The Trouble With Folklore

By Rosie Sedgwick

There is a Swedish folk belief that if you go out before dawn on Christmas Eve morning, without eating, without drinking and without speaking to anyone, and sit in a graveyard, you will see a parade of those who are destined to die the following year. Does anyone believe it? Probably not.

          Olof had been amused by these stories since he was a child. He wondered how they had developed. At some point, he presumed, someone had asserted that he had seen the ghost of a villager still very much alive, but who had died soon after. The story would have spread, with most people laughing and saying that the storyteller must have had a good skinful. But then someone tried it and complained to the originator that he hadn’t seen anything.

          “Oh but you did it after you’d eaten. No wonder.”

          Next year someone went out before breakfast. Still nothing.

          “Ah, you should have gone out before eating or drinking, see?”

          Next year, a thirsty and hungry person complained that it still hadn’t worked.

          “Well, did you tell your wife you were going? You mustn’t speak to anyone. That’s the issue.”

          And so, these things grow. 

          Olof happened to wake early, put some wood on the embers of the stove, and having nothing else to do, walked in the snowy darkness to the graveyard. His taciturn disposition was going to enjoy having followed all the rules and still proving that it was all nonsense. He would have the final laugh about that.

          The graveyard was glistening in the moonlight. Olof walked around it, his thick boots crunching prints into the perfect snow. He looked at each stone that he passed. The inscriptions were dusted with snow, but some he knew anyway. Bengt Andersson, died 1876, aged 53. Lars Svensson, died 1894, aged 37. He brushed the snow off an elaborate stone which had a good flat surface and settled down to wait and think. It was silent. Too early even for birds. After a while, he changed position. He was starting to feel cold and was thinking he had made his point. As he moved, he heard another sound. Was it his boots in the snow? He looked around at the complex patterns of moon shadow. Had something else moved? There was the sound again. Faint voices. There was a wisp of mist by the church doors. As he watched, it formed into an ethereal being, then another, and another. They processioned in a line down the stone path. Their feet left no marks in the snow. Olof stared, trying to make out the faces. Was that Birgitt? And Lars? Old Mrs. Andersson? Then, with a gasp, he recognised himself. He had a cloak on – the same cloak he was wearing right now as he watched. The hood was half off, revealing his own face. The procession continued down the path and then melted away at the gate. Nothing but wisps of mist remained. Olof tried to stand, but his legs were shaking. He sat a little longer to gather his strength. 

          “The next year? A year is a long time. No, a year is no time at all. It could be a whole year. Or it could be a month. Thirty days. Is that a long time? What if it is a week?”

          Would it be better to have a date? Or would that make it worse? He was feeling very cold now, so stood, steadying himself with the gravestone. It was icy under his fingers. Within the year, he too would be icy. Where would they put him? He looked around the graveyard for spaces. He supposed it would depend on the order… If Birgitt went first, she would get the best space. Did the order of the procession mean anything? Would fate take Birgitt first, then Lars, then old Mrs. Andersson… and then him? If so, he was safe as long as they lived. But it might be the reverse order. Maybe he would be first to go? He wouldn’t know until one of the others died. He walked back to his home, weighed down by his new knowledge. He could not tell anyone, because they would immediately ask him questions. Because they wouldn’t know how bad it was to know.

          He poured himself a bowl of broth from the small stove. The fire had revived and it was hot and comforting. Olof hugged the bowl and wrestled with his future.

          Over the next few weeks, Birgitt and Lars and Mrs. Andersson stayed alive. But at the end of February, Hulda died of a fever. He attended the funeral, of course, along with Birgitt and Lars and Mrs. Andersson, coming solemnly out of the church. 

          “They don’t know,” he thought.

          He hadn’t seen that death coming. Maybe he had left the churchyard too soon? He should have stayed to make sure he’d seen the whole parade. But this meant that, if the figures were in order, it was reverse order. Just in case, he started to keep a close eye on Mrs. Andersson in particular, enquiring about her health regularly, so that she began to find him a little unnerving. He began to toy with the idea that he could alter fate by looking after her well, and took to dropping off gifts of food, leaving treats on her doorstep. She suffered a fall in April and he was especially attentive, bringing her jugs of soup and extra firewood. Mrs. Andersson told her friends that she thought maybe he had seen a vision and had a religious conversion. When the rumour got back to Olof he wondered if that was really what had happened.

          Then, in August, Lars had a stroke. This meddled with Olof’s idea of a system, and he fretted over the man’s health for days. He visited so frequently that Lars’ wife found him a bit of a nuisance. 

          “Stop your fussing. Lars is doing fine. His left leg is a bit wobbly, but he’s managing. Thank you,” as she shut the door behind him, again.

          As the summer came to an end, Olof began to become really anxious. The window was closing. He had done everything he could think of to cheat fate, but he could not relax. Was there something he had forgotten? He checked up on himself regularly; he didn’t have a cough, or a fever. His clothes fitted him just as they had always done. He had no more aches and pains that a man of his age should expect. 

          By the middle of October, Olof realised that his fate must now be coming quite quickly. He was not going to have a slow decline, one in which his friends could gather round, offering him support, bringing tasty food and piling logs in his stove. No. It was looking increasingly like this was going to be sudden. Would he just drop, instantly, knowing nothing about it, like Johan a few years back? Or would it be a violent accident like that woman he’d heard about in the next village? The prospects played on his mind, interfering with his sleep and distracting him from his duties keeping Mrs. Andersson well. She told her friends that his religious conversion hadn’t lasted long, and she was disappointed in him.

          As the days became shorter and shorter, the darkness preyed on Olof’s mind. To die violently, unexpectedly, in the night was a horrible prospect. By mid November, Olof had decided that he had to take matters into his own hands. He took a rope used for securing stacks of logs from a small cupboard and put a chair under the main beam of the house. He did a last round of visits to Birgitt, Lars and Mrs. Andersson – “Oh you’ve remembered me again have you?” and returned to his home. The fire in the stove had burned low. That was fine. He didn’t want any risk that the place might burn down afterward. That was not part of his plan. 

          He knotted the rope into noose, threw one end over the beam and secured the other on a large metal hook on the beam which was for hanging cured meat. Now, it would support a piece of uncured meat.

          Olof prepared to take charge of his fate and kicked the chair away. 

          At the start of December, there was a ceremony in the church, and the body of Olof was laid in its grave. Out of the church filed the procession of attendants: Birgitt, Lars and Mrs. Andersson led it, and the rest of the villagers followed behind.