West of the Moon

by Margi Preus

  Still, somebody’s here, for I feel a hand on my back. A soft hand making gentle circles. When I turn, the hand holds out a handkerchief, which I take.

  “There, now,” says a woman’s voice. “It will pass. You’ll get used to the motion. In the meantime, the crabs appreciate all the meals they’re getting.”

  When I turn to thank the woman, who should it be but the parson’s wife!

  “It would be nice if we would get a favorable wind,” she says. “But as we are not getting it, perhaps the Lord is exercising us in patience.”

  “And disciplining our impatience,” I mumble.

  She smiles and starts to leave. “Keep the handkerchief, my girl,” she says, turning back. “When you are feeling better, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  She knows, I think. She knows everything. She knows that although I paid only one person’s passage, there are two of us. She knows that the sweet little girl who seems to be everybody’s child, or no one’s, is my sister and a stowaway, and the food we’re eating is stolen, mostly. Maybe she knows I practically murdered my former master. She can probably tell all this just because she is the parson’s wife. For if God is all-knowing and all-seeing, then the parson—and probably his wife as well—must be almost all-knowing and almost all-seeing.

  For a few days I am too sick to respond to her. As a steerage passenger, I spend my days between decks. Most of that time is spent on my bunk, which, along with Greta, I share with three other girls. All seems to be going along well enough, if you don’t count the seasickness, when the girl with the pink cheeks with whom I traded herring for hairbrush starts brewing trouble.

  First she plunks herself in front of me and turns her head sideways, so as to look me in the face.

  “I’ve never got one gold coin out of my hair,” she says.

  “Keep trying,” I tell her. “It doesn’t work every time—”

  “Maybe I’ll tell my papa,” she threatens.

  “—or for everyone,” I finish.

  “Who is that little girl?” She points to Greta.

  “How should I know?” I answer.

  “Hmmpf!” she hmmpfs, and flounces away, her shiny hair bouncing on her back.

  If anyone on this ship gets sold as a slave to the Turks, I hope it’s her.

  Now the girl approaches a woman who is rolling yarn into a ball. “Is that little girl there”—she points at Greta—“is she your little girl?”

  The woman looks up and over at Greta. She can’t help but smile—everybody loves Greta—but she shakes her head no. “I think she belongs to that family”—she points with her chin—“the one with all the girls.”

  So Little Miss Busybody trots over to the mother of that family and raises the same question and gets the same sort of answer.

  I watch her through the slits of my half-closed eyes, too weak to do anything. And what could I do about it anyway? If this girl with the well-brushed hair goes around to every mother on board and asks, “Is she your daughter?” and gets the same answer from every one of them, what will she do then?

  The days go on, with the north wind buffeting or the south wind sweeping up big nauseating swells, or the west wind trying to push the ship back from whence it came. It seems we have to be tossed every which way by each of the winds except the one we need. Finally, the right wind finds us, and our ship, the Columbus, moves westward, all sails filled.

  We steerage passengers are allowed—even encouraged—to leave our cramped quarters and go up to the top deck. There, people cook, eat, sew, and play cards. Greta runs about in a cloud of towheaded children, disappearing into one family and another. She’s so good with the babies and the youngest of the toddlers, always willing to hold, coddle, and comfort them, that no one minds her at all. Everyone just assumes she is the child of some other family.

  From the upper deck we can look down on the lounge of the first-class passengers and watch them while they talk, do their needlepoint, smoke their pipes, and read books.

  When she doesn’t know I’m watching, I stare at the parson’s wife as she reads. She seems to disappear into the pages—as if everything around her dissolves and she is transported into whatever world inhabits the pages of that book. It’s not like watching the goatman read at all. With him it was all darting eyes and shouting. The page was not a place to disappear into but a wall to bounce one’s voice off of. Watching the parson’s wife read makes me wish I could read, too.

  Since there’s a genuine parson on board, on Sundays everyone goes up on deck for services.

  Even though I’ve gotten over the worst of the seasickness, I’ve managed to be ill every Sunday so far. Today I am on deck but standing at the rail, well beyond the congregation, as usual. And, as usual, queasy.

  All the passengers are there, seated in two rows, the women and girls on one side and the men and boys on the other. The minister really has to use his deep voice to be heard above the wind, which wants to snatch his voice away.

  “Suddenly,” he intones, “there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon each one of them.”

  I cast my gaze off to the horizon, at the dark clouds massing there, crackling with lightning.

  “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance,” the pastor says. He is telling all about Pentecost, when the apostles were suddenly able to speak in all the regional languages. I suppose it would be like if suddenly a Hallingdaler could speak the Telemark dialect.

  It could be a lucky thing if we were all instantly able to speak English, which is what the Americans speak, and which nobody on this ship so far as I can tell knows a speck of.

  What if a wind like that came up right now? It’s not hard to imagine, given what we’ve been through already. And what if tongues of fire sat upon us the way it happens in the scriptures? Nobody seems the least bit worried about it. The sun shines in all its splendor down on their brass buttons and filigree brooches, on the colorful embroidered borders on their dresses and their white linen sleeves. They all look so fine, and they all seem to belong there, in their makeshift church.

