Far Afield (21 page)

“Look,” he said.

Petur nodded. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“It keeps happening,” Jonathan said, his voice shaking a little.

“Mmm,” said Petur. “I’ve heard of that.”

“Ice is good,” Maria said.

“Nah,” Petur said, “leave it alone.”

“Sometimes it soaks my whole pillow. It’s been happening for a week.”

“Like a woman, no?” Heðin put in, grinning. He leaned close to Jonathan. “I know what would cure it.”

Petur laughed. “Young men,” he said. “Maybe it’s time you got married, Heðin, so you can pay more attention to your work. You are thinking so hard about women you get the lines tangled up. Soon you’ll be courting a codfish. Well”—he sighed—“I was the same.”

“Papa,” Jens Símun piped up, “take me out in the boat with you. I won’t get the lines tangled.”

“I only did it once,” said Heðin.

“You have to go to school,” Maria said.

“Soon,” said Petur. “Next summer, I’ll take you out.”

“It’s boring,” said Heðin.

“Can be,” his father agreed, equably.

“You are not a fisherman,” said Jens Símun, fixing a fierce look on Heðin. “I am a fisherman.”

“Our conservative party member,” Heðin whispered to Jonathan. “Everything traditional for Jens Símun Dahl.”

Jonathan checked his nose with his forefinger while pretending to rub his eye. Heðin, astute, said, “Forget about it. It’s nothing. I have found her telephone for you.”

Jonathan managed a little smile. “Maybe a doctor—” he began.

“You have a nosebleed,” said Petur.

And that was the end of it. Named, his nosebleed stopped. His pillow was dry in the morning—and dry the next three mornings. His nose resumed its minor role in life, and life resumed its savor.

For instance, he had the pleasure of going into Sigurd’s store and hearing Jón Hendrik’s gruff welcome and invitation to “sit here by me,” which meant squatting on his heels till his ankles ached and listening to the old man’s mumbled gossip about Sigurd’s customers. That little toddler Sigrid took care of was Sigrid’s big sister Lisabet’s baby that she “got” from Páll who lived in Sandur; but Páll was engaged to another girl, in Klaksvík, so Lisabet had gone Down There (to Denmark) to work and find a husband, and her family took care of the baby. But that must have been a while ago, said Jonathan, because the little girl looked about two years old. Yes, Lisabet must be having a hard time finding the husband. Was she going to marry a Danish man? Jonathan wanted to know. Well, if that’s all she could get. And didn’t the family mind having to take care of a
baby? No, she was a good girl, Petra, always stopped to say hello to Jón Hendrik, even though she couldn’t really talk yet. But the mother, Jonathan persisted, Sigrid and Lisabet’s mother, wasn’t it hard to have a little child around again? No, it’s good to have a baby in the house, said Jón Hendrik, shaking his head, as he often did, at the wonderful stupidity of the American.

And that one—bobbing his chin at a roly-poly man who walked with a swagger and whom Jonathan had often seen on the dock, chatting with people who were baiting lines—what a lazy one! Talk and talk. What did he do for a living? Jonathan asked. Watch other people work, that’s what. Jens-Egg we call him, because he looks like an egg and because of a story. Do you want to hear the story? Of course, said Jonathan.

Sigurd coughed and shuffled his feet in the sawdust, his signal to hold off until the person in question had left the store. Jón Hendrik obeyed these commands with bad grace. “Jens-Egg, hah, hah, hah,” he said, so that Jens-Egg would be sure to know he was up for dissection. Spitting, rearrangement on his box, and new wads of tobacco carried Jón Hendrik over until he was at liberty to speak again. Jonathan took advantage of these pauses to stretch his legs and eat a hunk of cheese. Each time Sigurd had a cheese order, he cut a piece for Jonathan too, and a row of Tilsit chunks wilted on the windowsill.

So. The story was this: Jens-Egg was a rich man’s son. His father, jøgvan, had been the son of the King’s farmer here. He didn’t know what that was? That was a person who had more land, and also his land was all together, not in a little patch here and a little patch there. So he got more potatoes and it wasn’t so hard to plant and harvest them, because they weren’t all spread around. Jonathan looked confused. Jón Hendrik spat and explained. When you got married the woman brought a little land from over here, where her father had a piece of land, and the man had a
little land over somewhere else, and then those little pieces of land had to be divided up again more for the children later on. But not King’s land; that didn’t get divided. So. He was son’s son of the last King’s farmer.

