The silk scarf that had held the little package together had gotten so moist in the rain that he asked her to burn it on the fire. He placed the small things from the package in a bag Eidi found for him. Then she hung the clothes to dry.
Foula found a few greens, an onion, and some carrots and cooked a big pot of mussel soup. The mussels lay yellow and curved like egg yolks against the bluish mother-of-pearl of the shells. The soup was hot and tasted of the ocean.
Burd joined them at the table in some of Frid’s old clothes. He sat without saying a word, his hands shaking as he ate, so that the shells rattled against the side of the bowl and against his teeth. When he finished, Foula offered him more, but he declined. Instead he slowly and carefully collected the empty shells in the bowl before getting up and padding over to his bench.
He reminded Tink of a tame bear he had once seen at a market. The huge, dangerous animal had followed its master nicely and tolerated the children who threw pebbles and shouted at it.
Tink had lifted his hand and was just about to throw something when the animal turned its head and looked straight into his eyes. Tink lowered his hand; that’s how desperate the animal looked.
“Soon I’ll have to go to town and see if I can get some food,” said Frid.
“Can’t we slaughter one of the sheep?” asked Foula.
He shook his head.
“Only the best ones are left. And we need to get grain and seeds. I hope it won’t be too long before we can start planting.”
He glanced at the bench where Burd lay.
“I would have liked to wait a little,” he said, “or to have sent Ravnar. But people are starving everywhere; these are dangerous times to travel.”
“We’ll manage,” said Ravnar, and Foula nodded.
“Why don’t you fish?” Burd asked, his back to the room.
Frid didn’t answer, so Ravnar said, “We used to live farther inland. We’ve never tried sea fishing, and we have no boat.”
“Hmmm,” growled Burd, and pulled the blanket up around his ears.
“Before I leave, we’ll clear out a room for you in the empty house,” said Frid, with an unfamiliar sharpness in his voice. “You can stay there until you feel a bit better.”
“Nice of you,” mumbled Burd.
A little later the sound of snoring made it clear that he was sleeping.
Tink didn’t like that Frid wanted to go. A bear should have a bear tamer, he thought. If only I …
Then his thoughts raced on again.
3
Tink felt as if he had swallowed a sharp stone that had gotten stuck in his throat. His pale cheeks flushed with fever, and tufts of hair stuck to his forehead.
“Even if you won’t eat, you have to drink,” said Foula. She boiled water, which she poured over dried herbs and let steep to make a strong and bitter tea. She sweetened it with a bit of the last of the sugar.
Tink forced it down.
The others were busy carrying driftwood up to the houses and laying it in long rows, so the rain could wash the saltwater out of it before it was used as firewood. The best pieces were set aside for gates and fences, doors and trapdoors. The sound of voices came through the windows and joined with the fire’s quiet crackling and Foula’s rattling with crocks and mugs.
Burd had drunk the tea she gave him. Suddenly he hurled the mug across the room, shook the blanket, and brushed something or other off his shoulders and arms with quick movements.
“Get them away!” he screamed despairingly. “I hate rats. Foula, help me!”
“It’ll pass in a little while,” she said.
“Oh, no, they’re biting me. Look at my legs!”
He pulled up Frid’s old pants and displayed his pale legs, dotted red with wounds.
“Arghhh,” he screamed, and grabbed his throat with both hands, as if he was tearing loose a rat that had latched onto him.
Foula walked over, picked up the mug, and left the room. She came back a little later and handed it to him.
He emptied it and sighed with satisfaction. “That’s the best poison to take care of rats.”
Foula had turned her back and was busy by the hearth.
Burd smiled at Tink. Then he shut one eye and winked at him.
* * *
Later Burd fumbled for a long time with a string and some other small objects he had in his jacket pockets.
“So, you little rat. If you weren’t so poorly, you could go out fishing with me.”
“Don’t call him a rat,” said Foula angrily. “He’s the one who saved your life.”
“He was? I thought it was your so-called husband who had taken pity on an unhappy wretch.”
“No, it was Tink.”
Burd looked at him with renewed interest.
“What do you know. What do you know,” he growled.
Eidi came in with Cam so they could warm themselves by the fire.
“What about you, Eidi? Do you want to go fishing with your old stepfather?”
She sat down in front of the hearth and stuck out her hands. She didn’t answer him. She pretended that he wasn’t in the room, as she had ever since she had learned who he was.
“Man talk, man talk,” said Cam, and pulled at her skirt to draw her attention to Burd.
Foula walked over and picked Cam up.
“Oh, she’s too high and mighty now. There was a time when she could play horsey on my knee and eat all the fish I could catch.”
“Just leave her alone,” said Foula wearily, and Burd stopped talking.
A bit later Eidi went out with Cam again.
“Then I’ll have to go alone,” said Burd, and got into his jacket and boots and limped out the door.
Tink lay on the settle and hoped with all his might that Burd would catch something, even the tiniest fish, so there would be even a little bit of good about having found him.
After a short while Burd came crawling in the door on all fours.
