Rural Highway 511

We turn our heads as we drive past the alternating flashes of red and blue that break the night. We  read about an accident in a newspaper article the next day, think about it for a while but probably never become aware of what remained unwritten, or that circles sometimes close in unexpected ways.

From the local newspaper Södermanlands Nyheter:

“A tragic traffic accident occurred on Highway 511 outside of Otter Bay during last night’s snowfall. A vehicle, according to police reports, swerved to avoid a collision with a deer that came up onto the road, went into a skid and vaulted over the guard rail, plunging through the ice and into the Otter River. One of the occupants is reported missing and assumed to have drowned in the strong currents…”

The village of Otter Bay is at the end of a twisting country road, on the map designated as Rural Highway 511. Legend has it that the dense forest that still surrounds the village was a refuge for brigands and highwaymen well into the 1700´s. It is located on a peninsula that juts out into the Baltic Sea, or as it  is called in Swedish, "Östersjön", the Eastern Sea. It is one hundred and twenty-five miles south of Stockholm in the county called “The Land of the Southern Peoples”, although it is on the same latitude, sixty degrees north as Anchorage Alaska, and only seven hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. The surrounding sea is choppy and rough most of the time and during a normal winter frozen over until mid-March. Icebreakers keep the freight routes open by pushing their armored hulls up on the ice and crushing it, creating a muffled roar that disturbs the frigid stillness and reverberates throughout the surrounding landscape.  My favorite time there is late fall when the first thin ice covers the harbor like a clear pane of glass and the snow covered islands that dot the bay stick up like jagged muffins dusted with powdered sugar. The population of Otter Bay stays steady at about nine-hundred, not counting summer residents. When you look out over the archipelago from the narrow lanes that wind up the hillside to the village, it is easy to imagine Viking longboats setting sail as they did over a thousand years ago for their trading and plundering voyages to the East.

I met Torbjörn Olofsson not long after we had bought and began to renovate one of the 19th century houses on Miller's Road, a story book lane lined with apple trees on both sides and bordering on the Kolmården forest. Torbjörn was a modest, unassuming man with the good looks of one of those heroic, rugged types you can see in the catalogs of wildlife outfitters. His name suited him, it meant Thor’s Bear in Swedish. He was well over six feet tall, thick limbed and solidly built in an old fashioned way with a body hardened by work and the outdoors, and not sculpted by the machines in a gym. He was at home on a boat or in the woods, standing over the stove, or comforting his children. He was a product of the arduous conditions and isolation of the windswept islands where he grew up, and a typical offspring of the self-sufficient people that lived on them. He came from a long line of coastal fishermen who earned their living trawling the great schools of herring that migrated into the bay during the winter and spring, as well as the cod, salmon and flounder that fed on them and were plentiful before the Russian factory boats came in and sucked up all life from the sea. His ancestors also supplemented their incomes by piloting the coastal freighters that carried cargoes of grain and timber through the narrow passages of the bay. Torbjörn was pragmatic and practical, a linear thinker that was ill at ease in the world of broken promises and abstract philosophizing. He used words with a thrift that made you feel that they were a commodity that had to be rowed in from the mainland, speaking them slowly as if he was capturing his thoughts and then forming them before he presented them, and I always had to resist my urge to finish his sentences.

I had first seen him and his wife Eva in the general store. They were a striking couple, so much alike that they could have passed for siblings and when you met them you reflexively turned around to take a second look. I was driving home from town one afternoon and saw Torbjörn trotting through the park to the bus station. He was carrying his two flaxen haired girls, one on his shoulders the other under one arm, both with pigtails and in matching clothes. He had picked them up at their preschool and was racing to catch the bus home. I stopped and asked him if he wanted a lift. It was the beginning of a long friendship. We drove to work together, when it was time to paint our houses or put on a new roof we were there for one another. We cooked for each other and our families celebrated holidays and our children’s birthdays together. Eva and Torbjörn were like an exciting uncle and aunt to our children. Torbjörn taught them to fish and sail a dinghy and play soccer. Eva taught them horsemanship and the names of the birds and plants of the fields and forest. When it was time for their riding lessons she rode her long limbed, spirited jumper Sleipner, named after the god Oden's fleet footed mare, into our back yard followed by her girls on their ponies. We´d open the kitchen window and to the delight of everyone, the grey mare would stick in her massive head and eat apples or carrots out of our hands, ears pointed forward and grunting to show her appreciation.

Eva wasn’t a native of the village. She grew up on the family farm on the other side of the county. Her mother had contracted meningitis as an infant that left her deaf. On a winter morning when Eva was six years old, her mother on her weekly trip to town, took the well-used shortcut through their fields to the bus stop on the main road. The path followed the railroad tracks for a hundred yards before crossing them and intersecting the highway. She walked head down in the biting wind and stepped out onto the road apparently unaware of the tank truck that made its rounds from farm to farm, collecting the morning´s milk. It killed her instantly. Village gossipers speculated as to whether her death was actually an accident, but friends and relatives let her memory rest without question, and her father never hinted otherwise. He waited until Eva was an adult before he told her of her mother’s recurring depressions and the frustrations she had encountered all through her life trying to navigate in the world of the hearing. Eva's memories of her mother had faded, but she still remembered the rudimentary sign language that she had taught her and the guttural sounds that she used to communicate. She remembered how her mother had compensated for her lack of hearing with refined senses of sight and smell. After the accident Eva's father kept interested divorcees and single women at bay and raised his only child by himself.

Even now underneath Eva's poise, I could still see the shards of a tomboy. She learned how to plow and harrow by sitting on her father´s lap, steering the tractor and changing gears before she could reach the pedals and she could gallop a pony before she learned how to ride a bike. They kept a work horse on the farm, a white maned Ardenne palomino, muscular, broad hooved and compact, a robust, functional animal of a different breed than the sinewy thoroughbred  that Eva rode as an adult. While she was growing up, Eva was with him whenever she could, riding him regardless of the weather or mucking his stall without regard to the time of day. When she was twelve she fell off and broke two ribs while standing up on him like a circus princess. Her father condescended to the machine age by keeping a horse as a reminder of  the time when there was something that was alive in the barn, a companion to care for and talk to, and not just the cold metal of the tractors and tillers.

He liked to tell stories from his youth, of how he cut timber in the winter with Eva's grandfather, waiting until the ground  froze and the snow came, selecting the mature trees and pulling the logs from the forest on a sled, their horse patient and strong, a perfectly trained part of the team. He complained that now there were just these gigantic mechanical harvesters that cut and trimmed the spruces and firs to exact lengths, as if they came from a factory. The machines worked day and night and even when the forest floor was soft after a heavy rain or during the melting season. Their monster wheels and caterpillar treads left deep ruts and mutilated the landscape. When they were finished the forest was unrecognizable, ravaged and scarred like a war zone.

