Burial Rites(36)

I thought I could be a servant here. Over a month has passed at Korná and already I have forgotten what will become of me. The days of work have soothed me, have given my body cause for rest, so that I’ve slept deeply, below the surface of dreams stricken with portent. Until now.

It’s true that I’m not one of them. All but the Reverend and Steina refuse to talk to me except in the briefest of ways. But how is that any different from before, when I was a low sort of workmaid, emptying the chamber pot as I will be asked to do in a few hours? Compared to Stóra-Borg this family has been kind.

But soon winter will come like a freak wave upon the shore – suddenly, with speed, obliterating the sun and warmth and leaving the land frozen to the core. Everything will be over so quickly. And the Reverend: how young he is, and how I still don’t know what to say to him. I thought he could help me as he helped me over the river. But talking to him only reminds me of how everything in my life has worked against me, and how unloved I have been.

I expected him to understand me from the start. I want him to understand me, but I’m a fool to think we speak the same tongue. I may as well be talking to him with a stone in my mouth, trying to find a language that we both understand.

The Reverend will not arrive from Breidabólstadur for another few hours – it’s still too early to rise. I fold my hands on top of the blanket and tell the strings of my heart to slacken, and think of what I will tell him.

Tóti wishes to hear about my family, but what I have told him has not been what he wants to hear. He must not be used to the gnarled family trees that grow in this valley, where the branches rope about one another, studded with thorns.

I haven’t told him about Jóas, or Helga. He might be interested to hear I have siblings. I can imagine his questions: Where are they now? Why don’t they visit you, Agnes?

Why, Reverend, I would say, the blood tie is not strong: they have different fathers apiece, and Helga is dead and buried. Jóas? Well, he’s not a man who can be put to anything, even a visit to a doomed sister.

Oh, Jóas. I cannot reconcile the dull-eyed man to the sweet blur of boy I was once allowed to love.

We were lugged along in the arms of a common mother. Which farms? Countless badstofas belonging to other men and their red-eyed wives, kind or desperate enough to hire a woman with three mouths, two of which screamed at night in hunger because they did not know it was useless.

Beinakelda first. Until I was three, they tell me. Just Mamma and I. I remember nothing. It’s all shadow.

Then Litla-Giljá. I don’t remember the farm, but I remember the man. Illugi the Black, they called him, my brother’s father. Sitting on the floor, rubbing my hands in the dirt, and then the man beside me, his eyes rolled back into his head and his body writhing on the ground like a landed fish, and all the women screaming to see the foam spurt from his mouth. Then, afterwards, the groans that came from his bed, and his sour-skinned wife pushing my face into her bony neck and saying, ‘Pray for him. Pray for him.’ Where was my mother? No doubt squatting over a chamber pot, searching for blood that would not come.

I remember the screaming. Illugi, healthy again, his great bear face roaring at his wife, who would not stop crying, and amidst them my Mamma in long skirts, throwing up on the ground.

Illugi died of that shaking sickness while he was fishing. They say he was drinking, then fell into a fit, upset the boat and drowned, tangled in his nets. Others say it was a fit punishment for a man who fished from elfish pools, but those were folks that had been at the wrong end of his drinking and fighting.

What would the Reverend make of all this?

Jóas Illugason, born at Brekkukot, the third farm. Five years old, I was allowed to hold the rag soaked in milk to his tiny salmon gums. The married folk there wanted to keep him and raise him with their own two children, and Mamma explained that I would be fostered to them too, that it would be for the best. For the next year we seven were a family, and I helped feed life into the small boy with hair as light as mine was dark. He smelt of snowmelt and fresh cream.

They must have changed their minds. One morning I was shaken awake by Mamma, who looked at me with swollen eyes. I asked why she was crying, but she said nothing. She climbed into bed with Jóas and me, and I fell asleep against the hot curve of her body, until the caw of the house ravens woke me and I saw my belongings bundled in a sack on the floor.

That morning we started on foot and returned to the valley through an ill-tempered day full of spasms of snow. I thought I would faint from hunger. We stopped in the yard of Kornsá and before I could finish the whey given to me by the woman there, Mamma whispered in my ear, pressed a stone into my mitten and left with Jóas on her back.

I tried to follow her. I screamed. I didn’t want to be left behind. But as I ran I tripped and fell. When I got back on my feet my mother and brother had vanished, and all I could see were two ravens, their black feathers poisonous against the snow.

For a long time I thought those two birds were my Mamma and my brother. But they never answered my questions, even when I put the stone under my tongue. Years later I learnt that Mamma gave me a new half-sister, Helga, to the farmer at Kringla, and that Jóas was now a pauper, a child of the parish. But by that time I had convinced myself I no longer loved them. I thought I had found a better family, my foster-family: Inga and Bj?rn, the tenants of Kornsá.