“Come! You’ve got to see this!”
The Örland congregation is coming towards them across the hills. The seas are too high for anyone to want to come by boat in the dark. So they’ve started early from all the villages and now they can be seen in a long row of blinking, swinging lanterns descending the last slope. The verger runs to the steeple, for the bells must ring as they approach, the big bell and the small one tolling for all they’re worth.
The organist warms his hands on a radiator, and the pastor hurries to the sacristy. The first to come in fill the church with footsteps and noise, rustling and shuffling. “Merry Christmas!” they wish one another in their strong, Örland voices. The long walk with swinging lanterns, watching their step on the slippery rocks, has made them bright and talkative. But then the voices change and grow rapid and frightened, and soon the organist comes into the sacristy. “You need to hear this before we start.”
It seems one of the last to arrive is a ship’s pilot from the west villages who has heard on the pilots’ radio that a large American freighter has gone aground and sunk off the island of Utö. The pilots on Utö have rescued many of the crew, but a number of them are missing. “Many of us had a bad feeling last night,” he adds, understandably enough.
“Thank you,” the pastor says. “I’m glad you told me. I’ll say a prayer for them.” He looks at the clock and sees that it’s past time. Mona is sitting in the church wondering why they don’t start. The verger stopped ringing the bells some time ago. But now the organist hurries to the loft, the organ pumper starts to work, and the organist begins playing the opening bars of “When Christmas Morn is Dawning”—a little too fast.
The whole church is glowing in its Egyptian darkness and the talking dies down reluctantly. When the organist indicates that the hymn is now beginning, they are ready. It is one of their favourite hymns, which they’ve waited all year to sing, but now they’re distracted, the dissonances are unexpectedly great, the bellowing more distinct, the differences of tempo more audible. The pastor is at the altar, singing as he always does, but not happy, horrified, as is everyone who’s already heard the news. “The Lord be with you,” he sings, as usual, and Lillus answers happily a little ahead of everyone else. Anyone would be inspired in these wonderful acoustics, and the pastor takes them through the liturgical embroidery and through the lesson. When they sing “Starlight on Sea and Sand”, there are people talking out loud in the back rows, and many in the front pews turn around. In the loft, where the younger boys have gathered, they talk and run around without restraint.
No calm, no collective expectation when the pastor climbs into the pulpit. “Dear friends, brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ,” he begins as usual. “Let us pray.” The older people obediently bow their heads and then everyone listens, for now the pastor will give them the information that led to all the hubbub. “This night, on Christmas night itself, the whole crew of a freighter has been fighting for their lives in the storm off Utö. We thank you for the pilots on Utö, who put their own lives in danger to rescue many. We pray for those who have lost their lives at sea. God, be merciful to them and receive them into your fatherly embrace. Let the light eternal shine for them. Amen.”
After this, it’s easy to return to the subject of light, the church lit up for celebration, for the feast of our Saviour’s birth, but also to the light in the bell tower that faithfully and steadily blinked all through the storm-lashed night. And on to the Star of Bethlehem that wandered through the night and led shepherds and wise men to the stable and the manger. We ourselves surrounded by deep darkness, but in the centre a light that guides us from age to age. The light is Christian hope, personified in the body of Christ, which is a lantern to guide our steps and light up our path. In the silence that follows, everyone can clearly hear a foot colliding gently with a storm lantern on the floor, a little clinking that jingles through the church. The candle flames flutter in a draught, no one misses the parallel with their own trek with swinging lanterns through the deep darkness towards the shining church.
