Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  A couple of them even go to church on Sunday and sit there benevolently, like white men among the natives. After the service, they talk with the pastor about the local sights, and before he knows what’s happening he has agreed to give a guided tour after lunch. True, he and his wife usually rest for a while on Sunday afternoons, the only day of the week they have the chance, but he can make an exception. They will enjoy themselves, he assures them. “I rarely have time to get away, and I’m as eager as you are to see everything!”

  It really is a great pleasure to show them around. The distances are not as small as people tend to believe when the see the Örlands as a collection of fly specks on the map. It takes half a day to see Church Isle and the hills west of it with their stone labyrinth and ancient hiding places from pirates and Russians, their newly excavated bronze-age settlement and, as a contrast, their recent artillery emplacements blasted out of solid rock for the Continuation War. Also the greatest sight of all in the eyes of the Örlanders—the little lake in its crater of grey granite that all visitors must be dragged out to see. “All fresh water, all the way down!” the Örlanders explain proudly, blind to the whole great sea which lies heaving all around them, even in the calmest summer weather, and which is the source of the sailboat people’s enthusiasm. Someone is interested in plants, so they stop to botanize. Yes, indeed, there are a number of odd species to be discovered among the stones! Others look at birds. Someone else recalls the proud history of the Örlands during Prohibition. My goodness, yes! They gaze meaningfully at a couple of the larger houses in the west villages, which can be seen from the hill, and they chuckle. Several stories suitable for the ears of a pastor make the rounds, about smuggled liquor and restaurants in Helsingfors.

  The weather is wonderful, and it’s a fantastic luxury to be free from work and out of doors in pleasant company. Looking at the time, he draws a deep breath and declines the offer of an evening snack, says goodbye and hurries home. He can’t understand how it’s grown so late, and he appears at the parsonage feeling guilty. “Forgive me, I had no idea it would take so long. Has anyone called?”

  Mona can put up with the sailboats. It’s fun for Petter to socialize with people from Helsingfors, and they’re pleasant enough and, on the whole, take care of themselves, stay on their boats, in cabins where they can’t stand up straight, sleep in bunks where they can’t even sit up, and live on canned goods they’ve brought with them and on fish and bread they buy in the villages. But all the relatives and friends who come to visit are another thing entirely.

  It’s no exaggeration to call it an invasion. They come like outright raiding parties, and primarily of course it’s Petter’s rabble that can’t stay away. Petter stands on the steamboat dock and receives them with a warm smile and a hearty welcome, while he timidly wishes there was a custom that required parents to keep their distance during the first few years of a child’s marriage. For his part, he takes boyish delight in showing them his church and all the villages and people in his parish, his cows and sheep, his sailing skiff and his nets, but he is keenly aware that Mona is not happy, although she controls herself. “Two weeks!” she cries. What did she expect? That they’d make that long journey merely to turn right around and head back?

  “You know they’re unpretentious, don’t ask for much. They want to get to know Sanna and see how we’re getting along. Mama will be happy to help with the housework if you’ll let her.”

  Mona snorts. As if she’d want to have her mother-in-law pottering around in her kitchen! She cleans frenetically before they arrive, sure that the old lady will criticize and complain about everything that’s not absolutely perfect. She’ll inspect and examine and scrutinize. Nothing Mona does will be good enough for her eldest, idealized son. Mona is angry, angry, angry before they come, takes Sanna by the arm, hard, “Not a peep!”, snaps at Petter when he comes in with water buckets so full they splash over the sides, lies awake at night foaming and steaming. When he’s fallen asleep, she lies awake repeating quietly to herself, “And here I’m supposed to be their servant and cook their meals and take care of them from morning to night. Not a moment’s peace all day long while you can at least take a rest now and then and have a really good time as their guide in this beautiful weather! And I slave on, have the coffee poured and the meals ready whenever it pleases them to saunter in. All you have to do is sit down at the table. Cook, maid, hired girl all in one, but their chamberpots they can carry out themselves!”