“Darn legs just won’t carry me.” He laughed painfully and fought his way up onto the settle.
Tink felt a stabbing pain in his throat when he tried to swallow his disappointment.
“Well, little rat, you saved yourself a pathetic creature. You should have let him lie there.”
“Stop it now!” said Foula, and the room grew silent.
* * *
Burd began to practice walking, with stiff steps around the table and back to the bench to rest a bit. Then out into the hallway to stand for a moment in the doorway and sniff the air, and back again to the bench.
Tink kept an eye on him and could see that he was walking better and better day by day, even though his gait was still strangely stiff.
“Look, now he’s going over to the potato house.”
Foula looked out the window.
“Yes, he’s walking quite well by now. It would be nice if he could start earning his keep.”
Tink cringed.
Burd soon returned, leaning on a long pole he had found among the driftwood.
“It’s going to be so fine, that room they are fixing up—much too fine for me, right, little rat?”
“Stop calling him a rat,” hissed Foula.
“I don’t mind,” Tink mumbled.
He sat on the settle with the blanket around his legs. He was pale, and his eyes had grown very large in his lean face. His throat was feeling better, but the fever would not let go of him. His skinny legs had gotten even skinnier from lack of use, and they had a hard time carrying him when he tottered out onto the floor.
Burd sat down and dug various things out of his jacket pockets, fiddled with them, and put them back. Then he took the pole in hand and left.
When he returned late in the afternoon, he brought a small bunch of cod, which he presented to Foula. Then he turned to Tink and winked before he threw himself on the settle in exhaustion.
* * *
At dinnertime Tink shook his head when Burd handed him a bowl of soup. Fine, white flakes of fish swam a
round among large yellow mussels, tiny dice of onions, potatoes, and carrots, and green flecks of herbs.
“I caught them for your sake,” said Burd. “So won’t you please…?”
Tink took the bowl and spoon, and for the first time in many days he ate.
Burd smiled. The cuts on his face had shrunk into a few dark crusts that protruded from his skin. His eyes shone warm and brown at Tink when he said, “You’ll see, little rat! Maybe you’ll end up being happy you found me.”
No one said anything around the table. Spoons scraped against bowls. Foula ladled out new servings, and there was again a blowing on spoonful after spoonful of hot soup until spoons clattered against empty bowls again.
“Maybe I should wait until there’s a market in Last Harbor,” said Frid.
Foula nodded.
“Then you could come,” he said, and looked at Myna.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’d like to.”
“You’re good with a shotgun, which will come in handy if we meet anyone desperate, and you’ve never seen anything but the Hamlet, and you can barely call that a town.”
“Ugh.” Myna laughed. “Don’t talk to me about that place! I start to itch all over when I think about it.”
“Then you could sell all the shawls I’ve woven,” said Eidi.
“And the goatskins,” said Ravnar.
“And perhaps buy a couple of hens,” said Foula. “We don’t have many left.”
“And some raisins,” Tink blurted out.
They all laughed, and Tink blushed.
“Well, with my own money,” he mumbled, and he lay down and turned his back to them.
“And tea and sugar,” Foula went on. “We’ll probably have to buy some seed potatoes as well.”
Eidi went over and sat down next to Tink while the others kept talking.
“We’re all just happy that you’ve started eating again,” she said. “Don’t you see?”
Tink kept his face to the wall. Eidi placed her cheek against his.
“Oh Tinkerlink,” she said, but he didn’t move.
So she got up and returned to the table.
4
“Come in,” growled Burd, and Tink opened the door to Burd’s new room in the potato house.
It still smelled of newly whitewashed walls, but also of wood smoke and wet wool clothing. Burd sat on a chair he had lashed together out of driftwood. The strings creaked and stretched every time he moved. In front of him on the table, which consisted of one broad plank, lay his hooks and lines and the small, heavy sinkers that kept the baited hooks underwater.
“Are you going fishing?” asked Tink.
Burd nodded.
“Can I come?”
“If your legs can carry you.”
“They can.”
“Have a seat while I finish this.”
Tink sat down on the bed and looked at Burd. His brown hair had been washed, and it curled onto his forehead. He was still pale, but the cuts were gone. It was hard to recognize the bruised man in him.
He looked almost as he had the very first time Tink saw him.
“What happened to the woman you were together with—and to your horse?” popped out of Tink’s mouth.
“Damn!” Burd stuck his finger in his mouth and stared at Tink in surprise.
“I was at a market a few years ago. I saw you there,” Tink said quickly.
Burd pulled out his finger and examined it. A bit of blood trickled toward his palm. He found a rag to bind it with.
“Hmmm. What became of them…? I sold the horse because I needed money, and the stupid woman—she ran off with the drunken clod who bought it. That’s what happened to them.”
“You drink yourself,” Tink objected.
“There are those of us who like to wet our whistle, and then there are those who don’t think about anything else. There’s a big difference,” Burd said firmly, putting on his jacket and patting the pockets.
“Ready?”
Tink nodded and got up.
Together they walked past the house where Tink lived and down the path along the stone walls to the sea.
