The vestry and the council also head off in the wake of the surging Coast Guard cutters, but for them a quick reunion awaits. The very next day, all the Örlanders who helped or contributed to the celebration are invited back for coffee, which will give them a chance to relive the events of the day in relative peace and quiet and allow the priest and his wife to thank everyone properly, as they deserve, with great warmth, communal song, and the love and respect of their new vicar.
But now, finally, they stand there stupefied—Petter and Mona, Grandma and Grandpa. Thanks to the Coast Guard, the house is not full of overnight guests. Grandma and Grandpa are to sleep in the guest room, Cecilia in the attic. It is utterly quiet, a slight chill in the air, and they shiver as they stand on the steps. Petter, who has been standing as if bewitched, shakes himself loose. “Now let’s go in. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all caught cold on the warmest day of the year? We’ll have a cup of tea, and then everyone to bed.”
Mona looks out across the desolate party site. A couple of her finely woven tablecloths overlapping on the long table are covered with ugly sauce and coffee stains, but it’s a small price to pay. Before they went home, the Marthas did a huge job— all the serving dishes, platters, and bowls have been cleared, washed, and sorted according to where they came from. There is warm water on the stove, and before long it’s boiling and everyone gets a cup of tea. Not even father Leonard has more to say. The lively conversations, speeches, and babble of the day echo in everyone’s head, along with the music from the organ and the breasts of the Örlanders. Cecilia has said goodnight and gone up, the others say goodnight and pour wash water into pitchers and go to bed. The vicar and his wife long to lie flat on their backs and say a few words, entire sentences if they have the strength, before they sleep.
But Mona has a hard time relaxing. It’s midnight, but she worries that there aren’t enough pastries left over for the locals. She set aside a considerable quantity of sweet rolls in the cellar, but at some point during the day she grew nervous and pinched some of the reserve and put them on the table. In the middle of the night, she stands in the cellar with a flashlight in her hand and counts sweet rolls and counts Örlanders and counts the people who may wander in uninvited. If no one takes two, there may be enough.
It is not true that you can lay your troubles before the Lord and lay your head calmly to rest, trusting in Him, because the church of Christ is heavily dependent on its ground crew. Ask and you shall receive—well, yes you shall, if someone has done the baking and set the table. Everyone has thanked God for this fine day, and Mona can go so far as to thank Him for her health and strength, which, thanks to Doctor Gyllen, allows her once again to work like a dog. But if the dog didn’t work, they’d all sit there twiddling their thumbs while their stomachs rumbled. Miracles are thin on the ground; work is everywhere waiting to be done!
Chapter Twenty-One
IN THEORY AT LEAST, the vicar and his wife can take it a little easier now that his pastoral exam and installation are behind them. For Petter, it means that he allows himself to enjoy the beautiful days that August still has up its sleeve. The congregation is busy with its fishing, and he has no pressing duties except Sunday’s sermon and occasional functions. He makes his pastoral visits to the elderly and deals with the recurrent paperwork in his office, but he does have a little time to himself, so he sometimes goes out for a walk with Sanna. It is a great concern to him that a good clergyman must neglect his family. A shepherd who devotes most of his time to his family must necessarily neglect his parish.
It breaks his heart to look at them, Sanna and Lillus, the way they love him and forgive him everything, no, do not even see that there is anything to forgive. Adoring and happy, they cling to him and love him however much he is away, however little time he has for them, however much he forbids them to stick their noses into his office, however often he goes off and leaves them. They stand and wave for as long as he’s in sight, and when he comes back after what must seem an eternity to a child, he can hear their joy even before he opens the door. There are a lot of sentimental verses written about a mother’s love, but as far as he knows, very little has been written about children’s love, which is like God’s, unconditional and boundless.
However much Sanna watches over Lillus and however hard she finds it to believe that Lillus could survive without her big sister, she abandons her nevertheless when she and Papa go out for a walk. They wander around Church Isle and look at plants and birds and Sanna learns all their names. They climb hills and jump on rocks and splash in the water, and as they walk Papa talks about things that he knows all too well what Mona would think of. Like this business of studying. “It’s remarkable,” he says to Sanna, “but after all the trouble I had studying for my pastoral exam, which was sometimes terribly boring, I still have a desire to study. Not theology but something else. Botany, for example. Someone could make a terrifically interesting study of the flora in a well-grazed landscape like this one. You could have ungrazed areas as test sections for comparison. My suspicion is that an intensively grazed landscape will have a greater diversity of plants, whereas in the ungrazed area just a few dominant species will take over. It would be fascinating to study the way plants adapt to intensive grazing. The ones that manage to bloom have to grow low and fast, maybe creep along the ground. Where the soil is shallow, the way it is here, it dries out quickly, so the species that survive have to be better than average at tolerating dry conditions. It’s questions like that that interest me! Would you like to be my assistant? That means my helper. What do you think?”
