Sleet: Selected Stories

The woman stopped, dropped her sack on the stone walk and pulled the hair back from her sweaty forehead. Then she looked Alice in the eyes with an expression that was utterly inscrutable, neither kind not malicious. All the same, Alice found it confusing, and she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She simply looked down at the sack and then past the sack toward the bower. She noticed then that Mrs. Mattsson was beginning to look off in the same direction, so she had to do something to divert the woman’s attention. She wet her tongue to ask the farmer’s wife what it was she wanted, but the little woman beat her to the punch.

Posing a question that really wasn’t a question, she lifted the sack and said, “Mind if I walk across your yard? This sack, it’s so heavy, and it’s shorter for me this way.”

It sounded all right. If she’d only held her eyes still it might have sounded even better. But they were wandering all over, inside the house and back out again, up to the forester’s bedroom and down to the yard, between the apple trees, hovering for a moment like a hawk, unmoving, over the bower. It was as if she could see down into it, even though she was standing there on the walk beside Alice, breathing heavily from her exertion.

“Naturally, Mrs. Mattsson,” said Alice at last, reaching down to help the woman with the sack.

But Mrs. Mattsson would not accept her help. She became suspicious, in fact, when she saw that Alice was so eager to assist her, and so she found various pretexts for dawdling there in front of the porch. There were invisible cats to lure out of the bushes, flowers to admire and aromas to savor as she let her eyes wander over the yard and the house.

“It’s such a nice place you have,” she said, looking Alice in the eyes one last time. Then, at last, she picked up the sack and began to move off. “Strange folk here,” thought Alice, “never saying hello or good-bye, looking at you with such insolence whenever they feel like dropping by, whenever they feel like leaving.”

Then of course it had to happen — as the woman was trudging away, just as she was opening the front gate — the one thing that Alice most feared. The forester called out to her.

“Alice! Where the hell are you?”

At that moment Alice seemed to be hearing his voice for the very first time. Her entire body went stiff. The gate took an eternity to close and when at last the latch clanged it brought her back to life. She rushed back up the porch steps, in through the hallway, and up the stairs to the second floor. The sitting room door was wide open. Rushing in, she locked it behind her and collapsed in a big chair. A few moments later the forester was knocking at the door. Though she refused to open it at first, she finally gave in and did so, only to find him standing there in the hallway, filling his pipe with tobacco, oblivious to everything.

Thoroughly preoccupied by this task, he glanced up and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Alice lost control of herself. She couldn’t bear such apathy. The present situation was so foreign to her that she found herself completely incapable of mastering it. All the dread over what had already happened between them, dammed up throughout the spring by new caresses, clandestine pleasures, all of it flowed out from her now in a long shriek, an outburst of shame and fear.

She had already imagined many times before that she knew what her defiance might lead to, but she’d really only toyed with the thought of ultimately getting caught. She had allowed her thoughts to race skywards like rockets, had reveled in their blinding glare as she burrowed her head into his flesh. They often pulled down the shades in his room for a few hours in the middle of the day to pretend it was night. They made one another strong, each by seeking protection in the other. She crept inside him as into a cave, and in the soft warmth of that dim retreat the hostile outer world seemed comically weak, laughable, small. The long periods between their short respites in the forester’s room had been like bridges between small, delightful islands. And it was these bridges that enabled her to understand the sensual bond she was developing with this man, her lover, a bond that grew stronger with the passage of time. They were bridges of memory — memories of a fingertip on a breast, a bite on the shoulder, a kiss on the neck, a long hand gliding down her back.