The Last Boat Home

by Dea Brovig

  Bjørn Fodstad brought an American football to school that an aunt had sent him from Wisconsin. For the next two weeks, Lars, Rune and Petter used the breaks to blunder after the oblong ball. Else cheered them on together with Gro Berge and Hanne Austbø, whose parents were Smith’s Friends and who was the youngest of eight siblings, or else the girls would climb Torggata to the bakery and Gro would ask her mother for some of yesterday’s raisin buns. Sometimes while Else was eating her roll, she would find herself listening for a blast of horns on the hill outside, though she knew the circus would not come back for another year, if at all.

  A sombre sky settled over the town. Its clouds were low and tinged grey. After a stretch of days deprived of sunlight, the locals began to mutter about an ugly autumn. In the mornings before school, when Else stood at the public dock and watched the shipyard’s boat ferry its workers across the fjord, her breath met the air in a thickening fog and she knew that winter would follow soon.

  On a Saturday at the end of October, Else kicked through the rotting leaves on the forest floor behind the Tenvik farm. A torrent of rain had finally subsided and the brook thundered under the weight of new water. The paddock bore the scars of the circus’s visit. The grass had been chopped before its arrival and what was left had been gouged by hooves and tent pegs or churned by feet and countless sets of tyres. Else’s shoes sank into the soggy earth. She hesitated when she saw two trailers parked on the meadow. Smoke spiralled from the remains of a fire in a ditch and melted into the sky.

  Lars was not there. In front of one of the trailers a man leaned over the open bonnet of a Volkswagen, his ponytail wagging between his shoulder blades when he spat a gob into the soil. Else had begun her retreat when she heard a shout. Another man had stepped from one of the caravans and was yanking shut its door. He started towards her across the field.

  ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Are you looking for Tenvik? This is private property. Are you looking for the circus? The circus has gone.’

  As the man approached, his scar came into focus. His left eyelid wilted across the iris that darted in his eye. He stopped too close to Else, who realised she was staring and looked away. He took his time to study her.

  ‘You need something?’ he said.

  ‘I’m just waiting for someone.’

  ‘Lucky someone,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll be here any minute,’ Else said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll keep you company while you wait. I’m Yakov. You want something? Coffee? Cigarette?’

  ‘No,’ Else said. She crossed her arms over her chest, her muscles taut even after Lars had ducked under a branch into the clearing. At first, he did not seem to notice her companion. He brushed the pine needles from his hair and then his hand dropped to his side.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re from the circus. You’re the brothers with the net. You are, aren’t you? I saw the show. I saw it twice. You and your brother were pretty good.’

  A smile thinned the circus man’s lips. He called to his brother, who was still bent over the car’s hood. ‘Do you hear that, Oleg? This boy says we were pretty good.’

  Oleg aimed a fresh lump of phlegm into the mud.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ asked Lars. ‘This is private property.’

  ‘That’s what I just finished telling your girlfriend,’ Yakov said.

  Lars nodded. He stood almost as tall as the foreigner and met his challenge with an indifference that made Else shrink.

  ‘We’re doing some work for Tenvik,’ Yakov said. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

  ‘But what about the circus?’

  ‘The season’s over,’ Yakov said.

  The door to the second trailer opened and a man that Else recognised stooped through its exit. She felt her feet turn to clay. There was no mistaking the strong man. He straightened up to his full height, rising until he towered above the roof of the caravan. A dry sound scraped Lars’s throat.

  ‘We should go,’ Else said.

  ‘You just got here,’ said Yakov. ‘Do you have more questions for me, young man? Or is that all?’

  While he spoke, the strong man lowered himself to sit on his trailer’s top step. He started to roll a cigarette, sprinkling strands from a tobacco pouch that he pulled from the pocket of his trousers.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Yakov asked.

  ‘Lars.’

  ‘Lars,’ he said. ‘Now, Lars, I think you can answer some questions for me. Does your father have a farm? We’re looking for more work.’

  ‘No,’ Lars said.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked Else. ‘Maybe your Pappa has a farm.’