Like a lot of farm children Eva went to a small school with several rooms and combined classes in the nearest village. She was a good student and stood out among the other pupils. She was curious and social, an easy learner that seldom got anything other than the highest grades. She was the first one in the family to go to college, and practical farm girl that she was, graduated as a doctor of veterinary medicine. Once she had invited me and my children to a nearby dairy farm to watch while she delivered a heifer that was having difficulty with her first calf. I learned that veterinary work was no job for the squeamish. She put on a thick apron and green rubber gloves that covered her arms up to her shoulders. I soon found out why she had a heavy metal chain with her. She put her gloved arms deep into the braying animal, wrapped the chain around the stuck calf's front parts and asked me to help. We both pulled as hard as we could until the slimy new calf plopped out onto the soft bed of straw.

There was no mystery in what it was that attracted Torbjörn to Eva. When you met her the warmth of her smile was like sunshine no matter how cold it was. She had the erect posture and fluid eroticism of a dancer and the genial manner of someone who found life delightful. While on the job she was confident and matter of fact. Off, she was graceful and charming and drew you in with pale blue eyes that had a speck of green in the irises, a little flaw that only heightened their perfection. Her thick rope of hair was the color of ripe wheat, and she wore it for the most part, in a single braid. Torbjörn met her in high school. They had the same circle of friends, kept contact and became a steady couple after Eva finished her university studies.

When they decided to marry they did it on a cloudless mid-summers day, one of those high skied northern days, when the sun only sets for an hour or two and you can read a newspaper outdoors at midnight.  Eva’s father drove her and Torbjörn to the village church in a wagon that only came out of its shed on special occasions, decorated with wild flowers and drawn by his Ardenne whose mane and tail were braided with yellow and blue ribbons, the colors of the Swedish flag. The village church was a historical landmark from the 15th century. You could still see the stains from the soiled clothing of the copper miners who stood against the inner walls and sought divine protection before they went down into the darkness of the pits that were just a hundred yards from the sacristy door. After the ceremony they celebrated out on Mås Island at the fishing camp that was Torbjörn's family home. His mother decorated their boat with garlands of thin birch branches interwoven with wild flowers and his father ferried the wedding party across the bay.

Torbjörn and Eva bought a rambling old house that they had admired from the first time they walked past it hand in hand. They were expectant and enthusiastic, I suppose like most young couples, with their dreams still untarnished by life. The house was high up the on the ridge where the village bordered the forest, not close to the beach, but still with a grand view of the islands where Torbjörn grew up. It needed modernizing and lot of repairs and they felt that they couldn’t afford it, but when they spoke of it to Eva’s father he said that he'd help them.

He sold fifty acres of mature timber to the logging company despite his misgivings about their methods and gave them the proceeds as a wedding present. He let the loggers take the timber "on the root" as it was called in Swedish, when you sold the logging rights and not the land.  He couldn't sell the land. It had been in his family for generations and he had always been awed by its pathless woods that had been untouched since his great grandfather’s day. He'd let the loggers harvest the timber providing that they did not irreparably destroy the habitat that the forest provided for so many animals and birds.

Ulf Skog was a childhood friend of Torbjörn and like him one of the village's favorite sons, the brightest kid that ever came out of Otter Bay's grammar school. He was a lanky type with unruly rust-colored hair that never seemed to succumb to a brush or comb. He stooped and leaned towards you when he spoke, staring intensely through his round eyeglasses: a Harry Potter precursor long before the books and movies were so enormously popular. He disguised his formidable intelligence beneath an eccentric appearance and a fleece of self- deprecating and self-orientated humor. Torbjörn was the practical one of the two and watched out for Ulf when they began middle school in town.

The townies called the kids from Otter Bay “hicks and hillbillies”. They bullied them and called them inbreeds, but they gave Torbjörn a wide berth, and that went even for his best friend Ulf. They followed one another through the grades until high school. Ulf went on to Uppsala University and then spent two years at the Sorbonne in Paris as a guest student. Torbjörn began working as a model maker in the carpenter shop at the foundry, and then later as a boat builder at the marina in town, restoring and building custom yachts and sailboats. After his university studies and degrees in literature and European history, Ulf taught at a school in Stockholm but didn’t like city living or teaching. Academia bored him and he said that teaching was just regurgitating other people’s ideas and prevented his thoughts from bearing fruit, "like apple blossoms that were exposed to an untimely frost."

He said he missed the village, the birches and pines and the charming red houses with white trim and watching his favorite birds, the great sea eagles when they rode the thermals over the islands of the bay.  He decided that his true call in life was driving a bus, so he took a course that the regional employment agency offered, and got his bus chauffeurs license. He returned to Otter Bay and had driven the route from town to the village five times a day for years.

But Ulf never left the academic life completely, and even if he stopped teaching formally, he never really gave it up, sometimes tutoring the students he drove to school mornings and evenings. As the bright green bus wheeled through the countryside, the  passengers that listened, found him much more interesting than any classroom lecture or textbook. There was a sign behind the driver’s seat that that said “Please don't talk to the driver" but that didn't deter the driver from talking to the passengers.

There wasn't a pub in Otter Bay and he and Torbjörn had always talked about starting a cafe and a second hand book store.  The ideal location was the carpenter shop where Torbjörn had first worked as a model maker.  It was abandoned when the wooden prototypes for the sand molds used in castings were out- sourced to Finland. The foundry let them use it in exchange for repairs and maintenance. A local character, an artist and former owner of the tattoo parlor in town, thought that the old shop could use some decorating and used the café as a gallery.

His grey-blue watercolors depicting the granite outcroppings and cliffs of the islands and coast had begun attracting the attention of collectors and he made much more money selling them to tourists and galleries in Stockholm than he ever did inking bikers. Torbjörn cut logs from the prime virgin firs that grew slowly on the northern slopes of Eva's father’s property and that he had his eye on for future use as suitable boat timber. Using a chain saw he carved and sculpted them into life as if he was working in clay or marble, forming effigies of the woodworkers that had once stood over the belt and pulley driven saws and lathes. The cafe had a treasury of books from a time when books were well made and had hard covers.

