the evening, he stops and looks around him at each crossroads, I think of Jesper at the bottom of the harbor basin with clenched hands, the green face that will not breathe, and the pig that drowned without making a sound. Over the sea in the east the weather that has passed lies in a dark line at the far end of the world and it is warm now and a big sky rises like a film of blue over the whole of Denmark and behind it no one knows what there is. Sometimes at night I lie gazing out of the window and up at the sky and force my thoughts through the firmament to see what they meet on the other side, but in spite of what I learn at school, everything dissolves into small pieces and I have to go to sleep or my head starts to ache.
Strandby is north of our town. All the people there are Baptists and fisherfolk, and halfway there I cross the Elling brook. It is deep and green and full of shadows under a bridge across the road, and soon after that another road leads down to the right. It’s just a cart track with parallel wheel ruts, and I cycle first in one and then in the other, it bumps so much I have to stand on the pedals so as not to get a pain in the bum, and then I look out over mustard fields growing a meter high on each side. A puff of wind and everything moves.
And then the road opens up and the walls of crops turn into clover and marram grass and the road ends in a hollow of sand which makes cycling impossible. I wheel the cycle for a while until it cannot be seen from the cart track and hide it in some undergrowth before I walk on, carrying the books under my arm. I slide down a sand dune and come out on to the white beach. I see Strandby to the north and the breakwater there just above the marram grass and my town to the south with the big roof of Frydenstrand health baths as a landmark and straight out to sea are the islands of Hirsholmene with the finger of the lighthouse pointing at the sky. I take off my shoes and carry them and walk barefoot on the sand the sun has shone on all day; it burns my feet at first and after a few meters that is really nice. There is not far to go. On the inner side of the beach black and white spotted cows stand chewing the cud behind a barbed wire fence and on the seaside there are big piles of seaweed and stranded jellyfish drying and slowly dying in the sunshine.
Jesper built the little shack out of the driftwood that always lies strewn around on the beach after gales, and I used to go out and help him, dragging heavy waterlogged trunks and long planks from the beach and laying them to dry in the sun. We imagined they were the wreckage of boats that had been sunk and cast ashore here. But of course boats are not built of wood anymore, and anyway that was just a game we played.
The shack lies between two slanting dune walls and is invisible until you get right up close, it has a turf roof and a view straight out to sea. I walk silently without seeing anyone, it is quite silent and I wonder whether he has gone somewhere else. But there is nowhere else, only Vrangbæk and we go there as seldom as we can. After Grandfather died and Lucifer disappeared there is nothing but coldness in the rooms out there even in summer. We are sent for when it’s time to sow potatoes and mow the first hay and have to work hard for no pay, but that is all.
“You’ll have to go,” says my father and will not come with us even though it is his childhood home. Then Jesper and I cycle out alone, for we have seen them together, Grandmother at Vrangbæk and her only son, and she stands stiffly at the end of the potato rows with a chalk white face and sees to it that our backs are not straighter than necessary, and Jesper curses into the furrows and says:
“That feudal-remnant of a squire’s hag! One day we’ll come back with scythes and pitchforks and there’ll be many of us, and then!” Just what will happen then he does not enlarge upon, but I can see in his face that it will be grim.
After
Norman Russell
Dianna Love
Linda Wood Rondeau
Magdalen Braden
Winston Groom
Jessica Andersen
MAGGIE SHAYNE
Holly & Larbalestier Black
Alison Roberts
Colm Tóibín