met his wife, and moved back to Kiruna with her and their two daughters only a year ago. He was a sensible man and didn’t have anything particular against writing up records or taking down witness interrogations, tasks that had seldom been performed during the time when Spett alone had been in charge of the station.
Spett, who was unmarried, was darning a sock. On the tile stove damper, another pair of his socks had been hung to dry. Björnfot overlooked this. When he had taken up his duties in Kiruna, Spett and Kajsa had been living at the police station. In order to keep the peace he turned a blind eye to certain habits that remained from those days.
They were both broad-shouldered men of considerable strength. Spett was wiry, while Björnfot had an impressive stomach. “Diplomatic talents and physical strength” was what the mining company, which paid the salaries of the town police force, wanted in its servants of justice. The ability to break up troublemakers, in other words. Because there were a lot of those in town. Socialists and communists, agitators and trade union organizers. Not even the religious people could be trusted. Laestadians and Bible thumpers, always on the edge of ecstasy and senselessness. In Kautokeino, a group of newly converted Laestadians—in their eagerness to put an end to sin and liquor sales—had killed both the sheriff and the local shopkeeper, set fire to the vicarage and beaten the vicar and his wife. This happened before the sheriff was born, but even so, people were still talking about the Kautokeino uprising. And then there were all the young men, navvies and miners, just kids, really, migrating here from all over. Far from their fathers and mothers, they spent their wages on drink and behaved as could be expected.
But for the moment, the cell in the corner of the room was empty and Björnfot closed his log and thought of his wife, who was waiting for him at home.
Kajsa rose from the carpet and barked. A second later, there was a knock at the door and Erik Bäckström, the hauler, stepped in. He didn’t even take the time to say hello.
“I’ve got postman Johansson and Oskar Lindmark in my sled,” he said. “They’re as dead as can be, both of them.”
Parked in the courtyard were the mail sled and Bäckström’s sled. Bäckström’s assistant had draped blankets over the horses. Johansson lay in the mail sled and young Oskar Lindmark in Bäckström’s sled.
Spett swept away a few curious passersby who had stopped at the opening to the courtyard.
“There’s nothing to see here,” he roare
d. “Keep moving, before I lose my temper!”
“. . . so when we found Oskar Lindmark lying in the snow we realized that something must have happened to Johansson,” Bäckström said. “We put Oskar on the sled and turned around and caught up with Johansson. His horse was just trotting along. Of course it knew the way from earlier trips. Good Lord, when we halted it and saw that Johansson was shot . . .”
He shook his head. Looked at his assistant who stood a few steps away, pale as paper and holding Lintu’s reins. She exhaled calmingly on him, as if he were her half-grown colt. Don’t be frightened, my boy.
“So we tied the mail horse to our sled,” Bäckström finished. “And came here at once.”
Sheriff Björnfot climbed up on the mail sled and took a good look at Johansson. Turned him over.
“Shot in the back,” he said thoughtfully. “And you found him sitting up.”
“Yes.”
“And young Lindmark on the ground?”
“Yes. With his face in the snow.”
Björnfot felt in Johansson’s pockets. Looked around in the sled.
“Where is his pistol?” he asked. “I’m not saying he wasn’t a peaceful man, but he must have been armed when he was traveling on duty.”
Bäckström shrugged his shoulders.
“We didn’t see any gun,” he said.
“And the letter box is broken,” sheriff Björnfot went on. “So it was a robbery. But it seems strange to think that someone would shoot him with his own gun.”
He switched sleds and examined the wound on young Oskar Lindmark’s head. He leaned down over the boy, holding his lantern very close to his face.
“It’s snowing,” he said. “Was it possible to see any tracks?”
“No,” replied hauler Bäckström. “But of course it was dark. And we were upset.”
“Come here and take a look,” Björnfot said to Spett.
Spett came closer.
“Now this looks like frozen tears,” Björnfot said, touching Oskar Lindmark’s face with his finger. “And look at his muffler. Given the light clothes he has on, he should have used it to cover his face.”
“So?” Spett said.
“What I’m thinking,” Björnfot said, “is this. Perhaps the killer shot Johansson, and the boy ran. Crying. And pulled his muffler away from his face to be able to breathe more freely while he ran.”
“Maybe so,” Spett said thoughtfully. “But why wasn’t he shot as well?”
Björnfot pulled his hand over his face in a gesture that meant that he was thinking. His hand passed over his large mustache and down over his mouth. His fingers and his thumb followed the opposite sides of his jaw until they met at the tip of his chin.
“We have to talk to the postmaster,” he said. “Ask what kind of mail they had to deliver. And then we have to tell Johansson’s widow. And Oskar Lindmark’s parents.”
Spett regarded him silently. Kajsa also quit her sniffing around the runners of the sleds, sat down in the snow and gazed at him. Her tail struck a pleading rhythm against the ground. Björnfot knew what their looks meant. They didn’t want to bring mournful tidings to crying widows. They wanted to follow the trail of blood.
“Yes, yes,” Björnfot sighed, turned to Kajsa. “You talk to the postmaster, I’ll talk to the families.”
At that, Kajsa gave a happy bark. She rose on all four and ran to the archway. When she was out in the street, she turned and gave her master a summoning glance. Her pointed ears were turned forward.
Come on, she seemed to be saying. We have a job to do.
Hauler Bäckström had to smile despite the harrowing events of the evening.
