Book Three — Hellgum's Letter

Eva Gunnersdotter comes out of her little log cabin in the forest dressed as if for church, though it is only a weekday. She is very old and very frail but holds herself erect. She has a long walk to the Ingmar Farm. Along the way she remembers what the Hellgum movement was in its early days — brothers and sisters who came to find her in her solitude, who cleared paths to her cabin after snowfall, who gave her a community she had not had in years.

Now she is troubled. Too many have abandoned the movement. The summer she had hoped would bring the departure is not bringing it. She recites to herself the lines from Hellgum's letters that she knows by heart — letters the Hellgumists treat as apostolic writings, reading them at every meeting as the Bible is read in church. The letters demand a Jerusalem departure that keeps being postponed.

The meeting at the Ingmar Farm is smaller than it once was. Hellgum's letter is read aloud. It is all they have left of the original fire. Old Eva listens, remembers, and holds to it. The chapter is a study in faith that has outlasted its first certainty and found something quieter and more stubborn in its place.