It became a meeting place for culturally and politically interested and artsy people from town. It was a perfect forum for Ulf to discuss his thoughts on everything and anything. He was a scholar from the working class and an intellectual force of nature. He enjoyed a good discussion and argued with a soft spoken amiability and logic that had endeared him to both his students and his rhetorical opponents. His favorite subjects were solidarity and social responsibility and he deftly wove them into every discourse.  Torbjörn was mainly interested in reading, serving coffee and listening. He read eclectically, devouring anything that caught his fancy until he exhausted the subject and then moved on to the next.  Of course the cafe´ didn’t make any money but that was never its purpose.

Ulf’s wife Elsa baked most of the cookies and cakes. She was a no nonsense energetic woman built like a lady wrestler, a former national champion canoer and former member of the Swedish Olympic team. She had competed in two Olympics and could beat most men she knew, with the exception of Torbjörn, in arm wrestling. She was a firm believer in excellence through sweat and when she was young she was a common sight in her kayak, rhythmically paddling in any weather from the harbor to the inner islands and back again until the first thin ice forced her to move her training to the cross country ski trail. Kayakers use mostly the muscles of their arms, shoulders and abdomens so she skied by just using her poles, doing endless intervals up the slope we called Heart Attack Hill.

Her lineage could be traced as far back as the earliest parish records allowed. The oldest of  the villagers said that the women on her  mother's side were "jordemödrar" "earth mothers" who were healers and  midwives knowledgeable in the use of herbs and  homeopathic cures, and if you believed the folklore, reputed to have an understanding  of the occult. It was said  that the skills were passed down  from mother to daughter. Elsa´s mother never believed the old wife´s tales,  but Ulf joked often about her ancestors  and sometimes referred to Elsa as" the good witch who watched out for everyone she loved." She had had a crush on Torbjörn since kindergarten and even then would wait  for the boat that ferried him to the mainland and they'd walk together up the hill from the harbor to the village schoolhouse.  

The villagers called him simply “the Doctor” and he would play a disruptive role in our lives. The Doctor had spent the summers in Otter Bay with his family since he was a child and then with his wife after he inherited the  home from his parents. After ten years of marriage he returned to live permanently.  His wife had moved him out of their Stockholm apartment without ceremony after warnings that he never took seriously. Local gossip said she had heard the rumors about his affair with Eva that had begun circulating in the village. That on top of his tryst a few years earlier with one of the nurses at the hospital was the last straw. Her slow burn was over. He had been away at a medical conference and when he came home he found his clothes, books, his guitars and even his piano in the courtyard and the entrance code on the ornate oak door of their apartment changed.

While he was gone she had hired a gang of movers who expediently boxed his belongings and lugged them down the three flights of marble stairs to the courtyard. She put his dog: she never considered it theirs, in a kennel. She never liked it. She didn’t appreciate its playfulness and it always seemed to want to go out at the most inconvenient times and in the worst weather. In the early mornings if they weren't quick to heed it's whining, there could be a puddle in the hall. Its paws scratched up the parquet flooring and its bludgeon of a tail hurt when it walloped her shins. Add to that, during their last dinner party he pushed open the door to the laundry room where he was put to be out of the way, sauntered up to the table to beg a scrap from the guests and right before the crème Brulé was served, laid a stinky fart. She moved the doctor out without histrionics, but her refined exterior hid a hint of something wilder and camouflaged a tart temper and sharp tongue.  She gave him a taste of both when their TV began acting up a few months earlier. When they couldn´t agree on what to replace it  with, and  the days passed, and  she was  tired  of  arguing, she ripped out the cables, carried it to the open French doors, and tipped it over the railing onto the same courtyard where most of his personal belongings now stood securely covered by a thick vinyl tarp.

The Doctor, faced with the fact that he needed a place to live, chose Otter Bay for his new start. He had spent every summer there since he was a child and always loved coming back to the family “camp." The "camp" was actually a comfortable and modernized ten room mansion with an impressive veranda and a magnificent view of the archipelago and the open sea, built by the patriarch of the foundry for its manager in the beginning of the previous century. One of the Doctor's fondest childhood memories  was the smell of the smoke from the birch log fire when his father lit the cast iron stove in the kitchen for the first time every season. As an adult he looked forward to the promise of long summer evenings sitting on the veranda with a drink, watching the fishermen mend their nets and then hang them to dry between poles polished smooth over the years by the sun and wind.

The Doctor grew up as an only child in a patrician home. He was the darling of his parents, suntanned and expensively dressed city dwellers who possessed the discreet but condescending charm of people who were used to always getting what they wanted. He and his family spoke in a way that locals considered high-toned, articulating their words with the educated and nasal dialect of their class, with drawn out guttural R's and a confidently intoned upper-class enunciation that the villagers mimicked when they were out of earshot. They sent their son to an exclusive boarding school that taught him to move through the world with the easy self-assurance and manners of the privileged, behavior that the villagers construed as arrogance. In as much as he spent every summer since he was a child in Otter Bay, he and Torbjörn knew each other by sight, but lived in separate worlds.  When the Doctor’s friends came to visit, Torbjörn regarded them as spoiled preppies.  They didn´t need to wear badges that said “Privileged.”  He saw it intuitively by the way they focused their eyes when they looked at people, never sinking their gaze, the way they carried themselves and the upward tilt of their heads when they spoke.

If you lived in Otter bay it was taken for granted that you owned a boat. People never asked you “do you have a boat” everybody had at least one. We had a seven meter “snipa” a seaworthy double-ender, and if you included our canoe and two sailing dinghies, we had four. The doctor’s boat was a trim day-sailer, a classic mahogany and teak boat with a thick coat of varnish, fast and sleek and easy for one person to handle in moderate seas.  He usually sailed leeward of the islands that stretched like a necklace along the coast and were a buffer for the offshore winds that blew up in the afternoon. On the day that almost cost him his life he had wanted just a little more breeze, wanted to see how fast he could push his boat and feel the thrill of its light  shell skipping over the surf. He disregarded the warning he had heard since he was a boy sailing his first dinghy." Don't stray beyond the mouth of the bay."  In August squalls could blow up as if from nowhere, when the warm moist air from land collided with the cold air from the Baltic. The wind would suddenly change direction bringing with it a pelting rain, violent thunder storms and sometimes hail stones the size of marbles. A gale could begin blowing in a few minutes and whip up a chop that attacked a boat from every direction.

The Doctor felt the wind and sea change without warning and when the first ten footer rolled under him he knew that he was in trouble. The next wave slammed the boat as though it hit a wall and before he managed to rip the sails another crashed over the flank and stern, washing him overboard and capsizing it. He landed underneath and when he came up he panicked. He rose on the crest of each wave and could see the shore less than a mile away and swam towards it in an adrenalin fueled frenzy. After a hundred yards he realized that he would never make it to land and that his only chance of survival was staying with the overturned boat.

