Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (53 page)

Near the century's turn, on a winter night when the men had been drinking until they grew as cheerfully red as the enamel on a housewife's coffee mill, and the talk turned on old times, when herring had enriched the sea, bread sold for a fair price and children obeyed their parents, the sexton, now retired, confided to his son Eirik, who was himself somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, that the most hideous experience of his life had been opening a certain woman's coffin and finding it choked with its decomposed occupant's tresses which had grown out with such unnatural vitality as to be on the verge of worming through the lid.— Yes, father, said Eirik. I know who you're talking about.

And well you should. Parish history is our family's bread and butter.

Come spring I'll renew the sod on that section. Blonde hair, isn't it? It's coming up again.

Silently the old man poured himself more brandy.

And what about Magnhild?

No, son, it's Magnhild I've been speaking of.

But she—

Went bald in her old age, quite suddenly, it seems. Was it the scurvy? I remember seeing her coming to church, always with her bonnet on, summer or winter. Almost a scandal it was. Your mother used to say—

You see, father, that hair, wherever it might be rooted, it's spread all through the Gudmundsson section, just like dead grass. So I thought—

No, it's Magnhild's. Astrid, now, perhaps I should have left her in peace, since her coffin was perfectly sound, but in those days I was still curious about things, like you. Marianne Olafsdottir, who used to serve in that house, was not yet demented, so on the following Sunday I had a chat with her. She said that in her youth Astrid used to have beautiful long hair, which I didn't remember at all, but one woman's not likely to forget such a thing about another.

What else did she tell you?

That poor Astrid always returned good for evil. Marianne was fond of her, for a fact. Once she dropped a porcelain cup, and Loden was out for blood!
Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money—in secret, of course.

All right, father. So what was in Astrid's coffin?

Nothing.

How belatedly these unpleasant happenings might have been prevented is another of the deep matters unknown to me; but Lady Justice (when she isn't blinking) can descry murder's signature even on the rottenest corpse ever carried on a hurdle to the coroner's jury. Ten or twenty years in the ground need not leave a case unknowable, in witness of which I remind you of those occasions when daring memento-hunters (whom the law calls by other names) have recognized this or that disarticulated skeleton by the nitrous jewel amidst its bric-a-brac. And so, had someone dared to exhume Astrid, he might have noticed that her skull was half smashed in! Then what? We could have pulled out Loden's remains and burned them, or at least cast them out of the churchyard. The Devil
already held that soul, without a doubt, but the living would have been edified, and Astrid gratified. Or we could have burned
her;
that's what grim old Bishop Eriksøn would have done, had this story taken place in his time.

Were justice too much to expect, why not appeasement? In the Domkirke I have found people praying as industriously as ever bondsmaids can turn a millstone; so what if we had uttered heart-winged words for Astrid's comfort? Some say the dead know nothing, but the minister assures me that at every funeral he perceives ghosts screaming around our prayers like a flock of gulls. And so when Astrid died, we could have had a sermon on the subject of
Blessed are those who are persecuted,
or, if that was too daring,
Blessed are the meek;
at least we could have paused en route to the churchyard and offered her a eulogy, even one as simple as any of the heliographic cutouts on my cast-iron stove; for the old people remember that she was easily pleased.

Most people say that the bride was rather gloomy . . . As the saying goes,
things learned young last longest.

“
The Saga of Gunnlaug
Serpent-Tongue,”
ca.
1500
A.D.

I
n the Mary Church in Old Stavanger leans a great stone from ages ago, smoothed along one side and then carved in runes so tall that they stretch from edge to edge:
Kjetil made it and erected it to the memory of his dear wife Jorunn.
Who they both were is forgotten.

When Birgitte and Olav were wed in that church, he promised to remember her as well as Kjetil did Jorunn, at which Birgitte said: Not good enough. I'll expect you to follow me.

Yes, wife, I'll follow you . . .—at which his drunken cousin clapped him on the back.

