Punished

51. Jon-Ante

JON-ANTE

1986

The sun had completed one circuit around the sky and was beginning the next. Jon-Ante knew that Isá was probably sitting at the kitchen table, gazing glumly out at the village in the midsummer night and muttering that this was the turning point, that darkness would soon return. It didn’t matter how many times they pointed out to him that it wouldn’t be noticeable for several more weeks. As long as the sun traveled its course without dipping below the horizon, the light was theirs.

He yawned and leaned back in the driver’s seat. From beyond the pines came the music at T?rendoholmen, the place where all of Norrland partied on Midsummer’s Eve. Two rivers met there, and the confluence was well-known. It was nice for the small villages to have something to brag about. Chattanooga was playing tonight; Jerka wouldn’t be onstage until Midsummer Day; Jon-Ante couldn’t wait to see him live.

This was Jon-Ante’s last Midsummer at ’Holmen, and it had been a triumphant journey. He’d cruised slowly through the villages, watched curious residents cast long stares at his freshly waxed Lincoln. He’d been meticulous about who was allowed to ride down with him. He didn’t want any yelling, it should all stay respectable—as respectable as possible, that is, with the bass booming in your chest.

He’d tagged along to Norway for Syttende Mai as well, and that trip really solidified his decision: after Midsummer, he was going to put these big bashes behind him. Twenty cars had driven in a caravan from Giron to Narvik, drawing attention all the way there, past Tornetr?sk Lake, Abisko, Bjorkliden, Riksgr?nsen, and other small villages. Narvik was already greening up thanks to the Gulf Stream, and the Norwegians gaped at the Swedes who’d barged in and almost taken over their festivities. They continued on to Harstad, and at that point there was getting to be a little too much drunkenness in some of the cars. The cops got fed up and kindly but firmly offered escorts back to the border. Jon-Ante felt a little ashamed as they passed through Narvik again, a colorful spectacle with their cars and red satin jackets. It was a damn shame; it didn’t have to be this way. Most of them drove really nice cars, which was something to be proud of. They stopped at Bjorkis for a pee break and cracked up at the ruckus they’d caused on the Norwegian side.

Jon-Ante sighed and smiled privately. Hell, it really had been a lot of fun, for the most part. He didn’t feel sad, although perhaps there was some melancholy as he faced the end of an era. Realistically, he was already playing in overtime. In recent years it had mostly been about the car. And Classe had always been important to him, having given him a way to belong. He didn’t say much when Jon-Ante let him know that Midsummer would mark the end of his raggare days. Maybe Classe was ready to take a step back, too. Although he’d been careful to point out that there was no such thing as too old when it came to cars; that was a lifelong interest. It was—Jon-Ante agreed on that point—but eventually the time would come for his last drive to T?rendoholmen.

Just as he knew there would eventually be a last time he went underground. His plan was to take the mining pension at sixty and never look back. He had no intention of becoming one of those guys who retired and then died of a heart attack six months later. He would live a real, full life. Marge had found it rather amusing that he was looking forward to a gold watch and a pension before he even turned forty.

They sometimes didn’t see eye to eye. He’d tried to convince her that they should build a life together in town, unwilling to budge on that point.

But then, as he drove her and a singing Stella to the village before Midsummer, the trailer piled full, he had suddenly felt weak, even trembly. It dawned on him what he risked losing. Everything became crystal clear. He could choose to place his heart in their hands. He nearly burst into tears, then pressed her hand to his cheek until she chuckled in surprise.

“What’s up with you?”

They unloaded everything and he pulled Marge close and told her maybe he would follow her. By that point he’d already made up his mind, but he wanted to see if a “maybe” would make her happy, and it did. He left it at that. No definite promise. And his body kept shaking.

Back in town, the day before Midsummer’s Eve, he put on his helmet and went underground and talked to the foreman; he’d decided to ask for a leave of absence, keep one foot in the door in case the village didn’t feel right after all. But what came out of his mouth was something else entirely.

“I’m giving my notice. Effective immediately. I have vacation days and comp time to use up, and then I’m done.”

He didn’t mention the reindeer, but said instead that he was going to start his own business fixing cars and snowmobiles. The guys clapped him on the shoulder, and he washed his black-smudged face and emerged from the darkness, into the light, for the last time. He sat in his car in the parking lot for a long while, blinded by the sunbeams reflecting off the windows of the thirteen-story administrative building. He’d once gone to the top floor to drop off some papers, had felt filthy there in his work costume, and thought it seemed like people kept their distance to avoid getting soiled.

