One morning the doctor came to the village in hot haste. The womenfolk crowded to the windows, but much to their vexation, they couldn’t make out what his errand might be. An hour passed before they learned anything; but then Tummas came through the lane with the news.
‘It’s the pastor’s wife who sent for him. One of her children is ill.’
‘You don’t know what’s wrong?’ asked the womenfolk.
No, Tummas didn’t know. ‘But of course, it could be measles, you know; they’ve got measles in the southern islands.’ Then he stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, shrugged his shoulders, and went on.
It was a sorrowful morning in Ketil’s house. No one had the strength to utter a word. Ketil’s wife slammed the door shut. ‘Nobody’s going to put a foot over my threshold, you’d better get that clear,’ she said. ‘We’re going to keep ourselves free of infection. There’s not been measles in this village for fifty years. The place will be laid waste.’
Ketil looked down at his feet and folded his hands. ‘No good will come of trying to keep apart, to my way of thinking,’ he said. ‘If any of our neighbours’ households found themselves helpless, they’d have to be given a hand, as long as anyone was on his feet.’
Lias Berint bent forward as he sat, took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Now I’ll soon be a pauper after all – living here among strangers, and dying without having the title deeds of my ancestral lands by me, and maybe having borrowed planks to my coffin and bringing myself to shame.’
Kálvur sat with his head on his breast, crying. Once he looked up and asked his father whether there was much sweating when folk died of measles. He was afraid the doctor might go from house to house sticking his instruments into people’s backsides. It was so embarrassing showing your private parts to strangers.
The old woman was the first to recover heart. ‘Well now, it’s no good sitting here moping. We must at all events have the place so neat and tidy here that we’re not put to shame if the doctor should have to pay us a call. Only it’s a great nuisance washing the place out, when the roof leaks so badly that the sooty water drips all over the place. Ketil, couldn’t you get the roof watertight straight away?’
‘I’d very gladly have done that already,’ replied Ketil, ‘if I’d had the necessary materials. We can’t afford to buy birch bark yet, before we’ve paid off the bill for the whale meat. And there’s not a straw in the village. One or the other we shall need to hold the turf in place.’
‘Well, then, go south to the next village,’ said Lias Berint. ‘You’re bound to get all you want there. I’ve got a thing or two to do there as well, so I could go in the boat with you, if I wouldn’t be in your way.’
‘That’s a good idea of yours, but the day’s half over now, so we can’t do anything before tomorrow,’ said Ketil.
Before sunrise the following morning, Ketil, Kálvur and Lias Berint set off in the old boat. The old men’s arms creaked as they started rowing, and they wrinkled their brows with the pain of rheumatism. But it was nothing to make a fuss about – when old age comes on, you expect to have rheumatism. An old man has to be thankful if he can still get out of bed and put on his own clothes. There are plenty who are not as brisk as that.
The weather was good. They rowed lightly, with a following current, and had the sail up. The shore they were rowing along was black from the night’s rain; a few crows flew up cawing from the boulders by the shore, and a sheep got up out of one of the stone shelters and stretched itself. The old men looked up at the sky in silence. ‘The sky looks a bit murky. You can’t be sure how long the weather’s going to stay fine. Maybe it’ll hold as long as there’s light,’ they thought. But they said nothing. A youngster was in the boat, and it was not worth making him nervous.
The boat glided gently southward, lying deep in the water, rather like a purblind sea beast fumbling its way forward. There were patches in her sides, the tar shone thick on her keel, and every plank bore witness to age and wear. But when the breeze freshened a little, and Ketil went back into the stern to steer, you could see how pleased he was with himself. He sat there in the stern, conscious that the boat was his own, whatever it might look like. He thought she sailed quite well. ‘The young fellows can laugh at my boat if they like,’ he said, ‘but let me tell you, she’s tight and seaworthy, and that’s all you can ask of any boat. Theirs are perhaps prettier, but what’s the use of being prettier when they belong to someone else, and for the most part are just for show? Let them fetch as many loads home as this old boat of mine has done, and then their boats won’t look so bright and glossy.’
Lias Berint saw a piece of timber in the water, and asked Ketil to steer over to it. It was about as big as a boat stock, but Lias Berint took it in, saying that there was always a use for a piece of wood if you were going to build a house. It would do for a cross-strut.
‘Are you going to venture on building at your age?’ asked Ketil.
