The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [237]
Gunnars Stead stood empty for these three years, and every year, Thorkel Gellison came to Gunnar and attempted to persuade him to return to the steading, but every year Gunnar shrugged and declared that he had not thought about it. In fact, however, he knew that Birgitta was much opposed to such a move, and though he longed for it himself, he hesitated to force it upon her. The case was that her strength and her spirits did not seem to recover from the hunger as those of the others did. She could barely tolerate the light and the play of breezes outside the steading, and so she stayed within her bedcloset most of the time, and her limbs never regained the plumpness they had had, nor the strength. Nevertheless, she made room in her bedcloset for Gunnar now, and greeted him pleasantly each night, with caresses and questions about his activities. As she had once held and gazed upon the hands of her babies, or their toes or their knees, now she was pleased by Gunnar’s strength and firmness of flesh, and especially at the warmth he radiated, which was the warmth that had kept Death off her when he came seeking her at the end of the hunger. It seemed to her that she had seen him himself, and he had not been a large man with a white face, dressed in black, as the tapestries in the cathedral showed him to be, but instead Death was a white, shaggy, bearlike fellow with huge hands like paws and nails like curved claws that raked away one’s garments, one’s skin, one’s life. In fact, it seemed to Birgitta that, like others, she too had learned something, and that was that the Greenland wastes was where Death had his home, and he was the more ready to come among the Greenlanders because of proximity. The image of his claws reaching around Gunnar, groping after her, was one that she could not escape, and it did not seem to her that such a beast would be gathering her into the pleasant home of her eternal life, as priests said. Besides, the new priest, Eindridi Andresson, who came to St. Birgitta’s at the prescribed times and was rumored to be a nephew of Sira Audun, said that Hell was seven times bigger than Heaven, because for every soul that God took to himself, the Devil took seven. He also said of himself that it was his intention to harry the Greenlanders into the knowledge of God, not to cajole them into it. God was not as a mother, who holds out a bit of chewed meat so that the baby will toddle away from the open fire, but as a father, who chastens the child with blows so that it will know that the fire is painful. Eindridi Andresson was not a comforting priest, but most folk said that they had been comforted too long, lulled into sin, perhaps, which was why they had been punished. Others did not agree with this view.
It was Helga who took up her mother’s interests in the sheep, for she was not unlike Birgitta in her ways, although she was much more like Gunnar in her looks. In addition to this, Johanna returned from Hestur Stead, and most of the inside work fell to her. It had been Gunnar’s hope that Johanna and Helga would be friends and companions to each other, but they diverged so in temperament and interests that it was almost as though they were unrelated to one another. They did not even know enough of each other to quarrel, but were entirely indifferent.
Indeed, Gunnar, who had gotten quite used to Helga’s ways about the steading, which were like Birgitta’s, hardly knew what to do with Johanna, who went about behind him, picking up his tools and arranging them, picking up his socks and folding them together, putting everything out of the way before it was even in the way. After his meals, she whisked away the trencher or the bowl before he had pushed it from him, and he often had the feeling that there might be something left in it,