After searching for a while, Killian looked up and said: “That must be it. My stone.”
“Killian, are you sure you…you don’t have to…”
“I am.” He looked at Sander and, as if to reassure him, reached out and touched his friend’s arm. “It’s okay. I think I need this.”
He rested alone here, not far from his mother.Killian Persson, 1981–1999,in a long line going back through generations.
“Weird,” he said simply. “Soon Dad will be lying around here somewhere too.”
So many times Sander had imagined this: standing before the grave and reading his friend’s name. He had always held off, as if he weren’t quite ready yet but would be someday. Now he was here, but it didn’t feel real. These were circumstances that didn’t belong to any reality he recognized.
He understood it was a lovely headstone, but he couldn’t see it that way. Instead, he was about to be overcome by a sudden, burning fury. What he read on that stone was a mistake, and he didn’t understand how it could have come to be, whose fault it was. He twisted the leather bracelet like it was chafing him.
Killian sank down on the grass in front of the gravestone tailor-style, his sturdy long legs surprisingly flexible.
“I just need to sit down for a minute. Want another beer?”
Killian had a few more in a bag. Sander sat down next to his friend and was given a can. They drank and stared at the grave without saying anything.
In his mind, Sander returned to the short stretch of county highway that wound through Esmared. He had thought of it often, how it lay there smooth and slippery on that Christmas Eve night. The flames blazing forth and the moaning, solitary wreck of the car. More than once, years later, he had almost gotten in his own car and driven to that spot, just so he could say he had been there, to the place where his friend met death. But what would he do there?
“I just don’t understand how the fuck you can be sitting here,” Sander said at last. “We buried you. You died.”
Killian chuckled, a sound void of happiness. “I sure did.”
89
Farmer Jansson was chipper and pleasant when Siri paid him a visit during the human-chain search for Hampus Olsson in 2002; he was well over sixty but still active and able-bodied. He had twinkling eyes and was never far from a genuine, loud laugh. Siri spoke with him as they stood in a bright old entryway with hand-stitched embroidered art on the walls.
He’d had his suspicions, he said. He’d hung out a Help Wanted sign months earlier without much hope. In late 1999, no one was particularly excited by the thought of farm labor. So when a young man came walking down the gravel road in late December, Jansson had the feeling something was off. When the young man said his name was Johan and he was willing to work in exchange for food and a place to stay, Jansson’s misgivings only grew.
“He had to be running away from home, I figured. He couldn’t produce identification either. When I asked what he was good at, he said he could do most anything. We’ll see, I said. When can you start? Well, he said. Now? Or tomorrow? We happened to be in quite a pickle that day, because the ripsaw in the workshop was on the fritz and we needed it in the morning, for the firewood. So I told him, okay, the saw out there is broken. If you can fix it, get it to work, you can stay and work on trial starting tomorrow.” The farmer laughed, astonished. “And wouldn’t you know, that bastard fixed up the saw in underan hour? Anything else I can do? he asked, standing there in the doorway. So he started the next day, Johan did, although of course I realized that wasn’t his real name. Lived in one of the farmhands’ cottages.”
Even though the farmer didn’t know who he was. Or, more accurately: even though the farmer knew he wasn’t who he said he was.
“He was with us for almost two years. Never complained, never sick, always a hard worker. I don’t know what he was running away from, but I knew he must not have had it easy. So I made sure he had a good life here, and I figured he had it better at my farm than wherever it was he’d come from. He wasn’t much of a talker, that boy, but with a work ethic like that there’s no need to be. I told him what to do, and he did it.”
“So he never mentioned anything about who he was or where he came from?”
“There’s not much time for small talk out here. So, no, he never said, and I didn’t ask. In any case, what happened later on had nothing to do with him.”
The farm was struck by hard times. It failed to recover, and the layer of “surplus fat,” as the farmer put it, had already been eatenup.
“He contributed a lot, Johan did. But I needed to rent out his quarters. That rendered him homeless, because I had nowhere else on the farm where he could stay. I couldn’t exactly pay him a wage, either, aside from some small change here or there. So he didn’t have any savings to rent a place of his own.” The farmer looked despondent. “I told him he was welcome to keep working, but he would have to find his own place, and I told him I certainly understood if he wanted to find another job. But there was a farmer not far to the east, up toward Djuparp, who I thought could use some help. He took off that same day. I offered to drive him, but he said no, no, I ought to use these feet of mine for something. That was Johan for you. It was the last I saw of him.”
But he never arrived in Djuparp.
“Anyway, listen,” he said, “that was all a long time ago, over a yearago now. But I called the farmer up there and told him a good worker was heading his way. He said he looked forward to meeting him and then I suppose a week or so passed. When no one showed up, he called me back and asked if I had been messing with him.”
No point in getting your hopes up, as Siri knew better than many. Hope made you stop thinking clearly, kept you from separating the facts from the wishes, made you see what you wanted to see. Even so, she felt a flutter inside her, a sudden warmth spreading to her stomach and up through her shoulders. She took out a picture of Hampus Olsson, the most recent of his school portraits, from the autumn of 1999. So many hands had held it by now that the edges were getting worn.
“Do you recognize this person?”
Standing in the hall, the farmer from Mjäla raised two bushy eyebrows, took the photograph between his thumb and index finger, and studied it closely.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Are you sure? This isn’t the boy who stayed at your place? Johan.”
