Kristin Lavransdatter (130 page)

“Are you going out skiing, Bjørgulf? But it’s going to be clear today, son!”

“As you can see, Mother, I am.”

“Perhaps you’ll all be home before the holy day?” she asked helplessly. Bjørgulf was a very poor skier. He couldn’t tolerate the brilliance of the snow in his eyes and spent most of the winter indoors. But Naakkve replied that they might be gone for several days.

Kristin went home feeling fearful and uneasy. The twins were cross and sullen, so she realized that they had wanted to go along but their older brothers had refused to take them.

Early on the fifth day, around breakfast time, the three boys returned. They had left before dawn for Bjørgulf’s sake, said Naakkve, in order to reach home before the sun came up. The two of them went straight up to the high loft; Bjørgulf looked dead tired. But Gaute carried the bags and packs into the house. He had two handsome pups for the small boys, who at once forgot all about their questions and grievances. Gaute seemed embarrassed but tried not to show it.

“And this,” he said as he took something out of a sack, “this Father asked me to give to you.”

Fourteen marten pelts, exceedingly beautiful. Kristin took them, greatly confused; she couldn’t utter a single word in reply. There were far too many things she wanted to ask, but she was afraid of being overwhelmed if she opened even the smallest part of her heart. And Gaute was so young.

She could only manage to say, “They’ve already turned white, I see. Yes, we’re deep into the winter half of the year now.”

When Naakkve came downstairs and he and Gaute sat down to the porridge bowl, Kristin quickly told Frida that she would take food to Bjørgulf up in the loft herself. It occurred to her that she might be able to talk about things with the taciturn boy, who she knew was much more mature in spirit than his brothers.

He was lying in bed, holding a linen cloth over his eyes. His mother hung a kettle of water on the hook over the hearth, and while Bjørgulf propped himself up on his elbow to eat, she boiled a concoction of eyebright and celandine.

Kristin took away the empty food bowl, washed his red and swollen eyes with the concoction, and placed moist linen cloths over them. Then she finally gathered her courage to ask, “Didn’t your father say anything about when he intends to come back home to us?”

“No.”

“You always say so little, Bjørgulf,” replied his mother after a moment.

“That seems to run in the family, Mother.” After a pause he continued, “We met Simon and his men north of Rost Gorge. They were headed north with supplies.”

“Did you speak to them?” she asked.

“No,” he said with a laugh. “There seems to be some kind of sickness between us and our kinsmen that makes it impossible for friendship to thrive.”

“Are you blaming me for that?” fumed his mother. “One minute you complain that we talk too little, and the next you say that we can’t keep our friends.”

Bjørgulf merely laughed again. Then he lifted himself up on his elbow, as if he were listening to his mother’s breathing.

“In God’s name, Mother, you mustn’t cry now. I’m tired and dejected, unaccustomed as I am to traveling on skis. Pay no mind to whatever I say. Of course I know that you’re not a woman who’s fond of quarrels.”

Kristin then left the loft at once. But she no longer dared, for any price, to ask this son what her children thought of these matters.

 

She would lie in bed, night after night, when the boys had gone up to the loft, listening and keeping watch. She wondered whether they talked to each other when they were alone up there. She could hear the thump of their boots as they dropped them to the floor, the clatter of their knife belts falling. She heard their voices but couldn’t make out their words. They talked all at the same time, growing boisterous; it seemed to be half quarrel, half banter. One of the twins shouted loudly; then something was dragged across the floor, making dust sprinkle down from the ceiling into the main room. The gallery door crashed open with a bang, there was a stomping from outside on the gallery, and Ivar and Skule threatened and carried on as they pounded on the door. She heard Gaute’s voice, loud and full of laughter. She could tell that he was standing just inside the door; he and the twins had been fighting again, and Gaute had ended up throwing the twins out. Finally she heard Naakkve’s grown-up man’s voice. He intervened, and the twins came back inside. For a little while longer their chatter and laughter reached her, and then the beds creaked overhead. Gradually silence fell. Then a steady drone interrupted by pauses could be heard—a drone like the sound of thunder deep inside the mountains.