  Me? I am the black sheep, the ugly duck, the one spotted piglet in a litter of pink ones.

  The Halling Dance

  oday it is the thumping that brings me above decks. Bang! Thump, thump, whump. It’s feet, I can tell that, lots of feet, but what are they doing?

  There’ll be no rest for me, of that I can be sure, so at last I climb the companionway stairs, up.

  On deck, all is piercing light and whirling color. The fiddler saws away at his fiddle. There’s a fellow with an accordion. And the deck swirls with dancing bodies. Then the Halling men start their high-kicking dance. Someone holds a long pole with a hat dangling at the end of it, and one by one, the dancers try to kick it off. They whirl and twirl to the music, then leap in the air—so high you must squint against the sun to see their legs scissor out, their white shirtsleeves flashing.

  No one can reach that hat—who could? It seems as high as the pennants fluttering on the mainmast. But then one of the young men steps forward and gives me a little nod, and I give him a glance back. It’s the blond-haired boy who came by the goat farm.

  He wouldn’t recognize me now, would he? Now that I’m all cleaned up, hair washed, the bruises faded? Still, my heart beats two or three times out of rhythm.

  Oh, he’s very fine, he is. He struts about with his head held high and his chest thrown out like a rooster’s. He’s nimble, too. He turns; he spins; he flips. All the while his arms swing by his side, casual-like, as if it’s nothing much to him.

  Then he whirls, winding up like a top on a string, and flings himself high as a wheeling seabird. There he goes—heels over head—and off the hat flies and away it sails into the sky, then down to the sea.

  Oh! That cr
eates a ruckus! People race to the rail. The owner of the hat shouts orders to “Nab my hat!”

  While everyone rushes to watch where the hat will go, the boy saunters over to me, smooths his hair, and smiles.

  “Do I know you?” he says.

  “No,” I answer quickly.

  “You seem familiar,” he says.

  “You’ve seen plenty like me, I don’t doubt,” I tell him.

  “No, not like you,” he says.

  Maybe he means that as a compliment, I don’t know. But I suppose he wants a compliment himself, so I say, “You seem to know that dance well enough.”

  “’Tisn’t much,” he laughs. “But now I’ve lost the postmaster his hat.” The boy does an imitation of the squat little man racing after his hat, and I can’t help but smile.

  “There, now!” the lad says. “A smile becomes you. Or perhaps you become you when you smile.”

  “Whatever do you mean by that?” Maybe I snap a bit.

  “I hardly know, myself,” he says, all sheepish-like. “But wouldn’t you like to dance?”

  “Me? Nay!” I tell him. “I have mending to do.” I show him the needle and length of thread I am holding—a gift from a kind woman so I can mend my stockings. The boy tips his head politely and goes back to his dance.

  Now I suppose I’ll have to avoid the parson’s wife and the Halling boy. Well, I won’t think about it. If I were to close my eyes, I could imagine myself home in the mountains, my back against a boulder, my bare feet in the warm sun, the dancers on the greensward, and none of that to worry about.

  But that is useless daydreaming, so I bend to my task. I’ve barely got my needle through the first hole when I notice Greta standing over me. “What did you say to Bjørn that sent him away so fast?” she asks.

  “Who’s Bjørn?”

  “The boy you were talking to. The Halling boy who danced so well. Don’t you like him?”

  “Why should I like him?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” Greta asks. “He likes you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Big sister, you are so foolish sometimes,” Greta says. “Would it hurt to be just a little nice? Why don’t you show the goodness in you?”

  “There isn’t any,” I say.

  “Pfft!” Greta says. “You’re as full of goodness as a hive is of honey. Stop pretending it isn’t so.”

  Surely she is the only person on the face of the earth who would say such a thing, I think, as she skips away to join the other children.

  They are all munching on sandwiches, and the ship’s chickens cluster around the children, clucking and receiving bits of bread from them. When a rooster plucks an entire sandwich out of one of the little girls’ hands, she howls and cries while the others laugh.

  “Oh! You bad rooster!” Greta scolds the bird. He is so surprised that he gives the little girl back the crust.

  I laugh to see this, then turn to my darning. I don’t suppose I need to explain how it is my stockings came to be so full of holes? After traipsing up and down the mountainsides where thorns tore them, cockleburs grabbed, branches poked, and stones ripped, there is plenty need of repair.

  Here’s a rip I made running back to the goatman’s farm. I am just putting my needle to the repair of it when who should come up to me but the girl with the glossy hair, hands on her hips. Grace, I’ve learned her name is.

  “I still haven’t got one gold coin from that brush you gave me,” she says.

  “Like I said, it doesn’t work for everyone,” I tell her.

  “It doesn’t work for anyone, more like,” she says.

  I shrug and offer to give her the herring cask back.

  “Don’t want it,” she says.

  I shrug again. There’s no herring in it anymore anyway.

  “I know that the little girl there”—she points to Greta—“is your sister.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “She’s the only one on the whole ship toward whom you are kindly disposed.”

