The force of the emotion startled me. My relationship with Quince was one of the things that I was most grateful for, that I believed in. We were talking about marriage. I understood that he couldn’t make the trip, and once he’d been offered the work, I’d in fact encouraged him to stay home. But these thoughts, this memory of love, felt dull to me. Who was this person far away? What was my duty to him? We had nothing in common.
When Henning walked in, I shut the browser quickly and stood, embarrassed that he had caught me in a moment of emotion. But he passed by me as if I weren’t there at all.
That week, the folk school year ended. A poster hung outside the shop: a year-end revue, open to the public, at 6 P.M. on Friday. I went alone, walked with a herd of visiting parents into the familiar musty gymnasium, handed fifty kroner to a cool girl in pigtails in exchange for a paper ticket. The folk school had struggled over the past decade. It seemed that not as many young people wanted to learn arctic survival anymore. In a desperate bid to stay afloat, the principal had hired a celebrity adventurer and produced a reality show about his students, which showed in Norway and Russia; the prize for the best student was a trip to the South Pole. But the prize trip was illegal, and three people had drowned, and the school had been thrust into an unflattering spotlight that it did its best to back out of, even as the winning student fought prominently in a successful campaign to save folk schools when their national budget fell under attack. Now, after its brief fling with fame, 69˚North was returning to its roots. Forty students, a year in the wilderness, everything the same as before.
The students were eighteen and sixteen and nineteen and they were just like I had been, just like all the students I had gone to school with; they were tough and wild and skied down mountain faces and ate raw meat and lived in the snow. They sang songs about the Northland, and performed skits about their teachers and Malangen, including a roast of Arild in which a suspender-clad fellow approached audience members with offers of coffee and relentless questions about where they were from. I sat in the back of the room, invisible in a crowd of strangers, and thought about how I was no longer this, how the students were no longer me. They were leaving. Once I had been that tough. Now I had sheep to shear.
When the show ended, someone touched my arm. It was the enthusiastic German organist. Come to her house, she said—she was hosting a dinner party right now. I followed her up the hill. She lived in the tall black house with a grass roof, right beside the church, where the former principal had lived before moving south.
Her house was clean and spare and her guests were well dressed. I did not recognize most of them. They were Egil’s customers, or they shopped in the city. They wore stylish scarves and praised my accent and asked polite questions about jet lag. For dinner, the organist’s husband, also an organist, made a delicately spiced fish soup, and for dessert our hostess offered sugar-free gluten-free nut balls. Where was I staying? the guests asked, and when I answered they said, “Oh,” and smiled a little too late. Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants—wasn’t that where the farmers sat all day, doing nothing?
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you’re mixing something up.” As soon as it was late enough, I excused myself. I passed the graveyard and pulled my arms tight against my chest. The snow-covered graves looked like sheep. The graveyard was cut with well-worn paths and scattered footprints.
The next few days were busy. The first lambs had been born, and the trick was to shear the rest of the mothers before they birthed. Every few hours Arild and I walked the pasture in search of new lambs, who were usually hidden in the farthest corners, trembling in piles of yellow slime. Then we’d carry them to the barn and encourage their mothers to follow. Even when they could see their lambs in our arms, the mothers would turn and run back to the places where they’d given birth, circling and re-circling the empty ground while their newborns wailed. When we could, we chased the sheep who were about to give birth into the barn, too. There, the lambs were safe. They chirped and grunted and cried like babies. Arild installed a security camera that broadcast sound and video into the back room of the shop, so he could keep tabs on the nursery.
If we didn’t find the lambs fast enough, then the crows got them. The first time they beat us, they left a lamb with red holes for eyes stumbling in the mud, bawling for milk. There were live lambs everywhere, yellow and bloody, and this one seemed no more grotesque than any other. Arild killed it fast with the back of an ax while I waved my arms to distract its mother.
We’d lost three ewes that week, birthing. The last we got to in time to call a vet, and I held her neck while the man shoved loose, dangling organs back inside her. She didn’t moan, just huffed her breath, her eyes wide and white and her head sinking ever lower. He threaded a shoelace under her tail, tied it in a bow, and said to untie it in a few days. She was bleeding like a faucet. It’ll stop, he said, but it didn’t, and the next morning the barn was full of crows that filled the air when I walked in, and smacked all at once against the windows, and the sheep was dead and her eyes gone, too. Arild and I dragged her body out on a feed sack, heaving in unison. We had to heave twice over the door frame. “Some people have cows,” Arild said, panting, and we both laughed.
Two days later, another lamb, worse: its flesh and bone pecked out through a neat hole in its belly, its fleece still so clean and white. It was a bag of lamb, perfect but for its hollowness, and when Arild lifted it up I felt sick, the crows all around, watching. Even that morning, Arild had fed them bread behind the barn. It was his compulsion: he had to feed everything. Now he dropped the empty lamb into another empty sack. Henning leaned out the window with his father’s rifle and shot twice, and nobody jumped but me.
