Out Stealing Horses

  ‘Hi, chief,’ he said and I opened my eyes and looked around. The bus had stopped, the engine was switched off, we were in the shade of the big oak tree in front of the shop. I saw the path to the bridge over the river and the river was narrow just there and foaming as it dropped down the rapids, and the low sun sparkled in the spray. We were the last passengers to leave. This was the final stop. The bus could go no further, from here we had to walk, and I thought it was just like my father, to take me as far as he possibly could where it still was called Norway, and I asked no questions about why precisely here, for it was as if he was testing me, and I did not mind that. I trusted my father.

  We took our bags and gear from the luggage compartment at the back of the bus and started to walk towards the bridge. In the middle we stopped and gazed down at the rushing, almost green water, and we held on to our bamboo fishing rods, beat them against the newly carpentered wooden rail and we spat in the river, and my father said:

  ‘Just you wait, Jacob!’

  Jacob was his name for all the fish, whether in the sea-salt Oslo fjord at home with his chest right over the rail and his face in a scornful smile at the water, with a playfully boxing fist over the deep; just you wait, Jacob, now we’re coming to get you, or in the river here that came flowing in a semicircle crossing the border from Sweden and down through this village and back into Sweden a few kilometres further south. And I remembered the year before when I had gazed down into the whirling water and wondered whether in some way or other it was possible to see or feel or taste that the water was really Swedish and was only on loan this side of the border. But I was so much younger then and didn’t know much about the world, and after all it was just a fancy. We stood on the bridge, my father and I, and we looked at each other and smiled, and I for one felt the sense of expectation spreading through my stomach.

  ‘How goes it?’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and could not help laughing.

  Now I walked up the path from the river in the rain. Behind me Jon was in the boat sailing down on the current. I wondered if he was talking aloud to himself, as I often did when I was alone, describing what I had just done and pondering for and against and ending by saying I hadn’t had any choice. But probably he didn’t.

  My whole body was freezing cold, my teeth chattering. I carried my sweater and shirt under my arm, but it was too late to put them on again. The sky was darker now than it usually was at night. My father had lit the paraffin lamp in the cabin, there was a warm and yellow light in the windows, and grey smoke whirled up from the chimney and was immediately beaten down onto the roof by the wind, and water and smoke ran down the slates in a blend that looked like a grey porridge. It was a weird sight.

  The door was ajar. I went right over to the porch and sniffed the smell of fried bacon filtering out of the shining crack. I stopped under the little eave. For the first time in ages the rain stopped slamming down on my head. I stood there for a minute or two, then opened the door wide and went in. My father was at the wood stove making breakfast. I stood on the threshold dripping onto the rag rug. He hadn’t heard me. I didn’t know what the time was, but I was sure he had postponed the cooking as long as he could. Over his shirt he had on an old sweater that was full of holes, which he liked to wear when he was working. He had not shaved since we arrived. His beard was growing. Hairy and free, he would say, stroking his chin. This was a man I liked. I coughed, and he turned and looked at me with his head on one side. I waited for him to say something.

  ‘Blow me, what a wet lad,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘Oh yes,’ I said between chattering teeth.

  ‘Stay right there.’ He pulled the frying pan off the heat, went into the bedroom and came back with a big towel.

  ‘Off with your shoes and trousers,’ he said. I did as he told me. It wasn’t easy. Then I stood there naked on the rug. I felt like a little boy again.

  ‘Come to the stove.’ I went to the stove. He put two new logs in and closed the small door. Through the damper I saw the flames leap up, and waves of heat welled out of the black cast iron, almost painful on my skin. Then he wound the towel round me and began to rub, carefully at first and then harder and harder. It felt as if I was bursting into flames, it was like the Red Indians rubbing two sticks together to make fire. I was a stiff, dry stick, then I became a red-hot mass.

  ‘Look, hold on to it yourself,’ he said. I held the towel firmly round my shoulders, and he went into the bedroom again and came out with clean trousers, a thick sweater and socks. I got dressed very slowly.

  ‘Hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then I didn’t say any more for a long time. I sat down at the table. He served bacon and egg and bread he had baked himself in the old oven, and he cut it into thick slices and spread it with margarine. I ate everything he set before me, and he too sat down to eat. We heard the rain battering the roof and it rained on the river and on Jon’s boat and on the road to the shop and on Barkald’s meadows, it rained over the forest and the horses in their paddock and all the birds’ nests in all the trees, over moose and over hare, and on every roof in the village, but inside the cottage it was warm and dry. The stove was crackling, and I ate until my plate was completely clean, and my father ate with a half smile on his mouth as if it was just any old morning, but it was not, and then I suddenly felt tired and bent over, put my head on my hands on the table and there I fell asleep.

