The Crow-Girl--The Children of Crow Cove

by Bodil Bredsdorff

  The Crow-Girl could see that his eyes had begun to glisten and that his mouth quivered a tiny bit. She sat completely still so that he would not burst into tears.

  His gaze was empty and far out across the sea. Then he took a deep breath and continued. “It was not until we were on the way here that he said she had fallen into the bog.”

  He stared blankly again, letting his glance slide out toward the horizon. An eagle screeched above their heads. And the water prattled among the stones.

  “There’s a large bog in the heath that stretches up to our house,” he said.

  The Crow-Girl nodded.

  “He was so used to going hunting out there that I think he had totally forgotten how dangerous it could be. Then one day he took my mother and Doup along to gather berries.”

  “Doup!” exclaimed the Crow-Girl.

  “Yes, he was sitting on my father’s shoulders. It was then that my mother slipped and…” Ravnar hid his face in his hands and allowed himself to cry. Great sobs rose up from his very depths and made his shoulders shake.

  The Crow-Girl cautiously laid her hand on his back and held it there until he stopped crying. When he lifted his head, she removed her hand.

  He dried his eyes with his knuckles. They sat for a long while looking out across the sea.

  Then the Crow-Girl got up. “Come on, let’s go back.”

  * * *

  Later in the afternoon Frid appeared on the crest of the hill with a young billy goat across his shoulders. It had taken him the better part of the day to get into shooting distance of it.

  He skinned and cleaned it on the flat stone in the brook, and Foula promised to care for the skin so Doup would have it to sleep on.

  Frid cut off a leg for dinner, and the rest of the carcass was hung up in the attic.

  The Crow-Girl sat on the bench outside the house and followed him with her eyes, especially when he and Ravnar went down to the shore together.

  The sun was about to set out across the sea, and the two figures stood like black silhouettes against the pink clouds and the glowing sun. They talked for a long time.

  At last, black spots began to dance before the Crow-Girl’s eyes, and she closed them to make the spots go away.

  When she opened her eyes again, Frid and Ravnar were standing before her. Ravnar smiled at her, and Frid said, “We would be pleased to accept your invitation.”

  16

  The Crow-Girl suggested to Frid that he repair the empty house, the house they used as a stable for the horse. But Frid wanted to fix it up for Foula and Eidi.

  “One day, you will surely want to have your own house. And Eidi will, too,” he said. “So Ravnar and I will take the ruin. And then Doup can join us later, when he is prepared to do so,” he added a little sorrowfully, for Doup had not yet been willing to let Frid pick him up.

  * * *

  A couple of days later Frid and Ravnar set off for the town that lay farther up the main road. There, Frid would sell his house and land, and for the money he would buy lumber, lime, and mortar and have it all transported down the coast to the cove.

  When they returned by the boat that was carrying their goods for them, it became apparent that Frid had gotten a good price for his place. There had been enough money to buy all kinds of things.

  In addition to the materials for the houses, there had been sufficient money for a little plow that the horse could pull, a sack of oats, and a sack of potatoes.

  For Doup he had bought a pair of woolen trousers, and for Eidi, Foula, and the Crow-Girl he had bought each a piece of cloth for a dress. Eidi’s was light brown with a gold-leaf pattern; Foula’s was a subdued apple-green with small red berries with dark-green stems; and the Crow-Girl’s was sky-blue with white feathers sprinkled all over it.

  But the best of all was the furniture he gave the Crow-Girl in thanks for her having taken such good care of Doup, and as a sort of payment for entrusting him with the ruin and the fields around it.

  There were two settles of light, varnished wood, each as yellow and shiny as honey and with flowering vines and birds carved into a border along the back; a large dining table with two benches; and two chairs with slatted backs and arms in the same shiny yellow wood.

  The Crow-Girl was filled with such joy when she saw it all that she threw her arms around Frid’s waist. Doup, who wanted to join in, threw his arms around his legs. And Frid laughed.

