There was larvae in the cabbage again. Fat, spotted, hairy larvae that rasped the outermost cabbage leaves and in toward the hard, white core. Tiny little black-glittering heads moving forward in eager jerks, their bodies leaving long, wet stripes of shit that were dark-green and resembled bile.
Damned creepy crawlies.
I’d been confirmed last year; a relatively peaceful affair, if you forgot about Dad getting drunk on the wine that had been bought for the occasion the week before, and Mom having to run to Hansen’s Drugstore that day and butter him up for twenty bottles on credit. The story of God punishing the Egyptians for their wicked conduct was one of the few that had stuck. Water to blood. Mosquitoes, swarms of blowflies, pests, boils, darkness and death. Frogs, which I’d personally wondered about—they couldn’t really have been a plague—and then the locusts, who ate everything, leaving the ground empty and barren.
The cabbage larvae were probably not on the same level as the ten plagues, but they seemed like a kind of heavenly punishment for my compulsive masturbating to my own drawings of Ellen. At any rate, Anton had sent me out in the rain with a bowl to pick the cabbages clean, then feed the gross creatures and their excrement to the chickens.
The cherries hung swollen and ruined in the brothers’ orchard, their dark fruit bursting out through cracked skin; the apples had scabies, and the carrots were small and worm-eaten, but the worst was of course the corn that had blown off in the damp wind, causing Anton to scowl markedly at the sky. Every afternoon, he walked restlessly along the edge of the field with wet ears of corn crushed in his large hand.
“Jacob.”
I looked up and saw Anders. He was standing a few feet behind me, his hands hanging relaxed by his sides.
“Yeah?”
I’d been kneeling by the cabbage so long that my legs were stiff and had pins and needles. Anders’s gaze flickered from my wooden clogs and to a place on my stomach.
“Jacob . . . it’s Soffi.”
“What?”
I reached out and grabbed two more soft larvae, which I dropped into my bowl. Didn’t even look up at him.
“I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “She’s lying down on the dung heap.”
“Is she sick?”
I looked at him properly now, because there was something wrong with his face. It seemed rigid, the wet corners of his mouth pulled down tight. I realized he didn’t actually look okay. Despite it not being too warm, his brow was glossy with sweat. His eyes were wide and shiny under his cap.
“No, not sick.”
I got up and stretched my sore legs, then looked down the rows of cabbage and up to the sky, which was white along the horizon. The sun was invisible behind the clouds.
“Would you like me to go down to check on her with you?”
He nodded and quickly turned around. Took long steps in the clumsy clogs and kept turning his head back to make sure I was still behind him. I wished Anton was here. Or Ellen. But I knew Ellen was out buying groceries, and Anton was God knew where. I’d have to deal with whatever this was alone.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Anders chanted to himself when we reached the whitewashed half wall fencing it in.
Now I could see Soffi, who was lying outstretched on the sticky cakes of straw, and I immediately knew she was dead. No dog would lie as still as that, not even asleep, and once I got a little closer I could see the wound in her throat, which had bled fresh, red blood into the straw.
“You’d better stand over there, Anders.”
I found a place for him on the other side of the half wall, and he stayed there willingly, the big, bony man moving his hands restlessly over his face. He didn’t say anything else.
I gently stroked the dog over the neck and pulled her head back a little so I could better see the gaping wound in her throat. A fight with another dog maybe, but it looked more like a straight cut, and there was also something strange about her tail. A stick, no thicker than two fingers, was sticking out strangely from her hindquarters, but it was only when I grabbed it and felt the resistance that I understood why. Someone had shoved the stick into her. I pulled it out and threw it hard, then lifted Soffi up and carried her out to the grass.
I’d never seen Anders like that before—petrified. He didn’t even want to go over to the dog, keeping a few yards away with his side to us. A hand still over his face. He must have known she was dead when he came to get me. Anders had seen plenty of dead animals in his life, so how could he have been in any doubt?
“Anders . . .” I looked for Anton in vain again. “Soffi is dead. She . . .”
I didn’t know if I should say anything about her throat. That somebody had killed her. He’d seen himself how she’d lain there.
He shook his head, scratched his forehead and then set off without looking back.
Anders wouldn’t talk to anyone afterward. He sat with his head hung over the kitchen table while rain washed Soffi’s blood into the grass and made her stiff and cold.
“We’ll have to bury her at some point,” Anton said, but only after dinner. Ellen bent over Anders’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear. He got up and went out into the pouring rain with her, and a little while later we heard the engine of the blue Taunus in the yard. We sat in the darkness like on a typical winter evening when the light from headlights swept in through the kitchen windows and across the remains of pork patties and stewed beans.
“What’s happening, Jacob?”
Anton caught my gaze, but quickly looked away again, as if he already regretted his question.
I shrugged gently. “What do you mean?”
“Stop playing the idiot.”
He refocused his eyes on me with a jerk; the dark, narrow slits in the unsmiling face made me jump. His transformation was so total that for a split second, I didn’t believe it was him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It could’ve been anyone.”
He uttered something barely resembling a short laugh. “Anyone?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I started moving the dishes to the sink and scraping the remains into the bucket for the chickens. His eyes were still on me, angry. Uneasy. Reproachful? Either he was breathing heavier than he usually did, or the silence in the kitchen was denser than it had ever been before.
“I’m going to the stable,” he said.
“Yeah.”
I stood with my back half to him and waited until the light from the stable windows cut through the rain and the darkness. Only then did I look at my hands, shaking under the cold water from the faucet.