The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [69]
“Do the Greenlanders have extra to give? Every farm is hard pressed, it seems to me.”
“No more is being required than the farmers are able to pay. The bishop, in his generosity, gave a great boon before Yule when he allowed the farmers to hunt reindeer on Hreiney. Every farm that participated is rich in meat and hides. But even if this were not true, we have noticed more than once that the farmers of Greenland pay great attention to the wealth of the earth, but little to the riches of Heaven. More than one farm is nearly as wealthy as Gardar, and every farmer schemes to get more goods for himself. Almost no one gives freely to the church, or the king. All live as if they were their own men, here and in eternity.”
“This is true, that the Greenlanders are much accustomed to holding their own opinions and doing as they please.”
“Now when they have the chance to glorify God in His earthly temple, they grumble and mutter more even than the French, although they sacrifice themselves far less than the French, and although, in fact, the building they dare to call a cathedral would be as nothing among the French, or among the English or the Germans, or any people you could name on the face of the earth.”
“The Greenlanders are much unlike the French.”
Now Jon stood up, and his visage was dark with indignation. Pall Hallvardsson raised his hand and said quietly, “Brother, it seems to me that you have persuaded yourself that these Greenlanders deserve your anger, and that you are about to speak in haste of things that should be considered carefully, especially in light of the fact that it is likely that you and I will die here among the Greenlanders, and never again visit or live among the French or the Germans, or even the Norwegians.”
Jon seated himself again and was silent for many minutes, and then at last he said in a low voice, “Brother, it is many weeks since I have been confessed,” and together the two men went into the cathedral.
Now Sira Jon knelt behind the gray wadmal curtain of the confessional, and he spoke in low, passionate tones. “It seems to me,” he said, “that there are two sins that rise like twins in my heart, and that these are anger and pride. These demands of the Hvalsey Fjorders touch me closely on these two points, for what they withhold, it seems to me, will end in the humbling of Gardar and of the bishop himself, and I am his steward these days.”
Now he was silent for a long while, and Pall Hallvardsson listened to him shift and groan at his place. “Whatever our feelings, the bishop is fixed in his views on the proper wealth of the Church, is he not? He deplores the heretical meanness of such as the Franciscans, does he not? It is true that the peculiar place of the Greenlanders on the face of the earth has spared them that baneful influence, but it also gives them such pride in themselves!” And now he groaned loudly, and declared, “You see in my tones this anger that mortifies me? That I wrestle with every day? Every time I have aught to do with a Greenlander? It is given to me, of all the bishop’s men, to gather goods for the tithe, and so it is given to me to witness the trickery and reluctance and stubbornness of the farmers. Indeed, they become deafer and deafer when I name to them the sums they really owe, and more forgetful as the day of payment approaches. I am not taking these gifts for myself, am I?