Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  Jonathan looked at the sheep. It popped a turd onto his floor. Sigurd got out of the chair.

  “I’m going to get the gun,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Jonathan sat down in the chair and put his head in his hands. The sheep clicked over to him on its sharp, small hooves and bent its head down to his and sniffed. Then it said “Ah-ah-ah.” Jonathan put his hand on its hard brow and looked into its black eyes. In a horrible facsimile of a human movement, the sheep tipped its head to the side to get a better look at Jonathan. At this, a lump filled Jonathan’s throat.

  It was completely impossible to have this sheep for dinner. He was not so sentimental that he would forego eating lamb altogether, but it was intolerable to eat a sheep he knew, even if only slightly. He would explain this to Sigurd and arrange to get half of a different sheep—which would be better anyhow because he didn’t think he should get special treatment in the village. Resolved, Jonathan stood up.

  Sigurd came in the door after the gun, which he held at arm’s length in front of him. “I hate this,” he said. Before Jonathan could get a word out, he’d pushed the sheep onto the floor, sat on its back, and shot it in the head. The shot, muffled by all that thick bone, sounded like the merest thud in a nearby yard. The sheep’s tail twitched once.

  “Get a pot,” said Sigurd, He stood up and put the gun on the counter beside the sink.

  Jonathan didn’t move.

  “Hey. Get a pot.” Sigurd pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt.

  Jonathan got a pot and returned to his spot on the floor, with the pot hanging from his hand.

  Sigurd took the pot from him and put it next to the sheep’s head. Then he cut a gash in the neck and lifted the animal up so that it lay on the pot with its blood pouring out. The blood was thin, pink, frothy, and quick to flow, and it flowed for more than ten minutes, during which Sigurd raised the sheep’s hindparts so all the blood could come out and Jonathan stood in his spot.

  “Okay,” said Sigurd, finally. The carcass was flat and shrunken. He took up his knife and sawed off the head; the neckbones resisted the blade, and he had to work the knife back and forth, making a scraping noise, to cut through. He put the head on the counter beside the gun. The ears, drained of blood, flopped down like a spaniel’s.

  Sigurd stood up and flexed his legs. The floor around his feet was a mess: wool, blood, and bits of flesh and bone surrounded the body. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess in America you have a special room to slaughter the sheep, no? You don’t do it in the kitchen.”

  “No,” Jonathan said. He could barely get the word out.

  “Now,” Sigurd said, wiping his knife on his pants, “the innards.” He slit the belly with one quick move, and the long, pale, complex intestine of an herbivore tumbled onto the floor. Jonathan felt his stomach heave. Steam was rising from the entrails in the cool kitchen, and the smell of shit in its most elemental phase—pre-turd—was mingling with the musk of sheep fear and the heavy, sweet smell of blood.

  Jonathan went to his bathroom, where he retched out lunch.

  When he got back, Sigurd was detaching a gray baglike item from a pink sacklike item. “Stomachs,” he said, holding the gray bag aloft. “Lots of stomachs in sheep. You need them for sausage.” He looked at Jonathan, who was pale. “You don’t like this, hah?”

  “In America, other people slaughter sheep.”

  Sigurd frowned. “I’m doing that for you.”

  “No. I mean, there’s a place where they do it—it’s like the fish factory. All the sheep are taken care of there.”

  “So, so, so.” Sigurd nodded. “Well, here, nobody likes to do it, so each man must kill his own. Nobody would want to spend his days killing sheep for other people. That is,” he hastily added, “except as a favor for a friend like you.”

  “Thank you,” said Jonathan humbly. “I really couldn’t have done it myself.”

  “Now you can help,” Sigurd said. He picked up the little pile of stomachs and offered them to Jonathan. “Wash these. Turn them inside out. You see all those little bubbles?”

  The inner surface of the stomach was dotted with tiny flaps of flesh. “Yes,” said Jonathan.

  “You must scrub until all the bubbles are clean and the stomach doesn’t smell anymore.”

  Jonathan went to the sink and began his work. The sheep’s head rested by his right elbow, its eyes shut, a thin line of foam around its mouth. The stomach was a tough item to clean. It had a rubbery, resistant texture that held in the years’ worth of mulched grass. At Jonathan’s feet, Sigurd was extracting kidneys and lungs, digging around for the liver, piling the organs by the sheep’s shoulder. The pot of blood stood at the sheep’s hindquarters.