‘I’ve been thinking of doing so for forty years, in Jesus’s name. Just as the old proverb has it, “Nothing venture, nothing win”. I should have had a lot of timber gathered together by now, but the pieces I stowed away in the earlier years are so rotten that they won’t be much use when I come to need them. But be that as it may, I’m not going to wait any longer. I may as well begin the foundations tomorrow as any other day.’
Kálvur sat thinking about meals and measles. He rested his oar, and asked his father for something to eat.
‘You’re a fine sort of man,’ said Ketil, ‘wanting to eat already. You know the food chest isn’t opened until the return journey.’
‘It’s all the same,’ replied Kálvur. ‘Nobody knows when the measles are going to come, and there’ll be no eating then, I shouldn’t think.’
As they approached the village, they saw about thirty young men standing on the quay with their hands in their pockets, staring at the mail boat, which was churning in behind them. When they saw Ketil’s old boat, they laughed, swore, and crowded around it. They had never seen a boat like that before.
Ketil’s party climbed ashore and tied up their boat. Ketil asked a young man standing there whether he knew of anyone who had some straw.
‘Straw?’ repeated the young man, dragging at his cigarette. ‘Sorry, I don’t know anything about any straw.’ And he turned on his heel and was gone.
In the village, they asked their way until they came to a farmer, who gave them some straw – he was so glad they hadn’t come to demand an allotment from his land, that he overwhelmed them with straw, so that Ketil had to say, ‘Hold on, hold on, our boat won’t carry any more.’
Lias Berint said to Ketil, ‘I’ll just drop in and see my niece while you’re carrying the straw down. Don’t go without me.’
He had a fair way to go through the fields. Some way from the houses he sat down for a few minutes to think out what he ought to do. Should he come like an angel, or like a thunderstorm? He didn’t know. ‘If only I had my temper up, I’d cope with the wretched creatures a bit better,’ he thought. He pulled at his beard to try and rouse himself to fury, but the anger was not genuine. So it would be better to approach them calmly. He took a stump of chalk and smeared his beard and his hair. ‘They shall see how grey I’ve turned since I left them,’ he thought. As he neared the houses, he tried to look miserable, and put on a limp.
The only one at home was his niece. ‘Good day,’ said Lias Berint in a mild voice.
‘Good day,’ answered his niece without looking up. She had her breast hanging out over a baby, which was lying there sucking and clutching at her arm.
‘There were just a few things I had …’
‘They’re right where you left them.’
He went upstairs to his old room, and took out a little red chest from under the bed. Here he kept his title deeds and his Sunday clothes. He took the chest under one arm and went downstairs again.
‘Good-bye,’ he forced himself to say as he reached the door.
‘Good-bye,’ answered his niece, hanging out her other breast for the baby.
Lias Berint stopped, cursing inwardly. ‘Damn her, she doesn’t as much as look up at me and swear.’ But she did not look up. So he went, shutting the door behind him, quietly and patiently. But a little further on, in the fields, he suddenly felt furious. He put down the chest, ran back to the house, and flung the door open. ‘Shame on you, niece,’ he cried, ‘for having the heart to treat me in this way! Look at me, and you’ll see how grey I’ve turned, since I had to leave.’ And he pointed to his whitened beard.
‘May God forgive you,’ she replied. ‘We have not pushed you out. You do us an injustice to say any such thing.’
‘No, maybe you didn’t push me out, but you pushed me on to the rates.’
‘No, all we did was to apply for your old-age pension.’
‘So I hear, so I hear, and shame on you for doing so. I was all right for you as long as I was bringing something in to the house, but now I’m an old man, and more or less past work, you push me on to the rates.’ He slammed the door behind him and went. And he was so angry, he forgot which leg he was supposed to be lame in. ‘But damn it,’ he muttered, ‘why the devil should I limp for an old harridan like that?’ He snorted, until his beard spread out like whiskers on each side of his cheeks. To take a short cut, he went straight across the field. Then he tripped over a tussock and for some time lay there fuming. But now he began to feel afraid. He sat quietly in the grass, crossed himself, and recited the Lord’s Prayer. Then he went on again.
He met several of the old men, who came out to talk with him.
‘You left the village and deserted us,’ they said. Apart from that, it was just the usual they talked about: rheumatism, the weather, and the boat fishing.
