The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [200]
Bjorn Bollason and his men were much impressed with the abundance of food at Gardar, and when it was all given out and taken away, Bjorn Bollason came to Sira Pall Hallvardsson and said, “I expected to find a mouthful for everyone and found instead a week of feasts. All your extra prayers have done naught for the Greenlanders compared to these actions of ours. Men go away thanking the benevolence of the bishop, for which the bishop should be grateful.”
Pall Hallvardsson replied only, “Time will show where gratitude should lodge,” and he turned away from Bjorn Bollason and went to his chamber. The case was that he, too, had been much surprised by the quantity of reserves, but indeed, after all these years of Sira Jon’s madness, he still hadn’t solved the puzzle of the bookkeeping, and each winter the time he spent huddled over those pages, either reading Sira Jon’s hand or making his own confusing and incomplete entries grew less and less. He did not know as much about these things as he had at Hvalsey Fjord, when at least he had looked daily into the two cupboards, and Sira Jon had looked twice a year at his offerings. At Gardar he could not even frighten himself with the thought of the coming bishop, or of a ship removing all of the obligated stores to Nidaros, for indeed, after so many years, who would know what was to be expected, or how much the tithes would amount to? And so, perhaps, he had spent even less time over the books in the previous winter than before. Perhaps he had spent no time at all, but only said to Olof and Petur and everyone else who came to him to do as they thought best, and use what they had to, and perhaps he had taken all of the tithes from all of the farms without looking at them very closely, or asking after the sheep and the seal hunt—those probing questions that Sira Jon had been so good at and that had made him detest the Greenlanders, who always seemed to be reserving something, even the smallest part of their due. Perhaps they were, perhaps they only appeared to be, as he himself had always told the other priest. But what man, who had not the eye of God, could see how much there was and how much was really owed? In the abbey where he had grown up, a score of monks had spent their days traveling about the abbey lands and reporting the activities of every peasant, every cow, every pig, so that when a peasant brought in his rent or his tithe, the abbot could say, “There is nothing here from that field of barley you planted at the edge of the forest,” or, less often, “The illness of your wife brought hardship during the harvest, and you have paid too much here.” Such was not the case in Greenland, where the priest knew nothing about a farmer’s success except what the farmer himself told him. But indeed, all of this carelessness little mattered, as there had been so much of everything. Perhaps, Sira Pall Hallvardsson thought, it was not only uncounted, but also uncountable.
Sira Pall Hallvardsson sat in the high seat in the great hall and looked out into the dimly lit room, and saw this, that the Greenlanders would remember the prayers and masses he had said, and the broth he had given out and the meals he had given to the servants and such pilgrims as came by, and they would take them as deceptions, meant to hide a mountain of provisions and greed for hoarding them, and he wished, only for a moment, that there had been less abundance, or that it had been stored differently, or that men’s eyes hadn’t widened in disbelief at the sight.
He got up and went to the door of Sira Jon’s room, and put his ear to it and listened. From inside he heard a scratching and swishing sound that he could not recognize, but when he pushed open the door, he saw the lunatic priest sitting quietly, as he always did, and awaiting him. Sira Jon,