Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  Sigurd grunted. “Yah, but we do. They won’t go back, you see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once they’re up they won’t go back. I knew a man once who tried to get one to go back. It came up alone, after a big grind had come a few days before. He felt sorry for it, like you do, and he roped it to his boat and towed it out. It came right back.” He shrugged. “So. We kill them.” He looked at Jonathan again. “You’ll kill one. You’ll feel better then.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Jonathan. “And after all, this is your business, not mine.”

  “You don’t need to eat?” Sigurd shook his head. “It’s not like the sheep, you know. Other people divide it. It’s just one cut, maybe two.”

  “You said you hated killing the sheep.” Jonathan was pleased to have remembered this.

  Sigurd shifted from foot to foot and cleared his throat. “You don’t hunt sheep.” He looked down the beach at the ranks of whales. “Hunting is good.” His expression and stance changed as he said this, streamlined to the intensity of the Sigurd who’d yelled at Jonathan earlier.

  The discussion was over, Jonathan could see that. He could see also that Sigurd was itching to get to work on the whales, that his continued presence was a mark of his affection; even in his hunter incarnation, Sigurd had time for Jonathan and his worries. Had made time, rather, for now he took a few steps toward the shore, where the slaughter was beginning. Then he turned back, put a thick arm around Jonathan’s waist, and pulled him bodily down the beach.

  Sigurd was stronger than he looked, and surprise weakened Jonathan’s resistance. Within minutes they were wading among the flailing bodies. Jonathan felt his heart pounding in time with the crash of the surf and the blood singing in his ears with the calls of the whales. Whales, men, children were everywhere, all spattered with sea-foam flecks. They had to walk farther into the sea to avoid getting hit by thrashing tails. Then Sigurd pushed him up, to where the press wasn’t so thick and the animals lay unattended in a single line.

  “Here,” Sigurd said, straddling a medium-sized whale who had beached somewhat apart from the others, “this is a good one. Come here.” Jonathan approached, slowly but without stopping, as if a rope drew him. Sigurd moved off the whale and waited for Jonathan to take his place.

  This whale was silent and still, and Jonathan managed to fit himself around it. Again that sensation of heat seeping through the chill surface; his blue jeans were wet from the whale’s wet skin, but his legs were warmed by contact with the huge, warm body. “Clamp him,” Sigurd said, and Jonathan pressed his knees against the dense flanks. At this the whale began to wriggle and twist. The power was unlike anything Jonathan had ever felt, much stronger than a horse and more impersonal. A horse knows a man, bucks a man off because it refuses to be ridden; this animal had never known subjugation or fear. And Jonathan was to show him both? He loosed his legs somewhat. He began to slide backward toward the tail, which was thumping on the sand.

  “Don’t let go!” Sigurd yelled. “Watch out!”

  Jonathan put his hands on the whale’s forehead to steady himself.

  “You have to do it now.” Sigurd had drawn his knife and was brandishing it at Jonathan. “He’ll hurt you with his tail. Get your knife out.” But as soon as Jonathan lifted his hands to his belt, he started sliding again. “Stop,” said Sigurd. “Use mine.” He extended it to Jonathan.

  Jonathan clasped the knife: a cold handshake with bone and steel. Between his legs, the whale’s muscles rippled and tensed; he had to put his knife hand back on the whale’s head for balance, and in doing this he nicked an opening in the neck: the glimmer of pearly blubber, and then, slowly, beads of blood seeping up through the tear in the black sheath of skin. Jonathan gulped. A hopeless shock, as if he’d shattered a precious object, gripped him at this inadvertent wounding.

  “You have to do it now,” Sigurd repeated.

  “I don’t know how,” Jonathan said.

  “You saw it.” Sigurd was firm. “Put your hand below the blowhole and make a long cut across the spine. And do it hard. You want to do it quickly, no more than two cuts.”

  Jonathan looked at Sigurd, implacable in his boots and his Viking stance, legs apart on the wet sand. Then he looked down at the whale’s neck, as big as two men’s torsos, as black and glittering as December midnight, and raised his arm.