“Look at that,” he said to Spett. “Before you know it, she’ll be ironing your shirts.”
“She’s too smart for that,” Björnfot commented, watching his younger colleague disappear into the street, following his dog.
When Björnfot arrived home shortly after eleven that night, the lights had been turned off and the sheriff’s house was dark. He found his wife sitting at the kitchen table.
“Hello,” he said, carefully. “Are you sitting in the dark?”
He immediately felt stupid. Of course he could see that she was sitting in the dark. She often did. Said it saved them expensive kerosene. Now she slowly turned towards him. Smiled, but only as though her polite upbringing compelled her to.
Björnfot thought of Spett and Kajsa. How simple that bachelor life seemed. He lit the kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling as well as the one on the table.
She didn’t reply. Instead she asked:
“Would you like something to eat?”
She got out bread and something to put on his sandwiches. Set a fire in the stove as well. That disturbed him. It was as if she was telling him that there was no need for a fire just for her sake. He asked about the girls. She told him that they were asleep.
“What’s that?” Björnfot asked, nodding to a parcel on the sideboard.
“Sheet music from my mother,” she replied without looking at it.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I don’t have anywhere to play,” she said without emphasis. “I can’t understand why she would send them to me. Will three sandwiches do?”
He nodded without finding anything to say. He wanted to remind her that she was welcome to use the piano at the community center whenever she felt like it. As well as the piano at the company school. But what good would it do? She had answers to everything and he was tired of hearing them. One of the pianos was too out of tune for her to stand it. The other was guarded jealously by the headmistress of the company school, who always found it convenient to appear just as Mrs. Björnfot sat down on the piano stool. And since it was the headmistress who played at commencements and gave lessons, her interest in the keyboard took precedence. Always.
“You could at least open it, take a look,” he tried. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see what it is? And I’m sure your mother has written you a letter.”
“Open it if you want to,” she said, still in the same light tone. Thin as autumn ice on cold, black water.
Björnfot looked at the parcel. Would it lie there all through Christmas, spreading malaise? He was seized by a longing to throw it in the fire.
Instead, he chewed his sandwiches dejectedly. His wife watched him with vacant eyes. Not in an unfriendly way, but he still felt that he was being punished. He just didn’t know for what.
He thought of Elis Johansson’s widow, whom he had visited. Her silent reaction when he had delivered the news of her husband’s death. Six children in a two-room apartment. The ones old enough to understand had gathered around her. Stared at him, dressed in dark fabrics, as the Laestadians usually dressed themselves and their children. Eyes like deep wells when he told them. Mrs. Johansson had stood there before him, she also simply dressed in a long, gray skirt, a kerchief and a simple cardigan. Nothing ostentatious. No frills. Their home had also been simple, no curtains, no pictures on the walls. She hadn’t cried. But he had seen her mouth and the wings of her nose widen in fear.
What will become of her now, he thought. Will she be able to support the children on her own? Will she have to give up some of them? Of course they wouldn’t be able to stay on in the apartment, since it belonged to the Postal Administration. She had asked if he wanted some coffee, but he had declined. Her frightened eyes were more than he could stand. And the sobs of Oskar Lindmark’s parents were still ringing in his ears.
He had longed for home, for Emilia and the girls.
Now he wished he had returned home earlier. So that the girls had been awake. They enlivened things.
Why can’t you be happy? he wanted to ask.
The girls were healthy. They had food on the table. Dresses of bought fabrics. She had recently purchased new lace curtains. How could she feel that everything was so miserable all the same? When the Female Lecture Association had courted her and offered her membership, she had declined on some pretext he co
uld no longer remember.
“I’m not the pioneering sort,” she had said at some point.
You don’t know what a pioneer settlement is, he had wanted to answer. In this mining town we have streetlights, shops. A public bath! But he had kept quiet. The words between them were growing more and more scarce.
After they had gone to bed, he lay awake for a long time. Stared up at the darkness under the roof and thought about Oskar Lindmark’s crushed head. About postman Johansson’s widow. He longed to touch his wife, but refrained for fear of being rejected.
“Are you asleep?” he asked.
She didn’t reply. But he could tell from her breathing that she was awake.
When he woke up it was still dark. It took him a while to realize what had awakened him. Someone was throwing snowballs at the window. The pocket watch on his nightstand showed a quarter past five.
Spett and Kajsa were waiting for him. They were accompanied by hauler Bäckström.
“Get dressed and come along,” Spett called. “Bäckström has something to show us.”
They walked together in the falling snow through the town. Kajsa was sometimes ahead of them, sometimes behind them. Plowing her pointed nose through the snow, which was light as down. Sometimes she snorted and took a small, joyful leap.
Björnfot felt frozen in spite of his winter uniform and coat. Even so, it wasn’t as cold as it could be in December.
Lights were lit in many homes already. Women had risen to light fires. Now they were preparing breakfasts and lunch boxes for their husbands. After that, they had their own jobs to go to. The insides of the kitchen windows were fogged up.
When they arrived at Bäckström’s property, the hauler led them into the carriage shed. They went up to one of the sleds inside.
“An hour ago, one of the mares arrived home alone dragging this sled. Someone had borrowed her without asking permission and then just left her somewhere. But she found her way home on her own. Stood outside the stable in the cold, waiting to be let in. And when I took a look at the sled . . .”
A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 14
