by John Gardner
He began to nod thoughtfully, his lower lip over his upper, his eyebrows low. At last he brought out, his voice oddly thin, at least in his own ears, like the bleating of a sheep, “There are evils in the world that a man can’t take the blame for, evils that nobody can do anything about—my going away, I mean. Not being here to see the children grow up.”
The softness of her voice startled and unnerved him. “I know.”
He thought of touching her hand, then thought better of it. “Surely it’s the truth—at least I think it’s the truth—that when a man in my position … having people who depend on him, the country not safe unless he goes out and does what he can to make it safe …” He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling hollowed out and helpless, like a child who’s been caught in a lie, though Lars-Goren was not lying. “If I could stay here all the time, the way a husband should,” he said, “if I could watch over the peasants, see to their welfare, settle their disputes—” His fingertips were trembling.
“Hush, Lars-Goren,” she said, “eat your supper.” She was looking at him now, her eyes a faded blue, beautiful, like ice come alive. As if shed come to some decision, she reached out and touched his left hand. “I know how it is,” she said. “You do what you have to do. I’m glad you’re home.”
Lars-Goren closed his hand tightly around his wife’s hand, small and strong, and his head swam with thoughts he had no words for. She rose, with her hand still in his, and as if at a signal, he too rose. “That’s all you want to eat?” she asked, eyes widening in surprise, as if she didn’t know—and perhaps indeed she didn’t—that it was she who had given him the signal to rise and come with her.
“No,” he said, “it’s good, but I’ve had enough.”
She led him to the beds of the children, one by one, and at each bed he stood for a long moment gazing at the face he knew as well as he knew his own heart yet at the same time seemed not to remember. It had been more than a year, and the changes in his children were so mysterious and painful—or the fact that he hadn’t been there to watch them change was so painful—that he felt again, more strongly than before, that helpless hollowness of a child in despair. Holding his wife’s hand, bending forward to see, he wore an expression of fear and foolish eagerness, a face prepared against the chance that the child should awaken and discover him standing there.
As he stood beside the bed of his elder son, Erik, what he feared came to pass. The boy frowned in his sleep—he had a long, angular face with wide, sharp lips like Lars-Goren’s—his mouth moved, almost spoke, and then all at once his eyes were wide open, staring straight into his father’s. His head raised a little from the pillow. “Pappa?” he asked. He was twelve, a large, broad-shouldered boy, his shoulders blue-white in the light from the candle in Liv’s hand.
“Erik!” Lars-Goren whispered, bending closer, smiling.
He couldn’t tell whether the expression on his son’s face was joy or panic, or so he would have said. In the dark part of his mind from which dreams come, he knew the whole truth: what he was seeing was terrible love and pain, the exact hollowness he was feeling himself, the woe of the child who has no hope of being loved, who feels deservedly betrayed and abandoned. Lars-Goren bent, thinking of seizing his son in his arms, but the boy had changed greatly, there was fuzz on his upper lip, and at the last instant Lars-Goren’s heart shied, and instead of seizing him he merely reached out clumsily and touched his shoulder. Now, in spite of the remains of his smile, the look on the boy’s face seemed almost entirely panic.
Quickly, his mother said, “Go to sleep, dear. Your father will be here in the morning. You can talk to him then.”
Erik’s eyes flew to his mother; then he let his head fall back on the pillow.
“Good-night, son,” Lars-Goren said. Already he was beginning to back away.
“Good-night, Pappa,” said the boy.
The rooms now seemed larger, more foreign than before. As they moved down the hall toward their bedroom, candlelight flickering on the walls, his wife said, “They talk of you all the time, Lars-Goren.” She gave his hand a squeeze.
Like a man standing back from himself, he watched how his heart gave a leap at those words. He shook his head, grieving and rejoicing, and opened the bedroom door. When they’d entered and he’d closed the door behind them, she turned to face him, smiling. He took the candle from her, seizing it awkwardly, so that he burned the palp of his thumb on hot wax and very nearly let the candle fall, then composed himself and set the candle in the holder on the table beside the bed. She waited. He returned to her and took both her hands, studying the smile. After a moment, for the first time since he’d arrived, they kissed. The feeling of strangeness and guilt fell away; he understood by sure signs that, odd as it might seem, he was the joy of her life, as she was of his. He held her in his arms bending down so awkwardly that he was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of things—this huge man, this small woman—and he pressed his cheek to hers, then bent down more and kissed her shoulder.
