Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

She put her arms around his waist, which was wider now than it once was. “You stare at it like an old enemy. Did it insult you in some way?”


“Just the opposite.” He stepped away from her and walked to the door, where he fell upon the bench, pushing his feet into his boots.

He stood and shouldered himself into his coat.

Olga remained by the kitchen sink, the humor in her face giving way to concern. “What’s got into you, Ivar?”

“Finish the bathwater, woman. I’ll be back in a moment.”

? 267 ?

? The Giant in Repose ?

It was a long trek from the front door to the barn, and though the year was old and the snow was new, a hard winter was promised, and there would be a time coming when this trek could not be made without a rope tied around your waist, lest a blizzard swallow you whole. The Minnesota plains were flat and long, not like the robust countryside of Norway, where glaciers carved bright watery roadways through the mountains. There were no hidden kingdoms in this fertile land, unless they were the kingdoms of the sown seed and the ready harvest.

The crow appeared as young as he ever was, his feathers glossy black, his beak sharp as a blade. He turned his head to the side and fixed Ivar with a bright, black glare.

“H?kon,” said Ivar, coming to a stop beside the post. “I never thought to see you again.”

“I’ve found the church,” the crow said, as though countless years had not elapsed since last they spoke.

Ivar found it suddenly difficult to breathe. “Forget it,” he said.

“I cannot. You rendered me a service in another age, and I am bound to repay it.”

Ivar sighed. He looked over his shoulder at his little house, at the farmland stretching around it beneath the piled snow. He had come here with Olga many years ago, when he had long surrendered hope of finding the church, leaving Norway for this new world with a tide of his own countrymen. They found in the deep winters a comforting echo of home. Even if the land looked nothing like it.

He looked at the crow again. “Fine then. You’ve told me. Consider your debt repaid.”

H?kon flared his feathers and jerked his head. He paced sideways along the fence, paced back again. “That’s not how it works. You know that.”

Ivar put his own hands on the wooden fence. They were old, short-fingered, broad. He was still amazed to watch the fall of his own body. He had been young, raven-haired, and strong, for the length of an age and beyond. For as long as he’d stayed true to the Story.

? 268 ?

? Nathan Ballingrud ?

And then he’d come to America.

“Look at you, H?kon. Still so young. Your feathers are as black as Odin’s eye. And I’ve grown old.”

“You have abandoned the Story, and so you’ve aged. Everyone has aged, waiting for you to come back to it,” said the crow. “Only I have not, because only I’ve been faithful to the tale. Return to your purpose, Ivar.”

The sun hovered low in the sky. The day wore thin. How wonderful would it be, he thought, to push it up into the sky again.

He remembered the directions procured for him by the princess, who whispered flattering lies into the giant’s ear. “His heart is at the center of a lake, beneath a church, chained to the image of love.”

Behind him Olga would be pouring the boiling water into the bath. A skirl of smoke lifted in lazy coils from the chimney, rising like a prayer into a low winter sky. He had farmed this land with her for forty years. Raised a daughter and a son with her. Together they were drifting into the strange waters of old age, and he had come to believe that they would reside together beneath the earth, in whatever realm waited for old Norwegians far from the path which God had set for them.

He was reluctant to leave, but the pull of responsibility, and more than that the pull of the old Story, were impossible to resist. If he did not come back, he could at least find consolation in the knowledge that Olga would not have to live long in loneliness. The earth would call her soon.