She was a girl with a star at her throat and her scarf's narrow ends hanging straight down below her breast. Then she was a goldenhaired young mother clenching her hands against the cold, and every morning she rocked the cradle, singing the song of the spider and the brooch, but their baby died.

She was never well; she was always as whiteskinned as a young wooden house. When her doom grew certain, she leaned against him, and slowly they walked up the hill, looking down over the steep roofs of the wooden houses at the narrow, streaming brilliance of the Vågen. The Østhavn was empty but for one or two great ships; the picket fence was going grey with dusk; the maple leaves were already black.

Again he swore to ride the day-ship and the night-ship, with the sail his wife should weave for him; and so she passed the rest of her life, vomiting and fainting, rolling her sailcloth upward on the warp-weighted loom as she formed the stuff. Just as a woman in her moon-bloody shift runs round the barley field before her husband sows it, so that the earth will bear, thus Birgitte uttered all her paling magic into the cloth she made, until her lips turned black. After she could no longer speak, she
still stretched her arm toward him whenever he came to sit with her. Her hand closed tremblingly around his fingers. She learned how to make the good death once the leaves were new.

Because her life and death were in part secret to others, Olav's nightmares grew brighter than the sea. Beside their child he buried her in her finest cloak, pinned with a golden trefoil brooch. Her stone read:
Olav made this in remembrance of his dear wife Birgitte.
As far as others were concerned, she had now been cast away, forgotten beneath the grass, avoided like dead wet leaves on the path—his mother spoke of fresher women, and the slanders of others resembled fallen poison-berries crimson on rock stairs—but Olav took mind of his promise, although he felt uneasy enough, to be sure, because where Birgitte had gone was as dark as a forest at a glade's end.

Just as in a green hollow, a school of obedient dark stone heads stands aligned—a cemetery—so his nights now ranked themselves until a certain old witch in a double-brooched scarlet dress finished weaving the sail, spitting onto it to give it more woman-power.

Now the time had arrived for Olav to set out upon his journey, but first he wished to visit the husk of her whom he sought. Because he had paid the witch what she asked and more, she grew friendly, and even accompanied him that day, carrying the shovel. The church was cold. A man and boy bent over the votive candle which they had just impaled upon one of the equatorial spikes of the skeletal iron globe whose North Pole was a black cross, and when they had departed, Olav entered the churchyard, while the witch stood watch, reading the sun. An hour and more it must have been. Grimacing, she said: Do it now. I've locked the gate.

So he opened Birgitte's grave, kissing her rotten face most lovingly, whispering in the hole where her ear once was that he would come to her now, and when he touched the heart-mud between her ribs, her lead cross went white with reflected gold-light, its triple rows of runes shining copper-red in their grooves.— Now she knows, said the witch. I wish I'd had a husband like you.

On the following day, Olav left home, with the witch-cloth rolled under his arm. The witch called up a breeze for him, then went her way. He said: Birgitte, prepare to welcome me.— Rainy wind on the slippery mossy rock, beech trees bursting from the dark rock, these sang to him
when he put his feet in the two ovoid footprints, because in this very stone, dead people had made clean long ship-carvings: three vessels, one over the other, with people or animals or other beings on them. But what they had meant by it no one could say. Olav carried a silver neck-ring for his wife. Glorious white flowers were all he sorrowed to leave behind. Here he unrolled his sail. The keel sprouted before his feet. The wind caught him up.

