Seal Woman Read online

  She touched the card in her pocket. It bore the name of her farm, Dark Castle.

  The driver stopped.

  Sheep's Hollow.

  Silence. Each woman checked her card. The dust billowed through the half-open windows, and Charlotte felt the grit in her teeth. Finally, a short, broad-shouldered woman waved her card.

  "It's me."

  Applause as if the woman had set a new record on the pole vault. From her window, Charlotte watched the lone figure pick her way along the path.

  Gisela sat next to her. She was a brunette from Berlin with curls parted and pinned back. Her face dimpled when she laughed in a way that men probably liked. She was from the Wedding district of Berlin, the place where Max had looked for trouble and found it.

  "Mine's called Stony Hill," Gisela confided.

  On the ship, crossing the Atlantic, the two women had walked the deck together, holding their coat collars high at the neck against the North Atlantic wind. Each day as the ship drew closer to the island, Gisela added details to the hair color of her future five children.

  As the bus bounced over the ruts in the road, Gisela leaned against her.

  "Remember what I said about a husband?"

  Charlotte registered mock surprise.

  "I want one," Gisela said. Chirpy as a shopper, she recited her list.

  "And three boys and two girls, just like my mother had."

  Would it work for her too? Could new humans replace old ones? Charlotte was still pondering these things when the driver stopped and called out the label for her fate.

  Dark Castle.

  Gisela followed her out.

  "You'll write me?" she asked, lips trembling.

  Charlotte nodded, watched her only friend on the island disappear inside the bus.

  Mountains, meadows, and ocean rolled toward the horizon. The same wind that flattened the grass tingled on Charlotte's cheekbones. Rocks with jagged features, like those of bigboned people, studded the foot of the hillside.

  She ran her hands over her hips and looked up at this new sky. She was thirty-nine years old and still alive, a solitary figure in the deepest landscape painting she'd ever seen.

  Up ahead, high on the hillside against a gloomy purple mountain, stood a liver-colored farmhouse. She picked up her suitcase, bulging with sweaters knitted by her mother, and walked up the gravel road. Stones stung her feet through the thin shoe soles. As she drew closer to the farmhouse, a small dog with a curled tail burst out of the bright green grass.

  At the window, a pale figure lifted a curtain. The door opened, and a man with thick brown hair appeared on the steps. He extended a calloused hand and rolled out the r's of his name.

  "Ragnar."

  She said her own name slowly, wishing she could explain how her mother had named her after Sophie Charlotte, the elector of Brandenburg's beloved wife who had died young. Usually, the explanation helped her get to know people. But her dictionary was at the bottom of her suitcase.

  The dark hallway smelled of sheep's wool and rain gear. She slipped off her gritty shoes and left them next to the pile of rubber footwear. Above the door to the kitchen hung a driftwood painting of a three-gabled farmhouse. Ragnar padded across the floorboards in his socks. Looking too big to be indoors, he said things she barely understood.

  Wife's dead. No children.

  In the awkward silence, she heard the rub of cloth against the wooden wall. A third person was breathing in the dark hall.

  "My mother," Ragnar said.

  An old woman with narrow shoulders offered, and quickly withdrew, a slender parched hand, then moved along the wall into the kitchen, her sheepskin shoes swishing over the floor. Ragnar picked up Charlotte's suitcase. She followed him into a small bedroom, dark but for the light from the small window. A chest of drawers stood against the window. A child-sized chair separated the two beds. On it stood a candle next to a book. Egilssaga. She and the old woman would take turns undressing in the narrow space.

  When he set the suitcase down on the bed, the comforter made a sound like a person exhaling. At the foot of the bed was a wooden box full of uncarded wool. A carved plank bore words about God's eternal embrace. It hung on the paneled wall above the bed. Making rocking gestures with his arms, Ragnar explained.

  From my father's boat. Dead.

  Everyone but the three of them seemed to be dead.

  The floorboards were splintered and the window casement warped. Above the old woman's bed hung a small oil painting of a farm with a chlorophyll-green home field, next to it a photograph of an ancestor with a stiff priest's ruff.

  "Coffee?" he asked.

  When she nodded, he looked relieved. Through the thin walls, she heard him talking in the kitchen. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Until this moment she had been moving constantly, caught between then and the future, but now she felt the finality of having arrived. She felt alone like on the day her mother had left her at the new school.

  Beyond the open window, earth and sky met at the horizon. She was sealed in. She'd wanted to leave Berlin, not slip off the edge of the earth. But it was not so much a matter of geography as of time. The years of her old life had run out. She swallowed hard.

  Here, not there.

  Under the neatly folded underwear in her suitcase, she found her old address book and brought it to the window. The names of her classmates were written in a childish script. Her eyes blurred over those who had not survived the war.

  Folded up between the pages, she found the advertisement and read it again.

  Farmers in Iceland seek strong women who can cook and do farm work.

