Out Stealing Horses

  ‘That’s reasonable enough. I’ll be glad to pay it. Thanks a lot, for your help and the coffee,’ I say.

  I walk out into the shop and pay for the indicator light bulb, and the mechanic’s wife smiles and says, ‘Have a good day,’ and I go all the way out and get into the car and drive home. The little yellow note I have stuck in my wallet has made the immediate future much less complicated. I feel easy and well and think, Is that all it takes? Anyhow, now winter can come.

  Back at The Top I park the car facing my courtyard tree, an ancient almost hollow birch that will come crashing down if I don’t do something about it soon, and I go into the kitchen with my shopping bag, fill the kettle for coffee and switch on the percolator. Then I go and get the chainsaw from the shed and a small round file and a pair of ear protectors that were included in the price of the saw. I fetch petrol and two-stroke oil from the garage and place everything on the flagstone in front of the door in the sunlight that feels almost warm now at its height at midday and go in again and find the Thermos and stand by the worktop waiting for the percolator to finish its cycle. Then I fill up the Thermos with steaming coffee and put on warm working clothes and go out again and sit on the flagstone and start to sharpen the saw with the file as gently and systematically as I can until the edge of each tooth in the chain is sharp and shining. I don’t know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with a forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it.

  Anyway, I did not learn how to sharpen a chainsaw from my father, have not watched him doing it and cannot copy him no matter how hard I search my memory. The one-man saws had not reached the Norwegian forests in 1948. There were only a few heavy machines which took five men to carry or had to be transported by horses, and no-one could afford them. So when my father was going to fell the timber on our land that summer so many years ago, it was done in the way it had always been done in those regions: several men at work with a cross-cut saw, and a hatchet, and the air so clean to breathe, and a horse that was trained and a chain-tow to the river where a stack of logs lay on the bank ready and waiting and drying out and the owner’s symbol cut into each log, and when all was down that had to be felled and the bark stripped off as good as could be, the logs were rolled out into the water with pike poles by one man at each end of the pile, and then a shout of farewell across the river in words so ancient that no one knew their meaning any longer and the flat splash of water and then gently out into the current, picking up speed and then finally: Bon voyage!

  I get up from the flagstone with the newly filed saw in my hand and put it on its side and unscrew the two caps and pour in petrol and fill up with oil and screw the nuts tightly back again. I whistle for Lyra, who comes running at once from some serious digging work behind the house, and with the Thermos under my arm I walk over to the edge of the forest where the dead spruce lies long and heavy and almost white in the heather with no trace of the bark that once covered the whole trunk. After two quick tugs I get the saw going, adjust the choke and let the chain run in the air, there is a howl through the forest, I put the earmuffs on, and then let the saw blade sink into wood. Sawdust spatters my trousers, my whole body vibrates.

  6

  There was the scent of new-felled timber. It spread from the track-side to the river, it filled the air and drifted across the water and penetrated everything everywhere and made me numb and dizzy. I was in the thick of it all. I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I was forest. Carrying my hatchet I waded knee-deep in spruce sprigs and cut the branches off in the way my father had shown me; close to the trunk so that nothing would stick out and get in the way of the shaving tool or get caught up in or injure the feet of the man who might have to run on the logs when the floating timber got tangled up and blocked the river. I swung the hatchet to my left and my right in a hypnotic rhythm. It was heavy work, it felt as if everything struck back from every side and nothing would yield by itself, but that did not bother me, I was worn out without realising it, and I just went on. The others had to restrain me, they took me by the shoulders and sat me down on a tree stump and said I had to sit there and rest for a while, but there was resin on the seat of my trousers, and a prickling in my legs, and I rose from the stump with a tearing sound and picked up my hatchet. The sun was baking, my father was laughing. I was like a man intoxicated.

  There was Jon’s father, and there was Jon’s mother for some parts of the day with her white-blonde hair against the dark green of the trees on her way up from the boat with a basket of food, and there was a man called Franz with a z. He had powerful forearms with a star tattooed low on the left one, and he lived in a little house beside the bridge and watched the river rushing by every single day of the year and knew everything there was to know about what went on on the water. And there were my father and I, and there was Brona. Jon was not there, they said he had gone to Innbygda on the bus a few days after the funeral, but they did not say what he was doing in Innbygda, and I did not ask. What I was worried about was whether I would ever see him again.

  We started in the morning just after seven and kept on until evening when we fell into bed and slept like the dead until we woke with the light and went at it again. For a time it looked as if we would never get to the end of those trees, because you can walk along a path and think that what is around you is a nice little wood, but when each spruce has to be felled with the cross-cut saw, and you begin to count, you can easily lose heart and feel certain you will never finish. But when you are in the swing, and all of you have fallen into a good rhythm, the beginning and the end have no meaning at all, not there, not then, and the only vital thing is that you keep going until everything merges into a single pulse that beats and works under its own steam, and you take a break at the right time and you work again, and you eat enough but not too much, and you drink enough but not too much, and sleep well when the time comes; eight hours at night, and at least one hour during the day.