Olav flew above the tongue of city into the Østre Havn, with small islands ahead: Plentingen on his left and Natvigs Minde on his right. Just like a duck paddling rapidly in cold black water, then diving, so his night-ship scored a wake in the day, then descended to the sea. His day-ship slit open the night; his night-ship found light; his day-ship carved darkness. Sometimes a sound as of wind came beneath the hull, but more often he heard slappings and sloshings; while after dark the ocean always sang like the choir back home in Stavanger. He grew as lonely as a dandelion flower high on its stalk. From Karmøy to Bukkøy he sailed, through shade and silver-wet grass, way-lit by the thunderglow of silver-blue lichen on black boulders, wife-lit, rune-lit, his ship's swan-neck so dark-lit by water that it seemed to be its own thing, a snake; and as he travelled he began to wonder whether he crossed waves or was but a shadow upon blackberries and petroglyphs by the sunny sea, so many broken shells and mouse skulls did he pass over upon that cracked rock-shelf with its black and silver-white lichens and grasses growing up gold in the cracks, until after sailing through many rains he began to forget some of this Birgitte whom he sought, voyaging ever more lightly over green island-heads in the pale blue water. But he would not release his grip on her memory. He kept dreaming of her dead breasts because he sailed between rosehips as large as suns, while her dead womb became a red crabapple in autumn.

Ahead came the desired land, and on the grass, the outspread arms of rock. Olav kissed Birgitte's neck-ring. The ship became an eight-legged horse whose eyes were dandelions. He sailed into the rock's embrace where white water leaped up out of the dark water it struck, the rock pale and nearly green in the light. He hovered over green moss and lichens, breasting the leaves which waved at the sheep-clouds on the grass-sky. Cloud-sheep grazed on the green horizon.

He called out to Birgitte, but she did not yet answer. So he rode his horse across the trees, watched by blurred Dorset faces on a wand of antler.— Now I'll roll up this horse and carry him under my arm, he said to himself.— He leaped across the dark lake, then across the river like a silver sword.

Far away where the blue-grey sea was writhing under a double bank of purple cloud, the sky glowing whitish-yellow at sunset, he approached the steeply tapering wooden roofs of Valhalla. Up rose mead-worthy woman-ghosts: Ingrid, Mari, Signe, Johanna, Karen, Elisabeth, Anna, Margaretha, Inga, Juliane—but Birgitte happened to be the one on whom he'd set his heart. So again he mounted his horse whose eyes were dandelions and rode down to Hel, whose dark hills are wound-gashed with red leaves. The ogres were greyish-blue like cold clay, and the trolls were as black as berries in a wall of green thorns; the giants were boulder-hearted, and the night-elves were pond-eyed. Sometimes they were grandly terrible; then they became as leaf-shadows. Scattering them all, even the monster with an ovoid head and closed ovoid eyes, he lifted a stone, and up rose Birgitte.

She wore a brooch made of crumbling green rust; perhaps he had once given it to her. Her hair had grown longer, and she was younger. She declined to open her arms. She was whiter than a birch tree, and her fingernails were paler than evergreen tips.

He held out her neck-ring, and unsmilingly she slipped it over her head, saying: If you teach me to love you again, I'll show you why dark water catches light.

He drank water from the moss beneath her arms. Her voice kept the high sound and the low sound of a stream.

She said: Your memory stone is choking me.

What shall I do with it, Birgitte?

Birgitte's not my name.

You told me to come here.

Go home and roll your stone away.

When Olav opened his eyes, the sun hurt them. The ground chilled his back. He was lying in his wife's opened grave, with dribs of rotten sailcloth between his fingers and the memory stone on his chest, facing downwards. He managed to push it off, then clambered back into the
sunlight. As soon as he stood upright he felt as if he had recovered from a drawn-out illness.

Although he felt curious as to whether the silver neck-ring remained in her coffin, burning her bones with precious frost, he remembered the words of Christ:
Let the dead bury the dead.

So he called workmen to haul the stone away. The gravediggers filled in the hole and laid new turf over it.

Then he remarried—a sweet young girl named Jorunn, who had long been on his mind. She promised to outlive him, which she did. He left instructions to be cremated.

. . .
if foul witch dwell

by the way you mean to fare,

to pass by is better than to be her guest,

even if night be near.

“Sigrdrífumál,”
ca.
1000
A.D.

