The Last Boat Home

by Dea Brovig

  ‘I suppose,’ Else said, ‘you’re almost done with the barn.’ Valentin nodded, his focus still on his meal. ‘How much longer will you need?’

  ‘Two days,’ he said, ‘no more.’

  Else thought of the cow snug in Tenvik’s barn. Poor animal, she thought, to be forced from relative comfort to return to her old quarters. For her part she would not miss the morning walk, especially now with the fresh snowfall, although, in truth, she had not minded it so much, had not minded coming home to the scrape of Valentin’s tools. Yakov had left her alone the few times she had seen him shuffling in or out of the pig barn. Once she had glimpsed him running from the henhouse, his hands nests for what she assumed must be pilfered eggs.

  Valentin shovelled the last of the casserole between his lips and sighed at his empty plate. He picked up the water glass and drained it in a series of short gulps. Again he lifted the mug, cradling it in his palms, resting the curve of the porcelain against his chest as if to warm his heart. He closed his eyes and breathed the vapour through his nose. His eyes opened and found Else’s face.

  He tasted the brew and his jaw softened as the liquid slipped down his throat. He raised the mug and took another mouthful. Else looked away, ashamed to feel so pleased.

  ‘I thought you might be cold,’ she said.

  ‘So I was,’ Valentin said. He drank again and relinquished the mug to Else. ‘You look cold yourself.’

  She hesitated, but accepted the mug. She sipped and a firework went off in her gullet. She swallowed air whose scent of damp pine and woodchip she had come to associate with Valentin. With a shy smile, she handed him the chicory and pulled the flask from her pocket. She refilled the mug with the remaining liquid, then waited for the strong man to drink it down.

  By the time she left the barn, the tracks that testified to her expedition to the boathouse had almost vanished. The snow had filled them in like cement. Still it was the snow that gave her away.

  That afternoon’s dinner was punctuated by a faint pattering that came from the barn. Through the meal, Johann’s eyes snapped up from his vegetables to glower at the flakes that danced in the sweating window. In spite of the moonshine that warmed Else’s belly, her nerves were pricked. She was restless in her chair. She stopped herself from jumping each time her father barked at her mother from the head of the table.

  ‘When will that ape be done out there?’ he said. ‘I’m sick of listening to his damned hammering.’

  ‘Soon,’ Dagny said. ‘In a couple of days.’

  ‘What in hell is this I’m eating? Why haven’t you cooked any meat?’

  Johann picked his way through half a portion of Solveig’s casserole before stalking outside to the boathouse. Else was sitting by the oven reviewing the sewing pile when he burst through the front door, his coat still buttoned to his chin. Her mother leapt from her seat as he barged into the dining room.

  ‘That circus ape,’ he said, ‘is a thief. He’s been in the boathouse.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Dagny said. ‘He’s been in the barn all day.’

  ‘There are puddles on the floor. He’s been in there, all right. Someone has.’

  Else’s heart lurched. Her fingers pinched her needle.

  ‘Unless it was you?’ her father said. ‘Why would you go in there?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said her mother.

  Johann moved into the room. His stare pinned itself on Dagny, who backed away.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, ‘I swear.’

  ‘Father,’ said Else.

  ‘Why would you go in there?’

  ‘Johann, no.’

  His teeth were bared when he lowered his face to his wife’s. She screamed when he grabbed her hair and struck her head against the wall.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’ he said. ‘Were you checking on me?’

  ‘Johann, please!’

  He knocked her head harder. ‘Spying on me in my own house?’

  ‘Father,’ Else said and was on her feet.

  ‘Why were you there?’

  Her mother’s sobs tore through her pleas.

  ‘Father, stop! It was me!’

  Before Else knew it her father had her by the throat, his fingers pressing her windpipe. He lifted her off the ground and she was sailing across the room and falling and crashing to the floor. A wild cry erupted from somewhere behind the pain that shot from her ribs and up and down her side. She could not breathe. Her mother shrieked, her father closed in. Then a banging behind her startled his charge.