“There aren’t any now?” Jonathan asked.

Jón Hendrik growled with irritation; he hated to be interrupted in his stories. “We are independent,” he said firmly.

So. Notwithstanding Jens-Egg’s wealth—and King’s farmer families were always wealthy—he was greedy. Or maybe that was why he was greedy. Anyhow, during the war—

“The Second World War?” asked Jonathan, knowing he risked another growl but intent on facts.

“The English war,” Jón Hendrik answered. “When the English came.”

Jonathan nodded; that was the Second World War. He scribbled. Jón Hendrik spat. Then they got back to business.

So. During the war he had chickens. He was a young man then, not yet twenty. He had chickens and he had feed for them too. Most others didn’t have feed, so they ate their chickens early in the war. Then they didn’t have any eggs. Everybody was hungry. Here he paused, scanning his memory of hunger. We ate scallops!

Jonathan didn’t know the word. “Draw it.” He offered his notebook. Jón Hendrik drew a nice portrait of a scallop shell and made a face of disgust. “In America we like those,” Jonathan told him. “We pay a lot of money for them.”

Jón Hendrik stared. What a country! “You eat them now, after the war?” Jonathan nodded. Jón Hendrik shook his head. Well. He had eggs. He hoarded them, though. He buried them in a barrel of peat ash in his basement. You can keep an egg that way—but not for as long as Jens-Egg kept them. He waited until everybody was very hungry, then he began to sell those eggs. Some of them were
like rocks. But what was there to do? We were sick of those scallops. So he got richer, from selling his eggs. So he’s Jens-Egg.

Then there were the more complex and sociable pleasures of the dock, where Jonathan went after lunch. Small boats that had set out from Skopun before dawn were returning then and the fish-plant workers were straggling back in to the briny tables where they sliced four fillets a minute. Those who from age or disinclination did not work were gathering in a line by the railing to watch for the mail boat, due in at three.

Jonathan on the dock was Jonathan at his best. He was a good hand at unloading and stacking; he’d learned to fasten quickly a line thrown at him from a bow and to ask, with the correct offhandedness, “How did you do?” He could stand comfortably alongside the village elders rolling the occasional cigarette and commenting on the color of the sea and the sky, the prospects for storm, the likelihood that today Ami’s new toilet would arrive from Tórshavn. He was no longer the nincompoop underfoot or the possible spy from America (two of his earlier assignments). He was not even the Scribe of Skopun anymore, it seemed. Since his reprieve from death, Jonathan saw himself, and felt himself seen, as one of the guys.

An odd guy to be sure, but everybody had quirks. He didn’t know everyone’s name, but neither did Elin’s new husband, Jákup, who was trying to get Jens Símun to buy a boat with him—well, that was a stupid idea, because Jens Símun hated to go fishing and he already had the boat with Petur. But he’d learn. (Jonathan listening to this marveled at the intricacies of language: Jonathan would learn the names, Jákup would learn the names, and Jákup would learn to give up on his boat project.) He was writing that book, but writing that book was a good idea, and maybe you’d have to come from outside of Skopun to have that idea. (Jonathan was pleased to know that America, once as far
away as the moon, was now in the same universe as Klaksvík or Vestmanna: that is, the Outside of Skopun universe rather than the Down There universe, which commenced at the Faroes’ disputed three-hundred-mile fishing limit and radiated into the depths of the Milky Way.) He wasn’t married, but they could fix that. And hadn’t he met some pretty girl in Tórshavn? Heðin said—well, Heðin said a lot of things about women—yes, but he’d said that Jonathan had met a pretty girl. (Jonathan blushed.) Anyhow, plenty of young men didn’t get married until they weren’t so young anymore. He had to finish the book first and get rich, so as to marry a rich pretty girl.

This public discussion of his characteristics was the clearest sign that he’d been accepted. The old men mulled over each other’s traits and habits daily, poking each other with their sharp old elbows as they delivered especially insightful comments. That guy walks just like you—poke—like he’s two years old with his pants full of shit. And closer to the bone. One rheumy old guy about another who could barely stand up: I think he keeps living just to spite his daughter. He never wanted her to marry Arni, so now he’s making their lives miserable by being so sick. Poke.

