Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  It goes so well it’s as if they had worked together always, with Mona and Tyra raking up and Petter driving and tramping down and Ruben loading. No friendships arise as effortlessly as those formed at work. Like old friends, they throw themselves down by the barn and drink coffee that has stood in glass bottles wrapped in thick wool socks along the south-facing wall. Cheese sandwiches and rolls have been inside in the cool darkness. The food is good, just right for haymakers, and their conversation is just right for four pairs of ears. But of course that’s precisely when a couple of the sailboaters come wandering by and ask if they can help. Since the war, the whole country has learned to smell its way to coffee and fresh-baked bread, and Mona has to go back to the house for more cups and to butter some more bread. They certainly don’t need their city help. They just confuse things and fail to see what needs to be done. Petter puts them in the haymow in the barn, which is already nearly full, and asks them to tramp down the hay so there’s room for more. They’re willing enough, but it’s harder work than they’d imagined, and sweatier, and itchier, and hard stalks push right through their deck shoes.

  Unnecessary extras that need to be humoured. Things never turn out the way you think. The next time someone asks if they don’t get lonely out here, they’re likely to get a punch in the nose!

  She looks around. They’re not going to get in all the hay this evening, but if all goes well they can finish the next day. If so, the hay will be of very good quality and will last a long time. They can collect leafy twigs as a complement for the sheep, but leaves aren’t plentiful either, and the cows eat the reeds as soon as they stick up their heads.

  “The way we have to work for fodder!” Tyra says. “We’re so happy to have the church meadow. I don’t know how we’d manage otherwise.” She tells how they used to go to the outer islands when she was a girl and rake up a little grass here and there. “After Easter, our cow had to eat moss and twigs. Every day Mama went to the barn to see if the cow was still alive.” Mona realizes that she’s been afraid the pastor and his wife would take back the meadow for their own use, since they’ve shown themselves to be such serious farmers. And it had been a close call. If the organist hadn’t explained that the church meadows beyond Church Isle have always been leased in exchange for work. “There are those who could hardly manage otherwise,” he’d said, and the pastor gave in.

  Tyra goes on. As nice as the weather is, they’ll surely get their grass cut and into the barn before it’s time for the fishing. The meadow isn’t so big that they’ll need to borrow a horse. Ruben can carry it in on his back, she can tramp it down, and the children can rake.

  “An admirable desire to stand on his own two feet,” the priest says later to the organist, but the organist looks uneasy and says he offered his horse, but Ruben has a hard time accepting help. He’d rather break his back with a tumpline. “The worst part is that everyone needs to get in their hay at the same time. So the fishermen have to wait, and then it starts to rain on the dry hay before they can get it under cover.”

  Although the pastor and his wife see themselves as small-holders and active farmers, putting new land under cultivation, they have a privileged situation. No matter how collegial they try to be, there is a gap between them and others. They can always fall back on his salary, the others must depend on what a capricious Mother Nature can provide. It sounds cheerless, but in fact the Örlanders are like the fish they catch, quick and glittering. They smile as they talk about the toil of the autumn fishing, how hard they work, how little sleep they get, how exhausted they are. It is something they look forward to as they labour at the haying. The pastor’s wife has her hay literally high and dry when the weather grows unsettled and the Örlanders start cutting. Every time Petter has been in the village, she asks him how the hay harvest is progressing. Surprisingly slowly, he has to admit. No one likes haymaking, it’s heavy and boring, they tell him, and Mona is amazed. It’s fishing that’s hard work! Not boring, but still hard. Night work, cold and raw, deadly dangerous in a storm, expensive nets that can drift away if luck is against them.

  Yes, but people are full of stories, the fishing is what life is about. It’s where they find their identity and their self-image and the pictures that describe their lives. They value variety and risk-taking more than security and routine. Standing on a safe piece of meadow, turning wet hay, is deadly dull. Struggling in rain and wind in an open boat, that’s life! You’re thrown around like a rag doll, but you come ashore weighted down with herring.