  Valentin was at the window, his face visible through the glass that rattled when he thumped it with his fist. A vein bulged under the skin at his temple. He pointed a finger at Johann.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  Johann ran from the room. His footsteps pounded the stairs and then came the smack of a door through the ceiling. Else tried to sit up, but the ache in her side sent her back to the floor. Her mother was next to her.

  ‘Else,’ she said.

  She felt hands on her shoulders, her mother’s palm on her cheek. She let her terror melt to tears and buried her face in her mother’s lap.

  ‘Oh, Else,’ she said, ‘what have you done?’

  Else touched her fingers to her neck. Only then did she remember the needle whose line had imprinted her thumb. When she looked at the window, Valentin was gone. The snow spun and billowed and flitted away.

  VALENTIN NEVER RETURNED to the Dybdahl farm. It fell to Dagny to settle matters with Tenvik. She arrived on Tuesday morning to collect the cow and explain that the circus man’s services would no longer be needed. Tenvik nodded without argument and she led the cow home through the snowbank, gripping the forelock of the head which swayed from side to side. There would be no getting rid of the draught in the barn but, even with it, the conditions for the animal had far improved.

  Johann shut himself up in the boathouse, where he remained for several days. In the mornings, Else would leave her mother staring at its door from the window and set out for the public dock, longing for the ferry’s deliverance from the strain that had her wincing with every crackle of the oven’s fire. She ignored the shipyard workers, who threw her wondering glances before they climbed aboard the shipyard’s boat. On her journey home from school, she stationed herself on the ferry deck and willed the wind to numb her, to empty her out.

  Sunday’s sermon told her to embrace suffering. ‘“Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Lord”,’ the minister said. After the service, while the parishioners huddled together for warmth and news in the churchyard, Reiersen broke away from his wife in her mink to cut off the Dybdahl family’s retreat.

  ‘Johann,’ he called and Else felt her mother stiffen and all the eyes in the cemetery turn on them. ‘A word, a quick word.’

  Her mother touched her father’s elbow. He halted by the gate, a hand resting on its post.

  ‘This week,’ Reiersen said. ‘Well, I hear you’ve been missed. Are you ill?’

  ‘No,’ said Johann.

  ‘A fever,’ Dagny said.

  ‘Well. I’m glad to see you’re better. I’ll tell Syvertsen to expect you tomorrow, then, unless there’s a reason not to?’

  While they spoke Lars watched from under the horse chestnut tree, not far from the church steps where Pastor Seip had paused in his blessings to observe the exchange. Lars studied his father taking a labourer to task with an expression that seemed to say he was learning a hard lesson. With his arms crossed, he chewed the inside of his cheeks. Else knew it had been a mistake to find him in the crowd. Their eyes met and he held hers for a moment before looking away.

  Neither mentioned what had happened during school the following week, nor the week after that, once it had happened again. This time when Reiersen challenged Johann about his absences, his tone was hostile, his dissatisfaction clear. Even within the shelter of their silence, Else could sense the splitting open of a still-healing wound which, not long ago, her and Lars’s shared interest in the strong
man had stitched up. She worried the spot, prodded it, made it throb just as surely as the marks left on her neck by her father’s fingers and hidden by a scarf that she refused to unwind, no matter how Lars urged.

  ‘Can’t you meet me tomorrow?’ he asked her more than once. ‘The Cadillac will be free. I could pick you up at five.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Else said.

  ‘You managed before.’

  ‘I can’t get away.’

  ‘But you managed before.’

  Else counted time by the fading of those marks, the dulling of black to plum and yellow. They had almost disappeared when, one afternoon, Lars did not come to find her during the break. Else waited alone in the shadow of the caretaker’s shed, sliding the sole of her boot over the ground, dislodging the studs of grit from where their points had tacked them to the ice. Now and again, she would peer around the wall across the schoolyard, her gaze searching the asphalt. She shivered in her coat. She raised her hood over her hair and packed her hands into her coat sleeves.