“Yes!” says Sanna, where Mona says, “Don’t you think you have enough to do? When you were finally done with your pastoral exam I thought we’d get a little rest on that front.” True, true, but Sanna says, “Yes!” Willing, full of love, her hand lies in his. All right then! Botanical assistant it shall be.
But then he goes on thinking out loud. “But even more, I think I’d like to get into ethnology. What an unbelievable field of study the Örlands could be! In fact, I have a unique opportunity to get to know people here and to understand how they think. What other job lets you go into people’s houses and get to know people the way I can do as a priest? You know what? I think I’ll study ethnology as an academic discipline and have botany as a side interest, just for the fun of it.”
“Yes!” says Sanna.
“Thanks,” says Papa. “As soon as we’ve got a motorboat and a horse and the bridge is finished and everything gets much easier, then we can start. I’ve got lots of ideas about what I could write my dissertation on. People’s ideas about signs and omens, for example. The old skin-clad men who warn of dangers, dreams that carry messages. Those kinds of things. The closest word is folklore, but I could also write about information-sharing in a rural community. Communications are difficult and everything is far away, and yet when something happens, word spreads like wildfire. Of course the telephone has a lot to do with that, but what’s interesting is that it was probably the same way before the Örlands had telephones. If people call each other in a certain pattern then I’d guess that same pattern was the basis of information-sharing even before the telephone. Family relationships are decisive here, and my hypothesis is that newcomers without family ties remain far outside the well-established information networks. But I have to test the theory and be able to prove it. There are an incredible number of interesting dissertation possibilities just here on the Örlands. It’s a small, defined area, in the winter it’s even isolated. It’s fantastic that all this is here just waiting for me!”
“Yes!” says Sanna. She looks at him earnestly and understands that he’s talking about important things and she’ll be allowed to be part of it as his assistant. His hand is warm, his voice deep, but then he sighs.
“But where will I find the time? Mama and I have way too much to do, and we never get enough sleep. We can’t go on like this indefinitely. And yet I’d still like to find a new subject to study, now that I’m finished
. Do you think I’m out of my mind?”
Sanna stops and laughs, and Papa starts laughing too. “Oh well,” he says. “You’ve got to have plans for the future, even when you don’t know how you’re going to make them happen. Come on, let’s go get those perch from the live box and clean them like Mama asked us to.”
As if to prove his hypothesis about the way information travels on the islands, a large quantity of smuggled liquor arrives on the Örlands, and the parsonage is the last place to hear about it.
If the priest hadn’t come cycling to the store on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, they would never have had to know that a large cargo had been dumped in the outer archipelago and taken in hand by local Örlanders, this news having made a detour around the Coast Guard, the parsonage, and the police. The scene was utterly peaceful as he approached on his bike. For some reason, the phrase “pastoral idyll” crossed his mind—peacefully grazing cows, no visible activity anywhere, woolly clouds in the sky, a benevolent sun shining down on all of it. Like life on earth before the Fall, he thought, smiling, and the faces he began to see as he pedalled into the largest of the west villages beamed with goodwill and bonhomie. Down by the village harbour they were remarkably stationary, sat where they sat, waved slowly and royally in answer to his greeting. Like a quiet Sunday in the middle of a weekday.
What was it they put down in the grass when he came? They were clearly on some kind of break, half sitting or half lying down, and they made no effort to rise or get busy with something when he came. One of them started to sing and the others hushed him but burst out laughing. Their good spirits were perfectly normal. Their particularly good spirits were not.
“May I sit down?” the vicar asked. “Please do,” they said, as they always did. But they laughed and wouldn’t look at him.
“Would I be wrong if I guessed that something amusing has happened?” he said.
They glanced at each other furtively and their bellies bounced with mirth. One young smart aleck said, “Yesterday’s catch was a little better than usual.” They lay back on their elbows and guffawed. The phrase “drunk with laughter” occurred to the vicar, and then simply the word “drunk”. Quite simply, plastered. Drunk as lords, or maybe not—able to talk but clearly unsteady on their legs.
A tough situation for the priest, who was seen as a kind of authority figure and who might be expected to report them. He found himself in a situation where he didn’t belong and wasn’t welcome but where the level of inebriation led to his being cordially received. He couldn’t just get up and leave, so he said, breezily, “Fish with corks and labels, sounds like. Fish that sort of gurgle.”
They laughed till they cried. And of course one of them, in accordance with the rules of hospitality, asked if he wanted a taste. They looked at him expectantly. His answer would show what calibre of priest they had. Whether they could feel respect for him. They wanted him to have a drink with them, but on the other hand, if word got around that he sat tippling with the men that time the load of liquor came in, he would never be able to regain their respect for his office. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “But I catch my own fish.”
There was no great reaction to this statement, and he started to walk to his bicycle. “Have a pleasant day,” he said in farewell. “And congratulations on your catch.”
For the first time, he felt like a total outsider. Who should have had the sense to stay away. He did his shopping at the Co-op without seeing Adele and biked straight home. Both Coast Guard cutters lay at their dock, he noticed, neither out on patrol. He heard later that both Brage and the police had been at home and invisible, seized with a sudden strong yearning for the home fires and old newspapers that needed to be read from cover to cover.
