Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Read online

  “Serious? Mutiny?”

  “No,” Gnut said. “We’re just saying we—”

  “Call it what it is, motherfucker,” Djarf barked. “You sons of bitches are mutinizing my operation?”

  “Look, Djarf,” I said. “Nobody’s doing anything to anybody. We just need to head on back.”

  He yelled and snorted. Then he ran at us with his sword raised high, and Gnut had to slip behind him quickly and put a bear hug on him. I went over and clamped one hand over Djarf’s mouth and pinched his nose shut with the other, and after a while he started to cool down.

  We let him go. He stood there huffing and eyeing us, and we kept our knives and things out, and finally he put the sword back and composed himself.

  “Okay, sure, I read you,” he said. “Fair enough. We go back. Oh, I should have told you, Olaffssen found a stash of beef shells somewhere. He’s gonna cook those up for everybody who’s left. Ought to be tasty.” He turned and humped it back toward the bay.

  Gnut didn’t come down to the feast. He said he needed to stay at Bruce and Mary’s to look after Haakon. Bullshit, of course, seeing as Haakon made it down the hill by himself and crammed his tender stomach with about nine tough steaks. When the dusk started going black and still no Gnut, I legged it back up to Bruce’s to see about him. Gnut was sitting on a hollow log outside the cottage, flicking gravel into the weeds.

  “She’s coming with me,” he said.

  “Mary?”

  He nodded gravely. “I’m taking her home with me to be my wife. She’s in there talking it over with Bruce.”

  “This a voluntary thing, or an abduction-type deal?”

  Gnut looked off toward the bay as though he hadn’t heard the question. “She’s coming with me.”

  I mulled it over. “You sure this is such a hot idea, bringing her back to live among our people, all things considering?”

  He grew quiet. “Any man that touches her, or says anything unkind, it will really be something different, what I’ll do to him.”

  We sat a minute and watched the sparks rising from the bonfire on the beach. The warm evening wind carried smells of blossoms and wood smoke, and I was overcome with calm.

  We walked into Bruce’s, where only a single suet candle was going. Mary stood by the window with her one arm across her chest. Bruce was worked up. When we came in, he moved to block the door. “You get out of my house,” he said. “You just can’t take her, what little I’ve got.”

  Gnut did not look happy, but he shouldered past and knocked Bruce on his ass. I went and put a hand on the old farmer, who was quaking with rage.

  Mary did not hold her hand out to Gnut. But she didn’t protest when he put his arm around her and moved her toward the door. The look she gave her father was a wretched thing, but still she went easy. With just one arm like that, what could she do? What other man would have her?

  Their backs were to us when Bruce grabbed up an awl from the table and made for Gnut. I stepped in front of him and broke a chair on his face, but still he kept coming, scrabbling at my sword, trying to snatch up something he could use to keep his daughter from going away. I had to hold him steady and run my knife into his cheek. I held it there like a horse’s bit, and then he didn’t want to move. When I got up off him he was crying quietly. As I was leaving, he threw something at me and knocked the candle out.

  And you might think it was a good thing, that Gnut had found a woman who would let him love her, and if she didn’t exactly love him back, at least she would, in time, get to feeling something for him that wasn’t so far from it. But what would you say about that crossing, when the winds went slack and it was five long weeks before we finally fetched up home? Gnut didn’t hardly say a word to anybody, just held Mary close to him, trying to keep her soothed and safe from all of us, his friends. He wouldn’t look me in the face, stricken as he was by the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose.

  After that trip, things changed. It seemed to me that all of us were leaving the high and easy time of life and heading into deeper waters. Not long after we got back, Djarf had a worm crawl up a hole in his foot and had to give up raiding. Gnut and Mary turned to homesteading full-time, and I saw less of him. Just catching up over a jar turned into a hassle you had to plan two weeks in advance. And when we did get together, he would laugh and jaw with me a little bit, but you could see he had his mind on other things. He’d gotten what he wanted, but he didn’t seem too happy about it, just worried all the time.

  It didn’t make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It’s crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you:

  Ben Austen, Jack Bookman, Joe Bookman, Willing Davidson, Betsy Dawson, Marion Duvert, Harrison Haynes, Courtney Hodell, Eli Horowitz, Brigid Hughes, George Jenne, Matt Jones, Mark Krotov, the MacDowell Colony, Ben Marcus, Madeline Neal, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, David Rowell, Amanda Schoonmaker, Heather Schroder, Ed Tower, Lauren Wilcox, the Corporation of Yaddo.