We drove the hay in. Ellen, Anton, Anders and me.
Early in the morning, it was me who drove the tractor to the hay trailer, where Anders worked on splitting it, his huge body stooped over the coupling while Anton directed me with a raised hand.
Ellen was already sitting on the trailer with her legs dangling off, grimacing at the sharp sun and pitchfork next to her. She was in rubber boots and a pair of old overalls that were far too big. Under that, a T-shirt and bare, freckled arms.
I’d found her at the chicken run while Anton was doing the morning milking. She sat smoking under the whispering trees. She used to take her little breaks there. She liked watching the chickens, she said, because they looked so happy. She loved the two big gobbling tom turkeys, too, when they puffed themselves up and the loose, bobbing skin on their throats flared bright red over their dusty feather suits.
“Utzon.” She looked up at me and smiled, her eyes still screwed up against the bright sky. A loosely rolled cigarette was clasped between her lips. “Come, sit down.”
I nodded and sat carefully beside her. Couldn’t help looking at her arms and thinking how little she looked like Laurel, or any other girl, for that matter.
“I’ve been thinking about this place.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the grass and intertwined her slender fingers. “That it might not be the right place for me. What with everything going on . . .”
My stomach twisted in the same way it had when I was little and had been sent to the basement for beer. As though I had to shit or run or both to survive.
“Because of what happened to Soffi?”
“No.” She was quiet for a moment. “Or yes, maybe. Because of what happened to Soffi, and because of Lise, and because of Karsten. I shouldn’t have stayed here. But it’s magical out here, isn’t it? Time moves both too slow and too fast. It’s like in a fairy tale, when the young hero rests his head on Elves’ Hill for a moment, and when he goes down again he’s a hundred years old.”
I nodded, pretending that made sense.
“Do you know who did it to Soffi?”
I shook my head, despite that obviously being a lie. It was Sten and the dagger in his belt, but was that really why she was leaving? She’d let me touch her breast and laid her head against my shoulder, and now she wanted to leave?
I got up suddenly, but it didn’t look like she noticed. She was somewhere else. The dew on the grass had soaked the knees of my trousers, giving me goose bumps, but we’d quickly work ourselves warm again out in the field. And Anton and Anders were waiting for the tractor. We were ready.
I’d driven the tractor before, but mostly on flat ground. Now we were trundling over the dirt road, then farther down the paved road to reach the far corner of the field on the other side of the track. The noise was deafening, and the cab, which consisted of only a windshield, roof and two door holes, smelled of greasy, hot diesel from the stamping engine and heavily vibrating transmission. Through the scratches on the Plexiglas window, I could see the blue sky, and farther along at the edge of the forest was the day’s work laid out on the stubble field. Hay bales distributed unevenly by a heavy, pounding bale processor rented from the machine station.
Anton shouted incomprehensible orders through the rhythmic hack of the tractor, directing me with big arm movements so the tractor and trailer stayed on the right path. Then Ellen straightened up, grabbed the heavy steering wheel with both hands and put the tractor into first gear as I climbed onto the loading bay to receive and stack.
The first few bales he lifted up to me with the fork were heavy and pressed too hard. Grass, weeds and thistles from the moist, low-lying green area in the shadow of the trees. The hay wasn’t good right here in general. Instead of shining butter yellow, it was dark and gray, and after lifting the bales with the fork, Anton left most of them there and moved on to the next row.
I got quickly into the rhythm from last year. Lifted the strings, pressed my knees against them and slid them into place one by one while Anton and Anders strode next to the open side of the trailer, tossing the bales up to me in turn in smooth, hard shoves.
Everything scratched and poked.
Under my shirt, on my ankles above my blue tennis shoes and on my wrists, where the skin swelled up in stinging, skin-flaying scratches. First layer at the bottom; second layer on the other side with a hole on the trailer side so they didn’t need to throw so high. Third layer to be laid across, which demanded I lift the bale and crawl over the load, making it slower. Ellen had to stop the tractor once in a while so I could keep up. Sometimes Anders jumped up on the trailer to help me; other times, he trudged across the field after the closest bales, which he gathered in a pile beside me. A steady pace without breaks.
I’d never seen Anton without a shirt, but if you’d ever seen him work, you knew how strong he was. Just as strong as Anders. And not only in body. He had what my father lacked: a kind of savage toughness, which on days like today could drive him to work until he dropped without showing any signs of pain along the way.
The bales were passed to me as high as Anton’s arms and the fork could stretch, and I took them and set them in the right pattern. Pulled two of the heavy, defiant, prickly bastards up against each other, kicking them into place so that they sat wedged, and the load grew layer by layer until Anton jumped up into the tractor cab and began trundling the hay trailer back over the fields. The rest of us were still atop the rocking load. Ellen and I lay side by side at one end, staring up at the blue sky. The sweat was steamed off me by the wind, and though my nails were flayed and ripped to bleeding, my hands white and red from scratched skin, nothing hurt.
“I didn’t know it could be like this, Utzon.”
Ellen turned her head and looked at me with glittering eyes.
I would have liked to ask her what she meant, but everything inside me throbbed dull and painful when I looked at her. I couldn’t take her hand like I wanted to. I couldn’t even smile without tears welling up in my eyes. So I just lay there, watching her and torturing myself with the idea of a final farewell as she raised her arms over her head and grabbed beech and lime leaves, pulled all the green off and left them stripped down to skinny skeletons.
