Sundown

The sound that woke Kaisa on Sunday morning was iron on iron.

It came down the shore in slow strokes, three and a pause and three again. She lay still under the blankets and placed it. A bar of old railroad steel hung from a pine below the council lodge, and it was struck for one purpose. The alpha had a word for the whole pack, and he would say it at the morning fire.

She had slept ten hours and felt every one of them. The window was grey. Tansy stood at the door with her tail going.

“That’ll be the weather,” Kaisa told her. “He’s going to tell them about Thursday.”

She dressed in the dark green wool and braided her hair tight. It was the thirtieth day, and she meant to look like someone worth another thirty. His red-and-black shirt hung on the peg by the door. She touched the sleeve as she went out.

His shop was dark and the red canoe was on its rack. He had not come to her step with coffee. She noticed it and thought he must have gone up early.

People were coming out of every cabin along the shore road, in coats, with children by the hand. Nobody spoke to her. That was nothing new, but this morning they did not look at her either. Kaisa noted it as she would have noted a silence in the woods.

The gathering ground lay below the council lodge, on a flat of rock and pine needles above the water. There was a ring of lake stones twelve feet across, with split-log benches round it. She had not set foot there since she was twenty-two. She had walked past it thirty times in a month and had always found something to look at on the other side of the road.

A fire was burning in the ring. A hundred people stood round it, and more were coming.

She stopped at the back, behind the last bench, where an unsworn wolf stood. Tansy sat against her leg. The council was on the lodge side of the fire. Hilja sat very upright with both hands on her cane. Dagny looked at the ground. Urho looked ill. Stefan stood at the end in his good wool jacket, with his hands folded in front of him.

Britta came through the crowd from the south with leaves on her coat. Jari was behind her. Britta’s face was white and furious, and when she saw Kaisa she started toward her. Jari caught her arm and said something in her ear. She stopped.

Kaisa’s stomach went cold. She knew then that it was not the weather.

Anders stepped up to the stones.

He had not slept. She could see it from forty feet. He had a bank envelope in his left hand. He looked round the ring once, and then he looked straight at her. He did not look at the ground this time. Afterward she remembered that most.

“The council sat last night,” he said. His voice carried without being raised. “I’ll give you what was decided, and what I have decided. The contract is ended. Kaisa Rautio leaves Vaara land by sundown.”

For a moment she did not hear the fire, or the lake, or anything at all.

Then it all came back at once. A child was coughing. A murmur ran round the benches, and there was satisfaction in some of it. Under her breastbone the thing that kept track of him leaned toward him exactly as it had yesterday. It had not understood a word. She could have torn it out with her hands.

She had been twenty-two the last time, and every feeling she had went across her face. She had learned a great deal since then. She stood with one hand on her dog’s harness and showed them nothing.

“Anders,” Britta said. It cracked like a branch. “What are you doing?”

“Be quiet, Britta.”

He had not put the word into it, but Britta shut her mouth all the same. Jari had both arms round her from behind.

“She found Kettle Island,” a woman said. It was Elsa Hautala, in her scrubs, at the end of a bench. Her voice was flat. “Nobody else on this lake has found my daughter’s bed. I’d like that remembered.”

“It’s remembered, Elsa,” Stefan said kindly. “It was three weeks ago.”

Anders came round the fire. The crowd opened for him. He stopped in front of her, an arm’s length off, and took the money out of the envelope.

“The contract was six hundred dollars a day for thirty days,” he said, for the benches to hear. “The treasurer paid forty-two hundred on the twenty-fifth of September. This is thirteen thousand eight hundred. That makes eighteen thousand dollars. It is paid in full.”

She held out her hand. He counted it into her palm in hundreds and fifties. His fingers did not touch hers once. The short one was white at the tip with cold. She kept her eyes on the bills.

When he had finished she did not close her hand. She counted it again herself, aloud, note by note, and it took a long time. Nobody on the benches moved.

“Thirteen thousand eight hundred,” she said. “A treasurer told me once never to take anyone’s word.” She folded the money and put it inside her jacket, next to the logbook. Then she looked past Anders. “Mrs. Maki. You signed my paper. Is this the council’s word?”

