Mose Schrute of the Helsinki Schrutes is born in 1979, the first and only son of a brilliant automotive engineer and a former catalogue model. In 1984, his parents are unexpectedly killed in a Nordic skiing accident. A lawyer hired by the government struggles to find Mose a guardian: His Uncle Gunther is too busy with that bitter slander lawsuit with the neighboring goat farmer, as well as his own teeming brood of seventeen children. The next logical relative to take in Mose turns out be his Great-Aunt Schrude, who lives on a beet farm in Pennsylvania. She signs the paperwork and her secretary drops Mose and his nanny at the international terminal.

A man ten times as wide as his father collects Mose in an airport lounge, helping him climb into an old blue truck that sounds as though it has a bad cough. The drive is long and as they turn off the main road, Mose twists in his seat, watching loose dirt swirl crimson in the taillights. There’s a mailbox with his family name on it, eerily red. It disappears into the night and Mose faces forward just in time to see a white house appear, only partially visible in yellowed headlights.

*

The main parlor of the farmhouse is full to bursting with distant family members he has never once laid eyes on. They fall silent as he enters the room, watching him with stern gazes.

At last, a woman seated in the corner beckons. As he nears her grasp, he sees that she’s even older than the child-eating witch from the stories his mom used to tell him at bedtime. He hesitates on the last few steps, fixated on the life-like stuffed weasel mounted on the wall above her head. When he’s close enough, she squeezes his arm, testing for thickness and strength. He has none, and her disapproval is immediately evident. She begins speaking to him in English, which he hasn’t learned yet. The words have a strange gurgling noise and sound as though they are escaping her lips against her will.

Mose reaches into his pocket and unfolds the piece of paper his lastenhoitaja had pressed into his hand as she left him with a tiny suitcase at the airport. While they seated him in the smoking section and a lady with a cigarette and orange, billowy clothes had helped him practice the language on the plane, now that everyone is staring none of the scribbles seem familiar. He swallows the lump in his throat and returns the paper to his pocket without speaking.

The old woman sighs and pats his head. Another woman the age of his own mother emerges from the group and pulls him to her side. He hides his face in her skirts. They smell of sun and earth and boiled potatoes and he is grateful. She tows him away; away from the unfriendly eyes and into the dark corners of strange and dusty rooms. A kitchen; a pantry; the underside of the porch – a crude, dark place that brings fresh tears to his eyes when he remembers the shining lavatory in his own home. The home he’ll never see again.  He counts bedrooms on his fingers and has one thumb left over. None of them seem to be his.

He continues to follow her through the house with his eyes fixed on the golden braid hanging down her back. She steps around a corner and up a narrower flight of stairs that seem to lead into the ceiling. When she swings open the door and reveals a musty black cavern, Mose grips the rail, frozen to his spot on the bottom step, visions of Lempo dancing in his head. She lifts her oil lantern to demonstrate the outline of an attic. The gently swinging light casts menacing shadows. A small bed with a plain quilt and a wooden dresser come into focus and the woman has to drag Mose the last few feet. The lantern is thrust into one hand and his suitcase into the other. She locks the door behind him.

For the first time since his lastenhoitaja sat him down with a cup of hot cocoa and explained how his parents weren’t coming back, he cries for them, for his warm bed, for his beloved Lapphund, Ukko, who went to live with the boy next door. Mose is sure Ukko must hate it there and is probably crying too. He pulls the covers over his head to ward off evil spirits, drafts and moans that he suspects are the disembodied spirits of murdered stoats and other small mammals that adorn the common room. He lays there in the dark imagining the old woman had been testing his arms for meatiness and they plan to make him into a pie. They are keeping him in this chilly attic so he will be fresh for Christmas dinner.

He does not sleep.

*

The next morning the sun wakes him before the sound of an unknown hand lifting the latch does. His room at home had been dark until his mom opened the blinds, singing.  Eventually he summons the courage to creep down the stairs, still wearing his rumpled clothes from when his journey began. The entire house is quiet – the hordes of people from the previous night are gone, vanished like a bad dream in the light of day. A delicious smell draws him to the kitchen and he finds a table heaped with eggs and biscuits. The man who picked him up from the airport is lumbering from sink to stove, pouring coffee and stirring gravy in a practiced dance. His heavy body elicits creaks and squeals from the abused floorboards.

A boy with owlish glasses that Mose recognizes from the gathering enters the room and takes a seat at the table, immediately filling his plate. Without a word of greeting, he begins to shovel the food into his mouth, casting the occasional derisive glance in Mose’s general direction. Finally, he speaks around a half chewed piece of bacon. “Are you stupid or something? Don’t they have food where you come from?”

The man at the stove makes a tsking noise. Mose doesn’t know the word “stupid”. Or the word “food,” or any of the other words. He nods enthusiastically and offers to shake hands.

The boy grunts and continues with his meal. “Like I thought. Stupid.”

