Free Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi Page A

deathbed and confessed her sins in a barely audible whisper before licking the bread with the tip of her liver-brown tongue and having her shriveled lips sprinkled with wine. Then she said she could see a bright light, and angels drinking curdled milk from ladles, and when she drew her last breath her body became half an ounce lighter, that being the weight of her eternal soul.
    Close relatives were summoned to the
ulosveisu
the same day as she died. Her sons carried her coffin around all the rooms in the house, with the foot end first and the lid open so that she could take farewell of her home; hymns were sung, coffee was drunk, and the corpse was eventually driven off to the freezer at the mortuary.
    Then the funeral arrangements were made. The Pajala telephone exchange glowed red hot, and the post office started distributing invitations all over Norrbotten, Finland, south Sweden, Europe, and the rest of the world. After all, Grandma had filled as much of the world as she could manage and had had time for. She had borne twelve children,the same number as the apostles, and like the apostles the children had gone off in all possible directions. Some lived in Kiruna and Luleå, others in the suburbs of Stockholm, and others yet in Växjö and Kristianstad and Frankfurt and Missouri and New Zealand. Only one still lived in Pajala, and that was Niila’s father. All of them came to the funeral, including the two deceased sons—the ladies of the parish in touch with the other side had seen them. They had wondered who the two boys were, standing with heads bowed by the coffin during the introductory hymn, but then had realized that they were rather bright around the edges and that their feet were hovering a finger’s breadth over the ground.
    Also present were grandchildren and great-grandchildren from all over the globe, strange, elegantly dressed creatures speaking every Swedish dialect you could think of. The grandchildren from Frankfurt had German accents, while the Americans and New Zealanders chattered away in Swenglish. The only ones from the younger generation who could still speak Tornedalen Finnish were Niila and his brothers and sisters, but they didn’t say very much anyway. There was a whole host of languages and cultures assembled in the Pajala church, a very tangible tribute to what a single fertile Tornedalen womb could give rise to.
    Valedictory homilies delivered by the side of the coffin were numerous and lengthy. Tribute was paid to the deceased’s life of honest toil, in a spirit of devoted prayer and self-denial. She had lugged and heaved, heaved and lugged, fed cattle and children, raked more hay than three horse-drawn harvesters, woven five hundred yards of rag carpet, picked three thousand buckets of berries, drawn forty thousand buckets of water from the well in the yard, chopped firewood equivalent to a major clear-felling in the Käymäjärvi forests, washed a mountain of dirty linen as high as Mount Jupukka, and shoveled acres of shit from the outhouse without so much as a word of complaint, and when she lifted potatoes the clatter of them dropping into the tin bucket had frequently been mistaken for a salvo from a Finnish machine gun. To mention but a few of her achievements.
    In her last years, when she had been bed-ridden, she had read the Bible from cover to cover eighteen times—the old Finnish version, of course, uncontaminated by the modernizers and atheists who work for the Bible Commissions. Naturally, the written Word was nothing compared to the Living one, the two-edged sword wielded with such fervor at prayer meetings; but it might as well be read as she had nothing else to do.
    As usual at Tornedalen heroic burials, the preachers spoke mostly about Hell. They described in minute detail the endlessly burning charcoal stack where sinners and heretics were fried like pork in tar in the Devil’s red-hot skillet, while he prodded them with his trident to bring out the juices. The