  How easy it was! How smoothly the knife bit through the skin and into the creamy blubber. It sailed across the neck, trailing its wake of blood, and at the slightest pressure from Jonathan plumbed deeper into the whale, so that the ping of metal on bone rang in the air. Jonathan felt the body beneath him jolt and subside, almost deflate. He pulled the knife out and then, drawn by that red arc he’d engraved in the skin, plunged the blade back in for the second cut.

  “No!” Sigurd took a step toward him. “No more. He’s dead.”

  But Jonathan could not stop himself from finishing what he’d begun, and when he stepped down onto the sand, what lay dead at his feet was far larger and weightier than a whale.

  He held his bloody hand out to Sigurd. “Here’s your knife.”

  “I think you should keep it.” Sigurd looked Jonathan over and nodded. “Yes. You keep that knife. But give me yours.”

  Jonathan shifted Sigurd’s knife from one sticky hand to the other and wiped his palm against his thigh before pulling the clean knife from his belt, but the blood was hard to get off and the hilt he offered Sigurd was tacky. Sigurd dipped it in the ocean and dried it carefully on his sweater. Jonathan did the same with his knife, then kneeled to clean his hands. He had to rub sand between his fingers to loosen the caked blood. The tide was rising, slowly swamping his boots and lapping at the dead tail, swaying it back and forth.

  “Do you want to open the stomach?” Sigurd asked. Before Jonathan could answer, he said, “I’ll do it.”

  Jonathan stood up. “I can,” he said. He leaned over the whale and drove the knife in below the front fins, as he’d seen Klæmint do. No bones resisted him when he dragged the knife down. A strange smell came out of the cut, the freshness of an opened oyster combined with the dark, intimate air of a body’s interior. The entrails slithered out—white loops of intestine, the flopping red liver. Jonathan stepped back.

  “Done,” said Sigurd. “Not so bad, eh?”

  Jonathan looked down at his hands, which were bloody again, and then along the shore, which was studded with still-living whales. “What about those?” he asked.

  Sigurd laughed. “You want to kill all of them?” He started walking back toward the center of activity, where most of the pod had beached. Jonathan followed. They walked higher up the sand this time, out of tail range.

  “These are safe,” Sigurd explained. “They won’t get away. It’s more important to kill the ones that are still in the water.”

  “You said they wouldn’t leave.”

  “They might drift out on the tide.”

  Jonathan nodded. “So you do kill these too?” He pointed at the stranded whales they were passing.

  “Later,” said Sigurd.

  The sun had passed its zenith and was rolling slowly down the slope of the sky, enlarging as it declined. It seemed not to radiate light but rather to reflect it, as if it had become the moon; Jonathan found he could look straight at it. And everything he saw had taken on the color and texture of mercury. Opaque, dense silver waves slapped the jetty’s gray concrete pilings and divided, foamless, contained in silver skin. The dead whales were fading to pewter. The black skins of those that were still alive glimmered with reflections of the leaden sky. The men who moved among the animals and splashed in the tide were silvered with sweat—but at the same time they were matte and muted, gray shades flickering on a gray background.

  A shadow world, a gray otherworld—these were the huldufólk, the gray people who lived in the rocks and demanded their due from the sea and the sheep. They were the villagers, he saw it now, they were all the violent, te
rrible impulses that village life could not contain, banished to the outfield to wait for this moment, when they were needed. Looking at the havoc they were wreaking with their silent gray movements, Jonathan could understand why Heðin, months ago on a rock at the edge of their territory, had cautioned him to treat them with respect. He glanced at Sigurd to see if he too was a silver shade, but Sigurd was not even the Viking; he was plodding down the strand leaving huge footprints that filled with seawater immediately, and he looked tired.

  Jonathan picked out Petur and Jens Símun from the crowd of men straddling bodies and wielding knives. The whales were so thick here that finding a foothold on sand was difficult; some kids were hopping from one felled back to another, the way kids in America hopped along logs. The smaller boats had been dragged up onto the beach as well and lay like pale, short versions of whales among them. Petur and Jens Símun were wrestling with a very big whale, at least fifteen feet long. Petur was sitting at his neck and Jens Símun down closer to his tail, but the weight of two men was not enough to still his thrashing.

  “Eh,” Petur grunted in their direction. He beckoned them over. “Sit on him,” he said.

