The End of Drum-Time E-Book

Hanna Pylväinen

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 662

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the National Book Award A story of forbidden love and fugitive faith in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle 'Transports readers deep into an unfamiliar world, yet with familiar conflicts and desires. I was absorbed and changed. Absolutely beautiful' Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse's daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders―of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides―as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea. Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY HANNA PYLVÄINEN

We Sinners

THE END OF DRUM-TIME

SWIFT PRESS

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2024

Originally published in the United States of America by Henry Holt and Co., 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Hanna Pylväinen

The right of Hanna Pylväinen to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Offset by Tetragon, London

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-436-2

eISBN: 978-1-80075-437-9

To Anne-Maret Labba

The Laestadius Family

Lars Levi & Brita

Nora

Willa

Carl

Levi (deceased)

Lorens

Four daughters, unnamed

One son, unnamed

The Tomma Siida

Nilsa & Anna

Risten (Kristina)

Elle (deceased)

Nilsa’s brother and wife

Their children

The Rasti Siida

Biettar & Biret (deceased)

Ivvár

Two of Biettar’s brothers, unnamed

Ánde & Niko, Biettar’s nephews

The Lindström Family

Henrik

Frans, Henrik’s uncle

Let the reindeer decide.Sámi proverb

THE END OF DRUM-TIME

PART ONE

1

The day of the earthquake was the darkest day of the year. This far north what counted as day was just twilight stretched thin, so that no shadows fell, and the steeple of the church made no impression on the snow, and the river and forest and hills were all suspended in the same half-finished light. The effect of this was a shared, if unexpressed, uneasiness, but most people were used to it—if given the choice they would have said, let there be darkness, and gone back to their work. That was the sentiment anyway around people who had grown up here, Lars Levi among them—he found the cold and the dark invigorating, he was a man of extremes and so he was drawn to extremes, they suited him, they spurred him on.

But even he had to admit the morning was off-kilter somehow. He had dreamed the night before of something of importance, what, he couldn’t say, and it troubled him, that he might have missed its message. He was a man who put credence in these things, in the importance of what was felt, in part because his mother had been that way and in part because the land made everyone here that way—no one could live beneath the northern lights and the midnight sun and not come out of it sure there was something besides rationality at work, least of all Lars Levi, the pastor of this most northern parish for the past twenty-two years, a man of some hubris but not a man who could be accused of insincerity. He was here to preach, he believed in what he spoke, but today he was especially sure of his purpose, and the weight of that purpose made him anxious. He paced up and down the side aisle, inventing little tasks to check on—had Henrik rung the bell? Had Willa made the fire in the stove?

The church was filling up, it really was, the Finns in their usual places toward the front, while behind them were the Laplanders, the Lapps, the Sámi, whatever you called them—he used Lapp when he spoke to the Swedes, and Sámi when he spoke to the Sámi—and it occurred to Lars Levi that he was doing it, he had eight hundred and twenty-nine parishioners stretched over a hundred miles and a good quarter of them were here. The Finns had skied for hours along the frozen river, and the Lapps had harnessed their reindeer to the sledges and they had driven twenty, forty miles through the snow to get here, to a tiny church-village in Sweden where ten of the forty inhabitants were his own family, to hear him speak, him, Lars Levi Laestadius—but had Henrik rung the bell?

Henrik had rung the bell, and then he had promptly gone back to his store, which was also his home, which people called the dark house because you could get alcohol there, technically illegally, but in the first place the law was impossible to enforce because too many people broke it, and in the second place Henrik was not one to stand on principle, he was one to stand on getting himself out of debt, and moreover, he was of the opinion that the darkness was going to drive them all mad so they might as well go down drinking. He wasn’t from here, and he hadn’t grown up to be cold and call it happiness—my God, if he’d had the money he would have left the day he’d arrived! He would have left and he would not have come back. But since he couldn’t leave this very end of the earth he would, at the very least, leave all the talk about sinning to those who cared to sorrow endlessly over their sin. He, for one, was worn out by such talk, and all the lecturing about drinking, sometimes from the very same people who came to him later to buy something to drink. But more practically, there was a very good chance someone would sneak down during the service, wanting to buy a bottle of something or other, and he couldn’t lose the sale. And, anyway, how could Lars Levi even notice if he wasn’t there? Now that so many came?

No one did notice that Henrik hadn’t returned. The church was so full it was starting to get warm in there for once, and everyone had taken off their hats, and when they shook the snow off their coats bits of loose fur drifted to the floor, as if it were snowing indoors as well as out. The same sense of flurry came from sound, from one conversation atop another, alternately polite or hearty tones, hello, hello, it’s nice to see you again, hello, what a coat, hello, hello, before anyone moved into any real business. Probably people should have waited until after the sermon to talk about it but no one could help it, it got inserted in anyway, did you hear, people said, in tones that conveyed worry but really suggested horror, about the Heikkillä boy who’d been born with two thumbs on his right hand?