“Work costume,” that was an in-joke he and Classe had kept going over the years. When you pull on your costume, you become yourself again. And he’d been proud, in fact. He felt it every time he saw the ore trains winding away like snakes, heading for other parts of the world, to build the next Eiffel Tower and the cars he was completely uninterested in buying.

His uncle was far too eager to remind him of the mine that had destroyed the reindeer collectives’ land in the region. “And you’re a part of that,” he’d said.

“I am not.” Jon-Ante refused to fight about it. No one in his family had been convinced that money and a steady job was a good thing, not when they came from the mine.

He’d called Enná to say he was thinking of coming back to the village. For a moment she said nothing, but then she remarked that it would be nice, before changing the subject. As if his news didn’t matter. But he knew it did; this just wasn’t something that could be said aloud, and there was no reason to get emotional over it. He swallowed the words he’d wanted to say, how he felt about returning home, and, perhaps more urgently, about why he’d left in the first place.

But there was one person who needed to hear the whole story.

Marge didn’t know he’d quit his job. He didn’t want to tell her over the phone and decided to surprise her with the news after Midsummer instead. She had been disappointed to learn that he was going to celebrate with his buddies, and he had explained that it was only because he’d promised to drive four others around. He couldn’t change his mind and leave them in the lurch. But it was also his last Midsummer with the whole gang, and she didn’t know that either.

But now, among the boozehounds at T?rendoholmen, his decision seemed stupid. He sat up from his reclining position. What was he doing there? He had someone he belonged with now.

He exited the car and peered through the trees, not up for walking all the way to the party zone. He spotted Perre, who was on his way toward the parking lot, and hollered at him.

“Tell Classe and them I went home. You can squeeze a couple extra guys in, right?”

“Are you serious?”

“Totally.”

H E WAS WELCOMED BY the mirror-smooth river, the puffy clouds, the chirping birds outside her rented house, and the mosquitoes dancing around his head. He was back in the village where he knew everyone and was related to many of them. Goa ? un. Home.

Marge was an early riser, but it wasn’t even six o’clock on Midsummer Day, and she must still be sleeping.

He sat on her front steps and gazed out at the river. He would teach Stella to fish for salmon and grayling. He glanced down the road and saw his cousin’s house; he was probably awake. Isá and Enná were surely up, too, on the other side of the village, sitting at the kitchen table with the day’s first cup of coffee. Their younger sons were comfortably close by, maybe talking about the upcoming calf marking. áddjá was no longer in the village but at the nursing home in Vazá?. Jon-Ante would go see him, bring Marge and Stella, and tell him he was back. But in one sense it was too late, too late to be out with the reindeer alongside áddjá, who could no longer tolerate the tough conditions. It was painful to dwell on. But nothing had been in vain; what he’d learned from áddjá would be passed on. His stories, and maybe even the joik, although Jon-Ante wasn’t very good at joiking. He’d stopped trying when he moved to town.

He would at least teach Stella to throw a lasso. He would be there when her áddjá gave her a calf to mark for the first time. He would tell her about when he marked his first calf, how it had been snowing and his fingers went stiff.

“What? Snowing?” Stella would exclaim. “In the middle of summer?”

He smiled to himself. There was something special about that kid.

“I’m probably too old to have babies of my own now,” Marge had said. “You should get yourself a younger girl if you want children.”

“But you do have a child, and that’s enough for me.”

Enough? What he should have said was that he wanted to become Stella’s father for real, wanted to adopt her. He would say that today, too.

He heard barking, and his cousin’s dog came shooting across the yards like an arrow, heading for him. Someone whistled and the dog, who had already wound herself between Jon-Ante’s legs, didn’t know up from down, what to do. A shout, a herding command, and the dog pricked her ears and was gone.

The sound hit him hard. He’d missed it. He scratched at the back of his head and looked down at his winklepickers. Now they would see him, those cousins of his, sitting there on the porch in his dancing shoes. That was exactly what they’d say, “dancing shoes,” and they’d laugh. He grinned. Kicked the shoes off and sat there in his sock feet, watching the mosquitoes as they tried to bite through the fabric.