  They still come to church on Sundays and make little detours to look at the pastor’s well-raked meadows and to peer through the cracks in the overstuffed barn and stare out across the potato patch that seems to flourish somewhere far to the south of the Örland Islands. What they have to say about all of it is not so clearly heard, but when the parsonage cows come strolling along, blooming matrons, they remark loudly that, well, for those who have good grass …

  For his part, the pastor has paid close attention to the popular mood at the prospect of the autumn fishing and in his sermons makes many allusions to the fishing in the Sea of Galilee and to the fact that the disciples were fishermen, recruited beside their boats. The congregation picture their own shores and boathouses, and after the service, the former verger tells the pastor straight out that if you didn’t know they were Jesus’s disciples and became apostles and evangelists, you’d have every reason to think it was very wrong of them to just wander off in mid-season and leave all the work to the poor women and children.

  “And the boats lying there to dry out in the sun!” he adds disapprovingly, aware that the Lord moved in a warm, dry climate.

  “Yes indeed,” says the pastor. “I’m sure everyone on Galilee agreed with you. But that’s what’s so remarkable about Jesus— that he gets us to drop everything and follow him.”

  Silently, to himself, he’s thinking what a tough battle it would be if Jesus were to appear and ask Mona to abandon everything and follow him. Petter could burst out laughing when he thinks how successfully she’d struggle. “Impractical,” she’d call him, with reason. “Visionary. Dreamer.” And Petter himself, trying to mediate between them, with nothing but weak arguments in both directions.

  He’s in the process of acquiring a little kingdom on earth, with brimming barns and root cellars. An example for the parish, which, however, has its eyes firmly on the sea. The Örlanders work hard at the autumn fishing, up before dawn so they can be out at sea when the sun comes up and raise their nets, gut the fish, rinse them, pack them in barrels in neat rows, salt them, then rest in the afternoon, if they have the time, before heading out again with their herring nets. A long trip out to the fishing waters, a long way home. From Church Isle, you can see dark boats far in the distance working their way through rain and waves.

  Several people have mentioned how important the church is to them when the weather’s bad and it’s hard to see. Even though they know the right heading and know where they are, when the church appears on the top of its rocky knoll it’s still a reassurance that they’re headed right and will make it home this time too.

  “Can you explain it?” they say. “When we come to church it seems like she sits in a hollow, but when we’re out at sea, we see her up on a hill, as if she were keeping watch. It’s like a miracle. She stands up on the hill and looks for us, and when we come up from our boats on Sunday she stands down by the churchyard and welcomes us.”

  “Like the Holy Mother of God, as we’d say if we were Catholics,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thought.”

  “It’s not a thought, it’s the way it is,” the old verger says. He’s hurrying after the others, who are on their way to their boats, moving faster than they do in summer. They’ll eat and rest and be ready to go out with their nets as soon as the Sabbath is over at six o’clock.

  The summer has turned on its heel. The sailboats are sparse in the bay, and one day the last of them has gone. The guests at the parsonage have thinned out too, an
d soon they’ll be alone in the house. She and he and Sanna, who’s run wild and been spoiled by all the attention. “Now we’ll need to tighten the reins a bit,” says Mona, “and pull her back into shape.”

  Chapter Nine

  STILL AUGUST AT ITS MOST BEAUTIFUL, but the evenings are dark and there is a cold breeze. The parish around them is very hard at work, and days go by without anyone setting a foot through the parsonage door. It’s quiet at the store and the post office. There is time for heartfelt conversations with Adele Bergman and Julanda at the post office, well-informed and full of goodwill. She knows a lot because she asks questions—for example, if they won’t soon be expecting a little one at the parsonage—and she gets him to lay out his Åland family tree back to Adam. In return, she tells him how the fishing is going: not too bad, though the fisherman has never been born who would admit that it’s going well. By the middle of September, they should have taken what they need, so they’ll have time to salt down their herring and get ready for the autumn market.