  When I woke up I was lying under the duvet in the bottom bunk, which was really my father’s place. I still had all my clothes on. The sun shone in through the window from the sky behind the cabin, and I realised it must be long after twelve. I pushed the duvet aside and swung myself out of bed and put my feet on the floor. I felt great. There was a tenderness down one side, but nothing to worry about. I went into the main room. The door was wide open and there was sun in the yard. The moist grass was glittering and a woolly carpet of steam hung a metre above the ground. A fly buzzed in the window. My father stood by the cupboard in one corner, taking groceries out of his backpack and putting them on the shelves. He had walked the long way to the shop and back while I slept.

  He saw me at once, stopped what he was doing and stood there with a bag in one hand. It was very still, and he was very serious.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I feel just fine.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, and then fell quiet, and then he said:

  ‘When you were out this morning, were you with Jon, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘We were out stealing horses.’

  ‘What’s that you say?’ My father was taken aback. ‘Which horses then?’

  ‘Barkald’s horses. We weren’t really stealing them. We were just going to ride them. But we call it stealing to make it more exciting.’ I smiled cautiously, but he didn’t smile back. ‘I wasn’t too successful,’ I said, ‘I was thrown off, right over the barbed-wire fence.’ I held out my arm to show the cut, but he looked me straight in the face.

  ‘How was Jon?’

  ‘Jon? He was the same as usual. Except at the end. He wanted to show me the eggs in a goldcrest’s nest high up in a spruce tree, and then suddenly he crushed the whole nest, like this,’ I said and held my arm out again and made a squeezing gesture with my fist, and my father put the last bag into the cupboard, still looking at me and nodding, and then he closed the cupboard door and stroked his bearded chin, and I said:

  ‘And then he went off, and then the thunderstorm started.’

  My father took his backpack over to the door and put it down there, stood looking out at the yard with his back to me. He scratched his neck, then turned and came back and sat down at the table, and said:

  ‘Do you want to know what they’re all talking about at the shop?’

  I didn’t particularly want to know what people were talking about at the shop, but he would tell me anyway.

>   ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The previous day Jon had been out with his gun, hunting hares as usual. I didn’t know why he was so mad about shooting hares, but it had come to be a speciality for him, and he was good, he got one out of two. And that was not bad considering what a small, swift creature the hare was. I didn’t know whether his family ate all those hares. They might get a bit tired of that. Anyway, he came home with two of them dangling by an ear on a cord, and he smiled like the sun, for he had fired two shots that morning, and both had hit the mark. That was a rare triumph even for him. Now he was home looking round for his mother and father to show them his booty, but his mother was visiting friends in Innbygda, and his father was in the forest. In his hurry to go out he had forgotten that, he did not notice who was at home, but it was his job to look after the twins. He put his gun down in the hall and hung the cord with the hares on a peg and ran through the house to find his brothers, but they were nowhere to be seen, and then he ran out into the yard again and round the shed and round the barn, but he did not find them. Now he panicked. He ran down to the river and waded out beside the jetty they had there, turned and looked along the bank upriver, and he looked downriver, but all he saw was a squirrel in a spruce tree.

  ‘Damn tree-bear,’ he said. He bent down to the water and ran his hands through it as if to pull it aside so he could see better, but of course it was pointless, the water only came up to his knees and was perfectly clear. He straightened up and drew a deep breath and tried to think, and then he heard a shot from the house.

  The gun. He had forgotten to make the gun safe, he had not removed the last cartridge, something he always did when he got home. That weapon was the only thing of value he owned, and he had looked after it and polished it and kept it in good order as if it was his baby, and he had done that ever since his father gave it to him for his twelfth birthday, with strict exhortations on what it should be used for, and in particular what it should not be used for. And he always put it at half cock and took out the cartridges and hung it in place in the closet on a hook high on the wall. But now he had just put it down in the hall because it suddenly came to his mind what he had forgotten, that he was the one responsible for the twins, who were at home alone. They were just ten years old.

  Jon splashed out of the river and ran a stretch along the bank, then on in a straight line for the house, and it seemed such a long way, and his trouser legs were wet and heavy right up to the knee, and his shoes squelched and made a squishing sound with each step that he took and it made him feel sick. Halfway to the house he saw his father come running out of the forest on the other side of the farmhouse. He had never ever seen his father run, and the sight of the big heavy man come leaping out from the trees and into the yard with long, pounding strides and his arms clumsily raised to shoulder height as if he was running through water was so terrifying that Jon stopped and sank down onto the grass. Whatever had happened it was too late now, and his father would be first into the house, and Jon knew he did not want to see what had happened.

  What had happened was that the twins had been playing in the basement the whole morning with cast-off clothes and worn-out shoes. Then they came running upstairs laughing, and stumbling into the corridor through the basement door, and there they saw the hares hanging on the peg and the gun leaning against the wall. It was Jon’s gun, that they knew, and their big brother Jon was their hero, and if they had the same role models as I did at that age, he was their Davy Crockett and Hartsfoot and Huckleberry Finn in one person. Everything Jon did could be mimicked and turned into a game.

