3. Seven
David adjusted his tie over and over again, but somehow the knot just never seemed to keep that triangle shape. David had tied a Windsor knot hundreds of times, and now he couldn't even keep it from looking like a lump of coal was wedged inside. He groaned and yanked it off of his collar, starting over.
The bedroom door opened but David ignored it, opting to focus on the vanity mirror to get this damned knot looking just right. Greg appeared at his side in the mirror, and David gave up with a growl.
"I'd ditch the tie anyway," Greg said. David bunched up the tie in his fist and threw it on the ground. When he finally brought himself to turn and look at Greg, he was completely floored. His hair was combed back, his clothes ironed and crisp. His white shirt was fit to the contours of his frame and his black slacks left little to the imagination but much to be desired.
"Wow," David finally sighed. "You clean up nicely, kid. I wish that I looked half as good when I try to dress up. I also wish that I could tie a friggin' tie…"
Greg laughed. He grabbed David's shoulders and turned him to face the mirror. Greg picked up David's overcoat and wrapped it over David's shoulder. Then Greg reached into one of his own bags and fished out a long, grey plaid scarf. He draped it over David's shoulders and let it rest over his clavicles.
"My Papa Olaf gave this to me when I was thirteen. He told me that it was the first thing that he'd ever bought for himself. His father died when he was young, and his mother only made enough money to buy the bare essentials selling the milk from her two cows to the neighbors – never more than a few Kron's a week, which isn't even worth an entire US dollar. He said that he worked for a man chopping down five trees a day, cutting them into firewood pieces, and stacking them. Every day, all of that hard work for pocket change. Three weeks later, he said he'd earned enough to buy this scarf. But he didn't. He gave all of that money to his sister. She needed money for some writing competition."
"So how did he get the scarf?" David asked.
"His sister ended up winning. She became a published author. And years later, on Papa Olaf's first Christmas married to Nana, his sister gave him this scarf. She said that she'd tracked it down just for him to thank him for everything he'd done for her. He gave me this scarf so that I'd always remember that part of being a man is self-reliance, but the most important part is helping those who can't help themselves."
Greg ran his fingers along the lengths of it and looked up into David's misty blue eyes. "It looks good on you."
"Thanks," he said, still a little astonished that Greg would let him wear something so important to him on the day of his grandfather's funeral. "I'm honored. Really, I mean that."
Greg pulled him down by the scarf ends and leaned in to kiss him. It was a simple kiss, clean and pure. Just a brief brush of lips, but enough to speak a library of unspoken affections.
David looked out the window, into the darkness. Just light enough to outline details on the trees and wheat fields, but still as dark as early morning. He glanced down at his watch; just after 1 o'clock in the afternoon.
"When you invited me to Norway, you didn't tell me that there wouldn't any sunshine," David said.
"It's the winter here," Greg said. "The Solstice is only a few days away. During the winter, the sun never rises above the horizon because we're so high up on the globe. And during the summer, the sun never really sets, always hovering just over the ocean. So the most light you'll see is the sunlight just below the horizon, and that only lasts for a few hours."
"So you researched this enough to know the ins-and-outs, but still didn't give me any warning," David said.
"I just did," he said with a devious grin.
"So no vacation-tan for me, eh?"
Greg and David walked down the stairs and into the living room. David had tried to prepare himself for the full house, but he was still a big overwhelmed by the dozens faces in the family room. Children ran and chased one another, while adults, old and young, laughed and drank and ate.
"I didn't know that your family was so extensive!" David yelled above the noise.
"What can I say? They really love knocking boots!" Greg laughed. David snorted.
"Runs in the family, doesn't it?" He said with a wink. Greg lightly hit him on his chest. Once he caught sight of Svana across the room, he was gone in a flash and David was left standing alone, looking around with an awkward smile plastered to his face.
David backed up toward the wall to get out of everyone's way until his lower back bumped into something hard and cold. He thought it felt like a piano, perhaps a chest, until he looked down and saw a grey, bushy handlebar moustache attached to a pale grey face. David quickly stepped away from the body of Papa Olaf. The large man rested in a simple wooden casket covered in black lacquer. His casket was propped on four large blocks of ice to keep the body preserved. Olaf was draped in a light brown and white fur – a fox, or wolf. But the knuckles of his hands were just visible above the shoulder of the animal, and something else; black and silver. David lifted the edge of the fur slightly to see what Olaf had clutched in his hands; a dagger with a black and silver spiraled handle. David followed the sharp edges to the tip. Dark flakes remained along the edge – something that had been sloppily wiped off. Then his eyes fell upon strange contusions along Olaf's wrists. The same width on both arms; he'd been bound prior to death.
