The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [112]
And the man said, “Here in my pouch I also have this bit of a lamp. You might put some seal oil in it, and have both light and warmth.”
“Nay,” said Thorbjorn, “the smell of seal oil turns my nose.”
Now the man laughed and said, “Thorbjorn, thy neighbors have been eager to help you in your trouble.” And Thorbjorn said, “They are lowly men, these neighbors, and none of them has been made into an earl by the Norwegian king. It is for us to help them, not for them to help us.” And so this man, who was the Devil himself, opened his great black cloak and said, “My Thorbjorn, the light of your pride has been like a beacon in the darkness to me, and I have come to take you for my own. You can go with me now. Your folk, I assure you, will follow shortly, one by one.” And that was the last of Thorbjorn.
Now all the assembled folk who were listening to Lavrans’ tale laughed at this, and Lavrans himself laughed, and Birgitta said, “Indeed, my father, there was never such a lordly family in Hvalsey Fjord as this one.” Lavrans grinned and raised little Helga onto his lap. But Olaf was not made more contented by this tale, and he sulked about all winter.
On moonlit winter nights, Gunnar got into the habit of skiing or skating across the fjord and spending the evening in conversation with Sira Pall Hallvardsson. And it happened that one of these nights, he asked the priest what he remembered of the ways of Europeans, for now that he was no longer at Gunnars Stead, Gunnar declared, he had a new longing to go on ship as his father had done, when he traveled to Norway and the Orkney Isles and Iceland, and returned with Helga Ingvadottir, Gunnar’s mother.
Sira Pall Hallvardsson now laughed heartily, and when Gunnar asked him why he was laughing, he said that in his many winters in Greenland, he had never been led to recall his youth or his education, for no Greenlander had asked him about it before this.
“It is true,” said Gunnar, “that we Greenlanders are like most men in this, we think that what is important is what is taking place in Greenland. And the men of Hvalsey Fjord are the same. To them, the disputes of Vatna Hverfi are small things, hardly worthy of remark, even though Vatna Hverfi is a larger district with greater farms and richer men.”
Sira Pall Hallvardsson said, “And the men of Vatna Hverfi consider that Eriks Fjord has lost much of its importance in late years.” Now Gunnar and the priest both laughed. Gunnar said, “When we went to the south, to Kollbein Sigurdsson’s swimming contest at the hot springs, the farmers of the south were a little perplexed by us and our concerns, and thought of Kollbein as a peculiar and insignificant man, although he was the ombudsman of the king. It seems to me that folk have smaller minds than they once did, in the days of my grandfather Gunnar Asgeirsson. My father, too, was a great one for having news of distant places.”
Now Pall Hallvardsson grew sober, and nodded, and said that all things were worse than they had been, that the decline of men from a state of grace was proven by Church authorities. Gunnar said, “My wife and her father say that even the weather is worse, and every year worse, although Finn declares that of seals and birds and other game there are such numbers as he has never seen before. I know this, that in earlier days, a man who wished to take ship and sail away for wealth and adventure had but to wait a year or so, and now he may see the birth of many children before he sees a single ship.”
Some time after this, Sira Pall Hallvardsson began to speak of his school, for he could remember nothing before this school, although it was said that his mother had been the daughter of a Flemish cloth dyer and his father an Icelander who was part owner of a small ship, and who had visited Greenland as a young man, before Bishop Arni died. But these people, Pall Hallvardsson’s mother and father, along with her parents and brother, all died during