The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [73]
At this Birgitta dropped her eyes and spoke no more, but only kissed Pall Hallvardsson’s ring when her father came to let the pair out of the dairy. And Sira Pall Hallvardsson said to Lavrans later, “The heart of a woman is known only to God, and a great enigma to those to whom it is given to guide these eternal strangers through life.” And the two men shook their heads in rueful agreement on this score. Early the next morning, Birgitta returned to Gunnars Stead, and thereafter she went about her work with great steadiness and purpose. The Hvalsey Fjord folk, and Lavrans among them, agreed that of all the priests, Pall Hallvardsson was the wisest and the most to be trusted, and sometimes they spoke among themselves of what would happen if the bishop were to die.
Not long after this, Birgitta went to Gunnar where he was dredging a canal through the homefield, for Gunnar and Olaf had decided to enlarge the farmstead’s water system, and she spoke to him at length of Vigdis and her designs, and the result of this was that Birgitta and Katla stopped visiting Undir Hofdi church and Birgitta stayed quietly at home for the rest of her term. One day Gunnar rode away from the farm early in the morning and did not return until the late summer dusk. Sometime later, there was talk in the district that one of Erlend’s thirty cows had been meddled with, so that her ears and her teats had been nicked with a knife, and a wide band had been tied tightly around her eyes and she had been led into the lake, which was quite cold, and tied there overnight, facing Erlend’s farmhouse. By the time of the seal hunt, the talk subsided, and just after the beginning of the winter half year, a daughter was born to Birgitta, and she was named Gunnhild, and everything went well with her. Shortly thereafter, on the feast of St. Andrew, a son was born to Vigdis at Ketils Stead, and this was a great surprise, for Vigdis had grown so stout that the coming of the child had gone unnoticed. This child was named Jon Andres, and he did well enough considering that Vigdis was something close to forty winters of age.
It so happened that shortly after the beginning of Lent, Margret Asgeirsdottir felt the quickening of life within her, and she calculated that the child would be born around the feast of Mary Magdalen, but she said nothing of this, neither to any of the Gunnars Stead folk nor to Skuli Gudmundsson, who visited from time to time.
It was Skuli’s habit, when he lived in Vatna Hverfi district, to ride from farm to farm and stay at each for some days, for he was considered the representative of Kollbein Sigurdsson, who was the representative of the king. He had at first intended to stay at Undir Hofdi church, with Nikolaus and his “wife,” but this elderly couple was hard put to take care of his needs, and yet were too polite to allow him to take care of himself. He told Margret that awaking in his bedcloset to the sound of Unn’s slow, hobbling step as she approached with a bowl of sourmilk and knowing that she would be hurt if he arose to help her, or even appeared not to be asleep when she came up to him, was no little difficulty for him.
The other farmers greeted him suspiciously, at first, and, though showing all the forms of hospitality, were also ostentatious about the hardship his coming made for them, giving his horse what appeared to be the last of the hay, scraping the bottom of the cooking pots to make the evening meat go around, declaring that certain healthy cows belonged, not to the farmers themselves, but to neighbors. Skuli, however, did not appear to be counting the livestock or surveying the farmsteads, or looking longer than was polite at the fine possessions inside the houses, and after a while, after it was discovered how handy he was at fashioning some needles or carving gamepieces or repairing