"I see you've met Papa Olaf," Svana said. Her voice startled him so badly that his heart literally ached. David glanced around for Greg, but his sandy-haired bucket of sunshine was nowhere to be seen.
"I thought Greg was with you?"
"No; he made the mistake of accepting a drinking challenge," Svana said.
David shook his head, trying to imagine just what kind of Greg he'd be dealing with all day. Greg was a lightweight and didn't drink often. David had the feeling that his family was a bit more seasoned than he was.
"Why is his body here?"
"It's part of the tradition," Svana said. "It's called Likferd, an old tradition that goes back centuries. It means the journey of the corpse. The body of the deceased goes on its last journey with friends and relatives. We carry them from the home to the churchyard. This gathering is called Fønnekveld – our neighbors and friends bring food and drink, and we lay him out for everyone to say farewell and leave him gifts to take with him into the afterlife."
"Do you know who left him this knife?" David asked. Svana looked down at the blade in Papa Olaf's hands, and simply shrugged.
"It could have been anyone here," she said. She leaned in closer. "Maybe one of his nephews – they often hunted together. But that's not like any hunting knife I've ever seen."
"Nor I," David said. "How did he die?"
"A heart failure," she said. She looked down and emotion took her as tears filled her vision. "I'm sorry, excuse me."
David graciously nodded and stepped out of her way to let the girl go and grieve. He lowered the fur back over the corpse's hands and looked around at the scene. Maybe he could take the knife without anyone noticing and test it for blood? He couldn't prove that it was human, but if those dark flakes were blood then those marks on his wrists may lead to evidence of a CoD that wasn't a heart-attack.
Then David spotted Greg at a table near the bay window overlooking the front porch. He was laughing and smiling, and chugging a large stein as his newfound family cheered him on. And he remembered that here, he wasn't a CSI. He was just David Hodges, a man who was here to support his boyfriend during his time of need. He stepped away from Papa Olaf's body and went to find a drink of his own.
He walked into the kitchen. Svana had been leaning over the sink, crying, with Nana Olaf right beside her. As soon as David stepped into the kitchen, she looked up and gave him that same, dark, completely loathing stare. David simply stared back, neither moving. Svana finally looked up and panicked, wiping her eyes on the sleeves of her jacket.
"I'm sorry – I didn't want anyone to see me like this," she said.
"No, I'm sorry, I didn't know you'd come into the kitchen. I wouldn't have followed you if I did," David said. "I just, er – I'm not much of a beer person, so I was wondering if anyone could point me in a better direction."
"Say no more," Svana said. She sniffled and reached into the cupboard above the stove, grabbing a bottle of Vikingfjord, a Norwegian brand of vodka.
"You are my savior," David said with a grateful sigh. He even went through the motions of a mock-worshipping bow. Nana Olaf gave him one last snide look before leaving the kitchen and walking into the party.
Svana poured them each a shot and they clinked glasses before knocking them back. David coughed; it was a very potent proof, so strong that it burned the inside of his nose as he breathed out alcohol fumes. He was betting that he could blow his breath toward an open flame and become Godzilla.
"Greg told me how much it meant to him that you came all the way here for him. He's very thankful," Svana said. "I just wanted to add that I'm also very thankful that he has someone like you to watch after him. Family is very important as are our traditions."
"Speaking of traditions, let me ask you something; is there some crazy Norwegian tradition for family of the deceased to dress up in feathers and masks and walk around with their face painted up like a skeleton?"
Svana shook her head humorously. "No, not as far as I know."
"That's what I thought," David said.
"It sounds like you had a very interesting night," Svana said with a laugh. She poured another shot for the both of them and they endured the bitter burn on the back of their tongues as they ingested the powerful liquid relaxer.
"Well Greg's mentioned that your grandmother is thought to have 'psychic powers' and that Greg somehow has this gift, too. Is your grandmother into any kind of witchcraft stuff? Weird rituals, cutting open goats with daggers, and so forth?"
"No, no," Svana laughed. She looked at David with a child's amusement. What she must have thought of him, he could only imagine – and he didn't really want to open up that box of thoughts. "Nana isn't what we call a witch, but rather a Spákona, or a Seer, I think they're called in English. A witch is far different from a seer; witches are said to have descended from Valkyrie, and the Valkyrie blood gives them harmful magic. Witches are what you would call inherently evil to us. Seers only do good. Just look at Greg; he's nothing but goodness."
David was somewhat doubtful on Nana Olaf's pure heart, but he couldn't argue her point on Greg. He was the most decent human being David had ever met. They knocked back another shot.
