The crowd parted as he approached. To his relief there was no corpse lying by the wall. What he found there was a poorly carved picture of an animal. Actually it was only an outline with strange proportions and a big eye.
The eye was red, or really almost black. But it was blood, he could see that at once. The eye stared at him and the pain over his own eye grews sharper. One of the richest parishioners, an unpleasant man by the name of Arnman, stood and pounded on the wall with his stick. The year before he had donated an ugly, heavy, but expensive bridal crown to the parish. Hallén suspected that it was stolen goods that he had acquired on one of his many trips to Poland. Arnman lived there with his mistress on a run-down estate very close to the port where the ferry connection from Ystad reached the Continent. He boasted openly that almost every year he begot a Polish brat, even though his wife in Sweden kept bearing him new children. Hallén felt sad when he gazed from his pulpit at fat Arnman and his skinny wife. Sometimes he also permitted himself the unpleasantness of imagining them naked together. It seemed amazing that Arnman hadn’t crushed his wife to death in bed long ago.
‘The Negro,’ said Arnman in his thick voice. ‘It’s the Negro’s doing.’
There was muttering and buzzing among the crowd. They sounded like angry bees, thought Hallén.
‘The Negro,’ Arnman repeated, and Hallén wished he could get rid of him. But Arnman had great influence in the parish. He sat on the church board and nobody could deny that in spite of everything, he had contributed to the needy church with his donations.
‘How do you know that?’ asked Hallén, thinking about the boy from the distant dark continent, the boy he had tried to teach manners but who had thanked him for his efforts by putting a viper in the offering pouch.
Arnman waved his stick. From the dark-clad crowd of people, one of Arnman’s hired hands stepped forward. He was always drunk but according to rumour had a way with sick horses.
‘I saw him,’ said the hired hand.
‘What did you see?’
‘He was sitting here and chipping at the wall.’
‘When?’
‘Last night.’
Arnman rapped the hired hand on the back with his stick, and he slunk off.
‘He’s been drinking,’ said Arnman. ‘But you can’t deny what he saw. It was the Negro who sat here chipping away, and cut himself and rubbed blood on the wall. He doesn’t belong here. We know about witchcraft.’
Hallén gave Arnman a searching look. The pain over his eye increased.
‘What is it you know?’
‘That people should be careful about who they allow into their community.’
Arnman uttered these last words in a powerful voice. A murmur of agreement came from the crowd.
‘I shall attend to the matter,’ said Hallén. Then he turned to the sexton. ‘Try to scrub this off,’ he said. ‘And the rest of you can go home.’
Arnman marched down to the road and the carriage that was waiting for him. The crowd dispersed slowly. Hallén know that he should talk to Alma and Edvin right away, but the pain above his eye made that impossible. He went back to the parsonage and lay in bed for the rest of the day.
The next morning his serving woman came and told him that the animal with the red eye was back on the wall. Hallén had just woken up, relieved that the pain over his eye was gone.
That same day he paid a visit to Alma and Edvin. They had heard about what happened. Alma had asked Daniel about it, but she got no reply except a few words in his own strange language. They all went out to the barn together where Daniel lay curled up in the straw.
‘He has a fever,’ Alma said. ‘But he refuses to sleep in the house.’
Hallén observed the boy in silence.
‘It’s possible that he should be moved to a mental hospital,’ he said. ‘There are many indications that he has gone insane. It’s not normal to carve animals on churchyard walls. Did he cut himself to get the blood?’
‘I think he coughed it up,’ said Edvin.
‘He’s killing himself with longing for home,’ Alma said firmly. ‘What business does he have among lunatics?’
‘You don’t know anything about these matters. You heard what the pastor said,’ said Edvin.
Hallén tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but he kept looking away. Every time Hallén looked at the boy he had an eerie feeling that there was something he ought to understand that was escaping him. The child lying there in the straw had a message for him that he couldn’t comprehend.
‘It’s causing unrest in the parish, the way he’s carving the wall and daubing blood on it,’ Hallén said. ‘If it happens again we’ll have to consider sending him to St Lars in Lund.’
‘Is that a church?’ Alma asked.
‘You know quite well that it’s the madhouse,’ said Edvin.
‘He doesn’t belong among those people.’
They left him in the barn. The milkmaid who had been alone since Vanja died went about among the cows, weeping. Daniel thought of Sanna. He still couldn’t grasp how she could have betrayed him. He had felt happy with her, and she had shared her warmth with him. But she had deceived him about who she really was. She had acted the same way as the man who had hit her and dragged her by the hair.
He lay there until far into the night and tried to understand why she had acted as she did. He didn’t touch the food that Alma brought him.
‘I don’t want you to be tied up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to end up with crazy people. Can’t you stop going to the church?’
Daniel didn’t answer. But when Edvin came in she told him that Daniel had promised he wouldn’t go out that night.
‘We could always put the boy in the house,’ Edvin said. ‘Or I could stay out here myself.’
‘That’s not necessary. He won’t go.’
Edvin shook his head. ‘The hired hand said that Arnman has stationed some of his boys outside the church.’
‘That man is disgusting. He probably told them to attack Daniel if he shows up.’
‘If only we knew what he was thinking. He sees something that we don’t see. He’s surrounded by people again. They’re here, I can feel it.’
‘Nobody wants to put you in the madhouse,’ Alma replied. ‘But you want to put him there?’
‘I’m just trying to puzzle him out, that’s all. It’s as if he’s telling a story. Sometimes I feel like all this mud is being transformed into sand, and that it’s getting hot. But then it’s gone again.’