That was the news among the Finns, anyway. The Sámi didn’t tend to know much about the Finns, and had their own interests to exchange—they wanted to know how everyone else’s herds had done over the summer, though no one wanted to reveal how their own had done, and no one was really going to ask or answer this directly, but still, it could be inferred, by whether someone had a new coat on, or how they talked about the migration, how long it had taken them to come up from the sea, and even if someone wouldn’t say anything straight out about their own herd they might talk about someone else’s—how many white calves the Tommas hadn’t slaughtered, for instance, just leaving them in the herd to show off. The Tommas were easy to talk about, because everyone resented them slightly—they were reindeer-rich. They didn’t brag, per se, but they didn’t need to—every year it seemed the Tommas were hiring someone else to help with the herd, and that did its own talking. Plus it was even easier to talk about them today since they weren’t actually there—and, there was the very interesting news that Risten Tomma was engaged to the Piltto boy. Not really what anyone would have expected, but if you were already that wealthy, then maybe it didn’t really matter who you married. No one said that, of course, but they all understood they were saying it. He’ll need good luck with Nilsa Tomma for a father-in-law, people said, as if they pitied the Piltto boy instead of envied him.

What no one said was what they were all really doing there. Lars Levi was right, that the effort it took to get to church was so great most went only when required, on the four high holy days, to pay taxes and be confirmed and pick up supplies from Henrik’s store, but none of them dared admit to each other that they’d all come this time for the same reason: over the summer it had been said that Lars Levi’s sermons had become particularly wild, and that people who went to hear him were stricken with some sickness and threw themselves around, and so they were all there, mostly, out of the curiosity to see someone else go crazy. Though if they thought about it Lars Levi had already been getting a bit strange the year before . . . or had it started a few summers earlier, when his son had died?

In the aisles the dogs snapped at each other and the children wandered about, staring at strangers. In the front Lars Levi, newly nicknamed Mad Lasse, eyed them all, estimating when it would make sense to begin, since more people were certain to arrive late. It was how everything was here, there were no clean lines, there was no even break to any bit of wood, and the only way to manage was to accept that if services were generally begun in the morning around first light, ten in the morning or so, that really they might begin around ten-thirty or even eleven, and he had to cling to the success of holding the service at all.

Not that Lars Levi blamed any of them for this. He had some interest in his Finnish parishioners, who made up a quarter of his congregation, and he felt a responsibility toward them, especially their poverty, but it was the heart of the Sámi he was always after. He couldn’t have said why that was—was it, simply, how poorly they’d been treated for so long by other pastors? Was it his own Sámi blood and sympathies, his feeling that they were unfairly maligned? Was it—did he—simply like them better as people, admire and even envy their vitality, how hard they worked, never a day off ? Or maybe it was defensiveness, plain and simple, from his own days in the south at seminary school, where he was mocked for being so poor, for dressing so shabbily? It had got so that he was happy enough for anyone to call him a Lapp, though, usually, no one did. But wasn’t he just like them? Wasn’t he too full of feeling, didn’t he also understand what it was to know without knowing, to have his feeling know first? Of course just then he saw one of them, drunk in the back pew, asleep on his back, and he was annoyed, he took it too personally, though he supposed he should just be glad the man had come at all. No, he wouldn’t let it bother him, he decided, he would preach with such strength, such vigor, even the drunks would sit up and hang their heads with shame.

By now, without realizing it, he had made his way to the back of the church, where he’d opened the door, looking outside to see how many were still tying up their reindeer to the posts, but a new snow had begun to fall, getting in the way of his view, and he became too distracted to count. He shut the door.

Henrik had rung the bell, Willa told him.

She was kneeling by the stove in the back, putting in more wood. When she closed it he saw her hands, how red and tough they were, like a little man’s.

“Well, go and sit then,” he said. He snapped at her without knowing why. She wasn’t anything but dutiful but why did she insist on standing there, dawdling, with all the men looking at her? She never seemed to have any sense of what was going on when it came to men, and it worried him, she was so naive as to seem a little stupid, and he wondered, not for the first time, what he had done to his children by raising them here, so far from anything resembling a town, a school, even a road.

But in the moment it was better to not be seen reprimanding her, and anyway, it was time to begin. He walked to the front and stood there, aware of how the candelabras at the altar framed him on either side. He motioned to Simmon to begin singing, since Simmon always started services this way as he had an aggressively loud voice, but as there was no instrument to help them along the melody wandered everywhere, and by the time the front of the church finished a verse the back was still in the middle, but this, too, didn’t matter, he was determined for it to not matter. He looked instead at his wife, his sons and daughters, pressed against each other in the front pew, and the Finns behind them, rows of small somber faces in black wools and gray scarves, a dark foreground for the Sámi behind them in their fur coats, their red scarves, their red and blue woolen caps, their dogs at their feet, even two mothers nursing, the mounds of their breasts exposed.

“Let us gather together,” he managed, when the congregation was as close to quiet as they ever came, “let us beg to sup for one more day at our Father’s gracious table.” He bowed his head.

As he prayed, he did not look up; he heard nothing but himself. He was speaking today on Daniel in the lion’s den, and he had come up with a phrase he liked, though he was aware of his own vanity in liking it, and he was repeating this phrase—“and did Daniel, in understanding his own sin, seek to be devoured”—when he sensed rather than saw that everyone was turning to look back at a man who had just entered. Even his own family was turning around, even the black-kerchiefed head of his wife turned around. For a moment it was not clear to him, or to anyone, why they were all staring, since it appeared to just be another reindeer herder, a lone older man, and why should they all stare? Were they staring because someone else had stared, and then someone else had looked to see why they were staring, and so on and so forth, until now they were all making a fuss about something that was utterly ordinary?