When his wife lay asleep in his arms, he stared at the ceiling, not thinking but floating in the sensation of being home. It seemed a long, long way from where the Devil schemed and plotted. Indeed, it was hard to believe in the Devil’s existence, here in his own long bed, with his wife. Yet the Devil was real enough, he knew, somewhere far away—or maybe not so far away. He thought of the toothless old woman who had smiled and waved, then fled, and the shadow of movement that might or might not have been a deer. As he drifted toward sleep, he thought briefly of the distance he’d felt between himself and his children, even between himself and Liv; thought of how he’d failed to take his son in his arms, and how he’d hoped no one would see him as he passed through the villages in his keeping. Not that one could call that the Devil’s work, exactly. He struggled to rise back out of sleep and think, fight off the fear surging up in him, but someone was muttering, an old Lapp with brown eyes, beating with his fingertips on a drumhead on which lay three stones.
3.
IN THE MORNING, LARS-GOREN looked through the records of his glum old groundskeeper, veteran of many wars—an exasperating man when he got off on his exploits—and reviewed the accounts of the village managers. By ten he’d talked with all his lesser officials. When he’d approved or disapproved the peasant requests that had been set down in writing to await his return, dealt with small complaints and one slightly larger one, the request of some villagers that a certain old woman be burned for witchcraft, a charge they supported with positive proof, Lars-Goren announced his intention of riding out for a first-hand look at his villages and lands. He invited his twelve-year-old, Erik, and his ten-year-old, Gunnar, to ride with him. His wife and the cook prepared a lunch for them, on the chance that they should find nothing to their liking in the peasant kitchens or the village inns; and the groom brought around three horses and gave Gunnar a leg up. “I’m all right,” the boy protested, but only for show, accepting the help. Gunnar was red-headed and freckled, still chunky and dimpled like an infant, and though his grin boasted confidence, he was secretly afraid of horses, as all of them knew. Erik sat very tall, comfortable in the saddle, and watched his younger brother’s struggles with friendly detachment and the patience of an adult. Lars-Goren, covertly watching his elder son, felt a shower of pride and felt, at the same time, even more remote than he’d felt last night in Erik’s bedroom. Somehow without Lars-Goren’s help, or so Lars-Goren imagined, the boy had become all any father could have wished. It crossed his mind that Erik would soon be old enough for war. Hastily, to distract himself, Lars-Goren glanced behind him, making sure that Lady, his spaniel, was not too close to the horses’ hooves.
Seeing him turn to look at her, Lady yapped officiously, then growled low in her throat and feinted at the fetlock of the horse’s left hind leg and yapped again, showing her master in her own way that she had everything in hand—have no fear, she was paying close attention! Lars-Goren laughed at the dog and at himself, then glanced at Erik and saw that
he was smiling. “How I love that boy!” he thought; then, glancing at Gunnar, seeing how he was still smiling with pretended confidence, a dimple cut deep into his right cheek, but his pupils cocked downward, exactly like those of a colt in alarm, Lars-Goren corrected himself, “How I love all of this! Erik, Gunnar, my wife, my girls, the peasants who look to me for defense, this glorious land—!”
Now everything was ready. His wife and two daughters waved to him from the arch. Lady stood poised, looking up at him, meaning to take her first step the same instant his horse did. He made one last check glancing at the cinch-straps, his younger son’s two-handed grip of the reins—he held them high over the withers and sat unnaturally erect, like a circus performer. Then, since all was well, Lars-Goren leaned slightly forward and, as if part of one motion, quick and sure—quicker than Gunnar had expected, judging from his face—the horses and dog began to move. At a half trot Lars-Goren’s horse Drake, one ear cocked back in case Lars-Goren should whisper, led them down the hill and, at the faintest suggestion of a signal from Lars-Goren, angled through a break in the hedge, took an easy little ditch (Lars-Goren glanced back at Gunnar, whose eyes briefly widened in alarm but all was well), and headed crosslots through the fields in the direction of the nearest of the villages.