  * * *

  In the evening they sat around the table eating the stew Foula had boiled up from some of the goat meat and some of the potatoes Frid had brought.

  “How good it tastes,” said Ravnar, sighing with satisfaction, as he took his third helping.

  “Make sure to enjoy it, because it will be a long time before you get potatoes again,” said Frid. “The rest must go into the ground. There’s just enough time left. And then it’ll be a while before we see a potato again.”

  “Not at all,” said Foula with a smile, “for mine are already about to flower.”

  “Yum,” said Eidi, because she loved new potatoes.

  “I think Ravnar and I will begin with the land and then later fix up the houses—if we may live in the attic until then?” said Frid, looking at the Crow-Girl.

  She nodded with her mouth full of food. Doup began to nod in the same way, and they all had to laugh.

  Just at that moment the door was thrown open. A large, heavy man with a full red beard and a broad woman with a little gray knot of hair on top of her head stood in the doorway.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman shrieked. “Don’t you realize that this is private property?”

  The Crow-Girl leapt up from the bench.

  “Private property!” she shouted. “You bet your life it is! My property, that’s exactly what it is. And don’t you ever come here and steal from me again!”

  Doup became frightened and started to cry. Eidi lifted him to her lap and started consoling him.

  Frid, Ravnar, and Foula had also risen, and they all had their hands on the knives in their belts.

  The man and his wife, dumbfounded, remained standing just inside the door.

  Frid walked over and placed himself in front of them.

  “Well, you’re here at last,” he said, and to the Crow-Girl’s surprise he sounded nearly friendly. “You’ve been a rather long time in coming to settle accounts for the furnishings, not to mention the driftwood, but…”

  “Driftwood,” snapped the woman. “Everyone has a right to gather that.”

  “Yes, in the place where one lives,” said Frid, and his voice took on a slightly harsher tone; “otherwise, it counts as theft. But that, of course, is not the case here, for I can see that you have brought the money along.”

  He had pulled the knife up from his belt and was pointing it at the heavy leather pouch hanging from the man’s belt. The man began to loosen it.

  “Don’t you do it!” the woman yelled.

  Frid continued in a calm voice. “There is, after all, the possibility that we’ll report it.”

  The man had gotten the pouch free and handed it to Frid. Frid took it and handed it to the Crow-Girl.

  The woman stepped slightly closer, and now her voice had completely changed. “You surely haven’t the heart to do that, have you now, little Crow-Girl,” she fawned. “After everything we have done for you? Didn’t you get all you could eat, a good fire to sit by, and a bed to sleep in?”

  The Crow-Girl nodded, but she hugged the pouch to her. At the woman’s words, she began to itch all over her body, and she did not dare to let go of the money in order to scratch.

  “For heaven’s sake, just stop it!” shouted Frid. “First you let her toil and drudge for you, then you steal everything she has, and now you tell her that she owes you thanks. Get out!” He was so furious that his words cut through the air like the crack of a whip, and his eyes flashed icily blue.

  “There is no harm in teaching children gratitude,” said the woman, aggrieved. “We had plann
ed to take her in as our own. You can be sure we’re good people. We just wanted to look after her things, so that no one would steal…”

  “OUT!” bellowed Frid.

  And the woman and the man dared not do anything but turn around and hurry out the door.

  “Such an ungrateful, thieving child” was the last they heard from the woman before the door slammed shut with a bang.

  The Crow-Girl put the pouch down on the table and started to scratch herself. “Ugh,” she said. “That woman always gets my entire body to itching.”

  “What awful people they are,” said Foula, and sat down.

  Frid was still so angry that his hands were trembling. “If she had been able to steal this house, I’m sure she would have taken it along, too,” he said. He placed his hands on the tabletop to keep them still. “Gratitude,” he snorted. Then he tossed his head as if to shake off his anger. “Now, Crow-Girl, let’s see what they’ve paid you for what they took.”

  The Crow-Girl opened the pouch, and a whole handful of gold coins rolled out on the table.

  “Hurray!” shouted Eidi. “Now you are rich.”