  No mention of companionship, certainly not with this ungainly farmer. Still, his hesitating manner and his stained gray sweater suggested a pleasant humility. Perhaps he'd be more at ease outdoors. She placed her clothes in the chest of drawers. At last there was nothing left in her suitcase but her paintings. No place to hang them in this bedroom.

  A shuffle of slippers, and he was back. Smiling awkwardly, he beckoned her to follow him into the kitchen. He seemed to have forgotten about the coffee. Fish sizzled in a pan, and potatoes rattled in a pot. He gestured toward the two place settings. The rest of the table was covered with stacks of bills and receipts. He placed these on the floor, opened the cupboard, and brought out a cracked plate. She sensed this would be her own special plate until it broke or she left.

  The old woman gestured toward the steaming fish and potatoes. Then she drizzled a woolly smelling fat over her food. With their eyes on her, Charlotte did the same. Mother and son chewed the saltfish in silence while Charlotte had the feeling she'd interrupted a conversation begun long before she arrived.

  There's a hole in the fence out by the main road. That chicken isn't laying.

  The old woman dropped her gaze, and Charlotte studied the thick gray braids, looped against her sun-dried neck. The shiny hair appeared to have sucked the juice out of her face.

  That night, Charlotte waited in the hall outside the bedroom until the swish of skirts stopped. When she heard the bed boards creak, she tiptoed into the room, slipped off her clothes, laid them at the end of the bed, and crept under the stiff sheets.

  A sliver of moonlight revealed the old woman's stony profile, still but for the lips, vibrating with each breath. A cow lowed in the home field. On the moor, a horse neighed.

  But sometime in the night, Charlotte's two worlds collided. She hadn't expected the ghost of Max—full of blame and love—to cross the Atlantic, to follow her up the hillside. His lean body pressed against hers in the narrow bed. He whispered about Monet's blues and greens. And she felt safe. But he wouldn't stay the night. When he slipped away into the mist, tears slid down her cheeks and into her ears.

  A Creature Going Ashore

  The sunlight drifted through the panes of the little window. Facing the old woman's empty bed, Charlotte dressed slowly. A burlap apron hung on a hook. She tied it around her waist and went to the kitchen. A rust-colored cat sa
t hunched over a saucer, picking at fish bones. Somewhere outside, milk pails rattled.

  Between the kitchen and the cowshed, she made her plan for hitchhiking back to Reykjavík. Getting off the boat, she'd seen smoking chimneys in the town. They'd need maids— maybe German tutors—in those big houses.

  A lamb grazed on the shed roof. Charlotte ducked her head under the wooden frame of the door and entered a shed that was dark but for one small window. Unlit oil lamps hung on the walls of piled stone. Under her feet, she felt the grit of a dirt floor. Her lip curled at the stench of ammonia, and she nearly tripped over a tub of soaking overalls.

  Ragnar stepped out from behind the wooden framework that separated the cow stalls from the washroom. In this setting he looked almost graceful, walking toward her, trailing his fingers along the cow's spine. Nourished perhaps by the warmth of the animals, his voice had a resonance.

  "Good morning."

  She imitated the greeting as best she could. A follow-up phrase came to mind, but the words knotted her tongue. She watched him pour milk from a bucket into a waist-high canister that stood in the center of the room.

  The angular haunches of cows rose above the wooden framework that separated one stall from the other. The cows' tails were looped up with string attached to the splintered beams over their heads. The old woman wore a smock of burlap bags and a brown bandanna over her forehead. She sat on a stool tugging the teats, sending streams of milk crashing into the bucket.

  "Skjalda," she said, introducing the cow.

  Shifting her bound hooves, Skjalda sent a canary yellow cascade into the dirt gutter.

  The old woman cheered like a Berlin soccer fan, picked up her bucket and spun it away from the downpour of pee. Nimbly, she lifted a jar from the shelf and held it with both hands under the flow. When the cow had squeezed out the last drop, the old woman carried the jar back to the shelf, placed a lid on it, and reached for the milk bucket again. Other jars lined the shelf, each one full of yellow liquid.

  Ragnar led Charlotte to the next cow. He tied the cow's hooves together and greased her teats. Then, holding one in each hand, he milked a bluish beam into the bucket. When it was her turn, the rubbery flesh swelled in her hands, but no matter how hard she squeezed only a tiny dribble hit the bottom of the bucket. To relieve the pain, she spread her fingers.

  The next day, the milking went better. But later, when Charlotte was pulling up weeds around the yarrow in the garden, her hands hurt. Alone in the kitchen, she held up her right hand, counted the fingers. How many ways could you use a hand? She'd brought her little box of colored pencils. Drawing moss wrapping itself around lava rocks could keep her here.

  That and a man's voice—if only he'd use it more.

  The old woman entered the kitchen. She handed Charlotte a dirty smock and a pair of work gloves. Back in Berlin, she'd avoided the Imperial School for Secretaries, dreading the short skirt and nubby sweater uniform that typists wore. Now she slipped her arms into a uniform stiff with filth.