Kristin smiled in the dark. Gaute snored whenever he was especially tired. Her father had done the same. Such similarities pleased her; the sons who took after Erlend in appearance were also like him in that they slept as soundlessly as birds. As she lay in bed, thinking about all the small likenesses that could be recognized in offspring, generation after generation, she had to smile to herself. The painful anguish in her heart loosened its grip for a moment, and the trance of sleep descended, tangling up all the threads of her thoughts as she sank down, first into well-being and then into oblivion.

They were young, she consoled herself. They probably didn’t take it so hard.

 

But one day, shortly after New Year’s, the curate Sira Solmund came to see Kristin at Jørundgaard. It was the first time he arrived uninvited, and Kristin welcomed him courteously, even though she had her suspicions at once. And it turned out just as she had thought: He felt it was his duty to inquire whether she and her husband had arbitrarily, and without Church consent, ended their marriage and, if so, which of the spouses was responsible for this unlawful act.

Kristin felt as if her eyes flitted restlessly, and she spoke too swiftly, using far too many words, as she explained to the priest that Erlend thought he should tend to his property up north in Dovre. It had been sorely neglected over the past few years, and the buildings were apparently in ruins. Considering that they had so many children, they needed to look after their welfare—and many other such matters. She gave much too detailed an account of the situation, so that even Sira Solmund, as dull-witted as he was, had to notice that she was feeling uncertain. She talked on and on about what an eager hunter Erlend was; surely the priest must know that. She showed him the marten pelts she had received from her husband, and in her confusion, before she realized it or could reconsider, she gave them to the priest.

Anger overtook her after Sira Solmund had gone. Erlend should have known that if he stayed away in this manner, their priest, being the kind of man he was, would show up to investigate the reason for his absence.

 

Sira Solmund was a little trifle of a man in appearance; it wasn’t easy to guess his age, but he was supposedly about forty winters old. He was not very shrewd and apparently didn’t possess an overabundance of learning, but he was an upright, pious, and moral priest. One of his sisters, an aging, childless widow and a wicked gossip, managed his meager household.

He wanted to be seen as a zealous servant of the Church, but he concerned himself mostly with paltry matters and common folk. He had a timid disposition and was reluctant to meddle with the gentry or take up difficult questions, but once he did so, he grew quite fierce and stubborn.

In spite of this, he was well liked by his parishioners. On the one hand, people respected his quiet and honorable way of living; on the other hand, he was not nearly as avaricious or strict when it came to the rights of the Church or people’s obligations as Sira Eirik had been. This was doubtless due to the fact that he was much less bold than the old priest.

But Sira Eirik had loved and respected every man and every child in all the surrounding villages. In the past people often grew angry when the priest strove, with unseemly greed, to secure the fortunes and wealth of the children he had conceived out of wedlock with his housekeeper. During the first years he lived in the parish, the people of Sil had a difficult time tolerating his imperious harshness toward anyone who overstepped the slightest dictate of Church law. He had been a soldier before he took his vows, and he had accompanied the pirate earl, Sir Alf of Tornberg, in his youth. This was all quite evident in his behavior.

But even back then the people had been proud of their priest, for he surpassed nearly all other parish priests in the realm in terms of knowledge, wisdom, physical strength, and courtly manners; he also had the loveliest singing voice. As the years passed and he had to endure the heavy trials God seemed to have placed on His servant because of his willfulness in his youth, Sira Eirik Kaaressøn grew so much in wisdom, piety, and righteousness that his name was now known and respected throughout the entire bishopric. When he journeyed to ecclesiastical meetings in the town of Hamar, he was honored as a father by all the other priests, and it was said that Bishop Halvard wanted to have him moved to a church which would have granted him a noble title and a seat in the cathedral chapter. But Sira Eirik supposedly requested to stay where he was; he gave his age as his excuse, and the fact that his sight had been failing him for many years.

On the main road at Sil, a little south of Formo, stood the beautiful cross carved from soapstone that Sira Eirik had paid to have erected where a rockslide on the slope had taken the lives of both his promising young sons forty years before. Older people in the parish never passed that way without stopping to say a
Pater noster
and
Ave Maria
for the souls of Alf and Kaare.

