The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [139]
Or discussion would arise of the efficacy of certain relics. St. Olaf’s finger bone at Gardar would be recalled to have cured a madness, and Einar would declare that the relics of St. Olaf were well known for curing scrofula and other skin ills, but not for curing madness. At this someone would assert that his father or grandfather had been there when the cure took place, or was a member of the household, at which Einar would declare that in that case, it must not be the finger bone of St. Olaf, but of some other saint, perhaps St. Hallvard, or even a saint from Germany or France, such as St. Clothilda or St. Otto, and folk did not know how to answer these notions, for they had not heard of these saints, and hesitated to admit it. It was true that Einar’s tales had this effect on people, that when he was finished speaking, they were reluctant to admit how little they knew in comparison to him. It was also the case that he often corrected his foster father when Bjorn related tales or made talk, but Bjorn did not mind, and indeed, thanked the younger man for remembering things he himself had forgotten.
Nevertheless, like Bjorn, Einar was a generous and interested man, as free with tales and trinkets from abroad as he was with advice. Best of all, he was of the sort of sanguine temperament that doesn’t recognize when it is giving offense, and so he felt no enmity for others, and received none. When folk heard of the betrothal to Gunnhild Gunnarsdottir, they cocked their heads wisely and declared among themselves that the Gunnar Stead lineage would certainly bring some much needed pulchritude to the lineage of the Icelanders. But mostly it was a lucky match for Gunnar, who was a man of little luck, after all.
Now Einar began to talk to Sira Pall Hallvardsson of the cattle before them in the Gardar pen. These cattle now numbered about forty, including spring calves, who were just being weaned, and Einar was not much impressed with them; he had seen better in Denmark, Germany, even Iceland. And now he told a tale of Iceland, in which someone he knew desecrated a small chapel by using it for a lambing fold in the early spring. And this man lived near a volcano, and one day some vapors rose out of the volcano in the gray cloud and settled upon the farmer’s pastures, and after this his cattle and sheep grew quickly, but in distorted and monstrous ways—their teeth grew out of their mouths so that they could not feed, and their hooves grew long and curved backward toward their pasterns and one or two legs grew more quickly than the others, so that the animals could not stand or walk and were in great pain, so that those who didn’t die the farmer had to kill himself and he was reduced to a beggar and had to go out to the farms of other folk as a servingman.
Sira Pall Hallvardsson had no tale to match this one, so he only said that when he first came out to Greenland, there had been almost a hundred cattle in the pasture, all fat and glossy, with these same lovely white marks upon them. And the Gardar sheep had numbered in the hundreds, and of all possible colors, and in addition there had been many goats, ten horses, a half dozen or so pigs, and many dogs, both of the reindeer hunting breed and of a smaller black and white breed that was sometimes used by herders to ease their work, but these were no longer found much at Gardar or Brattahlid, though more in the southern parts of Vatna Hverfi district.
Einar declared that these deer hunting dogs were fine beasts, but not as fine as those you might see among the Irish, dogs whose backs came up to a