I stared at the window. It had begun to rain.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ Kroner was saying. ‘He hit me, that’s all. Your brother.’
‘Let’s have a look at it.’
He knelt on the floor and lifted his lip. He showed me the tooth.
‘It’s chipped,’ I told him, ‘nothing more. It’ll give you character.’
He looked up at me and the way he looked then, just for a moment, even with the child crying and the rain crawling down the window, I knew why I’d allowed it all to happen.
Winter lasted longer than usual that year, and even in April we had sleet driving almost horizontally across the land, the wind tearing out of the north-east and cutting through your clothes as if they weren’t there. One morning that month I came back from the village to find both Kroner and Mazey gone. They rarely went anywhere together; I couldn’t think where they might be. But the moment I noticed tyre tracks in the yard I guessed.
It was afternoon before Kroner returned, and he returned alone. He was trying to keep his eyes steady as he stepped down out of the truck and saw me waiting outside the back door. He did a poor imitation of a man with right on his side.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘The boy …’ He stood in the mud, one hand outstretched, as if the truth was self-evident.
It was — but I wasn’t about to put it into words for him. I shifted his child higher in my arms. The inside of my head was scorched, charred; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to.
‘I thought we agreed,’ he said, taking one step towards me. And then, bristling, ‘I’ve done you a favour and that’s all the thanks I get?’
I turned and ran into the barn and snatched a skinning knife down from the wall. Then out into the yard again, the child still in my arms.
Kroner was standing where I’d left him, but all his righteousness, and all the indignation that had followed it, had fled. Just those small, square hands spread in the air and his chin at an angle, justifying. Like most men, he could be hypnotised by sudden, unexpected movement.
My head was black inside, all black. I held the knife just below my jaw, which was the same height as Kroner’s heart.
‘Give me the keys to the truck.’
His Adam’s apple plunged, then climbed again. ‘Not with the child here, Edith. Not with the —’
‘Give me the keys.’
He reached into his pocket. Took the keys out, handed them to me. His eyes were still running backwards and forwards between the aimed blade and my face.
I pushed the child at him and left.
I drove the forty-five kilometres with the knife lying beside me on the seat. It was a cold day, with snow at the edges of the road. Everything was grey: the sky, the trees, the fields. I saw a fire burning in the land behind a house. I couldn’t believe how orange it was; it was the only real colour anywhere.
Kroner had talked to me the week before, when Mazey and my father were asleep. I was tired that night; I couldn’t remember much of what he’d said. He never could say things straight out, anyway. He had to come at you round corners. The long and the short of it was, he’d tried to love the boy; he’d tried, and failed. I thought he should try harder.
Kroner shook his head. ‘He doesn’t belong with us, not now we’ve got a child of our own.’
‘Where do you think he belongs? With the Poppels?’ I laughed scornfully.
‘We’ve got our own family now. It’s just not natural.’
‘Nobody said it was natural. It’s how it is, that’s all.’
Kroner shook his head again. I hadn’t listened. I hadn’t understood. And so he’d been forced to act without me, on my behalf.
That was the trouble with Kroner. He thought he was the clever one. He thought he could get his way. Well, we’d see about that. We’d see. I gripped the steering-wheel so hard, my hands ached for three days afterwards, as if I’d been strangling guinea fowl all afternoon, or scything grass.
The institution was a big building, and it took me almost half an hour to find Mazey. He was in a long room on the second floor. It was something like a church in there, only the smell was different. They’d strapped him to a metal bed, with nothing underneath him but a dark-green rubber sheet. He was almost naked, just a gown on him that was unfastened at the sides, and it was cold in that room, so cold that my breath showed in the air like cigarette smoke. I didn’t bother unfastening the belts. I just worked the skinning knife under the leather and sawed until it frayed and snapped. First one wrist, then the other. Then his ankles. I put his clothes back on, and led him out of the room and down the stairs. There were three men in white overalls who stopped talking when they saw us. We walked right through them and they didn’t move. It was something in my eyes, maybe. Or maybe it was the knife that I was holding upright in my fist.
He sat beside me in the truck and watched the trees go by. His right hand opened and closed on his bare leg. He didn’t seem upset by what had happened. It had happened in the world where his body was, but his mind was somewhere else. There was a gap between the two that most people didn’t have: his body might be in pain, but his mind would be too far away to notice or remember. I asked him if he was hungry. He looked at me with eyes that were the same colour as the weather; he didn’t say anything, though. I stopped at a roadside café and bought him a sausage and some chips on a paper plate. He ate slowly, his head turned sideways, one finger on the window. Sometimes it hurt me just to look at him. There were things that were going to happen and I would never even know.
He only spoke once during the drive, and that was when we passed a house that had a crab-apple tree in front of it. I thought I heard him murmur the word ‘singing’.
I turned to him. ‘You mean chimes? The wind-chimes?’
He didn’t answer. His head was resting against the seat, and his hands, closed into soft fists, were pressed against his thighs.
‘We’ll be home soon.’ I took one hand off the wheel and pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘I wouldn’t leave you in a place like that. I wouldn’t leave you there.’
It was dusk when we drove into the clearing. A light was on in the barn — my father, working late. He’d taken to spending most of his time in the barn since Kroner had moved in; he even had a bed out there. The house was in darkness. Just the kitchen window glowing, and the sky still pale above. Those yellow panes of glass looked welcoming, but a welcome was the last thing I expected. There was a man in that room, and three hours ago I’d held a knife to him.
Kroner was sitting by the stove with a newspaper spread on his knees. He was pretending to read, but I knew he wasn’t taking in a single word. The baby was lying on a blanket on the table, crying.
‘Baby needs feeding,’ he said.
Some of the fury that had carried me forty-five kilometres across the county still remained. I took Mazey by the shoulder and stood him in front of Kroner. At last Kroner looked up from the paper, his eyes jumping from my face to my hand and back again.
‘See that man?’ I was pointing at Kroner, but looking at Mazey.
Mazey nodded.
‘That man is not your father,’ I said. ‘Do you understand?’
According to Eva, Karl had started drinking two years after he’d got married and he’d been drinking ever since, so when I drove to the town one morning I wasn’t surprised to see his car parked outside a small bar near the railway crossing. What surprised me was what happened next. I was supposed to be buying shoes for Karin that day. Instead, I parked my car next to his and walked into the bar.