Free The Second Winter by Craig Larsen

arm he touched, yanked the old woman out. The bones inher wrist bent in his hand, and she tried to resist. “You’re hurting me,” she said, but he didn’t let go. He dragged her clear of the truck, dropped her onto the wet, sandy soil, reached back inside for the girl.
    Oskar helped the old woman to her feet while Fredrik pulled her daughter out. The girl was rattled from the journey, and her teeth were chattering. Her hair was splattered with mud, and it clung to her cheeks. Fredrik let his hands travel over her breasts — he was surprised at how firm they were. She didn’t complain. She stumbled, fell to her knees, lifted herself up without help.
    The old man was next. Fredrik reached into the gap. The cashmere coat was wet, but the fabric was still softer than anything the laborer had felt for many years. It triggered a memory — something dating back to his childhood at the family’s villa outside Copenhagen — but just as quickly the memory flitted away. His fingers wrapped around the old man’s feeble shoulder. The Jew wasn’t helping him at all. He had gotten used to the truck. Maybe he didn’t want to go any farther. “Come on, you old sow. If you don’t get yourself out of there, I’ll leave you here. Understand?”
    Fredrik tugged, and the old man’s head emerged between the oversize truck tires like a calf’s head from the vagina of a pregnant cow, wet with its mother’s blood. His glasses had slipped, and they bound his mouth like a gag. His thinning hair covered his forehead, thick with coagulating plasma. One eye was open, the other was closed. This made Fredrik snicker. The old man had become a clown — they would pay him well at Tivoli for a performance like this. He made sense of a gash at the top of the Jew’s head. A rock must have kicked up from the front tires, clipped him across the pate. Fredrik deposited the limp body on the mud. He was calculating whetherthe cashmere coat could somehow be made big enough to fit him — Amalia was handy with a needle and thread, but no, it was far too small, it would fit Amalia better — when the old man coughed and opened both his eyes.
    “Is he all right?” Axel asked from the shadows.
    “What happened to him?” Oskar wanted to know.
    “Harold!” the old woman said. Her voice emerged in both a whisper and a shriek.
    “Hush!” Fredrik warned her.
    “Harold,” she said again.
    “Papa, what is it, what is it?” The girl fell to her knees next to her father, pulled him free from Fredrik’s hands.
    “He’s been hit by a rock,” Fredrik said, stating what he thought was the obvious. “Didn’t you notice when you were underneath? You must have heard something. A loud thud, I guess. Didn’t he shout?” He straightened up, left the girl alone to take care of her father. He joined Axel at the rear of the truck.
    In the dark, the door of a barn opened, and Farmer Brandt’s cousin — who would take the truck from them and drive it to the market up north — stepped outside, punched into a silhouette by the soft, flickering light of a lantern behind him. Axel paused long enough to identify him, then reached inside the truck for the crate containing the Jews’ belongings. “Olaf doesn’t look so happy to see us this morning,” he said to Fredrik.
    Fredrik didn’t hear him. Even as he helped Axel lift the crate, his fingers were remembering the texture of the old Jew’s coat. The memory of a smell, of urine and wool, permeated his nostrils. Growing up in Copenhagen, though there were more than enough rooms in the house, he had shared a bedroom with his older brother. When Ludvig was ten yearsold, he was still wetting his bed. Fredrik was only nine, but he was already the taller and stronger of the two. The stench of Ludvig’s piss had woken him. It was a sickly odor, but cloying, like the fragrance of a flower — not the smell Fredrik had come to associate with piss in his adult life. One night, he had gotten out of bed, gathered