Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  On that evening Magnhild was dreaming of a group of hooded women in long dresses carrying water from the well. In this well lay something poisonous, and these women, whoever they were, were coming to make her drink of it. She woke up with her heart rattling in her dry old chest.

  The next dream proved worse; yes, here lies the tale of a woman who lives overlooking a graveyard and one dark night hears something scratching against her window; when she parts the curtains she finds herself looking into a hateful whitish-yellow face framed in long hair, and before she can even scream, the thing has smashed out the glass with a single furious blow of its skull; then its bony fingers reach through, gripping the ledge fast; it pulls up its shoulderblades, locks its skinny arms; and in another rush it is through and biting her to death.

  Magnhild woke up screaming. She lit a candle, rose and went to the head of the stairs. Something was ascending toward her; perhaps it had an osprey’s white neck and dark breast. No, its breasts were as pallid as the autumn cabbages which they sell in the street near the cathedral. As for hair, there seemed to be none. It opened out long black rakes of fingers. It said: Magnhild, give me your hair, just for awhile. Magnhild, give me your hair.

  With her mouth wide open, the old lady backed away, all the way into the wall, believing that she whispered the verse I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers, when in fact her tongue would not move. Gruesomely smiling (when it comes to ghosts, any expression is worse than none), the specter drew near to her, so that all her nightmares of her life grew as bright as the reflections of ships in the cold harbor. Its stench took root in her nostrils. She closed her eyes. But not seeing proved unendurable, so she looked, and found that the thing was upon her. Its eyes were red, its teeth had the chilly glitter of a stained glass image late in an autumn’s day, and its groping fingers resembled the dark high ribs in the ceiling of the Domkirke. Magnhild now realized who it was.

  It commenced to caress her head. The worst thing was the way it looked at her. Wherever it touched her, her tresses fell out. Once Magnhild had been utterly denuded, the ghost removed its skull, rolled it around the floor, and thus gathered up her hair unto itself. Replacing its death’s-head upon its spine, it rose, hovering near the ceiling and preening itself, as if it too were now one of those blue-eyed blonde Norwegian women who retain the beauty of health as they age. And it smiled with its withered black lips, which had once been pink like the bells of a valurt-flower.

  4

  When the dirt gave way in the Gudmundsson family plot, and several monuments upended themselves, the sexton took both helpers and commenced smoothing everything over as decently and rapidly as possible. By then Magnhild had already been dead for eighteen years, with the paint going grey on her rotting house, which no one could afford to buy; and several prominent men had erected a statue of Loden Gudmundsson, who inspired the rational modernization of timbercutting in this part of Rogaland. Around his gravestone the earth appeared especially disturbed. Feeling called upon to disprove a rumor that certain graves had been tampered with, the sexton fetched a crowbar, which turned out to be unnecessary in Loden’s case, since the lid of his box had collapsed. Strange to relate, in place of the viscera which the ribcage had once contained there lay a hoard of old silver coins as variably irregular as scales of herring-skin. The sexton could not help remembering the verse which runs: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume . . . For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Magnhild and Astrid had been placed on either side of that wicked miser.

  Near the century’s turn, on a winter night when the men had been drinking until they grew as cheerfully red as the enamel on a housewife’s coffee mill, and the talk turned on old times, when herring had enriched the sea, bread sold for a fair price and children obeyed their parents, the sexton, now retired, confided to his son Eirik, who was himself somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, that the most hideous experience of his life had been opening a certain woman’s coffin and finding it choked with its decomposed occupant’s tresses which had grown out with such unnatural vitality as to be on the verge of worming through the lid.— Yes, father, said Eirik. I know who you’re talking about.

  And well you should. Parish history is our family’s bread and butter.

  Come spring I’ll renew the sod on that section. Blonde hair, isn’t it? It’s coming up again.

  Silently the old man poured himself more brandy.

  And what about Magnhild?

  No, son, it’s Magnhild I’ve been speaking of.

