THE QUESTION FORMED IN MY HEAD of how this fabric quote—once framed and hanging on the wall—had come into my mum’s possession. I couldn’t believe the hermit had given away an item as precious as the stitching his wife had been working on when she died:
“Mum, did you steal this?”
Yes, I stole it, but not from Ulf, from someone who stole it from him, someone who understood its importance. I don’t want to speak about that yet. You must let me keep to my chronology or we’ll jump around and I’ll end up telling you what happened in August before we’ve finished the month of May.
When I arrived back at my farm, the first thing I did was find my fifty-year-old Swedish Bible given to me as a gift by my father, inscribed to me in his beautiful old-fashioned handwriting—he always wrote with a fountain pen. I looked up Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12, which I’ve now memorized.
Listen again to her stitched version!
“For-my-struggle-is-against-flesh-and-blood-against-the-rulers-against-the-authorities-against-the-powers-of-this-dark-world-and-against-the-forces-of-evil-in-this-earthly-realm.”
Now listen to the correct biblical version. I’ll emphasize some of the words that are different, but feel free to make your own analysis.
“For-OUR-struggle-is-NOT-against-flesh-and-blood-but-against-the-rulers-against-the-authorities-against-the-powers-of-this-dark-world-and-against-the-forces-of-evil-in-the-heavenly-NOT-earthly-realm.”
His wife changed the quote! She stitched her own version so that it read that our struggle was against the flesh and the blood and she’d taken the forces of evil and located them not in heaven but on earth. On earth! What does this prove? It was a message, not a mistake. How could this poor woman ensure the message survived, that it wasn’t destroyed after her death? She hung it on the wall—disguised among the other quotes, a message to those of us paying attention, a message, not a mistake, a message!
I was excited to share this discovery with Chris and I ran outside, calling for him. There was no reply. Unsure where he could be, I noticed spots of red on the gravel drive. Before I even crouched down I knew it was blood. The spots weren’t dry. They were recent. Fearing Chris must be injured, I followed the trail to the outhouse. The drops continued under the door and I took hold of the handle, throwing the door open to reveal, hanging from a hook, a butchered pig, a whole animal sliced in half, opened up like a book, rocking backwards and forwards—a butterfly with bloody carcass wings. I didn’t scream. I grew up in the countryside and I’ve seen plenty of animals slaughtered. If I was shaken and pale, that’s not because I was shocked at the sight of a dead animal but at the meaning behind this butchered pig.
It was a threat!
I accept, on one level, that Håkan was merely fulfilling his side of the agreement. In return for allowing him to use our land I’d requested pork. Correct. But I’d expected some sausages and rashers of bacon rather than an entire pig. Yes, it was a good deal because there was a lot of meat on this carcass, but why drop it off at that time, why did it need to be delivered while I was talking to the hermit? Doesn’t it strike you as odd—the timing? Look at the sequence of events: the sequence is everything.
Firstly—Håkan received a call from the woman in the coffee shop, informing him that I was in conversation with his daughter.
Secondly—he saw me visiting the hermit in the field, which he will have connected to Mia.
What does he do next?
Thirdly—he selects a butchered carcass, or butchers one himself, freshly killed because it was dripping blood, and comes round to our farm, leaving a blood trail across our drive, hanging it up, not to fulfill a contract but as a way of telling me to back off, to ask no more questions, to mind my own business.
I should point out that Chris claims that the incident with the butchered pig didn’t happen when I returned from visiting the hermit in the fields, it happened on an entirely different day, and in my mind I’d combined two separate events, connecting memories that had no connection. He wants to cloud this provocative sequence precisely because the sequence itself is so revealing.
Håkan’s threat had the opposite effect to the one intended. It made me more determined to find out what was going on. I was sure that Mia wanted to talk. I didn’t know what she wanted to talk about. I couldn’t even guess. But I needed to speak to her again, sooner rather than later. I was on the lookout for opportunities to do so, but in the end Mia found me.