In 1868 some Rogalanders remained in hopes that the herring would swim home to them, and a few even believed it, for it is always an insult when good things depart, and one readymade defense of the insulted is faith. That great wooden hand still pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland's shop, as if to remind us where those good things go; while the herringmen reached in the opposite direction, praying even yet for silver treasure in their nets. Out where the coast unrolled page after page of rock-stories, it seemed as if some secret fish-hoard might yet give itself, pallidly pure, like autumn light breaking weakly through the clouds; and since the herring occasionally pretended to return, the believers went on believing, awaiting their own continuance, watching the stillness of black water in the rain. Fortunately, universal afflictions manifest themselves in our neighbors before we need to confess the symptoms in our own faces. In other words, Karmsundet grew impoverished more rapidly than Stavanger, whose shipwrights and merchantmen made do thanks to lobster if not lumber; but even in Stavanger the unluckiest fishermen presently began to pack up for America. They were followed by carpenters whose iron-jacketed mallets had rusted, servant-girls expelled from their fine situations beneath the master's stairs, stevedores whose great shoulders went unhired and whose despondent women had given up expecting to stand in mountains of herring, gutting and salting by the hour; ropemakers whose only use for their product would have been to hang themselves, bankrupt farmers and other apostates from the silvery faith.

The shipping companies' agents promised easy terms and golden lives
to any who would buy their tickets. After all, isn't gold superior to silver? To be sure, certain crows kept croaking about the
Amelia,
which departed Porsgrunn Harbor with two hundred and eighty souls, seventy-nine of whom died of sickness. But some of her survivors came out rather well. One family even bought a piano, in a place called Minnesota. Although not all emigrants could expect that, they stood a fine chance of doing worse at home. Even the Rosenkilde family, it was said, was suffering: they now ate red meat but thrice a week.

Many Stavanger emigrants signed up with Mr. Køhler, his family having dwelled thereabouts since the Late Bronze Age, which rendered him nearly trustworthy and his passengers nothing if not civically patriotic. But not all were satisfied in the end. The ones who got buried at sea declined to complain, but their widowers and orphans wrote home that America had cost them twelve weeks belowdecks in a stinking prison of verminous, vomitous bunks, scuttles locked tight and not even enough water to drink—never mind the thieves in Liverpool and the road agents in New York.

So when Øistein Pederson and his wife Kristina prepared to make the adventure, they wondered whether Mr. Køhler's competitors might be any better. Kristina had already been dismissed from the cannery, for slackness, so the foreman said, but to her husband she tearfully swore before God that she had never for a moment slowed down; even between fish-barrels she kept on, cleaning the floor or sharpening the gutting-knives, nor had there been complaints about her. Øistein believed his spouse, who was honest in all things; moreover, the factory immediately took in a horde of hungry young Swedish girls who worked for less. A week later they hired her at Magnussen's, and it seemed as if they could live as before, weary over their bowls of soup on the narrow wooden table, so early it was still dark, a sheen of her gold hair reflected like aurora borealis on the dark frosted window. Then Magnussen's closed.

Øistein was a cooper. For three months they got along on his earnings, but the canneries ordered ever fewer barrels, so he and Kristina began to quarrel. On a certain cold night, Øistein slept badly, awoke in a fever, and because the room was so close and squalid, he fancied himself already
dead, trapped in the cold black earth, open-eyed, blind, unable to catch his breath. What could he do but suffer forever? Of course he had simply lost himself beneath the bedclothes. With a gasp he threw them off, disturbing Kristina, and gave thanks when he saw her shape in the pallid nightdress. Although he kept this experience to himself, it changed him. In brief, he conceived a horror of rotting away in Stavanger.

