Meadowland (13 page)

‘Cracking good place for lumber,’ I said.

‘That’s not what I asked,’ Leif replied.

‘Bet you anything you like those woods are bloody crawling with deer,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t look like anybody lives here, so they won’t be used to people - you could probably walk right up to them. And bears, too. Never tried it myself, but they reckon bear’s as good as the best beef.’

Leif looked down his nose at me, and I gave up. ‘This isn’t where I came ashore,’ I said.

‘Thought not,’ said Leif. ‘Where’s that bloody Tyrkir got to?’

‘While we’re here, though,’ I said, ‘we could beach the ship, see to those sprung boards, maybe build a fire, dry out a bit. Really, we could do with making a new rudder, with all this timber. Silly to take risks with something like that.’

He didn’t answer, and I decided to shut my face before I got on his nerves. So we walked up and down the beach for a bit, and I wondered if we were the first men who’d ever come there, and if so what were my chances of getting a loan of a ship back in Greenland and coming back here for a cargo of lumber, since nobody else seemed to want the place - waste not, want not, as my old mum used to say But then I thought of all the trouble we’d had, and how I’ve never really liked sailing much anyway, and if I were to kid someone into lending me a ship, I’d have to go halves on the profits with him, so fuck that. It was very quiet there. I don’t mind a bit of quiet, but too much of it makes me nervous.

Then Tyrkir came loping back out of the trees. He hadn’t brought anything back with him and he didn’t say where he’d been or what he’d been looking for, so for all I know he’d just been searching for somewhere he could have a slit without thirty-four men watching. Soon as he’d joined us we went back to the boat, and that was that.

It was’ pretty quiet on the ship, too, when we got back on board. There wasn’t the babble of questions you’d have expected - well, what’s it like, then? Are we going ashore or what? Is this where you were looking for? What about fresh water and all that? Instead, they all waited for Leif to say something, but he wasn’t in any hurry.

‘Suppose we’d better call it something,’ he said at last. ‘Forestland all right with you lot?’

Nobody answered him, so presumably it was. Then we raised anchor and left.

By now I guess everybody was thinking the same thing: had we not reached the place I’d come ashore at yet, or had we gone past it? Not something you wanted to dwell on, particularly since we still didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing out here. Well, probably not felling lumber, for obvious reasons. Wouldn’t have taken us more than a few days to fell enough to fill our ship, and then we could have gone home. (Except we’d have trouble breaking out of that current enough to strike out east; nobody was forgetting that we didn’t actually know the way home from here, bar turning round and going back the way we’d come, which wasn’t possible because of the current and the winds.) All in all, it was hardly surprising that nobody spoke much as we left Forestland behind us, because there wasn’t anything cheerful to be said, and we were wound up enough without making it worse by arguing.

The next two days were pretty grim. We didn’t have much control over where we were going, or how fast. The wind made all the decisions for us. It wanted us to go south, fortunately, so we hung on and tried not to dwell on all the things that could’ve gone wrong so far. There comes a point where either you go with it and hope everything’ll end up fitting into place, like a tenon in a mortice, or else you jump over the side and spare yourself the pain. Nobody jumped over the side, so I guess we all found our own ways of coping. By now, though, as a crew we were pretty much all pulled apart, like the boards of an old abandoned ship laid up on a beach. We’d long since run out of things to say to one another, and we’d reached the stage where talking to someone wasn’t much less of an assault than smacking him in the face. We did our work because we knew we had to, because otherwise the ship was going to drift or sink. Nobody was interested in Bjari’s second island any more; except possibly Leif, and he might as well have been on a different ship. We’d given up hope of anything good happening; by the same token, we were far less worried than maybe we should have been about not knowing where we were, stuff like that. Mostly we weren’t living in the here and now. We were thinking about home, about things that had happened years ago, things we could’ve said or done but didn’t, things we did or said and wished we hadn’t. We all thought about the past, because it seemed like the present was just turning endlessly and slipping, like a cartwheel in the mud. As for the future, I think a lot of us had more or less made up our minds that there wasn’t going to be one. Maybe you’re wondering what’d got into us all, why we’d suddenly turned so miserable in two days. Not sure. After all, we knew we weren’t all that far from dry land, and the weather wasn’t kicking our teeth in. I think we’d just been on the ship rather too long, without a reliable end to look forward to. Let’s say it was the difference between climbing down a ladder and jumping with your eyes shut.