The sun was high, the day warm. In the second field they came to, peasants were cutting and shocking rye, working, as always, in their dark, heavy clothes, dark round hats or kerchieves, working quickly, as they never did at any other season, since the weather would allow them only three or four weeks to get the grain in the bins, the hay harvested, and the land reploughed. Lars-Goren rode straight to where a group of them were loading up a wagon. They stopped their work as he approached and straightened up to greet him; a few raised their arms in a two-handed wave. It was as if he hadn’t seen them in years, he thought. After months of war and weeks of Stockholm, they were like apparitions from another century, black-garbed and wrinkled, even some of the youngest of them toothless, their smiles open and innocent. Even their language was at first strange to him, though he’d heard it all his life. But almost at once, almost as soon as he’d registered it, the strangeness fell away and he was one of them.
An old man with a gray moustache and beard put his hand on the side of Drake’s neck. Lady, wagging her tail, stood close to the peasant and looked up at Lars-Goren making sure it was all right.
“Good to have you back, sir,” the peasant said.
“Good to see you well,” Lars-Goren answered.
The old man smiled and looked over at Erik, then Gunnar. “Big boys,” he said, and shook his head as if the fact saddened him.
“They’ve grown, all right,” said Lars-Goren. “And how are yours?”
The peasant’s smile came back, wide and toothless. “Six grandchildren now,” he said, “all strong as oxen, two more on the way. So far, all boys!”
“God keep them!” said Lars-Goren, with more feeling than he understood.
Tears came suddenly into the peasant’s eyes. “And the same to you and yours!” he said. He gave a pat to the horse’s neck as if to end the conversation.
Lars-Goren glanced at Gunnar. The boy was watching with great curiosity as an old woman with hands so stiff they would hardly bend stood dabbing at the corner of her mouth with the end of her black kerchief. What Gunnar was thinking Lars-Goren couldn’t tell, but he saw that the old woman’s legs were shaky; she was too old and weak to be working in the fields. Lars-Goren threw a questioning look at the peasant he’d been talking with.
“It was a hard winter,” the old man said with an evasive smile. “The Devil is always busy.” Again he gave a pat to the horse’s neck, and this time, to make sure the conversation was ended, he turned away.
“Well,” said Lars-Goren, looking from the old man to the rest of them, “God be with us all!” Without another word, he swung his horse around and started at a trot down the field in the direction of the trees and the village beyond.
When they reached the road into the village, his son Gunnar came up beside him. “Pappa, what happened to the old woman?” he called out. His chubby, freckled face hovered between expressions, as if at a signal from his father he was ready either to laugh or show concern.
“Trouble of some kind,” Lars-Goren said. “They keep these things to themselves, if they can. Maybe she had a stroke, maybe her son turned murderer. If it’s bad enough, sooner or later we’ll hear.”
“But aren’t we supposed to take care of them?” Gunnar asked. When Lars-Goren said nothing, the boy demanded, “Aren’t we supposed to be like God to them?”
Lars-Goren glanced up. Though the sky was clouded over, the light was intense.
It was Erik who spoke, riding a little behind Gunnar to his left. “Even God they’d never ask for help,” he said.
Lars-Goren glanced back at him. Erik was staring straight ahead, like a knight, or rather like some image of a knight that Lars-Goren had somewhere seen but couldn’t call to mind.
“It’s true,” Lars-Goren said, half to himself. “They’re stubborn. They serve us, they treat us with a certain respect; if war comes, or plague, they’re willing to depend on us. Otherwise, our hands are tied.”
“You mean even God’s hands are tied?” asked Gunnar. As if without knowing he was doing it, he lowered his left hand to the pommel of the saddle, making himself more secure.
Lars-Goren smiled and gave no answer. They were entering the village now, Lady trotting out ahead of them, guarding her party against ox-carts, stone fences, and cats.