  And so on. Her exhaustion black as night. But she also has a motor that shoves her out of bed when the alarm clock rings and it’s time to go out to the cows, which have all of Church Isle for a pasture but usually come when she calls. “Come bossy, bossy! Come!” Apple first, the lead cow, ploughing her way through the bushes under protest, gentle Goody in her wake. As a teacher, you can’t have favourites, but with cattle it’s allowed. Gentle Goody following temperamental Apple because it’s her sweet nature.

  Cows calm and comfort people, or anyway they do Mona. She milks them promptly, feeling almost happy, talking to them a little when no one can hear. But she hurries—strains the milk, carries the can to the well, peels off her dairy smock on the steps, quickly in through the door. Petter has built a fire in the stove. Sanna is up, they’re eating breakfast. Happy, at this stage. Thank God they’ll be arriving by cargo boat this afternoon, not in the middle of the night. But they will soon have that experience too, for who arrives in the following wave but Petter’s brother Frej and his wife Ingrid. Then a long series of Petter’s cousins, and when they’ve all been placed, yet another one shows up unannounced: “I figured I’d surely be able to find a room in the village in case you have no space for me.”

  “Church Bay Inn”, it should say on the door. “Free food and lodging, first-rate service” in smaller letters underneath.

  In a family, there’s always something. The worthy Kummels show only a cursory interest in their granddaughter and in Petter’s domains. He remembers what he got when he was a boy and showed them something he had made—a pat on the head. They’ve other things on their minds. They arrived worn and harried, and both of them take him aside for endless conversations he doesn’t have time for. Petter is twenty-eight years old but has never yet felt free of his parents. Papa has to be kept in good humour, Mama needs help and sympathy. Now that he’s an adult himself, he has to be their marriage counsellor. They’re over sixty—in heaven’s name, why can’t they accept the fact that they’re married and stop having all these crises?

  They’ve been belabouring the present problem for years, with all its branches and offshoots. Papa is retired and has gone to ground on Åland with no intention of returning to the schoolhouse on the coast of Finland, which he has come to loathe. Mama stubbornly continues to teach there, despite the fact that she now has the right to retire. He thinks she ought to move to Åland and take care of him. She is hurt that he has abandoned their conjugal home in Finland and allows her to struggle on alone, without his help. Now, when they come out to the Örlands, they haven’t seen one another for nine months, and they are not happy to do so now.

  Mama suffers from her famous sense of duty, and both she and Petter know how it will end. But not right away. Not with some kind of smiling resignation. First there must be a great deal of talking, sympathizing, commiserating, soothing noises, and the speaking of quiet words of wisdom. While more and more time passes. Mama is aware that Papa, in frail health and completely impractical, will have a hard time getting through another winter alone. “It was awful,” she says, “to come into the house and see the way it was, as if he’d been living in a lumber camp. Burned food stuck to the frying pan, indescribable rags in the bed, the whole place messy as a den of thieves, soured milk in the pitcher, everything to make me feel as bad as possible. I know I can’t leave him like that for another winter.”

  Her certainty makes Petter’s compromise proposal sound almost welcome. “How about this? You live in peace at the school for one more yea
r. Then you can get your pension and move to Åland. If this is a long, hard winter, Papa can live here for six months, let’s say from November to April. The Örlands are still part of Åland, and new faces would make a little change for him. What do you say?”

  While Mama is thinking it over, Petter speaks cautiously to Mona, who is surprisingly agreeable. She likes her father-in-law better than her mother-in-law, and why not? The parsonage attracts a lot of visitors, and if father Leonard entertains them, maybe Petter will get a chance to work on his pastoral examination. Papa is immediately keen on the arrangement, always happy to sit down to a good meal. Mama needs to carry on a good deal longer about her duties and about everything she will have to leave behind—relatives, friends and clubs, villages and the landscape itself, Helsingfors with its shops and cultural amenities, but it is clear that she finds the suggestion attractive. Much can happen in a year. Of course she cannot wish that Leonard, sickly, nervous, impractical, might be called to his forefathers, but some great intervention from above is nevertheless not beyond the bounds of possibility, and a year, which has not yet even begun, seems at this stage a satisfying length of time.

