Sometimes the Ghost Is Us

The first sheep was the hardest to kill. From there it got easier. But the first one struggled. More than the others after it the first ewe fought as the boy took it by the head, as he shoved it through the rungs of the ladder, as he crumbled it, crumpled it, as he twisted its horn, as he twisted its neck, as he twisted its life around his hand. He was unskilled, that first time, unprepared. He didn't know how badly a sheep could want to live; that it would want to see spring, that it would care to stand and keep standing as he used to care to stand and keep standing. He wasn't prepared for the ferocity of the docile; as though some spirit had crept into the hay in the farm, after all—crept into their heath, their croft, their ewe-house, nestled into the bones and muscle of their sheep, made itself as a home here as they had tried to and kept trying.

The boy's father mourned the sheep more than he had mourned his wife. Not that his father cried, or grieved, or complained, or stopped at all his work; but he swore, at least, which was still more than he did when the boy's mother lay dead. He wouldn't touch his wife's body, but his hands were soft as they unfolded the sheep's head from in between the rungs, careful as they held the sheep to his chest, tender as they stretched the sheep on the ground, gentle even when they eventually butchered the dead sheep, stripping its bones clean; “we won't waste good meat, even if this was the devil's work,” the father told his children looking on. But of course it wasn't the devil's work. Just his alone. Just the boy's work, just Helgi's.

He still didn't really know why he did it. He knew even less why he kept doing it. Why he lied about it, making up stories of a man, then a woman, then a devil he'd seen running through his father's land. All the while he snuck out in the night, when the ice on the ground wouldn't leave footprints as the snow would have, opening the door to the ewe-house just barely always careful of its creaking, careful so his father wouldn't hear or his brothers or his sister. They would be so confused. His father would likely kill him.

Sometimes when he crept into the ewe-house he just sat there with them. He stroked them as he remembered his mother stroking him, long long ago. He whispered stories to them as his mother used to whisper to him, when they were both younger and alive. He told the ewes stories about elves and about God, about other countries where the sheep stayed out all winter long and where elves all sang beautiful songs, glittering songs, as sharp-edged as light. And finally he'd shrink against a ewe's soft coat and close his eyes and pretend he was not where he was. And too old at age twelve to pretend or imagine anything any longer he would open his eyes and sometimes he would sigh or else he would just stand up quickly and quietly he would walk back to the house before someone woke and saw him gone.

But when Helgi crammed that first sheep's head between the ladder rungs, it was because he had laid his head on her coat and—unhappy with him there—the sheep had gotten to her feet and walked away from him, not wanting him, leaving him, forgetting him, ignoring him, thinking only of herself and her illness and her cow as he worked and worked on his father's farm, a laborer when he should have been a child, her child. Then the sheep was dead and he realized it was not his mother he had killed as he had thought while he was killing but a sheep. Just a sheep. A middle-aged ewe, well-bred, mother of three growing boys. And he snuck back through the winter night and went to bed.

And then a day later he snuck back through the winter night and laid his head on another ewe. They were shy creatures but not ones that grieved or feared, and thus were no different for the past night's death. But for these traits he looked at them and saw his father in them. They are my father's children, he thought. But not my sisters, not my brothers. They are more my father's children than I am, he thought. He stroked the ewe closest, pulled his fingers through its tumbled coat like his sister pulled her comb through her hair before slipping into bed at night. He envied them: these sheep. He envied them his father. But he also pitied them his father. The first sheep he killed for his mother. The second for his father.

But this second time he waited. He went that night back to bed and he planned. In the morning he found rope his father wouldn't know was his, and he hid it under his mattress until nightfall. And when night finally found him—when his sister's breathing slowed, when his brothers’ eyes had closed, when his father's snores had begun the falling and rising and falling and rising they find only in the deepest dreaming sleep—Helgi sidled out of the covers of his bed, took the rope and a lamp and went through the snow to the ewe-house.

He chose carefully this time. Helgi walked around the stable with the lamp in his hand and he looked into the ewes’ eyes until he eventually settled on one of his father's finest ewes: a fat ewe that had cost his father many other ewes, one who had already given him twins and whom his father hoped would give him many more in the years to come that were no longer to come. So he swung a rope over an open post holding up the roof of the barn, put a halter around the ewe's fat neck, tied the rope to the halter, and heaved, heaved, heaved the other side of the rope, tying the rope down to another open post once the ewe was high enough off the ground. Then he just watched the ewe sputter. It kept trying to say something, he could see its mouth opening and closing, and he thought of his father's snore rising and falling, falling and rising, as the ewe's mouth was closing and opening, opening and closing. But it had no air to speak with. Some of the other sheep looked up at the one that sprawled in the sky above them, but being just sheep they thought little of the miracle of this flying sheep. It was only Helgi who gaped at the sheep, amazed at such a beast, at such a child of his father's. Finally its mouth opened and didn't close, and the ewe stopped sputtering, stopped sprawling in the air above him. It hung, dead, floating, ghostly. So many years people had seen ghosts on this property, but this was the first time the ghost was animal, not human, not monster. This was the first time the ghost was real, white, ghostly. Helgi went to bed.