Sertus came along and wanted to gossip. He wore a black kerchief round his neck and a linen cloth round his jaw, and his sidewhiskers stood up so high that his hat looked as though it was perched on a nest.
‘Do you always go wrapped up?’ asked Lias Berint.
‘Oh, don’t talk about it – I’m no good for anything. These wraps are nothing in particular, just for a gumboil, but there are other things which are a lot worse. You remember the time I broke my bones in five places, when we were in a boat together – once in each shoulder, and in three places in the left thigh? Now I’ve got a swelling in the throat that I have to take medicine for, and a pain in the loins that I have to massage, so beyond all question I’m the most broken-down old fellow in the village. Lofty Heindrikkur goes around saying that he’s worse, they tell me. But what I say is, let him show you where he’s sick, if he can. What’s wrong with me anybody can look at.’ And he showed him the swelling in his throat, and took hold of his breeches and was going to pull them down to show his thigh, but Lias Berint told him he had to hurry. ‘For it’s getting late. Why don’t you go and see the doctor?’
‘See the doctor!’ snapped Sertus. ‘I’ve seen the doctor often enough. But I don’t know, doctors nowadays are not a patch on what they used to be. That’s what I always say, although folk laugh at me for it. It’s a sure fact that the doses they give you nowadays are smaller than the ones the old doctors used to give you.’
But Lias Berint had to go. ‘Good-bye, Sertus,’ he said. ‘Good-bye, old friend, good-bye, don’t let me hold you up. No, I don’t trust these doctors nowadays. It’s better to rely on a man like Klávus. They tell me he’s left the Church of Denmark and joined a sect. But it’s all the same to me, he’s strong in the faith, for if you get him to lay his hands on you, it helps a good deal.’
Lias Berint ran to escape from the fellow, but Sertus followed him as well as he could.
When Lias Berint came to the quay, Ketil and Kálvur had loaded the straw into the boat, and were lying there waiting. The old man came on board, buried his chest under the straw, and sat down.
They pulled away from the land. A stack of straw was at each end of the boat, and between the thwarts they had loaded the boat up to the gunwales. The weather was still calm, but the sky was more threatening than ever. ‘It could hold till nightfall,’ the old men ruminated.
When they had gone some distance, they opened the food chest, cut themselves a few pieces, and ate them as they rowed.
‘I’ve never carried a fuller load of straw in this boat,’ said Ketil. ‘It’ll be easy to stop the leaks in the roof now.’
‘Will you use all this straw?’ asked Lias Berint.
‘I don’t know. But no, I couldn’t! There’s such a quantity of it.’
‘It was just that if you should have a truss or two over, perhaps you could let me have it. Even if I don’t build straight away, I can store it up.’
Ketil agreed to do this.
Kálvur sat sucking sugar candy, and rowed eagerly. He was looking forward to all the rye bread he would eat when they held their thatching party. He asked his father how many men he would invite to share the work.
‘None,’ replied the old man.
Then Kálvur began to sulk, because there wouldn’t be a party. He inwardly swore that he would stop putting any weight into his rowing. ‘Damn me if I’m going to sweat myself if there isn’t a square meal to look forward to,’ he thought.
While they were passing the deserted ferry landing at Fútaklettur, a rainstorm swept down from the northwest, and blotted out the sound ahead of them. When they were off Oyragjógv, they ran into the weather. The first squall turned their boat round, and the storm now sprang up so fast that they could never get their bow back into the wind. They were driven broadside on towards the shore, struck a boulder, heeled over, and the straw slipped into the water. All three of them jumped out and flung the straw onto the shore, before it blew away.
But while they were engaged in doing this, Lias Berint let out a heart-rending cry for help. His chest with his title deeds and his Sunday clothes was drifting away, blown southward down the sound. All three of them hurried along the rocky coast, expecting it to be blown ashore again somewhere. Lias Berint was in front. Bareheaded, and with stockings hanging down, he ran as if his life depended on it, shouting and invoking God. ‘Jesus, Jesus, save my precious chest, save my ancestral lands and my Sunday clothes, my hope of salvation!’ He ran on as fast as he could go, with the others behind him. The salt water flung itself off them, their beards flapped in the wind, and they stared beseechingly at the chest, making one vow after another for its safe return. When all was of no avail, tears filled their eyes, and they clenched their fists, threatening the chest, frantically appealing to God, losing all control of themselves – for if God did intend to restore the chest to Lias, He had not a moment to lose.