  Else examined a patch of spoiled grass by her shoes. She wished that Yakov would stop staring at her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s always nice to meet the locals, but we’re busy. So you’d better run along.’

  ‘I know about things around here,’ said Lars.

  His boast took Else by surprise. She thought perhaps she had misheard him, but Yakov’s grin told her she had heard him well enough. She peeked at the strong man, who smoked on the step and acted as though he were alone in the meadow. Still, his size made her nervous. She longed for the shelter of the forest.

  ‘What kind of things?’ Yakov asked.

  ‘All kinds,’ said Lars.

  ‘Like liquor? You know about that?’

  ‘I can get some, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Else said.

  ‘You’d better go with your girlfriend, or you’ll wish you had later on,’ said Yakov with a wink. ‘Don’t disappear, though. Do you hear? Come back soon. You, too, treasure,’ he said to Else. ‘Come back anytime.’

  Else retreated into the wood, pushing a path between the tree trunks. She bowed her head to the branches that clipped her jacket, splashing mud up to her knees as she hurried through puddles towards the spot where she had left her father’s bicycle. Behind her, Lars stumbled through the undergrowth.

  ‘Else!’ he called. ‘Hold on! Where are you going?’ He caught her arm. ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘We don’t know anything about those men.’

  ‘They’re circus performers,’ said Lars. ‘And they’re camped in our paddock. What else do we need to know?’

  ‘That Yakov,’ she said. ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘He was just flirting with you. He thought you were pretty. He didn’t mean anything by it.’ Lars let go of her arm and touched his fingers to her cheek. ‘Calm down. All right?’

  ‘I’m cold,’ Else said.

  ‘I’ll warm you up,’ he said. He wrapped her in his arms. With her jaw pressed to his collarbone, Else looked for the circus men over his shoulder in the warren of shadow, bark and brush. Lars kissed her until she felt safe. The pounding of the brook smothered the whine of the wind.

  ‘There you are,’ her mother said. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d got lost.’ She smiled at her sewing as Else arrived in the dining room. ‘Are you hungry? I took a loaf of bread out of the oven half an hour ago.’

  In the kitchen, Else sawed the end off the warm loaf. She peeled the lid from a tin of mackerel in tomato sauce and, after heaping the fish onto her slice, carried her plate to the dining table and sat across from her mother. Between them on the table, lengths of fabric had been arranged in piles beside the sewing machine. Her mother squinted through her spectacles as she fed material under the presser foot.

  ‘Who’s that for?’ Else asked.

  ‘Ninni,’ her mother said. ‘I still haven’t finished the dress pattern she brought me a month ago. What’s the weather like out there?’

  ‘Grim,’ Else said.

  ‘Your father’s taken the trawler out early. They’ve forecast a storm tonight.’

  Else watched her mother rub her forehead where concentration puckered the skin and tried not to mind the weariness of the gesture. Even so, the guilt that unsettled her each Sunday at church stirred her stomach
like a spoon. She let herself imagine for a moment her mother’s shame if she and Lars were ever to be caught. She crammed the remains of the bread slice into her mouth and returned her plate to the kitchen.

  ‘I thought I’d go fishing,’ she said from the doorway.

  ‘Now?’ asked her mother.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said.

  ‘But it’ll be dark soon.’

  ‘I’ll keep to the front of the house,’ she said. ‘I won’t stay out long. Some fresh fish for supper would be nice, don’t you think?’

  The idea of doing something useful had already made her feel better. Else washed her dish and, in the corridor, zipped up her waterproofs and stepped into her shoes. She left the farmhouse and made her way under the branches of the morello cherry tree to the boathouse. At the top of its stairs she laid a palm on the door, whose cracked paint flaked off when she gave it a shove. Inside, the vinegar stink of homebrew stung her eyes. It was stronger than it had been when she’d last had reason to come in here. Since then, a sponge mattress had been pushed against the wall beneath the pair of oars that rested across the ceiling beams. Its flower-print sheet was stained and dusty. The Norges jars her father used for decanting were lined up at its foot.