  Through the afternoon’s classes, Lars sat in his seat between Petter and Gro Berge and did not turn around. Else caught herself staring at the back of his head and forced herself to look elsewhere. In the schoolyard outside, the snow reflected winter sunlight so bright that its glare stunned her. The fjord glimmered at the bottom of the hill as if its ripples had been stitched with circus sequins. Else remembered how, on the night under the Big Top, Lars had lain beside her at the edge of the manège. The riders’ costumes had sparkled molten white under the lights. Lars had held her hand until the strong man took his bow.

  They were surprised the letter from Reiersen did not come sooner. Johann brought it home after having spent the best part of three weeks in the boathouse, on some days only emerging to scavenge for food or to use the toilet or to revive himself with a cup of chicory. His thermos was in the kitchen when Else arrived home from school and joined her mother from the hall.

  ‘I thought he went in this morning,’ she said.

  ‘He did,’ said her mother.

  The fat in Dagny’s skillet spat and cooked two fillets of coalfish. She jabbed their flesh with a fork while her other hand pressed her stomach, its fingers curled above a limp wrist. Her profile glowed with hints of fresh bruising.

  ‘What happened?’ Else asked.

  ‘I fell on the ice,’ her mother said.

  On the kitchen counter, next to a pile of carrot peel, Else saw an envelope addressed to her father.

  ‘It’s from the shipyard,’ said her mother. She put down her fork and rubbed an eye. She opened the refrigerator door and checked its contents for something she did not find. ‘He’s been fired,’ she said. ‘They’ve finally got round to firing him.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ Else asked.

  ‘Where you’d expect,’ her mother said.

  ‘Will you speak to Karin?’

  Her mother gripped her fork. A fillet of fish broke apart in her pan when she tried to turn it. Slivers stuck to the metal, browning and crisping while she jabbed at them. ‘Set the table, will you?’ she said. ‘Dinner is almost ready.’

  ON A SATURDAY at the end of March Else stepped off the ferry at the Longpier and, with her chin tucked behind her scarf, walked under the branches of the ash trees that shaded the harbour to Elvebakken. The worst of the snow had melted from the roads; what remained was hard-packed and black with exhaust fumes, or else soft and wet enough to trickle through her boots and moisten her toes.

  Today a group had gathered at the bottom of the hill, where the Elvebakken pier cut a slab out of the ice that extended like a sheet of brushed metal over the water. A handful of boys swung sticks at a hockey puck, lobbing it back and forth and hollering if it flew too far. They took turns to feel their way, testing the surface of the ice before returning, puck in hand, each a hero come home.

  Else found Lars with Rune, Petter and Gro Berge, whose smile dug dimples into her cheeks. They loitered on the pier and shared a cigarette. Else slipped into a gap at Lars’s side.

  ‘I didn’t think you would come,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes when he kissed her, blocking out the sight of Gro’s buckling smile and embracing the relief that soothed her heartache, trying to catch it in her arms.

  For the next half hour Else stayed on the pier together with Lars, his hand in hers while the boys played hockey and Stine Wiig engraved patterns on the ice with the skates she had strapped to her shoes. In a loud voice that drew the attention of their peers, Rune dared Petter to a race. They bounded from land and glided on their boot soles towards the brink where the ice began to thin into the fjord.

  ‘Come on,’ said Lars. His breath was hot on Else’s ear. She shadowed him through the crowd which closed up in their wake. They climbed Elvebakken, picking over the filthy patches of snow that spotted the pavement. Behind them, shouts from the ice dwindled to the occasional, high-pitched shriek. Else looked over her shoulder to the bottom of the hill, where the race had its winner, though she could not make out who it was. She thought of her mother insisting she take the trip to town. ‘A bit of fun will do you good,’ she had said.

  Lars led Else through the schoolyard to the caretaker’s shed. He grinned as he pushed open its door. Inside he cleared a space on the ground, lifting the shovel and rake to the grit box before spreading his coat on a corner of the concrete. He pressed himself to Else.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

  She knelt beside him on the coat.