“Dwight!” The man scolds.

“Dwight!” Mose repeats, pleased. His first new word of the day.

Dwight narrows his eyes.

*

In the next few weeks, Mose learns the names Uncle and Aunt and Cousin. They are the ones who disappear at sun-up and return for the evening meal smelling of dung and fresh plants. The old people who rarely move are called Grandma and Grandfather and Grandmutter Mannheim (who speaks as little English as Mose and is always kind to him). Sometimes he will play chess with Grandmutter Mannheim until she drops off to sleep mid-strategy. Once her eyes have drifted closed he knocks over his king and puts his queen next to her gnarled hand. In exchange, she reads him German poetry and knits him wool socks with swastikas and stags on the toes.

Throughout the day, the house’s inhabitants ebb and flow like the tide in Helsinki Harbor. He’s never sure which members of the family sleep in those nine rooms. No one offers their name or bothers trying to teach him English. They leave it up to him to learn by immersion. Most of the family mime what they’re trying to tell him (clean this, carry that) or ignore his existence altogether. There are no other children on the farm apart from Cousin Dwight, who is seven and a half years older, more severe than the elderly women and spends most of his time on a shoddily constructed crossbow range with human shaped targets that tip each time an arrow strikes its mark. Mose tries his best to connect with him but Dwight is unmoved.

As an act of friendship, Mose organizes a construction project to improve the stability of the straw and beet sack targets. It’s a matter of geometry, something he has a gift for. At the next full moon, he sneaks out of his attic window, down the trellis and across the lawn to the barn. There’s a stack of good wood he found once while playing and a box of tools. He drags the planks one by one to the neighboring clearing with a hammer weighing down the waistband of his pants. It takes him all night to nail the new   supports into place and re-stuff the sagging appendages.

Climbing back up to his room at day break with splinters in his fingers, Mose smiles his first smile at Schrute Farm.

The sun has reached its zenith on the following day when Uncle Grit (who-is-actually-Aunt-Margarite-but-prefers-to-be-Uncle-ever-since-that-cow-accidentally-sat-on-her-head) comes to find Mose mucking out the pig pens. She speaks quickly, waves her arms towards the clearing. Mose grins. They must have found the updated crossbow range. Dwight will be his new friend now, someone to play games with and to teach him how the farm works and what the word “Dummy” means, since people keep shouting it at him. Perhaps Dwight will even let him go on those deer hunting excursions with the fat man. 

There are a few Cousins and Uncles standing in the clearing when they arrive. Mose approaches and they all turn to stare like he is arriving in their midst for the first time. “Child genius,” they say in English. “Prodigy.”

Mose lays his hands on the nearest straw man. “Gift.” He says in Finnish. “Dwight Gift.”

Dwight turns on his heel and marches into the forest, face red with shame. Mose’s hands fall to his thighs, clenched. Uncle Grit hangs her head and ushers Mose back to the pig shit, sunshine and potato-scented skirts swirling as she walks.

­*

Grandma and Grandfather Schrude, the last of the Amish Schrudes, die at the same hour of the same night, side by side in their handmade twin beds. Mose watches with morbid fascination as they are carefully bathed and dressed in wedding clothes by the aunts under the watchful gaze of Grandmutter Mannheim. A box is hauled from the loft of the barn, just like the one his parents were kept in after their accident. It’s obviously old, the crusted dirt falling in drifts on the floor of the bedroom they had shared for the last eighty years. Mose hopes that when he dies he will be so lucky as to take the one he loves with him to the next life.

The funeral is strange, but romantic. The women read love poems. The men heap garlands of wildflowers upon the coffin and lead the women in traditional celebratory dances. It’s joyous and beautiful and everyone seems glad instead of lonely and left behind. Mose wipes the tears from his cheeks and tries to be happy, too.

Following the ceremony, there is a huge party. Everyone eats too much of Cousin Helga’s famous beet cake and drinks inadvisable amounts of beet wine. Even Grandmutter Mannheim indulges, loose lipped in her drunken state: the whole gathering is regaled (against their will) with vivid descriptions of the exiled Grandfather Mannheim’s genitals and Nazi crimes that would make even the most stalwart Hitler follower blush. Fortunately, Mose doesn’t understand a word and loves her all the more for her animated hands and sparkling eyes. Some of the family doesn’t speak to her for the rest of the night but Mose never leaves her side as she dozes off next to the stone fireplace.

The wake continues long past sundown. Uncle Grit plays guitar while the other women sing Neil Diamond and Van Morrison songs. The men tell stories of particularly good harvests and hunts. The house is packed with more family than Mose’s first night at Schrute Farm; the floorboards are groaning under the weight and the room under the porch is badly in need of emptying. Cousins of cousins turn out to celebrate and honor the dead. There are toasts and laughter and it’s so unlike the funeral for his parents that Mose actually starts to have fun.