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The Seam

They were three on the ice, in rope harness like horses, hauling a boat across the frozen sea.

The boat was a four-oared yawl set on iron-shod runners, sledge-fashion, and it carried sail and pike poles and bread, and, lashed to the middle thwart with its three crown seals turned upward, the mail bag for Stockholm. The men hauling it were these: Erik Mattsson, post-farmer of Storby in Åland, a heavy man going grey, in sealskin cap and homespun; his son Anders, fourteen, thin as the sounding pike he carried; and a passenger, a tall man in a black town coat too thin for the work, who had given his name as Simon Tavast and his trade as schoolmaster, and had paid for his crossing in silver, counted out coin by coin on the post-farm table with the candle between them. From one rim of the world to the other there was nothing else standing. White plain, white sky, the dark speck of the boat, and seven leagues of frozen sea between the burning coast of Finland behind them and the Grisslehamn light in Sweden ahead.

The wind came round to the south an hour after they lost sight of land, and Erik stopped hauling and stood with his hand on the gunwale and listened to the ice.

It spoke from a long way off, a dull working sound, like a great door being tried in its frame. The boy heard it too and looked at his father. Tavast heard nothing, or seemed to hear nothing. He leaned into his rope and waited to go on.

"South wind," the boy said.

"I hear it."

A south wind in Candlemas week was the worst wind there was. The north wind made ice and the south wind unmade it, lifted the whole white plain of the Åland Sea on a swell you could not see and worked it until it opened along its weaknesses. And the great weakness, the one that opened first and widest and closed like a trap, lay ahead of them: the seam, the channel of black water that ran down the middle of the sea, that no winter ever fully healed.

Erik spat on the ice and took up his rope. There was nothing else to do. Behind lay nine hours of hauling and a coast the Russians were burning along at their leisure; ahead lay Sweden, the Grisslehamn light, and the postmaster's book where his name would be entered, arrived or lost.

The bag goes over. That was the whole of the law he had been born into, post-farmer's son on the post-farm at Storby, as his father, as his father's father. The bag does not wait on weather. The bag does not wait on war. His grandfather had gone through the ice off Signilskär in the year eighty-nine and been hauled out dead with the strap still turned twice around his fist, and the parish had thought well of him for it, and the crown had sent the widow a paper.

They hauled. The ice under them was good shore ice yet, blue-grey, two hands thick, dusted with dry snow that ran before the wind in low white snakes. The boy went ahead with the pike, sounding. Tavast pulled steadily and badly, in the way of a man imitating work he has watched but never done, and Erik watched him do it, as he had been watching him for nine hours and, before that, for the three days the man had sat in the post-farm waiting on the weather, saying little, paying for what he ate, asking only one question that mattered.

Is there mail from Åbo in the bag?

He had asked it the first evening, lightly, a traveller's question. There was. Half the bag had been made up in Åbo before the post road through Finland broke under the war, letters that had come west by sledge and fishing boat and luck, and now went on to Stockholm by the last road there was, which was this one, the ice. Erik had told him so, because it was no secret, and the man had nodded and looked into the fire and not asked the question he had plainly wanted to ask next, which Erik could not guess at, and which sat between them on the rope all the way out from land like a fourth man hauling.

By noon, by the light, they had made the middle ground, and the ice changed under them. Old pressure ridges stood up in walls, screw-ice, plates the size of barn doors stood on end and frozen so, and they unloaded and lifted and dragged and loaded again, six times, eight times, the boy white-faced, Tavast bleeding into his thin gloves and not complaining of it. The working sound was nearer now, no longer like a door but like carts going over a bridge, many carts, and from the top of the last ridge Erik saw the seam.

It was open. It should have been two boat-lengths wide in such a winter, a black ditch you rowed in five minutes. It lay before them the width of a river in spring flood, black as tar between its white banks, smoking with cold all along its length the way open water smokes in hard frost, and the further edge of it was moving. He stood and watched the far ice walk slowly north, a whole country of it, calm and white and walking, and he made his reckoning, as his trade was reckoning: wind, drift, daylight, the weight of the boat, the weight of three lives and the bag. The reckoning came out badly, and would come out worse for waiting.

"We row," he said. "Boat to water. Bag amidships. Nobody stands."

They slid her in off the floe edge, runners and all, and she sat low and steady in the black water with the three of them placed as Erik placed them: himself amidships at the oars, the boy in the bow with the pike, and Tavast in the stern, set to bail, with the bag at his feet because there was nowhere else for it. The crossing of the seam took the afternoon. He would not afterwards have said how long; in such water there is no time, only strokes. The swell that had been invisible under the ice was visible now, long slow hills of black water with pan ice and brash riding on them, and the boat went up and down those hills like a beetle, and twice a floe came at them end-on and the boy fended it with the pike and his whole weight, and once Tavast, unasked, threw himself across the thwart to drag a fouled runner clear, and shipped a sea down his neck for it, and came up gasping and did not complain of that either. Erik rowed and watched him and revised nothing.

They did not reach the far side. That is the thing about the seam in a south wind: the far side does not stay where it was. Dark came down while the white edge was still half a mile off and walking away from them as fast as they rowed, and Erik did what the post-farmers had always done when the sea won the day's reckoning, and put the boat up onto the biggest floe he could find, a flat pan fifty paces across, and drew it out of the water's reach, and turned it over, and made the camp of the ice mail, as it had been made for a hundred years: the boat turned over, keel to the wind, snow banked against her gunwales, the sail spread on the ice beneath her, and the three of them laid in a row in the black space under the thwarts, the bag at Erik's back between his body and the planking. From outside there was nothing to be seen on all that drifting plain but an upturned hull already whitening over, like some sea creature dead on the ice. Underneath it the tarred planks hung a hand's breadth above their faces, and the floe drifted north all night with the whole groaning plain.

