The Greenlanders

by Jane Smiley

  Now it happened that Ingrid appeared and herded the children, including Jona and Skuli and Halldor, into one of the other rooms of the steading, where there were two bedclosets. All sat down in the doorways of the bedclosets and prepared to listen to a tale.

  Ingrid told them one of her best, the tale of Thorgils the foster son of Orrabein. Even Jona sat open-mouthed at the familiar story of the big ship leaving Iceland with Thorgils and his folk, some thirty of them. They sailed late in the season into a huge storm, and the seas were so high that heaven itself disappeared from sight, unless you were to lie down in the bottom of the boat and look straight up. Two thralls were carried overboard by waves and another would have been had Thorgils not caught him by the shirt just as the wave took him. It happened that the storm lasted many days and nights, which proved that it was a magical storm, the fruit of a curse, and indeed they were cursed, for they were cast up on the eastern coast of Greenland, far from the settlements, and their ship was broken up in the ice floes. Before the onset of winter, Thorgils and his folk managed to build a booth and to kill some of the many seals that frequented the area, and indeed, the seals were not seals, because they smiled like men and came close to the booth. The folk inside could hear the swishing and flapping of the seals as they walked round and round the booth. But men have to eat, so they did eat the sealmeat, although Thorgils’ old mother said that they were the souls of the men who had been washed overboard. In that year many of Thorgils’ party died of the bleeding disease, but Thorgils’ wife gave birth to a son, who was called Thorbjorn.

  One day Thorgils sent his steward to fish with the thralls, while he himself climbed up to the nearest icefield to get a view of the pack ice. When he returned, he found the steward and thralls to have disappeared, taking the ship’s boat and all the stores of food. Thorgils’ wife, they discovered, lay upon a bench in the booth, murdered, and the baby was suckling the corpus.

  At this, though all Greenlanders know the story quite well, for it is a true story, the children let out little cries, and Margret shivered.

  Thorgils took his knife and cut into his own nipple and put the baby to suck. First came blood, then clear serum, then, at last, milk, and Thorgils suckled his own child thereafter, and discovered for himself what is possible in Greenland, where folk must learn new ways, or die.

  Now the outcry in the hall had settled down, and Ingrid said that it was far past bedtime. The hall of the farmhouse was in great disarray, with benches pushed back and overturned and men and women slumped where they sat, asleep. Ingrid looked about. “Indeed, it is unlikely that this will be the only mess to clean up from this mead drinking.”

  Sometime later, the news got about the district that Sigrun Ketilsdottir had been raped by one of Thorleif’s men, Ragnar Einarsson, on the night of the feast. Some folk said that Ragnar might not have been the first accused, had Sigrun been differently disposed in the past, but others said that Thorleif’s men did not all comport themselves as well as they might, and, furthermore, sailors are what they are.

  It happened that one day Ketil and his son Erlend surprised Ragnar in the southern part of the district, where he was over-wintering with some Greenlanders, and they abducted him to Ketils Stead and beat him. Only the intervention of their servants prevented them from killing the sailor in anger, thereby having to pay compensation rather than receiving it.

  Now it was well into Lent, but Ivar Bardarson left Gardar and came to Gunnars Stead on skis, and he and Asgeir decided between them that the case must be settled quietly in Vatna Hverfi district, and not taken to the Thing, where most cases were settled. No need to let matters stew until the summer, said Ivar, for it was not such a large incident, although Ketil might make it so. Ketil was well known to be a litigious man. The two went early the next morning around the hill to Ketils Stead, and the result was that Ketil received some compensation for the rape of his daughter, amounting to six large sheep, six goats, and three good milking cows from Asgeir, since the drink served at his feast had gone to Ragnar’s head, and from Thorleif’s store of untraded goods he received a small amount of barley seed, a vat of pitch, and four iron wheel hubs. Ragnar was allowed to leave Ketils Stead and return to Gardar, where, some folk said, Thorleif ought to finish what Ketil and Erlend had begun. But Thorleif simply laughed at Ragnar’s stupidity and did nothing.

