Tink finished the meal with some small spiced cakes and a handful of raisins and nuts.
“Would you fetch the bottle, Ram,” said Bandon, “so we can have a small glass with dessert?”
Ram got up. So did Foula, who took out the house’s only glasses. One for Bandon and one for Frid. That was all they had. Ram came in and wanted to serve Foula first, but she put a hand across her mug.
“Thanks for the offer,” said Burd, and pushed his mug toward Ram.
Ram poured, first for Burd, then for Frid and Bandon. Before he was done, Burd had emptied his mug, and he handed it to Ram again. Ram poured one more time and then placed the jug on the table.
Tink moved uneasily on the bench.
Frid and Bandon sat talking, and meanwhile Burd emptied one mug after another. His gaze slowly grew veiled and a little drop of spittle appeared in one corner of his mouth.
Foula walked back and forth, puttering at the kitchen table and returning to offer them more cake. Burd followed her with his eyes.
“You rub up against them like a dog in heat,” he exclaimed.
Foula stopped with the cake platter in her hands.
She put the platter on the table. Her cheeks were bright red. All talk had ceased.
“And you drink like a swine,” she said.
“Like a dog,” he repeated.
Frid got up. His eyes flashed ice blue at Burd.
“Out!” Frid said without raising his voice, but it was sharp, like the crack of a whip.
Burd emptied the last drops from his mug.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Take it easy now. I didn’t mean to insult anyone.”
He fumbled into his jacket and got unsteadily to his feet.
“There’s no law against talking to your former wife.”
“Out!” shouted Frid.
Burd tottered across the floor. Foula shot a pleading look at Tink, and he got up from the bench to help. Bandon lifted the bottle to pour. A golden drop slid slowly down his glass. It was all that was left.
“Would you get another one?” Bandon asked Ram.
At that moment Burd peed in his pants. Dark stripes raced down the worn cloth and ended in a puddle on the floor. Tink walked over and pulled his sleeve.
“Come on!” he said. “We’re going now!”
Burd looked down at himself. His gaze stopped at the floor. Then he looked shamefacedly at Tink and nodded.
* * *
“Have you ever had chew fish?” Burd wanted to know a few days later, when he had slept off the brandy.
Tink shook his head and bent down to pick up a broken plank. They had rowed up along the coast to the place where Tink had found the boat. Now they were collecting driftwood and lashing it together to make a raft they could pull along behind the boat.
“It’s the best,” continued Burd. “Especially when it’s made out of lumpfish. Fatty and firm at the same time.”
He sat on a stone all the way down by the water and tied the wood together as Tink dragged the planks over to him.
“Let’s make another raft. You would think that all of Last Harbor had drifted this way.”
Tink sat down and wiped the sweat from his brow. Then he pulled a large splinter out of his palm with his front teeth, spit it out, and checked to make sure he had gotten it all. His hands were red and cracked between his fingers from saltwater and the cold spring breeze. One of the cracks was bleeding.
“Piss on them!” said Burd.
Tink stared at him.
“It helps.”
“I don’t have to go right now,” said Tink.
“Oh, come on, you can always squeeze out a few drops. Or I can piss on them for you.” Burd laughed.
Tink got up and did as Burd had advised. First on one hand and then on the other. It felt soft and warm. He let his hands dry in the wind before he and Burd walked farther up the coast to collect wood for the next raft.
“Wait a minute!” exclaimed Burd. “Look at this!”
It was the remains of a large wooden barrel. There was a hole in the bottom and the staves were so loose that Burd could press them out. He ended up with an iron hoop so big that Tink could walk through it without ducking.
Tink carried the staves down to the water, and Burd rolled the hoop after him.
“What are we going to do with that?” asked Tink.
“I’ll show you another time,” said Burd. “Now we are going to make chew fish.”
And the iron hoop was ferried to Crow Cove on one of the rafts and placed against the wall of the potato house.
