“Tell me about your prophetic dreams,” Liv prodded.
Stephen shuddered, imagining the gnarled bone-fish spine he’d placed beneath his pillow and the carved coal beside it.
He knelt by the circle of rocks Liv had arranged, adding the jumble of sticks she’d tied together with twine.
The dreams disturbed him, and though he wanted to confide them to Liv, he feared she would see deeper into their meanings and know things about him he’d rather not reveal.
“I dreamed of a black cat with yellow eyes and a trunk floating down a river,” he confessed, leaving out the sense in the dream that a black veil was falling over the world. The dreams had been vivid and unsettling.
On the third night, he’d woken crying and wet the bed. Rather than an eighteen-year-old man, he’d woken feeling like a five-year-old child, disoriented and terrified of the darkness in his room.
He’d ripped off his sheets and ran into the dewy early morning forest to bury them. Later, it had seemed foolish. He should have washed them, but he couldn’t bring himself to see the yellow stain on the cream fabric.
He was a man. He hadn’t wet the bed in years.
Though in the months after his father died, there’d been an accident or two. Stephen’s mother made sure he never forgot those.
He felt Liv’s eyes on him.
“I threw the dream stave away. The spine and the coal. My mom almost found it, so I threw it away.”
Liv didn’t respond, but returned to her digging, and Stephen wished he’d never mentioned dreams. Why had he wanted prophetic dreams? It wasn’t as if they revealed anything useful.
How could a black cat and a trunk possibly foretell his future?
Liv
“Who was Freya again?” Stephen asked when they’d completed the pyre.
“Freya was the Norse Goddess of love and fertility, beauty, sexuality, and even war. When I was a child, George prayed to Odin, and I prayed to Freya. He told me she was the true embodiment of the Volva, and I was made in her image.” Liv blushed as Stephen watched her. The sun had set, and a violet sky gazed upon them. “I used to see her in this sky,” Liv murmured, gesturing above. “Pink and violet. I imagined her riding in the heavens on her chariot pulled by her two Skogkatts.”
“What are Skogkatts?” he asked.
Liv grinned.
“They’re cats.”
“Cats! What an awful choice. Didn’t the Norse men who wrote the history books think they should give the Goddess of Love a better beast than a cat?”
“Where’s your faith, Stephen Kaiser? Freya was a Volva. She could have instilled a butterfly with the power to pull her chariot.”
He shrugged.
“I still think a tiger would have sounded better.”
“A tiger in Scandinavia?”
“Okay, fine. A bear, then, or some mythical beast with the head of a mountain goat and the body of a bear.”
“Who do you pray to, Stephen?” Liv asked. She had never doubted George’s stories of the Norse Gods, but she was suddenly curious who Stephen worshiped.
“Your question implies I pray at all. I’ve never suffered that common affliction.”
Liv looked up, startled.
“You don’t believe in any gods?”
Stephen did not return her stare.
“I don’t believe in the God of the church. I went to Catholic school, Liv. Do you know what God is? Eternal damnation if you covet your neighbor's wife?” He chuckled. “Hell must be packed.”
Liv laughed despite herself. She too did not believe in a Catholic God, but she believed in the old Gods, she believed in the balancing of good and evil, and she’d never been around anyone who openly mocked the common faith. George disagreed with most religions, but he deferred to a need for belief in a higher power. His ancestors came from Norway. Thus, he worshiped those Gods, but worship them he did.
Liv’s mother followed a Christian faith. A crucified Jesus hung above the bed she shared with Roy. Simple wooden crosses hung in every room in their small house.
When Arlene had gotten pneumonia, Liv’s mother spent every night on her knees at Arlene’s bedside, repeating the Lord’s prayer. She rarely attended church. Working six days a week didn’t permit it, and on Sundays she did the washing, worked in her garden, and mended clothes.
“Do you think we were meant to meet, Stephen?” Liv asked, wishing she could keep the hopefulness from her voice.
His eyes flicked up, and at the look in her eyes, he stopped.
“Like destiny?”
“Sure,” she shrugged.
“Does George believe in destiny?” he asked.
Liv glanced toward Stephen’s bag and imagined the book inside.
“Yes, he does.”
Stephen nodded.
“I saved your life, Liv. What could it be, except destiny?”
Liv held the torch high.
“Freya, Goddess of love, healer of the afflicted, giver of sensual pleasures and beauty,
Join us in this sacred place, the forest of our ancestors, as winter edges in, fierce and unforgiving,
Bless us with your bounty, your goodness, your magic,
Surround and fill us with your gifts, exalt us on our path ahead.
Freya, we invoke you.”
Liv watched Stephen’s face in the firelight. His eyes glowed like the delphinium that grew tall and wild in the summer.
He gazed at her with reverence, and Liv’s voice shook as she spoke, her voice rising high, carried into the night on the smoke of their pyre.
Chapter 22
Liv
Liv watched her mother brush Arlene’s hair. The brush made the girl’s blonde curls light and fluffy.
Liv tried to remember the days when her mother, Polly, had brushed her own hair, but could not. Surely there had been some.
Yet Liv mostly remembered her mother curled in the bed, arms wrapped across her bony ribs, crying into the jacket that had belonged to her dead husband. Liv’s brothers took care of the house. Danny had dropped out of school to drive a tractor for the Morrison Family Farm. Her second brother, five years her senior, had taken over the household duties.
Liv had been a wandering child who wasn’t naturally inclined to women’s duties. When Liv’s mother remarried, both her brothers enlisted in the army and were gone within a year. They never returned to Michigan, but they’d survived the war. Letters from Germany and France still trickled in.
As a child, Liv had subsisted on George’s love. He had visited often before Liv’s mother married Roy. He took Liv to the Stoneroot Forest and told her stories of the five siblings he’d left in Norway. He described their winter nights and summer harvests.
What she loved most of all were stories of his mother, a short woman with blue-gray eyes who went to the sea every morning to divine the future. Not only the big things, George would tell her, but she would plan her dinner because in the waves, she saw the day’s catch and which berries would be most ripe. She taught her children to forage with their eyes closed, learning the language of the plant so they could find it even when it went dormant in the winter.
Liv’s mother loved her, but she looked at her differently than her other children. In Arlene, Liv’s mother had found a kindred spirit. A beautiful little girl with soft curls who let you coddle her and dress her in pretty things.