Lias Berint stood on the edge of a small basalt cliff. He now realised that the chest was irretrievably lost, and he kneeled on a rock to pray, and beseech God for its return. But the stone was a loose one, and he rolled with it, over the edge of the cliff.
‘Are you hurt?’ shouted Ketil to him. Lias Berint did not answer, but lay there motionless. Ketil climbed down and took him up, but he was dead. The fall had been only a short one, but his skull was fractured. For a few moments, Ketil stood quietly over him, his hands buried in his face. Then he went silently back to his son, who sat waiting for him on the clifftop.
‘Has Lias Berint hurt himself, Father?’ Kálvur asked.
‘Lias Berint has passed into the Lord’s keeping,’ Ketil replied.
They unloaded the stranded boat and pulled it ashore. They carried the straw into a boathouse, the only building on this desolate shore, maintained by the men of Sandavágur, four miles away over the mountains, on the other side of the island.
As dusk fell, the wind dropped a little and the sky began to clear.
Ketil took the rope out of the boat. ‘We won’t get the body up unless we use rope,’ he said.
‘Father, I’d be scared to come and help,’ said Kálvur.
‘Don’t be silly, lad, I can’t pull him up by myself, and he can’t be left out there, at the mercy of the waves of the sea and the birds of the air.’ So they went together, though Kálvur trembled like a leaf, and his legs would scarcely carry him. He fell down time after time.
The old man climbed down with one end of the rope and fastened it around Lias Berint. ‘Haul away,’ he called up to his son.
‘I’m scared to, Father.’
‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll hold him from below.’
So Kálvur hauled away, but he placed himself a long way back from the edge of the cliff, and shut his eyes. Ketil pushed from below, and they got him up on the ledge. Kálvur, his eyes shut, pulled until he had the corpse actually in his arms. Then he let out a piercing shriek and was about to run up the hillside. But when he saw how harmless Lias Berint seemed, he recovered heart, and asked his father when the funeral would be – he was rather fond of sago soup. The old man did not answer this, but told Kálvur to take hold under the dead man’s knees. Then they carried him back along the coast, and laid him in the stern of a boat that was lying in the boathouse.
Then Kálvur began to complain of the cold.
‘We could walk home,’ said Ketil, ‘but it’s not right to leave a dead body unaccompanied in this deserted place, so we shall have to stay here for the night.’
Kálvur was appalled by this. ‘Are we going to spend the whole of the night here in the pitch dark, wet through and without a fire?’ he said.
‘I can’t help that. We’ve come here, and here we’ve got to stay. Give thanks to God that we’ve reached land at all.’
So they made themselves a comfortable place in the bow of the boat, with straw under them and over them, and they lay down peacefully. They set the food chest in front of them. There was still a bit left in it, but they had come through so much that they had no appetite, and besides, they were so cold they thought it best to burrow into the straw before they froze.
The boathouse stood on the shore at the mouth of a gully. There were black cliffs on both sides of them, a waterfall behind, and the breakers at their feet. Darkness was just falling.
Kálvur lay tense and listening. Every time he heard a sound, he asked his father what it was. The old man bade him be easy. ‘It was a puff of wind, blowing under the roof, or a mouse perhaps. Commit yourself into God’s hands, and lie down and sleep. Nothing can work us any evil. We are treading our lawful paths and have nothing to be afraid of.’
A little afterwards, Kálvur asked him, ‘Have they been for the soul of Lias Berint?’
‘Who?’
‘The angels.’
‘Oh yes, as soon as the spirit left the body, they carried it away.’
‘Wouldn’t he feel awkward when he got to Heaven, where everything is so fine and there are so many strangers?’
‘There is nothing to feel awkward about where nobody makes fun of you.’
‘Did it hurt Lias Berint when he died?’
‘No, he couldn’t have known a thing.’
Kálvur was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘Then I think I would have liked to be in Lias Berint’s place.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because then nobody would make fun of me any more.’
‘Don’t take it to heart, lad, when people make fun of you. They like you well enough all the same – it’s just a bit of a joke.’
‘I don’t think they do like me, because whenever I’m going to say something, they tell me to shut up because I’m a halfwit. Father, is it true I’m a half-wit?’