  I did sleep in the daytime, and my father slept, and Jon’s father and Franz slept, only Jon’s mother did not sleep. When it was break time, and we lay down in the heather each under our separate trees and closed our eyes, she went down to the boat and rowed home to Lars to look after him, and when we woke up she was usually back, or we heard the sound of oars from the river and knew she was on her way. Often she would bring with her things we needed, tools she had been asked to fetch or fresh food in the basket, something she had baked and we all enjoyed, and I could not understand how she managed, because she kept at it as hard as any man. And each time I saw my father lying with half-closed eyes glancing at her as she walked towards us, and I did too, I could not stop myself, and because we did, Jon’s father did as well, in a different way than I had seen him do before, and maybe that was not so strange after all. But I do not think that what we saw was the same thing, for what he saw made him embarrassed and apparently surprised. What I saw made me want to fell the highest spruce and watch it tip over and fall with a rush and a crash that echoed through the valley and trim it myself in record time and strip it clean myself without stopping even though that was the hardest thing to do and drag it to the river bank with my bare hands and my own back with neither horse nor man to help me and heave it into the water with the strength I suddenly knew I had, and the splash and the spray would rise as high as a house in Oslo.

  I had no idea what my father was thinking, but he too put more into it when Jon’s mother was there, and of course she often was, so as the days went by we both grew very tired. But he joked and laughed,
and then I did the same. We were flying high without really knowing why, at least I didn’t know, and Franz was in fine good spirits as well, and with his bulging muscles and peals of laughter he flung out one quip after another as he swung his axe, even once when he was careless and got in the way of a falling tree, and a branch knocked the cap off his head. He dropped his axe and whirled round with a big smile and his hands straight out like a dancer and he cried out:

  ‘I have mixed my blood with Fate and welcome whatever comes with open arms!’ And I could picture him standing under the falling tree heavy and almost bursting with heady juices and stopping it dead with his bare hands, the shining blood running from the red star on his forearm. My father scratched his chin and shook his head, but he could not resist smiling.

  ‘Your dad is taking a chance,’ Franz said during a break. I sat on a stone by the river rubbing my aching shoulders and looking out over the water, and there he was beside me, saying: ‘Your dad is taking a chance felling timber at midsummer and sending it down the river straightaway. It is full of sap, as you may have noticed.’ I had noticed, no question, and it made the work harder, because each log had a weight that was roughly double what it would have had at any other time of year, and old Brona could not pull as many as she otherwise would.

  ‘The whole lot might easily sink. The water level is nothing to write home about either, and it’s getting lower. I say no more. But if he wants to do it now, then we’ll do it now. That’s fine by me. He’s the boss around here, your dad.’

  And he was. I had really never seen him like that before, with other grown men where there was a job to be done, and he had an authority that made other men wait for him to tell them how he wanted things done, and they just went along with what he said as the most natural thing in the world, even though they themselves probably knew better and most certainly had more experience. Until then it had never crossed my mind that anyone except me saw him like that and accepted it, that it was something other and more than a relationship between a father and a son.

  The timber pile by the river grew bigger and bigger until we could no longer get the logs onto the top of it, and we started a new one. Brona came down from the upper parts of our wood and turned into position beside the river where we were working, and there was a clanking of chains and the sun sparkling on the water, and the horse was dark and hot and sweating in large patches and smelling strongly as only horses can, and not like anything I had ever experienced in the city. It was a good smell, I thought, and when she stood still there after a lap I could rest my forehead against her flank and feel the stiff coat rub against my skin and just breathe close to that, and there was no need to drive her or even go with her, for after a circuit or two she knew the ropes perfectly. All the same, Jon’s father went along, with the reins slack, and my father stood by the river ready with his timber hook as long as a lance in a painting of a tournament in England’s age of chivalry. Together they tugged the logs into place as high as they could, and to begin with it was easy, and then it grew harder and harder still, but they would not give up, and eventually it was clear that they had started a competition with each other. When one was about to give up and decided they could go no higher, the other one wanted to go on.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Jon’s father, and they each knocked a hook into one end of the log, and my father shouted:

  ‘Heave!’