  “Hooway!” shouted Doup, and clapped his hands.

  “What a lot of money,” said Ravnar.

  “Now you can buy anything you want,” said Foula.

  “I know what I would like the most,” said the Crow-Girl.

  “What is that?” asked Frid.

  “A gun.”

  “A gun?” said Foula, surprised.

  “Yes,” said the Crow-Girl. “For if a person can hunt, there’s never any need to go hungry.” Then she looked at Frid. “Will you teach me how?”

  “You can count on it.”

  * * *

  The Crow-Girl gave each of the others a gold coin so they could buy whatever they wanted for themselves, and the rest she hid up in the chimney behind a loose stone.

  The next time Frid and Ravnar went into town, they bought a spinning wheel, three plump brown hens, and a rooster for Foula; a loom and two combing cards for Eidi; a cow for Doup, so that he would always have round cheeks; a sheep and twelve small windowpanes for Frid; and a gun for Ravnar and one for the Crow-Girl.

  In the course of the summer Frid taught them how to hunt: to walk up against the wind and to sneak up on their prey, to wait for hours in hiding by a ford, and to skin and cut up the animals they had shot. And Foula showed them how to tan the skins.

  They soon became good at hunting both deer and goats, but the Crow-Girl liked best of all to walk along the shore alone to shoot ducks.

  Glennie proved to be a good hunting dog. When the Crow-Girl shot a duck out over the water, Glennie swam out to get it, carefully carrying it in her mouth back to land.

  But the Crow-Girl never went hunting out by the seals’ pool, and she never fired a shot when there was a crow nearby.

  17

  Foula’s potatoes were the first to flower, then Frid’s. The oats stood rustling in their field, first green and later yellow. Parsnips and carrots waved their feathery tips in the wind. The kale grew tall and crinkly, and the lambs as large as sheep, and Doup’s arms were growing out of the sleeves of his sweater.

  The ruin had become a house, which, along with the stable Frid had built for the cow and the horse, stood shining bright white against the green grass and the gray rocks.

  The empty house was no longer empty. Frid had repaired the roof, and Foula and Eidi had whitewashed it both inside and out. And afterward they had whitewashed the Crow-Girl’s.

  * * *

  One fall day the Crow-Girl was sitting on the bench outside the house cleaning carrots and potatoes. Glennie, with her head on her front paws, lay dozing in the warm sunshine by the girl’s feet.

  There was a dead calm, and the smoke from the three chimneys was curling straight up into the sky. Foula was busy cleaning the whitewash off the windowpanes of her and Eidi’s house. Eidi was over in the kitchen garden gathering in the last potatoes. A brown hen and a flock of half-grown chickens were scurrying around between Eidi’s feet, searching for worms and other little creatures in the black dirt.

  Doup was at Frid and Ravnar’s. He was walking around with a hammer that Frid had made from the hammerhead the Crow-Girl had found in the ruin, and he was beating on everything that he came close to. Frid was busy making a table and some benches out of the wood that had been left over from the construction. Ravnar was helping him, and Doup believed that he was, too. The sheep were grazing along the banks of the brook.

  The Crow-Girl sat enjoying the sight of the little group of houses. They almost resembled a real hamlet, she thought, with the smoke from the chimneys and all the people and animals.

  Then she saw a figure approaching them by the inland path. She shaded her eyes with her hand and saw a pointed cap on top of a small, round person.

  “Rossan!” she shouted, running with Glennie to meet him.

  Eidi had also recognized him and came running over the plank across the brook. They reached him simultaneously, and he threw an arm around each of them.

  “Such a welcome,” he said.

  And then they all began to talk at the same time, telling about everything that had happened since they parted from him.

  “There, there,” said Rossan laughing. “One at a time.”

  “Who is looking after your sheep?” the Crow-Girl wanted to know.

  “My sister’s next oldest boy came by to see if there was anything he could help me with. So I thought I would use the opportunity to see how all of you were. And fortunately you all seem to be just fine.”