The lone man was a reindeer herder, in a thick outer coat of fur and dark pants of reindeer leather, and fur boots turned up at the toes, and on top of this such a firm carapace of ice and snow that you could hardly see the shape of a man inside. Maybe that was why they all stared, or maybe it was the way he walked, down the center aisle, with slow and sure purpose. He drew closer, then stopped when he was standing beside the second pew. This close Lars Levi could make out that it was Biettar Rasti, a man of some significant standing, a man whose grandfather had once had the largest herd east of the Tornio River, but who had drunk his own herd down to nothing, had squandered every bit of the inheritance, but claimed so staunchly it was due to thieves and bad luck that no one dared disagree. Anyway, the Rasti family still retained enough of a kind of stature that no one liked to admit his downfall, either, and after all his wife had died, a long and tragic illness, and now their only son was a drunkard, too, and yet Biettar walked then and now as if he were still king of the Lapps, he stood there like it was Lars Levi who should come bow to him.

Lars Levi could not figure out what to do. Should he approach him, should he wait for Biettar to come all the way up to the altar?

They stared at each other, like two creatures crossing in a field, wary. Even in the candlelight Lars Levi could see Biettar’s eyes were unnervingly blue. He did not blink. It struck Lars Levi that the old rumor was true, that Biettar was some kind of shaman, had some kind of power of prophecy, but as if he’d heard this thought Biettar slowly lowered himself to the church floor. His back was straight, his arms loose at his sides. Lars Levi came closer slowly, like Biettar was a bird. He held out one hand and began to bend a little at the knees.

“What is it, my son?” he whispered, though Biettar was as old as he was, and though his whisper, in the sudden and total silence, surely carried. Biettar bowed his head. He smelled, very much, of his way of living—he smelled of years of smoke from the fire, and beneath that smell, like reindeer fat, and beneath the reindeer fat, he smelled unwashed. “Do you feel the awakening within you?” Lars Levi asked. “Have you come with remorse to the altar of Christ?”

But Biettar did not move. He didn’t speak. His eyes were down and he might have been anywhere, been thinking anything. He might have come here entirely by accident, in a drunken stupor, and only just now realized where he was after all, in which case he might very well just stand up and leave, but Lars Levi couldn’t allow that to happen. What a coup, if Biettar should be saved, here and now! Usually it was the women who were saved, the women who dragged their husbands or sons to church, desperate to cure them of their drinking, when half the time they were just bringing them closer to the dark house . . . he was in alliance with these poor women, they were fighting together not just for these men’s souls but for this very way of life, and it could not be kept up, this drinking, not when the men were supposed to be herding, not when a bottle of brännvin cost more than a pelt . . .

The silence was becoming unbearable—the church itself, its very windows, its pulpit, seemed animate with expectation, and Lars Levi felt it was not his hand but a public hand, a hand on loan, that reached to grasp the head of the not-shaman; his not-hand that felt the shaking of Biettar’s shoulders through the shaking of Biettar’s head.

Old Sussu, nearby in the front pew, began waving her hands in the air, and Lars Levi was overwhelmed with relief, because the ecstasies were here, the rejoicing was here, and they were all going to be swept into it, even Old Sussu, and what a morning this was, Biettar and Old Sussu, saved on the same day, and he had the same pleasure he had when he shot a bird and it fell perfectly from its roost to the snow—the day was going his way—when he realized dully, slowly, that Old Sussu was not shouting with rejoicing, and Biettar was not rocking back and forth from the sheer force of salvation, but was shaking from an earthquake—they all were—he was, too, he was going to fall, he was stumbling—he waved his arms for balance until his hand landed on the arm of a pew. His eyes met his wife’s, she stared at him while she clutched the baby in one arm and held the children back with the other. What a force she was, what a proper dam—her face hardened in resolve, and with her very eyes she urged him upright.

The shaking stopped and the floor stilled but the children screamed, and their mothers tried to still their screaming, and the men alternately laughed and shouted their fear. Lars Levi was filled, mostly, with amazement—hadn’t this happened when Christ had died? Hadn’t God sent an earthquake to mark the moment of his sacrifice? The force of this realization nearly made Lars Levi fall to his own knees. He looked at his congregants, his parishioners, his reindeer, skittish on the snow, and he saw them multiply before him, ten upon ten, so that the back of the church was not littered with drunks who stank of their drinking, but instead each face shone clean and each body’s blood coursed with the mysteries and the magics of Christ . . . he found himself, suddenly, saying this, some form of this—he was talking without hearing himself speak, speaking without feeling himself think—this was what it was to be a mouthpiece for God—this!

But this extemporaneous address was interrupted by another earthquake, smaller, but a quake nonetheless, and this time people cried out with even more noise, and when he looked at his family he saw one of his sons crying, his face red and growing redder, crying so hard he could hardly breathe. It scared him, as any upset in his sons always did, it brought him back to the death of Levi, he saw Levi’s face thick with measles and how Levi would not, could not, stop crying. His wife, though, had the baby nearly smothered to her chest, and he looked to Nora as if to ask, would she please take the crying boy outside, but Nora was staring at Biettar with unseeing eyes. “Nora,” he hissed, but it was Willa who heard, and she picked Lorens up and began to carry him, his legs beating against her chest, down the side of the aisle.

He had to put Levi out of his mind.

What was it he’d been saying? What had been the thought? He wiped his brow with his sleeve, but he had done that so many times that morning that he only moved the sweat around on his forehead.