Come to think of it, horror of constriction might have been his very nature's foundation-stone. When he was a boy of five or six, his mother, who once saw it, told him how the great stele of Saint Mary's needle leans ever closer to Haakon's church; some believe that when they touch, Doomsday will arrive. Of all the children, Øistein was the only one affected by this tale. He could almost imagine himself caught in that inevitable evil hour—pinched, chilled and crushed. Seeing how readily he grew disturbed over nothing, his father realized that the child had too much time on his hands, and set him to the most wearisome tasks of coopering, which he soon mastered, after which nobody could find any fancies of which to disapprove in that quietly straightforward young man. Kristina's father, and perhaps even Kristina, would have been surprised to know what sort of person had joined their family. Naturally, they themselves might have presented a few astonishments to Øistein, had there ever come time to get to know each other in that way.

After his nightmare, he asked himself: If the herring never come back, what's the best we can expect?— The answer untricked his mind.

To say that Kristina and Øistein loved each other conveys less than I would wish, for doesn't marriage often commence with some kind of love? After three years their passion had not waned to nothing; but it had lessened, for a fact. On the other hand, they had learned how to be loyal helpmates each to the other. Øistein thought matters through, from his wife's point of view and his own. If there was no money then there would be more quarrels, in which case the chance of their remaining true friends appeared as unlikely as a happy ending to one of those tales which begin with a pretty girl luring a man into the churchyard. Anyhow, even if the old plenitude returned, why should Kristina spend herself in gutting herring by candlelight? Sometimes when they lay down together he could barely endure the smell.

His father-in-law, that gaunt and bearded believer, had stood against
emigration, but on one of those dark mornings he lost his capacity to wake up, so they buried him beside Kristina's mother and began to consider in earnest. Now was the time. Øistein's parents were already dead. No children had come yet; they retained a sack of coin from better days; as to their future, the landlord had increased the rent, and next month would bring three more boarders into that tiny house.

It was Sunday. When they all got home from church, two of the other tenants commenced disagreeing over a pair of boots, while Øistein stood watching raindrops on the window, the harbor trembling, reflections of red, white and yellow edifices barely pinkening or blueing the water. Then he opened his heart to Kristina, who said: I'll do whatever you think best.

He loved his wife's hair. In America, perhaps, she might not be compelled to kerchief her face against the stinging herring-brine. Then he could admire it every day. One could breathe in America, it was said. There was cheap good land, and the taxes were low.

Bypassing Mr. Køhler's, they went to Mr. Kielland's cousin Nils, who ran a clean business, everyone said. His passengers tended to be rich, but Øistein hoped that a berth in steerage might not be too dear. So the Pedersons awaited their turn, gripping the railing-narrow counter while the officials sat far away around their square wooden island of a desk-table, writing in their ledgers, counting money received and placing it in envelopes, never opening their tall black safe before the public. Some of these men Øistein had seen across the nave on Sunday, and some he had never met before; they looked nearly as grand as the Rosenkildes.

Finally the Pedersons stood before the high clerk, who asked what they wanted. From his tone they could have been unemployable Pietists. Looking him in the eye, Øistein demanded his cheapest price to America.

America, now, that's a wide place. Where in America?

New York.

We sail only to Québec nowadays.

Then you could have said so at the beginning, sir.

Good luck to you. Next!

How much to Québec?

For two?

That's right.

The man wrote down a number on a scrap of paper. Øistein led his wife out of that office, passing framed etchings of sailing ships and frowning rich men.

Fortunately, Kristina's aunt had been watching out for them. She said that there was nothing as easy to keep an eye on as that raven-suited agent who rushed so busily across the winding walls of white houses. He usually flittered by in mid-morning, when women had given up standing outside the canneries. The next day the Pedersons stood waiting for him, and here he came.

In his black suit he reminded Øistein of the dark narrow column of a mink standing up, its little hands dangling against its breast. Under his throat he wore a high white collar, whose clasp was a ruby-eyed herring cast out of pure silver.

He extended his hand, but Øistein stepped back.

So it's America you'd go to?

Frowning, the young man nodded.

I'll quote you a fine price!

What price?