He thought of his brothers. Had the rumor reached them, had Enná told them he was thinking about coming back? It could never go back to the way it was when they were little; he had no illusions. He wasn’t seven anymore, no longer the big brother they looked up to. The two of them were their own team. At least he wouldn’t be coming back alone. He was coming with Marge and Stella.

Marge didn’t understand that there were some things you just couldn’t talk about. She wheedled and pried, wanted in, but the topic of the three brothers was off-limits. No acknowledging the deep sorrow he felt that the two of them had become a solid duo because Jon-Ante had been forced to live away at school. No acknowledging the emotions that emerged when they didn’t have to go to the nomad school while he came back marked.

Without Oskar, he probably wouldn’t have survived the village school either. Things were better there, but something was indelibly different about him now and children could sniff out weak points. Anyway, the nomad-school children did still come home on occasion. When they did, he stayed home or went to Oskar’s house.

His brothers, though, never had to turn into anything like the cowering, fearful puppy he’d become. They were full of confidence. He envied them, even as he was grateful they had been spared.

The door behind him opened and there she was, her eyes sleepy and without her glasses—she could probably hardly see.

“Are you nuts? What are you doing here?” Her voice was as gravelly as leftover winter grit in May. She bent down and threw her arms around him from behind, soft and still warm from bed, and he shivered.

He wasted no time. “You once asked me, didn’t I want to go back to the reindeer, and I don’t remember what I said but I always want to go back to the reindeer. The problem is that I’d have to face the people who tortured me at school and pretend like it doesn’t matter.”

She slid down into his lap and rested her head against his chest.

“I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it,” he said.

“And I don’t know what to say.”

He held her close and pressed his nose to her hair.

“Aside from that it makes me so sad for you.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t want to be a victim. So I fake it with them, act as if we have no goddamn past, and it always just feels kind of wrong.”

“I get it.”

“Maybe they don’t even remember. Maybe they’re all like Nilsa, who seems to have repressed it all.”

Suddenly she peered up at him. “Speaking of Nilsa, this is a secret, and I shouldn’t say anything, but he’s the one who assaulted Rita Olsson.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Anne-Risten recently called and told me.”

“Damn. I would have done the same thing, given the chance.”

“Would you?”

He nodded, and they didn’t say anything for a moment.

“So you won’t move here because you can’t bear to see certain people in the village?”

“I quit the mine.”

“You did?” Now she spun to face him and threw her legs around his waist, pressed her forehead to his. “So you’re coming to be with us?”

“I’m already here, aren’t I?”

She kissed him, her hands stroking his throat; she let one hand stop at the back of his neck in the way that always made him shiver with pleasure. She held him at a distance and eyes that had been so sleepy only moments ago were now glowing. “You made me awfully happy just now, you know that?”

He laughed and took a firm grip on her waist as he kissed the spot on her throat where she always smelled the most herself.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We can make it through together.”

He had to leave it at that. There wasn’t more to say right now. But he feared it wasn’t going to be easy. His brothers had told him that there was discord in the reindeer collective. Nilsa and his cousins were kicking up a fuss, accusing people of falsely marking reindeer as their own. Nilsa’s isá had never hesitated to call Jon-Ante’s isá a reindeer thief. Now he was in the nursing home, unable to care for himself. But that hadn’t fixed anything; Nilsa picked up where he’d left off.

“It’s good to have some dirt on Nilsa—the assault, I mean,” she said with a sly smile.

He smiled right along with her, but this wasn’t really any comfort. Guys like Nilsa always got away with everything.

He looked down toward the river, could picture Aslak carrying up his fishing rod and a salmon he could hardly lift with one hand. Jon-Ante had walked beside him, helping to carry it. Nilsa had spotted them and kicked Jon-Ante’s legs out from under him, then picked up the salmon and walked off. Aslak followed, his head hanging. As he went, he turned around and made the V sign. That was their sign. They had flashed it through bus windows, from opposite sides of the dining hall, across yards in the village, and, one last time, when Aslak was on the soccer field and scored the winning goal that moved NIK up a division.

He’d never made the V sign when Jon-Ante was on the ground, not until that day. But Jon-Ante had scrambled to his feet as fast as he possibly could and raised both arms in the air. Double V signs. He jumped up and down, waving at Aslak, whose eyes danced with laughter. That was enough. It made everything okay.