AT THE DOOR, his daughter turned to see why he had stopped speaking—she thought, even from this distance, that he looked sick, though she knew he wasn’t; she was familiar with this side of him, his near-hysteric states. Actually, Willa envied him, how he loosed himself on people like that. She herself was nothing beyond or below well behaved, quiet in the evenings, diligent about her chores, always first to offer to go out for wood, or put the cow in the cow-house, or pluck or skin whatever needed to be plucked or skinned, even copying her father’s sermons with ink she mixed from blueberries and soot. But her outwardly manners bore little relationship to her insides, she felt if anything she kept herself as contained as she could, making herself smaller, quieter, more palatable, like she couldn’t scare anyone with who she really was or what she really thought. She had no rebellion in her, though, or none that she had ever exercised, she was a kettle left at a gentle boil, and with her heat she did nothing more than make coffee or tea.

As ever, then, she did not do what she had been told, but what she knew was wanted, and she opened the door. Outside, the silence was absolute. The snow muffled even the smallest of sounds, so she heard nothing, not the reindeer tied to the posts, not the titmouse in the tree, not the services inside. Right then the wind was blowing the snow so that the scene was almost picturesque: the ten wooden cabins, most chimney-less, with shutters for windows, pelts of various kinds nailed to the plank walls (reindeer, squirrel, fox, even a lynx); storehouses on their stilts, some atilt; the cow-house, with its lonesome inhabitant, pacing in place to keep warm; the frozen well; three small saunas, each a few steps from the river; six woodsheds, two with their doors hanging open; beyond these, the fruitless fields, a wheelbarrow abandoned and now stuck until spring—and along the river the tracks of so much coming and going that the river seemed more road than ice, though following the tracks you reached on all sides only the unceasing tundra; the overwhelming sense was that this was the only habitable place within days and days. They were entrapped by emptiness—it was like being at sea—the snow might as well have been ocean, and they a caravan of small and weary boats, adrift. It was true what the Lapps said, it was always better to move than to stay; staying only fortified your sense of loneliness, that no visitors would ever come, that you were the only human life.

She didn’t sense that she was being watched, but she was, for while she looked down from the slope at what had entirely comprised her world for nineteen years, Henrik watched her from his store window, his curtain pushed to the side. From Henrik’s vantage point she made an odd shape, as she still had Lorens on her hip, and for a few moments Henrik couldn’t make out who she was. He’d hoped, of course, that she was Nora, but as soon as Willa turned to one side he could see it wasn’t Nora at all, because Nora didn’t hold children on her hip—he didn’t strictly know this but sensed it to be true—and because she was much taller than Willa, and she didn’t have Willa’s slight hunch, which always made her head arrive before her body.

Henrik had rushed to the window with the first quake, thinking the world was at Lars Levi’s ever-threatened end, but now Willa stood so stoically that he wondered if he’d imagined it. He thought: it’s happened to me, the hysteria, it’s here. People had joked about it when he’d moved north, they had said everyone lost their minds up here, but back then, with all the fuss and scandal, the prospect hadn’t bothered him, it had seemed like a pleasant thing to lose one’s mind, but now he saw the terror of having no control over what one believed, of having lost any fastness to truth. His whole body shuddered.

He shook his head, of his own volition this time, and he closed the curtain that Mad Lasse had told him was a vanity to have put up in the first place, with the same thought he always had, about how it was too cheap to be considered a vanity—he had cut it from a bit of leftover muslin and tacked it up with nails—but as if called up by the sinfulness of this thought the whole cabin began to shake for the third time, worse than before. On the walls and shelves everything was coming down, the spools of thread, the portrait of King Oskar I of Sweden, the fox tails, the candles hung by long waxen threads, and the things on the counter were sliding, glasses, his pen and ink, his accounting book, a ferret’s pelt, a sack of goose feathers, the candle in its candlestick, down it all came, like a giant was hoisting up the store on one side, and then, tired, the giant dropped it, and walked away.

Emelie had told him not to move here. She had told him it was a bad idea to deal with the Lapps but he hadn’t had much of a choice, and anyway his uncle had promised it would be easy, that there was a fortune to be made off of their drinking. What was needed was someone with gumption, someone to buy the vodka, brännvin, whiskey, whatever, from the merchants in Tornio and then sell it at triple, quadruple the price, and Henrik had thought he could be that person, he had thought by now he would be rich, and instead he was in debt, badly, to his uncle—he was, in fact, nearly bankrupt, and every time he put wood in the stove he thought: what will I get if I try to sell this stove? Who would even buy it? It had cost him a small fortune to have it hauled here, but now he saw the problem was not getting here but leaving here. Once you came here you had sunk in so much you couldn’t afford to leave, and you waited for the cold to kill you, your whole life long, that was all.

He had to leave, he had to get out of here, not just the cabin, but the town, not just the town, but the north itself. It was suddenly intolerable to be alone, and he threw his coat on and hurried his way up toward the church, head down, chin down, the wind on his wrists, in the arms of his coat, in his boots, his ankles, the inside of his ears aching with cold, the snow wetting his head and his cheeks and his neck. The hill up to the church seemed steeper, the reindeer more restless, and Willa was gone, and suddenly he was afraid, afraid for Nora—what if something had happened to her, to all of them—and he opened the door with unusual force.

On the floor, lying flat, totally still, possibly dead, was Biettar. Henrik knew that coat, how patchy it was, because Biettar was one of his best customers, or worst, depending on how you looked at it; Biettar owed him a small but significant fortune: he held the record of having drunk the most brännvin of anyone the past winter, unless of course, you included Henrik, which Henrik resolutely did not do. As it was Henrik could not look at Biettar without thinking: there walks the worth of my stove, and now his stove was maybe dead on the floor. Lars Levi was bent over him, and the congregation bent around Lars Levi, but no one moved, as if it were too late to do any good.

