Revolver Read Free

longer control the muscles in his arms.
    Knowing his chances are slipping away, he pushes the matchbox open, but then he shivers and pushes too far. Box and tray separate and all the tiny wooden lifelines spill into the inch of snow on the frozen lake.
    Sig sees it all, just as if he’d been there. He knows he’ll never forget it to the end of his own days. He wonders what it’s like to die. To die alone.
    Now, Einar knows he’s dead. He can’t pick the matches up with his bulky, shaking gloved hand, and he can’t pick them up with his free hand because it has frozen into an unworking claw. Frantically he tries to push the heads of the matches against the striking paper on the side of the box. He tries to use his lips to pick them up, but it’s no good; he’s lost all feeling in his face.
    Finally, with a hideous irony, his fumblings against the box randomly strike head against paper, and a small chemical miracle invented by some Swedes, involving among other things glass, phosphorous, sulphur, and potassium, occurs out there on the frozen lake in the middle of a Northern nowhere. A single splutter of flame catches as the match head ignites, lying on the ice. It burns halfway down the wooden stalk of the match, and all Einar can do is watch it burn for a second, and then die.
    An hour later, and he’s dead too.

4
    Sun Day, early morning
    â€œH ave faith. Be brave, Sig,” Anna had said, and they’d gone, leaving him with Einar. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, then stopped himself, remembering it was a gesture of his father’s.
    Sig had heard stories that when you freeze to death, the last thing you feel is a wonderful warmth spread through your whole body, filling you with joy. He hoped it was like that for his father, but a bit of him, in the corner of his mind, wondered how anyone actually knows. Again he was reminded of his father, who would always say, “Know what you can. Know everything you can know.”
    All Sig knew as he knelt by his father was that suddenly there had been the sound of skis shushing up behind him, and Anna and Nadya were there.
    He remembered little of the hurried plans. Anna and Nadya had come fully dressed for the snow; they’d seen Sig on the ice and had rushed out to intercept him. The
snow sifted down at them insistently, and hesitantly they managed to lift Einar onto the sled, trying to suppress their panic, pushing aside the shock of seeing Einar dead. The ice had complained and whined, yet none of them spoke of the sudden frozen end that could take them at any moment. With Einar on the sled, they made it to the cabin, running onto the land before the creaking and cracking could shatter their nerve entirely.
    There had been a short, silent standoff as they wondered who should go and who should stay, and in the end, Sig, seeing the discomfort on his sister’s face, had said, “You two go. I’ll wait.”
    Nadya squeezed his hand.
    â€œBravely done,” she whispered.
    Then the two women had gone to town for help.
    â€œBe brave,” Anna had said. She was trying not to cry. Nadya had said nothing. There was an empty look in her eyes as if the cold landscape had taken possession of them. They’d set off with the dogs once again, Anna driving the team, standing on the runners, Nadya sitting where Einar had lain. Sig watched them vanish, and between the smoky trees and the gray snow in the dusk, they vanished very quickly indeed. He headed back to the cabin.
    He’d closed the fire down a little before going to bed, now that it was full of food and eating slowly but happily. He looked at the narrow bed where Einar and Nadya
slept, and at the bench where Anna put her mattress every night. He had a choice of beds now.
    Then he looked at his father on the table, and he opted for his sacks of flour in the freezing larder, leaving the warmth of the cabin to the corpse.
    In the pale morning, rubbing his