Harvi

Harvi agreed to be my bride under the fourth moon of the Great Rains. I had been asking her for the better part of a summer. It was a haunting night full of a great moonless sky. Smoke-lined clouds scudded above us, a steady wind pulled the rain sideways until it looked drunk on itself.

I was drunk on her.

We tumbled into the stables, drenched and laughing; I chased her up the ladder. In the midst of that hazy downpour, damn near midnight, she finally whispered yes into my lips. Stuck in the loft, we poured ourselves out and drank in a tangle of legs and breath. We weren’t patient.

No, that isn’t quite right.

We’d been paying our respects to the gods since we were squat toddlers, in the name of tradition and her whims. She made me toil for her, so maybe we were starved, and tired of patience. Hungry things do tend to bite. We were awkward limbs and supple curves. As my fingers trailed her neck, her icy eyes preached a frosted sermon.

Simple. Undeniable. I was eager to worship, and over the coming months, I never missed a chance to bend the knee.

After that night, I built her a church of salvaged wood and vines, tucked into the treeline. A home. I had no wealth to speak of and my only dowry was my new religion, so I crafted with what we had. I tended her heart with promises of more, but she required no tithe. There was only the softness of her skin, the sigh of her satisfaction.

We’d been cautioned, through the unsought advice of family, that we had to temper our love, take it from volatile flame to frigid steel. My uncle Orn loved to say that. He owned a tavern down by the river and had endured three wives.
None could see us for what we were. We were no flame, no steel. In place of these there was only a lake. Vast and cold, it ran deep, cavernous spaces, and we filled them with ourselves. It was a different kind of strength.

There is no breaking a lake, no tearing it from the earth, but these facts did not stop what came next.

Three signs welcomed me home after a long day pulling in the crops. The first was the scent—sweet, bubbling decay beneath the heat of the sun, a sting in my nose that turned sour in my stomach. My mother shrieked as I approached, and threw herself against the door. That was the second sign. Orn peeled her off as she flailed and begged me not to enter. The third and final sign was the heaviness of my home, my temple. The holy spirit had abandoned it, leaving behind a still, empty set of walls to sink into the earth. My stiff fingers creaked apart.

I opened the door.

Harvi hung from the rafters like a slaughtered hog, face twisted as if calling out for me. Butchered and defiled. A fly perched upon her bloodied lip.

And so, Harvi, named for the felling of wheat, my goddess, my love, my wife, was reaped before the dawn of our first year.

We laid her to rest that evening. Tradition again. I dug the hole myself, steady, moving dirt like a man now possessed by whatever I found in that house. An emotion I could not name settled into the calluses on my palms with each chink of the shovel. Hate? Hate for what? Perhaps the rocky earth, that kept me digging longer, kept her among us. Maybe it was the incessant nagging of the nursery rhyme that spurred us forward with no regard for my grief.

*Dig the hole and bury them low.
Bind the wrists and hush the crow.
Morning-glory from the mouth,
Turn their toes to face the south.
Speak the words, kneel and pray,
Iron stakes in the ground to stay. *

Many thoughts crossed my mind that day. When I found who was responsible, I’d say something poetic, fitting for the moment, before I flayed the skin from their bones. Or, maybe I’d bleed them like animals over days and let the spiders have them when I was done.

No, it wasn’t good enough. I kept circling corpses in my head like a buzzard. Nothing stirred the same pangs I now carried, nothing was fitting. That’s when the hole inside me tore open, that moment, I can track it to the exact place in time. Yet, the mindless digging kept me from seeing that no matter what punishment was dealt to their bodies, it would never be good enough.

Which was fine in a sense, because it would be years before I got my answers. All I had then was a bloody handprint pressed into her chest and a note that said:
She tasted like meadowsweet.

“Jaro?” My mother asked, “My sweet boy, we must hurry, she has been—for too long now—”

I snapped my head to her with wide eyes and she fell silent. They all remained so.
With care, I slid her coffin into the hole and laid her gently within it. I nailed her to the backboard with thick iron spikes. My father, Mattoc, had insisted I let him do it, but no. She was mine to send below and I couldn’t feel her anyway. Her body was cold, and my faith had gone into the earth with her.

I placed the morning glory seeds in her mouth, aligned her feet south, and bound her arms and legs. A small prayer, to nothing in particular, more ceremony than anything, and I covered her with dirt as the people in my life watched on in reverent silence.

I wish I could say that I chose vengeance. That I dedicated myself to bloodletting every last person in that river-fed shithole until I found who did it, but I didn’t. Instead, I filled a sack with what I could carry, slung my shovel over my shoulder, and resolved to leave Fornthveit behind.