  As soon as the snow melted and the grass greened in the spring, Asgeir had the south end of the cowbyre torn down. The cows were carried out into the homefield. This spring there was no hay left at all, but the grass turned early, and a few of the younger cows were able to stand up almost as soon as Asgeir and Hauk set them down. Others were not so sturdy, but Asgeir said that they would eat their way back to health, and put Gunnar and some of the other boys to pulling the moist grass and carrying it to the leaner beasts. After four days all the cows but one old one were on their feet and grazing in the homefield. That was not much of a loss for one winter, and the sheep and goats, too, had lasted well, without sickness. Skuli Gudmundsson said that his father, and other farmers in his district in Norway, did not hold with walling up the cows for the winter, and Asgeir was surprised at this, for it is well known among the Greenlanders that in addition to winter grass being unsuitable for a cow’s stomach, winter light hurts their eyes and has been known to blind more sensitive beasts. Skuli said he had never heard such things.

  Margret was extremely fond of her uncle, Hauk Gunnarsson, and in this spring, as Hauk was not going often to the wastelands, they spent a good deal of time together in the hills above the farmstead. They were of like temperament, and sometimes they went for an entire day without speaking. Such days were a relief to Margret, for the nurse Ingrid was always chiding her to speak up, or to adopt softer ways, for soon enough she would be wanting a husband, and it was good to develop pleasing habits early.

  Hauk’s hunting prowess was well known among the Greenlanders, and Asgeir had joked more than once that he was not going to be the one who probed into what skraeling tricks his brother might have taken up. There was no telling what a Christian man could learn from the demons in the north. Nor did Margret ask questions, but she watched with eager, though veiled, curiosity, every time he set a snare or a trap, every time he fingered a bit of a plant, or plucked it and put it in his pocket. She followed in like manner his gliding, calm, and silent gait, and emulated the utter stillness of his posture when he paused to listen for the sound of a hare or a fox in the underbrush. She had seen him, in other times, bend suddenly and pick up a hare by the leg or a fox by the neck, but he denigrated his own skills—skraelings, he said, could stand still as a stone over a seal’s breathing hole, sometimes for two days and nights, and even then have the wit to sense the seal rising through the water and fling a harpoon suddenly downward to make the kill. A skraeling man could walk over ice in the fjord so quietly that the seals swimming below would not hear him, sharp as they were. “It may be,” he said, “that we Greenlanders, with our sheep and our cows and our great stone churches are not so well off as we think, and the skraelings, with their howling dogs and everlasting moving about are not so badly off as we think.” And that was all Margret ever heard him say on the subject.

  One day, the sailor boy, Skuli, came up to Margret and handed her a bird cage that he had made from willow withes, and he told her only that her uncle had asked him to make it, and showed him the proper shape. Margret thanked him for his work, and her uncle came up behind her, and nodded at it, but he did not say what it was for. Some days later, when Margret was in the hills with Hauk, and he was laying snares for ptarmigan, she saw him do a thing that she had never seen a man do, and that was to reach out to a lark perched on a branch of birch and take the bird in his hand. Then he closed his other hand gently over it, and put it in his pocket. When they returned to the steading, he took it, still living, out of his pocket, and put it in Margret’s cage. “Now,” he said, “when the bird sings to you, think of his song as your uncle telling you a tale, for if it h
ad been up to me to choose a shape to be born in, I would have chosen such a shape as this.”

  Now Skuli went back to Gardar, and he gave Gunnar a great parting gift, such a gift as belonged to no child in the eastern settlement—a carved model of Thorleif’s ship, with six men sitting in it and a sail made of gray wadmal that could be taken down and put up again, and Thorleif himself standing in the bow. The tiny mouth of the figure was open, as if it were laughing. He also had a small gift for Asgeir, a tiny knob of soapstone in the shape of a seal, as smooth and shiny and wet-looking as the real thing, Asgeir said.

  Thorleif and his men were hard at work tarring and repairing their ship, and sewing up rents in the sail, even though there was still a great deal of drift ice in Eriks Fjord. Thorleif, Asgeir, and Ivar Bardarson spoke of the winter, as men must when they meet for the first time in the spring. The hall at Gardar had been covered, almost completely, by a snowdrift, all through Yuletide and a while thereafter. “Not so bad,” said Ivar, though Thorleif rolled his eyes. Had not an old couple in Isafjord died of cold inside their own steading, with seal oil still in the lamps? “Isafjord folk,” said Asgeir, “expect the worst and, often as not, receive it.”