Burd began to build a small, pointy-roofed hut out of driftwood, open at both ends so the wind from the sea could blow right through it. It was close to the place where they usually pulled the boat onto land. Long poles hung under the roof, hooked at the ends to a pair of wooden blocks so they could easily be lifted down again.
Burd tarred the top of the roof and let Tink do the rest. Thick, dark-brown drops dripped off the broom he used as a brush, and Tink enjoyed the smoky aroma. The gray timber was soon covered.
Bandon stopped by. He nodded approvingly.
“You know how to make the best,” he said. “Not many people do nowadays. I will buy chew fish made from lumpfish.”
“He knows what he wants,” growled Burd.
Bandon ignored him. “Do you need anything?” he asked Tink.
“Yes,” replied Burd. “A fishing net.”
“For that?”
Burd shook his head. “For something else.”
Bandon stood thinking for a moment.
“We have an old net we received as payment from someone who had nothing else to pay with.”
“If you’ve taken his net, then he’ll never get anything else,” objected Burd.
Bandon ignored him. “You can have it,” he said to Tink.
Tink thanked him, having no idea what he was going to do with it.
Burd and Tink fished with lines. It took them hours to bait the hooks and arrange the lines so they didn’t get all tangled together. Then they carefully carried them to the boat. After they had rowed for a while, they put the fishing lines out and waited. When they pulled them in, the lines were full of cod and other fish and, once in a while, a lumpfish.
They threw back the females but kept the males. The fish were plump and gnarled, but they had fine red fins and a suction cup under the orange stomach. Once in a while Tink amused himself by letting one of them attach itself to the bottom of the boat and then trying to pull it loose. He often had to use the knife to wrench it free from the bottom.
On the beach stood two sawhorses Burd had built, covered by a pair of broad planks. This was where they cleaned the fish. Myna and Doup came down and helped when they caught sight of the boat. They opened the cod, cleaned it, cut out the backbone, and put it in brine. After three days the fish could be spread on the rocks to dry. They put the liver in barrels that they stored in the attic of the potato house, so the liver would sweat oil.
The tarred hut was for the lumpfish. It was hung up over the long poles to dry in the fresh sea breeze. All the other fish they hooked were either smoked in the chimney or fried or boiled at once, except for the liver from coalfish, which was put in the barrels with the cod liver.
There was an abundance of food. In the evening, when Tink stood tired and full on the beach, looking at the tarred hut with its filled poles and at the rocks that were white with fish, he felt proud of the bounty he had helped create.
11
Tink heard someone come up behind him. Bandon had taken off his hat and let the wind flow through his hair. The red evening sun gave his pale skin a golden glow. They stood for a while, side by side, looking over the water.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” said Bandon.
Tink nodded.
Bandon turned the hat around between his hands. A gull screamed above their heads. Small waves fussed with the stones on the beach.
“Do you want to come?”
&nbs
p; Tink started. His hands began to shake, and he hurriedly stuck them deep in his pockets. He had no idea what to say.
“You could become a merchant.”
Tink pressed the toe of his shoe down between stones and shells.
“Someone has to take over my business one day,” Bandon continued. “And I’d rather have it be a boy than a girl.”
Tink’s hands stopped shaking. He looked up at Bandon.
“I am not your son,” he said, and breathed in deeply.
Bandon cleared his throat and said nothing.
“I’m staying here,” decided Tink.
They stood silently for a while. The sun was sinking into the sea. The water was creamy yellow and smooth.
“When I was very small,” said Bandon, “my father sometimes brought me up on a cliff close to town to see the sun go down behind the Gray Mountains. At the very moment it disappeared, he lifted me up, and when he was fast and I was lucky, I got one last glimpse.”
All that was left of the sun was a single ember, which the sea extinguished.
“That was a very long time ago,” said Bandon.
Then he turned to Tink and held out his hand.