“You must be risen, you will be risen! You are not of flesh and blood,” Lars Levi was saying, in a coarse whisper. “There is no one more holy than a Sámi, you are pure and good, be awakened! Any sin you have done Christ can take from you!”

To Henrik’s relief Biettar’s legs, the fur trousers, began to twitch, or rather, seize. Lars Levi bent down and put his hands on Biettar’s chest. “Do not forget what Christ said to his disciple, he said that thou art Biettar, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church,” Lars Levi said, almost with admonition, and Biettar’s legs kicked harder. Biettar was saying something in Lappish, or for all Henrik knew, he was speaking in tongues.

“What is it,” Henrik asked a man standing near the door, “what’s he saying?” But the man ignored him. Henrik looked around for Nora, but she wasn’t in her usual pew, nothing was in its usual place.

“Biettar,” a woman shouted. It was Old Sussu. Her voice was strained, it might have been a cry of fear or a cry of encouragement, it was impossible to know.

Lars Levi reached down and took Biettar’s arm, and pulled him up to sitting, but Biettar’s head remained folded into his chest. “Do you believe?” Lars Levi asked. “Are you saved? Have you taken Jesus Christ into your own heart?”

Biettar turned suddenly, he was looking around the room, for someone, for something. “I am not flesh and blood,” he said, “I am with God,” he said, “I am forgiven,” and his eyes watered over into tears, which he did not wipe away.

The church door opened. It was Willa, holding Lorens’s hand. She had taken out the braid in her hair, or maybe the wind had, and as she drew near her shoulder brushed Henrik’s and he looked at her, but she didn’t look back at him, her eyes were fixed on Biettar.

“He’s being awakened,” she whispered. Henrik thought she was explaining it to him but she was explaining it to herself. She wanted, for some reason, to weep.

“The herd,” Biettar said.

“This all,” Lars Levi was saying, “this is for you.” But Willa wondered if her father had it all wrong, if the earthquake was meant for her, if God had seen into her heart and found her wanting. He had searched her and known her, he had tried her and known her thoughts. He had seen there was a wicked way in her. Yes, it was why Biettar had come. God might as well have sent an angel to fill the church so that its wings singed against the stove, its head lodged sideways against the rafters, demanding, its finger pointed at her, it is not he who should be on his knees but she. Not he but she.

2

Well east of the church, and north some, a solid day’s travel by ski, the snow was coming down with a preposterous beauty, dropping in fat flakes that wafted through the smoke-hole and wended their way to the fire. They are throwing themselves to their deaths, Ivvár thought, but they go with such grace. With some difficulty—his fingers had no bend to them, and his shoebands were stuck together with ice—he took off his boots. He poured the shoe-grass out of them and looked at his toes, wrinkled and a little damp, sort of white, but otherwise recognizably his feet. The fire singed his heels and all around him he felt the lávvu settling into being warmed again, the frost steaming off everywhere, so that he was living, briefly, in the clouds. It was so nice, it was so pleasant he could have fallen asleep at that very moment but in the past few days he had lost not one but two calves, clearly to the same wolverine that had been stalking the herd, and the thought of losing more was unbearable—he was already dreading when his father would come back and see the pelts stretched out on the drying rack and know it was Ivvár’s fault, that Ivvár had snuck off again for the sake of a woman.

Part of the difficulty though was that Ivvár didn’t know when his father would come back; his father was Biettar, and though Ivvár did not know his father was then in the throes of awakening on the church floor, he knew his father had not been his usual self, he’d been especially surly lately, and practically silent. They’d slaughtered the eating-reindeer a week ago but not any reindeer for the debt, and in this there was a silent acknowledgment that they weren’t going to pay the debt, and when his father had set off for town Ivvár had assumed that he had gone to inform the storekeeper of this fact, and to try to wheedle something to drink out of him anyway. In this case his father would have been gone at least two days, maybe three, and Ivvár had been careful to be off at Risten’s only the one day, but he hadn’t been prepared for his father to be gone four days, and now five, and still Ivvár was out with the herd alone. In Ivvár’s mind the carcasses were becoming, slowly but surely, his father’s fault, because it wasn’t fair to leave him alone for so long and still expect him to keep the herd together, not when his father could see perfectly well that the wind was blowing up from the south, which meant the reindeer were going to want to wander south, where they’d cross and mix into the Unga herd, and they couldn’t have that, they needed the herd to graze this valley and they needed to not lose more time to more herd separations; his father knew that. His father knew that because it was his father who had taught him these things.

But his father had left him, as if it were possible for Ivvár to never sleep, to just sit forever at the southern flank of the herd and keep turning the nose, keep sending the dog off to ring the males back in. And, his father wasn’t here to see what Ivvár was seeing, which was that now that they’d slaughtered those old females, the balance of the herd wasn’t right, and there were too many males, and they ought to have slaughtered those three-year-old bulls instead of the old females, even if it was unlikely they’d calve again this year. Or castrated the bulls, at least, what with Borga getting old, and there being so little time now to train new draft reindeer to pull the sleds, which, not incidentally, needed repairing—when was any of that going to happen? The more he thought about it, the more he agreed with himself that his father ought not to have left him like this, and the more he resented his father for probably enjoying himself; probably he was passed out on the store’s floor right now. And of course Ivvár couldn’t say a word of complaint, he’d tried that once and to teach him a lesson his father had left for even longer, and when he’d returned he’d just said how it was the job of a herder to deal with what was, and not waste one’s time wishing things to be any different. No one controls nature, he’d said bitterly, and I am part of that nature.