  Else crouched by the workbench cluttered with fishing equipment and studied the distillery that was hidden under its shelf. While the fjord slapped the hull of the skiff docked under her feet, she followed the curl of a hose from a sealed pot into a bucket. She considered committing an act of sabotage – piercing the rubber with a fishhook, or twiddling the dial of the camping stove and emptying its gas into the air – but instead stood and chose a line from a tackle box, unsnagging its weight and hook before tugging open the trapdoor in the floor.

  When she had finished lowering the oars through the hatch, she climbed down the ladder to the stacked rock ledge on one side of the boat. She loaded her gear before untying its ropes and clambering aboard. With an oar in hand, Else nudged its blade against the walls of the dank moorings, pushing the skiff from the cobwebs into open air. She left it there loosely knotted and crossed the pier to tear a cluster of mussels from the water, shaking the drops from the seaweed-sewn shells. After finding a stone with which to crush them, she balanced a foot on the skiff’s gunwale and pushed off from land. The boat bobbed while she fitted the oars in the rowlocks. It turned on the current until, perched on the middle bench with her back to the shipyard, she started to row.

  A slow ache crept into her arms as the farmhouse withdrew behind the trees. Else gritted her teeth and dragged the oars under white-capped waves. With each stroke, she resented the Johnson motor that her father had bought the previous year and forbidden her to use. It seemed to dare her from the stern of the boat, where it tilted its propeller out of the fjord, cocking its bulk to one side like the head of a sneering passenger.

  By the time she had rowed far enough and decided to pull in the oars, the day’s mist had graduated to a drizzle. Else drew up her hood and smashed a mussel with her stone, stabbing its meat with her hook before dropping the weight into the water. The line slipped through her fingers towards the schools of fish that she imagined streaking colour under the skiff, diving and weaving in synchrony as their scales gleamed in the black depths. She was glad for the rain that pocked the fjord’s skin, knowing the fish would bite more readily because of it.

  She thought suddenly of the Brothers Bezrukov tumbling and twirling in their net and yanked the fishing line. Perhaps Lars was right: they were men like any other. However Yakov had made her feel, all he had done was offer her a cigarette. Else recalled the strong man spreading his hands over the horse’s belly and heaving her out of the sawdust towards the Big Top’s roof. The animal had not kicked while he held her in the ring. She had not protested at all.

  Else yielded to the bright daze that came with memories of the circus while the raindrops grew fat, skating over her waterproof trousers and beating the canvas hood that covered her ears. By the time her line jerked, the benches were slick. Water swished under the planking of the rowing boat. Her fingers were raw and clumsy with cold and she winced when the fishing wire nicked her flesh. She was surprised by how far the skiff had drifted. Behind her, the shipyard’s empty graving dock carved a slab out of the shore. She let her catch fight the hook before easing it in and landing a coalfish in the boat. It thrashed, thumping the hull with its tail while its mouth gaped and its gills flared pink.

  Else caught it in her palms and bent its neck until she felt a pop. She guessed its weight at around a kilo. It would do. After wiping the slime from her hands, she rescued the oars from the bottom of the boat and rowed for home. The cloudbank flashed like the inside of a shell. The coastline blurred behind sheets of rain as the boat pulled away, smearing the shipyard’s construction sheds into brown dabs and washing the barns and farmhouses clean from sight. The old tomato tin that her father kept aboard for the job of bailing spun along the hull, thudding dully as the rain pelted its rust. Else strained against the wind that swept her off course no matter how her muscles burned.

  When she craned her neck to gauge the distance to the farmhouse, the Aaby farm took shape in the murk. She backed an oar to correct her bearing and carried on rowing until, some minutes later, she looked around again. Else frowned at the choppy water that still separated her from home. She rowed with all of her strength, though her arms cramped with the wasted effort of fighting the current. The trees thinned and there was the boathouse, there was the straight stroke of the pier. Her mother stood at its end huddled against the downpour, clutching a sou’wester to her head. Else crossed the oars by her feet before raising a hand in the air to signal that all was well. Her knee connected with something hard. A rowlock jiggled in its socket and tipped overboard.