  Sigurd plopped himself down just above the dorsal fin. Then all three of them looked expectantly at Jonathan.

  “Hurry up,” said Jens Símun.

  The resistance, then the pop of punctured flesh, the scarlet gash, the crack of the vertebrae: it was all the same, all known and simple. Looking around him, Jonathan saw in the dozens of animals strewn on the sand potential moments like this: each living creature held the moment of its death within it, and one simple movement could bring that moment out into being. The distance between life and death was short—as short as the length of his own arm. Jonathan shut his eyes and imagined that every slaughtered body here about him was a man’s, not a whale’s. He could imagine it easily. Whiter corpses, but the same bloody sheen on the sand and the same quickening in the air, the rush of the wind of life passing overhead. And could he kill a man? Jonathan didn’t know; he hoped not. But his feet and fingers, stained, muddy, and throbbing, and his chest that clattered from his busy heart, told him something undeniable: killing makes the killer feel alive.

  Admitting this changed the look of things again. Substantiality returned to objects and people, and the peculiar metallic shroud lifted off the sea and sky—making him doubt his notion that he’d seen the huldufólk in action. After all, he was the one who constantly banished feelings and maintained an internal shadow government of the emotions.

  Jonathan bent down to the water to rinse his knife. Behind him, the three men were sliding off the whale, opening its abdomen, chatting together. As he rubbed sand over the hilt, he consigned to the sea his doubt, his second-guessing, his analyses. He imagined them wrapped in a bundle and bobbing on the waves. Oddly enough, this trick seemed to work. His unpleasant cargo was anchored out there, mute for the moment.

  Thus lightened, Jonathan strode through the short, bloody afternoon beside his fellow villagers. They trod spilled innards into the sand as they moved up and down the shore, here helping to pull a whale beyond the high-tide line, there adding their weight to a bucking back. The day was fading, and all the men of Húsavík—even young boys—were working fast to finish before dark. The animals had to be gutted and tugged out of the sea’s reach, and then counted and apportioned between the two villages. Some still had to be killed. Jonathan had a bad minute when they came on a calf, about the size of a human being, that was sighing and whimpering beside its dead mother; it had a cow-brown eye, which it blinked rapidly at their approach. Jens Símun killed it.

  The dark came down at about three, compressing the daylight to a pale pink streak around the horizon and a few rosy streamers shooting into the sky. In the quarter hour of tinted gloom that was all the Faroes got of twilight in winter, the ocean was purple, the sand black. Men now were as dark as whales and almost as big, looming out of the murk. Wind came up and whipped a lavender foam on the sea, and the waves that with each retreat washed the beach clean of blood broke red again at each advance of the tide.

  It was over. Up and down the beach red dots of cigarettes signaled the end of work. People began leaving, tramping uphill through thick cold sand. Heðin appeared out of the darkness to offer Jonathan a welcome cigarette. Their little Skopun group seemed a bit forlorn, still standing in the breakers while others were on their way home to warmth and food.

  “So, so, so,” said Petur.

  “I reckon so,” said Heðin. He sat down on a convenient whale. “Yah, I reckon so.” He looked up at Jonathan. “How did you like it?”

  “I liked it,” Jonathan heard himself say.

  “Yes,” Jens Símun put in, “killing whales is a good sport.”

  Sigurd shuffled his feet in the clumpy, clotted sand. Heðin tossed his cigarette end into the sea and said, “It’s not only for sport—”

  “Let’s go,” Petur interrupted.

  Jens Símun scowled at Heðin, who refused to look at him. Petur put his heavy gentle hand on Jens Símun’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he repeated. “We’ll go find Grandpapa.”

  Jonathan contrived to fall behind and walk with sulky Heðin, hoping for an explanation of that interchange. Heðin was chewing on a matchstick and noisily spitting out splinters.

  “What was that, about sport? What did you mean?”

  Heðin ejected the matchstick onto the sand. “My uncle is a brute,” he said. Five paces ahead, Jens Símun plodded along unheeding, though Heðin hadn’t taken the trouble to whisper. But Petur stopped and waited for Heðin and Jonathan to come abreast.

  “I know, I know,” said Heðin to his father.