  And so they worked, in the waning light, Jonathan scrubbing and staring out the window, Sigurd now pulling the sheep’s skin off with long, heart-stopping rips. He held the pelt up for Jonathan to admire. It had been a handsome white animal.

  “This will be your rug. I got it off nicely for you. Tomorrow, I’ll show you what to do with it.”

  Jonathan nodded. The sour odor of the stomachs was nauseating him anew. He glanced at the carcass; without its skin it looked like an embryo—raw, vulnerable flesh that was never meant to be exposed. He turned back to his stomachs. Three remained to be cleaned. He sniffed the two he had worked on; they still smelled of bile.

  “I can’t get these clean,” he said.

  Sigurd nodded. “That’s women’s work. It takes forever.” He draped the lambskin over the back of a chair and took up his knife again. “Maria will help you. She’ll help you make the sausages. You should have a wife.” He now embarked on butchery. Grating noises and grunts of effort accompanied Jonathan in his scrubbing. A bone cracked occasionally as Sigurd snapped off a limb. Before Jonathan had finished his third stomach, Sigurd stood up for the last time.

  The sheep as an integrated unit no longer existed. Its components were scattered about the room. The four legs were balanced in a pile beside the bucket of its blood, the edible organs were on the counter near its head, and a smaller pile of meat—chops, Jonathan supposed—flanked the legs. Sigurd had pushed the large intestine under the chair where the rug-to-be was hanging.

  Sigurd sat down in the other chair and began pawing through the intestine, tearing off yellow, lardy hunks and stacking them on the table.

  “What’s that?” asked Jonathan.

  “Tallow.”

  “For candles?”

  “Hah? For eating, with meat or in the sausage.”

  Jonathan shuddered and returned to washing. Despite his queasy afternoon, he was beginning to feel hungry, but he couldn’t imagine cooking dinner in this war zone of a kitchen. He had an impulse to telephone Eyvindur and skip town—but the afternoon boat was long gone. He was marooned in a slaughterhouse.

  “The head,” said Sigurd. “Do you like it?”

  Jonathan looked at it. The head just made his sorrow well up again. “I don’t know,” he mumbled, unsure if Sigurd was asking for an aesthetic or a culinary opinion.

  “Have you had it?”

  Culinary: “No. But please, take it.”

  “Yah?” Sigurd smiled. “You don’t want it?”

  “No. I think you can take the tallow too.” Jonathan looked around the room at the other parts. “And the blood.”

  “No. The blood is important. You need the blood for sausages. But maybe I’ll take the tallow. In America, you are not so fond of eating it?”

  “Not as fond as you.” Jonathan could more easily imagine eating a light bulb.

  “Tonight you have lamb lung for dinner,” Sigurd announced with vicarious anticipation. “Lung and liver and kidneys—all that for dinner.”

  Possibly the kidneys, Jonathan decided. “You can take the lungs.” Then, not wanting Sigurd to think he was merely getting rid of garbage, he said, “Really, you have been so good to do all this for me. Please take anything you like. Please.”

  “Well, you know, Jón Hend
rik and I only get one sheep between us.…”

  Jonathan plucked the lungs from the counter and held them out to Sigurd. Sigurd’s hands were full of tallow.

  “I’ll come back for them,” he said. “I have to get the head and the gun too.” He left, kicking the front door open with his foot.

  As soon as Jonathan was alone he went up to his bedroom, where he sat on the bed and looked out at the sea, gray and smooth against the white horizon. The evening stars blinked through the clouds. Petur and Maria’s lights cast a mild yellow mist into the yard. Jonathan walked to the window and leaned his forehead against the glass. Sigurd came into view, returning for his booty. But he went into Petur’s house. Jonathan waited, his head still on the cool pane.

  He was beset by the image of the peeled sheep. Without fur, what had been a carcass shifted in memory into the realm of corpse—a dead being whose skin could no longer protect it, whose eyes’ liquid had set into eternal jelly, whose form, made for movement, would not move again. And Jonathan could not stop himself from speculating on its thoughts. A sheep was capable of volition, aversion, curiosity; couldn’t it lift its hard head up to sniff the evening air, or yearn for its summer pasture?