  And Jon’s father shouted back:

  ‘Haul away and pull goddamn it!’ And he was scarcely in control, and I realised then that what he was doing was challenging my father’s authority, and they took hold and pulled and swayed so that the sweat poured and their shirts slowly turned dark on their backs and the veins stood out on their foreheads and necks and on their arms as blue and broad as the rivers on a map of the world: the Rio Grande, the Brahmaputra, the Nile. Finally there was no way they could go on, and there was no sense to it anyway, we could just as well start a new pile, which would have to be the last one, because we had kept at it for a week, and now we could see the end of the felling and the stacking, and what we had so far accomplished and the amount of timber we had produced, lying shiningly yellow and stripped on the bank, was so awesome to me that I could hardly believe I had been a part of it. But they would not stop. They were determined to lift up one more log, and then another, or at any rate one of them was, and which of the two it was seemed to shift. They rolled them up against two logs lying crosswise against the pile, at such an acute angle that they ought to have used ropes, standing on the top and letting the ropes down in two loops around the log and up again like a pulley so that the weight was halved when they came to haul it into place. Franz had shown me how it could be done. But they did not do that, they used only their timber hooks, one on each side, and it was so heavy now that it was getting dangerous, for there were no good footholds and it was virtually impossible for them to do anything in harmony.

  It was high time for a rest. I heard Franz call in a mock-desperate voice:

  ‘Coffee! Give me coffee! I’m dying!’ from somewhere near the track at the top, and I stood with aching arms, staring at the two grown men who kept pushing each other along, and they groaned aloud in the heat and would not give up, and Jon’s mother too came down on her way to the boat and the row home to Lars, and she stopped beside me to watch.

  I was aware of her standing there, warm-skinned in her washed-out blue dress, and because she did not go straight to her boat as she usually did, stepping into it and pushing out the oars, I was sure something was going to happen, that it was a sign, and I thought of calling out to my father, telling him to stop all this nonsense he had managed to get himself tangled up in. But I do not think he would have liked that too much, although he often considered my opinion, if I had anything sensible to say, which I often had. I turned to look at Jon’s mother, who at this moment had nothing to do with Jon, or maybe that was precisely what she had, but she was in fact two different people and we were equal in height and our hair equally fair after weeks in the blazing sun, but the face that a moment ago had been open, almost naked, was closing now, only her eyes had a dreaming look as if she was not present at all and looking at the same thing that I was looking at, but at something beyond, something larger than this that I could not fathom, but I realised that she was not going to say anything either, to stop these two men, that as far as she was concerned they could go on to the bitter end to settle once and for all something I did not know about, and possibly that was just what she wanted. And that alarmed me. But instead of letting it drive me off I allowed it to draw me in, where else was there for me to go? There was nowhere to go, not for me alone, and I took a step closer and stood right beside her so my hip was almost touching her hip. I don’t think she even noticed, but I felt it like an electric shock, and the two on the pile noticed, and they looked down at us and for a second slipped out of their roles, and then I did something that surprised even me. I put my arm round her shoulders and drew her close, and the only person I had done that to before was my own mother, but this was not my mother. It was Jon’s mother, who smelled of sun and resin as I no doubt did myself, but also of something more that made me dizzy, just as the forest made me dizzy and on the verge of tears, and I did not want her to be the mother of anyone, living or dead. And the strange thing was that she did not move but let my arm stay there and leaned lightly against my shoulder, and I did not know what she wanted, what I wanted myself, but I held her even closer, terrified and happy, and maybe it was just because I was the nearest one with a shoulder to lean on, or because I was the son of someone, and for the first time in my life I did not want to be someone’s son. Not to my mother, at home in Oslo, not to the man on top of the pile so amazed at what he saw that even though they were in the very middle of hauling and heaving, he straightened up and all but let the timber pole slip out of his hand and that was distraction enough, and Jon’s father, who looked just as surprised, struggled to hold on. But he failed and the log swung like a propeller
all the way round and struck his ankles before rolling at an angle down the pile, and I heard one of his legs break, like a dry twig, before he fell forward shoulder first down the pile and landed on the ground with a thump. It all happened so fast that I did not take it in until he was lying there. I just looked. My father stood alone and off balance on the pile with his timber pole swinging from one hand, the river behind him and the blue sky almost white with heat. On the ground Jon’s father groaned horribly and his wife, whom a moment before I had held so close and gently around the shoulder, had woken from the trance she was in and torn herself loose and run to her husband. She sank to her knees and bent over him and laid his head in her lap, but she did not say anything, only shook her head as if he had been a naughty boy for the seven hundred and fiftieth time, and she was about to surrender, at least that’s what it looked like from where I stood. And for the first time I felt a flash of bitterness towards my father because he had ruined the most complete moment of my life up to then, and suddenly it overwhelmed me, on the brink of rage, my hands shook and I started to feel cold in the heat of the summer’s day, and I do not even remember whether I felt sorry for Jon’s father, who was so obviously in pain; in the leg that was broken and the shoulder he had fallen on. And then he began to howl. Desolate howling from a grown man because he was wounded and maybe too because one of his sons had just died, and another had left home, perhaps forever, what did he know, and at this moment because everything seemed beyond hope. It was not difficult to understand. But even then I do not think I felt sorry for him, for I was so burstingly full of myself, and his wife only rocked her bowed head, and behind me Franz came running heavily down the path. Even Brona shook her mane and pulled at the reins. From this moment on, I thought, nothing will be as it was.