knew already that whatever fate might befall the one would surely befall the other. And as regards the outside world, that is to say the world of nature (and the people and spirits and animals who inhabited that tangible world), each of us was for the other a filter. I remember with a clarity that would seem to be extraordinary after so many years (these events having occurred at such a young age) talking with Evan all the long days and into the nights (for is not a day actually longer when one is a child, time being of an illusory and deceptive nature?) as if we were indeed interpreting for each other and for ourselves the mysterious secrets and truths of life itself.
We were bathed together in a copper tub that was brought out once a week and set upon a stand in the kitchen near to the stove. My father bathed first, and then my mother, and then Karen, and lastly, Evan and me together. Evan and I were fearful of our father’s nakedness and respectful of our mother’s modesty, and so we busied ourselves in another room during the times when our parents used the copper tub. But no such restraints had yet descended upon us as regards our sister, Karen, who would have been, when I was five, seventeen, and who possessed most of the attributes of a grown woman, attributes that both frightened and amazed me, although I cannot say it was with any reverence for her person that Evan and I often peeked behind the curtain and made rude sounds and in this way tortured our sister, who would scream at us from the tub and, more often than not, end the evening in tears. And thus I suppose I shall have to admit here that Evan and myself, while not cruel or mischievous by nature or necessarily to anyone else in our company, were sometimes moved to torment and tease our sister, because it was, I think, so easy to do and at the same time so enormously, if unforgivably, rewarding.
When our turn for the bath had come, we would have clean water that had been heated by our mother in great pots and then poured into the copper tub, and my brother and myself, who until a late age had no shame between us, would remove our clothing and play in the hot soapy water as if in a pool in the woods, and I remember the candlelight and warmth of this ritual with a fondness that remains with me today.
Each morning of the school year, when we were younger and not needed to be hired out, Evan and I rode together in the wagon of our nearest neighbor, Torjen Helgessen, who went every day into Laurvig to bring his milk and produce to market, and home again each afternoon after the dinner hour. The school day was five hours long, and we had the customary subjects of religion, Bible History, catechism, reading, writing, arithmetic and singing. We had as our texts Pontoppidan’s Explanation, Vogt’s Bible History and Jensen’s Reader. The school was a modern one in many of its aspects. It had two large rooms, one above the other, each filled with wooden desks and a chalkboard that ran the length of one wall. Girls were in the lower room and boys in the upper. Unruly behavior was not allowed, and the students of Laurvig School received the stick when necessary. My brother had it twice, once for throwing chalk erasers at another student, and once for being rude to Mr. Hjorth, a Pietist and thus an extremely strict and sometimes irritating man, who later died during an Atlantic crossing as a result of the dysentery aboard.
In the springtime, when it was light early in the morning, and this was a pearly light that is not known in America, an oyster light that lasts for hours before the sun is actually up, and so has about it a diffuse and magical quality, Evan and I would wake at daybreak and walk the distance into Laurvig to the school.
I can hardly describe to you the joy of those early morning walks together, and is it not true that in our extreme youth we possess the capacity to see more clearly and absorb more intensely the beauty that lies all before us, and so much more so than in our later youth or in our adulthood, when we have been apprised of sin