The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [81]
One day a rather large piece of driftwood, V-shaped and rounded at both ends, as if it had been drifting for many years, was caught below the farmhouse on the strand, and her first thought upon seeing it was that Skuli Gudmundsson could make good use of it, for it was a large piece of wood, six or eight ells long and at least an ell broad in the widest spot, and no branches at all, and she remembered how he had spoken of carving her a chair with fish for arms and a whale in low relief across the back, but a good piece of wood had never come to him for such a project. And now she was taken with longing for him in such a way as she hadn’t yet been since his death, for the piece of wood below her began to take the shape of two wiggling fish, curved and shining, caught in the piece of wood as if in ice, or amber, or water itself made solid. The two fish seemed to arch and writhe for freedom, as they do in a net being pulled from the water, and Margret could not drag her gaze away from them. When after a small space, they ceased moving and resolved themselves once again into the two halves of the piece of driftwood, she was seized with such grief that she began screaming and screaming, until at last she fell forward in a fit, and it was thus that it came to her what changes had been wrought around her, that Skuli Gudmundsson was dead and she was to be alone with her child for the rest of her life.
Before this, in the time since the killing, she had thought of little except what she would be taking to Steinstraumstead and how she would be living there. During the killing itself, and the retrieval and burial of the corpus, and during the time she spent at Undir Hofdi and Gunnars Stead before moving, she had felt calm, as if dead, but not unhappy. She had followed many commands—Birgitta’s commands to free her little birds and rip apart, seam by seam, the red gown, Pall Hallvardsson’s commands to pray for God’s forgiveness and to beg for the forgiveness of her husband and brother, as well as that of Kollbein Sigurdsson for luring his hirdman into sin and death. Even Olaf had commanded her. He had commanded her to sleep in Ingrid’s old bedcloset and never to be inside when he was, nor outside when he was. She had done every task set her day after day, and then fallen into such sleeps as she had never known before, dreamless and black. Then she had come to Steinstraumstead, following Gunnar’s commands not to speak to him and not to look into what Birgitta had packed for her until he was away.
After her coming, there was such novelty and labor to establishing herself that she had thought of little, and dreamed of nothing still, but now, after seeing the fish caught in the driftwood, dreams came to her every night of Skuli Gudmundsson, whole and beautiful, sometimes as if he had been resurrected, more often as if there had been no killing. The yearning for him that she had never been without after their first meetings doubled and redoubled, so that she could not sit or walk or run or lie down or pray or eat or sleep or set one stone on top of another. She thought of tales she had heard of fiery demons that sometimes got into folk, so that they looked the same, but when they died, as they always must, their insides were black and putrid, unlike the flesh of godly souls. A few Greenlanders maintained that the skraelings were such folk, others declared that they were not, that these things were more often seen far to the south, in hot places. However it came about, Margret thought that the entrance of such a demon would surely feel much as her longing felt, and would be as difficult to relieve. The V-shaped piece of driftwood sat as if enchanted on the tiny strip of strand for many days. Storms and high tides seemed only to lift it higher, never to carry it off. Margret grew both afraid of it and fond of