The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [230]
Sira Pall Hallvardsson could not tell if the other priest was still mad. It seemed to him at times that Sira Jon had traded a set of uncongenial habits for a set of congenial ones. Certainly now and for the last eight years he had done just as he pleased. He had stayed by himself in the smallest chamber he could find, sometimes crying out for a smaller one. The door to his chamber was unbarred and occasionally fell open, unnoticed by the man within. He had ceased having any intercourse at all with Greenlanders, and was relieved thereby of resentment, or even, perhaps, knowledge of them. He spent his days in dialogues with the Lord, or with himself, or, from time to time, with Sira Pall Hallvardsson. Sira Pall Hallvardsson had heard of hermits who went into the deserts to do the same thing, and anchoresses who were walled into tiny cells hard by convents that were not unlike Sira Jon’s cell. Such practices were not exactly the fashion they once had been. Certain thinkers Sira Pall Hallvardsson knew of spoke against them now that working in the world was considered the better way, but every bridle does not suit every horse, that was what the Greenlanders would say.
Sira Jon had survived the hunger very well, if it could be said that he had noticed it at all. The poor life that he led told on him greatly, though, and he was much bent with the joint ill. When he closed his hands, the fingers did not meet well enough to grasp a spoon, and from pain he could not lift anything heavier than a bit of cheese. Sira Pall Hallvardsson himself fed the other priest, and saw that he was offered his share of whatever there was to be eaten, though he might not eat it. The cook was from Brattahlid district. She had never seen or spoken to Sira Jon, and knew him only as “the mad one.” Even so, Sira Jon was the only one of the steading who did not complain of her cooking. When Sira Pall Hallvardsson carried his trencher to him, as he was doing now, he knew that it would be welcomed with the same indifference as it had always been welcomed.
Sira Jon was huddled beside the wall. At the sound of the tray being set upon the floor, he held out his finger to be kissed, but did not turn around or look at Sira Pall Hallvardsson. Sira Pall Hallvardsson knelt with difficulty and kissed the finger, then sat upon his knees and waited for the other to speak. Sira Jon was so bent and thin and had such little color in his skin or hair that if the Greenlanders should see him they would surely suspect that he was another man from the one that they remembered. They would recognize the passage of haughty looks over his countenance, however, and that this was the bishop’s nephew would finally be as unmistakable to them as it was to Sira Pall Hallvardsson, orphan boy and descendant of Flemish merchants.
After a while, Sira Jon said, “What lies they tell.”
Sira Pall waited. He knew that no reply was expected of him as yet.
Sira Jon cast a furtive glance at the food tray, then said, “It was all for the sake of that oaf. Perhaps he is dead now, perhaps they all are. They take the beasts into their houses and regard them with the fondness that other folk reserve for their children, but this is because they are themselves half beasts.”
Still Sira Pall Hallvardsson did not speak. Partly, he was not sure of what Sira Jon was referring to, if it was actually any knowledge common to them both, and partly he desired to wait out the usual references to beasts and animals that the old priest chattered about when he first looked at his food. He had been trained to eat a little, calmly, by years of force feeding, as he had been trained to cover his nakedness by years of enforced bathing and dressing, so that now in these things he was docile if contemptuous.
“Indeed, this everlasting flesh that we must chew upon and choke down, without bread or wine, it seems to bring the nature of beasts into a man