  “Maybe she’s the only one on the ship who’s kindly disposed toward me!” I exclaim. I suppose there is a fancier way of saying that, more the way the shiny-haired girl said it, but that’s the best I can do.

  “Maybe if you directed a little kindness toward others,” she says, “they would return the kindness to you.”

  I have an urge to poke her in the eye with my needle. Instead, I jam the needle through the stocking and pull it back out again, stitching up an eye-sized hole.

  The only way to get her to go away is to ignore her, so I put all my attention to my task, repairing the snag that I got climbing the birch tree.

  I am thinking fondly on those days gone by, for although they were difficult and dangerous, I would prefer them to having this troublesome girl standing over me instructing me on how to behave. Or just standing there breathing with her mouth open, as she is doing now.

  When I feel someone sitting down next to me, I steadfastly ignore it, until I feel a soft hand on my arm. I turn, and there is the parson’s wife, smiling her good-natured smile and patting my hand with her own. I marvel at its softness. It’s a hand that hasn’t shoveled a lot of manure, that’s certain. She’s from a fine family that lives in a fine house and has servants to do that kind of work. The thin gold band around her finger is brand-new and shiny, with nary a scratch on it. She hasn’t been married long.

  “Margit, isn’t it?” she says to me, and I nod, my heart in my throat. Here it comes: the question I’ve been dreading. Or the accusation. It’s one thing to have a silly girl from steerage making accusations; it’s quite another having a grown-up, first-class parson’s wife raising questions. Another thing: I worry that she can see right down into my black soul. That she knows my every misdeed. And that I’ve carried a Black Book aboard, risking lives and limbs and immortal souls.

  I consider making a dash for the rail, but the sea is calm. I doubt I can feign seasickness.

  “It seems your stockings have had quite some little adventures,” says she.

  “I guess you could say so, ma’am,” I answer.

  “Now,” she says, and I hold my breath. “My first question is: Do you think you might need spectacles?”

  “What?” I gulp.

  “For your eyes,” she says. “To see better.”

  I look at her.

  “You’re holding your sewing so close to your eyes,” she says. “It seems you don’t see terribly well.”

  “I didn’t know I was doing that.”

  “Well,” she says, “you’re probably used to it. Once you’re in America, though, it would be a good idea to get your eyes examined. My sister recently got spectacles, and she says it made the world look like an entirely different place.”

  Was this what she wanted to talk to me about? I swallow and nod and hope that’s all she wants.

  But she goes on in a musing sort of way. “You and I are maybe a little bit alike,” she says.

  I doubt it, but I don’t say anything.

  She watches the dancing for a moment and then says, “It’s strange, but there is this odd feature of my personality that almost always makes me sad when I’m surrounded by joy and cheerfulness. I often succeed in appearing cheerful. Once in a while I can even defeat the seriousness, to be happy with the happy. No, I don’t mean to say ‘happy’; I’m often happy, even though I’m serious. I would rather say ‘cheerful with the cheerful.’ Ah, well.” She sighs and smiles at me. “I don’t really know what I mean!”

  What is funny, I think, is that I know what she means. Why, in the midst of merriment, do I so often feel as if I am not really part of it?

  So far, I think, this conversation is going fairly well. But then she clears her throat, and I can tell she’s going to get serious.

  “Well!” she says. “What I really want to say is this.” Here it comes. “I know you are alone, and if it would help you, that is, if you are seeking employment in America, I am in want of a maid. Would you b
e interested in such a position?”

  A firebolt from heaven.

  To be a maid for a fine lady! Imagine that! A fine, kind lady with soft hands and a gentle voice! Unlike Svaalberd in every conceivable way. In a real house with a wood floor, maybe. This would be a big step up!

  “We can’t pay much to start, and we’ll have very little room to begin,” she says.

  What about Greta? I look across the deck, where she is rolling dried peas with the other children. I want us to stay together, but we haven’t got a skilling between us. What am I going to do about that? How will I finance what might be quite a journey to find Papa? I can’t say no to the parson’s wife, can I?

  “You are giving it a mighty hard thinking-over!” the kind lady says.

  “May I give you an answer tomorrow?” I ask.

  “Of course!” she says, then, looking about, adds, “My, it’s getting late.”

  Night has come on quickly. The dancers disperse. The children are shepherded downstairs. Except for the crew, the deck is soon empty. There is just enough light to see that in the case of my now-knotted, knobbly stockings, the old proverb is true: Sometimes the patch is worse than the hole.

  The Pest

  he next day dawns, and I do not have to give the parson’s wife an answer.

  The weather has worsened; the crew has closed the hatches to prevent the seas that slosh across the upper deck from flooding our space below. It makes the dark space even darker. And smellier.

  Most people sit on the bunks that line both walls—five to a bunk. The passengers sit holding their heads, or retching into buckets. The exceptions are the fishermen, who are used to this kind of motion. They’re trying to catch a barrel that’s come loose from the ropes that are supposed to lash it to the wall. The thing rolls back and forth across the floor, banging into bunks while people leap out of its way and the fishermen give chase.