When his father came back the next morning from the ewe-house he lied to his children about the hung ewe; he told them he killed the sheep himself because it had eaten wool, that he had had no choice. Of course he didn't know Helgi knew, and Helgi just nodded like his brothers and his sister at the news, all taking it as they'd been taught to take all news of something gone—as a fact, not to be mourned, just as what is, whether it is a sheep or a mother or an elf or a world that existed once on the other side of the croft.

In the evening as they rested Helgi took little Nonnie, his youngest brother, to the brook. He asked him: “Do you believe Father? Do you think the ewe really ate the wool—that Father really killed her?”

And little Nonnie looked at him with his round round eyes and he shook his head. “I think it was a ghost, or a spirit, or maybe God. Something bigger than Father—maybe even bigger than the heath.”

And Helgi nodded his head. “Something bigger than father,” he repeated, but quietly, like a tuft of wool. And they sat in the silence for a little while.

Finally, Helgi spoke again: “I think it was the man I've seen around here, the one I was telling you about a few days ago, the one who cut up the ear of that sheep last year. Remember me telling you? Do you remember that, Nonnie? I think it was him again, the ghost—the ghost that will never let us live. Sometimes I see him still. I see him on the hills in the evening. Once I looked out the window in the croft in the middle of night and I think I even saw him then—or at least I saw a shadow with a lamp in its hand but I think it was him.”

“Sometimes I can't get to sleep at night and I hear the floorboards creak. Is that him, Helgi? Do you think it's him? Father says it's the wind but I think it's him.”

“It's him, Nonnie. It's him alright.” Helgi looked down at little Nonnie. He pitied him, the poor creature. Little Nonnie with the ocean in his eyes.

“You're sure it's not Mother, Helgi? What if it's not a him, what if it's a her, if it's Mother, and what if she's just trying to talk to us, or get our attention? Or maybe it's Mother and she's angry because Father killed her cow, and now she's trying to get revenge on Father by killing his sheep. Do you think it could be her, Helgi?” And little Nonnie looked up at Helgi with the ocean in his eyes.

“No, stupid. Mother's dead. She's not coming back.” And as Nonnie started to cry Helgi began to envy him, this strange child. He envied the ocean in his eyes and he envied his sobs, which broke out of him with loud gulps of air and swallowed the space around them until it was only the two boys and the world at their feet to drink from. “Shut up, Nonnie. Stop blubbering.” And the world started to grow again as Nonnie breathed it back out, until they had again themselves and the brook and the sour fish swimming in it and the hills running alongside them and above them and behind them—the entire world.

Little Nonnie rubbed his eyes red as his sister's cheeks in winter. Helgi sighed deeply, glancing at Little Nonnie just barely before staring back out at the stream again. “The ghost killing the sheep is not as dead as Mother is; that's why he can kill the sheep. Mother's too dead to do something like kill a ewe, because she died twice: first when Father killed her cow, then again in the winter from her sickness. Mother would come back for you if she could, Nonnie. But she wasn't made for this world. You know that as well as the rest of us.”

Little Nonnie looked up at Helgi with his red ocean-filled eyes. “She was an elf, wasn't she Helgi? She wasn't made for this world because she was an elf who got mistaken for a human, and without the other elves she couldn't live; we kept putting all that medicine and that food in her but it was meant for humans, not for elves, and so it couldn't help her and instead she just shriveled away. Do you think she was an elf, Helgi? And that's why she told us all the stories about the elves and that's why she died two deaths?”

Helgi knew his mother was very, very human. But for Little Nonnie he half nodded, watching the water twirl in the stream before him. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe, Nonnie.”

Little Nonnie watched his brother's eyes, watched them twirling in the stream. Nonnie breathed, sighed; the water twirled. Helgi breathed, sighed, watched his eyes twirl in the stream before him. “It's getting late,” Helgi breathed, not looking up. “It's time to go back.”

They went back to their house. Little Nonnie, then Helgi after him, first waiting a little longer and watching over the tops of the hills. There was snow coming; the clouds were lengthening and the sun was lowering down under the dirt like a coffin. The water had stopped twirling, had started freezing.

The days were short; the sun pulled up the covers of its bed and slept.