Morning of the third day out of Forestland, I was asleep with my back to the rails. I woke up, and the first thing that hit me was that I’d got drenched with water during the night. Maybe rain, or a big wave; made no odds. I just felt tired, a bit angry that I’d gone to sleep almost dry and now I was soaked to the skin again. Sun was coming up; half a glowing orange egg-yolk in the seaward sky. Cold; but it wouldn’t have been too bad if only I hadn’t been sopping wet. Another day on the ship.

Well, I like to start the day with a piss if I possibly can; so I stood up, staggered to the rail and started to pull my trousers down. And then I saw it.

You always assume that other people will do the important stuff, like keep an eye out. But sometimes they’re assuming the same thing, and it doesn’t get done. At that moment, nobody was keeping a lookout. They were waking up, cussing and muttering, stretching and whining about cricked necks and ricked backs. So it was me, with my trousers down round my knees, who saw it first.

I thought: can’t be, or someone would’ve mentioned it. So I looked again, and there it still was. I had this crazy flash in my mind of us sailing right on past it because I’d felt all shy about yelling and disturbing people. So I yelled. ‘Land,’ I shouted.

Leif was squatting right up front, coat and cloaks snuggled round him. You’d have bet he was fast asleep, but as soon as I opened my mouth he jumped up like he’d got a bit of string nailed to the top of his head and someone had just given it a sharp tug.

‘Land,’ I repeated. ‘Over there, for crying out loud. Look.’ I pointed. People were blinking, rubbing their eyes - it took a quarter of a heartbeat or something like that before they could start looking. But Leif was staring at it, the woods with hills behind, the flat white beach. He turned his head and looked at me - I’m not making this up - looked at me the way a cow does just before you cut its throat.

‘Is this it?’ he asked me.

‘Think so,’ I replied.

I’d said something wrong, because he went off at me like pouring water into a crucible of melted lead. ‘You think so,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, is that it or isn’t it?’

Suddenly everybody was waiting for me to say something. ‘I think so,’ I repeated, and he flared up again, like the famous hot-water spout at Geisir back home. ‘I can’t bloody well see from here, can I?’ I yelled. ‘Soon as we’re close enough, I’ll tell you if we’re there or not.’

While I was saying this, I was thinking. I was asking myself, You clown, it doesn’t matter, nobody’s seen the place where you went ashore except you, and that was in the dark; so if you lie, nobody’ll ever know and you’ll get all these angry people off your back. And supposing this isn’t the place: are you going to tell them that, and have them throw you overboard out of frustration? And the really weird, crazy thing was, my answer to that was, Well, yes. I couldn’t have told a lie about it if I’d tried. If it hadn’t been Bjari’s second island, and the place where I’d landed, I’d have told them so, because - I have absolutely no idea why - it mattered.

Just as well, really, that I didn’t have to.

It was Eyvind who spoke up before I did, bless him. He said, ‘Yes, this is it, we’re here,’ in a quite calm voice, almost cold, bored. ‘And a bit further on, there’s a sort of rounded point that leads into the straits.’

What straits? I was asking myself, but the good bit was, I’d stopped being the centre of attention. Now why they were all so quick to take Eyvind’s word for it when he’d been completely wrong the last time, I couldn’t begin to tell you. My guess is, because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. Makes you popular for a while, but bad policy in the long run.

‘Are you sure?’ Leif was saying, and Eyvind was nodding and wagging his beard, all wet and caked with salt into little rats’ tails. ‘Quite sure,’ he was saying. ‘Couldn’t mistake it for anywhere else. There’s the wooded hills, see, and the beach, and the rounded point in the distance. You can’t see the grassy plain from here, of course, but we never noticed it the first time.’

People started looking back at me over their shoulders, since of course it was only me who reckoned there was a grassy plain on Bjarni’s second island. It was the first island that’d had the nice flat green meadows; but for some reason Leif had never seemed particularly interested in that.

