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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.
Copyright © 2023 by Hanna Pylväinen
