Christmas was approaching, and it was not fishing weather. Spirits steadily sank in Ketil’s house. The old folk racked their brains night and day for ways of laying their hands on a few pence, for an announcement had been posted on the notice board that the District Sheriff would be coming to the village early in the new year, and that the whale-meat bills would be paid then. But they saw no way through. And the cow had not calved, although she was overdue. The old woman tried giving her warm water, but still no calf came. They had wool to spin and knit up, but there was so little time left that this work would not meet their needs.
One Friday morning the church bell rang, the signal that Holy Communion would be celebrated the following Sunday. Ketil and his wife resolved to take communion, although it was not their turn. They did not talk about why they should go again this time, but this had happened many times before in their lives, when difficulties had been at their greatest.
On Saturday, Ketil came back from the fields earlier than usual, and neither of them worked that evening. On Sunday morning, they had a cup of tea when they got up, but ate nothing. Long before service-time they were sitting in their Sunday clothes, ready to go off. Ketil stepped in and out of the courtyard to see whether people were on their way to church, for it could always happen that they might miss the bell.
Once when Ketil was in the yard, Tummas went by. He said nothing, and did not stop, but he told the people in the house next door that Ketil was standing by his door, dressed ready for church. ‘Didn’t they take communion last time the pastor held service here?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Ketil’s neighbours, ‘they did. But Ketil’s family always have to be different from everyone else. What other reason could they have for breaking the old custom?’
‘That I don’t know,’ said Tummas. ‘Remorse, maybe?’
‘Why should they feel remorse more than we or anyone else?’
‘I don’t know, but I just heard that some folk think it a bit odd that anyone should fall and kill himself in a fairly flat place.’ Tummas said this from the doorway, as he was on the way out.
Ketil’s neighbours gaped and goggled. ‘No, this must be evil tongues telling such a story. Ketil could never be so wicked as to wish any harm on Lias Berint.’
‘No, you’d think not; but you can’t be sure. They could have been drunk, or they could have quarrelled about land. People said when Lias Berint came to live with Ketil that land was at the back of it.’ This idea upset them so much that they had to go out and talk it over a bit more.
When they got outside, they met people from other houses Tummas had visited, and they learned in addition that Lias Berint’s title deeds had been in the boat. Klávus brought that information back to the village the day he had been to the funeral. Now people began to make free with their guesses. Gracious heavens, what news for a Sabbath morning! Women, half-dressed, and their hair streaming behind them, ran from house to house. ‘Jesus help us, have you heard …?’ ‘Yes, too true I’ve heard about it, but do you know anything else?’ ‘Oh yes, now they’re saying …’ And the story grew with the telling.
Two elderly spinsters ran from one part of the village to another, their pattens in their hands for speed, darting breathlessly into people’s houses with the news. ‘Now they’re saying that Ketil did away with Lias Berint that day! Yes, because why else should he fall and kill himself on level ground near Oyragjógv? Just to get his title deeds from him. There were ten title deeds in the boat, according to what Klávus told Tummas. And now his wife’s dragging him to the communion service today. They say he’s quite beside himself with remorse, and doesn’t look like a human being any longer. Oh, my dear, you’ve no idea how upset we are about this. Of course we don’t believe a word of it – it’s just evil talk.’
The church bell rang, and Ketil and his wife set out. They had a smelling-bottle which they passed to each other – it was a great help if you felt ill in church. They walked slowly and silently; he went first and she followed. They were surprised to see so many people afoot that day, but they thought no more of it. In the dimness of the porch, they took another sniff at their bottle, before going to their usual places.
The church was full. A mass of folk who were not usually to be seen there, crowded the gallery and the porch, waiting to catch sight of Ketil, who was supposed to look so ghastly.
Tummas sat in the gallery, chewing tobacco and spitting into the eaves. He was rather uneasy, feeling uncertain how all this was going to end.
The two old spinsters sat stretching their necks and looking at the door, trying to look shocked. Their eyes were agoggle and their lips pursed.
When Ketil and his wife stepped into the aisle, he went first, his hands together and his head bowed, quietly and with a peaceful expression. His wife followed, a little bent, like all women when they take communion, holding her shawl round her as she always did in church. A whisper went round the congregation, ‘They look just as they always do!’