* * *
Burd pressed his knife in between the shells and forced them open. The still-living mussel contracted and quivered when he cut it loose and pressed it onto the hook. The fish he had unhooked lay dead on the boulder next to him.
Tink helped him bait the hooks, and when they ran out of mussels he waded out into the cold water and collected more in a woven basket.
When he began not to be able to feel his legs, he sat down by the little fire Burd had made, warming himself until his feet pricked and tingled.
They had gone all the way down the coast to where the seals were. In the pool between the two rows of boulders that stuck out into the sea, the water was almost always calm, and mussels hung in heavy bunches from every rock.
The sky was a deep blue between dark clouds. Occasionally a few heavy drops fell from them before they drifted on and let the sun peek out. Flocks of ducks drew arrowheads above them, and the air sang with the flutter of wings and the sound of bird calls. Tink pulled on his thick, knitted socks and poked his feet into his boots.
“I’m going to walk up the coast a bit.”
“You do that,” growled Burd, with his knife in his mouth and his hands full of fishing lines and hooks, lead sinkers and bait.
* * *
No one had collected driftwood here. The beach was covered with silvery-gray wood after the winter’s storms. Tink began to collect it in piles away from the water’s edge, so the sea wouldn’t tear it away again and throw it onto land somewhere else.
Then he saw it—so high that it was hard to imagine the water had gotten all the way up there. The bow of the boat pointed in toward land, as if it had been pulled ashore. He looked around. But no one was there.
He climbed up to it. A rowboat without oars—intact and clearly watertight because rainwater had been held in and covered the bottom. He walked around it and scrutinized it from all sides. There was nothing to see but a boat, a dark, tarred boat without a name or sign, led to land in an angry storm without a scratch.
Tink ran back to Burd and told him about it. Burd wanted to come see, but it was as if his joints locked and his legs wouldn’t behave.
“Well, never mind,” he said. “You say it’s lying far up?”
Tink nodded.
“Then we’ll let it lie there until I make a couple of oars and we can row it home.”
He took the bunch of fish in one hand and the pole in the other, and using it as a cane, he limped along the shore toward home. Tink took the basket of mussels and followed.
* * *
All the potatoes had been eaten, but now it didn’t matter. Myna and Ravnar had shot a young goat. It was hanging in the attic. Foula cut large hunks of the dark meat and put them on spits across the embers, and the whole room filled with the lovely smell of roasted meat. They ate until the fat dripped down their chins and they couldn’t squeeze down another bite.
And when there wasn’t meat on the table, there was fish. Roasted flounder with crispy skin, warm soups with white flakes and the springlike taste of the first tiny nettle leaves. And mussels. Fat and yellow in the soups or just placed on the embers until they opened invitingly.
Frid and Myna got ready to leave for the spring market in Last Harbor. Eidi’s shawls were packed on Doup’s little horse along with the goatskins and a smoked leg of goat. Tink offered them his money, but Frid would have none of it.
“That’s all you have, and that’s what you’ll need to secure your future.”
So the golden coins stayed in his purse, which Eidi had hidden in a safe place.
Frid rode on Eidi’s horse and Myna on Tink’s. They had their shotguns on their backs when they pulled the horses up the steep path from the cove. When they reached the crest of the hill, they turned and waved. You had to strain to see them.
Tink shaded his eyes with one hand and lifted the other in
greeting, but Myna and Frid had already turned their backs on the cove. Burd put an arm around Foula and pulled her toward him.
“Well, little mother,” he said.
Foula shook off his embrace and walked quickly back to the house, and Eidi glared at him furiously.
* * *
Burd had whittled two oars from the driftwood. Tink balanced them on his shoulder, and together they went to collect the boat.
Burd rowed it home. Tink sat in the bow and kept an eye out for sandbars and rocks. The wind brushed his hair away from his brow. He lay down on his stomach and stuck his fingers in the water. Small waves danced along the boat’s sides and rocked it up and down.
When he looked toward the shore, he recognized every part of the landscape, yet everything looked completely different. Far away Myna’s house glowed white against the grayish-brown cliff, then the potato house and the barn and his own house appeared, and finally came the fenced-in fields, where Foula walked, bent over the earth. Tink waved at her. But she didn’t see him.
“Well, little rat, finally something you like. How lucky that you found it. Now we’re going to fish.”
And Tink turned around and smiled at him, his first smile in a long time.
* * *
Back at Crow Cove, Burd showed Tink how to bait a fishing line.
“Spread your arms!”
Tink did as he was told.
“Now try to reach my hands!”
Burd held his hands as far apart as he could, and they compared.
“You have long arms. Seven of your fathoms against five of mine, I think. Measure seven fathoms on the line and attach a hook, like this!”
He showed him how.
“Then seven fathoms more and a new hook, the entire length of the line. You see?”
Tink nodded and began.
Burd was cutting strips from the light belly of a coalfish. He held one of the strips aloft and made it flap its tail.
“What does that look like?”
Tink laughed.
“Precisely! That’s how we’ll fool them. A line full of shiny little fish. What do you think?”
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