The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [320]
The old mad priest, Sira Jon, died in this winter after the burning, and was carried out, wrapped in a fine silk shroud, and was as little as a child. The women who laid him out said among themselves that his hair had grown to his waist, and his eyebrows hung into his eyes, and his beard matted on his chest, and altogether, their duty had been an unpleasant one, for the lice jumped off him as lively as capelin jumping into the nets in summer. There was a great smell in his little chamber that had gotten into the very stones themselves, and the cook, not such a fastidious soul as a rule, said that nothing edible could be stored there, and so the door to the place was closed as tightly as it had been in the old fellow’s life, and most folk forgot that he had died, and two or three times, the cook made up his dinner, as she was accustomed to doing, and left it by habit for Sira Pall Hallvardsson to take to him.
Sira Pall Hallvardsson was much crippled now, and had a boy who ran about for him, and either sat down or stood the whole time while he said the services in the cathedral.
It also happened to Sira Pall Hallvardsson that after the death of Sira Jon, he found his food so distasteful that it nearly gagged him to eat of it, although always before he had been of good appetite. It was a tenet of his preaching that whatever the Lord gave men for their nourishment was wholesome to them, and it was good for them to eat their fill of it, unless for some special penance they had engaged to fast for a brief time. He had also early gotten a taste for the foods of the Greenlanders, as sour and pungent as they were. But now the very odors of his meat brought nauseating juices into his mouth, or else his mouth grew so dry that he could not chew what he took between his teeth. Those about him urged him to eat, as he had always urged Sira Jon, and he found himself toying with it in the same wise as Sira Jon had always toyed with his meat.
He did not regret Sira Jon’s death, for it is a sin to do so, when a man has been shriven and reconciled with the Lord and his friends may be confident that he has received his best reward. But it was also the case that there were many hours of the day to fill that had been filled before with something—carrying food, or talking, or sitting nearby, or whatever. These days, Sira Pall could not exactly remember what they had been filled with, but these days, also, he sat a great deal in the high seat of the great Gardar hall and looked about himself, or lay in his bed in the dark hours, sleepless, or sat in the cathedral, praying, sometimes energetically, sometimes idly, but always with the sense that while things needed to be done, there was nothing for him to do.
When he sat in the hall and looked about, it was his habit to remember the cathedral as it had once been, under the care of Bishop Alf, or even under the care of Sira Jon, a pleasant and well-kept spot, where folk took holy pleasure when they came. This was no longer the case. The floor was a mat of old and new rushes and leaves that gave off a rotting, dusty odor. The tapestries hung in blackened shreds, and no one dared to touch them, for the slightest pressure separated thread from thread, and they fell into bits on the floor. The altar furnishings were as black as could be, and dinted and bent. The high seat itself wobbled, for the joinings were coming apart, and the crucifix had a great crack now, that ran from the legend above His head, through His cheek, down the left side of His torso and His leg, so that the leg was separated from the body, and then through the lower limb of the crucifix. Once in a while a