Free Northern Lights by Tim O’Brien

whispered.
    “Yes. I had a walk.”
    The sheets were cool now, and Perry held her.
    “Tired?”
    “Hmmm, I was sleeping. Storm over?”
    “All quiet. Getting nice out there.”
    “Rain.”
    “No. No rain yet. It’ll come.”
    She whispered. “Your face is burnt.”
    “It’s all right. I feel better. I don’t know what gets into me.”
    “Let’s put some cream on your face.” She gently touched his nose. Perry took her hand. “You are a woman,” he said. “Gee,” she whispered. She got the cream from the nightstand. They undressed and Perry lay face up on the bed. He closed his eyes. He breathed easy. He felt the lotion on his chest. He did feel better. He breathed slowly. “What are you doing?”
    “Putting lotion on you,” she whispered. “Hold still now.”
    But he wasn’t thinking. He was tired. Wings clipped by the old man. No bulls here. Rushing from nowhere to nowhere and learning to swim. “Just lie still now,” she whispered. But he wasn’t listening because the thick waters were against his ears. “Shhhhhh,” she whispered, “does that feel good now? Lie still, lie still,” part of the pond, soft as water. He concentrated, finally opening his eyes, and she smiled at him. She reached in the dark for a tissue and wiped him. “Such a fountain,” she whispered.
    “Come here.”
    “Can we have a baby someday?”
    “Come here.”
    Soft as water. He tightened his arms, squeezing, and he held her and squeezed, all his energy, squeezed until she said to stop.

Elements
    T hey called it a dying town. People were always saying it: Sawmill Landing won’t last another decade. But for all the talk, Perry never saw the death, only the shabby circumstances of the movements around him. It was a melancholia, seeded in the elements, but he had no idea where it started. It might have started with the Ice Age. Four glaciers advancing and receding over the course of a million years, freezing, stinging with crystalline cold, digging out boulders, ice a mile deep, a permanent stillness. Then the Stone Age. Indians. First the Sioux, later the Chippewa. In the basement of the town library there was a museum that housed all the relics: broadheads, pottery, clay pipes, hides and drawings. Then the French, taking what they could. Then the Swedes. The Swedes built houses. Pine planks, dirt floors, hard-rock fireplaces. The Swedes hacked at the forest, broke their backs and ploughs trying to turn the Arrowhead into corn-bearing land.
    In 1854, the Chippewa ceded their timber and fish and game for a few hundred square miles of reservation.
    In 1856, the Swedes named their hamlet Rabisholm. Fourteen houses, a blacksmith, twenty-six horses, a stable and a store. That same year Minnesota became a state.
    In 1857, the Germans came. And a few Dutch and the Finns.
    In 1858, an Indian boy was hanged for intention to rape. In 1859, an Indian family was found frozen in the snow, dead of starvation before freezing. In 1860, two full-grown Indian males were shot dead while stealing corn from Ole Borg. In 1862, while the southern Sioux were going crazy with revenge, three Chippewa renegades slipped into Ole Borg’s house and cracked his skull with a hatchet. The renegades were later captured by a cavalry troop dispatched from Fort Snelling. They were hanged until dead.
    In 1863, the town celebrated its first Ole Borg Day.
    In ten easy years, the Indians were gone, pushed north and west.
    Perry learned about the hardships. Hardship was something the old man stressed. He learned that the Swedes broke ploughs on base rock, got robbed on prices, seeded soil meant for spruce and not corn, wore silent hard faces. They were blond. He learned that they left Sweden in famine and, in perfect irony, came to Minnesota just in time for more of the same: locusts and drought, fierce winter and boulders; they left bad soil for worse soil, rock for rock, pine for pine. In some miserable genetic cycle, they did not leave at all and they did