"Svana!" Greg appeared in the kitchen doorway with a wide smile on his face. He stumbled a bit – already buzzed from the look of it. David chuckled at the thought of Greg walking all the way to the church without his help. "We're starting."
"Shall we?" She asked with a kind smile in her dark eyes.
David rose from his chair and offered his hand. Svana slipped her delicate fingers into his palm and hoisted herself up. When they emerged into the hallway, six pallbearers were already making their way out of the wide front door with the casket. Greg looped his arm into David's, and they were about to join the trail behind the casket when Nana Olaf stepped in the way. She looked at the scarf draped over David's shoulders, and ground her teeth with menacing eyes.
"Jeg ønsker ikke sin tilstedeværelse," she said, her hard scowl still focused on David.
"What did she say?" Greg asked, his brow heavy with the weight of his confusion and worry. Svana said something back, but the old woman shook her head and repeated the same phrase with sharper words. Svana turned regretfully to the two of them and looked up at David apologetically.
"She says that she does not want to feel his presence when they bury her husband," Svana said.
"What? Nana Olaf, I brought David there because I wanted him there for this moment. I wanted to experience this with him," Greg said, but his words fell on deaf ears. Svana was about to translate for Greg, but David raised his hand.
"No, it's fine," David said.
"No, it's not," Greg said.
"Svana, will you give us a moment?" David asked. Svana ushered Nana Olaf out the front door, but the woman stared at him all the way down the porch steps until the other guests blocked her view.
"David, I want you to be there with me," Greg said.
"Look, this is your moment with your family. I'm an outsider – and it's really none of my business anyway," David said. He grabbed Greg's shoulders and rubbed his arms. "I don't want to ruin this day for anyone if my presence is going to make some people feel uncomfortable."
Greg just stared back into David's eyes, reading something there that David couldn't even begin to fathom. He just wrapped his arms around David's shoulders, embracing him tightly, and then let go, leaving without a word.
David sat on the old wooden rocking chair on the front porch, overlooking the softly glowing skies. It was still dark, but there was a purple and green tint to some of it, glowing with scattered light from an unseen sun. The vodka had been coursing through his system for a while now, and he was completely relaxed. He didn't think he could possibly be more relaxed. The farm was a dead silent place, and the dim world was easy on the eyes. No worries, no strife, just him and his own calming thoughts.
That was until a dark shadow appeared at his side and scared him half to death. He scrambled out of the chair as it tipped over and he quickly jumped to his feet.
"I'm so sorry," Svana said. "I just seem to have a knack for surprising you."
David took a few deep breaths and then laughed it off.
"What are you doing back here? Is it over?" He asked.
"No, there's still a gathering afterward where the friends and family drink to his memory and tell stories of his life," Svana said. "I just wanted to see him put to rest."
Great, David thought. Greg would be drinking even more and he couldn't even keep an eye on him.
"I was wondering if you would like to walk me home from here?" Svana asked. "I'm sure it's better than sitting around here, isn't it?"
David had to hand it to her, she was right about that. But if he was going anywhere, he wanted to take that bottle with him. After what Greg's grandmother had been pulling, he deserved at least that much comfort.
He walked into the kitchen, and a distinctive smell caught his attention. He knew he'd noticed it earlier, but with everyone else gone now he could smell it much more. He followed the scent deeper into the kitchen, near the sink. Bleach. He checked underneath the sink; no bleach.
"David?" Svana appeared in the doorway and David smiled. Her grabbed the bottle off of the table and wished his stomach luck.
There was no real road to follow, just a path worn into the earth that cars and horses followed as guidance. As David and Svana walked in the chilly wind, passing the bottle back and forth, a few cars had passed by and honked at Svana, who smiled and waved back.
"Greg mentioned you having a degree of some kind?" David asked.
"I went to medical school to study animal medicine in Oslo," she said. "I received my degree ages ago. I was valedictorian of my class. I was always very proud of that, even though I chose to live here."
But why did you choose to live here? You could've done anything," David said. "I have a cousin who became a veterinarian. He was in the bottom ten percent of his class and he still makes more annually than I do."
"I stay here because this is my home," she said. David looked around the vast land of… nothing. The smell of the salty sea rolled in with the breeze, and it probably didn't bother anyone used to it, such as Svana. But for David, a man with a particularly powerful and acute sense of smell, it burned his nostrils as badly as the vodka.
"Besides, my family needs me," Svana said. "My father needs me."
"Your father?" David asked.