He swam back, diving under the highest peaks and swimming for his life until he managed to grab on to the hull. He didn't dare to climb up on it for fear of it sinking. The deep water beyond the land shelf was cold even during the long summer days and his thin limbs began shaking uncontrollably. His hands had quickly turned to icy clumps. He knew what was happening. He recognized the symptoms of hyperthermia. Blood was concentrating around his vital organs, he was losing the sensation in his extremities and he stopped feeling so cold. He said later that he must have been in the water for a few hours and despite his life jacket was losing hope of being able to hold on much longer. It was then he realized that he was no more than an insignificant intruder on a vast and alien expanse of sea, and as evening neared, he was convinced that he was going to drown unnoticed. He heard the rhythmic dunk of a diesel engine even before he saw its source, but was too cold and exhausted to feel any kind of jubilation.

Birger, Torbjörn’s father, was a tall, gangly islander with the weathered, unshaven look of someone who spent more time at sea than on land. His body was knotty from a lifetime of hauling nets and he could outwork most men half his age. He had fought the wind and waves in the Baltic almost every day and knew how treacherous they could be if you lost respect for them. When boaters spoke about the unpredictability of the elements on our stretch of coast he said empirically, “be prepared  when you are at sea" and added with a controlled seriousness as though disaster was always lurking nearby, "there are very seldom pleasant surprises." He had been fishing beyond the outer islands and was on his way back to port when the storm hit. A blustery arctic wind began to blow as two weather fronts, one from the north, one from the south collided. The sea and sky blended to the same charcoal color and the whitecaps were the only thing that marked where one began and the other ended. His trawler, a traditional broad beamed double ender, rolled and pitched but rode the waves easily, its hull and keel letting their slopes and swells slide under, as it was designed to.

He was watching a group of grey seals who’s furred, sleek heads were effortlessly bobbing up and down in his wake. He always felt that their whiskered mouths were turned up in a smile mocking him when they played around the boat and he was unsentimental in his feelings toward them. They destroyed his nets and stole his fish and he'd shoot every one he could if it wasn't strictly against the law. While he was watching them he thought  he saw something out of the corner of his eye, something out of place on the familiar seascape a half mile to starboard, no more than a  prick on  the metal grey water. He turned and gave full throttle and saw the capsized sailboat through his binoculars, foundering on the crests of the waves with a man clinging to hit.

He came in as close as he could, riding the swells, missing, gunning the Volvo diesel, backing, missing again, and finally finding an angle where the wind wedged the sailboat against the hull of his trawler. He let the motor idle and quickly made a harness that the doctor managed to slip over his shoulders and under his arms and with the strength acquired from fifty years of hauling up nets pulled him on board. He helped him out of his sodden wind-stopper and loaned him a sweater and trousers from the hold, wrapped a blanket around him and sat him shivering in the wheel house out of the wind. Before he headed in, he cut two hundred feet of nylon rope from the net winch and tied marker buoys to the sailboat's hull to make it easier to locate in case it sank. The thick rope could be used to hoist it to the surface. On their way back to port he radioed the coast guard and reported that there was a capsized boat drifting on the eastern side of the inlet to Otter Bay and that the owner was on board with him. He said the boat would need to be salvaged and gave them its precise location and said it was marked by one of his buoys. He docked and helped the doctor home, still shivering and subdued.

Fishermen aren't like other people.  The cold was a fact of life, cold water part of the job. It never occurred to him that the doctor might need to go to the hospital. He took kindling from a basket on the porch and lit a fire in the stove, sat the doctor next to it, pulled down a bottle from its shelf and poured two whiskies. The doctor’s usual self-confidence was gone. He was thankful and embarrassed and as he thawed out and the pain left his limbs, the endorphins after the shock and the strong drink loosened his tongue. He talked non-stop about the squall, the waves and how the wind suddenly shifted. He realized that he had to get to safety quickly but was broadsided, and found himself under the boat, then struggling to the surface and as the boat was drifting away, swimming for his life.

Birger was still in rescue mode, stern and businesslike and didn't tell him that he would be fish food if instinct hadn't prompted him to turn his head just a few degrees more. He played down his part in the drama and refrained from chastising the doctor for his foolishness. With his knowledge of the Baltic and its archipelago he knew how treacherous and unpredictable it's currents and winds could be. He had seen a lot of mishaps due to poor boats and bad seamanship and like every seaman he was superstitious and convinced that if you listened, every place left an echo of past events and that you could learn something from them. He didn’t mention to the doctor that one morning a few years earlier he had found another small boat bobbing on the waves in about the same place, overturned and empty. The water was over two hundred feet deep and the body of the owner had never been found.

Otter Bay is steeped in history and initially grew up around the kilns that were established there in the 1500´s to melt the copper and iron ore that were mined in the area and utilizing the charcoal that was made from the plentiful wood from the surrounding forest. The iron works originally manufactured cannons and shot for the powerful Swedish Royal Navy, and today makes cast aluminum machine parts for industry. The foundry still employs most of the men and even many of the women from the village as it did their parents and grandparents and the generations before them.

The residents of Otter Bay, like most people of small means are hardworking and modest. When they see something they shouldn’t they turn their backs or look the other way, but they still enjoy a bit of gossip when it comes along, not so much for the dirt but for the intimacy it afforded. Their kid’s weren´t expected to study; a job in the foundry or the steel mill twenty miles away waited for most of them. The blacksmiths and molders who worked the forges said that there was no delinquency in the village because “When there´s a troubled boy we take him under our wings in the foundry and help him find a little direction in his life.” Old men, mostly pensioners from the foundry or fishermen who’s life on the Baltic´s brackish waters hadn´t left their blood, sat on the “tall stories bench” with their backs against the boathouse wall and their faces turned to the sea, while they waited for the  boats  to  come in with the days catch.

They amused themselves by watching the “Sunday sailors” clumsily docking their expensive yachts and sailboats. Like many places that had preserved their environment and traditions there was a struggle going on between the present and past. An influx of affluent people, “fast fooders” Ulf called them. They were urbanites who were attracted to the village’s charm and it´s unspoiled beauty who people thought were changing things with their pushy city ways. Gentrification was threatening the village that attracted these well-heeled refugees, looking for the simple life in their expensive houses with their own beaches and sailboats tied at private docks and shiny SUV.s in their driveways. The new residents carried themselves with an inferred superiority. They paid prices for houses and sea front land that locals couldn’t afford, their mere presence changing the way of life that had first attracted them. They caused friction in a place where change had always taken place slowly and social interaction was governed by a codex called Jante Lagan “Jante’s Law,” unwritten rules, sprung out of an austere Lutheran tradition where all feelings of personal worth and pride are strained through a sieve of self-deprecation.