  But she—

  Went bald in her old age, quite suddenly, it seems. Was it the scurvy? I remember seeing her coming to church, always with her bonnet on, summer or winter. Almost a scandal it was. Your mother used to say—

  You see, father, that hair, wherever it might be rooted, it’s spread all through the Gudmundsson section, just like dead grass. So I thought—

  No, it’s Magnhild’s. Astrid, now, perhaps I should have left her in peace, since her coffin was perfectly sound, but in those days I was still curious about things, like you. Marianne Olafsdottir, who used to serve in that house, was not yet demented, so on the following Sunday I had a chat with her. She said that in her youth Astrid used to have beautiful long hair, which I didn’t remember at all, but one woman’s not likely to forget such a thing about another.

  What else did she tell you?

  That poor Astrid always returned good for evil. Marianne was fond of her, for a fact. Once she dropped a porcelain cup, and Loden was out for blood! Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money—in secret, of course.

  All right, father. So what was in Astrid’s coffin?

  Nothing.

  5

  How belatedly these unpleasant happenings might have been prevented is another of the deep matters unknown to me; but Lady Justice (when she isn’t blinking) can descry murder’s signature even on the rottenest corpse ever carried on a hurdle to the coroner’s jury. Ten or twenty years in the ground need not leave a case unknowable, in witness of which I remind you of those occasions when daring memento-hunters (whom the law calls by other names) have recognized this or that disarticulated skeleton by the nitrous jewel amidst its bric-a-brac. And so, had someone dared to exhume Astrid, he might have noticed that her skull was half smashed in! Then what? We could have pulled out Loden’s remains and burned them, or at least cast them out of the churchyard. The Devil already held that soul, without a doubt, but the living would have been edified, and Astrid gratified. Or we could have burned her; that’s what grim old Bishop Eriksøn would have done, had this story taken place in his time.

  Were justice too much to expect, why not appeasement? In the Domkirke I have found people praying as industriously as ever bondsmaids can turn a millstone; so what if we had uttered heart-winged words for Astrid’s comfort? Some say the dead know nothing, but the minister assures me that at every funeral he perceives ghosts screaming around our prayers like a flock of gulls. And so when Astrid died, we could have had a sermon on the subject of Blessed are those who are persecuted, or, if that was too daring, Blessed are the meek; at least we could have paused en route to the churchyard and offered her a eulogy, even one as simple as any of the heliographic cutouts on my cast-iron stove; for the old people remember that she was easily pleased.

  THE MEMORY STONE

  Most people say that the bride was rather gloomy . . . As the saying goes, things learned young last longest.

  “The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue,” ca. 1500 A.D.

  In the Mary Church in Old Stavanger leans a great stone from ages ago, smoothed along one side and then carved in runes so tall that they stretch from edge to edge: Kjetil made it and erected it to the memory of his dear wife Jorunn. Who they both were is forgotten.

  When Birgitte and Olav were wed in that church, he promised to remember her as well as Kjetil did Jorunn, at which Birgitte said: No
t good enough. I’ll expect you to follow me.

  Yes, wife, I’ll follow you . . .—at which his drunken cousin clapped him on the back.

  She was a girl with a star at her throat and her scarf’s narrow ends hanging straight down below her breast. Then she was a goldenhaired young mother clenching her hands against the cold, and every morning she rocked the cradle, singing the song of the spider and the brooch, but their baby died.

  She was never well; she was always as whiteskinned as a young wooden house. When her doom grew certain, she leaned against him, and slowly they walked up the hill, looking down over the steep roofs of the wooden houses at the narrow, streaming brilliance of the Vågen. The Østhavn was empty but for one or two great ships; the picket fence was going grey with dusk; the maple leaves were already black.

  Again he swore to ride the day-ship and the night-ship, with the sail his wife should weave for him; and so she passed the rest of her life, vomiting and fainting, rolling her sailcloth upward on the warp-weighted loom as she formed the stuff. Just as a woman in her moon-bloody shift runs round the barley field before her husband sows it, so that the earth will bear, thus Birgitte uttered all her paling magic into the cloth she made, until her lips turned black. After she could no longer speak, she still stretched her arm toward him whenever he came to sit with her. Her hand closed tremblingly around his fingers. She learned how to make the good death once the leaves were new.