  With all these complicated negotiations going on, and with all the time-consuming emotions they engender, there is still the hay harvest to plan, in all haste. Mona has been looking forward to it eagerly, under the verger’s supervision. The Holmens, who lease one of the church’s meadows in the western villages and do a couple of days’ work each year in payment, usually get called upon when it’s time to make hay. “Of course they’ll come. They’ve been waiting for this since the day you arrived! It’s always been done this way.” The verger promises to come himself and help with the mowing but is surprised when Petter sticks his head in one evening and suggests the next morning. “This early?” he wonders, almost shocked. “No one starts haying here until sometime in July.”

  “The sea level’s dropped and there seems to be a real high pressure on the way. And Mona says we should cut the grass when it’s still juicy and full of nourishment. I count on her completely.”

  “Well, maybe,” says the verger doubtfully. “If you’ve got enough grass. Here we let it grow as long as it will get, and even then it’s barely enough.”

  When it comes to church customs, the pastor sticks to the local traditions. When it comes to agriculture, he sticks to Mona. The Örlanders are part-time farmers. In season, the fishing is more important to them. Mona is a farmer’s daughter from the grain fields of Nyland. She knows better than anyone on the Örlands when to cut the grass and harvest the crops. For example, her potato tops are plump and ready to blossom when the last of the Örlanders are still planting their last seed potatoes. No one questions her expertise, not even the verger, who is a born traditionalist. On the contrary, he is pleased that there will be no collision with his own haymaking or the Holmens’, since the pastor clearly means to have his cut and into the barn before it’s time for the rest of them to mow.

  The pastor’s wife may think that the vicarage’s hay meadows are on the small side, with poor soil, but in fact they have many advantages and lie enviably close together on Church Isle. For the villages in general, hay meadows are spread out all over the map. Farmers have their land in the village, in outlying fields, and on the larger islands. In some cases, fishermen with one or two cows have no meadow at all but have to gather grass around their cottages and out on the islands where the farmers don’t harvest the meagre sedge that grows among the rocks.

  Mona gets Petter to sharpen the scythes that evening, and early the next morning the verger arrives and has coffee. Mona goes out to the cows and the men to the meadow, still wet with dew, which is how it should be when the mowing begins. They decide how to proceed. “Best you go in front,” says the pastor politely, but before very long the verger gives up. The pastor works like a mowing machine, long sweeping strokes, a supple back, good stride. During the midday meal—pike and potatoes with white sauce, fruit cream—the pastor explains that he used to work as a summer boy on his uncle’s farm on Åland. Cutting grass is something he’s been doing since he was eleven years old. Naturally he’s developed a certain technique.

  Mona is never sunnier than in haying season. It’s the best time in a farmer’s year. The workers need to be kept well fed and in good spirits. But much is done differently on the Örlands. For example, they don’t stack the hay on pikes but let it dry on the ground in long windrows, which are turned in the sun till the grass is dry enough to store. If the weather is good, you take in first-class hay with this method, but if it rains and the hay gets turned too many times, its quality declines dramatically. Mona figures that the farmers on the Örlands have transferred their fishing mentality to farming—it’s all a question of luck and the weather gods. If the fishing goes well, so much the better. Getting in the hay before it’s lost its vigour, well, that’s another piece of good luck.