The foundry provided housing  for its workers as part of their salary until the 1930's, and a portion of their pay was in goods; they received wood for their stoves and ovens, tokens for milk at the company dairy, vodka from the company distillery and potatoes from parcels of land that that were allotted to every family. Conveniences like indoor plumbing and heating didn’t exist. Water was warmed on wood burning stoves and people braved the cold to use the outhouse. There was a community bath, a small stone building where water was heated in cauldrons. The women did laundry once a month, boiled it in cast iron vats and then took it down to the river to rinse it, sometimes breaking a hole in the ice to do so. In this patriarchal system trade unions were not permitted, and when unionism was growing, organizers fearing reprisals, held the first meetings in the woods where the village school now stands.

There is a stone that the speakers used as a podium  alongside the playground with a bronze plague  commemorating those first gatherings. The foundry kept its archaic semi-feudal system long after the rest of the country had improved its standard of living and membership in a trade union was a rule rather than an exception. The workers took off their caps and bowed respectfully when they met the mill owner and his foremen. Lowest in the hierarchy, they showed respect for authority out of necessity, but they were proud, and if they could, avoided being indebted to anyone.

Elsa's grandmother the village midwife and a knowledgeable herbalist, was often called on when someone was injured or ill. She told a story that illustrated the point. Carlsso,n a stable hand, was mucking out the stalls that housed the foundry's work horses. He found a dead hedgehog among the straw bedding and manure. When he picked it up to throw it out he pricked himself on one of its quills, an innocent enough scratch, but it was before the discovery of antibiotics. There wasn't anything Elsa's grandmother could do. A week later he died of septic shock from the infection that spread its black threads first up his arm and then into the rest of his body. After his passing, his widow was allowed to stay on with her children in one of the small cabins provided for the workers on the outskirts of the village. Someone told the mill foreman that the widow could be seen in the mornings sneaking into the company woodshed and taking fire wood.   The owner approached her about her thefts and said that she didn’t have to steal, that he would let her take all the wood that she needed. Feeling that it was better to be accused of theft rather than being indebted to him, she pulled her shawl tighter around her greying hair and replied “I’d rather steal my wood.”

During the late stone and Bronze Age the trail that would become Route 511 connected the small settlements that grew up along the river bank just where it's lazy flow begins to pick up speed on its way to the sea. Through the centuries the trail grew to a cart path and then a road that followed the original track and was now wide enough for two cars to pass if they hugged the shoulders. There was a stretch a few miles outside of the village where signs warned for dangerous curves and wildlife crossings. Survival instinct told you let up on the accelerator and ease your car through the bends and dips, especially if the temperature was below freezing. The county council had tried, to no avail, to persuade the highway department to straighten it, or at the very least strengthen the guard rails. In the winter the snowplows keep after the drifts but the road is banked at the wrong angle, first deceiving and then punishing aggressive drivers. A careless or unobservant motorist could easily get in trouble there and occasionally you came upon wrecks laying on their sides or on their roofs: someone had underestimated the dangers of the road or overestimated their abilities behind the wheel.

It was a bright spring morning. Mist was rising from the river, “elves dancing” local people called it. What I remember most about the collision was the moose’s long, graceful strides as it moved onto the road. Torbjörn and I were on our way to work in the car that we jointly owned, I took care of the repairs and maintenance, and he paid the gas and insurance. We had driven together for years, watching the seasons change as we drove along the river through the forest and fields. We usually didn’t speak, it was a shared silence and not uncomfortable. Our daily commuting was synchronized to the news broadcasts so we just listened. When I tried to make conversation it was usually just my monologue with an occasional nod from him, or a “ja” or “nej” while sucking in breath in that economical way of answering that Swedes used. That particular morning I was lost in my own thoughts, Torbjörn was scouring the terrain, shifting his gaze from left to right, squinting against the low hanging sun.  He was scouting the forest on both sides of the road, looking for moose or deer that were going down to the river to drink.  He was an experienced hunter, always taking an inventory of game that eventually might find its way into the cross hairs of his rifle sight and then onto his table.

As I maneuvered through the curves he said matter of factly, "moose", "moose" again a little louder and a half octave higher "MOOSE" he shouted and I finally paid attention. I hit the brakes hard and heard the hacking of the Saab’s ABS. Crashing into an eight or nine hundred pound moose square on was like hitting a tree trunk and if its head went through the windshield you could be impaled on its antlers. I aimed instinctively for its hind parts, hit it mid-on as though it was a tunnel that I was driving through.   Its underbelly, grey and bristly, covered the shattered windshield, it’s long, fragile legs hung limp, dangling for a moment on either side of the Saab's hood before it slid off.  The colossus lay on its side in the road twitching, trying to get up and falling, its legs flailing in fear as if it was running away from danger. Blood ran from a wound on its abdomen staining the coarse grey hairs and forming a pool on the asphalt. It tried to get up again, got on its knees, fell.

Torbjörn told me in a quiet voice to walk away and turn my back. I heard the trunk lid open and the rattling of tools as he rooted around and found a small ax, then the dull thud of the sharp metal against bone. He brought down the axe without flinching but came back to the car with a bit of the light gone from his eyes. He said that the animal was suffering and would otherwise die slowly and putting it down was the only acceptable thing to do. Had Torbjörn shot it during a hunt, he would have laid out a bed of fir branches and gutted it on the spot, left the entrails for  the foxes and  crows and  fed the liver to the dogs.

I hitched to the nearest farm house and called the tow truck and the farmer drove me back with his tractor and wagon. We tied a thick rope around the animals back and middle and used the tractor´s bucket to lift the carcass onto the trailer. Even if it was road kill, it was fresh and nothing would go to waste.  On the way home that evening, we saw it skinned and hanging in the farmers shed. The doors were open, and a group of men were butchering it. The meat that was unsalvageable because of the wound made by the collision would be ground and used to feed to the dogs. They had probably gotten the heart and lungs already. The skin would be salted and sold to a tannery in Dalarna, one of the provinces farther north. We caught a ride to town with the tow truck. He dropped us off at the railway station café. We were going to be late for work and might as well stop and eat something first and get the morning's trauma out of our systems, and Torbjörn had said that something was bothering him and he had been wanting to talk with me about it.