“It is the council’s vote,” Hilja said. “Three to two. It is not mine.”

“Who has the search?”

“I’ll do what I can with it, Kaisa,” Stefan said. He sounded truly sorry. “I’ve got your board to work from. It’s a fine board.”

“It is,” she said. “I hope you get everything out of it that I put in.”

She clicked her tongue to the dog and turned her back on the ring of stones, and she walked down the shore road at her ordinary pace. Nobody had prepared her for this. Hilja had not said a word, and neither had Jari. She had slept forty yards from the man himself.
***
She packed the way she did everything on a bad day, in order.

The harness went in, and the long line, the bells, the scent bags and the dog food. The map tube from under the bunk went behind the seat of the truck. The logbook, with two flakes of green paint taped into it, stayed inside her jacket with the money. The glove in its bag went into the day pack. She stripped the bunk and folded the sheets, because someone had left them clean for her.

She was lifting the canoe pack over the tailgate when she heard his boots on the path.

“Kaisa.”

“Keep your voice down,” she said, without turning. “Half your pack is watching from the road. You’ll want them to see you supervising.”

He came to the side of the truck and stood where the cab hid him from the shore. He spoke low and fast.

“They locked your father in the ice house last night. Stefan called the council at nine and kept you out of it. He said the pups had tracker’s training. He said Reino was on the water alone the night Mikko went, setting nets. He read them your board, every line that says nothing found. Urho went with him because of the cold, and Ivar followed Urho.”

She put the pack down very carefully. “My father is in the ice house.”

“With a stove and blankets. Eino’s on the door. Dagny’s seen to him.”

“Since when?”

“Eleven last night.”

“Go on.”

“They gave me until this fire. I was to end it in front of the pack, or Urho would call the vote of the howl on the spot. I’d have lost. Stefan would be alpha by noon. He could put a word on me and Britta and Jari, and none of us would ever say his name. He can’t bind you, because you’re unsworn. There’s an old law for that. A pack may drive an unsworn wolf off its ground by force.” His voice roughened. “I’ve seen it done. I wasn’t going to watch forty of them go after you at dusk.”

“And so?”

“So you’re out of their reach by tonight. He thinks he’s won, and he has a front coming on Thursday. He’ll go to them. I’ll be behind that green canoe when he does. I’ll bring them home, and then I’ll come for you, and you’ll have every word of it. I meant none of what I said up there.”

She turned round then. He was grey under the beard, and his eyes were raw. He believed it. That was the worst of it, and it had been the worst of it every time.

“When did you decide?”

“After midnight.”

“Where was I?”

He did not answer.

“I was in that bunk. You’d have had to walk forty yards. Did you come to the door?”

“I stood on the step.”

“For how long?”

“A few minutes.”

“And you thought about it, and you went away again.” She heard her voice hold steady, and she was distantly glad. “You had a whole night. You had my father telling you to wake me, I’d guess, because I know him. You had six hours to knock on a door and say, here’s what they’ve done, what do we do. I might have said go. I might have thought of something better. You’ll never know, because you didn’t ask me.”

“If you’d known, he would have seen it on you.”

“I’ve stood in front of that man for five days and taken coffee from his hand. So has your sister. Don’t tell me what my face can do.” She drew a breath. “You’re going to follow him. Up Ukonvesi, at night, alone. He’s fished that lake in the dark for forty years. What do you do when he puts out his lantern?”

“I’ll keep up with him.”

“I know you’ll keep up. You can outpaddle anyone alive. Then he lands on some island in six miles of them, and he’s gone, and all you’ve got is a shoreline. You told me yourself on the first morning that you can’t read one. You looked at a shore you’d passed ten thousand times and said, I can’t.” Her hands had begun to shake, and she put them in her pockets. “And at Burnt Point you sat at a fire and told me you were not going to do this again. You promised me that. I didn’t ask you for it.”

“I know what I said.”

“I told you what the next time would be.”

“Yes.”

Tansy had come to stand between them. She looked from one to the other and whined. Kaisa bent and lifted her into the cab. Her eyes were stinging, and she did not mean him to see it.

