Burial Rites (19 page)

I heaved against the door to shut it, but the wind was too strong. My hands stiffened with the cold rush of air. It was as though the wind was some form of ghoul demanding to enter. Then, all of a sudden, the wind dropped, and the door slammed shut. As though the spirit had finally entered and closed the door behind it.

I returned to the badstofa with oil and filled the lamps. Björn was angry at me for letting the cold air in, with Inga in such a delicate state.

The blizzard hurled itself upon our croft that afternoon, and raged for three days. On the second, Inga began to have her baby.

It was too soon.

Late that night, amidst the sound emitted by the wind and snow and ice, Inga began to have terrible pains. I believe she was afraid that this baby, too, would arrive before its time.

When Björn realised that the baby was coming, he sent Jón, their workman, to his brother’s farm for his sister-in-law and their servant woman. My foster-father bade Jón tell the women what was happening, so that they might at least give their advice, if they couldn’t return with him.

Jón protested that the blizzard was too forceful, and that he couldn’t be expected to perform such a task, but Björn was a demanding man. So Jón dressed himself in thick garments and went outside, but he returned soon after, covered in ice and snow, and told my foster-father that he couldn’t see two steps in front of him, and that he wouldn’t be made to walk farther than the barn when the weather promised only death. Yet, Björn made him try again, and when Jón returned, half-frozen with cold, telling him he could scarcely stand in the wind, and had not made it more than six feet, my foster-father took him by the collar of his jacket and pushed him outside. I think then, when he opened the door, he saw just how dangerous the weather was, for when Jón returned inside a few minutes later, shaking with cold and anger, Björn said nothing, but let Jón undress and get into bed to revive himself.

I’m sure Björn was scared then, too.

Inga had remained in her bed and was now groaning with pain, as white as milk and overcome with a shuddering that left her covered in sweat. Björn carried her from the badstofa to the apartment in the loft – there used to be a loft in this cottage – so she might be afforded
some privacy, but when he lifted her, her nightgown and the linen of her bed were soaked with water, and I cried out in surprise. I thought she had wet herself.

‘Don’t move her, Björn!’ I called, but he ignored me and lifted my foster-mother up the stairs, asking me to boil water and bring him some wadmal. I did as he asked, taking the new woven stuff I myself had made. I asked if I might see Mamma, but he told me to go and look after Kjartan, so I returned to the badstofa.

Kjartan must have realised that something ill was afoot, for he was whimpering when I returned. As I sat back on our bed, he clambered across and in my own fear and need for comfort, I pulled him onto my lap, and we sat waiting for Björn to tell us what to do, listening to the storm.

We waited for a long time. Kjartan fell asleep against my neck, so I laid him down in our bed and tried to card some wool, separating the tangles into thin wisps between my paddles, and picking out the little burrs. But my fingers were shaking. All the while I could hear Inga in the loft, crying out. I reminded myself that the crying was normal, and that soon I’d have a new foster-brother or sister to love.

After some hours Björn stepped down from the loft. He entered the badstofa, and I saw that he was holding a small parcel. It was the baby. Björn’s face was ashen, and he held out the wee thing and made me take it into my arms. Then he left the room and returned to the loft to see to his wife.

I was excited to hold the baby. It was very small and light, and didn’t move much, but it was mewling, and it rumpled its eyes and mouth, and its face was very red and awful looking. I unwrapped it and saw that it was a girl.

Kjartan had awoken by this time. It had become chill inside; the wind was getting in through some crack, and a draught suddenly blew out most of the tallow candles we had lit and put on the table.
Only one candle remained and, in its flickering light, our shadows danced out across the wall, and Kjartan started to cry. He closed his eyes and buried his head into my shoulder.