  Even as she watched it sink from sight, Else thrust an arm after it into the water. Swearing under her breath, she ran her fingers along the gunwale for the missing cord that should have fastened it to the skiff. On the opposite gunwale, a shoelace secured the remaining rowlock. Else swivelled on her bench and shouted into the rain.

  ‘Mamma!’ she called. ‘I lost a rowlock!’

  Her sleeve leaked an icy stream down her arm when she picked up the oars. Every stroke sent the unfixed oar skidding along the slippery wood. Rain clattered in the boat.

  ‘I lost a rowlock!’ she called.

  Her mother cupped a hand to her mouth, but Else could not hear her. She turned again to face the shipyard and seize the oars and, as she struggled to row, the skiff’s prow wrenched to the portside. She glared at the Johnson engine, remembering her father’s instructions. She balked at the thought of openly disobeying him. Still, she lifted in the oars and threw herself at the petrol can that was pushed under the bench at the boat’s stern, pumping its hose before grasping the motor’s pull rope in her fingers.

  The engine would not start. As Else checked the shift lever the wind snatched at the boat, driving it further from land. She tried again. The motor grumbled and spat smoke into the air before it died. Else eased out the choke and tried again. With each failure she looked for her mother, who paced the pier and waved her arms over her hat. Else tried again. And again. She jammed in the choke and tried again. She considered rowing again but the boat had drifted too far; she was too tired.

  But this time, when she tugged the pull rope, the engine sputtered awake. Else twisted the grip of the throttle control arm, savouring the tremble of rubber under her palm. The tomato tin rolled down the hull’s planking and bumped the toe of her shoe when she opened the throttle and the prow pitched out of the water. It juddered with each smack of a new wave, hurling spray into the rain as Else approached land.

  Her mother ran up the pier to meet the skiff. With her hands on the gunwale, she guided it in.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Else said.

  ‘Thank God. What did I tell you about going out in this weather? We’re lucky the boat wasn’t damaged. You know we couldn’
t have afforded to get it fixed.’

  Else killed the engine and, after tipping the propeller out of the tide, used the oars to manoeuvre the skiff under the boathouse. Her mother helped her tie its ropes before hurrying to the farmhouse, leaving her to hoist the oars out of the boat and through the trapdoor. Else climbed after them up the ladder. Once inside, she replaced her father’s fishing line in the tackle box. With her fingers hooked under the coalfish’s gills, she plodded into the rain and across the sodden yard.

  THE FRØYA RAN aground around six o’clock that evening. Ole Haugeli and Tom Ivar Lund brought Johann home in borrowed clothes, which were tight over his shoulders and appeared to do little to relieve the chill that shot his muscles with a visible shiver. From her seat by the fire, Else listened to her father deliver the news that the trawler was gone. He limped away from his wife’s questions, locking himself in the washroom even though she called after him from the bottom of the stairs.

  Dagny’s skin was ashen when she faced Ole and Tom Ivar, who shifted on their feet in the dining room. With their hands on their hips, they took turns to shake their heads in a slow, grave manner.

  ‘We were the first to arrive,’ Ole said. ‘We saw his flare. He was lucky we did. There aren’t many boats out tonight.’

  By the time they’d reached the banked trawler, the rain had subsided, but still the water had been rough and roiling around the Iselin, launching her to the peaks of its waves and falling away before unleashing a new swell. The Frøya had been sinking. In seeking shelter from the worst of the sea, Johann had navigated behind an island group and been stranded on a scattering of rocks. Ole had guessed from the speed with which the water claimed the trawler’s prow that one may have punctured her hull.

  As he and Tom Ivar closed in on the boat, they’d spotted Johann at its stern waving his flare gun in the air. Ole had steered the Iselin up wind, while Tom Ivar had prepared to float a lifebelt. It skated over the water to the Frøya’s starboard side and Johann had jumped overboard. Clutching the ring, he’d hollered for Tom Ivar to reel him in.

  ‘He’s had a shock, but he should be fine in a day or two,’ Tom Ivar said.