  The organist has a farm and his organist’s salary, so he isn’t dependent on the herring catch the way the fishermen are, but he fishes by tradition and so that his boys can earn a little money of their own. He comes rushing to church on Sunday mornings without having rehearsed, his fingers stiff with cold, and doesn’t play as well as he does in the spring and summer; this too is a tradition. The congregation yawn and sleep discreetly during the sermon, an indulgence no one begrudges them. Then they fly away in their boats, and the verger is left in the church, pottering about and chatting with the priest, who basks in the peace and quiet like a cat. Young man that he is, surely the rush and bustle of the summer has not worn him out? Of course not, but this calm is now a welcome part of existence. Perhaps he’s become too materialistic, he tells the verger, and it’s high time he thought about the spiritual side of his work.

  But as soon as he says this, he starts laughing and has a story to tell the verger, whose cow grazes on the other side of the narrow inlet separating Church Isle from the main island. “Early this morning I was sitting in the sacristy thinking about my sermon. The light wasn’t good, and suddenly it got even darker. I thought the sun must have gone behind a cloud and I looked up at the window. And there I saw a large, dark, unmoving face with big eyes staring straight at me. I was as frightened as a child, and all sorts of thoughts went through my head. I thought of the devil, though I’ve never imagined him so substantial, and the expression ‘God sees you’ occurred to me, though I’d never pictured God looking like that either. Staring, dark. Myself, I just stared back, without moving a hair, and then I blinked and looked again. Do you know what it was? It was Gertrude, with her dark face, who’d swum across to Church Isle and now stood there staring in at me through the sacristy window. Probably as terrified as I was, and just as incapable of understanding what she saw.”

  They both laugh, but the verger is uneasy that his cow has invaded the parsonage’s pasture. “She’s a dickens of a cow for wandering off,” he says. “We’ve run the fence clear out into the water, but she swims around it, the old devil. I assume Mona sent her packing.”

  She had indeed. Armed with a big alder switch, she came dashing up and drove the blasted cow back across the island and out into the water. As if it wasn’t enough that she had to keep an eye on the tenant farmer’s animals, now she’s also got the verger’s cow to watch. There is nothing to eat on the verger’s land, grazed bare, so of course she swims over. And the tenant’s cows stretch the barbed wire till it breaks in order to get at some grass, but that’s no reason for the pastor’s cows to suffer. They’ve both been properly covered and can now graze on the meadow where fresh growth has exceeded expectations because they cut their hay so early and the dew has been rich and also the evening mist.

  It’s as if they were closer to the primitive forces of nature out here, and Petter observes that they work in harmony with the primitive forces in Mona, who has acclimatized astonishingly well. If he asks her if she likes it here, she snorts and says she doesn’t have time to think about it. She has so much to do, and when you’ve got a lot to do, you’re happy!

  Sanna is one and a half years old in September and has started to talk like a grownup. Petter falls head over heels in love. “She says ‘summer people’, she says ‘salt herring’. Isn’t that fantastic?” he says. He can’t get enough of his daughter, who acts silly and writhes with delight, and Mona gets angry. “Such nonsense!” she says. “Don’t encourage her! She has to get it through her head she’s not the queen of the castle.”

  She lifts Sanna from her Papa’s arms and Sanna screams and cries because Mama is mad. “Shame on you!” Mama says. “What a way to act! Now you can just sit in the bedroom till you can be good!” She whisks her off and puts her down in her crib with a careful thud. “No one feels sorry for you!” she says. “The way you carry on. Now you can sit here and calm down.”

  She closes the door and goes back to Petter, who looks sheepish and unhappy. Poor Sanna! She wails in despair. Why shouldn’t she be queen of the castle now and then? But he doesn’t dare say so to Mona, who is absolutely convinced that children should be kept on a short leash and not allowed to believe that they were put on earth to be courted and indulged. Discipline hurts, but it’s necessary if the child is not to become a pest. Sanna has been spoiled by all the summer guests and given an altogether exaggerated sense of her own importance. They have to take that out of her.