Svana pointed up a hill to a small house with a porch light on. There was a barn to its right and an old Volvo parked out front.
"I live there with him," she said. "He can't speak for himself, you see. When I was a girl, he and his brother Yolav – Greg's father – went on a hunting trip. But when they returned a few hours later they carried only blood and panic with them, not deer. The story was that Yolav had spotted a deer out of the corner of his eye and reacted, not realizing until it was too late that my father was walking into his line of sight. His rifle shot through my father's face, shattering his jaw and destroying seven molars as the bullet shot through his cheeks. The entrance wound left only a hole; the exit wound had taken nearly half of his face. The bullet shot his tongue out of his mouth as well. He was very lucky to survive, but it has left him unable to speak for himself."
"You have a very kind soul," David said. "It's so uncanny how much the two of you are alike."
"Well, we did grow up together," Svana said. "I remember our favorite show was Little House on the Prairie."
"Please tell me that you're joking," David said, taking a swig of the bottle as she passed it back to him. "That show was pure dreck! Michael Landon couldn't act his way out of a nut-sack!"
Svana laughed with him. "Still, we seemed to love it. I remember us making a game out of it when we were seven years old, but it was really very boring. Our bunk bed was the house, and we would prop up books on their spines and pretend that the pages were the crops. So we would harvest the 'book corn', or go and gather water from the towel river."
"I have no idea how Greg survived such a repressed and mundane childhood," David said.
"He's special," Svana said.
"I know that," David said. They walked up the slope to the house and Svana stopped suddenly.
"Can I ask you something personal?" She asked. David shrugged. "Do you ever find yourself holding back from Greg?"
"In what way?" David asked. Svana walked up to him and took the bottle from his hands.
"Establishing a future with him," Svana said. "It's easy to see that something is always looming over your head when you're with him, like there's a dark cloud that will never go away. Something holding you back. Greg's seen it too, and he's worried that he's doing something wrong to push you away."
"He never does anything wrong," David said. "It's me. It's always been me."
"You're not certain that Greg will feel the same way a few years down the road," Svana said.
"I'm forty-six years old, Svana. I'm going to be fifty years old in just a few short years and he'll only just be on the verge of forty," David said with chagrin.
"You're worried that he'll realize that he's missed out on options and still missing out on choices by committing to you. And you don't want to risk taking that away from him," she said.
"Yes, how did you know?" He asked.
"I don't know," Svana said. "Intuition."
"What if he wants kids?" David asked. "I don't want kids. In four years he could change his mind, and I'll be old enough to be a grandfather."
The fact that he was old enough to be a grandfather now didn't make him feel any better.
"What if he decides that he should've found someone his age after all? What if he's ridiculed for being in an intergenerational relationship?" David reached for the bottle, and Svana handed it over without any resistance. He took a long swing and forced himself to swallow before coughing like a coal miner. "I'm constantly thinking that I'm pulling him away from something better. And what if I am?"
"Then it's Greg's choice," Svana said. "You can't force him to do anything that he doesn't want to. If he misses out on choices in the end then he has no one to blame but himself."
David let those words sink in.
"Let me ask you something; has he made any indication that he misses being single?"
"No," David said. "In fact, he wants to move in together."
"There you go," she said. "You're making something out of nothing."
"I always do," David said. "I'm neurotic and paranoid and always grumpy about something, even when there's nothing to be grumpy about. Somehow Greg looks past all of that. I think he takes care of me more than I take care of him."
"I think that you two are Elskende," she said.
"Elk-what?"
"Elskende, it's a Norwegian word to describe two people who complete each other's souls," Svana said. "One soul split apart into two pieces that eventually comes back together."
"Ah – soulmates," David said.
"I lost my other half a long time ago, but you have a chance to keep Greg," Svana said.
David looked up, about to ask her more about her past, when his eyes caught a figure just beyond her face, standing in the barn. One of the masked and feathered people he'd seen last night. Svana must have seen the alarm in his eyes. She looked over her shoulder, but the figure had already stepped into the shadows of the barn.
"Did you see something?" She asked.
"There's someone in the barn," David said. "Wearing some kind of costume."
Svana nodded and started walking toward the barn. David grabbed her arm to stop her and she laughed.
"I'm not joking," he said.
She pulled out of his grip and once against resumed her path toward the barn. He followed her – he had to protect her in a worst-case scenario, after all – and stopped beside her at the mouth of the barn. The shadows inside concealed any-and-everything.
"Kommer ut av skjul," Svana said. "Det er alt rett, far. Han er en venn."
Out of the shadows stepped the toothed bird-man.
