The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [59]
Half through the afternoon Braaf asked Karlsson could it be true that the Russians had buried the finger of a saint under the church of theirs at New Archangel?
Wennberg snorted derision.
Karlsson doubted the tale. How would any saintly finger find its way to New Archangel?
Braaf pondered, nodded, hummed.
If anything, green now crowded the waterline beside the canoemen more thickly than ever. When crows and ravens flew into this timber they disappeared as if gulped. The repetition of pattern, each green shape pyring dozens of long branches upward to a thin rod of top, seemed to have no possible end to it, simply multiplied ahead to circle the world and join back on itself here in this mesh beside the canoe. Braaf and Wennberg long since had ceased seeing individual trees, only the everlasting shag. Karlsson worked at watching for changes in this channel forest, but without result yet.
"Don't make a melody of it, Wennberg. Fog's fog, it'll leave when the ghosts in it want to visit somewhere else." The sea mist which clung onto the forest and was delaying launch into the channel this morning had been the blacksmith's topic of indignation during the past minutes, Braaf now his moderator.
"You'd know, you've as much fog in that head of yours as this bedamned coast," Wennberg muttered.
"Drown in your soup," Braaf invited. He glanced somewhere over the heads of Wennberg and Karlsson. "Mast paint."
"What?"
"Mast paint, he called it."
Still Wennberg gaped at Braaf.
"Mast paint," Braaf recited one more time. "Melander called pea soup that."
"Melander." Wennberg gave a half-hearted snort.
"At least he was worth grave space, more than can be said for you."
"You little pile of—"
"The pair of you, douse it," Karlsson inserted quickly.
"My regrets, blacksmith," Braaf offered. "Maybe you're worth grave space after all. But just tell me a thing, you've swallowed gospel in your time. Where is he?"
"Where's—? Braaf, are you moonstruck or what?"
"No, only tell me. Bible-true. Where's Melander just now?"
Wennberg squinted as if Braaf had asked him the exact cubits of the universe. "Melander's buried, you helped tuck him into his grave."
"Not the grave," Braaf proceeded patiently. "After. Away there."
"Oh. You mean, where's he—been fetched to?"
Braaf bobbed yes. Wennberg appeared no more comfortable with this translation than with the original query.
"That's, well, the pastors now, they say it's a matter of how he'd've met judgment, that's all. 'Judge none blessed before his death,' is what they preach."
Braaf blinked and waited.
"Look at it this way," the blacksmith bid anew. "Those balance scales where the Russians weighed out the poods of fur, remember those?"
Braaf nodded.
"Well, then, you know how one too many pelts made the scale go down on that side, or one too few made it go down on the weighted side."
Braaf nodded.
"Well, the pastors say life gets measured out that way, good deeds and bad, and whichever the judgment scale comes down on, you see, a sou! goes either to Heaven or Hell."
Braaf didn't nod.
"You mean its all up to some weighmaster?" asked Braaf with incredulity.
"Well, not, no, not just a weighmaster, so to speak. God does it. The pastors say."
"What if it comes out dead even?"
"Dead—?"
"What if God puts a pood over here, credit to Melander, and another pood over here, his misdeeds your gospel spouters'd call them, and it comes out dead even, balanced?"
Wennberg looked to Karlsson for aid, Karlsson shook his head. "Bible is your rope of knots, Wennberg, not mine."
"I say he'd come out dead even, Melander would," Braaf swept on. "He'd have savvied any scales, known how to wink them into balance."
"So where—" Braafian theology riveted Wennberg. "So where d'you think Melander