The Last Boat Home (27 page)

She was going to have a baby. Her father’s child.

She caught her breath when her mother opened the front door. Else heard her on the stairs, her footsteps overhead.

‘What are you doing out there?’ she called from the dining room.

‘Preparing the bonfire,’ her mother said.

She left the way she had come in and again the house was quiet. Else closed the circle around the first ankle, tied a knot in the thread and snipped it loose with her teeth. She imagined the quiet broken by a scream. A baby’s scream. Its clinging hands, its greedy mouth. What did a baby have to do with her? She sensed an aching in her breasts and poked her thumb with the needle, pushing it deeper until the pain was all she felt.

The first bonfire was lit later that evening, after her mother had boiled the coalfish and they had eaten supper. The sun had yet to set when a coil of black smoke rose on the other side of the fjord, dirtying the pink rinse of the sky. Before long, flames
dotted the shoreline. Else carried two buckets across the yard behind her mother, who bore two of her own. To the left of the pier, Dagny’s kindling was heaped on a slip of rock between the lawn and the fjord. Else was able to distinguish solitary objects as she drew closer: crab traps, a lobster pot, twists of rope, a single oar. A sponge mattress leaned against the rubble, displaying its mildewed bottom through the holes of a fishing net.

At the sight of the boathouse’s contents piled up and ready to burn, Else felt a sore opening in her chest. She hesitated at the foot of the pier, while her mother moved to its edge and crouched to dip her buckets into the fjord.

‘Come, Else,’ she said.

She beckoned to her daughter and Else did as she was told. They took turns to pour a ring around the stack, isolating it from the pier and the lawn. When the rock base was slick with salt water, Dagny hurried to the boathouse, leaving Else to refill the buckets. Her mother reappeared with a
Norges
jar in each hand. She unfastened the lid of the first and tipped it over the traps. The stink of moonshine soaked the air. Else placed her bucket on the grass along with the others, ready to use in case a wind swept the fire out of control. She watched her mother splash the mattress, saw the flower-print sheet tucked amid a snarl of fishing wire darken with liquid. The hose from her father’s distillery curled around the sheet like an octopus’s arm. Its rubber dripped with homebrew.

‘Stand back,’ her mother said.

Else covered her face when the match landed on the pile. The fire leapt with a roar and a shimmer of air. Wood snapped and split and fishing wire melted. The crab traps’ metal prongs glowed a vicious red. Against the disintegrating backdrop of the mattress the flames scuttled up the net, eating away its diamond threads. The distillery’s hose bubbled and spat. The fumes made Else’s eyes water.
She stuffed her sleeve into her mouth while her mother fumbled something from her pocket. When Else looked, she saw the oil cloth blotted black with her father’s blood. Her mother tossed it onto the fire and, side by side, they watched it shrivel to ash.

They stayed by the pier until late into the night, holding vigil over the bonfire. Its heat singed the grass at the lawn’s rim, but there was no need to use the buckets of water they had prepared. When the flames began to dwindle, Dagny stalked off to the boathouse and returned with another
Norges
jar. The homebrew kept Johann’s belongings burning as the sky dimmed over the shipyard across the fjord.

T
HE SUMMER HAD
cooled by the time Else returned to Tenvik’s paddock at the end of August. Her mother had spent the morning running errands in town and was not due home from the
bedehus
until later. In her absence, Else had milked the cow, dug up the potatoes and laid them out to dry in the sun. Now she sat at the dining table rubbing the ache from her spine. She felt a flutter in her stomach and rested her hand against the spot. This was a new sensation, one that she was beginning to recognise.

‘The baby is moving,’ her mother had said when she had asked her about it.

Else imagined a foot stamping the lining of her womb and pressed back gently with her palm. Again there was the feeling, like bubbles popping. She stroked the swell of her belly through her blouse. Her clothes were getting tight. Her mother had already tacked fabric panels into the waistband of her trousers. The rest would have to be let out soon. In the two months since the end of the school year, she had measured the changes of her body with dread and wonder. Irresistible bouts of drowsiness had sent her dozing through July. She had awoken one morning to find a seam
stitched from her diaphragm to her navel, an uneven line that had not been there the night before.

