Chapter 79
Word had it that the Lord had revealed to them a spade.
Isidor Enoksson didn’t doubt for a second that this was so.
Strange things, really, spades. No matter how deep man digs, God’s works are always greater.
Isidor had spoken these words during a service once, but he no longer recalled the context.
It slipped away like so many things did.
Seeing the miracle in the individual.
Sometimes it was very simple; other times, very hard.
What had happened once upon a time out there in Skavboke, were there visible traces? Perhaps in the people, yes, but not in the land. The land had healed. The young trees reached for the sky in groves and the fields were arable again. New farms had arisen where the old ones had collapsed.
Even so, it was as though the community, at least part of it, wanted the truth to come out. That spade was probably the clearest sign.
Things seemed to emerge from the land. At first you didn’t even know what you were looking at. You thought it might be a piece of trash, or an object someone had dropped. Then you realized: Didn’t that belong to…? Didn’t that used to be hanging on the wall at…?
Tools, construction material, old junk, the kind of stuff it was common to run across out in the countryside, but unusual objects as well: a dish wand, unused coffee filters, a hockey stick, a headband.
Artifacts or clues. Years later, and it could still happen; you’d be walking by a grove of trees or cut across a field, and there they were.
As if the earth were spitting back out what it had once swallowed.
Some objects found were recognized.
Not all of them, but some.
One of the found objects was, yes, a spade, and the one who discovered it was Frans Ljunggren.
He didn’t recognize it. According to Frans, it had been peeking up out of ?stholm’s old field like a rusty metal tongue one morning.
Frans had pulled it out and looked around, unsure whether anyone had noticed him.
Then he took it home, pleased to have gained a new tool, and stashed it with the others; he bragged about the discovery to those around him. Not least Filip Soderstrom, who was given a tour of the house and workshop before it became his.
“This here, why, I found it for free out in the field. Well, no one’s going to miss this, I said, so I brought it home with me.”
When Filip told Isidor about this, the old priest mused about spades, what strange things they are.
“Whose do you think it was, originally?” Isidor said.
“I think I recognize it,” Filip said. “I think it’s the one that used to hang on the wall outside Jakob Lindell’s house.”