One morning four enormous strangers walked into the shop, burly men in leather jackets with tattoos crawling out their sleeves and up their necks. They split up and walked the aisles, back and forth with their hands in their pockets, and didn’t seem to notice that everyone at the coffee table had fallen silent. Finally the men, after consulting in Russian, converged at the checkout counter. The tallest stepped forward, his arms crossed over his chest. Arild greeted him with a nod.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the Russian, in thick English. He frowned and turned back to his friends, who encouraged him. “I look for a casserole, and small wood.”
Arild handed a Post-it pad and pen across the counter. The man drew a bunch of dots on the paper. “For to smoke fish.”
“Sagflis,” said Arild.
“Sawdust,” I offered, from my seat cross-legged on the floor, where I was attempting to make shelf space for the thirteen varieties of menstrual pads that Henning had recently acquired.
The Russian nodded.
“We do not have it,” said Arild, “but I know who have it.” He picked up the phone and called Rune’s number. When nobody answered, he drew on paper a map to Rune’s house. “Listen,” he said, amusement flashing in his eyes. “This man shall not open his door. He is probably asleep.” He mimed taking a drink, and the Russians nodded. “So you must just walk into his house. Do not knock.”
Everyone at the coffee table was paying attention.
“Do not knock?” the Russian confirmed.
“No,” said Arild. “You four must walk in, he is sleeping, you wake him up. Then you say that Arild sent you for sawdust. Good luck with your fish.”
The Russians thanked him politely. Arild gave them a casserole pan from his own kitchen and waited until they left before he started to laugh. He laughed for a long time.
In gratitude for the casserole, the Russians returned with a bottle of expensive vodka. Arild thanked them humbly. After they left, he called a customer who worked at a farmer’s co-op and arranged to trade the vodka for a large quantity of frozen tenderloin. He sorted the meat, wrapped the choicest steak in several plastic bags, and drove two hours south to Finnsnes, where, in the parking lot of a soccer stadium, he handed the bag-wrapped package to a man in a gray van. The man handed h
im a key. The key unlocked the back door of a dead grocery store, where Arild collected a number of shopping carts. The carts were so large that they would hardly fit down the narrow aisles of Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants, but this Arild viewed as a virtue: it was a fact, he said, that giving customers big carts made them buy more.
On impulse, he also retrieved from the grocery store an assortment of vinyl-strip curtains, which he intended to hang over the refrigerated display of salami, fish, and vegetables along the back wall. He was pleased with the find; such curtains were expensive, and they would save both money and electricity. But when he showed the curtains to his son, Henning was disgusted. The curtains were old. The vinyl, once clear, had yellowed. Henning hauled them down to the basement and dumped them by the cleaning supplies. How could his father be so careless with appearances?
Later, when Arild was reading his newspaper, Henning sat down at the table but didn’t lean back. His mouth was pressed in a line. He stared at his father until Arild looked up.
“Listen,” Henning told his father. “I have to talk to you. You cannot go commenting on what people buy. You can’t make people feel judged for their purchases. You can’t say, ‘Oh, you’re getting those cancer sticks again.’ You can’t say, ‘Odd Jonny likes such-and-such beer,’ ‘Ingvarda likes such-and-such toilet paper.’ That’s not how it’s done. People need to feel like they can come in here and leave without getting talked about.”
Arild blinked. He glanced down at his newspaper and then pushed it slightly away. He’d been reading about dead miners in Turkey. Earlier he’d read his horoscope, which suggested that today he was likely to make mistakes. He’d shown it to me, since we were both Tauruses. Double trouble, he said.
“Here’s the thing,” Henning said. “You sit at this table and you talk about your customers and nobody feels like they have any privacy. Everything you say here, everyone knows it by the end of the day. They know everything anyone says here! It all gets around. Anne Lill complained so much when those children were taken that child protective services had to come talk to her.”
“She was writing things on Facebook,” said Arild. “That’s public.”
“This is public!” Henning shouted, grabbing the edge of the table. “When you sit here, you’re a public figure. You have to understand that nothing that’s said at this table is private. Egil doesn’t gossip about his customers. If you go to the city, no one is gossiping about their customers. No one is teasing them. The things you say are entirely inappropriate. The other day you said to a child, ‘It’s wonderful when you arrive, and wonderful when you leave, too.’ To a child! If Blair worked at Eide Handel, would she say that to a customer?”
Arild didn’t answer.
“Answer the question,” said Henning. “If Blair were working at Eide Handel, and a customer came in with their child, would Blair say to the child, ‘It’s wonderful when you arrive, and wonderful when you leave, too?’”
“I guess not,” said Arild.
Henning let out breath. “People are talking. There were customers here ten years ago who aren’t here now, and I need to know why. This is about me. This is supposed to be my salary now. I need to know why people won’t shop here. I need as many customers as possible.”
A tractor pulled up by the front door and cut its engine.
“After the divorce from your mother—” Arild began, then trailed off. “People took sides.”
“You made it easy for them,” Henning said, “by being so unprofessional. Honestly. Sitting here commenting on purchases? Keeping track of how often they buy beer? Asking—”
Behind him, the farmer Eilif Idar walked into the shop, grinned, then stopped smiling. He turned and started examining the candy rack. Arild raised his eyebrows pointedly. Henning glanced over, but kept talking.