Because it had become so cold, I tried to tuck the baby in its blanket in my shawl, and then used my pillow to hold it close to my chest. But we didn’t have down pillows, only seaweed, and they did not give off much warmth. But the baby had stopped crying, and I thought that maybe it wasn’t too cold, and would be all right. I used my fingers to wipe a little of the thick fluid off the baby’s head, and then Kjartan and I gave it a kiss.

We sat on the bed together for a long time. Hours passed. Days could have slipped by for all I knew. It remained gloomy and cold, and the storm raged endlessly. I had told Kjartan to go and pull off the blankets from his parents’ bed, and we’d draped them around us, huddling together for warmth. Inga’s moans came unceasingly from the loft. It was a sound someone might make if they were asleep and having a terrible nightmare: a low, awful language without words, just sounds. And the wind was blowing so hard all the while, that sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was Inga crying out, or the wind, making the candle gutter in its candlestick.

I had put an arm around Kjartan, and used the other to bring the baby close to my chest, and I told them both to try to listen to my heartbeat so that they would forget the snowstorm.

I think we fell asleep. I say I think, because I don’t remember waking, but I do remember suddenly seeing Björn standing in the badstofa. The last candle had snuffed out, and in the dimness of the room I could just see him standing very still, his head hanging down.

‘Inga is dead,’ he said. The words fell heavily in the room. ‘My wife is dead.’

‘Björn,’ I said, ‘the baby is here. Take the baby,’ and I moved it out from under the blankets and offered it to him.

He wouldn’t take it. ‘The baby is dead too,’ he said.

I looked down at what I held in my hands, and I saw that the baby had become still, and that it wasn’t warm any more. The blankets were only warm because I had pressed them to my own body. I started to cry. Kjartan saw the baby’s little blue face, with the dried blood still clinging to its cheek, and he saw that it didn’t move, and he began to whimper. Björn watched us. I became upset, and I put the baby on the bed, and threw myself down on the floor with my face in my hands. I was wailing, and I cried out, ‘I want to die too!’

‘Maybe you will,’ Björn replied. That was all he said to comfort me. ‘Maybe you will die too.’

I lay on the floor for a long time, screaming. I remember the wooden boards – the very same ones here by our feet now – were wet and smeared with my tears and the mess from my nose. I was angry at Björn, sitting on his bed in the darkness, with his head in his hands and not crying, not screaming, not telling me to get up and stop my tantrum. He was as frozen as the ground outside. And so I screamed and rolled on the floor until my eyes were swollen and my hands stung from slapping the wood. I howled like the blizzard outside, until I remembered Inga in the loft, and then I got up and ran out of the room, tripping on my skirts and falling on my knees. I climbed the stairs to the loft and ran inside.

In our loft there was a little window in the roof, above the beams. We normally stuffed the hole with cloth to keep out the rain and snow, but it had fallen out, and let in a little blue light, although the blizzard still stormed outside. It was extremely cold in the room. My breath floated out from me in a soft cloud. A great deal of snow had blown in, and it had melted into a large puddle on the floor, and I saw that puddle first, how it threw back the light admitted by the window, so that it was bright on the floor, like a looking glass. And then I saw Inga.

In the blue light of the room her blood looked purple. She lay on
a narrow mattress of hay, over the woven wadmal I had given Björn earlier, except that the cloth was no longer white, but stained with blood. Her eyes were open and they reflected the light in moist glints that made me think she was still alive. I bent down to her and cried out ‘Mamma!’ and put my hand on her shoulder, but when I touched her I knew that she was dead. Her body had stiffened, and she was cold to touch.

Her blood was everywhere. Her nightgown seemed black with it, all over her legs and the bed, but her bare shoulders were smeared in it too, and I noticed her hands, which lay beside her, palms upturned, were covered in it, just like when she’d make sausage, letting the blood clot and straining it through linen. Her face was white, too white in the dim room, and her hair had slipped from her cap and was stiff over her forehead.

I won’t forget the smell. That room was filled with the smell of her blood, and the sharp, clean scent of the snow on the floorboards. It made me feel sick to breathe it in.