Even though Ivvár should have just reused the old shoe-grass drying by the fire, he rewarded himself for his sufferings by reaching up for the fresh bundle, and he let himself have a pinch of salt in his coffee as he stuffed his boots, and then he let himself have a bite of the cheese Risten had given him that he was not going to tell his father about. The cheese was warm from being pressed against his chest, where he kept it, so his father would not accidentally chance on it and stuff it all in his mouth immediately, and while he chewed the sweating cheese he thought of Risten, milking the reindeer on the slopes, then turning the milk to cheese, and he even had the strange and perverse sensation of eating or drinking her milk, and he regretted it was winter, and that when he’d seen her the other day she’d been wearing her heaviest fur coat, the one that made her look twice as wide as she was, and barrel-like, so the only womanly thing about her was her fur cap, with its embroidery running around her face. She’d given him so little time before she’d run off, though she’d teased him by pushing at him hard enough that he fell, and she’d rolled with him a little in the snow, thinking what, he didn’t know.

It was all a mistake, of course, a grand mistake, all of it; it had been a mistake this summer to have gone to her family’s summer grounds, and it had been a mistake two days ago to go see her, mostly because she was engaged to Mikkol Piltto (who was, he had heard, going to actually come and join her siida instead of the other way around, an emasculation Ivvár was proud to pretend he would never have allowed), and because Ivvár was aware he did not love Risten and had never really loved her and had been leading her on for years, and so to appear to her now was neither prudent nor purposeful, though he couldn’t have said why he had done it. Not that she would ever have been encouraged to marry him, of course. Not even his family’s old and good name would have allowed for the shame of her going so far beneath herself, for if her father despised anything, he despised anyone who he didn’t see as a serious Sámi, a real herder, and everyone knew that he wouldn’t let her have her reindeer if she tried to marry someone who wasn’t serious about herding. That was how he always put it, someone serious, and Ivvár was serious, in his own way, mostly about not taking things so seriously, but Nilsa only understood seriousness in terms of reindeer, and a herd like Ivvár’s was so far from serious as to be laughable. It was not even a herd, it was a small flock; it was an embarrassment.

He finished his coffee to the last drop, thinking he needed all the luck he could get, and he tightened his shoebands one more time. Outside the wind had relinquished its hold on the valley and the moon was rising over the fell, and the little trees and the little hills and his little reindeer, they threw long and dark shadows on the snow. All around him the herd was gathered. He could see, at its edge, his father’s dog, Mirre, resting with one eye open, his tail over his nose, and he turned back to his herd and listened for the big bell reindeer, who was right in the middle of the herd where he belonged, and then he looked for Borga, his favorite, his beautiful all-white Borga that even his father wouldn’t dare harness and take to town, and then he listened for the bell on the new mother who never could stay with the herd, and there she was, on the fringe, rooting around, her missing antler giving her the appearance of a joke. His father didn’t like to use bells like Ivvár did, and Ivvár only put them on when his father was gone, taking them off when his father returned. A bad crutch, his father said. If the big bell reindeer wandered and the rest followed the bell, like they tended to do, all you’d done was mark what was missing. But Ivvár liked the bells. With his eyes closed he could still watch the reindeer, hear where they went, how they moved, where the wind was sending them, what the birds said, and while he listened the snow became its own weight, took its own shape against his back.

Although he thought at every minute that his father might appear, in fact he was alone with the herd for two more days, sleeping at most six hours in those two days, six hours in which he woke up each time certain the herd had wandered, each time coming outside to see Mirre’s watchful eye, and all around him the lumps that the reindeer formed when they slept and it snowed on them. So he was all fog, all delirium when he heard the sound of his father’s sledge, and he stood and brushed the snow off and began to move around the herd, closing them in together, tightening their edges. His father’s form grew slowly, Mirre barking his happiness and Ivvár’s relief until his father raised his arm, elbow bent, and on cue, quiet fell.

Ivvár followed his father into the lávvu, and Mirre followed Ivvár. Inside they all went to their usual places, Ivvár to the right and his father to the left of the fire, Mirre near the door. His father snapped bundles of branches in half and placed them with care inside two half-eaten logs. His father’s fires always looked the same, very neat, and the branches always looked too thickly set to light, but it was never the case, and soon the ice on their eyebrows and hats dripped onto their cheeks but neither wiped them off.

We lost two calves, that was what Ivvár should have said, but he was afraid to call it to his father’s attention. Clearly his father was avoiding talking about it, because he kept sniffing and resetting his hat on his head like he did when he had something to say but couldn’t get the words free of himself.

“You remember your mother?” his father said, finally. Ivvár was so surprised by this he looked straight at his father, and for what felt like much too long they looked at each other. It was always a strange exercise, looking at his father, because he was aware he was looking at himself. Everyone loved to say it, you have the same eyes. What was it that French lady had said? I didn’t know natives could have such blue eyes, magnifique, she had said, like he was a particularly nice pair of sealskin mittens.

Ivvár looked around for something for his hands to do, anything, so that he didn’t have to look at his father at all. He settled on a piece of wood that was on the edge of the fire but hadn’t yet burned. He took out his knife and began to peel the edges of it into long curling strips that bent backward over each other.