  Because her life and death were in part secret to others, Olav’s nightmares grew brighter than the sea. Beside their child he buried her in her finest cloak, pinned with a golden trefoil brooch. Her stone read: Olav made this in remembrance of his dear wife Birgitte. As far as others were concerned, she had now been cast away, forgotten beneath the grass, avoided like dead wet leaves on the path—his mother spoke of fresher women, and the slanders of others resembled fallen poison-berries crimson on rock stairs—but Olav took mind of his promise, although he felt uneasy enough, to be sure, because where Birgitte had gone was as dark as a forest at a glade’s end.

  Just as in a green hollow, a school of obedient dark stone heads stands aligned—a cemetery—so his nights now ranked themselves until a certain old witch in a double-brooched scarlet dress finished weaving the sail, spitting onto it to give it more woman-power.

  Now the time had arrived for Olav to set out upon his journey, but first he wished to visit the husk of her whom he sought. Because he had paid the witch what she asked and more, she grew friendly, and even accompanied him that day, carrying the shovel. The church was cold. A man and boy bent over the votive candle which they had just impaled upon one of the equatorial spikes of the skeletal iron globe whose North Pole was a black cross, and when they had departed, Olav entered the churchyard, while the witch stood watch, reading the sun. An hour and more it must have been. Grimacing, she said: Do it now. I’ve locked the gate.

  So he opened Birgitte’s grave, kissing her rotten face most lovingly, whispering in the hole where her ear once was that he would come to her now, and when he touched the heart-mud between her ribs, her lead cross went white with reflected gold-light, its triple rows of runes shining copper-red in their grooves.— Now she knows, said the witch. I wish I’d had a husband like you.

  On the following day, Olav left home, with the witch-cloth rolled under his arm. The witch called up a breeze for him, then went her way. He said: Birgitte, prepare to welcome me.— Rainy wind on the slippery mossy rock, beech trees bursting from the dark rock, these sang to him when he put his feet in the two ovoid footprints, because in this very stone, dead people had made clean long ship-carvings: three vessels, one over the other, with people or animals or other beings on them. But what they had meant by it no one could say. Olav carried a silver neck-ring for his wife. Glorious white flowers were all he sorrowed to leave behind. Here he unrolled his sail. The keel sprouted before his feet. The wind caught him up.

  Olav flew above the tongue of city into the Østre Havn, with small islands ahead: Plentingen on his left and Natvigs Minde on his right. Just like a duck paddling rapidly in cold black water, then diving, so his night-ship scored a wake in the day, then descended to the sea. His day-ship slit open the night; his night-ship found light; his day-ship carved darkness. Sometimes a sound as of wind came beneath the hull, but more often he heard slappings and sloshings; while after dark the ocean always sang like the choir back home in Stavanger. He grew as lonely as a dandelion flower high on its stalk. From Karmøy to Bukkøy he sailed, through shade and silver-wet grass, way-lit by the thunderglow of silver-blue lichen on black boulders, wife-lit, rune-lit, his ship’s swan-neck so dark-lit by water that it seemed to be its own thing, a snake; and as he travelled he began to wonder whether he crossed waves or was but a shadow upon blackberries and petroglyphs by the sunny sea, so many broken shells and mouse skulls did he pass over upon that cracked rock-shelf with its black and silver-white lichens and grasses growing up gold in the cracks, until after sailing through many rains he began to forget some of this Birgitte whom he sought, voyaging ever more lightly over green island-heads in the pale blue water. But he would not release his grip on her memory. He kept dreaming of her dead breasts because he sailed between rosehips as large as suns, while her dead womb became a red crabapple in autumn.

  Ahead came the desired land, and on the grass, the outspread arms of rock. Olav kissed Birgitte’s neck-ring. The ship became an eight-legged horse whose eyes were dandelions. He sailed into the rock’s embrace where white water leaped up out of the dark water it struck, the rock pale and nearly green in the light. He hovered over green moss and lichens, breasting the leaves which waved at the sheep-clouds on the grass-sky. Cloud-sheep grazed on the green horizon.