Inga’s nightgown was bunched about her waist, and so I pulled it, stiff with dried blood as it was, back down over her legs so that her body was not so naked. Then I kissed her slack mouth. Finally, I pulled off her cap and pushed my face into her hair. It was the only part of her that still smelt of my foster-mother and not the blood. I lay my body down next to hers and covered my face in her long hair, and breathed her in, for how many minutes I don’t know, until Jón pushed aside the curtain to the loft and picked me up, and carried me back downstairs to bed.

And when I next woke the blizzard had stopped.

This is what I tell the Reverend. I try to tell the story in the best way I know how. I let the words come as I knit, and I snatch little looks at the Reverend’s face, to see if he is moved.

I can feel the others listening. I can feel Steina and Margrét and Kristín and Lauga stretching their ears towards us in the shadowy corner, eating up this story like fresh butter and bread. Margrét and Lauga maybe thinking that it served me right, perhaps feeling sorry for me. Steina thinking I am like her – miserable, ignored. At fault.

But because I know the others are listening, I can’t ask the Reverend what I want to ask. I can’t say, Reverend, do you think that I’m here because when I was a child I said I wanted to die? Because, when I said it, I meant it. I pronounced it like a prayer.
I hope I die
. Did I author my own fate, then?

I want to ask the Reverend if he thinks I killed the baby. Did I hold her too tightly? But there is no right way to ask this question, and I don’t want to put more thoughts into these women’s heads. There are some things they should not hear.

It seems everyone I love is taken from me and buried in the ground, while I remain alone.

Good thing, then, that there is no one left to love. No one left to bury.

‘WHAT HAPPENED THEN?’
TÓTI ASKED
. He realised that he had hardly breathed during Agnes’s story.

‘It’s strange,’ Agnes said, using her little finger to wind the wool about the needle head. ‘Most of the time when I think of when I was younger, everything is unclear. As though I were looking at things through smoked glass. But Inga’s death, and everything that came after it . . . I almost feel that it was yesterday.’

Across the room, a chair scraped. Margrét gave a muffled cough.

‘I remember that after Inga died Jón was sent to fetch Björn’s relatives,’ Agnes continued. ‘I can remember lying in my bed,
watching my foster-father sit on the stool Inga had used for her spindle work. He was too big for its seat. Kjartan was in bed with me, and he was sleeping all hot and heavy on my shoulder. The wind had dropped and it was suddenly very quiet.

‘We eventually heard the clink of harness from the yard outside. Then Björn slowly rose to his feet and stepped towards my bed. He scooped my brother up with one arm so I could sit, and he told me to take the dead baby, wrap its face in a blanket and put it in the storeroom.

‘The baby seemed lighter dead than alive. I held it out from me and walked down the corridor in my stockings.

‘It was very chill in the storeroom. I could see the fog of my breath before me, and my forehead ached from cold. I covered the baby’s face with a corner of the cloth it was wrapped in and laid it upon a sack of dried cod heads. When I stepped back into the corridor, a blast of freezing air hit the side of my face, and I turned to see the door open, the faces of Björn’s brother, sister-in-law and their servant appearing from the murk outside. Their cheeks were wet and shiny from sleet.

‘I remember Uncle Ragnar and Jón carefully carrying Inga down from the loft while Björn was outside, attending to the sheep. It was my job to make sure they didn’t bump her head against the rungs of the ladder. They brought her into the badstofa and set her on the stripped bed. Aunt Rósa was in the kitchen heating some water, and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was going to clean my poor foster-mamma’s body. She wouldn’t let me watch. She let Kjartan play by her feet, and she ordered me to go upstairs to the loft and help her servant, Gudbjörg.

‘When I climbed the ladder I saw Gudbjörg scrubbing blood off the floorboards. The smell made me feel sick and I started to cry. Gudbjörg took me into her arms. “She’s gone to God now, Agnes. She’s safe.”