  Jonathan touched his nose. He too would die. All the force of desire, pride, pleasure, confusion, and every other disembodied feeling that chose his body to sing through was not enough to stave off the silence waiting for him. He realized he’d thought it was. But being alive was no guarantee of immortality—quite the opposite.

  He had never before considered the facts. His bleeding nose, a bout with measles at thirteen, intestinal paroxysms in Italian villages were mere skirmishes. Jonathan thought of the old men at the dock railing. Their faraway fishermen’s eyes looked out to yet further islands and seas. Some were so old they had begun to dry up and cool down; one hand laid on Jonathan’s arm had felt as light as papier-mâche, and as bloodless. Time had defeated them, and, if he was lucky, it would defeat him too.

  And more sheep would be slaughtered, and fish gutted, and birds snatched from their nests—and what was most amazing about this was that it was the way the world was supposed to be. It wasn’t savage or primitive or avoidable; it wasn’t even sad.

  He lifted his head, opened his window, and put his face into the heavy salt air. The clouds were skimming the sky, frothing at the edges and shredding in the center, and a pie-perfect amber moon was rising above Petur’s roof. From Petur’s door came Sigurd, with Maria behind him holding a huge pot. Jonathan went downstairs.

  Sigurd had the head in hand; Maria was sniffing one of the stomachs.

  “We’ll make the sausage after dinner,” she said. She scooped the stomachs into the pocket of her apron and decanted Jonathan’s pot of blood into her pot.

  “So, so, so,” said Sigurd, looking around the kitchen happily.

  “I reckon so,” said Jonathan, weary but polite.

  The three of them trooped over to Petur’s, Jonathan carrying the gun and the armful of innards as directed by Maria, Sigurd stopping to place the sheep’s head on the doorstep. Inside, Jón Hendrik sat at the kitchen table, tossing back a cocktail of straight aquavit.

  “Ho, the American!” His traditional greeting. “A cowboy,” he went on, in English now, “home from the range, where the animals play.” Jonathan nodded hello. He wished Sigurd would relieve him of the gun, and Maria of the innards. But for several minutes nothing happened at all. He stood holding these things while Jón Hendrik had another shot of aquavit. Maria was fussing at the stove, Sigurd had vanished, and not even little Jens Símun was around to bother people. After two glasses of liquor, Jón Hendrik offered the bottle to Jonathan. “Drink,” he said.

  Jonathan laid the gun on the table.

  “Don’t put it there!” Jón Hendrik shook his head.

  “Well, where should I put it?”

  “Not there.”

  Jonathan felt like strangling Jón Hendrik; why was this old man so exasperating? He grimaced with the frustration and embarrassment of ignoble feelings. A harmless old guy, and he wanted to kill him.

  Jón Hendrik bared his yellow teeth in a forgiving smile. “Put it outside,” he said. “It’s not good to have a gun inside.”

  Jonathan put it outside, leaning against the house next to the head. Then he dumped the kidneys and the liver and the lungs, which Sigurd hadn’t taken, on the counter beside the stove. This move gave him a glimpse of what Maria was up to: stirring the pot of blood. He gulped and headed back to the table for aquavit.

  But Jón Hendrik had hold of the bottle by the neck and wasn’t offering anymore. Instead, he poured a last shot for himself and shuffled to his feet to put the liquor in its hiding place in another room. Jonathan sat at the table alone, listening to the pot of blood bubbling on the stove and silently cursing Jón Hendrik. For he found that he wanted a drink very much. And he realized this was part of a trend: many events in the Faroes made him want a drink. Nothing in America had ever made him want a drink—at least, his frustration had never surfaced through that particular desire.

