The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [14]
Sigrun Ketilsdottir was white, and except for her large belly, as bony as a cow at the end of winter. She lay with her eyes closed between the pains, and each pain seemed to wring her out. The women sat about her. Ingrid went up and took her hand and said, “My Sigrun, it seems to me that the child will be a big one, for it has been eating you up from the inside. But it will sleep well and thrive, once it is born.” Sigrun nodded and was taken with another pain. Behind her, Margret heard one of the farm women mutter, “She has been seized by ghosts, no matter what folk say about sleeping and thriving.” And another woman said, “This child here has more flesh on her bones.”
It seemed to Margret that Sigrun’s belly lay over her like a whale, smothering her, for no matter how the women pulled her up, or propped her, Sigrun sank down without strength beneath the weight. The first pains had come at evening meat, two nights before, and the waters shortly after that. Margret gleaned from the farm women’s whispered conversation that they had little hope for either mother or child.
But Ingrid had a good reputation in the district for delivering at difficult births, and she went about her business in the usual fashion. She smoothed the coverlet and untangled Sigrun’s gown, made sure there were no knots in her clothes. The door and the window to the steading were open, and the women walked in and out with their spinning. Sometimes Ingrid offered the laboring girl a warm drink of ground dulse mixed with some other herbs. She slipped a small knife under the straw of the bedcloset, to cut the pains. The afternoon went on, and toward suppertime, Ingrid reached into Sigrun and felt the baby’s head with the tips of three of her fingers. The servingwomen ran to get a clean sheepskin for catching the baby, and Ingrid sent for Nikolaus the Priest from Undir Hofdi. Sigrun had ceased screaming, although anyone could see the contractions under her gown. But they seemed not to be a part of the woman in the bedcloset, whose eyes were almost closed, and who let the warm hearty seaweed mixture dribble out of the corners of her mouth nearly as fast as the servingwoman could pour it in. All the women were full of sighs now. Night fell, and Nikolaus the old priest came after his evening meat and stood beside the bedcloset and prayed in a way that told everyone the outcome.
The women held Sigrun up by the shoulders and the back to ease the passage of the baby, and she was utterly without strength. The baby was born, caught on the sheepskin, and wrapped quickly in a length of fine wadmal. It was not large at all, and it frightened Margret to look at it, with its slanting eyes and black hair growing all down its back. After it was born, Sigrun began to pour forth bright red blood, drenching her shift and the straw of the bedcloset, and then she was dead.
The child was taken to Vigdis, one of the farm women who had given birth to a child in the late winter, and put to the breast, but Vigdis said that it didn’t know how to suck, and finally the women had to drip ewe’s milk into its little mouth through the shaft of an eagle’s quill. Nikolaus the Priest christened the baby Ketil and agreed that it would die.
But the child did not die, as it happened, and Vigdis succeeded in feeding it full of rich ewe’s milk. Not only that, it passed two large black stools, and in all ways began to look more like any other child. Vigdis and her own baby, Thordis, who was fat and cheerful, moved into the steading with the new one. Now it was reported that for three nights running, the ghost of Sigrun walked about the farmstead and came inside to seize the baby. And so Vigdis placed her own Thordis in the cradle, and when Sigrun laid hands upon her, Thordis screamed lustily, and Vigdis leapt from her bed