“Then goodbye,” he said. And Tink shook his hand.
* * *
“Right before he left, Bandon asked me if I wanted to become an apprentice in his merchant house,” said Eidi.
Tink lowered his knife.
“He did?” said Foula. “What did you say?”
“That I would think about it.”
Tink went back to whittling his spoon.
“Why not?” said Foula. “He’s a wealthy man, and you are after all his daughter.”
“I don’t like Eastern Harbor. The gulls scream so loudly.”
“They do that here, too,” objected Foula.
“Not all the time. Only when we’re cleaning fish.”
“Would you take that over to Burd?” Foula asked Tink, nodding at the bowl she had placed on the kitchen table.
He set aside his things and got up. At that instant there was a crunching sound under his foot. A moment later Doup threw himself at Tink and hammered at him with his fists.
“My best cow,” he yelled. “You’ve killed my best cow.”
Tink grabbed Doup’s wrists and held him at arm’s length and looked down at the floor. There lay the remains of the big blue mussel shell with the two white furrows that had been the cow’s horns.
Doup attempted to get loose and kicked at Tink’s shin. Tink grabbed him more tightly and forced him onto the settle. Doup screamed and kicked and spit.
“Stop it, you impossible kid!” yelled Tink. “I’ll get you a new cow. One that’s much finer. One that looks like a cow.”
While he talked, Doup calmed down.
“It’s not that easy to find a cow with two horns,” he hiccupped.
“You’ll get one with both horns—and ears and legs,” Tink promised. “And a tail.”
Doup stared doubtfully at him.
“You can’t,” he said.
“Wait and see!” said Tink, and he picked up the bowl and took it over to Burd.
* * *
That evening Tink made a start on his promise. He found a piece of wood without any knots, and from it he whittled a cow with legs, a tail, horns, and one ear, because the other one broke off.
He hammered a nail through a stick and held the point into the embers, and with that he burned the wood to make eyes and nostrils. He used a tuft of wool to spot the cow with tar, and then he placed it on the table in front of Doup.
“You have to wait until the tar dries to touch it.”
Doup stared delightedly at the cow.
Someone was pulling Tink’s pant leg. He looked down and discovered Cam, who stood with a trembling lower lip.
“Also for me,” he pleaded, and pointed at the spotted cow.
And Tink quickly agreed, because Cam looked as if he was about to burst into tears. His cow got two ears. But Tink didn’t make it spotted. He rubbed it with sheep fat until it became shiny and light brown, because Cam couldn’t wait for the tar to dry.
From that moment on, Tink looked at their animals in a different way. He walked around the cow, observing it from the front and the back and the sides. He spent a lot of time with the horses. And he began walking up to the sheep with Myna and Glennie.
A few days later, Doup and Cam had cows, ponies, horses and dogs, sheep and lambs, and each a little dark-brown pig, which Tink had cut from memory.
* * *
The cod had spawned and then swum out to the open sea. All the poles in the tarred hut were filled with lumpfish. The dried cod was covered with white salt crystals and piled next to the barrels of cod-liver oil.
Wool already lay in big bales in the attic between Tink’s and Ravnar’s rooms. The hens sat on their eggs in all kinds of places and pecked at you when you stuck a hand near them. If you wanted eggs, you had to plunder the gulls’ nests.
Burd was helping Frid and Ravnar fence in yet another field. Foula, Eidi, and Tink planted vegetables and put out the potatoes, and Myna and Doup kept the house and had food ready for them morning, noon, and night.
The boat lay on land, and the cracks in Tink’s hands had healed, but he missed fishing.
* * *
When they were finished with the field, Burd began repairing the net Bandon had given Tink. He had built himself a bench, on which he sat in front of the potato house.
He attached the edges of the net to the large iron hoop he’d found on the beach, to make a huge bag. Then he tied some strong ropes onto the hoop and attached them to a long, flexible pole.
“Where is the water deep all the way in to the shore?” he asked.