  A wheelbarrow stood against the wall of the shed. The old woman grasped the handles, and rolled it to the shed door. Charlotte stepped over the high wooden threshold into the winter residence of Dark Castle's sheep. The fresh manure squished under the toes of her boots. Ragnar held the handle of a square shovel with both hands, leaned his weight into it, pushed down with a grunt, and sliced through the layers of manure that had accumulated during the winter. He dumped the dark wedge onto a pile in the front of the shed.

  Humming again, the old woman bent over, arms extended, embraced a brown load, staggered toward the door, cleared the threshold and dumped the manure into the wheelbarrow.

  The sharp, blue eyes carried a challenge.

  Your turn.

  Charlotte pulled her sweater sleeve down to the cuffs of her gloves, lifted the waste in her arms, and inhaled the smell. In the sunlight, the layers of manure looked like an archaeological lesson on Germania under the Romans, the layered history of sheep cloistered in the dank shed from October to May, months devoted solely to chewing and defecating.

  Pushing the full wheelbarrow to the smoke shed, sweat pearling on her upper lip, Charlotte felt sympathy for the churlish Bavarian farmers her bureaucrat father had laughed at.

  Sometime that week, the clouds pulled away from the sun.

  "Drying Day," the old woman said, raising her hands toward the crack in the ceiling in a gesture of gratitude.

  Charlotte heard the praise in her voice. They hadn't discussed religion yet.

  Outside, Ragnar wrapped part of the scythe blade in a towel, grasped it, and cut the manure wedge in half.

  But the old woman whacked her wedge with a whalebone paddle. "That's how my mother did it."

  Charlotte knew she couldn't measure up to that. With her scythe blade she gingerly halved a wedge. Gradually she built up momentum until she sweated and the breeze chilled her armpits. Finally, the old woman demonstrated how to prop the wedges up against one another to dry. Soon the entire home field was brown, a tent city of manure.

  At the end of the day, the old woman was bent double. She gestured for Charlotte to follow her to the cowshed. Together, they wrung out the overalls that soaked in the tub and dumped the granite-colored water into the trough next to the shed. Ragnar brought a pot of hot water from the stove, then more. They added cold water, and the bath was ready.

  Several vials lay on the shelf next to the urine jars. The old woman took one. In the weak light from the steamed window, Charlotte saw the long stalk and tiny purple bloom of lavender sketched on the label. The plant grew in the garden behind the yarrow.

  "Lavandula—makes you happy," the old woman said and sprinkled drops of oil over the water. Its fragrance edged into the animal odor.

  The old woman lit a candle and undressed. A tiny splash signaled her immersion in the tub. Her eyes glistened above the water, like a pond frog's during mating season.

  "Get in."

  Charlotte stepped out of her clothes, held the side of the tub for balance, and climbed over the edge at the other end. Easing in, she felt the old woman's skin against hers. Her bathing companion made small sighing sounds as she soaped her shoulders and neck, then lay back, eyes closed.

  For a moment, Charlotte dozed in the warm, sweet smell. Then she heard the splash of a creature going ashore. The old woman, bones jutting, stood on the floor next to the tub, rubbing herself with a towel. Ragnar appeared at the door, then turned abruptly and disappeared among the cow stalls. Charlotte heard his shovel scraping up dung. She climbed out of the tub, dressed hurriedly, and hung their wet towels on the indoor clothesline. The old woman held the door for her. Turning, she glimpsed his large pale leg scaling the side of the tub.

  A Weather-ruled Man

  The script on the envelope was German, but the letter wasn't from her mother. The stamp featured the volcano Hekla erupting. Stony Hill was scrawled on the back. Dear Charlotte,

  "My" farm is a little primitive. We have only well water. But I like the farmer. He's nice looking—for a man of 50. I like him better than his brother who chases me and grabs me!!! Of course, I smack the devil. That's the price of being beautiful. Ha. Ha. Ha. I'll marry one of them. You'll come to the wedding! Gisela

  Hungry for words, she re-read the letter. Ragnar hoarded words, saving them like the cans of peas and beets she and her mother had stored at the back of the shelf at the beginning of the war.

  Sometimes Charlotte pored over the yellowed newspapers—some dating back to 1945—that the old woman tucked behind the kitchen bench, but getting through the long, hairy words wasn't easy.

  One evening, the old woman handed Charlotte a leather-bound book and a bread knife. The pages were still uncut. She chopped her way into the story and spent evenings in the big chair in the living room flipping through her dictionary, puzzling together the novel's parts.

  A young woman sews homespun on sheriff's farm until her fingers grow blue. Her only source of warmth is the sheriff's son's body rubb
ing against her at night. When his mother learns that her son has spilled his seed into a hired girl, she sends the girl away. She gives birth in a cave where a vagabond cuts the cord.

  Charlotte tried to repeat the plot. Misunderstanding, the old woman gave her some feverfew leaves for headache.

  "Chew it, but if your mouth hurts, spit it out."

  Finally the old woman had to give her an ointment for the insides of her cheeks.