We both liked the café, mostly because it was a workingman's hangout without frills or pretending to be something it wasn´t and served good sized portions, of if not entirely healthy, always tasty food.  Torbjörn always said that he was most at home in the company of the men that ate there every morning, the street cleaners and trash collectors and the city workers that plowed the roads and took care of the parks. He ate his favorite breakfast, small meatballs on thick rye bread with a slice of ham, liver pate and with a dab of dressing made from finely chopped beetroot and sour cream. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and hesitating between sips of coffee, asked me if I noticed anything different about Eva. He said she seemed distant lately and wouldn´t say anything when he asked her what was wrong. “Not really,” I said. “She´s hanging out with all those women at the stable, they’ve got some strange ideas." Some of them were breaking up, starting new lives and I had a theory that they were synchronizing their divorces, like it was reputed that women who lived together synchronized their periods. I suppose I knew that even if Eva and Torbjörn were a beautiful couple and seemed so well matched that they had the same problems as everyone else, and could get bogged down in boredom and pettiness..

Sooner or later everyone came into the village store. It stocked just about everything you needed for life in the country. It was a post office, sold groceries, cement, building materials, tools, fishing gear and had gas pumps. You could order medicine from the pharmacy in town and its employees even kept tabs on the village's older residents, helping them to shop and pay their bills. The store's bulletin board was a central reference point and Maj-Britt Ek, besides being the manager and the store's jack of all trades, was also one of the indispensable fixers in the village, friendly and helpful to all. She had known Torbjörn since he was a gangly school boy with sun bleached hair and a quiet charm. Like every kid in the village he came into the store on Saturdays to buy penny candy and she had watched him grow up.

She was childless and a widow. Her husband, a local fisherman that dulled his periods of depression with booze, borrowed a pistol on the premise that his dog was old and ill. He said that he was going to put it out of its misery. He shot the dog in the woods and then turned it on himself  in the garage. She and Torbjörn had begun a relationship a few years after his death when Torbjörn had finished high school. After their affair had run its course, she had felt a need to watch his back like an older sister or friend might look out for a younger brother. It was a habit that she kept even though he had become a husband and father. When he came into the store one afternoon she took him aside and told him to keep an eye on the doctor. When he asked why she said, “that she thought he was a little too interested in Eva.” In reality she had seen them walking together on a side street in town holding hands, but she kept that part of her reason for warning him to herself.

After our second cup of coffee he finally blurted out that he had seen five or six lines on notepaper that the doctor had written to Eva and she had left among a stack of mail as though she unconsciously wanted him to find it. When I asked what it said, he only answered, “he doesn't give a shit if she's married and has two kids, or that he'll take my family from me. He’s completely indifferent and thinks that it's his right ." I tried to comfort him by telling him the story about the birds that came to my window and ate from my hand. I said that they trusted me, felt safe and secure. They picked crumbs of bread from my open palm, flew off, came back and then were gone a few days and came back again.  If I closed my hand and frightened them they would never return.

I told him that I thought that Eva was just confused, and searching for something that she thought was what she needed and continued, "She wasn’t necessarily running from him and their life," but he wasn’t listening. He seemed numb. The tears welled up, burned under his eyelids, but stayed there. I realized then what I always had known, that the partners in a relationship were always unequal. The one that loved more was always in the power of the other that loved less.

Nobody was anonymous in the village. Eva knew who the doctor was, but first spoke to, or rather reprimanded him one afternoon when she was exercising her horse on the coastal trail. It was her favorite ride and she took it as often as she could. The doctor’s dog was running loose along the path and before he could leash him, had circled her, barking and growling. The mare stamped and whinnied and Eva reined her in, then with complete control brought her up on her hind legs for a few seconds, just long enough to chastise and intimidate the doctor. As she patted the horse's sweaty neck and calmed her, she looked down and asked the doctor sharply if he was aware that it was forbidden to have a dog unleashed on the bridle path. He apologized several times and turned up at the stable a few days later with the pretext of apologizing again, this time with a bottle of wine as a peace-offering: and an invitation  that if she ever rode by his house on Ferry Road that she could come in and he would treat her to tea and whatever else he had that was of interest. She said that she´d think about it, the stable was half a mile from Ferry Road on the southern side of the village. If you cut through the woods you came up behind the doctor’s house on the cliffs without having to go out onto the road. Torbjörn never asked Eva why she spent so much time with the horses lately; he just assumed that with the pressures from her job and the children that she needed time for herself.

Eva and Torbjörn hosted a smörgåsbord every year for their friends, mostly Eva´s friends as it turned out, people that she thought were interesting or were drawn to her and whose friendship she cultivated. The doctor eased himself into the group and at the time Torbjörn didn´t pay it much mind. My wife and I were there, family friends that we were, and Ulf and some couples that Torbjörn had grown up with and worked in the foundry, all in all about thirty people. I sensed an imaginary line that divided the guests. It separated those whose ancestors and relatives were buried in the graveyard that surrounded the village church and those who weren't. We helped in the kitchen while our kids played together and then went to bed. The idea of a mid-winter feast was an ancient tradition that Torbjörn and Eva kept alive and that went back to times when travel was difficult and friends and relatives didn´t have a chance to meet often. The food was all local, wild game, berries and mushrooms from the nearby forests, fish from the bay, crayfish from the river, breads from rye and wheat  that came from the fields that bordered the village and then stone-ground at a nearby flour mill.

The guests trudged up the torch lit path to the front door. They stamped the snow from their boots and put on the indoor shoes and slippers that they carried in bags and baskets. They chatted and laughed, light headed and garrulous from the sudden warmth and the expectant smells of Torbjörn's cooking.They left their shoes scattered around the hall. Torbjörn said that every pair told a story about their owner and that there wasn’t anything sadder than a pile of shoes, abandoned, scuffed and wet, some needing repair others new and expensive. He left his indoor shoes, handmade from the softest calf skin and a gift from Eva, in the closet. It was his discreet way of protesting against those small and unspoken rules of etiquette that defined the classes. People with social pretensions maintained that going around in stocking feet at a social function was boorish and typical of the working class. The doctor stood with a drink in his hand, looked down at Torbjörns´s stocking clad feet and wrinkled his nose. Torbjörn went about his duties as host unconcerned about his guest’s social codes, and to rub it in, had purposely chosen a pair of socks with a hole in the toe, provocatively holding up his middle finger to the higher castes. Ulf and I were the only ones that understood this subtle protest. 