His father sighed, expelled a large burst of air that joined the smoke of the fire and went up with it.

“It’s nothing,” his father said.

Ivvár thought, just be done with it already.

“I—” his father said. Ivvár looked at him again. He couldn’t remember his father being like this. He made all of his decisions swiftly, resolutely, and did not bother worrying about them once they were made. Never any going back, not in his mind least of all.

“Did you end up paying Rikki anything?” Ivvár asked. His father didn’t like this rude nickname for Henrik, but Ivvár used it anyway, as if to remind his father what side they were both on. It came out of him before he knew he would say it. It was clever of him, almost mean, distracting his father this way from the calves, making explicit what belonged in the realm of the tacit, and his father looked hurt, his tired eyes looked more tired, and this gave Ivvár the sensation of having stepped on a calf ’s leg, or knocked over a child in the corral.

“No,” his father said, and Ivvár felt the bitterness of his win, the coldness of it, because his father got up and went back outside, though he hadn’t dried out his shoe-grass and he’d hardly warmed himself. They hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. His father’s stubbornness was impressive like this, Ivvár had never known anyone to carry a grudge as long as he did. So Ivvár expected his father not to come back for several hours at the very least, but to his surprise his father promptly returned.

“You want something to drink?” Ivvár asked. This was, they both knew, another attack. Of course there was nothing left to drink, there was never anything left. There was no such thing, really, as a bottle half-drunk, not to them. So you went to Rikki’s and got drunk, Ivvár was saying, plain as could be, and his father shook his head. The pained look again, the calf ’s bent leg again.

“Let’s take some coffee,” his father said, and he reached for his rucksack, and took from the frozen leather a sack of coffee beans, and after that a loaf of bread that wasn’t made from bark flour, and then a bit of cheese. Ivvár felt guilty, thinking of his own cheese, wrapped in the bit of leather, sweating slightly against his chest.

“Old Sussu?” Ivvár asked. She had a soft spot for them, she was Ivvár’s godmother, and though she lived on so little it frightened him she was prone to sending along things anyway, you could not refuse them no matter how much you tried, you would say no and find the new mittens stuffed into the bottom of your rucksack later, even though you couldn’t recall a single time she had been anywhere near the bag.

“No,” his father said. He seemed about to offer up the answer, he opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Rikki’s decided to save us from ourselves, is that it?” Ivvár asked.

“No.”

“Well, don’t tell me anything then,” Ivvár said, knowing how petulant he sounded. “I don’t want to know.”

His father looked unimpressed by this. “It’s from the preacher’s daughter,” he said.

“The preacher’s daughter.”

“You know, there’s a few of them.”

“I know,” Ivvár said, but this all seemed to be beside the point, he could not gather why his father had things from Mad Lasse’s daughter, he could hardly bring to his mind an image of them at all, they faded into the background of everything to do with the church. They had such serious faces, and they stared too much but without giving him any sense of their admiration for him, and Ivvár’s pride could not account for this. His looks were, he knew, the last real value he had left, and it was why he had gone to see Risten, wasn’t it, to be admired, to know she looked and she liked it, she couldn’t help herself. She wanted Ivvár to smile at her, she would go back to her stack of soft pelts and she wouldn’t think, oh Mikkol, she would think, if only, Ivvár!

“She gave it all to me,” his father said.

“Why?”

“She wanted to, I guess.” His father looked so guilty saying this that for a moment Ivvár thought, he’s lying, and for a second he thought, they pitied him? They thought they were starving? His father had begged? “I was staying with them,” his father said. “They put me in, you know, they have that main cabin they mostly live in and then the other little one. It has one of those stoves in it with all the stone.”

Ivvár nodded, unsure why he was hearing any of this.

“I slept in there, they gave me a mattress on the floor. They put hay in their mattresses, did you know that? Well, they said the parents, Lars Levi and his wife, they sleep on goose feathers.”

Lars Levi, his father had said, not Mad Lasse. No one called Lars Levi Lars Levi except, Ivvár thought, people who mistook his madness for ministry. It unnerved him.

“So you stayed with Mad Lasse,” Ivvár said.

“I didn’t know it would be this hard,” his father said, as if there was someone else in the lávvu with them.

“What would?”

“You know, for a son, you’re not an easy one.”

“It’s hard to be easy when you haven’t slept.”

“If you were a reindeer,” he said, “I would never try to tame you. You would be terrible as a draft deer. You would never go which way I wanted.” It was the closest his father had ever come to a kind of compliment, and it surprised Ivvár, it almost hurt to hear. Or was it not a compliment at all?

“And you would?” Ivvár said lightly.

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it,” his father said, “I’ve been very wrong,” his father said. “About many things.”

Somehow it was awful to hear this, it made Ivvár sick to see his father like this. “Don’t,” he said, “no, you—”

“I have,” he said. “I’ve been, I’ve been drinking the Devil’s piss!”

“Don’t say—”

“I’ve been awakened,” he said.