When she straightened she had it under control.

“You’ve refused me in front of them twice now,” she said. “The first time your father bound you. What bound you this time?”

He opened his mouth. She watched him look for an answer. He was an honest man, and she saw him find that there was none. Nobody had laid a hand on his throat. He had simply been afraid for her, and he had let that count for more than she did.

He stood there with his hands open and said nothing.

“That’s what I thought,” Kaisa said.

She went up the step one last time. The red-and-black shirt hung on its peg. She left it there, shut the door of Cabin 3 behind her, and got into the truck.
***
Eino Saari was sitting on a chopping block outside the ice house with a shotgun across his knees that he plainly did not want. He stood up when she came down the path.

“I’m to let nobody in,” he said.

“I’m not asking to go in. I’m asking for two minutes at the door. You can stand right there and hear it.”

Eino looked at his boots. Then he walked ten feet off and studied the lake.

She put her hand flat on the logs beside the hasp. “Isä.”

“I’m here.” His voice came through the planks, dry and near. “I heard the iron. So he’s done it.”

“By sundown.”

“Did he ask you first?”

“No.”

“Hm.” There was a silence. “Did they pay you?”

“All of it. I counted it in front of them.”

“Good.” She heard him shift on the other side of the wood. “You told me in my kitchen you wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I wasn’t. Not by the pack.” Her throat closed, and she waited until it opened. “Are you warm?”

“Warmer than my own back room. Dagny Lund brought a stove and a feather bed. I’ve been worse treated by friends.” He paused. “Kaisa. They’ve put you off the land. That’s the south shore and the east shore. It’s a small piece of country when you look at it on a map.”

She did not answer that. Eino was only ten feet away.

“I’m not finished,” she said. “I want you to know that.”

“I never thought you were. Go on, now, before somebody makes a ceremony of it.”

She took her hand off the logs.

The lake road ran back past the lodge. People stood on porches to watch the grey truck go by. Elsa Hautala was on the hall steps with her keys in her fist. She lifted one hand, and Kaisa lifted hers. Britta was in the kitchen door with her arms wrapped round herself. She did not wave. She looked at Kaisa the whole way past, and it was a look that said this was not settled between any of them.

A quarter mile on, the road bent toward the fork. Kaisa looked in the mirror.

He had walked up from the point. He was standing in the middle of the road with his arms at his sides, bareheaded, and he was not doing anything at all. He was only getting smaller. The pull in her chest stretched out behind her as the truck went on, and it did not let go.

She took the bend, and the pines closed over him.

The Fernberg Road was nineteen miles, and she drove it in thirty-five minutes with both hands on the wheel. The maples in the low ground were bare. Tansy lay with her chin on the gearshift and watched her. Somewhere past the tenth mile Kaisa found her face was wet. She let it be, because the road was empty.

Ely was quiet on a Sunday noon. The sign on the Shagawa State Bank said 12:20 and 37 degrees. The motel on Sheridan Street still had its vacancy sign lit. The clerk was a boy of about nineteen with a hockey game on his phone.

“One night?”

“I don’t know yet. Start with three.”

“Dog’s ten dollars extra.”

“Of course it is.”

He gave her a key on a plastic tag. It was room 6, at the end of the row, with a window on the parking lot.

The room held a bed with a brown cover, a table, and a heater under the window that knocked when she turned it on. She fed the dog. She took the money out of her jacket and laid it on the table. She fetched the first week’s envelope from the bottom of the canoe pack and set it beside the rest. It was eighteen thousand dollars. She had earned every day of it, and she felt no shame in keeping it.

She put the logbook next to the money and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The first time she had driven away from that lake she had gone twelve hundred miles and stopped being a person for a winter. This time she had gone nineteen. She sat in a rented room with her boots on and her dog’s head on her knee, and she was so angry at him that her teeth ached. Under the anger, to the east, there were three children and a cold front and a man who could not read a shore.

After a while she got up and took the map tube from her pack. She unrolled the pencilled sheet on the brown bedcover and weighted the corners with her boots.

The pack’s ground was a narrow strip along the bottom of the paper, two shores of one lake. Everything north of it was water.
***