Only her mother witnessed this metamorphosis. Else continued to shy away from public places and, at certain times of day, from fields and tracks where she risked running into their neighbours. Now and then Ninni Tenvik would call, bringing with her a jar of honey or a basket of eggs. Else would wait out her visits in her bedroom and listen through the floorboards while she and her mother exchanged news of the town. Sometimes their conversation would turn to fresh reports of the oil tankers docked in bays and fjords along the coast. More than once, they wondered whether anything would come of the shipyard’s talks with the oil fields.

When she had rested her legs, she stood and crossed into the kitchen, where she sawed off two slices of bread and fetched the cheese from the fridge. As far as she knew, Ninni had never asked her mother about her father’s death. Still they must wonder what had happened that morning after Johann had showed Tenvik the barn and he had driven away in his Volvo. A sudden spasm had Else clutching her side. To calm herself, she thought about the paddock. She remembered Valentin on the floor of his caravan, his head propped against the wall between sips of coffee. She had not been back since the day he left. She had decided to go home.

Else pushed away the plate with its slices of bread and cheese. She needed some air. A little air would do her good. She found a pail in the cupboard and headed outside into the yard and behind the barn to collect her father’s bicycle. She brushed the cobwebs from its frame and checked its wheels before walking it up the hill. On the road, she placed her foot on the pedal and kicked off, swinging onto the saddle while the bike rolled underneath her.

Else cycled past the Aaby farm to the deserted public dock, where she rose in her saddle to meet the upcoming slope. The fjord fell away behind her, taking the shipyard with it as she followed the track inland. She pumped her legs and the pail swayed from left to right
on the handlebar. She was sweating when the woodland appeared at the roadside. Up ahead, she saw the familiar gap in the trees.

Once she had turned off the road and onto the path gnarled with roots, she dismounted from her bike. The forest thrummed with insects. Bees and midges collided with her as she pushed deeper into the trees. Leaves carpeted the earth, hiding the ground between tufts of heather and pine cones and mushroom caps. Among the stinging nettles, she saw the waxy green of blueberry bushes. She did not pause to check for fruit, though she gripped the handle of her pail. Instead she listened for the brook that would tell her the meadow was close.

The light had already changed when she heard it. Else waded through high weeds and over beds of moss. At the forest’s edge, she arrived at the field where once Circus Leona’s Big Top had sprung from the mud. It was unrecognisable. A temporary fence taped off the perimeter, enclosing an expanse of cropped grass. A handful of horses grazed on the spot where the strong man’s caravan had spent the winter. By the mouth of the track that curled away to his farm, Tenvik was keeping watch over his animals with his hands on his hips. He straightened up when he saw Else. He waved and ducked under the tape and she smothered the urge to flee back into the woods.

‘Else!’ he called.

He strode over the paddock and she scolded herself for being foolish enough to come here. The circus had left months ago. So, too, had Valentin.

‘Else,’ Tenvik said. He stopped in front of her on the other side of the fence. ‘How nice to see you. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ Else said.

She was barely aware of her hand on her belly, stroking as if to smooth out its curve. Tenvik smiled at the bulge and her arm fell to her side.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘So will Ninni be.’ He nodded at the paddock. ‘It looks different, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes,’ Else said.

‘We can’t afford not to use it. Not now, with the economy being what it is. It’s hard to say if we’re catching up or if we’re being left behind.’

Tenvik shook his head and turned his face to the sun. Else breathed in the smell of toasted earth. A wasp buzzed by her ear and she swatted it away, thinking of when Lars had brought her here last summer. They had lain in the grass where a piebald pony now wandered from the herd to rip a mouthful from the soil. A dandelion hung from its jaws. It flicked a gadfly with its tail. She knew that the circus would never return.

‘It’s good grazing land,’ Tenvik said. ‘It isn’t good for much else, but it will do for grazing land.’

‘The horses seem to like it,’ Else said.

‘You should come by to see us,’ Tenvik said. ‘With the little one, too. Ninni would be so pleased. We haven’t had any new life there for, oh. It feels like a long time now.’

