The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [342]
“We will walk over to Gunnars Stead after our morning meat, and Margret Asgeirsdottir will set it for me.” And that was all she had to say on the subject. And Ofeig was not seen again in that district, although Helga looked for him each night until the return of Jon Andres and the other men. But Johanna did not, and went to bed in faith and trust every evening.
Now it happened that the end of the seventh day came round, and Jon Andres failed to return, and the end of the eighth day as well, and Gunnar Asgeirsson, too, stayed away, although all of the servingfolk came back to Gunnars Stead, and the result of this was that on the ninth day, when Jon Andres did return, much dirtied and fatigued by the hunt, the tale that Helga had hoped to make of her adventure with Ofeig was stopped in her mouth, and the wish that she had had, to speak of this, and then speak of other things, that were nearer to her heart, was unfulfilled, and the silence between herself and her husband continued unabated. Jon Andres heard the story from Oddny and probed Johanna about it. He was much disturbed by it, but Helga did not mention it, though he gave her the chance more than once. Then he vowed not to speak of it to Helga if she had no care to mention it to him, and so things went on between them for the rest of the summer, and Margret’s proscription was fulfilled, and Helga had nothing to do with her husband that might endanger her life. In the summer, Johanna moved back to Gunnars Stead, and Helga was much cast down to see her go, and she considered Johanna a great friend of hers, although the two women never spoke of this.
At Gunnars Stead, Johanna found things to be much the same as they had been for many years; that was, it seemed to her now, very elderly. At Ketils Stead, she had conceived an affection for Gunnhild and Unn that she had not felt before. It seemed to her that children must wear into one, that a bit of fellowship with them was more than enough, but constant fellowship with them was less than enough. She was some twenty-four winters in age, not so much past the time of marrying for a Gunnars Stead maiden, and it occurred to her that her father might take her to the Thing this year, or might go himself, and seek about for a husband for her, but when she thought of this, it was not just any husband or any establishment that she felt this bit of longing for, but what was to be found at Ketils Stead, and so she held her peace. Gunnar and Margret were pleasant to her, and her footsteps about the place, and her pauses to look upon their work, one at her loom and the other at his parchment, were refreshing to them and long missed. Gunnar saw that she was his favorite child, as untroubling to him and as pure as water from tarns high in the mountains, and it also seemed to him, since her defeat of Ofeig, that she must outlive him, for which he felt simple gratitude.
At the spring seal hunt, Gunnar and Jon Andres had listened to many men, to many complaints of the absence of Kollgrim Gunnarsson, that issued from the mouths of men who themselves had tossed some wooden trinket upon the pyre that burned him. Gunnar and Jon Andres had nodded, had recalled, once in a while, how Kollgrim once killed forty-two seals in an afternoon, how he rowed his boat as quickly and as agilely as a skraeling, how he had preserved the life of Hrafnkel Snaefelsson when his boat was lost, so that he barely got his legs wet. Indeed, they had an ally in Hrafnkel himself, who was something of a blowhard, and always ready to tell the tale of his near drowning, and how he had felt himself all at once lost and saved, with Kollgrim’s arm, “like a roof beam, that big and hard, about my arms and chest.” The Icelanders, when they were about, cast a silence over the Greenlanders, a silence in which the cheerful tones of Bjorn Bollason and his sons rang like bells. The seal hunt had not been so prosperous as some, not so meager as some. No boats had been lost and no man killed. After it, the Thing came on,