The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [211]
In Dyrnes, only one farmstead had room for her, and this was a medium-sized steading where the wife had four small children to care for and no servingmaid, and this woman, whose name was Freya, made Margret agree to give up half of her portion of meat to the children if the hunger should demand it, and to leave any time she was asked to, with no meat and no guarantee of another place, but only the pieces of weaving she had brought, or pieces like them, should they be used for clothing in the interim. Since the winter was drawing on, and Margret no longer cared to travel in the cold, she agreed to these terms, and did not blame Freya for them, for she saw that Freya was senseless with dread at the approach of death. The children sat about their mother and watched her closely, for they had caught her fear, and when she closed her eyes, or looked up, or changed her expresssion in any way, the oldest child would cry out, “What is it, mama!” and the next oldest would shudder and tremble, and the youngest would begin to cry, and so Freya would try to sit ever more still, or to send the children to the bedcloset, but they refused to be away from her. They awaited the coming of their father with dread, not because he was an unkindly man, but because he too was of a gloomy temperament, and came into the steading every time, from working or from hunting, with predictions of disaster on his lips.
In fact, Margret saw, they had done a good job of filling the storehouse over the summer, and had more stores than Eyvind had ever had, even in his better years. But Eyvind had been a sanguine fellow, and this was not the case with Freya and Gudleif, the husband. Each night they prayed fervently to be brought safely to morning, and each morning, they prayed fervently to be brought safely to evening. Margret found the steading oppressive. Gudleif’s herdsman, his boy, and the other two servingmen stayed, by choice, in the byre with the sheep. Margret sometimes went to meet Finna and Eyvind for a little talk, but as the winter drew on, these meetings ended, for Finna suffered greatly from the joint ill, and could not walk in the least depth of snow, and Eyvind wished to stay with her.
Such games and pastimes as Margret was accustomed to in the winter, as she thought all Greenlanders were accustomed to, were wholly lacking at this gloomy steading. Gudleif carved no tops nor game counters for the children, nor did he tell tales to entertain them. No one gossiped about the neighbors or speculated about the ways of southern folk or folk in Jerusalem or life in Heaven, as Eyvind and his daughters had done. Freya sighed over her weaving and her spinning and her cooking equally, and both she and Gudleif measured out the children’s portions of food with dour exactitude, telling them to be grateful for what they had, as if it were thin and ill-tasting, even when it was hearty and delicious, so that the children took no pleasure in their meals, but were careful to eat it all up. Sometimes visitors came, most often Gudleif’s father and mother, who were both living, and not very old, and at these times, they, too, stared at the children’s trenchers and spoke grimly of the coming winter, and Margret saw that such habits as these folk had fallen into had preceded the hungry times, and had been theirs always. Gudleif’s father, whose name was Finnleif, spoke as if all of his