"David, this is my father, Jolfund," she said. She reached up slowly, and Jolfund twitched away but Svana shook her head and whispered something to him. She was able to grab the mask and remove it from his face.
David could see exactly why he was hesitant to remove the mask. Svana's story of that hunting accident was no lie. The right half of Jolfund's face had a circular and puckered scar where the entrance wound had closed and healed. But the left side of his face was mostly gone. The teeth he had left and gums were bare, callused and thick from years of exposure. Scars reached outward like a spider web, fissuring down his jaw and up to his eye from where the skin had been torn and blown away from the flesh and bone.
"He's very shy," Svana said. "But don't let his face fool you; he's really very gentle."
"I'm sure he is," David said. He reached out his hand, and Jolfund reluctantly took his hand and shook it. "You've raised a very impressive young lady."
She translated, and he nodded more enthusiastically. The muscle tissue on the right side of Jolfund's face had been damaged, making a smile impossible, but David could see it in his eyes and that was enough to break the ice.
David opened his eyes to darkness. Of course he did – it was always dark. His head pounded, throbbing, and his eyes felt like they were going to pop right out of his head. He wiped the drool off of his chin as he sat up in bed and shivered. His nose and toes were like icicles. He looked down and noticed that he'd crashed in full clothing. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Greg sprawled out on the bed beside his empty space. He placed a kiss on his soft cheek, not really worried about waking him. Not if Greg drank as much as he suspected he had.
Then David knocked something over – a brown bottle that rolled along the hardwood floor. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
"Oh, crap," David said as he realized just what he'd done last night.
He could barely remember the details, it was all so foggy, but he could still remember stumbling down the hall into the kitchen after Svana's father had dropped him off at the Olaf farm. And that bleach scent was bothering him, and the yellow wallpaper had gotten on his nerves so much that he drunkenly decided to remove it. And when he tore away at the paper he caught the full impact of the bleach smell, all over the wall above the counter. And then he remembered that he had a small bottle of phenolphthalein from a field kit. And Nana Olaf just so happened to have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the bathroom cabinet. And that's when David did what he would regret if Greg woke up and saw.
David ran down the stairs as quietly as he could in the early morning hours and flipped on the kitchen light. He saw his mess – bright yellow wallpaper all over the floor and counter – and the bright purple-pink blotches on the wall from David's homemade Kastle-Meyer test. And sitting at the coffee table drinking a hot dup was Nana Olaf, glaring right at David as he stood in the doorway as still as a raccoon caught in a garbage can.
"I know this looks bad, Mrs. Olaf but I can explain," David said. He rushed by, sweeping up the wallpaper into scraps into his fists and bunching them up into the trash can by the back door. "I was drunk, and it was late, and it's really just a habit for me to start looking for crime scenes wherever I go."
Nana Olaf sipped her cup and glared right at him.
David stopped sweeping up the wallpaper scraps when his mind had caught up the facts. He looked at the kitchen walls and the floor where he's sprayed; where the bright reactions told him that there had been blood.
"I was right," David said, staring wide-eyed where a crime had most likely been committed. He heard Nana Olaf chortled and he glared right back at her. "Don't laugh, this is serious."
And then realization number two dawned on him and his eyes were fixed on the old woman.
"You can understand me," he said. Nana Olaf stared at him with her cold stare, but he couldn't be fooled now – she'd given herself away. She sat her cup of coffee down and sat back in her chair.
"I didn't kill my husband, if that's what you're thinking," she said.
"The evidence in your kitchen says otherwise," David said.
"You people; you come from your big cities throwing your judgments our way without turning the finger back on yourselves," Nana Olaf said. "You're ruining his future, you know that?"
"Why are there pools of blood on your floor and impact splatters all over your walls?" David persisted.
"I did not kill my husband," she repeated firmly. "I found him here, lying in his own blood. I cleaned up the mess, and I told everyone it was a heart attack."
"No doctors or coroners even questioned his death? Wasn't there even an autopsy?"
"We are a small village on the outskirts of town; do you see any coroners?" She asked scathingly. "Besides, I know what killed him and I'm going to handle it myself."
"Oh yeah? And what killed your husband?"
"A witch," said Nana Olaf. "There is a witch among this community, and she summoned a demon spirit to kill my husband. The spirit took the form of a deer and killed my husband with its antlers."
David stared back with utter disbelief. He couldn't believe that this lady had just used a witch and a demon as her defense. She was nuts. The worst part was that he could see that she actually believed that story.
"What the hell?"
David saw Greg standing in the kitchen doorway, looking over bring pink stains and tears.
"Good morning, sweetheart," David said wryly.