  Mona gives her husband a piercing look. “It’s high time she had a little brother or sister, so she’s not ruling the roost alone!”

  They’ve talked about it before and considered and planned. The best time for a new baby would be after the haymaking, when the worst of the work has been done and it’s still summer and warm. The end of July, to be exact. She counts on her fingers. “Middle of October. We can start then.”

  She makes it sound like one more job, but she looks bashful and turns away, puts her hands to her face and smiles between her fingers. He’s up from his chair and takes her in his arms. She writhes like Sanna. “Not yet! First two weeks of pastoral work till late at night.”

  This is the way the pastor and his wife practise birth control. Work their heads off so they get to bed very late and then collapse as if they’d been clubbed. And in the day, anyone at all can walk in at any time, which promotes abstinence and chastity.

  The time is well chosen. The herring market in Helsingfors begins the second Sunday in October, and large portions of the congregation head off well in advance. The last Sunday they’re at home, many of them come to church. It’s like a thanksgiving celebration for the completed fishing season. The pastor prays for those travelling to the market, and they sing a hymn about the changing seasons, “As Transformation Overtakes the Brightest Summer Day”. You can hear that the voices are hoarser and less exuberant than they were in the summer. The wind roars in the roof, and draughts make the candles flutter. Mona has put clusters of rowan berries in the altar vases since there are no longer any flowers. When the congregation heads off for home, the following wind is so strong that the boats’ exhaust fumes blow forward. When the verger has gone, they’re alone. For three weeks, so many people are gone that it no longer pays to plan gatherings of any kind. Complete tranquillity reigns.

  They look at each other and then look away. He stretches out his hand, and she backs off. She takes Sanna by the hand and walks with small birdlike steps. He follows closely, gently exultant, his body as warm as liquid bronze despite the storm. Into the parsonage, off with his kaftan. And?

  Barely past noon. Potty time for Sanna. Sunday lunch on the table. Petter can hardly stand to watch the spoon going in and out between his wife’s lips. Sanna fusses. She’s usually so good and now she’s difficult, whining and complaining for no reason. He doesn’t want to hold her, even though she’s reaching out for him in tears. Mama takes her arm hard. “Now you be quiet! Time for your nap!”

  Normally, Sanna takes a good long nap in t
he great quiet of a Sunday afternoon, but getting her to fall asleep today is like pulling teeth. She bounces up and down in her crib and cannot rest. Mama gives up trying and goes out to the kitchen to wash the dishes. “Let her fuss for a while,” she says to Petter, who throws himself down with a three-day-old newspaper and tries to read. When it’s quiet in the bedroom, he looks up. Mona looks out through the kitchen door and stands still, listening. “I’m just going to …” she says, finish up, or whatever it was she meant to say, but just as he hears her throw the dishwater quickly into the slop bucket, Sanna gives a howl from the bedroom. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her, except that she senses that they desperately want her to fall asleep. And sleep long and deep. Not on her life!

  It gets later and later, and for the first time ever when Sanna doesn’t want to take her nap, Mama gives up. Mama always wins, but now she looks at the clock and goes into the bedroom and picks up Sanna from her crib. “If it doesn’t suit you, then you can just please stay awake until tonight!” she says angrily. “Otherwise you’ll never get to sleep this evening!” Sanna hiccups from fear. When Mama is this angry, knowing a lot of words and whole sentences doesn’t help. The only thing to do is cry, and Papa has taken shelter and pretends not to hear.

  Sanna, usually so bright and curious, always finding something to do, is now nothing but unhappy. Tired, despondent. When it looks like she might be wilting, sitting on the floor and rubbing her eyes, Mama gives her a shake. “It was you who wanted to stay awake, little lady, so now just be so kind!” she says. They drink their afternoon coffee, and Sanna won’t drink a drop of milk or chew on some bread, she just sobs. The evening is so far off that it’s hard to imagine the day will ever end. Mama is mad and in a terrible mood and Papa doesn’t dare say a word.