  Foula came running, while drying her hands on her apron, and she and Rossan embraced. At last Frid and Ravnar and Doup came.

  Glennie barked, and everyone talked, and suddenly Eidi shouted in order to drown them all out. “Now we’re going to have a party. We’ll butcher my male lamb.”

  * * *

  That is what they did, or, more precisely, that is what Rossan and Foula did, while Eidi hid inside the house.

  They placed the legs on a spit over the Crow-Girl’s hearth and put a lot of big potatoes in the hot ashes. And in the evening they ate at her shiny yellow table, with Rossan at one end and the Crow-Girl at the other.

  Frid sat beside the Crow-Girl with Doup on his lap and cut up small bits of meat for him. Fat was running down Doup’s chin as he stuffed in the pieces faster than he could chew them.

  “Now, now,” said Frid. “Take it easy, there’s food enough.”

  After a while they all began to eat more slowly.

  “By the way, I ran into your husband the last time I was at the market,” said Rossan to Foula. “I don’t think you need fear his showing up. He has found a woman that he makes the rounds with at every single market for miles about, and they both drink, I daresay, the same amount.”

  The Crow-Girl glanced over at Foula to see if she was saddened by it, but she just smiled and looked relieved.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  Eidi nodded.

  As they went on talking, the Crow-Girl sat regarding them:

  Foula, who with reddened cheeks was smiling at Frid;

  Frid, who was smiling back above Doup’s head and who told her that this was the best roast lamb he had ever tasted;

  Doup, who had finally had his fill and was now playing horse with a piece of meat, trotting it across the plate and out onto the table, while he made clicking noises with his tongue;

  Eidi, who was still gnawing on a bone and had apparently forgotten all about its having been a part of her own light-brown male lamb;

  Rossan with his neat beard, who was talking eagerly with Ravnar;

  Ravnar, who again and again pushed a dark forelock away from his eyes.

  She looked about the room—over in the corner at the broad bed that was entirely covered with goatskins, where she and Doup slept together; at the shadows that in the light of the fire were dancing on the newly whitewashed walls; at the light that was reflected in the honey-yel
low wood of the settle, so the birds and flowers across the back looked as if they were moving.

  “Look at her eyes,” said Rossan.

  It dawned on the Crow-Girl that they were all looking at her.

  She was sitting at the end of the table and wearing the new dress Foula had sewn for her. White feathers floated down on the sky-blue fabric, and the sleeves reached all the way to her wrists. Her hair was black and shiny, and the silk ribbon that Rossan had once given her could be seen in blue glimpses down through the braid at her back. At the end of it hung a black-and-gray crow’s feather. And her eyes! They were gleaming dark blue, nearly black, beneath her dark brows.

  “I think we should toast Crow-Girl,” said Frid, “for it’s owing to her that we are together.”

  They lifted their mugs and toasted her, and she could feel that her eyes began to glisten and her cheeks grow warm.

  When Frid had put down his mug again, he said, “Tell me something. Wasn’t ‘Crow-Girl’ what that horrible woman from the hamlet by the fjord called you?”

  The Crow-Girl nodded. “Well, she said that I resembled one, and so I said that that was my name. She continued to ask what my name was, and that was the only one I could come up with.”

  “But isn’t there something else you would rather be called?” Frid asked.

  “I don’t know what it would be,” she said.

  “Mine Cwo, mine,” called Doup, stretching his arms out toward her.

  She lifted him onto her lap, and he threw his arms around her before she could manage to dry the fat off his fingers. “How about Myna?” she asked.

  “Myna,” Doup said, delighted.

  “Then that’s what I will be called,” the Crow-Girl said with a big smile. “Myna.”

  “It seems that Doup has helped you find a name, just as you found one for him,” said Foula.

  “A toast to Myna,” said Rossan, and stood up. The others did the same.

  When they had sat down again, Ravnar said, “I think it’s a shame if we completely forget ‘Crow-Girl,’ so what do all of you say to our calling the place here Crow Cove?”