Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck Read Free Book Online

neither her mother nor her father talked about the dead man in the days that followed. Her father chopped wood and worked on filling the woodshed until late each day. Her mother fished and gave the girls their chores to do around the homestead. The evenings were light and warm. On the little field the grass grew a strong green and the water in the stream rippled clear, topped up by the melting snow from the high mountains.
    Midsummer’s Eve occurred at the end of June, the evening before the birthday of John the Baptist. Six months before that of King Jesus. And the most magical time of the year.
    “Seven different flowers under the pillow,” Jutta used to say every Midsummer’s Eve. “Put seven different kinds of flowers under the pillow tonight and you’ll dream of the one you’ll marry.”
    Maija’s face would become hard. Jutta’s face too, but from fear, not anger. Jutta had said it wasn’t solely good magic that was about on midsummer. The coming night was when the trolls were at their worst.
    Today they were going to the river. All that was fabric had to be washed. Whites, blacks, blues. Dresses — shirts — carpets — curtains. It was the day to rid yourself of the old. Middle of summer. Before winter turned around and started his journey back to them.
    “Wait,” Frederika said. She pointed. “You’re putting the clothes in with the bed sheets.”
    “Oh.” Her mother pulled up a blouse, put it in a new sack. She pushed her hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand, pulled up another piece of clothing, then shoved it back and got up. “We’ll sort it at the river,” she said. “When it’s all out in the open.”
    Her mother was like that: everything at once and in the open.The river was dark blue, its surface dotted and streaked. It ran fast, although it was still a long way to the rapids.
    They lit a fire, filled the large wooden barrel with water, and placed it over the embers. When it boiled, Maija emptied into it the sack containing the birch ashes they had brought to make lye-water. And then she began to put in the laundry. She let it simmer for a while before she swirled the hot fabrics around with a wooden stick, heaved them up and threw them down on the flat stone in the river. Frederika and Dorotea beat the washing with sticks. Clap. Clap. Clap. Out with the old.
    The day was brisk and airy. Frederika’s hands were cold. Still, better than washing clothes in winter when they had to melt snow for water, boil the clothes in the big iron pot in the barn, and carry the wet laundry to rinse it in a hole cut in the ice. And each piece of clothing had to be rinsed three times. By the time they finished, their skirts were frozen solid to the ground and they had to break them loose.
    “The water is dirty,” their mother called.
    Frederika poked at her knees. They were white and lumpy, bitten by grit.
    “Stand beside me,” Maija said. “Watch your feet.”
    They pushed the barrel until it toppled. The frothing water pierced the earth in hot rivulets, striving to join the larger body below.
    They waited for new water to boil. The river smelled of mud and angry stone.
    Midmorning Frederika showed Dorotea how to make a small fire. Their mother sat down beside them. Her hair twirled around her forehead. When she closed her eyes, her eyelids looked like the blue-pink petals of chicory that shut overnight. Across her mother’s top lip was a wrinkle, fine, like a hair. Frederika had never seen it before,but in the daylight it was as clear as a scar. Was her mother getting old? Jutta had been old, her head stooping further and further until she came to resemble a little iron hook. Toward the end they had been the same height, Frederika and her, and Jutta had had to turn her head sideways and up to see her when they spoke.
    I don’t want you to die, she thought, without knowing that notion had been inside her, and she felt a pain cut so deep, it was almost good. She held onto the