Epilogue

On his bed of soft pine needles, the man was at peace. He had completed the circle. He had avenged his mother for the brutalization perpetrated by his father. He had ensured the agonizing death of everyone who had slighted her, his golden angel. He had procured the information that caused the fools to hang Gunnar. He remembered well the drip, drip, drip of his loosened bowels into the soft autumn leaves. He had driven that Dupreux foreigner to madness with evil portents and talismans, the superstitious idiot. And that brute of a guide who had at first carried them out of his reach to safe Sweden; he had paid a vagrant to romance his stupid daughter and get her with child. Two, even. Two useless whores who, even at a few years of age, showed the tendency of their despicable mother, despicable for being his, Oswald’s, daughter. And then he had thrown her into the path of an asocial wife-beater, a man just like his father had been. He had driven that holier-than-thou pilot to an unending hell of self-recrimination: every year on her death day he sent him a letter: “why didn’t you tell?”

He had savored the last retribution for over 60 years. Einar Iversen, the faultless. The good guy who had lent him, him the wall-eyed serf-boy, his Superman comic book. The one his angel had babbled of in the months that followed: his curly hair and his dark blue eyes. She had made them into heroes, these raping bastards. That last night she had told him what they had done. Gathering her in their arms, bringing her to the clearing in the wood. Laying her down and lifting her tattered skirts. The other two had been quick and nearly unnoticed, but him, he was the one. She told him with the light of a woman in her eyes: she had rejoiced in his embrace. Frank Åge knew the world had ended.

He had returned from fishing early that day. Stood outside the one glass-less window an eternity. Saw her smiling to herself as she stirred a measly vegetable pot with the front of her dress not quite meeting across her belly. He had entered quietly. When she saw him hoist the rope over the rafter, she was strangely unafraid. He said nothing; nor did she. She went to the rope like Bossy to the chute. As he kicked away the chair, she murmured “Einar,” and then her neck broke.