Whatever others charge, Captain Gull will be less. Just bring a bill for proof.

Where is he?

This way.

That's not to the harbor! Øistein exclaimed.

It is, it is! A short passage! laughed the sailing-ship agent.

Following him up that steep lane whose twistings were nearly stifled by hordes of square-windowed wooden houses which watched every passerby like standing stones, they unaccountably found themselves back at the docks. Little single-masted vessels scuttled in and out of the VÃ¥gen, quick to tie up at their favorite warehouse before someone else could. The agent led them past the line of weary women in the salty stench of the herring wharves, some of whom tried to smile at Kristina, and just past Eystein's warehouse they arrived at a door in a small warehouse. Naturally they were subjected to no passenger ship office, and certainly not to
any clock with Chinese figures on its towering plinth, let alone some white door marked
PRIVAT
. This went far to explain why it might have been that the instant they saw Captain Gull, they liked him, although, come to think of it, this was unaccountable, for Øistein partook of a distrustful nature. With a name like that,
*
the fellow should have been a German goldsmith with six pink, roundcheeked children. As it was, he gave off a prosperous enough impression: narrow spectacles, fine white hair with a few strands of red still in it. His breath was scarcely beery at all.

Two more for America! said the agent.

Kristina wished to know how long the voyage would last.— Not above three weeks, said Captain Gull.

Impossible!

Not at all. Given fine weather it will be even less. You see, I've found a short passage.

Kristina was smiling. Alarmed, her husband took her hand, which even now remained blotched and inflamed from herring-brine.

Captain Gull was explaining that this shorter route to America had been worked out long ago. It was the way that Leif Eiriksson had revealed to no one, not even the ill-fated Vinland voyagers, who were his own kin; Captain Gull had followed up certain hints in the sagas, and claimed it for himself.— And you must promise to keep my secret, he continued.

He took them down to see the
Hyndla.
She was a pretty enough vessel, white, black and green. Øistein tapped his forefinger on the railing. Smiling, the agent said: Sound ship-wood—straight from the Ryfylke forest! And look here; this is interesting.

Her bowsprit was as impressive as an iron spear—for walrus hunting, chuckled Captain Gull.

We'll think on this, said Øistein, to which the agent replied: Don't think too long, Mr. Pederson. We have only half a dozen berths left.

In steerage?

They're all in steerage.

What's the price? And this time I want a figure.

Smiling, Captain Gull turned away. The agent murmured. It truly was unbelievably good.

Oho, said the agent. Three more emigrants coming! Excuse me now; perhaps I'll see you again.

After a glance at his anxious eager wife, Øistein said: We'll book our passage now.

Kristina's face was as shiny as her best possession, the brass teakettle that her mother had bequeathed to her.

Buying dried foodstuffs for the voyage at Mr. Kielland's store, Kristina felt even happier than she had been when Øistein first came courting. She laid in potatoes, flatbread, jugs of soured milk—and salted herring, of course; there was still a supply of it. In America, where food was cheap, she might be spared from eating that fish anymore. She bought plugs of tobacco for her husband, and a few onions against scurvy. Receiving Mr. Kielland's permission, the apprentice loaded the wagon and took her home with all her groceries.— Write us a letter if you get time, he said. Kristina thanked him, knowing that he would pray for her.

Her cousin Eyvind reached into his sailmaker's horn full of needles, and pulled out an awl which could pierce through anything. He gave it to her with a prayer and a kiss on the forehead.

Meanwhile her husband was packing up his trunk: wool mittens made by his sister, a striped white shirt, a cap, oilskin trousers and jacket, linens, a bit of rope, then all the farm tools the relatives could spare. How long he and Kristina could manage in America without work was as tedious to calculate as the number of green herring to fill a barrel. The uncertainties of the passage disquieted him, but after all, no man can see down deeply into the future. They had made their agreement and must be content. At least the voyage would be brief; moreover, his wife was too strong and good to complain.