  ‘No one will find us here,’ he said.

  He kissed her again and Else stretched out on the floor, which was hard and cold against her spine. Lars tasted of the cigarette he had smoked with Gro. He pulled off his gloves and unbuttoned her coat. His hands found her skin and her eyes were wide with the icy nip of his fingertips. She remembered the last time in the Cadillac, the fug of the wine and the lull of darkness. She breathed in the damp, mineral smell of the shed and searched his face, hoping to hold his eyes.

  ‘Lars,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you, too.’

  He buried his nose in her hair and fumbled with her trouser button.

  When it was over, he rolled onto his back and zipped himself up. He propped himself on his elbows and seemed to focus on the grit box until his breath was steady once more. He started to laugh. He shook his head. ‘We should get back,’ he said, ‘before they miss us.’

  ‘Can’t we stay for a while?’ Else asked.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ he said. ‘I should put on my coat.’

  Lars got to his feet and brushed down his clothes while Else rearranged herself, her bra and jumper, the elastic of her underpants and her trousers. As soon as she stood, he scooped up his coat and shook the filth from its wool. He restored the shovel and rake to their original places, then opened the door and passed into the day. The sun was bright after their time in the shed, the sky clear, its blue surprising. Else squinted as she stepped outside. She caught his hand.

  ‘Lars,’ she said.

  She wanted to say something that would make him stop but, before she knew what, he had snatched back his hand. Else followed the line of his gaze to where Pastor Seip watched them from the gate. He waited, a figure in mourning, his black coat, his black hair. Her pulse was a stampede in her head, its rush as painful as hooves. She cowered behind Lars as he tramped across the schoolyard to confront the minister.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’ asked Pastor Seip.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lars. ‘We were talking.’

  ‘Talking,’ he said.

  Else’s face was hot. She recognised the reproach that narrowed the minister’s eyes, that same sneer that he had trained on her father when he had discovered him drunk at home. In a weak gesture, she lifted a palm to smooth her coat. Pastor Seip continued up the hill to the grocery. Else looked to Lars, who had already begun his descent to the fjord.

  ‘The Lord teaches us,’ said Pastor Seip, ‘to trust in Him, to put our faith in His judgement. For who of us
can truly know another man’s heart? We are wretched beasts, racked by lusts and desires that we must strive daily to conquer. But the Devil is cunning and we, in our weakness, succumb too readily to his trickery. Is it not so that, every day, we stare the Devil in the face and mistake what we see for innocence?’

  Else had not slept the previous night. She had remained awake while the cherry tree’s branches rapped the window, replaying in her mind the moment when she had emerged from the caretaker’s shed to see Pastor Seip at the school gate. The horror of discovery filled her up; she felt overstuffed, her stomach aching and sour. As she sat on the bench between her parents and endured the sermon, she did her best to direct her thoughts elsewhere. She remembered the Big Top rising in a fog of white light in the middle of Tenvik’s paddock. Try as she might, she could not hold the image. She glanced at Lars in the nave’s first pew. Fair curls skimmed the collar of his suit jacket.

  ‘For three years under His ministry,’ said Pastor Seip, his voice seething from the pulpit, ‘Jesus loved Judas as He loved His other disciples, as He loves all men. Yet Judas betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver. He gave himself freely to the Devil, just as Jesus knew he would. Many here would do the same. For who remembers the promise of heaven’s bounty when pleasure offers itself here and now? Who has a faith strong enough to turn away when the Devil leads them to commit wicked deeds in secret places?

  ‘God’s mercy is great, but so, too, is his wrath. So says the first chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” We will answer to God for our sins, and He will punish us as a father punishes his wayward child. Do you imagine Almighty God cannot see into secret places? Did not Jesus know that Judas would betray Him? After He had washed His disciples’ feet, He dipped the sop and gave it to Judas. And Judas rejected His love and Satan entered into him.