There was a great deal that he heard afterwards, and his already multifaceted congregation gained one further dimension— they appeared to possess intimate knowledge of the various types of distilled spirits, knew the names of the most exotic brands, and seemed to have considerable insight into the prices they would bring on the black market and in restaurants. He himself was like a newborn baby in that area and full of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he should strongly disapprove and condemn what had occurred. On the other hand, it was a manifestation of the anarchic and pragmatic attitude towards land-based law that he found so exhilarating and admirable in his sovereign Örlanders. On the third hand, he saw more clearly than ever before that he was excluded from certain aspects of their lives, no matter how much he had convinced himself otherwise.
Chastened and torn, he turns inward instead towards his neglected children. During all the preparations for his installation as vicar, Lillus has her first birthday. At breakfast, Papa puts a rose on her plate. Quick as a wink, she stuffs it in her mouth. Mama leans forward and digs it out amidst Lillus’s injured screams. “On her plate!” she scolds her husband. “You know she puts everything in her mouth, and you put it on her plate! We’ve been trying to teach her to eat only what’s on her plate!”
Papa looks abashed. Thoughtless. As foolish as father Leonard himself. But was it really so dangerous? Anything Lillus doesn’t like, she immediately spits out. She investigates things by stuffing them in her craw, and there an automatic sorting process takes place. Stones, bits of wood and birchbark from the woodpile, candle wax, soap, napkins, pen wipers, erasers, buttons are all rejected. As far as they can tell, she rarely swallows things she shouldn’t, and when she does, they presumably come out the natural way. She chews larger things experimentally. The parsonage contains nothing at Lillus’s height that she hasn’t nibbled on. Towels, curtains, tablecloths that hang over the edge—all have damp hems, and she chews on the hem of her dress and on her collar, and she tastes boots and wool socks in the hall. Her father notes that she goes about it calmly, almost scientifically. Mama rushes over and stops her, but when Papa sees her gnawing on the leg of a chair in the parlour, he laughs and knows what he’ll say next time some sailboat visitor asks why the Örlands are so barren. It’s because of Lillus, he’ll say. The Örlands were once covered with pine forest, but then Lillus came into the world and started to nibble. Eventually the forest was chewed down, and then she started on the broad-leaf trees and the bushes. But mostly she munches on the furniture and accessories in the parsonage. Miss Woodworm, he calls her, the scourge of the Örlands.
She’s beginning to be so much fun, he thinks. She’s started to walk, and soon she’ll start to talk. He can already communicate with her. They play while Mama milks the cows. “What does the cow say?” “Moo!” “What does the ewe say?” “Baa!” “What does the pig say?” “Oink!” “What does the kitty say?” “Meow!” On an impulse, he says, “What does Papa say?” Lillus is in ecstasy, laughs so her eyes disappear. “Moo!” “Does Papa say Moo?” he asks, and she shouts, “Moo!” and throws herself on the floor with hilarity. Then he says, “What does Mama say?” She stops for a moment as if weighing his ability to get a joke. “Usch! Pugh!” she says, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, which sparkles with merriment. He is so surprised that he whoops with laughter, and then she laughs too. When Mama and Sanna come in from the milking, they are lying in a heap on the floor shouting, “Moo!” and “Usch pugh!” and “Baa!” and “Moo!” and “Usch pugh!”
“What are you doing?” Mama wants to know. “Don’t get her all excited just before her bedtime!”
“Sorry,” he says. “Do you think a person can have a sense of humour even at this early age?”
“Maybe,” says Mama. She has already dragged Lillus off the floor and Papa stands up shamefaced. She examines Lillus, who has accumulated new stains and wrinkles since she saw her last. Her hair is like Kivi’s Seven Brothers, the whole child like an unmade bed. “Sanna was always much tidier,” Mama says. “Lillus looks like she lived in a sty, and yet I run myself ragged trying to keep her clean.”
Lillus screams and cries. Left to herself and Sanna and Papa, she is sunny and content, but Mama, who does the actual pare
nting, finds altogether too much in Lillus’s character that must be driven out and replaced with regular habits and sound morals. In principle, Papa agrees with all of this and bows to his wife’s methods because she’s the one who takes the day-to-day responsibility. But he understands why big tears run down Lillus’s cheeks. Lillus doesn’t like regular habits. Left to herself, she happily takes a couple of naps in the course of the day, rolled up under the cupboard or next to the tile stove, but when Mama discovers her, she hauls her out and forces her into bed, and then she can’t sleep. One of Mama’s tasks is to teach Lillus that you take naps in bed, and that you don’t eat when you’re hungry but at fixed times. When she wakes up at night and cries, Mama lifts her crib into the study and closes the door so she’ll learn not to expect to be picked up in the middle of the night and coddled. At night, you’re to sleep, and in the morning, you’re to wake up bright and cheery!
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