Kotka nodded.
“Yes, finally. He felt all along that he would be a burden to you. He’s getting to be an old man. But then Bandon came by on his way back to Eastern Harbor, and they’ve agreed that Bandon will buy all the socks he can knit. He’s still good at that.”
“You’re still standing,” said Frid.
“Yes, have a seat,” said Foula, and fetched a plate for him.
Kotka sat down and attacked the fish.
“So he wanted to ask you and Ravnar,” he said to Frid with his mouth full of food, “if you would come and help him move?”
“I can’t,” said Ravnar at once, and got up. “I have an errand in Last Harbor.”
They all stared at him. Foula was just about to say something when Frid placed his hand over hers and said, “Yes, you have things to take care of.”
Ravnar sent him a grateful glance and left the room.
“Then I’ll go with Frid,” said Myna.
“No,” said Frid firmly. “Ravnar will need a horse.”
“He can take mine,” said Eidi.
“But Doup can come,” continued Frid. “If his legs haven’t gotten so long that they’ll drag along the ground when he rides on his little horse.”
“Then I’ll bend them,” said Doup, laughing.
* * *
Ravnar left the next morning, without saying what it was he needed to do. Perhaps he just wanted to get away. He didn’t want to take the horse, which was lucky for Doup, because his horse was in fact too small; that’s how much he had grown recently.
But the three others didn’t leave at once. First Kotka, Myna, and Frid fixed up the empty room in the potato house, so Rossan would have somewhere to stay before he got his own place. Kotka was going to come back and build him one. Burd lashed together another chair of rope and driftwood and put it in the room as a welcoming present.
* * *
The morning they were leaving, Frid took Tink aside.
“Now that Ravnar isn’t here,” he said, “you’ll have to be the man of the house while I’m away.”
Tink nodded.
“I don’t like to think of Burd speaking to Foula again the way he did that evening,” Frid explained.
“He won’t be allowed to,” promised Tink, and Frid patted him on the shoulder.
That same evening Foula suggested that Tink invite Burd for dinner.
“It must be sad always to eat alone,” she said.
“If Frid’s not here, I’m not staying,” said Eidi, and grabbed her shawl and her knitting.
Foula sighed.
“You’ll eat his fish but not sit at the same table with him. How long are you going to be so stubborn?” she asked, but got no answer except the sound of the closing door.
Burd was sitting with the mug and the barrel when Tink arrived. Tink sat down without saying anything. Burd emptied the mug and put the cork in the barrel.
“A little dram every day,” he said. “It’s pure medicine. What do you want, little rat?”
Apparently he’d only had the one mug.
“To ask if you wanted to have dinner with us.”
“What does my dear stepdaughter say to that?”
“She left.”
“Well, well then,” growled Burd. “It’s not every day one is invited.”
The first course was gull eggs in a thick mustard sauce with small, hard oatcakes.
“Well, this is certainly different than what I throw together,” said Burd, and pushed the empty plate away.
Then Foula baked little pancakes for them, with rhubarb compote. Burd wolfed them down in a second.
“Why didn’t Bandon take you as his housekeeper?” he asked. “Given what a good cook you are.”
Foula furrowed her eyebrows.
“And how you enjoyed serving him,” he continued.
“Be quiet!” said Tink, and got up from his chair. “You can’t talk to her like that.”
Burd looked at him with surprise.
“Who says?”
“I do,” said Tink shrilly.
Burd was just about to say something, but restrained himself and pushed his chair back. “You’re right, little rat. Thanks for the food,” he said to Foula, and got up. “It’s been a long time since I had anything that delicious.”
Foula nodded at him with relief when he walked out of the room.
* * *
Tink was on his way up the stairs to his room in the attic when the door was kicked open with a bang. Burd stood swaying in the doorway.
“Foula!” he roared. “Come out here! I want to speak with you.”
Tink sprang down and positioned himself in front of the door to Foula and Frid’s room. His little knife shook in his hand.
“Don’t touch her!” he shouted. “Go home!”
Burd came closer.
“Or I’ll kill you!” screamed Tink.
His voice broke.
Burd shook his head, turned around, and padded out into the darkness he had come from.
13
The next morning when Tink stopped by the potato house, Burd was sleeping. The barrel stood on the table, uncorked and bottom up. The mug had been hurled into a corner and was now just a collection of shards. Burd lay on his back with his mouth open. He inhaled with a huge snore and then there was complete silence. Tink held his breath as long as Burd did, until he finally exhaled with a rumble, and Tink breathed out in relief.
Only later in the afternoon did Tink see him stagger off to the brook, get down on all fours, and stick his head into the cold water. Snorting, he pulled it out and lurched to his feet. Tink followed him back home.
Burd was at the table with his face in his hands when Tink entered. He sat down across from Burd and waited. He wasn’t sure Burd had heard him come in.
“He was the one she cared about,” Burd said in a rusty voice.
Tink picked up a hook that was lying on the table and plucked a little piece of dried seaweed off it.
“The whole time, he was the one she cared about,” Burd said again.
Tink added the hook to the others.