4.
WHILE THEY WERE EATING their lunch in the church garden, they talked with the village priest, whose name was Karl, an officious little man with large gray eyes and a face like a woman’s, a flatterer and a liar from the day he was born—for which he despised himself, but no matter how he tried he could never improve. He sat on a headstone across from them, his plump hands folded on his knees.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “all’s well! No problems!”
Whatever the situation in the village, that was always his claim.
“We had some trouble with wild dogs; in fact a child was killed, the walleyed boy that used to tend the horses.”
“Yes. I remember.”
“It was a pity. Terrible. But the situation’s well in hand now.”
He cocked his head with the meek expression of one of those saints in old paintings. “It’s good to see you back,” he said. “You know how people talk. ‘That’s the last we’ll see of Lars-Goren,’ they say. ‘Now that he’s a friend of King Gustav, we’ll drop from his mind like last year’s toothache!’” Father Karl rolled his eyes up and smiled like a baby. “They say, ‘Lars-Goren’s become a Lutheran now.’ ‘Oh?’ I say. You can imagine how it makes me laugh—Lars-Goren a Lutheran! They say, ‘He’s become a great lover, down there in Stockholm.’ ‘A lover, you say!’ I tell them, and laugh to myself. ‘That’s not the Lars-Goren I know,’ I say to myself. I could tell them a thing or two about Lars-Goren, God be praised; but what’s the difference, it does no harm, all this chatter of empty-headed fools!” He opened his hands as if granting all gossips his mercy.
Lars-Goren’s son Erik sat staring at an arrow-shaped headstone with interlocked snakes, his face slightly pale with anger. Gunnar from time to time glanced at his brother as if trying to decide what expression he himself ought to wear.
“Ah well,” said Father Karl, “there’s always unrest, even here in Hälsingland. There’s always gossip and lying and idle speculation, especially when the lord is away, you know, and people have time on their hands. I let it go, for the most part. When the moment seems right, I put a word in.” He smiled, his eyelids lowered and glanced at Lars-Goren, too good a friend to ask for thanks.
Lars-Goren knew well enough that it was all lies and flattery, Father Karl’s childish way of showing loyalty and affection by making others seem less devoted, but he said, just to be on the safe side, “What kind of unrest do you mean, Father?”
“Ah, the usual, you know—” He threw his hands up and gave a laugh. “New governments are always a problem, of course. Where will they get the money to keep things going, you know? Where will they get leaders, with all the old ones killed off in the war or the bloodbath of Stockholm or fled away to Germany? The Lutherans are everywhere, needless to say. And who knows, some of them may even be close to the king. Will they argue that the holdings of the Church should be seized? Will they raise the peasants’ taxes, or take them from the fields for the army? Such are the questions people ask in their drunken foolishness.” He blushed slightly and threw a glance at young Erik then leaned toward Lars-Goren, confidential. “You see, it’s hard to worry about someone you never met. King Gustav’s a mystery. The villagers and peasants have never laid eyes on him. But Lars-Goren, now, there’s a face and figure they can call up in their minds, a man they can brood on and speculate on: ‘What will he do? What will he think? How might he betray us?’ That’s why they gossip, you see. Testing each other out, each man trying his fears on the others, watching for an answering spark of doubt.” He shrugged sadly and looked at his knees.
Suddenly Gunnar said, “I don’t believe you!” His eyes were large and fierce, his freckled face red.
Lars-Goren shot him a look, and Gunnar closed his lips together.
“Of course you don’t, my son! And I don’t blame you in the least!” The priest smiled with childish eagerness. “Who can believe these people we’ve known all our lives to be evil? And indeed they’re not! Just childlike that’s all! There’s no evil in their hearts! No, no, nothing like that! They babble without thinking, these poor ignorant peasants, no more evil than the flowers in this garden!” He shook his head sadly, holding out his hands, then folding them in his lap again. “That’s the Devil’s way, you know. Make use of whatever lies at hand. It’s not the people who are wicked, they’re just little children, like all of us.” He shook his head again and put his fingertips together as if praying. “God have mercy on us all!”
