Sigrid
By Rob Swigart
Several times a day the evangelist came to Sigrid so she could wash his hands. She poured warm water over his palms, and he smiled with what might have passed for delight. The evangelist was a gray man, but not that gray.
Sigrid—large, capable, sturdy, blonde, unsmiling, honest and somewhat stupid—sat mostly on a stump in the forest reading simple poems to the deer and other ruminants. They cropped the grasses nearby with soft whisking sounds, in metrical counterpoint to her reading. “That’s nice,” she would say, looking up from her book, and they would lift their heads and look at her. She thought of their eyes as liquid and quite brown. They thought of hers as blue and much too small, like the very tips of bullets as they speed toward them from the hunter’s rifle in autumn, when there is frost still even though it is late in the day. As it is today.
The evangelist carried both a hymnal and a gun. At least he called it a gun. It was really more of a stick with a flat part and a hole in the end, but he called it a gun. He could shoot things with it. Sinful things, mostly. He would flatten himself behind a tree, for there are trees in this forest, and aim down the length of his stick that he called a gun and make a ka-choo sound as he pulled the trigger. Sometimes the animal aimed at would look at him stupidly, not knowing it was already dead, and sometimes it would fall over and kick a few times dramatically. This revealed the power of religion.
Sigrid would look up when she heard the ka-choo, placing her plump index finger along the inside of the spine to hold her place, and make a small clucking sound with the fat part of her tongue, near the back where the little thing hung down and made a funny noise when she gargled.
“It’s the evangelist,” she would say, as she did this day. And it was, swish-swish, his hunting boots swung through the dried leaves toward her, his breath flying out of his mouth like the souls of dead rabbits, ears pinned back by the breeze of his passage. Even the trees trembled, then.
“I’m here,” he said, standing at the edge of the clearing. It was a clearing out of a fairy tale or a legend, or perhaps a myth. One of those. So he told himself.
Actually, it was a rather dreary clearing in the middle of a nondescript, even mediocre, wood somewhere in Scandinavia, or Germany. Around there somewhere. And it was a chilly autumn, but very dry. Only the frost, white along the edges of all the dried leaves lying picturesquely about for him to rustle through on his way to see Sigrid and have his hands washed after a tough morning pretending to shoot sinful animals.
The evangelist, if he must have a name at all, was usually called Snyder, as if that was his first name when it was really his last. His first name was Olaf, and he hated it. It was one of the reasons he had become a man of the cloth. At least that was what his analyst told him one afternoon in late spring as he sat in an uncomfortable chair stuffed with horsehair and looked at a picture of a reindeer on the analyst’s wall.
“Why do you have a picture of a reindeer on your wall?” he asked, and the analyst told him it was because he had always wanted to be a Lapp and wear a woolen cap in winter. The analyst told him that when he was very small his father had locked him outside one winter afternoon when it was snowing, and the only way he, the analyst, could survive, was by pretending he was a Lapplander, with extra layers of fat under his skin and a stolid, enduring kind of expression. He said that he had never really cared for his father much after that endless afternoon, but that he had felt a certain warmth towards the people of the far north of Scandinavia thereafter. “If I had been in North America, I suppose I would have wanted to be an Eskimo, but that was not to be. I live here, in Europe. I don’t even speak the language very well. I’ve always thought of it as one of my worst shortcomings. I’ve never really gotten over it.”
The evangelist murmured that that was really a shame, and that perhaps now that he was grown up with a thriving analytic practice of his own, he could find time to adjust to it.
“No, not really,” the analyst said. The analyst’s name was Rolf, and he was originally from a small town whose name he could no longer remember, although it was on a mountainside overlooking a gray and rather bleak sea. “I’m so busy,” he said. “People like you come in here with your problems, and I have no time for myself.”
The evangelist told him perhaps he could turn to Jesus. The evangelist told him that Jesus was his best friend. The analyst suggested that Jesus might get spread a little thin if everyone felt that way, and the evangelist told him that Jesus was dead, and so could not be spread thin at all.
