The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [148]
“It may be so. Gardar does not seem to me to be a thriving place under the direction of the priest Jon. But it may be that the new bishop will appear soon.”
“It may be, indeed.” And Gunnar fingered a bit of the parchment. “I have heard that the making of parchment is a difficult thing, asking much skill.”
“Most men have such skills. They are a farmer’s skills.” He lifted up a roll and put it down. “Forming the letters, this is the skill of a priest. Forming the ideas is a rarer thing.”
“For now, some would be content to make the parchment.”
“It is easily taught.”
And in this way Gunnar was kept from his evening meat, for he passed so much time at Thjodhilds Stead watching Einar stretch a sheepskin by laces onto a frame he had carried with him from Iceland, and then shave it with a handsome rounded knife that he did not return to Lavrans Stead until all the people there had gone to their bedclosets. After this, he got into the habit of going off to Thjodhilds Stead whenever he could borrow time from the summer’s tasks. Gunnhild seemed to him well enough employed. Whenever he saw her, she was going from the dairy to the steading or the storehouse to the dairy, or she was sitting with the baby and the two skraeling children who nursed him, or she was spinning and talking with Solveig about this or that. She knew better than to make much of his visits or to ask to accompany him back to Lavrans Stead, even for a few nights. And so the summer passed quietly, and there were no killings or other disturbances in the district and Bjorn Einarsson stayed home for the most part after the end of the Thing.
And the winter, too, passed quietly, except that Gunnar was engaged in stretching his own sheepskins over a frame he had made of whale bone, and shaving them with a curved knife sharpened from the shoulder blade of a reindeer, and Gunnhild, who returned at the end of the summer nights, helped him with this work. These tools worked surprisingly well, so that his parchments were smooth and pale and took the merest stroke of bearberry ink, and after Yule he began to write upon them in a large and awkward hand, and the first thing he wrote was as follows:
“A man named Erlend Ketilsson lived at Ketils Stead in Vatna Hverfi district, in much conflict with his neighbors. All considered him an ill-tempered and quarrelsome fellow. He was a very prosperous farmer, with a large steading and many outbuildings. Through his entire life he fornicated with a servant woman named Vigdis, and when she grew old, he chose another to fornicate with. As a result of his sin, he and his servant and the child of his servant and two others starved to death at a certain Yule season and were partly eaten by their dogs.”
Gunnar was much dissatisfied with this writing and scraped it off the parchment. As for Gunnhild, she was much dissatisfied with everything about Lavrans Stead, and complained without ceasing of how cramped the rooms were, and how humble all the household arrangements. Tales of Solveig and the baby and Bjorn were always on her lips, so that Helga and Kollgrim tormented her with mockery of the way Solveig blinked and talked and took turns breaking into each other’s conversation with corrections and other remarks, as was Einar’s habit. Even Johanna was unpleasing to Gunnhild, for she greeted her oldest sister as a stranger after so much time, and clung to Astrid, who was a very playful nurse, and fond of games and silliness.
It happened that a few days before Yule there was a great battle among the three older children, in which all ended up weeping, and it was clear to Birgitta that although Helga and especially Kollgrim were excessively teasing toward Gunnhild, she had brought this upon herself by condemning their ways and their clothes and everything about them for the previous two days, and doing her best to make them seem mean and unworthy in their