Ivvár stared, he stared at his father’s nose, its red and waxen bulb, at his father’s lips, cracked, he felt like he was looking at a stranger, he did not know this man who was speaking. It was a joke! His father, one of them! His father wasn’t going to drink anymore, he was going to start telling people what was wrong and what was right? He was going to start speaking in Finnish, or in Swedish? Or what, he would learn to read like Smålek had and go around reading the Bible at people whether or not they wanted to hear it—was that who he wanted to be? Most certainly, if he was anything like the rest of them, he would lecture Ivvár if he drank, maybe go so far as to dramatically pour it out, the believers were always doing things like that. But maybe he would go further still, maybe he would scold Ivvár for turning the kettle spout toward the kitchen, for laying the wood so that the root was turned toward the door, even though it was his father who had stopped at the sieidis to give offerings, who had pointed each one out, who had insisted, when they went by one, on complete silence, though he hadn’t gone to one in a long time, maybe since his mother had died. Ivvár laughed, a rough and fake little spurt that neither of them believed in.

“And while we’re at it, while I’m saying things . . . I heard Risten’s broken off her engagement with that Piltto. What’s his name. Sámmol.”

“Mikkol,” Ivvár said. He could not figure out which news was worse. He could not understand what was happening to his world, why everything insisted on looking the same but being quite different, why his father’s hand on the fire-stick suddenly seemed old, and why a new dread came through him, like he’d just crested a fell and been met with the reality of the wind beyond it.

This was not good, he thought. This was not good. He almost felt sick.

“Wind’s coming up from the south now though,” his father said.

“East this morning.”

“Maybe we’ll have to move in a few days, I was thinking down—”

“To Bálggesgurra.”

His father grunted, assented, and Ivvár wanted to shout, don’t speak of normal things, don’t you dare, don’t you behave like you haven’t done what you’ve done, but he felt tired, he felt so tired, and he thought, maybe if I sleep I will wake up and things will be different. This was a nice little lie, and if he was good at anything he was good at taking a thought and sticking it in a little hidey-hole, and never digging it up again. What was important was to just keep going, just think of what would be pleasant next, what could be pleasant next, and Ivvár lay down, and sure enough, in the sharp heat of the fire Ivvár found himself falling asleep, he was pulled down and down into the earth, he was covered with thick pelts by the underlings, and when he awoke his father was gone. They didn’t speak of it, and instead the next day his father announced they would move the herd, to get away from the wolverines, so they did, but when they got to Bálggesgurra they found more wolverine tracks, and they moved the herd again, skiing with the herd down along the river, the snowbanks on either side piled high. Each time they moved south Ivvár felt more and more aware they were closer and closer to the church-village and thus closer to Risten. He did not want to see her, not now, it seemed impossible to manage that on top of his father. But he was saved that confrontation by his father’s announcement they would head east, though the land was so uneven here, punched down in places, and it was hard to see the reindeer all at once, but his father read the snow and said it was all right, the lichen spread thickly over the ground and up the tree trunks, and the snow, though brittle, had no crust on top, nor ice on bottom, and moreover was only a hand deep; they could stay there awhile.

But his father, although he worked as much as ever—setting up new drying racks, finding new branches for the floor, fetching water, fetching wood, fixing the harness strap that had worn down—did not seem like the father who had left for town two weeks ago. First it was his humming, he had never been one for humming, and now he hummed loud melodies that Ivvár realized were church hymns, songs that hardly went anywhere at all. Then Ivvár realized his father was always quiet now, in a new way. Before he was quiet if he was upset, or sometimes if he was very drunk, but now it was as if something inside him had gone still, and what had been a rolling sea was now a placid pond. It was like the stories of underlings who stole good babies and swapped them for bad ones—his father had been swapped out, but for whom Ivvár did not know.

One night when they were lying down and smoking after dinner, his father said, apropos of nothing, “Come to church with me. You know,” his father went on, when Ivvár gave him no encouragement, “there’s something powerful there.” Ivvár thought he would do anything, give anything, if only his father wouldn’t talk about it. “I couldn’t see it on my own, but your mother showed me,” his father said. Ivvár willed his ears to close. “I was going to Rikki’s and then . . . remember when you got into the corral when the big bull was in there?”

Ivvár said nothing, to punish him more, but of course he remembered, his mother had liked to tell it as a story of luck, a story of Ivvár’s good instincts, even as a very little boy—you could barely walk, she liked to say, but you could duck. But he wanted now to hear his father tell it, he wanted to hear about how his father had rushed to get him out, while the bull’s antlers—wider than this, his mother would say, stretching out her arms—went swaying just over Ivvár’s head.

“You remember,” his father said dismissively. “Well, it was just like that, I was going to Rikki’s and then I heard a noise. Someone shouted out. It was the same shout your mother made that morning in the corral, the same one, and when I stopped the shouting stopped. So I stood there a minute, then I stepped forward again and the shout came. When I stopped moving the shouting stopped. This time to trick it,” he said slowly, “I sat down in the snow. And I listened very hard, I could hear the wind, that was all. I had a very bad feeling, and after I had waited I went forward again, but this time when the shout came I knew that if I kept going to Rikki’s I would die.” He nodded. “So I went to church,” he said.

There was a silence that was so long Ivvár came close to falling asleep, his pipe in his hand.

“You don’t believe me,” his father said sadly.

Ivvár lay down and turned his back to the fire, watching the bottom of the lávvu-cloth get tugged by the wind, watching his pipe smoke up, as if the wind were having a good puff. As the bottom of the cloth blew up he could see the snow outside, he could see the reindeer in the distance, they were exposed to him briefly, then hidden again. He needed to go out and fix the cloth, weigh the edge down with more rocks.

“Ivvár,” his father said, “I’ll pray for you,” and this was so uncomfortable for Ivvár that he got up to go outside. He would go look for some rocks. He would fix one noisome thing.

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