  The feast of St. Hallvard came on and Margret was twelve winters old. Thorleif, for all his declarations, lingered at Gardar, and his sailors were about Vatna Hverfi district, still. Margret, Ingrid said, must stop her wandering about the hillsides and tend to her weaving and her spinning and to the making of such provisions as all women devote their lives to. And Gunnar. Asgeir glowered down at Gunnar. Gunnar must not grow up sitting about the steading and telling tales to the servingwomen, but must turn his hand to such farm work as he was capable of.

  And this, too, was to be the case, that Gunnar was not to sleep in Margret’s bedcloset any longer. He might sleep with Karl, one of the younger servants, or by himself.

  “Not even dogs sleep by themselves,” said Gunnar. But he would not sleep with Karl, and so he lay by himself every night in the big bedcloset that had horseheads carved upon it.

  Now it happened that the young man Olaf Finnbogason came around the hill from the landing place at Undir Hofdi church, and Asgeir said that he had come to teach Gunnar to read, and that Gunnar could have Olaf in his bedcloset with him if he cared to. And Gunnar took a small soapstone basin off the eating board and threw it against the stones of the wall, but he was not punished, and everyone went out of the steading, and when Gunnar came out later, they were all hard at work.

  Olaf received as payment from Asgeir a new shirt, new stockings, and new shoes. He was given a bedcloset, a place at the bench, and his own cup and trencher. He brought the ashwood spoon that Skuli had given him and two books from Gardar. For seven days he sat with Gunnar for a while each morning and showed him the books. Gunnar said that they were poor things, and teased Olaf unceasingly about going outside, or eating something, or getting a drink, or any of a number of activities that Gunnar preferred to puzzling out the words that Olaf set for him. Finally, Asgeir said that they might put the books away for a day or so. On that day, Olaf helped manure the homefield, and Gunnar helped scrape the second field for seeding with the barley and oatseed Thorleif had traded to them. On the following day, Asgeir awoke early to find that the cows had broken into the homefield, and the farm folk spent most of the day rounding up cows and repairing the stone fence. After that, Asgeir said that reading was a winter amusement, but that Olaf needn’t return to Gardar until the old priest asked for him.

  Sigrun Ketilsdottir was now far along with her child by Ragnar Einarsson. It was also the case that Ketil’s flock had been hard hit by disease during the winter, and five of the six sheep he had received as compensation had died. Of this event, Erlend Ketilsson, who liked to go about the district and put his feet under other folk’s tables, had much to say. Asgeir shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his own healthy flock. Many folk said that Ketil had not been blessed in his children. Only luck, they said, had preserved Sigrun from motherhood before this, and Erlend was a blowhard and a complainer. Nevertheless, folk thought that Ragnar Einarsson would do well to marry Sigrun and settle at Ketils Stead, or even to take Sigrun back with him to Norway. Sigrun herself said, “Folk live prosperously in Norway as well as in Greenland.” But Thorleif said that as far as he knew, none of his sailors had come to Greenland to find a wife. It was certain that Thorleif and his sailors were eager to begin their return journey. Their ship was fully repaired and made ready, and Thorleif was collecting provisions and finishing his trading.

  It was the custom, from time to time, for Greenlanders from all parts of the eastern settlement to gather far to the south, at the mouth of Alptafjord, where there were great birdcliffs, and many eggs in the spring. Asgeir, for one, considered these eggs a treat, and there was always the opportunity for much talk with folk from the south. In this spring, he was moved to go to the egg gathering for the first time in a number of years, and declared that Margret and Gunnar would go along. They would stay with Thord Magnusson in Siglufjord, near the hot springs. Thorkel Gellison, too, would go.

  The nesting sites were on the seaward face of the island. West of this island, Thorkel told Gunnar, was Markland. The open ocean, which Gunnar had never seen before, was deep and blue, and it beat against the birdcliffs with a roar. There was no birch scrub, nor any other vegetation—the cliffs glared white in the high sunlight, alive and teeming with skuas and gulls. The skies resounded with bird cries and the rush of beating wings.