“On the rim of the seals’ pool,” suggested Tink.
Burd separated the hoop from the pole and gave both to Tink.
“You can start dragging it out there,” he said. “And bring along a big basket!”
He himself took nothing but the cane, which he had gradually come to use all the time.
Near the seals’ pool, the cliffs dropped almost straight into the water, but it was so clear that you could easily see the bottom. A couple of fairly big fish raced around on a hunt for cod spawn.
“Go get us a bunch of mussels,” said Burd. He sat down on a sun-warmed rock and began to attach the net to the pole again.
“What is it?” asked Tink.
“It’s called an old woman’s security, but it can probably also be used by an old man.”
“But you’re not old,” objected Tink.
Burd smiled.
“No, but maybe I will be one day.”
Tink gathered mussels from the pool and brought them out to the cliff, where he twisted the shells open. Burd had tied the hoop with the net back onto the pole and now lowered it into the water.
“Throw the mussels in!” he said, and Tink did as he was told.
The fish that had been hunting sought out the mussels, and a little later another small school followed. Tink and Burd waited awhile, then pulled the net out of the water and took the fish out. Soon the rock was crowded with young coalfish.
“Yes, even an old woman can manage that,” said Tink, laughing.
“Or a half-grown boy and a cripple,” said Burd, and he began cleaning the fish.
The basket was full when they carried it home, and Foula was thrilled. Now they could collect all the fish they needed in no time.
But Tink still looked longingly at the boat—and the sea.
12
Burd came walking up from the beach with his cane in one hand and a little wooden barrel under his arm.
“What did you find?” asked Tink.
He was sitting on the bench in front of the potato house, whittling in the sunshine. Cows and calves, sheep and lambs stood side by side on the rough boards. Burd set his cane aside and shook the barrel.
“Listen,” he said. “Isn’t that a lovely sound? Now we’ll see if it’s saltwater or…�
�� He winked at Tink. “Who knows if the sea can hear one’s prayers?”
“Oh no,” said Tink.
Burd fetched his mug, carefully edged the cork out of its hole, and tipped the barrel. A dark-brown liquid slid into the mug.
“Well, it’s not tar,” said Burd. He put the cork back in the barrel, sat down on the bench, and took a small sip.
A long, relieved sigh rose from his throat. Then he emptied the mug in one gulp, but he let the barrel stay closed.
“If I only have one dram a day, this barrel can last for a long time,” he noted, and put it in the front hall.
Tink exhaled in relief. Burd carefully moved the wooden animals closer together, so there was room for him on the bench. He folded his hands behind his head and stretched with satisfaction.
“Do you know what a rat king is?” he asked.
Tink shook his head.
“That’s what you call a litter of rats whose tails have grown together.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Tink.
“I once saw a litter like that at a market,” Burd continued. “Nine in all. Try to imagine nine heads, each pulling in a different direction, and none of them getting anywhere!”
“How can they survive?” wondered Tink.
“On pity and compassion,” answered Burd. “Solely on pity and compassion.”
He took his cane and got up.
“Do you want to visit an old woman?”
Tink smiled.
“You bet,” he said, sticking his knife in its sheath and joining Burd.
* * *
That evening, while they were eating, the door opened and a young man entered the room. His hair stuck straight up into the air and was so blond it was almost white.
“Here’s Kotka,” said Frid, and got up and welcomed him. “What have you done with Rossan?”
But before Kotka could answer, the door opened again. Myna came in with Doup at her heels. Kotka turned around and saw her and spread his arms. Myna disappeared in his embrace with a smile.
Eidi let out a little gasp, and Ravnar grasped his knife so hard that his knuckles shone white against the sunburned back of his hand. Kotka let go of Myna and turned to them. He smiled at Eidi and Tink.
“Rossan is at home,” he said. “I’m to say hello.”
“Has he made up his mind?” Tink burst out.
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