  In Jonathan’s family, “wanting a drink” was the first sign of losing one’s grip. Bear Brand, son of Hoosier teetotalers, had learned to appreciate wine with dinner from Gerda, daughter of a professor (of course! It was like hemophilia, Jonathan supposed, this academic heritage) at the University of Vermont. And a beer in the sultry afternoon on the porch in Maine was okay, too; even Jonathan had sat with a bottle drenching his fifteen-year-old hand with condensation during the dog days. But “I need a Scotch” was danger. Next thing you knew, you’d be hung over at your morning class, or dribble onto your tie at lunch in Kirkland House, or snooze snorily at a faculty meeting. They were far less concerned about drugs; they’d read Huxley, and Gerda had tried what she called “weed” back in the forties, when it was still called “weed.” “They drink” was in the Brand household a condemnation as damning as “They’re boring.”

  And here was Jonathan, drumming his blood-encrusted nails on the table because he couldn’t get a snort of aquavit.

  Oh, but what did they know? They had done library research for their theses. They had not been up against dismemberment and evisceration in their own kitchen, or kettles of blood (they thought these occurred only in Macbeth, probably), or Jón Hendrik, mean old Indian giver of aquavit, or case endings of Faroese nouns (four!), or bad weather, with which Jonathan had yet to contend but which would surely come along soon, now.

  Making this list of his burdens had a somewhat quieting effect on Jonathan. It also reminded him that he was an anthropologist; he oughtn’t to take everything so personally. It was really like being the psychoanalyst of a culture: if the culture chose to “present” lamb lung and crotchety elders, then he would make sense of them, but he was not in any way obliged to like them. Jón Hendrik’s behavior was perhaps useful for illuminating attitudes toward liquor? But no, this thought was quite enough to tumble the shaky structure of disinterest. Jonathan still wanted a drink, and Jón Hendrik hadn’t let him have one.

  His yearning for a little oblivion—at least a slight blurring of things—continued during dinner, over which the story of his barfing at the sight of the opened lamb was told twice, once by Sigurd to Jón Hendrik and once by Jón Hendrik to Heðin and Petur, who came in late from fishing. Jonathan knew that by the time he reached the dock the next afternoon, all the old geezers would have chewed it over among themselves and be ready to tease him with it. He tried to be affable; these were his friends, after all. A little ribbing between friends was nothing.

  But they were odd people, his friends, these villagers. So—so mired in blood, he thought, surprised by himself: spatters of it on Maria’s apron, a long brown streak of it on Sigurd’s forearm. Jonathan thought of incidents he’d paid little attention to at the time, such as a chicken’s neck being snapped casually, during conversation, by Jens Símun the elder (“too old to lay,” he’d muttered), and the heartlessness with which heaps of cod were allowed to gasp and flutt
er on deck. He wondered if he was just a city innocent, unused to the easy brutalities of country living. Or maybe he was looking too hard for Viking traces, bloodlines of savagery. After all, hadn’t Sigurd announced that he hated what he was about to do before he shot the sheep? And did he, Jonathan, really expect fishermen to sympathize with fish?

  No. And yes, he could admit to a touch of naïveté in his distaste for such graphic lessons in where food comes from. But all the evening Jonathan wondered about something he saw in the faces around the table, something as strange to him as the faraway look in the men’s eyes, and not as benign.

  After dinner Maria sewed each sheep stomach into a small bag open at one end and told Jonathan to hold them so she could pour in the blood-flour-sugar mixture she’d brewed up. “Raisins or tallow?” she asked.

  “In here?” Jonathan peered into the steaming red stomach.

  “Give him raisins,” said Sigurd. “He says they don’t eat tallow in America. It’s good with raisins. Many people prefer it that way.”

  They were his friends. They were always looking out for his welfare, protecting him from things he wouldn’t want to eat and assuring him that he wasn’t peculiar for not wanting to eat them. They were generous and kindly, all the villagers, and this family that had taken him in—this odd assortment of dreamy men clustered around one stout-legged woman who missed the stars in summer.

  And yet, he knew that he did not know them, or did not know some important thing about them, and that he had better learn.

  Wooley, and Rough Weather

  Wooley arrived on November ninth. Jonathan was sitting at his kitchen table looking at a dismal chart he’d cut out of the newspaper a week before, which gave the times of sunrise and sunset for the month and which he checked daily—as if the experience itself were insufficient. The sun had risen that morning at 8:26 and would be setting at 3:54, twenty minutes after Wooley, ominously large knapsack in hand, opened Jonathan’s front door.