Torbjörn had made most of the furniture in the house. He sat at the spacious table he had designed and crafted from the thick pine boards of a condemned barn, sawing and planning them carefully joining them and giving them new life. He watched his guests eat the meal that he prepared from the ingredients that he had picked, hunted and fished. I sat watching the doctor. He was a person that owned expensive things and expected people to listen when he spoke but I always felt that there was something false in his personality. It seemed to me that empathy didn’t come naturally to him that emotions were something that he learned like memorizing the lines in a play. I watched him eat slowly, meticulously picking each kernel and grain from his plate and chew it methodically. I remembered seeing a sample of his hand writing, miniature and perfectly formed, but so small that three rows of text would fit between the lines on a yellow legal pad.

The dinner conversation continued to wander from subject to subject, village politics, national politics the world situation. Torbjörn had difficulty breaking in. As usual Eva’s guests dominated the discussions; locals called them red wine socialists. The more they drank the more convinced they were that they were the only ones that had the right solutions to the world's problems. They were articulate “besserwissers”, “know it alls”, used to hearing themselves talk and enjoying the monologue. The chatter continued, mostly banalities and village gossip. The guests around the table spoke with the moral certainty that people had after four or five shots of vodka. The doctor on the verge of intoxication   monopolized the conversation, ranting his alcohol inspired aria, talking about the need for oppressed peoples to rise up against their governments much like what was taking place in the Soviet Union and Africa. After waiting for the doctor to take a breath,  and finally succeeding in getting a word in, Torbjörn  told them the story about the time that he and Ulf met with a group of political dissidents, representatives from the then newly formed Polish trade union, Solidarity. There was an exchange of ideas between them and the audience. Torbjörn said that he was disappointed. He had expected to meet factory workers, welders, carpenters, miners, and instead there were university people, engineers, lawyers and professionals from the affluent educated classes and he thought it arrogant and elitist to think that academics considered themselves chosen to change the world.

The doctor replied with  a note of  condescension, “revolutionaries are like the inch worm whose head moves forward and then drags up the body and the tail.”  Torbjörn unruffled replied, “You may be right but in any event the poor and uneducated always pay the highest price for lofty political ideals. When soldiers go to war it’s always the civilian population that suffers.” “It’s sometimes a cheap price to pay” countered the doctor. Ulf chimed in, clowning like always. He raised his brows, rolled his eyes, and imitating the  French accent of Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther films, quoted Jean Paul Sartre. “When the rich fight for their ideals it is the poor people who die.” Everyone laughed. The doctor unsuccessful at hiding his irritation, tapped on his glass with his fork to get everyone’s attention.  With an affected bonhomie, he called out, “Here, here” “skål” --- for the erudition and  common sense of the working man, naive as he may be. ” Ulf raised his glass in return and replied with his lips turned upward  as  if the doctor had just said something amusing, “Skål for  red wine liberals. We ‘re happy to have you come and enlighten us, but we´re never sorry to see you go.” As the talk continued Torbjörn’s attention had turned elsewhere. He sat still, balancing a knife on the tip of his forefinger, motionless except for his eyes that had glazed over to a feral stare, grey and steely, watching the doctor as he made an excuse to leave the table and join Eva in the kitchen. He didn't miss the doctor stroking Eva´s cheek with the back side of his hand, just a little brush of the fingers against skin, but still an intimate gesture reserved for lovers.

Between courses Eva and Ulf cleared the table and stoked the log fire that had burned down to glowing amber coals. At Torbjörn’s urging we put on our boots and parkas and followed him out to look at the night sky. He gave us a lesson in astronomy, guiding us around the constellations and more prominent stars and planets as easily as he would the back lanes of the village. It was a crystal clear northern sky and it was below freezing but we didn’t notice. It was typical of him. Raised in isolation he had found ways to amuse himself. One might think that growing up on an island would have stifled his imagination, but instead isolation fueled it. As a child, the stars were his diversion. With youthful curiosity he could lay on the dock for hours bundled in a parka and a sleeping bag looking at the Milky Way in the clear winter night and dream of the fantasy worlds he read of in the books of Arthur Clark and Isaac Asimov. 

While everyone gathered around the fire to warm themselves a guitar came down from its hook on the wall and made the rounds. The doctor was first, tuning it, playing a few chords and then tuning it again. He complained about the instrument’s quality and then gave a little discourse on the tonal intricacies of a proper flamenco guitar. He was an accomplished guitarist and played a  flamenco, Malaguenia, a composition that was to flamenco guitarists as "When the Saints go Marchin' In" was to New Orleans jazzmen. He  explained that it was a song from Malaga on the Spanish coast, once a small fishing village like Otter Bay.

Eva was giving the doctor looks that I interpreted as something other than admiration for his  playing. He was very good but both Ulf and I agreed privately that he played with more precision than passion. Ulf maintained that flamenco was the music of gypsies and poor people and was better played with soul than perfection. The guitar made the rounds. Ulf said he would continue the sea theme and sang "Titanic” a song about class discrimination and death at sea, imitating the manner and southern Swedish dialect of the well-known  troubadour  Mikael Wiehe.

Eva was a country and blues enthusiast and asked me to play. I caught her eye for  just  a brief moment and then played an early Bob Dylan ballad,  "Girl from the North Country," one of his rough-edged, exquisitely understated laments of loss and  longing and thought  of her and Torbjörn. I began “If you´re travellin' down the North Country fair where the wind hits heavy on the border line..."

Not long after the party, Eva said that she needed to talk to Torbjörn and that she´d bring the kids over to us to play. Our kids were always together and as close as siblings. Torbjörn knew what she was going to say.  A while before she had asked him when he was happiest, “When I’m with you, and can wrap my arms around all three of you at the same time,” he answered. “Is that all, she asked?” “When are you the happiest,” he wondered. But she let the question go unanswered, letting it fall between them, answering instead with silence. The light that came through the windows shrunk to pinpoints.  He thought he was dreaming the scene when she said bluntly, “I have found someone else.” She said she was seeing the doctor and was going to leave him: that she would move in with him as soon as things were settled and they could have the children on alternating weeks.” He said when she brought it out into the open that it felt like he was falling from a cliff. He compared the feeling to those long seconds before you hit the ground in the valley that you had just been peacefully admiring.

Torbjörn called the next night. Eva hadn´t come home. It had snowed. The roads were slippery and wouldn't be plowed until morning and he was worried, said she should have been home long ago.  It was bitter, the temperature had fallen to below zero after the storm and there wasn’t much traffic and there was a possibility that she might be stranded in a drift or had driven off the road.  He brought the kids over; they had on pajamas under their snowsuits and were more asleep than awake. We met him as soon as he pulled into the driveway, took the children  and tucked them in upstairs in the spare room adjoining our children's, stopping to listen to the peaceful cadence of their breathing as they nestled under their quilts.

