Chapter Fourteen

 

I AM HARBORING a fugitive. This morning, in the middle of a downpour, Karin arrives, small suitcase in hand. When I open the door, her reddish brown hair has turned black in the rain and water puddles at her feet. She cups a cigarette, trying to light it.

“Well,” I say. “You’d better come in.”

She goes upstairs, and I decide not to ask any questions.

When I telephone Olof, he says she left in the middle of the night. He is glad to know that she is with me, and his mother will look after the children.

“Tell her we can work it out,” he says, and I can hear that he means it.

What am I to do? Björn’s granddaughter is here. When I finally do ask her what is wrong, she becomes agitated just like Ulrika.

 

KARIN COMES DOWN late in the evening, says she cannot sleep. She curls up in my easy chair and pulls the blanket tighter. She asks me about the old church. She says she used to go there as a child. I never knew.

The old church, I tell her, was built to last. The walls were made of stone and nine feet thick, the windows narrow and small. The crucifix, a life-sized Christ, was carved of wood. During the wars, Danish soldiers used the church to stable their horses. The plague struck in the 1300s and flagellants came to lash themselves and expose their wounds to heaven. When Martin Luther brought about the reformation, the king robbed the church of its gold and silver, except for a few chalices that the villagers had buried in the river sand.

As I talk, I find myself using Rammen’s words. At some point Karin closes her eyes. I keep talking, if only to keep her calm.

In the mid-1700s a Christmas storm toppled the stone bell tower and split one of the bells. The bell was recast and housed in a new wood tower, inferior to the original in both beauty and strength. To preserve the bells, the parish council determined that they must toll no longer than half an hour, no matter how important the corpse. The farmers were also ordered not to hammer nails into the sides of the pulpit but find another place to hang their hats. To this they paid as little heed as they did to the request not to shear the lambs before they tithed them to their vicar.

Karin does not move. I think I see her smile. Perhaps it is a glimpse of the carefree young woman who used to come to Ramm, driven by various boyfriends. They would race around the courtyard in their open sports cars, Karin half standing up. Olof drove a rusty but solid Volkswagen. We were all relieved, including Björn. She never stayed long.

As soon as I grow silent, I hear her small, thin voice. “Don’t stop, Anna. Don’t stop now.”

And so I tell her how water from melting ice seeped through the cracks and rotted the church rafters. By the mid-1800s the church was deemed impossible to save. Despite repeated admonitions by visiting bishops, progress on the new church was slow. Negotiations to buy a building site took years, mired in real or invented obstacles. Time after time Lars was on record, stating that the money required to build a new church was more than enough to restore the old.

“Your great grandfather was always his own man,” I say. “His hat was firmly planted on his head. The only time he removed it was when the church bells rang. Even when greeting his vicar, he barely touched the brim with the tips of his fingers.”

I tell her how the diocese lost patience and hired an architect from Stockholm to draw up the plans. He used as his model the Greek Orthodox temple rather than the conventional rectangular basilica, arguing that an octagonal church would be cheaper to build. Lars died the day they began to break ground.

The walls of the old church were torn down to supply stones for various construction projects throughout the parish. The pews were sold at auction, along with the bells. The wooden Christ was sold to a church in Ljunga, a parish near the coast, which was where I had seen it. The villagers followed him for several miles. The paint was almost gone, the wood furrowed and gnarled. They said he looked like a scarecrow, his arms stretched out on the cross, rigged high on that cart and pulled by an ox.

“They shouldn’t have sold him,” Karin says. “Why didn’t Rammen stop them?”

“He told me his mind was busy elsewhere, but he never said where.”