The priest had married off his daughter with a dowry of property and cattle. He gave her to a handsome farmer’s son of good family from Viken. No one had any other thought but that Jon Fis was a good lad. Six years later she had returned home to her father, starving, her health broken, wearing rags and full of lice, holding a child by each hand, and with another one under her belt. The people living in Sil back then all knew, although they never mentioned it, that the children’s father had been hanged as a thief in Oslo. The sons of Jon didn’t turn out well either, and now all three of them were dead.

While his offspring were still alive, Sira Eirik had greedily sought to adorn and honor his church with gifts. Now it was the church that would doubtless acquire the majority of his fortune and his precious books. The new Saint Olav and Saint Thomas Church in Sil was much larger and more splendid than the old one that had burned down, and Sira Eirik had endowed it with many magnificent and costly adornments. He went to church every day to say his prayers and to reflect, but now he only said mass for the parishioners on high holy days.

It was Sira Solmund who now handled most of the other official priestly duties. But when people had a heavy sorrow, or if their souls were troubled by great difficulties or pangs of conscience, they preferred to seek out their old parish priest, and they all felt that they took home solace from a meeting with Sira Eirik.

 

One evening in early spring Kristin Lavransdatter went to Romundgaard and knocked on the door of Sira Eirik’s house. She didn’t know how to bring up the subject she wanted to discuss, so she talked about one thing and another after she had expressed her greetings.

Finally the old man said a little impatiently, “Have you just come here to bring me greetings, Kristin, and to see how I am? If so, that is most kind of you. But it seems to me that you have something on your mind, and if this is true, tell me about it now, and don’t waste time with idle talk.”

Kristin clasped her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes. “I’m so unhappy, Sira Eirik, that my husband is living up there at Haugen.”

“Surely the road isn’t any longer,” said the priest, “than that you can easily journey up there to talk to him and ask him to return home soon. He can’t have so much to do up there on such a small one-man farm that he should need to stay any longer.”

“I feel frightened when I think of him sitting alone up there in the winter nights,” said Kristin, shivering.

“Erlend Nikulaussøn is old enough and strong enough to look out for himself.”

“Sira Eirik . . . you know about everything that happened up there, back in the old days,” whispered Kristin, her voice barely audible.

The priest turned his dim old eyes toward her; once they had been coal-black, sharp, and gleaming. He didn’t say a word.

“Surely you must have heard what people say,” she continued, speaking in the same low voice. “That the dead . . . still haunt the place.”

“Do you mean you don’t dare seek him out because of that? Or are you afraid the ghosts might break your husband’s neck? If they haven’t done it by now, Kristin, then no doubt they’ll let him stay there in peace.” The priest laughed harshly. “It’s mostly just ignorance—heathen nonsense and superstition—when people start gossiping about ghosts and the return of dead men. I fear there are stern guards at the door, in that place where Herr Bjørn and Fru Aashild now find themselves.”

“Sira Eirik,” she whispered, her voice trembling, “do you believe there is no salvation for those two poor souls?”

“God forbid that I should dare judge the limits of His mercy. But I can’t imagine that those two could have managed to settle their debts so quickly; all the slates the two of them have had a hand in carving have not yet been presented: her children, whom she abandoned, and the two of you, who took lessons from the wise woman. If I thought that it might help, so that some of the misdeeds she committed could be rectified . . . but since Erlend is living up there, God must not think it would be of any benefit for his aunt to reappear and warn him. For we know that it is through the grace of God and the compassion of Our Lady and the intercessionary prayers of the Church that a poor soul may be allowed to return to this world from the fires of purgatory if his sin is such that it can be absolved with the help of someone who is alive and in this manner shorten his time of torment. Such was the case with the wretched soul who moved the boundary between Hov and Jarpstad, or the farmer in Musudal with the false documents about the millstream. But souls cannot leave the fires of purgatory unless they have a lawful errand. It’s mostly nonsense what people say about ghosts and phantoms or the mirages of the Devil, which disappear like smoke if you protect yourself with the sign of the cross and the name of the Lord.”