“I’m sorry I said I would kill you,” he mumbled.
Burd took his hands from his face. His eyelids were red and swollen. “You said that? You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t mean it,” stammered Tink.
Burd put his arms on the table and stared emptily. A little brown bee tried without luck to fly out through the windowpane. Though the sun shone in, the room was clammy.
“I thought we had been fine together—until he turned up here. But he was the one she always wanted. Anyone could see that.”
The bee bumped down onto the windowsill and sat collecting itself among some dead flies. Tink scratched with his nail on the broad plank table. He didn’t know what to say. His stomach hurt. The bee flew up again and buzzed against the windowpane.
“Now Frid is the one she cares for,” Tink said.
“God knows if that’s so,” said Burd.
Tink shifted uneasily in his chair.
“Do you want me to get you some food?”
Burd shook his head.
“There’s no more left of what I need,” he said with a glance at the empty barrel.
* * *
The heat came. The peas grabbed onto the stakes they had been sown next to and pulled themselves higher and higher. The potatoes were hoed for the first time. The hens appeared from their hiding places, marble-round chicks rolling at their heels. The garfish appeared in streaking schools and were caught and fried with parsley.
One day Burd asked Tink if he wanted to go out in the boat—not to fish, just for fun.
Cam and Eidi waded at the water’s edge. The sea was as shiny as cod-liver oil. The sunshine was a white haze that made the sky and the sea take on the same pearl-gray color. Cam and Eidi looked as if they were walking on air, and the cliffs floated in the water.
Tink and Burd pulled the boat away from the shore, and Tink crawled int
o the stern to keep an eye out for sandbars and rocks. The water parted before them and glided along the sides of the boat and slid together again in lazy whirlpools. A gull hovered on a cloud.
* * *
Late that evening when Tink checked on him, Burd was sharpening his good, big knife. The fishing gear lay in neat piles on the table. The floor had been swept, and there were no dead insects on the windowsill.
“Pull up a chair!” Burd suggested, and Tink sat down next to him.
The teakettle hung on its chain over a small fire that sent sparks up toward the chimney. The sparks shone like shooting stars against the black back wall before they disappeared. Burd spit on his sharpening stone and moved the knife around in small, careful circles.
“It matters how you do it,” he explained. “There’s an angle on the edge that needs to be preserved.”
He showed Tink how, and afterward Burd sharpened Tink’s knife as well. Then he placed the knife and the stone on the table next to the fishing tackle.
“Like that! Order in your things. That’s the best.”
Tink nodded. Burd poured them each a cup of tea in the two chipped mugs Foula had given him. Then he put a bit more kindling on the fire and sat down again. The flames lit up his face. His beard had been newly trimmed and his hair combed back with water. It was drying and kept falling onto his forehead, and he ran his fingers through the brown curls to force them into place.
“Remember that!” he said. “Order in your things, someone to care for, and a place to belong. Otherwise you become like a boat that drifts along without an anchor.”
He nodded to himself while he stared into the fire. Then he clapped his hands on the armrests.
“Come on, little rat. I’ll walk you home.”
Tink went first because he had followed the path to the potato house so often that he knew every stone, even in the dark. They stopped in front of the door.
“Good night,” said Tink.
“Good night, Tink,” said Burd.
Even though it was too dark to really see anything, Tink was almost sure that Burd had winked at him before he turned around and walked back.
* * *
When Frid and Doup, Kotka and Rossan appeared from behind the hilltop the next day, Tink went over to tell Burd. The door was open, the bed was made, the fire covered with ashes. On the table lay the piles from the night before, with a piece of brown wrapping paper on top.
FOR TINK it read in big clumsy letters. Tink picked up the paper and looked at it. Then he looked at the things. The ivory comb he had once given Burd lay on top. He left it there and walked out of the room.
In the hallway he saw the open trapdoor to the attic and footprints on the dusty steps. Someone had gone up there and hadn’t come down again.
Tink hesitated before he put his foot on the stair. The smell of cod liver and dried fish greeted him. Slowly he followed it and finally stuck his head up into the gloom.
* * *
As soon as he saw him, Tink knew that Burd was dead. Only a dead man could hang like that: with his feet high above the floorboards and a rope around his throat and up to the rafter. He was as dead as an animal carcass.
Tink felt a buzzing behind his ears. A clenched fist opened inside him, letting an old nausea rise to the surface, and he threw up on the dusty floor.
He continued until there was only a bit of spittle left. Then he staggered down the steep staircase and ran over to the house.
14
Frid cut Burd loose; he and Rossan carried him down from the attic and placed him on the bed. Foula laid him out and tied a yellow kerchief around his throat to hide the marks from the rope. Then they went up to the little hollow where Myna’s grandparents were buried to gather stones for the grave.
On the mantel two candles burned in the middle of the clear day. Their flames could barely be seen in the sunshine. Tink went over to the table and picked up the ivory comb.
Burd was dressed in Frid’s oldest white shirt. Tink unbuttoned it, placed the comb on Burd’s chest, and buttoned the shirt again.
