The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [203]
Death had laid a heavy hand upon every district. Babies were stillborn, mothers died with their infants at the breast, grandfathers went to their beds and failed to rise again, folk wandered away in search of food, and their families were too weak to go after them. Weakened servants lost their footing, fell, and were unable to rise again. Fires went out, and the effort to make them anew or go to the neighbors for more was beyond folk’s strength, so they froze to death with food on the table, or more likely, gorged themselves with what they had as the cold overtook them. Around Easter, Sira Audun went from church to church with Eindridi and the boy Andres, and he said prayers of thanks, but in this year, no one rejoiced as they had after the last hunger, or after the vomiting ill. No sign had come to redeem the sign of the deer, or the sign of Petur’s dream, Petur the Steward, God’s Provisioner. The talk was all of how the following winter would be worse, not better.
Even so, there were those who, through witchcraft, perhaps, had not seemed to go without, but had seemed even to grow fat through the winter, as if feeding on the flesh of others. The most prominent of these was Vigdis of Gunnars Stead, whose gross flesh had diminished not one whit while her neighbors all dropped dead about her. Instead she waxed, red-cheeked and glossy-haired. Was not this suspicious as well, that her hair lay on her seventy-year-old head as dark as it had ever been? In addition, she had grown hard and changeable. Some days she would pet and tease Jon Andres with banter and affection, so that he could not dodge her, and he would go off with his friends to be away from her. Other days she would begin by stripping the bedclothes off the boy and then beating and cuffing him about the head and then serving him offal for his morning meat, and on these days she would follow him about with accusations and scolding, accusing him of hiding her belongings, or stealing them, or of killing the livestock or of feeding poison to the hunting dogs, or of breaking into her stores and giving them away. When she threw bedclothes out of his bedcloset, she always shouted after the servingwomen, demanding to know where he was hiding them. Nor could she remember things as she once had, but called her servants by other names, and even Jon Andres “Erlend,” although he looked not at all as Erlend had looked, even in youth.
In this way, men knew that evil had come into Vigdis. More neighbors than one recalled what a gossip she had been. She was prideful and vain of her looks and her clothing. She had been covetous of Gunnars Stead, and had instigated Erlend into tricking Gunnar out of his farm. She had grieved little for her sons, and of her nursling, Ketil the Unlucky, she had even said, gazing upon his corpus, “Here is some trouble that won’t worry us now.” It is a fact that such sins as these attract demons, as rotting meat attracts dogs. Such were the tales that went around the neighborhood concerning Vigdis Markusdottir. Jon Andres removed to Ketils Stead with some of the younger servants, and Ofeig and Mar and the others of this band of men that had thrown Kollgrim Gunnarsson into the sea were always there with him.
Now it came time for the spring seal hunt, and this year, Gunnar Asgeirsson went along, and Kollgrim Gunnarsson did not, for the case was that the boy still had spells of insensibility and confusion from his dip into the icy water. When all the Greenlanders were gathered at Herjolfsnes and waiting for the seals to appear, Gunnar named witnesses and brought his case against Jon Andres Erlendsson, Ofeig Thorkelsson, and Mar Marsson in accordance