“—asking personal questions, and then telling other people the answers? It’s no wonder you’re losing customers—”
“Good day, Eilif Idar,” said Arild.
“And the worst thing,” said Henning, “is that you just keep doing it. As if you simply don’t care—”
Arild stood up. He nodded at Eilif Idar. “There’s coffee,” he said, “but I have to go check the lambs.” Eilif Idar had sheep himself; he would understand.
A sharp wind from the north blew snowflakes into flurries outside, and Arild walked quickly, pulling his knit hat over his ears. His knee was acting up, and he limped slightly as he strode past the gas pumps. The air stilled as soon as he entered the barn, with its warm scent of hay and wool. To his right, the youngest lambs rested against their mothers’ bellies, their bodies sprawling, nearly liquid. To his left, forty or so sheep stood and chewed cud. A few turned their heads and observed him. They were mothers-to-be.
Arild lifted the cord for the security camera and pulled out the plug. A faint buzzing stopped abruptly.
“Watch out,” he told the sheep. “Here comes Arild, scary Arild, who runs his mouth too much.”
He walked over to the lamb stalls and peered along the row, making sure everyone was alive. There had been some hard births; he’d overfed over the winter, and the lambs came out big. But they were hardy, too. Arild reached down and lifted a limp lamb by the back of the skull, a move he’d learned recently when another farmer did it on TV. The lamb bristled awake and he dropped it back down, satisfied.
One lamb in particular was special. Half of his face was black, and the other half was white. Arild had named him Black and White and tagged his ear with a round number, 40020. Sometimes he got fancy lambs like that—black faces, black spots—because he’d used a half-black stud ram from a farmer up in Skibotn. It made their wool worth less, but he could always recognize his own sheep when he passed the summer flocks grazing in the mountain village.
“I think he’s overreacting,” Arild told Black and White. “Half the people who don’t shop here, I could move to Africa and they still wouldn’t come. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.”
Black and White closed his eyes and breathed quietly.
“It’s hard to change when you’re old,” Arild said, “but I can try.”
The snow melted into patches and away, leaving fields caked in damp grass. The river and creeks flushed plates of ice into the fjord, where they lingered into nothing. Around the country, farmers protested the new right-wing government’s proposed subsidies for small-scale farms, which they deemed inadequate. Farmers drove tractors down the streets of Oslo and dumped loads of manure in front of the capital. They threatened to blockade the nation’s egg supply, just in time for Constitution Day, May 17. For a week, front-page news around the country lamented the farmers’ wrath: Did they have no compassion? How could they deny their countrymen cakes? Arild’s loyalty to shopkeeping was greater than his loyalty to farming; he followed a rumor about a nearby distributor’s abundant eggs, and purchased dozens of cartons so that his customers wouldn’t have to go without. But right before Constitution Day, the farmers called off the blockade, and Arild had to sell the cartons cheap to make room in the cooler.
On the morning of the seventeenth, villagers gathered in the Malangen church for a service. Arild refused to go, so I went alone and sat next to Jeanette’s father, a ruddy and cheerful ex-sailor who bred Swedish mountain cows in the mountain village. He had recently flown to Oslo for a day to join the protests, and was responsible for a number of protest signs around the peninsula and Tromsø, which he decorated with empty milk cartons. If he really wanted to make a point about the end of farming, I suggested, he should decorate the signs with dead lambs; I knew a reliable source. As he considered how to best decline my offer, the organ blared to life, its vibrations setting a model ship hung over the aisle swinging from side to side.
After the service there was a brief ceremony, during which the enthusiastic German organist’s solemn daughter lit candles in the cemetery for Malangenites lost at sea and war, and then local schoolchildren gathered to parade to the Sand School. They wore
bright bunads and waved flags and somebody played a trumpet; the procession, congregated, stretched halfway around the graveyard. But the whole thing saddened me, particularly when I thought of Arild sitting at home, avoiding the community that streamed from the church his grandfather had built. So I slipped back down the hill and didn’t join the parade. Back in the Old House, Arild had baked a chocolate cake with some of the extra eggs. He seemed happy about the cake, but I was worried about him. Between Henning’s scolding and Anne Lill’s impending departure, he’d seemed down lately, spending more time than usual in front of the television. His limp, which appeared on and off, had been constant for weeks. Even at the shop he was unusually quiet, and sometimes leaned on a shopping cart to get around. It was only with the sheep that he seemed content. So when, after a lunch of cake, he suggested driving to the school to catch the end of the festivities, I was all for it.
The parade had reached the school, and we drove slowly, inching along as children sprinted across the road with ice cream smeared on their faces. An older woman had dressed her poodle in a vest. Someone was handing out hot dogs, someone else playing an accordion. And then we had passed them, and there was nothing more; the potholed road curved uphill toward the mountain village, past two red houses, which belonged to Rune and to Arild’s ex-wife. Arild watched the crowd in the rearview mirror. Then, with a sniff, he pulled into Rune’s driveway. He had brought no gift, no excuse for the visit, but it was no matter. Sometimes he liked to spy on Rune, to tease him. Despite Henning’s discouragement, he was not getting out of people’s business quite yet.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 23