The same work awaited us inside the barn, just in reverse order. Ellen stood on the trailer, throwing hay bales down to Anton, who again stuck the pitchfork in them and heaved them up onto the conveyor belt to the open barn hatch. I stood in the loft with Anders, flipping them into place in the dusty darkness. One painstaking hay bale at a time. First lengthways, and then across, and then lengthways again. We’d been in the kitchen half an hour earlier to butter some rye bread with lard and liver pâté, as well as have pickled beetroot, and later we drank a cup of coffee with our burning hands folded around the thin porcelain. About half past eight, we ate some more before driving out for the last load.
The light had become soft, freshening up from the slowly fading sky in the west, but you could smell the rain on the wind over the newly harvested fields. Everything was slower now. The tractor stood still more often so Anton and Anders or I could catch up on the backlog, but somehow it still turned out all right. We’d done most of what we needed to, and we still had the evening ahead of us. The landscape dissolved into shadows with blurred edges around the tractor’s jumping headlights.
And finally, a trailer that was only half-full. Anton drove home over the stubble fields with the insects whirling through the white glow from the headlights, and Anders and I sat on the half load, which we didn’t need to drag up to the loft before the weekend, as long as it was under the lean-to. Ellen walked like a silent, black shadow beside the trailer.
“Wait here,” said Anton, smiling in the dark. Soon afterward, he returned with four cold beers, which he opened by tapping the caps against the edge of the trailer. He handed us a bottle each before climbing up and sitting down on the hay.
“Cheers, and thanks for all your help,” he said.
I let the beer bottle cool my burning palms. I looked up to meet Ellen’s eyes, but she didn’t notice me. Anders had moved closer to her, but that didn’t seem to bother her. On the contrary, she rested her forehead against Anders’s shoulder for a moment and closed her eyes.
It was so dark in there that I could only imagine his profile against the brighter sky outside.
We drank our beer in silence, and Anton took his pipe and a bag of tobacco out from a pants pocket, stuffing the bowl with a shaking hand.
“Light?”
I found my lighter and held the flame over the pipe. Saw him suck it down until it completely disappeared and the tobacco started to glow.
He was relaxed. Maybe happy? There was something almost unrestrained about the way Anton was sitting. Leaning back with a hand beneath his neck and his feet thrown youthfully up over another bale. I’d never seen that before. He didn’t even allow himself to put his feet up on the sofa—he only sat up straight, drinking his coffee. The harvest was a relief, even though there were green sprouts at the bottom of the straw and money had to be used to get the corn dried. It was in now, and everything would coast to a different rhythm. The wet hay in the field would have to be burned off at some point, graphite-gray plumes of smoke in the cool September wind. Black earth and glossy wet clay that the plow would leave in silky smooth furrows. It would be time to sleep and stay in, and walk down along the rows of cows in the stalls, watching the hot breath steam from their wet muzzles on the first frosty mornings. The sour, vomit-like smell of silage and peas.
If only she would stay.
I tried to catch her gaze again, a little more overtly this time, but she picked silently at her beer label and still didn’t see me as she let Anders’s troubled hands stroke her leg and then her shoulder without saying anything.
“Maybe you should go in with Jacob, Ellen. Anders and I will lock up the animals.”
She smiled. “Later,” she said, pointing to the sky. “I just want to see the last bit.”
Violent gusts grabbed the trees, and I felt cold splash against my forehead and lips as I walked in alone.
In the bathroom, I poured lukewarm water into the washbasin, pulled my T-shirt off and dipped both hands and forearms in until the scratches and wounds stopped burning. Afterward, I washed my face and cleaned my ears and nose of stiffened flakes of black dust. My face and neck were warm and sunburned, and my muscles so tired that my hands shook, but I could sleep all day tomorrow if I wanted.
The door out in the hall creaked. Light steps in the hallway, then farther into the kitchen, where someone brushed their teeth with the water drumming in the kitchen sink. Then it was quiet again.
“Ellen?”
The light was turned off in both the kitchen and the living room, but I could see her shadow dancing in the narrow strip of light from the half-open door to Great-Grandmother’s room. Her little breath when the heavy overalls fell to the floor and she pulled her blouse over her head. Her bare feet back and forth. And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement outside the living room window. An indistinct black brush stroke behind the pouring creek of rain.
The rain was ice cold against my bare upper body when I ran out into the yard. The darkness was complete without moon or stars, and the water ran down into my eyebrows and eyelashes, making it difficult to see where I was going. I hadn’t put shoes on, and I regretted it as soon as I turned the corner of the house and felt the sludgy mud under my feet and the sharp stones that I couldn’t avoid. Nevertheless, I jogged the last piece until I had a view of the south side of the house and Ellen’s illuminated window.
The figure that stood peeping a few steps from the window wasn’t doing much to hide. He’d only retreated a little, letting darkness do the work. But I could see him, weakly lit up as he was, and I recognized the heavy body, imperturbably leaning forward, and the hands buried deep in pockets filled with jingling shards of glass.
I stood frozen to the spot as I saw the light turn off in Ellen’s room, and Anders slowly turn around and disappear into the darkness like an animal from the forest.