‘You’re not a half-wit. As long as you trust in the Lord, you’re wise enough.’
Then Kálvur fell asleep, while Ketil lay awake, watching over his comrade in the stern. He took a wet box of matches out of his jacket pocket and laid them against his bare chest. ‘Maybe they’ll dry out enough by morning to be usable,’ he thought.
When the storm broke, Ketil’s wife became very worried. She walked backwards and forwards, praying Jesus to have mercy on them. Now they could not get back to the village. Twilight came, and still no boat. Then she went outside, and got a child to go and ask her eldest son to come over.
As darkness was beginning to fall, he came.
‘I’m rather worried about the boat. It’s not come back, and now there’s this bad weather, and night’s come on,’ she said.
‘Just like him, to wander off and get into difficulties,’ said her son. ‘I thought at the time, he wouldn’t come back unless the calm weather held. Neither his boat nor his crew are fit for a long journey. Why didn’t he tell me he was going off? I don’t know what’s the matter with you two. It’s almost as if you thought we weren’t good enough for you to ask us to do you a favour.’
He said he would go to the phone. Perhaps they had not left the other village.
Soon afterwards, Klávus looked in and said they were going off in the big boat to look for him.
‘Jesus help us! So they must have started home.’
‘Yes,’ said Klávus, ‘but remember that every corner of this vale of misery is in God’s keeping, and the Lamb has given His angels charge to guide them to the Rock of Salvation somewhere on the way home. God is good, and holds His protecting hand over all them that have the Seal of Life on their brows.’ He invited her to come back with him, and not sit there alone in the house sorrowing.
‘Yes, I think I will come over with you. It’s always a consolation to be with other people.’ She picked up her knitting and put out the lamp.
But at the same moment Klávus caught her round the waist and gave her a hug, went all soft-tongued and wanted to kiss her. But she bit him so hard that he shrieked and ran for the door. ‘Shame on you, you old beast, not leaving an old woman like me alone,’ she shouted. She lit the lamp again, and sat down by the fireside with her knitting.
Ketil lay in the boathouse, struggling not to fall asleep. He thought it would be keeping poor faith with his friend if he were unable to watch over him one night through. But he was an old man, and tired out, so that now he had a little peace, and was once again warm, he began to feel sleepy. And the waterfall foamed on in a very sleepy way. He closed his eyes, thinking, ‘The body is under cover, and He who is mightier than I is surely keeping watch here tonight. So perhaps it’s all the same if I do doze off.’ So he slept.
A little later his sons, clad in oilskins and sea boots, came clattering into the boathouse. The first one had a pressure lamp in his hand, which he set down on the boat. He looked down into the stern and said, ‘Some of this boat’s crew won’t be pulling an oar again.’
Then Ketil got up out of the straw.
‘What’s happened to you?’ asked the sons. ‘And where’s Kálvur?’
‘He’s all right, he’s lying here asleep.’
‘Oh yes, it could have been a lot worse.’
They gave them some food, and scalding hot coffee-and-spirits, helped them into dry clothes, and took them on board. Lias Berint they wrapped in a sailcloth and carried to the shore. But then came the skipper who had married his niece, in another boat. So he took the body home with him.
When they landed, Ketil said, ‘God be thanked we have reached the village again. The journey could have gone better, but it was doubtless God’s will that it should have been thus.’
‘You should be pleased you’ve got back with a whole boat and all your straw,’ said his sons. ‘As for Lias Berint, he’s well out of it. He’s had a lifetime of grinding toil, and now he’s shed the burden.’
‘Still, it’s a hard thing to lose your life.’
‘Not for a worn-out fellow like that,’ answered the sons.
‘Well now, in the old days that would have been thought slanderous talk, but things are so much altered nowadays – I don’t know.’ And Ketil and Kálvur went to their house.
‘How’s it going with the measles?’ they asked as they came in through the door.
Ketil’s wife beamed at them. ‘Bless you, there’s no measles in the village. One of the pastor’s children got a two-oyru piece stuck in his throat, that’s why the doctor came.’
Then Kálvur had to laugh, because he thought it a bit stingy of the pastor to fetch the doctor just to rescue a two-oyru piece.
The following day, Ketil began thatching, but he reflected that if this talk about the measles had not arisen, they would have stayed at home, Lias Berint would perhaps still be alive, and they themselves would probably have made do with the roof as it was, until the next spring.