Else nodded. She thought of the graves in the churchyard and felt the popping in her stomach. ‘I’ll visit you,’ she said.

‘That’s good,’ Tenvik said.

‘I’d better get started,’ she said, ‘if I’m going to find any.’ She lifted her pail, gave it a shake in the air.

‘Are you picking blueberries?’ Tenvik asked. ‘There are plenty along the brook. Ninni picked a few tubfuls there last weekend.’

Else thanked him and backed away from the paddock. She trod into the shadows that fell under the trees and followed the burble of the brook past crawling anthills and over leaves that covered the earth. The gurgling grew louder and then she was upon it. On either side of the water, blueberry bushes spread their stems. Else squatted and began to pick the fruits. Her hands moved quickly between the branches and her pail. She was surprised
when she looked up, her knees and back aching, to find that her bucket was almost full.

The first oil tanker arrived in the fjord later that day. Else saw it on her ride from the paddock to the farmhouse when she rounded the corner by the public dock, which was busy now with ferry passengers. No one seemed to notice her skidding to a halt on the road. She joined them in staring at the ship that had dropped its anchor across the fjord, not far from the shipyard and its empty graving dock. The tanker’s broad deck soared in a tower taller than any building in town. Taut lines secured its stern to the shore.

Over the course of the next weeks and months, more tankers appeared from the Skagerrak to moor up beside the first. They formed a neat row, two ships, then three, then four bound together with ropes and hawsers. With each new arrival, the locals rowed out their skiffs or steered their motorboats in for a closer look. They bobbed along the length of each hull, back and forth, staggered by their size. Dagny took to scowling at the tankers from the dining room window and muttering about a spoiled view. Tenvik discussed them with his wife whenever Else visited. She listened with one hand on her belly, the other holding a cup of tea.

Ninni was knitting a cardigan for the baby: a
lusekofte
in white and blue, to be finished with tin buttons.

‘I think it will be a boy,’ Ninni liked to say. ‘Have you thought of names? Klaus is nice. Or Marianne, if it’s a girl.’

Else knew from the headstones in the cemetery that these had been the names of the Tenvik children. She was not ready to think about what she would call the baby. She tried not to think about the baby at all. She sewed the clothes her mother brought home by the armload, pausing now and again to gaze at the tankers across the fjord, a beached herd robbed of its promise, forced to deny the pull of the sea.

The sun set earlier every day. Dawn arrived later in a gloomy sky. Else realised that autumn had passed and winter was upon them.

E
LSE WAS FIVE
days late when, on a Thursday morning in January, her contractions started. She had been working at the table in the dining room, which had been spread with blankets and sheets to protect the wood from her iron. Her arms were stretched long, but still she was forced to stoop to reach the surface beyond the obstacle of her belly. The cramp came in a ripple, a slow spreading of pain. She set down the iron and pulled out its plug.

Her mother arrived from the barn carrying a pail of milk. She shook the snow from her hair as she stepped into the dining room.

‘I think it’s started,’ Else said.

‘Sit down,’ said her mother. ‘I’ll bring you a glass of water.’

Else sat in a chair by the oven, gritting her teeth against a new stirring of pain. She pressed the floor with the balls of her feet until it had passed.

That afternoon, Dagny hurried from the farmhouse. Else watched her through the window, a black speck against an unbroken plain of snow. The glass rattled with wind as she marched past the barn and onto the hill, the hem of her coat fluttering behind her. The trees swallowed her up and Else was alone. She hoped it would not take her mother long. She had promised she would ask Tenvik to drive her home as soon as she had finished with his telephone. The hospital would send a car once she had rung. It would not take long.

Else stood to feed a log into the oven. She paced the floorboards, stopping to clutch the table ledge whenever the pain flared. She swallowed air into her lungs, breathed out and in and tried not to think about what was to come. But fear had grown solid inside
of her, gaining substance and form with the expanding of her belly. She would not allow herself to think about the baby. There was only this moment, and the next, and that was all.

A band of flames had erupted across her lower back by the time her mother returned. Else bit down hard on a moan as the front door opened and the wind burst into the farmhouse.