“Oh, you mean the historical Jesus,” the analyst said, surprised. “I thought you meant the metaphysical Jesus. Or perhaps the metaphorical Jesus.”
“I mean all three,” the evangelist said with impressive dignity. “I mean the one who walked on water in everyone’s imagination on Sunday mornings. Especially in autumn, when it gets dark early and stays dark late. Sometimes I would have to go to church in the dark, and when I came out the sun would be bright and I would be dazed with it.”
“Yes,” the analyst said. “I see. Very interesting. And when did you meet this woman?” He meant Sigrid, who sat on a stump in a clearing in the woods and read poetry to the animals, the ones that had not been shot by the evangelist.
“I was a hunter,” the evangelist explained. “I threw my rifle over my shoulder and strode out into the woods in search of supper. It was always thus, the air crisp and clean, the ground firm beneath my feet, the rustle of dried leaves rimmed with frost. I was younger then.”
“Weren’t we all,” the analyst agreed with a sigh.
“She was the stuff of myth,” the evangelist went on. “Large, blonde, serene. Her eyes were of the deepest blue, although they were rather small. Still are, for that matter. She sat there and unicorns and all that sort would wander by and lay their heads in her ample lap. She would stroke their cheeks, just beneath the eye, and they would exhale their damp sweet grassy breath on her hand and sleep. It was a wonderful thing to come upon after a tough day looking for sinful animals to terminate, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Mm-hm. Go on. Say more about it.”
But the evangelist would say nothing more, and the analyst grew frustrated with him and told him not to come back any more, he wanted nothing further to do with him. “You’re hopeless,” he said. “You might as well resign yourself to a lifetime of compulsive handwashing. Goodbye, Olaf, and good luck.”
“I hate it when people call me Olaf,” he answered. “My name is Snyder.”
“Don’t be silly. Pay the cashier on your way out.”
Sigrid didn’t like the evangelist, but he came around several times a day, and all she had to do was pour warm water over his palms and tell him he was clean. The evangelist liked that. He leaned his stick against a tree and took off his coat. He rolled up his sleeves, and his doughy arms raised up goosebumps in the chill. Sigrid never seemed to be cold, seated there in her simple peasant dress, magically warm, or merely insensitive.
The evangelist kneeled at her feet and bowed his head, his hands clasped over his hymnal. He murmured a few words about his friend Jesus, metaphysical, metaphorical and historical, and Sigrid reached behind her for the pot of hot water. She ordered the evangelist to hold out his hands, and he did, putting his hymnal down beside his left knee. She poured warm water over his hands, and he rolled his eyes heavenward and asked that somebody up that direction might forgive this overweight woman who knew no better than to read silly poems to animals who represented almost everything there was to represent about sin, both original and derivative.
“Aw, go on,” she said, replacing the pot. “You’re a stitch, you are.”
“I happen to be pretty well-adjusted, after all,” he said. “I can tell when I’m fooling myself. That’s more than I can say for most people.”
“All right,” she said simply. “I will marry you.”
This was almost too sudden even for the evangelist and he almost protested that wasn’t what he meant at all. But then he realized that he was a gray man, although not that gray, and that he wasn’t going to get any younger despite the special treatments, so he said yes, too, and they moved to town.
The analyst left soon after and moved to the north of Finland, where some people said they saw him wearing a wool hat. But Sigrid wanted nothing to do with him, so Snyder gave up being an evangelist and became a greengrocer, which was a more satisfying profession after all, and they lived more or less ever after until they died.
Rob Swigart earned a B.A. at Princeton University and a PhD at SUNY Buffalo. He has taught English at the university level, worked as a technology journalist and technical writer, and scripted computer games. His hybrid of fiction and nonfiction stories, Mixed Harvest (Berghahn Books), won a 2019 Nautilus Gold Award. Other books and collections of his have been published by Houghton Mifflin, St. Martin’s, AltaMira, Left Coast Press, and BooksBNimble. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry and others.