Then everyone changed their minds: ‘No, of course not, a murderer doesn’t look like that. Shame on the man who spreads such slanders! He ought to be soundly punished for weaving together such a tissue of lies.’
Tummas tried to efface himself. ‘I said nothing. They’ve no cause to blame me,’ he told himself. He saw the stern glances that people were giving him, and a young man came up and kicked him hard on the shins with his boot.
The old spinsters tried so hard to diminish their height that their Adam’s apples slipped right down below their blouse collars. ‘No, we said all the time it was just evil talk that people had put together – as if anybody could bring themselves to do a thing like that,’ they told themselves.
Ketil and his wife went up to the altar, for this was the nearest approach they could make to God Himself. They would try this last way to get the whale-meat bill paid – by praying in front of the very altar.
When people came back from church, the whole village was in turmoil. The story about Ketil had come to the hearing of people from other villages who were in the place, and it had been telephoned all round the island and outside it. ‘The whole thing’s a lie,’ said the people who had been in church. ‘We could tell by the way they looked.’
The reaction was violent. The villagers wanted to get at the people who had peddled around such slanders. The village lads caught one of the old spinsters outside the churchyard wall, tied her skirt up over her head, and painted her backside red. She had to bite a hole in her skirt to get free again.
Towards bedtime, Tummas came wandering through the village. Ketil’s eldest son fell in with him. ‘Now, Tummas,’ he said, ‘have you heard any news?’
‘No, I don’t know any. Wind looks like freshening northerly again.’
‘Well, well, you don’t know any news. I heard you’d been accusing my father of manslaughter – surely that must be big news?’
‘I never said that.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Ketil’s son now gripped him by the shirt front, flung him down into a muddy puddle in the middle of the lane, and gave him a sound drubbing. ‘Next time you slander anyone, you’ll get your jaw broken,’ said Ketil’s son. Then he thrust him away.
When he got home, he told his wife about what he had done, and laughed about it.
‘You can’t be right in the head,’ said his wife nervously, ‘laying hands on the man. Why didn’t you report him?’
‘Why didn’t I report him? What the hell’s the use of that? Just to let the court squeeze money out of him? And in the meantime his wife and children would go hungry.’
The next day was good fishing weather, and Ketil and Kálvur went out with the boat, but caught nothing. The second and third day they also caught nothing they could sell. The fourth day, when Ketil’s middlemost son came down to help them get their catch ashore, he saw nothing in the boat but two small cod, and said, ‘It’s a shame the sea’s so damned empty.’
Ketil answered gently, ‘No, my lad, it’s not damned empty, but blessedly empty.’ And he went home with eyes glazed and head hung.
‘How did it go with you today, did you catch any fish?’ asked his wife with a trembling voice.
‘No, we didn’t catch a thing. We’ve tried so thoroughly now, that I think there’s no use trying again even if it should be good weather tomorrow.’
They went to bed early that evening, but the old couple could not sleep, but lay silently, each deep in thought.
Some way through the night, Ketil said to his wife, ‘You’re not asleep, are you?’
‘No.’
He had heard her crying. An hour later, he spoke to her again. ‘It doesn’t do any good crying, old girl.’
‘We’ll be sold up,’ she whimpered.
‘Yes, we will for sure … But it’s God’s will, and it must be done.’ They talked no more that night.
The next morning their cow started to calve. Now this would hardly help the whale-meat bill much, because it would be too short a time to fatten up the calf, but it was some consolation all the same.
Ketil sat at the end of the bench by the door so that he could look at the cow through the peephole. His wife stood by the fireplace, heating up water. Kálvur stood by the door with the bolt in his hand, looking though the latchhole into the yard. If Klávus came, he was to bolt the door. They didn’t want him about while the cow was calving, for he always brought them bad luck.
While they were sitting there, Ketil’s eldest son came in to borrow a creel. He began to laugh, remembering these customs from his youth. He took Kálvur away from the door and held him. ‘Haven’t you given up all this business yet? It’s only silly superstition,’ he said.
‘When you know that Klávus brings bad luck,’ said his mother, ‘it’s no superstition then.’
‘But do you know that he’s ever done any harm?’