The doctor left his Land Rover at the shop that afternoon and hitched a ride to the clinic. His colleagues chided him and said that the only thing that didn’t wear out on it was the driver’s seat. That evening he stayed late to catch up on the stack of journals that seemed to grow higher every time he turned his back.  He called Eva and asked her to meet him there when she was finished working and give him a lift out to the village. He unlocked and let her in, all the other personal had gone home long before. They made perfunctory love on his sofa. Eva was distant, but the doctor didn´t notice; for him it was an affirmation of ownership rather than a display of affection or passion. Afterward when they sat in the personnel room and talked about their future, his divorce, the house, and the kids and what Torbjörn was going to do, Eva in tears, said she had told Torbjörn the day before that she was leaving him. She said to the Doctor that she had difficulty juggling her emotions, that her separation wouldn't be as easy as she thought. She told him that Torbjörn lived for "us, his children and me".

The doctor's reply was a little too quick and blithe, “No problem for him. Women will stand in line. I just read that there was a survey taken among career women in New York – When they were asked what kind of a man that they’d want to live with they said a Swede. One of those silent Alfa males who goes out into the woods and hunts, is handy and chops wood and stays home and takes care of the kids. He can get it together with a New York type.” They continued to talk as they drove.

The doctor’s dog was in the back. He took it to the clinic when he worked in the evenings and left it in the vacant personnel room. His co-workers were irritated but he said it was only temporary until he found someone to take care of it. That was months ago. The doctor listened patiently to their complaints with feigned attention but didn´t take them seriously. He was the highest in the hierarchy of the clinic and was used to getting his way. If his upper class charm didn’t work he just did what he pleased.

There is a moment when a link in the chain that holds our lives together breaks, changing its course in an instant, after which nothing is ever the same. In the s-curve a few miles before you came to the bronze cannons that marked the entrance to the village, a stag came up onto the road and stood still, blinded by the Volvo's high beams. Eva startled, turned the wheel hard to avoid a collision. The car spun around, hit the guard rail and vaulted over it, rolling down the bank into the rushing water. The doctor was shocked but conscious. His dog was no longer a pampered pet. It was thirty frightened kilos of muscle and sharp claws that was hopping between and over them in the dark, its weight pushing them down and its flailing paws ripping their faces and scalps.

Eva struggled in the freezing water. Her waterlogged parka was a strait jacket that restricted her movements. Her weight had pinned the doctor against the passenger door and he had struggled to keep his nose and mouth above the icy water. His seat belt gave him support and he clutched his life line in stunned panic. He was bleeding from his head. She reached down between the front seats, groping, and after what seemed like minutes rather than seconds found the buckle. As the belt lost its tension the pressure that was holding him up disappeared. She held him up with one hand and found the handle and forced open the door. The dog jumped out over them and disappeared. They both slid out into the water. She slipped on the bottom, lost her grip on the doctor and watched helplessly as the current dragged him down stream.  She crawled through the snow on her hands and knees up the bank.

When Torbjörn came to the curve along the river, he saw the damaged guard rail and Eva standing in the road. She was incoherent and in shock from the crash and her wet clothes were stiffening in the bitter cold. She screamed “help him, he's in the river.” As he led her to the car and covered her with his parka, he realized that she had been with the doctor. He saw where they had broken through the guard rail and the fresh tracks in the snow where the car had rolled down the steep bank into the icy torrent fifty feet below. The front end was submerged among the stones and ice, the rear end sticking up like a swan feeding on the bottom. Torbjörn slid through the snow, lost his footing and stumbled down the bank. It was pitch black except for the beam of his flashlight cutting a thin swath through the darkness.  On its way to the sea the river dropped, churning against the rocks, creating eddies of cascading white water. Branches hung low, weighted down by the ice that formed from the spray.

The doctor caught a bough with both hands and managed to hold on. It gave him a temporary respite from being washed farther downstream and into the rapids. He had a flash of his recurring nightmare about laying in the cold water of the bay with evening coming on and no help in sight, and then the calloused hand of Torbjörn’s father pulling him up.  The bottom dropped off sharply under him. He had no footing and his hands were going numb. The ice, his wet clothing and the rushing stream made it impossible for him to come up. Torbjörn heard his calls and found him, shone the beam on him and in the thin raft of light, saw the desperation in his face. He planted his boots firmly in the crusted snow and took hold of him. The doctor reached out as he did when Torbjörn's father had pulled him up out of the bay the previous summer. Torbjörn had a hard grip on both his wrists, held him for a few seconds, senses sharp, as if he was listening and then pulled him free from the tangle of branches. The doctor’s gratitude turned quickly to surprise when the grip loosened. Afterwards I wondered if perhaps he had a moment of insight as the current swept him under and he realized what Torbjörn had done.

The snow had begun falling again, its surface smooth and soft, muffling the sounds from the rescue team. Eva was helped out of her wet clothes and wrapped in blankets. In the warmth of the ambulance she explained to the investigating officer how she tried to avoid the deer, then vaulting down the embankment and her subsequent struggle in the icy water. Torbjörn stood in the blinking glare of the red and blue strobe lights waiting for some word from the divers that were searching the river. “It was surrealistic,” he said after. “We were so close to home but I felt as though I was there for the first time, standing outside myself watching the scene unfold. He never said to anyone except me that he thought he heard Elsa whisper, “let go of him” while he was standing on the river's edge with his hands clasped around the doctor’s wrists. They waited, but the divers couldn’t find the body in the dark. Paramedics from the ambulance team examined both Eva and Torbjörn. Eva pumped up on adrenalin refused at first to go to the hospital but finally acquiesced. The divers found the doctor the next morning downstream just after the rapids, washed up against the sturdy stone abutment of the bridge that crossed the river before it entered the village. He was already partially imbedded in the ice that formed around his body. They never found his dog.

Spring came late that year. The tire tracks in the deep snow of the embankment where Eva and the doctor had driven into the river finally melted and were covered instead by the ubiquitous white anemones that sprang up as soon as the soil thawed and the chill left the air. I knew that there are some demons that are better left unprovoked. The rational part of me didn't  want to believe in spells and sorcery and omens, but  I remembered  Elsa's reaction the night of the party when we overheard the doctor boasting to one of his friends about  his affair with Eva. The color rose in her face, her eyes narrowed to slits and she muttered an oath under her breath. I thought about her husband Ulf's words, "she´s my good witch, but I´d be careful about crossing her". After the accident Torbjörn and I stopped taking the river road to work. The road, so well-known to us, held a thread of sadness, a dull ache that came every time we saw the curve where the accident had taken place. Remembering what Torbjörn's father had said, “Every place holds an echo of past events,” we used the longer coastal route around the bay instead.