They sing “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming from Tender Stem Hath Sprung!” while the pastor changes his robe and returns to the altar. In his closing prayer he prays especially for all those struggling at sea, then the Our Father and the blessing. Finally, Topelius’s “I Seek No Gold or Majesty, No Pearl or Shining Gem”. The organist is about to begin his postlude, his showpiece, but the organ pumper is facing the other way, talking to someone, and people are already standing up in their pews and talking loudly. When the organist finally starts playing, they just talk louder. The pastor takes off his vestments quickly and the verger is back in the church before the postlude is over. As soon as he’s finished, the organist leaves his music on the organ and comes down to the others. In the middle is Anders Stark, the pilot who heard the news on his radio. He’s in a hurry to get home to hear more news, but repeats what he knows once again: The freighter is called Park Victory, a big devil, oh, beg pardon, and he himself was her pilot once. From the American South, lots of Negroes and such people. A crew of at least twenty-five. The pilots on Utö have rescued at least half, they think. The ones still out there haven’t got a chance. The Coast Guard has been out all night but has no hope of finding anyone else alive.
Then the pastor notices that no one from the Coast Guard is at church today. It’s starting to get light outside, and a couple of boys who’ve been up on a hill having a look around come back to tell them that both Coast Guard boats are gone, obviously to take part in the rescue mission along with the military from the base on Utö. They must have been called out during the night, over the radio. “Good Lord, you’ve got to have guts to go out in a small boat in this weather,” someone says. Brage’s parents and wife are in the church but didn’t know he’d gone out. He was on duty at the station and celebrated Christmas there. “First Christmas pike at home and then Christmas ham at the station, because Björklund’s from the mainland and pike won’t do,” Astrid explains. She doesn’t seem particularly worried. It’s another thing the pastor admires in his parishioners— their fatalism. What happens is what’s meant to happen.
Definitely light outside now, grey on grey, black where the sides of the hills are whipped with rain. Icy cold. Mona can guess that there will be a lot of visitors during the day and hurries home with the girls. They have to sit in the kitchen while she gets a fire burning in the range and puts pots of water on the rings. Then she quickly builds fires in the tile stoves and manages to measure out the coffee and slice the bread before the first of them arrive. First they have to count the collection and make certain every candle is out. The verger goes down to the boiler room two extra times to make sure that no coals are smouldering and that the insulation is not smoking anywhere. The radiators have started to go cold, but you never know, and the pastor promises to check again at dinner time.
No one really wants to go home, except Anders, who left in a rush, and by and by the pastor, the organist, the verger, Elis and Adele, and several men from the west villages, who are hoping the pastor’s phone is less dead than other people’s, head for the parsonage. There’s a lovely warmth coming from the tile stoves and the open oven door, and they all crowd around the kitchen table and pass around chicory coffee and bread and butter and slices of Christmas ham. “Such luxury!” Adele says about the ham, and the pastor’s wife thinks the same thought as, mournfully, she watches the disappearance of the ham, which would have lasted them three more days. But she comes from a farm herself, and she knows there’s nothing worse than having a reputation for stinginess and lack of hospitality.
Several of them crank the telephone energetically and fiddle with the radio, and in the midst of the static and the hissing they suddenly hear a clear voice from Finnish Radio talking about the Christmas Eve tragedy, the American freighter Park Victory, that sank off Utö. The U.S. Embassy conveys its gratitude to the pilots on Utö for their heroic rescue efforts. The Embassy has arranged for the survivors to be taken to
Helsingfors, where they will be housed until they can travel home. The pilots have rescued fourteen men. Eight bodies have been recovered and two are missing and presumed dead.
The men look out the window. “With this wind, they’ll be coming here,” they predict, and it takes half a second for the pastor to grasp that they mean the two missing crew members, whose bodies will be driven towards the Örlands by the wind and the currents. That’s why they figure the Coast Guard from the Örlands is still out. They’re moving slowly, with the wind, and searching the whole way. Nevertheless, they come home empty-handed, and it’s Post-Anton who finds one of the bodies shortly after New Year’s.
