His wife rarely approved, but Silas just couldn’t help himself. Besides, he was adamant that he would find a use for whatever it was someday. It was all about having an eye for things, he insisted. For their potential. Great treasures could be found among the lowliest of objects. After all, hadn’t he made a lovely chandelier from twelve old horseshoes? Else was forced to concede that indeed he had. It was incredibly beautiful and different. He had even sold a couple of chandeliers to tourists visiting the south coast of the main island and so been able to finance the purchase of more old horseshoes.
Silas’s talent for woodwork extended beyond carpentry; he also knew how to look after wood before it came under his plane. In fact, he cared for all the trees on the Head as if he were their father. As far as his actual sons were concerned, he had shared his love and knowledge as best as he could: Jens loved the forest with all his heart and Mogens loved it with his mind. In other words, Jens would have a lump in his throat when he saw a tree being felled, while Mogens would be busy calculating its value.
Silas Horder loved his sons equally, of course. But it was possible he loved Jens a little more.
The idea of expanding the existing mixed forest with a small area of Christmas trees was the most visionary idea Silas had ever had, and certainly the most lucrative. It would enable him to supply Christmas trees and ornamental branches to the island’s permanent residents and the few people who spent Christmas in their holiday cottages, and thus make money for more treats on the Horder family’s Christmas table. That, however, happened only when Else Horder managed to keep hold of the money before Silas spent it on more junk.
They had plenty of room to plant Christmas trees because the family had all the Head to themselves. No one else appeared interested in living so remotely, even before trees and bushes began to spread out of control and suffocate the open areas where animals used to graze. However, the locals were happy to visit the Head in order to have something mended or simply for a chat, even though it was a long walk or drive up the narrow isthmus. The island’s inhabitants respected Silas. They valued his craftsmanship and found his eccentricity amusing. It was common knowledge, for instance, that he talked to his trees, and his Christmas trees were always popular; customers especially liked to hear him whisper goodbye to the tree before selling it to them. Afterwards he would rub his hands in the December cold and look a little mournful while his wife took the money.
So Silas was no ordinary man, but no one doubted his goodness, and the coffins he made were so beautiful that it was regarded as something of a privilege to be buried in one of them.
No one apart from Silas Horder himself and his younger son knew that the coffins were tested before they were handed over to their rightful owners. On the night that followed the completion of a coffin, the pair of them would sneak out into the workshop when Else and Mogens were fast asleep. They would lie down in the coffin, Silas first, with Jens on his stomach, enveloped in the darkness and the scent of fresh wood.
Jens knew no nicer or safer feeling. Years later, when the hours in the coffins had blurred into vague childhood memories, that feeling would remain. Darkness was a trusted friend. A loving embrace.
They would chat about the bike-shop owner or the baker or whoever had just died and would soon be occupying the coffin. Silas knew most people on the main island, or he knew someone who knew them. Not that he was a gossip. He only ever spoke well of the dead. It might be something like how the baker had always been good to his rats, or how the postmaster had had such an excess of love for his wife that he had had to share his devotion with no fewer than three other women on the main island.
Silas also confided in his younger son that for years the mayor of Korsted had hidden things around his farm which they were allowed to take, but only if they could be as quiet as mice and invisible and never talk to anyone about it afterwards, including the mayor himself. It was an amusing little game, which the mayor played with a few initiated people. After his death other people on the island carried on the game, but it was a big secret, and Jens must never say a word about it to Mogens or anyone else. Especially not his mother, who didn’t like that sort of game.
What was said in the coffin stayed in the coffin. That was the deal.
However, not everything that was put in the coffin stayed there. On the night they were testing out the baker’s coffin Jens had a sudden flash of inspiration just before he climbed on to his father. He spun around and started rummaging through a box behind the lathe.
‘What are you doing, Jens?’ his father called out from the coffin.
‘I want to put the baker’s rolling pin inside,’ Jens whispered proudly when he came back. ‘Don’t you think he’ll be pleased to have it with him in the coffin, even though the handle has cracked?’
There was a small bang when one end of the rolling pin hit the bottom of the coffin. It took a while before Silas said:
‘Naaaah, I’m not sure about that. After all, I’ve had it for some time now, Jens, and I’ve grown very fond of that rolling pin – otherwise, why do you think I’ve kept it? There’s no need to bury a perfectly good item that’s still in working order. And it can serve to remind us of the old baker. No, it’s better that it stays here with us. The baker won’t need it where he’s going.’
‘You mean in the coffin?’ Jens whispered.
‘No, I was thinking more about afterwards.’
‘Afterwards? Where’s he going afterwards?’
‘Well, that depends on whether he has been good.’
‘At baking?’
‘No, I didn’t mean at baking. It’s more about whether he treated people properly while he was alive.’
‘He once threw a piping bag at me.’
‘Did he now?’
‘Yes, because I stopped to touch the doorframe of the bakery. It was the frame you made for him last spring.’
‘And did you take the piping bag with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good boy.’
‘So where is he going?’
‘Hard to know, but that’s for nature to decide. When his body decomposes in the coffin, his soul will leave and turn into something else. Whatever he deserves to become.’
‘What might that be? A butterfly? A blade of grass? A cart for a horse?’ Jens wondered out loud. ‘A fatted pig?’ He could easily imagine the baker as a fatted pig.
‘Who knows?’
‘Might he become a baker again?’
‘I hope not.’
‘But he’ll stay on the island?’
‘Who knows?’
Jens mulled over that night’s conversation in the coffin. He found it comforting to know that not everything ended when you died. But then again he didn’t like not knowing what he would become. He would prefer to carry on living as himself. And he certainly didn’t want to be a mosquito. He would rather be an ant; at least it didn’t fly around and sting people. Or a tree that might become a fine coffin in which someone might lie and have a chat someday.
He pondered death at length, but there was one thought in particular that he wished had never occurred to him: that it wasn’t just him who was going to die. His mother and Mogens would also die at some point. As would his father. And regardless of what they became afterwards, they would no longer be his mother and Mogens and his father. He had a tummy ache for several days at the realization, and it made him wonder whether it might not be better to die before them so that he wouldn’t have to go around missing them. But then they might go around missing him and be sad about it. And if he became a tree or a horse or a scarecrow after his death, would they even notice? He couldn’t imagine anything more awful than being a scarecrow that no one recognized and was reduced to just standing there frightening the birds. And might he become a rolling pin? What if he cracked?