Breath and Bones Read Online Free Page B

know.
    In these moments of privacy, Famke took shameless advantage of Birgit’s unstated preference. She played by sliding the gold band from the nun’s finger and sticking it on her own thumb, then popped it in her mouth and impaled it with her tongue to make herself laugh. On the unusual occasions when there was candy at the orphanage, Famke knew that even after all the other children had received their justly measured shares, there would be an extra piece or two in Birgit’s pocket. She knew also that if Birgit, and Birgit alone, caught her in some wrongdoing, she had only to place her hands on each side of the nun’s face and kiss her nose to be forgiven and pass unpunished. No one else would learn of her crime, and her bond with her fellow-Swede would grow.

    In Famke’s twelfth year, Birgit’s affections led nearly to disaster. As one of the physically stronger nuns, Birgit was asked to supervise the annual boiling of soap. She had been doing it for some years and had the routine chore mastered: rendering the waste fat saved from stringy Sunday joints, adding lye made from stove ashes, stirring endlessly. The older girls were excused from lessons in order to perform this stirring, for production of a good soap, the nuns argued, was of as valuable practical use as hemming the countless towels and blankets they made to sell—all skills the girls would take with them into service—and perhaps even more necessary than lessons in the use of Danish flowers and herbs, or reading the Bible and other useful books.
    That year, Famke was big enough to help. Sister Birgit smiled as her darling took the wooden stirring-stick from the orphan ahead of her and began to draw it through the liquid viscous with long boiling. Famke closed her eyes and breathed in the odor that, to her, meant the belly-fluttering thrill of flirtation and the promise of something she didn’t understand but knew, absolutely
knew
, would be wonderful. And so when one of the older Viggos, a large-eyed youth now nearing the age of confirmation, approached with wood for the fire, Famke smiled and shimmered at him. And he was lost.
    Just then Birgit’s attention was momentarily diverted—and for this the other sisters blamed her—by a cloud of bees threatening to swarm either the soap pot, the heavy-blossomed elder tree near which it rested, or the fair stirrer of soap herself. Birgit took off her apron and flapped it vigorously at them. So she did not see Famke slow down in her stirring, gazing at this Viggo, lost in her own hazy ideas of sin. And then Famke lost the wooden plank, or most of it, in the soap pot. With a cry of dismay, she lunged after it; the boy dropped his wood and lunged, too, to save her hand from scalding—and as a result it was his hands that scalded.
    Viggo howled with pain and ran toward the well. Famke ran after him. She nursed his burned hands as she’d been trained to do, with cold water and bandages swiftly torn from her petticoat. And finally, as a much-stung Sister Birgit abandoned the bees and came to the rescue, Famke dropped a tiny illicit kiss on one clumsy knot she’d tied over the boy’s wrist.
    In that moment, with no interchange of plank and air to cool it, the unstirred fat reached a crucial temperature. The whole soapy potful burst into flames. The conflagration blew toward the elder tree and, as Mother Superior said in yet another council meeting, “We were an angel’s breath from burning up ourselves.”
    Indeed, a spark landed in Famke’s hair and started to melt. With a hurt hand, Viggo smothered it, and Famke collapsed in his arms in gratitude. She never mentioned the singeing of her braids to anyone else, but she was to suffer a fear of fire the rest of her life.
    Sitting and tallying up the damage, Mother Superior said, “I believe some punishment is in order. For endangering not just herself and young Viggo but the entire orphanage as