The day citizenship was thus conferred on him, Jonathan went home in a very good mood. The three-o’clock boat had brought a letter from one of his classmates who was just now heading into the jungle, having spent months preparing his supplies and making his arrangements. Reading about mosquito netting, malaria pills, snake-venom kits, antifungal foot creams, the need to start the day by shaking the scorpions out of your shoes, and the difficulty of getting permission to travel from the torpid bureaucrats at provincial headquarters made Jonathan kick up his heels with pleasure at his own situation. He was in the absolutely perfect place. He looked out his kitchen window to the purple ocean that was the backdrop to the red-roofed church and snug clusters of houses; he leaned against his kerosene
stove, dependably pumping warmth into his home; he wriggled his toes in his pest-free shoes; he contemplated his high-protein dinner, his neighbors who cared about him, his bulging notebooks. Somehow, he had lucked out, and he bent his head toward the dusky sky in brief but heartfelt thanks.

When he lifted his head he saw Sigurd coming toward his front steps, tugging a sheep. Another phone call, Jonathan figured. Perhaps Daniela had thought about him as much as he had thought about her? Which wasn’t that much, he emphasized to the inhabitant of the sky, in order not to jinx his prospects. Sigurd was trying to coax the sheep to walk up the steps and failing. The sheep had dug itself into the ground with its front feet and lowered its head ominously.

“Hey!” said Sigurd. He had hold of the sheep by its ear.

Jonathan opened the front door.

“Help me with this,” Sigurd said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Pull it up the steps.”

Jonathan pulled and Sigurd pushed, and they got the sheep into the kitchen in short order. It stood there shaking with confusion, moving its black, soft nostrils in a frantic but silent effort to understand its circumstances. Jonathan was puzzled too.

“What are you doing with it?” he asked.

“It’s yours. It’s your sheep.” Sigurd sat in a chair and sighed.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, really you’re only entitled to half a sheep, but we thought it would be welcoming for you to have a whole one, and then, you don’t go out fishing, and we wanted to be sure you had food for the winter. So we decided you’d get a whole one. Jens Símun decided.”

Jonathan looked at the sheep. It popped a turd onto his floor. Sigurd got out of the chair.

“I’m going to get the gun,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Jonathan sat down in the chair and put his head in his hands. The sheep clicked over to him on its sharp, small hooves and bent its head down to his and sniffed. Then it said “Ah-ah-ah.” Jonathan put his hand on its hard brow and looked into its black eyes. In a horrible facsimile of a human movement, the sheep tipped its head to the side to get a better look at Jonathan. At this, a lump filled Jonathan’s throat.

It was completely impossible to have this sheep for dinner. He was not so sentimental that he would forego eating lamb altogether, but it was intolerable to eat a sheep he knew, even if only slightly. He would explain this to Sigurd and arrange to get half of a different sheep—which would be better anyhow because he didn’t think he should get special treatment in the village. Resolved, Jonathan stood up.

Sigurd came in the door after the gun, which he held at arm’s length in front of him. “I hate this,” he said. Before Jonathan could get a word out, he’d pushed the sheep onto the floor, sat on its back, and shot it in the head. The shot, muffled by all that thick bone, sounded like the merest thud in a nearby yard. The sheep’s tail twitched once.

“Get a pot,” said Sigurd, He stood up and put the gun on the counter beside the sink.

Jonathan didn’t move.

“Hey. Get a pot.” Sigurd pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt.

Jonathan got a pot and returned to his spot on the floor, with the pot hanging from his hand.

Sigurd took the pot from him and put it next to the sheep’s head. Then he cut a gash in the neck and lifted the animal up so that it lay on the pot with its blood pouring
out. The blood was thin, pink, frothy, and quick to flow, and it flowed for more than ten minutes, during which Sigurd raised the sheep’s hindparts so all the blood could come out and Jonathan stood in his spot.

“Okay,” said Sigurd, finally. The carcass was flat and shrunken. He took up his knife and sawed off the head; the neckbones resisted the blade, and he had to work the knife back and forth, making a scraping noise, to cut through. He put the head on the counter beside the gun. The ears, drained of blood, flopped down like a spaniel’s.

Sigurd stood up and flexed his legs. The floor around his feet was a mess: wool, blood, and bits of flesh and bone surrounded the body. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess in America you have a special room to slaughter the sheep, no? You don’t do it in the kitchen.”