Stands to reason I couldn’t have held my breath all the time we were drawing in to land; it took the best part of half a day, I’d have choked. It must just’ve felt like it. While we were getting there, I was thinking to myself that maybe there was something about this place that brought out the worst in all these strong-minded leader types. Like, Bjarni Herjolfson had been dead set against us setting foot on any of the three islands, even though we’d had good reason to go ashore. And here was Leif Eirikson dead set on doing the opposite and landing - what’s more, landing at the place where I’d landed, and nowhere else, like I was someone clever or important, or I knew some wonderful secret.

It must’ve been around midday when we got close enough to launch the boat, and the sun was bright and high. We dropped anchor off the rounded point Eyvind had mentioned - it was there right enough, though I had no memory of it - and rowed in up the sound a short way till we came to a little bay

This time there were six of us in the boat: a couple of Greenlanders called Thorvald Salmon and Lazy Hrafn came along, I’m not sure why It was a bit of a struggle rowing in, but we got there, ran the boat up on the sand and hurried up the beach.

Now I could be slandering you, but my guess is that you’re a City boy- ‘That’s not slander,’ I said. ‘That’s a compliment.’

He looked at me, smiled wryly and sighed. ‘Thought so, he said. ‘You’re a City boy all right.’

In which case (Kari went on) you may have trouble understanding why we ran up the beach. In fact, if you’d been there watching, you’d probably have thought we’d been drinking salt water on the journey and had gone off our heads.

You’d have seen us dashing up the beach till we reached the point where the sand stopped and the grass began. You’d have watched us dropping down on our knees, trawling our hands through the grass, licking our fingers and suddenly bursting out in whoops of joy, hugging each other, jumping up and dancing round in circles. Very sad, you’d have said to yourself, to get so far and then break down, brains eaten away with worm by the looks of it-The point being, you don’t understand about grass. You think it’s just a weed that grows up between paving stones, or a green colour in the background. You don’t know about the difference between sour and sweet grass, or why it’s a matter of life and death which sort you’ve got when, or why a man’d go to all the trouble of ploughing up a meadow just to sow grass seed. All a closed book to you, isn’t it?

Well, in that case, you’ll just have to take it on trust from me that the grass that grew between the beach and the trees in that place was enough to make us think the whole trip’d been worthwhile. You see, if the grass is right, you can keep your cattle outside in the open right through the autumn and into the winter; and then you can bring them in under cover and feed them hay until the spring. Result: you start off the new year with pretty much the same number as you ended the old year with. But if the grass isn’t right, you can’t leave them out when the weather starts turning cold. First their milk’ll dwindle away till they go dry, and then they’ll starve or get sick. So you bring them in early; but now you’ve got to feed them hay for a third of the year, and there’s never enough. You’ve got no choice but to pick out the best and slaughter all the others, preserve the meat as best you can to see you through the winter in place of milk and butter and cheese, and try and make the numbers up by bringing the calves on next year, which of course means less milk for you. Iceland’s a green country, large parts of it, but the grass is pretty grudging, if you follow me. It’s all right when it’s full and fat in summer, but it wanes with the cold till there’s not enough sweetness in it. You can make reasonable hay out of it some years, but other times it’ll let you down. Then you get shortages, and the fun starts. Good men’ll rob and kill each other for hay, when they’ve got stalls full of cattle starving down into bags full of bones. Greenland was a little better, the good land there anyhow, but the poor land was rubbish. It’s a green country all right, but just ever so slightly the wrong shade of green, which makes all the difference. I guess you could say that water and piss look very much the same, if you don’t know what you’re looking at; but you can drink one, and not the other.

So what we were doing, when we knelt down in the wet grass there, was scooping up the dew and tasting it; and I’m telling you, the beer the angels serve in golden jugs to our Heavenly Father in Paradise couldn’t be sweeter than the dew on the beautiful green grass of that landfall. The others were slurping it off their fingers and crowing like cocks and grinning; and I was kneeling there completely stunned, thinking, What the hell is going on here? Because this was the place where I’d come ashore that night when I swam over from Bjarni’s ship, absolutely no doubt about that at all. But I’d come there in the dark, I hadn’t even seen the grass, just felt it under my feet, so of course I hadn’t known it was so good, so bloody wonderfully good. So if it wasn’t me who’d known what a marvellous country this was, it must’ve been Leif, who’d been so determined to come here, ignoring all other possibilities. But he couldn’t have known, because I was the only one who’d been here. I couldn’t make it out, and I still can’t to this day