* * *
There it lay when they placed him on the ground, and Foula put a bouquet of yellow goosegrass on the shirt breast. Then they carefully covered him with stones until the grave was a little higher than the two others that were a ways off.
Frid cleared his throat.
“Does anyone want to say something?”
Tink looked at him in confusion. He had never been to a burial. He knew there was something he wanted to say, but he couldn’t find the words, so he shook his head.
Rossan cleared his throat.
“I saw him quite often,” he said. “He was a drunkard, but he was also a man I would have wished a better fate.”
No one else said anything, and they stood silently awhile.
“This is when you usually sing a song,” said Myna.
Tink looked over at Eidi, but she stood with her lips pressed together in a narrow, white line. He walked over to her.
“Won’t you, please?” he pleaded, because none of the others sang as beautifully as Eidi.
She looked into Tink’s shiny gray-green eyes in his sunburned face.
“I’ll sing it for you, Tinkerlink,” she said, and put her arm around him, “because you cared for him.”
Then she sang a song Tink had never heard before, about a man who has to leave a woman because his love for the sea is even greater than his love for her.
And about the sea that treats him as poorly as he has treated the woman, and finally takes him in and gives him a grave, where he can lie forever on the bottom’s cold stones, with the sea domed like a sky above him and the glints in the fishes’ stomachs like pale, distant stars.
“I have come from the sea,
To the sea I’ll return in the end.
My love, there I’ll meet thee
As I bid farewell to a friend.”
That was the refrain. When the song ended, Eidi said, “I learned that from him, of course,” and gave Tink a little squeeze before she let him go.
Tink stayed up by the grave a bit after the others went back. The wind sang through the grass, a gull screamed out at sea, but inside Tink all was still.
* * *
That evening they gathered at Myna’s house. Frid told them they had met a man by the big stone who asked if they could bring a message to Crow Cove. It was from Ravnar. He had been hired on a fishing boat and wouldn’t be back for a year.
“Though it’s Tink who fishes here,” said Foula to Rossan, “Tink learned from Burd. If Tink hadn’t found him, we would probably have starved.”
“It would have been my fault if we did,” mumbled Tink.
They all stared at him in amazement.
“I forgot to close the gate to the vegetable garden, so the sheep ate everything,” he explained to Rossan.
“You didn’t think…?” Foula said in surprise. “It wasn’t because of those rows of cabbage. We could easily have done without them if the potato harvest hadn’t gone wrong.”
“But—” began Tink.
“It did everywhere,” said Rossan. “The potatoes were full of mold and rotted almost before they had come out of the ground. People were so hungry they went from house and home and roamed the roads. They came and begged at my house.”
“That shows the danger in relying on one crop,” noted Foula. “But thanks to Burd and Tink, we’ve got food enough for a long time.”
“Tink has done the work of a grown man,” said Frid. “Ravnar can talk about that with you when he has done the same.”
Rossan smiled at Tink.
“You’ve certainly grown since you were that little whippersnapper who hid at my house with Eidi.”
Tink nodded. At first he had thought Rossan had become smaller until he realized he himself had gotten bigger. Not only had he grown taller, he had filled out. His chest had broadened, and his upper arms had become more powerful from rowing and pulling the heavy lines.
“Y
ou look almost like a young man,” said Rossan, and Tink scratched his arm and didn’t know what to say.
“Why don’t you just stay in the potato house,” said Frid to Rossan.
“Yes, do that,” said Myna.
But Rossan shook his head.
“There are children enough here who will need a place to live one day. And you also need room for storage. I’ve decided to build a little house with a single room up along the brook. I think that suits my quiet life best.”
Eidi laughed.
“You’re still a hermit,” she said.
Rossan nodded.
“I’d like to help build the house,” said Tink.
“I would, too,” said Doup.
“And me,” said Cam.
“Then we’ll be done in no time,” said Rossan.
* * *
Tink often sat on the bench outside the potato house. He also visited the room Rossan and Kotka were living in while they were building Rossan’s house. But he never went into Burd’s old room, until Foula came and sat down next to him one day.
“I’m planning to clear it out,” she said. “But first you have to look at what you’d like to keep.”
Tink stepped hesitantly into the room. Nothing had been touched since Burd died. A fine layer of dust covered all the surfaces. The windowsill was spotted with dead flies. Tink walked over to the table and lifted up the big knife and pulled it out of its sheath. He carefully let his finger glide across the edge. It was as sharp as a razor.
He took a piece of wood from the basket and tried the knife for the first time. The paper-thin shaving curled up and floated to the ground. Then he stuck the knife in the sheath again and attached it to his belt in front of his own small knife.
He opened the window and brushed out the flies. He moved the plank table over to the window and put all the fishing tackle and the sharpening stone on it. He took one of the chairs and set it by the table facing the window. Then he stepped backward and looked at it. He took the other chair and set it by one end of the table.
He brought the bits of kitchenware Burd had borrowed over to the house. Then Tink went back, loosened the ropes that held the bed together, and carried the planks outside. He burned the bed straw and spread the skins and blankets in the sun. Foula arrived while he was sweeping the floor.
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