The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [350]
Now Gunnar said, “Did you ever think of our father Asgeir’s travels to Norway and Iceland? Men elsewhere must live differently than Greenlanders do.”
“When I was living among the Icelanders, Snorri Torfason always used to say that the Greenlanders sin with the pride of thinking themselves the worst off until they hear news of other folk, then they sin with the pride of thinking themselves the best.”
“When I dealt Bjorn Bollason his death blow, it seemed to me that I had done a little thing, for it passed in a moment. My passion ran on beyond it, and was unfulfilled. Now it still seems to me a little thing, but a little thing like a snag, upon which my robe has caught. But instead of disentangling myself from this little snag, every thought and every movement nets me more and more tightly to it, so that sooner or later I will be strangled upon it.”
“The lawspeaker’s supporters will be glad to hear this, since that will relieve them of the burden of retaliation.” And Margret began pacing back and forth again, as deliberately as before, and so she went on for a while, with the spindle twirling and the thread lengthening, and Gunnar watched as he had before, and the sun shone brightly on the homefield, as it had for nearly half a millennium, since the time of Erik the Red, and the first Gunnar who had farmed this steading, and first fenced the homefield and fertilized it with the manure of his cows and sheep and horses. Then he said, “My sister, what is it that you seek in the world?” And Margret said, “It has always seemed to me that I seek to be as a stone, and when I was a young woman, it seemed to me that such was the progress toward death—a hardening that would come over the flesh bit by bit, until the corpus lay there in the bedcloset, or was thrown out into the snow to await burial in the spring. Now it seems to me that the flesh quivers with still more life in every year, and that I will never achieve what I seek. I fear, indeed, that death is not death, but life everlasting after all.” And she resumed her pacing and her spinning, and some time later, Johanna came to them and said that the evening meat was upon the table.
During the autumn seal hunt and through the fall, there were many discussions and arguments among the Greenlanders about who would be the new lawspeaker, or whether there would be any new lawspeaker at all, and it was the case that Bjorn Bollason had not sought to teach the body of the law to anyone, except perhaps, to Sigurd Bjornsson, who had died with his father at Brattahlid, and this was accountable to folk only through the speculation that Bjorn Bollason had considered himself such a lucky fellow that he would never die, as other men do. Or, perhaps, folk said, he had not as yet gotten around to it, for there were many things that Bjorn Bollason was more interested in than sitting down and going over the laws. Such entertainments as had been the rule at Solar Fell, especially in the years when the Icelanders lived there, must have filled a great deal of the lawspeaker’s time, after all. It was also the case that Bjorn Bollason could be said not to have learned the laws especially well himself, since the telling of them had shrunk in his time from a three-day cycle to less than a one-day cycle.
And to this, some folk said, what did it matter, after all? Such cases as had been going to the Thing were better decided in the districts, or among the folk who were principals in the cases, and if they were decided with blows, once in a while, was that so different from what had happened to Bjorn Bollason himself? The case had been decided in his favor, and yet he was dead with no one to avenge his death, since the foster brothers in Dyrnes had spoken not a word about it all summer, even though Signy had gone to live with them. To go to the Thing, especially as it was at Brattahlid, was a considerable