They ate hard bread and ate snow. The boy slept the moment he stopped chewing, the sleep of fourteen years old, with his boots against his father's side. The wind drummed on the boat's planking. And in the dark, in the small hours, the passenger made his offer.

"Post-farmer." Very low. "What is your farm worth? The farm, the stock, the boat. Name it in riksdaler."

"The farm is the crown's. It goes with the mail duty."

"Then name what a man needs, who has lost a crown farm and a crown duty, and must begin again in Sweden with his son." A pause, the wind, the ice working. "I am carrying more than I paid you from. Not silver only. It is yours, all of it. I ask for the bag for the length of one pipe. You will sleep, and you will wake, and the seals will be as they are, and you will be a rich man, and no soul on either shore will ever know what the sea knows."

Erik lay still and looked at the blackness where the man's voice was. He had been waiting three days for the question and here it was at last, and it told him everything except the one thing it needed to tell. A Russian agent would ask so, with the muster rolls and the beacon lists from Åbo lying a foot away under three seals. And a man whose wife's people had guided the Russians, whose own name might stand in some magistrate's letter in that bag, in a list of those to be taken up when the court reached Stockholm, such a man would ask so. And a man with a daughter in Åbo, in a burning country, who thought there might be one letter in that bag with his name on it, four lines in a known hand, alive or dead, such a man would ask exactly so, and would pay everything he had carried out of Finland to read it one night earlier than the law allowed.

Three men asked the same question in the same voice, and only one of them was lying under his boat.

"The bag goes over," Erik said. "It does not wait on weather. It does not wait on war. It does not open."

Silence. Then, mildly, out of the dark: "Your grandfather drowned holding it, they told me at Storby."

"They tell it right."

"And the parish thought well of him."

"The parish thought well of him."

"Yes," said Tavast, as if some private account had been settled, and said nothing more, and whether he slept or lay awake with his open eyes a foot from the bag all night, no one can now say.

In the grey of morning the wind had gone round to the west and the sea had closed. The seam had shut in the night the way it shuts, not gently; their floe stood rafted against the western pack in a field of broken plate, slabs the colour of bottle glass tilted up and frozen at every angle, with new grey ice skinned between them, and there was a road home for them across it, if road is the word, two hours of climbing through screw-ice with the boat. They were loading when the ice gave under Anders.

It went without warning, rotten brash bridged with snow, and the boy went through it to the armpits with the black water taking his breath so that he could not even cry out, only cough, and his mittens slid on the wet edge, and the edge broke, and slid, and broke. Erik was at the bow, thirty feet off, and he knew with a post-farmer's cold arithmetic that he was thirty feet too far. Tavast was not too far. Tavast went down flat on the rotten ice without a moment in which a man could be seen to decide anything, crawled spread out like a frog with the water working under him, took the boy's hood, then his collar, then his arm, and the ice broke under his own chest as he heaved, so that for one breath the two of them were in the sea together. Then Erik had the rope to them, and it was done, two soaked creatures dragged out flat across the plate, and the pack-load that Tavast had carried out of Finland, that he had set down to crawl, his silver and whatever was not silver, lay where he had shrugged it, on a slab of brash that tilted, and slid, and was gone, all of it, under the new black water, while its owner knelt on the ice and held another man's coughing son and did not once look round at it.

They came in under the Grisslehamn light in the early dark, a single oil flame burning in its iron cage on the headland, the low red wooden buildings of the post station showing beneath it window by window, and hauled the last mile on shore-fast ice as smooth as a church floor, the boy walking to keep his blood moving, wrapped in the sail. At the post-house Erik carried the bag in himself, as the law was, and the Swedish postmaster turned it under the lamp and counted the seals aloud, one, two, three, unbroken, and entered in his book the crossing, the date, the names. Tavast stood in the doorway in his stiff frozen coat while this was done, like a man waiting for a verdict, and when the book was closed he straightened, and thanked Erik for the passage in level Swedish, and remarked that he would walk to the church village that night rather than sleep, and went out, owning nothing in the world but what he stood in, into a country where nobody knew his name, if Tavast was his name. He did not ask after the mail from Åbo. That was the thing Erik turned over, all the years after. He never once asked.

It was only at Stockholm, they say, ten days on, when the bag was opened at the head office, that a clerk observed of the middle seal that the wax shone a little, as wax shines that has been warmed and pressed home again, and the clerk weighed the bag against its waybill and found the weight right, or near right, or right enough for a bag that had crossed the worst ice in nine winters, and entered no remark. It is told so in Eckerö parish to this day, where they still tell of the Candlemas crossing of the year fourteen; though whether the wax shone because a letter had gone out of it, or a letter had been read and returned, or whether wax may not shine of itself after such a sea, the parish has never settled, and Erik Mattsson, who thought well of his passenger and was never able to say so plainly, even to himself, would only answer, when he was asked what manner of man it had been who lost his fortune saving the post-boy: that the bag had gone over, and the souls had gone over, and the sea kept the rest, as the sea keeps everything it is paid.