• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 313 0

that. You see, what God, in His great mercy, has ordained is sacred. Too sacred to be profaned. Yet marriage is full of lurking dangers, and one of these terrible lurking dangers is jealousy. Jealousy rages around like a hungry lion, bringing an unhappy mind. Today you two, my dear friends, feel a deep sense of belonging to each other, and mutual love. Yet a time may well come, and a day, when some other person may seem still more dear. If that happens, I want you to remember these words from the Bible: ‘What then? Notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretense, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice.’ I quote from the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians, chapter one, verse eighteen, and these devout words I pass on to you as guardians of your marriage. In a time of need, take them out, read them! Then the drizzle of delusory love will pass, and your soul will find its peace. I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

Laamanen gave the married couple a white-bound Bible and shook their hands. He stood firm on both feet till the congregation had filtered out and the door finally closed. Then he carefully raised his foot. The church floor was stamped with a large blood-stained footprint.

Vatanen hurried to the parsonage to call for a taxi. While he waited, the Reverend Laamanen lay on a pew, quietly sobbing.

“What can that marriage come to, since I, figuratively speaking, performed it in blood-stained clothes? My dear Vatanen, swear by Almighty God you’ll never relate what happened here in this church today.”

Vatanen gave his word. Then the taxi came. Before hobbling into it, Laamanen knelt before the altar painting, clasped his hands, and prayed: “Lord Jesus, only begotten Son of God, forgive me for what I have done to thee today. But in the name of our Almighty Father, what happened was an accident!”

Vatanen told the taxi driver to go quickly to the outpatient department of Kuopio General Hospital. Laamanen eased himself into the taxi, and soon it had vanished up the dusty road.

Vatanen stretched out full-length on a pew, and the hare fell asleep on the floor. It was tired. The silence, now complete again in the nave, lulled them both into a profound slumber.

11

Granddad

Toward the end of July, Vatanen took a forestry job. It meant billhooking and chopping excessive undergrowth from the woods on the sandy ridges around Kuhmo and living in a tent with an ever more faithful, almost full-grown hare.

He was now seventy or eighty miles farther north, about halfway up the map of Finland. As he performed his heavy labor, with no concern for time, he grew tougher and thought less and less about the flabby life he’d left three hundred miles or so south in the capital city. Here there were no boring political arguments with raw proselytes, and no randy women displaying themselves for picking and choosing. In the Kuhmo forest wilderness he could keep sexual obsession out of his head.

Anyone could live this life, he reflected, provided they had the sense to give up the other way of life.

He’d been clearing undergrowth nonstop for a couple of weeks and had finished his assignment: the privileged saplings had been given enough space to grow. It was time to head for the township of Kuhmo and get paid.

Around midnight, he arrived at a little village on the shore of Lake Lentua. His seven-mile trek had wearied him, and he’d have liked to stop and stay at some house; but the village was asleep, and he didn’t feel like waking anyone in the middle of the night. So he went into a windowless, timbered barn in the yard of a large farmhouse, threw his knapsack against the wall, and settled down to sleep on the floor. It’s very pleasant sleeping in pitch-darkness: the mosquitoes don’t bother you. People who live in the forest think such sleep is a luxury. The hare was restless, though. It kept sniffing the air around it; the barn had an odor of rotten fish. They haven’t put enough salt in the carp tub, Vatanen decided, and dropped off, giving little thought to the sweetish smell.

At about six, he woke and