  He called out to Birgitte, but she did not yet answer. So he rode his horse across the trees, watched by blurred Dorset faces on a wand of antler.— Now I’ll roll up this horse and carry him under my arm, he said to himself.— He leaped across the dark lake, then across the river like a silver sword.

  Far away where the blue-grey sea was writhing under a double bank of purple cloud, the sky glowing whitish-yellow at sunset, he approached the steeply tapering wooden roofs of Valhalla. Up rose mead-worthy woman-ghosts: Ingrid, Mari, Signe, Johanna, Karen, Elisabeth, Anna, Margaretha, Inga, Juliane—but Birgitte happened to be the one on whom he’d set his heart. So again he mounted his horse whose eyes were dandelions and rode down to Hel, whose dark hills are wound-gashed with red leaves. The ogres were greyish-blue like cold clay, and the trolls were as black as berries in a wall of green thorns; the giants were boulder-hearted, and the night-elves were pond-eyed. Sometimes they were grandly terrible; then they became as leaf-shadows. Scattering them all, even the monster with an ovoid head and closed ovoid eyes, he lifted a stone, and up rose Birgitte.

  She wore a brooch made of crumbling green rust; perhaps he had once given it to her. Her hair had grown longer, and she was younger. She declined to open her arms. She was whiter than a birch tree, and her fingernails were paler than evergreen tips.

  He held out her neck-ring, and unsmilingly she slipped it over her head, saying: If you teach me to love you again, I’ll show you why dark water catches light.

  He drank water from the moss beneath her arms. Her voice kept the high sound and the low sound of a stream.

  She said: Your memory stone is choking me.

  What shall I do with it, Birgitte?

  Birgitte’s not my name.

  You told me to come here.

  Go home and roll your stone away.

  When Olav opened his eyes, the sun hurt them. The ground chilled his back. He was lying in his wife’s opened grave, with dribs of rotten sailcloth between his fingers and the memory stone on his chest, facing downwards. He managed to push it off, then clambered back into the sunlight. As soon as he stood upright he felt as if he had recovered from a drawn-out illness.

  Although he felt curious as to whether the
silver neck-ring remained in her coffin, burning her bones with precious frost, he remembered the words of Christ: Let the dead bury the dead.

  So he called workmen to haul the stone away. The gravediggers filled in the hole and laid new turf over it.

  Then he remarried—a sweet young girl named Jorunn, who had long been on his mind. She promised to outlive him, which she did. He left instructions to be cremated.

  THE NARROW PASSAGE

  . . . if foul witch dwell

  by the way you mean to fare,

  to pass by is better than to be her guest,

  even if night be near.

  “Sigrdrífumál,” ca. 1000 A.D.

  1

  In 1868 some Rogalanders remained in hopes that the herring would swim home to them, and a few even believed it, for it is always an insult when good things depart, and one readymade defense of the insulted is faith. That great wooden hand still pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, as if to remind us where those good things go; while the herringmen reached in the opposite direction, praying even yet for silver treasure in their nets. Out where the coast unrolled page after page of rock-stories, it seemed as if some secret fish-hoard might yet give itself, pallidly pure, like autumn light breaking weakly through the clouds; and since the herring occasionally pretended to return, the believers went on believing, awaiting their own continuance, watching the stillness of black water in the rain. Fortunately, universal afflictions manifest themselves in our neighbors before we need to confess the symptoms in our own faces. In other words, Karmsundet grew impoverished more rapidly than Stavanger, whose shipwrights and merchantmen made do thanks to lobster if not lumber; but even in Stavanger the unluckiest fishermen presently began to pack up for America. They were followed by carpenters whose iron-jacketed mallets had rusted, servant-girls expelled from their fine situations beneath the master’s stairs, stevedores whose great shoulders went unhired and whose despondent women had given up expecting to stand in mountains of herring, gutting and salting by the hour; ropemakers whose only use for their product would have been to hang themselves, bankrupt farmers and other apostates from the silvery faith.