Much can happen to a body that winds up in the water in a storm. You can figure the direction roughly, but you also have to reckon with currents which, in places, can move in the opposite direction to the wind and carry you on great detours. Then, when you start to approach a coastline, you have to deal not only with the current among the islands but also with reefs and rocks that you rub against and have to work your way around before you can move on. In amongst the skerries, the wind trundles around any way it likes, and if you’re a corpse at its mercy, you can end up in odd places.
I thought it was a seal, I did. But when it didn’t move, even though I came so close that it should have caught my scent, since I was upwind, I realized it was a man who’d washed up on the rocks like a big bull seal. A lifebelt and dark clothes, there’s no big difference between seamen and old bull seals.
It was a Negro. Not as black as I’d thought they were but more grey, maybe they lose some of their colour when they die. Otherwise just like a human being. A cap with earflaps so I couldn’t tell if he had woolly hair like they say Negroes have. Oilskins and good shoes on his feet. I wondered if I should try to pull him into the boat, but he was heavy as hell, and postal boats are supposed to carry the mail, not dead seamen. So I just pulled him up a little more so he wouldn’t drift away, and then I stopped by the Coast Guard and told them where he was, and then home with the mail.
“How did you happen to find him?” they asked, of course. “Those rocks aren’t on your usual route.”
“Well, no,” I said. “But I saw which way I should steer.”
Brage knows what I mean. But Björklund was irritated. “What do you mean, you knew which way to steer?” he said. “If you can tell us where the other one is too, then we can stop searching.”
“No,” I said. “If he’s caught on something and is on the bottom, or inside the wreck, for example, then I can’t see anything. Any fool knows that.”
This is the darkest time of the year, and there’s a lot of movement in the water, storms and currents. These are hard trips for me, even though I go only twice a week. That Christmas night I slept like a dead man. All the light was knocked out of me, I didn’t know a thing. Not a dream, not a sound could have woken me. In my sleep there was only the storm thundering away, while I lay deep down in my furs, dry and out of danger.
If I had been awake and able to hear and see, what could I have done, even with a thousand signs? There were a lot of people who did have them. The pastor himself said he was up wandering around the house and heard all sorts of things. The one who should have heard and seen was the captain of the Park Victory. They were waiting for a pilot, and the bridge was fully manned. Their radio was on, calling and crackling, which makes it hard to hear anything else, hard to figure out why there’s such an urgent unease in the pit of your stomach and where your fears are coming from. Do they carry a message, or are you just suffering fearful premonitions in the terrible storm? The pilots said that they tried to call on the radio and tell them to move farther offshore, but others who were out that night said they could hardly hear anything, mostly just occasional words, many of them Russian, so chopped to pieces they were impossible to understand. The engines pound and roar and the props thrash and whip. In that kind of hell, it’s not easy to grasp that there are spirits out there who are trying to get you to see how you can save yourself.
I have the greatest admiration for the pilots. When they are dead and gone, they’ll be out there too, that I know, and anyone with ears and senses will be safe. They were ready to sacrifice their lives, it says in the newspapers, but let me tell you that they knew exactly what to do to save themselves and still rescue as many as possible. You need one man to manage the engine and the rudder, and he needs a voice that can be heard and eyes that can see. And then you need men who know precisely to the tenth of a second when to fend off and which wave to turn on. That they managed to rescue so many in two little pilot boats, I respect them for that. More boats came out later from the military on Utö, but without the pilots they would have pulled out maybe three or four still alive. They all had lifebelts, but there’s a horrific power in the waves, and it was indescribably cold. Those who drifted in towards land were dashed to death on the rocks.
The pilots, yes. As they worked out there, they had others toiling beside them in harmony, I know that. It must have been so, for I’ve had the experience myself, many times.
Chapter Nineteen
PEOPLE MIGHT WALK ON THEIR OWN LEGS right up to their death. But that’s the end of it. From then on they are a weight to be moved, lifted and carried. Be spoken of and talked about in their very presence, important decisions made. Doctors will examine the body and determine the cause of death—drowning and hypothermia. The authorities grant Doctor Gyllen, no, Midwife Irina Gyllen a dispensation to perform this duty, which eliminates a good deal of trouble and expense. The local policeman, Julius Friman, is present as witness and recording secretary. An easy procedure at the present temperature. The seaman still looks newly drowned, washed clean by the sea and odour free.