  Gunnar carried a small willow basket full of moss with a loop to hang it over his shoulder, and Asgeir firmly grasped him by the hand and pulled him up the slippery rockfaces toward the nesting grounds. Ahead of them, Kristin, the wife of Thord Magnusson, and her two children scattered over the cliff. Kristin was very quick. She would raise her basket and shout, then bend down and pick up one or two of the eggs in the nest, which she would weigh in her hand and hold up to the sunlight. Some she kept and others she set back into the nest. Asgeir said to Gunnar that these were too old—the birds inside them had already begun to grow. He picked one up and weighed it in his hand, then cracked it. Inside was a yellow mass with feet and a beak that Gunnar could make out. Asgeir picked up another and held it up to the light for Gunnar. There were no shadows through the translucent shell. Asgeir nodded and Gunnar placed it in his basket. When, a while later, Gunnar showed Asgeir that he had gathered ten good eggs, Asgeir looked at him and said, “My son, were there eggs to be gathered every day, I might have some hope for you.”

  Some time later, Asgeir took Gunnar by the hand and eased him down the side of the cliff. Below him, drawn up on the strand, were many other boats from many other farms in the eastern settlement. Folk were standing about on the sand, talking and eating. Emboldened by Asgeir’s praise, Gunnar said, “My father, can all of these folk be Greenlanders?”

  “By Ivar Bardarson’s estimation, there are some hundred and ninety farms in the eastern settlement alone, and that was before the coming of folk from the west, too. Ivar Bardarson has talked of writing a great account of the Greenlanders, through which all the folk of the world will learn what is really the case with us.”

  “Then Ivar Bardarson has learned to read, like Olaf?”

  “And to write a fair hand and make pictures for decorating his words. It is a fine skill.”

  Gunnar sat with his sealmeat and his pieces of cheese and pondered this.

  Now someone came down the cliff, shouting that a party of men had cornered Thorleif and one of his sailors, who were also gathering eggs on the cliffs, and were threatening to kill the Norwegians. Asgeir set down his dish and said, “It is always the case with Ketil Erlendsson that he carries his discontents with him wherever he goes.” And he and Thorkel and Thord and some other men picked up what small weapons they had amongst them and went off.

  It happened a few days later that Ivar Bardarson appeared at Gunnars Stead with Thorleif. The shipmaster had a large bruise on his face and walked with a limp. As
geir and Ivar sat him down at his refreshments, and then sat down with him, one on either side. Thorleif was not laughing. Asgeir said, “Eat your meat, my Thorleif, and listen to this. The woman gets bigger, and Ketil says that she is worth more now. A vat of pitch and two wheel hubs, as well as six more healthy sheep.”

  Thorleif shifted in his seat. “Ragnar has been paid no compensation.”

  “And it seems to me,” said Asgeir, “that the trades I made last summer have been costly ones, when I add in these payments over the winter.”

  “Even so, Ragnar received nothing for his first beating, and now he has been beaten again,” said Thorleif. “Perhaps the Greenlanders are in the habit of these beatings. Even so, I do not pay out my goods for the pleasure of limping about. And Ragnar is a valuable man to me.”

  “This business has made ill dealings in the district. Ketil’s eyes are opened to every imagined slight.”

  Thorleif shrugged. “We are off soon enough.”

  Ivar said, “Others are annoyed as well as Ketil. Your sailors have eaten a great deal over the winter. Folk would like to see what they are getting for this.”

  Thorleif made a gesture to push away his trencher, but Asgeir filled it again with a smile, and said, “Indeed, enjoy yourself, shipmaster.”

  Early the next morning, when Thorleif was asleep, some men began to gather outside the farmstead. They carried various knives and clubs and other weapons, and spoke quietly among themselves. When Ingrid arose and saw them, she roused Gunnar and Margret, and hurried them to the bath house, but she could not stop Gunnar from watching. In fact, there turned out to be no fighting. When Thorleif came out of the steading to wash himself, he stood still before the array, then laughed loudly enough. Later, the Greenlanders dispersed. When Hauk Gunnarsson returned two days later from the wastelands, Asgeir told him that Thorleif and his sailors and a party of Greenlanders would be traveling to Markland for the purpose of bringing back timber, for Ketil had demanded this further compensation, and many Greenlanders were eager to take advantage of such a trip as had not been made in years.