  Lars got there first, he grabbed the gun and swung it around and shouted:

  ‘Look at me now!’ And then he pulled the trigger. The report and the shock from the butt sent him to the floor with a shriek, and he did not aim at anything, he just wanted to hold the wonderful gun and be Jon, and he might have hit the woodbox, or the small window over the steps, or the photograph of grandfather with his long beard that hung just above the peg in a frame painted the colour of gold, or the light bulb that hung there without a shade and was never switched off so that anyone out in the dark would see its light in the window and never get lost. But he did not hit any of those things, he hit Odd straight in the heart at close range. And if this had been something that happened in a western, those porous pages would claim that the very name of Odd had been written on that cartridge, or it was written in the stars or on one of the pages in the fat book of Destiny. That nothing anyone could have done or said would have made the lines that met in that burning moment point any other way. That powers other than those controlled by man had made the mouth of that gun point in precisely that direction. But that was not how it was, and Jon knew it where he lay huddled up on the grass of the meadow and saw his father come out of the house with his brother in his arms, and the only book where the name of Odd was written and could not be crossed out was the church registry book.

  My father could not have told me all this, not with all the details; but that is the way it is printed in my memory, and I do not know whether I began filling out this painting at once, or if it is something I have done over the years. But the cold facts of the matter could not be contested, what had happened had happened indeed, and my father looked enquiringly at me across the table as if I could say something sensible about all this, because I maybe knew the people in the drama better than he did, but all I saw was Jon’s white face and the rain falling on the rushing water of the river as he pushed off and let the boat drift out and down with the current towards the house where he lived and those who waited for him there.

  ‘Still, that’s not the worst of it,’ said my father.

  Early in the morning, the day before Lars shot his twin brother Odd, their mother had been given a lift to Innbygda in the van that delivered goods to the shop. The following day, the day it all happened, their father was going to fetch her with horse and cart. Their horse was called Bramina, she was a fifteen-year-old bay, a sturdy Norwegian horse with a white blaze and white socks. She was nice looking, I thought, but, not light on her feet exactly, and Jon thought she had a touch of hay fever, which caused her to breathe heavily, and that was pretty unusual for a horse. The trip with her to Innbygda and back took most of the day.

  The father stood out in the yard with the dead boy in his arms. His eldest son lay on the grass completely still as if he too was dead. He knew he had to go. He had said he would. He had no choice. And if he was to get there in time he had to leave at once. He turned and went into the house again. Lars stood in the hall, stiff and silent, and his father saw him, but he could not think about more than one big thing at a time, and he went into the bedroom and laid Odd on the marriage bed, found a blanket and covered the small body. He changed his blood-soaked shirt and he changed his trousers and went to harness Bramina. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Jon was on his feet and walking slowly towards the stable. By the time the horse was between the shafts Jon was there. His father turned round and seized him by the shoulders – much too roughly, he thought later – but the boy said not a word.

  ‘You’ll have to look after Lars while I’m gone. That at least you can manage,’ and he looked across at the steps where Lars had come out into the sun and stood blinking in the strong light. Their father ran a hand over his face, closed his eyes for a moment, then he cleared his throat and climbed onto the box, whipped up the horse and the cart began to move and turned out through the gate and down to the main road, up past the shop and then slowly the long way to Innbygda.

  Jon took Lars out in the boat with him and down the river to fish, he could not think of anything else, and they were away for hours. What they talked about I have never been able to imagine. Maybe they did not speak at all. Maybe they just stood on the bank, each with his rod, fishing; casting and reeling in again, casting and reeling in, with a good distance between them, and nothing around them but the forest and a great silence. That I can imagine.

  When they returned they went
in the barn with their small catch and sat there waiting. Not once did they go into the house. Late in the evening they heard the sound of Bramina’s hooves on the gravel and the cart rolling up the road. They looked at each other. They would really have liked to sit on there for a while longer. Then Jon got to his feet, and so did Lars, and they held hands for the first time since the twins were quite little, and went into the yard and watched the cart come towards them up the drive and stop, and they heard Bramina’s asthmatic breathing and their father’s comforting words to the horse; kind words, gentle words, words they had never heard him say to a human being.

  Their mother sat on the box in the blue dress with the yellow flowers on it, her handbag in her lap, and she smiled at them and said:

  ‘Here I am, home again, that’s nice, isn’t it?’ and she rose, put her foot on the wheel and jumped down.

  ‘Where is Odd?’ she said.

  Jon looked up at his father, but he did not look back, he just stared at the barn wall and chewed as if his mouth was full of tobacco. He had not told her. The whole long way through the forest, just the two of them, and he had not told her anything.

  The funeral took place three days later. My father asked if we should go and I said yes. It was my first funeral. One of my mother’s brothers had been shot by the Germans when he tried to escape from a police station somewhere in Sørlandet on the south coast in 1943, but of course I was not there when it happened, and I don’t even know if there was a funeral.