Three days after giving birth, Mutti had developed a high fever. Four days later, she was as pale as the sheets she lay on. She did not even have the strength to feed Elisabeth. Voter Luis had to give the baby boiled cow’s milk.
On the fifth day, since the fever hadn’t receded and Mutti had become delirious (“The pigs are talking to me, Luis, they want the baby, make them stop, please, please . . .”), Voter Luis decided to go down to the village and fetch a doctor.
But this was no ordinary fever. It was septicaemia.
Voter Luis’ herbs were as useless as his prayers and his final, desperate rush to the village in a thunderstorm that had turned the paths into rivers of mud. By the time he returned with the doctor, there was nothing for the medic to do but write the poor woman’s death certificate. Another death in childbirth at a time and in a region where, sad but true, such deaths were far from unusual.
If there had been a road suitable for vehicles instead of a path, if the maso had not been so high up . . . then maybe. When he told Simon that his mother had died, Voter Luis held him tight. Then, together, they stacked up bundles of wood outside the maso. Voter Luis sprinkled them with herbs, sulphur and broken stones, then later, that night, he set them alight.
They produced flames Simon had never seen before: blue flames. Like the sky Mutti had flown to, Voter Luis explained, going down on his knees and looking him in the eyes. For centuries, he said, the Kellers had used fire to say goodbye to the souls of their dead. They had done this also when Opa Josef had died, except that Simon could not remember because he was a child lying asleep in his bed.
This blue fire, Voter Luis told him, pointing at the stars, was a farewell that could be seen all the way from Heaven.
The notion of Mutti looking down at him from above made Simon cry. Gently, Voter Luis told him that these were his last tears as a child. He was now a man (had he not already begun to copy his first Bible?), and men had to be modest about showing their feelings. Only Elisabeth was allowed to cry, he added. She was little and could do it without anybody judging her.
Then he asked Simon to pray with him.
After that, there were still good days. Every so often you could hear Voter Luis’ laughter echo from one side of the valley to the other. Yet the fact that Simon remembered these outbursts of joy meant that something had changed in Voter Luis. And not just towards his son. In time, his attitude towards his daughter changed, too.
When Elisabeth began to speak her first words and toddle about the Stube, Voter Luis got into the habit of shutting himself in what young Simon called “the forbidden room,” the maso’s cellar, with the wine, the oil and the Bibles of past Bau’rn, and spending hours on end there, alone.
So it was that the task of raising Elisabeth fell to Simon.
She was a beautiful child, lively, alert, who called him “Sim’l” and was always smiling. Simon did not mind playing with her. On the contrary – he enjoyed telling her stories, making her rag dolls and carving animals. He learned to make Vulpendingen from the carcasses of animals that Voter Luis hunted and was never happier than when little Lissy would clap her hands at a new creation. Elisabeth looked at Simon in the same way that he, with his velvet bow tickling his chin, had watched Voter Luis talking to people in the village, dispensing advice and receiving praise.
Time passed.
Voter Luis grew increasingly withdrawn, Elisabeth increasingly cheerful, along with her growing resemblance to Mutti (the same raven hair, the same dimples), and Simon Keller increasingly tall and awkward, like any other teenager.
When Simon turned thirteen and Elisabeth was five and had already learned to chase away spiteful spirits by weaving garlands for burning in the Stube, Voter Luis had the accident that changed everything.
It was harvest time, but, hard as he tried, Simon knew he was not much help to his father. Not with such a heavy sickle and on such sloping fields as the ones below the maso, wedged between the rocky peak of the mountain and the forest that led down to the valley. The bulk of this arduous labour rested on Voter Luis’ shoulders.
It might have been exhaustion, or melancholy, or an angry wasp, but the blade of the sickle slipped and Voter Luis fell, screaming. Simon rushed to him and saw that his father’s leg had been severed clean off from the shin down, the stump gushing with blood just like when the pigs were slaughtered in November.
Somehow, using his belt, Voter Luis managed to stop the bleeding. He told his son to run down the hill for help. Fortunately, Simon did not need to go as far as the village. On his way, he ran into the doctor coming back from another maso on the other side of the valley. Voter Luis did not die. If he had died, things would have turned out differently for Sim’l and Lissy.
Like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground, Voter Luis did not die.