On the Örlands, the bodies of those newly dead are kept in a shed at their home farm until the burial. Traditionally, dead seamen are kept in the pastor’s boathouse. The Coast Guard brings the body, and it turns out there are trestles and planks stowed away in a corner for this very purpose. Pure good luck that the pastor never sawed them up for firewood. Österberg, the carpenter in the east villages, brings a smoothly planed coffin in his boat. The pastor’s wife lines it with white paper curtains from the war years that she’s found in the attic, and she contributes a pillowcase and pillow. The pastor and the verger heave the seaman into the coffin, staggering under his unexpected weight. They cover him with a paper shroud and the pastor reads The Lord’s Blessing. Together, he and the verger sing, “Now the labourer’s task is o’er; now the battle day is past; now upon the farther shore, lands the voyager at last.”
Then he lies there and waits for Sunday, because the pastor knows that many people are interested in this burial service and Sunday will give them a respectable reason to be present. It seems right, too, that this man who died alone in a howling gale should thus be embraced by a large parish community.
While they wait, the verger struggles to dig a grave in the cold, rocky soil. He gets help from the church crofter, for pay, and from the pastor when he has time between phone calls. There is much to be discussed and organized. The man’s wallet is sent to the U.S. Embassy, and he is identified as Eric Alexander Cain, from Brooklyn. A Swedish-speaking official at the Embassy calls and there is a vigorous discussion of the arrangements. The dead man was a Baptist, but the Baptists and the Lutherans are close, and a traditional Örland burial will not be a problem. Whirr, he rings off, and then in the afternoon he calls again. He has spoken to the Baptist Church in Helsingfors, but it’s a long way for the Baptist minister to come, so he has no objection to Pastor Kummel, assuming the pastor is willing? “Yes,” Petter promises for the second time, and whirr, they ring off. The next day the fellow calls again to talk about the expenses, and the pastor answers that the parish itself pays the very modest expenses for the burial of a stranger. He reports that the man is already in his coffin and what the coffin cost, and the official says that of course the Embassy will pay for all costs verified by an invoice. Petter thanks him, and, whirr, they
ring off. Ring ring, he calls back to discuss a possible floral tribute. Petter explains that flowers have to be sent out from Åbo and won’t survive the long trip from Mellom to the Örlands in an open boat. What they can do, and his wife has already started, is to make wreaths of juniper greens. There are frozen, dark blue juniper berries in the greens, and to give the wreaths some colour, she picks sprigs of red rosehips and uses them as decoration. “Beautiful and dignified,” Petter assures the Embassy functionary, and the man sounds impressed but also distant, as if he were talking to an Eskimo. “That will be excellent,” he says, and promises to arrange for a spruce wreath with a ribbon from the Embassy to be sent out on Thursday’s boat from Åbo. “Thank you,” Petter says. Whirr.
And on Friday morning, Post-Anton arrives weighed down by an enormous wreath of spruce and red paper flowers, plus a ribbon with gold lettering, a little American flag, and a large rosette in red, white, and blue adorned with an American bald eagle. Mona’s wreaths from Örland parish are smaller, but together they make an attractive arrangement on the coffin and later on the grave. The men of the vestry carry the casket up from the boathouse and set it down on the coffin stone outside the churchyard gate, as tradition dictates. The bells ring, and the congregation sings the departed to his grave. The pastor performs the burial service. In the biting wind, freezing temperatures and icing in the bays, he says a few words about the seaman from the vast land of America who met his death in the cold north. Alone, a stranger, but now reunited with the worldwide community of Christians. His body sinks into the cold earth, but his spirit rests by the heart of Jesus.
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