  She looks at the pasture grass, where no one has ever sowed a seed of clover or timothy and thinks that drying pikes would stand quite far apart on these fields. But when they’ve been mowed and she goes out to do the evening milking she is met by a fragrance without compare. “Petter, come here,” she calls. “Bring Sanna!” They stand on the steps and breathe. The smell of the grass is strong and sensual. Every plant gives off its aura and essence, building an atmosphere that awakens waves of longing and desire. Sanna sits perfectly still on Petter’s arm, and he puts his free arm around Mona. “That there is such a thing in the world!” he says. “I’ll put Sanna to bed. Come as soon as you can.”

  The next morning they decide to go out with their plant book and identify every plant growing in the meadow, but the telephone rings, and a new flock of sailboaters tumbles in. They’ve sailed all night and are filled with the beauty of the experience. Water, coffee cream, directions to the Co-op, general chatter, it all takes time. Off on errands, but some of the fragrance lingers, reinforced by memory. Every day it changes a bit—more hay, less grass—but what hay! The sea level is still low, the sun shines, there is a light breeze. A dry spell so perfect that Mona ventures out after only two days to start turning the windrows, in the afternoon when the hay on top is completely dry. The windrows are so light and fine that it’s a joy to let the breeze help as she turns them with her rake. At times the windrows seem to turn themselves. She walks beside the verger’s Signe, who works the neighbouring row. It’s not heavy work and they talk as they go, about the animals and their hope that the weather will hold and folks will finish their haymaking well before they start getting ready for the herring fishery. Signe tells her how it used to be, when they all went off to the fishing camps and stayed until well into September. She talks more than she could have in the verger’s company, and before the day is over, the hay is turned and the smell has changed—more barn, less heaven. Both of them are pleased and sweaty. “Almost makes you want to jump in the sea, if it weren’t for all those sailboats,” says the pastor’s wife. But Signe says that you jump in the sea if you want to kill yourself. Otherwise you wash in the sauna!

  For the next few days, Mona is deeply nervous. She runs around doing her chores and suddenly stops to look at the sky. This strangely beautiful weather can’t last, it’s only natural for the sea level to rise a bit at the shore, it’s starting to get cooler and there are banks of clouds above the outer skerries. Everyone who came to church on Sunday was astonished that the pastor’s hay was already mown. If it rains on the hay now, everyone will say that they were in too great a hurry. She passionately wants to show them that this is the time to cut grass, not when the hay is overgrown, and with all her might she tries to keep the clouds away. “Stay out there!” she commands them silently. “Don’t you dare come in over these islands!”

  The verger, who is her friend and admirer, states with all his authority that the granite is now so warm that the rain will go around it. “Even if it rains at sea, that doesn’t mean it will rain on land.” He is wise and experienced, no nonsense about God’s will
. Why would he want it to rain on her hay! She walks down to the meadow one more time to check. If it doesn’t rain, it needs only one more day. At least one, because the humidity is higher now and the hay is drying more slowly. She noticed that with the laundry she hung out.

  The pastor’s wife is far too experienced to hope for beginner’s luck, but the pastor is entitled to believe in a miracle. Although a little rain drifts in during the evening and, in mourning, she gives up the hay for lost, there is no great downpour. In the morning there is a damp mist in the air, but no more rain. Towards evening, the sun peeks out, the water recedes a bit from the cliffs, and the breeze freshens and blows away the mist.

  Just one day late, they phone for the Holmens and Brage Söderberg’s horse, who comes swimming across the inlet behind Brage’s boat. “A sea horse!” says the pastor. “Now I’ve seen everything!” There is a dilapidated hayrack in the parsonage shed, and Brage, aware of conditions on Church Isle, has brought some harness, and soon they have the sea horse harnessed up and ready. Brage cannot stay, but he can see that his horse is in good hands. The pastor handles it well, and his wife chats easily about all the horses she grew up with. Meanwhile, unnoticed, the Holmens have arrived in their boat and wandered up to the meadow with a pitchfork and a rake. They greet the others warmly, and the pastor is once again charmed by members of his congregation. There is intelligence in these two smiling faces and a lively interest in their clear eyes and in the expressive words from their lips.