  Petur just grunted. After a minute he caught Jonathan’s eye; he pointed at Jens Símun’s back, then at his own head, and moved his hand from side to side, seeming to indicate that not everything in Jens Símun’s head was as it should be. This made Heðin mad.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” he growled.

  Petur shrugged his shoulders and speeded up to his brothers, the brute and the merchant.

  Heðin stopped walking and began to roll another cigarette. He lifted one thick, blood-blackened finger and beckoned Jonathan closer. “He’s stupid, that’s all, and he’s mean. You watch tonight, at the dancing. He gets mean when he’s drunk. Then we have to take him home. You’ll see.” He jammed the cigarette into his mouth, then removed it to say, “Sometimes I wish I could leave this goddamned place.”

  Jonathan was amazed. He thought of Heðin as the perfect inhabitant of the Faroes: young, strong, well versed in the arcana of sheep driving, whale killing, womanizing, fishing—not only how to do these things, but how to do them in the proper Faroese way. “Where would you go?” he asked.

  “Yah,” said Heðin, lighting his cigarette. “Exactly.”

  They were on the dark village streets now, and the men ahead were peering in windows looking, Jonathan supposed, for Jón Hendrik. He felt tired, cold, hungry, and dirty. “I’d like to take a bath,” he said. Heðin laughed.

  “You can forget that,” he said.

  Sigurd beckoned to them from a lighted doorway. Jonathan and Heðin added their boots to a great black heap in the hallway and stepped into the kitchen, where Jón Hendrik presided over a bottle at the table, flanked by Petur and Jens Símun. A blonde girl with a short nose and dimpled arms stood at the stove pouring hot water into a teapot.

  Heðin approached her with his hand out. “Heðin,” he told her.

  “That’s Kristina, that’s Klæmint’s granddaughter,” Jón Hendrik said. “She keeps house for him. She’s living here all alone with her grandfather.” He tittered.

  “Okay, okay,” said Heðin, but he gave his crazy-tooth grin to Kristina, who turned quickly back to her kettle without shaking hands.

  Jonathan didn’t want to be left out. He moved toward the stove too, hoping Heðin would introduce him. Heðin was staring at Kristina’s back as she fussed over the tea; every now and then sh
e’d glance over her shoulder at him, and when she did, he’d show his strange teeth for a moment. Jonathan cleared his throat.

  “I’m Jonathan,” he said.

  “Jo-Na-Than,” chanted Sigurd, who’d settled himself in at the bottle. “Have some brandy.”

  Jonathan waited another few seconds for a response from Kristina, then retreated to the table.

  Each man had a tumbler of brandy—filled, as if the contents were orange juice, not liquor. Jón Hendrik was grinning and squinting, so probably he’d got a head start on the others. Sigurd poured Jonathan a glass and pushed it toward him. Some spilled. Jonathan looked at the glass and then over at the stove; he was more in the mood for tea. But tea was being held up by Heðin. He was leaning against the wall next to the stove watching Kristina, and though she made several moves to bring the teapot to the table, her attention to what she was doing kept faltering. They ended up just staring at each other, Heðin with his arms crossed, Kristina holding the teapot in both hands, her mouth slightly open.

  Jens Símun saved the day. “Tea!” he roared suddenly, banging his empty glass on the table.

  Kristina closed her mouth and made it to the table, with tea, cups, a plate of cookies, a half-moon of cake. Everybody fell to in a shower of crumbs and dribbles. Even Heðin abandoned his predatory position at the wall and slid in beside Jonathan to eat.

  Ten minutes later the drinking started. Jonathan had never seen anything like it. The brandy glasses were downed in two big gulps—he shuddered as he watched Jens Símun’s throat moving snakelike over what in America would be four shots. Stolid Petur, clever Sigurd, ancient Jón Hendrik, besotted Heðin: all of them were tossing it back like professional winos. When they’d finished a glass they poured another and did it again. Kristina washed dishes with her back to this bad behavior. The bottle was empty after half an hour.

  Petur lurched to his feet and into the hall, fell over the pile of boots, and came back with a new bottle, aquavit this time.

  Jonathan blurted, “You can’t mix aquavit and brandy. You’ll go crazy! You’ll get sick!”