‘Yes, he’s been in the house twice when our cow has been calving, and things went wrong both times. The first time the calf died, and the second time the cow milked blood.’
‘Yes, but what of that? Are things like that so very uncommon? It would have happened just the same even if Klávus had not been there.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Ketil. ‘Why should it be remarkable for Klávus to bring bad luck on occasions like this? A man who always treads in unlawful paths will bring no good with him, that we may be sure of.’
‘That’s just silly talk,’ said the son. ‘I’ll go straight over to Klávus’s, and ask him to come over, and then you’ll see whether anything happens.’
‘No, no, please, son, you must do no such thing – we couldn’t bear to lose this calf!’ said the old woman.
‘All right, I was only teasing. Nowadays we treat this sort of thing rather as a joke.’ He went off with the creel.
‘I can’t understand that man,’ said Ketil’s wife, ‘how he can be so cheerful all the time, a man who’s got a house full of unpaid bills, while we’re so worried about a single one.’
Later in the day the cow dropped her calf, and Ketil’s wife gave her a good milking. ‘God be praised that everything’s gone so well,’ said the old folk.
Kálvur had practically lost his voice since his sin. The old folk had to console him, and tell him he must not lose heart, though he must not do such a thing again.
He promised that he wouldn’t.
But one day they went to the rectory with him to have the banns entered. Then he recovered his voice, and asked whether it was still a sin to sleep with his girl.
‘Oh yes, definitely, right until I say to you, “Be fruitful and multiply”,’ answered the pastor.
The next morning Ketil felt rather poorly, but he got up all the same.
‘You ought to be lying quietly in your bed. There’s nothing to be earned anyway,’ said his wife.
‘Maybe so, but I thought I’d go along to the pastor for leave to go onto the bird cliffs.’
‘Onto the bird cliffs!’ said his wife, astonished.
‘Yes, maybe I could net some fulmars. If we sold them, it would help quite a bit.’
‘I wouldn’t dare to let you go – you’re so old, your legs are almost dead underneath you.’
He thought that was no objection. So he went to the rectory.
When he got there, the pastor was arguing with a man about land. ‘You won’t be renting any of my infield again,’ he said. ‘The hay you gave me as rent last autumn was quite useless.’
The man blamed the dry weather. ‘If I can’t have any of your infield again, I’ll have to kill the cow.’
‘You’ve deserved no better, because there’s always trouble with you. But you’re not the only one; nowadays it seems to be just the same whatever I do, I get blamed regardless. But remember this, it doesn’t pay to set yourself against me, because I own both the infield and the turbary in this village, and without my leave, you’ll get neither milk nor fuel.’
‘I thought a priest was supposed to be a merciful man.’
‘Yes, that’s just it,’ answered the pastor sharply. ‘I’m a priest, and so I have to put up with anything and everything. But let me tell you this. You give me what is my due, and ask me decently for what you need, and be thankful for what you receive. That is how it should be between Christian folk.’
Another man stood waiting. Now he asked if the other would be much longer.
‘No,’ said the pastor, and asked him what he wanted.
‘Mother asked if you would come over and give her absolution – she’s at her last.’
Yes, he would come.
Then Ketil came with his errand.
‘Yes, Ketil, you have my leave to go on the bird cliffs, and may Christ be with you. You are a man of the old school, a modest and peaceful man, thankful for the things you have received. But these younger folk, who boast of their right to the land and just about want to seize it for themselves, they don’t need to expect any mild treatment from me. For the land and the power in this place are mine.’
So Ketil trudged off with his fowling net. He did not want Kálvur with him, as they owned only one net. He could have had him sitting there ready to carry the fulmars home, but he thought it would be too presumptuous in the sight of God to have a man waiting to carry home birds that were still flying across the cliff face.
Quietly, he walked northwards over the hills, and quietly he sat down by a boulder at the end of the cliff line, and crossed himself. As he traversed the cliffs, his lips were quivering the whole time. He heard stones fall, and lumps of ice detach themselves, but he was not afraid, for these things fell where they were destined to fall, and were guided by a Hand that had the power to steer them.
A short way along the sea cliff he came to a little shelter, where he sat down. The fulmars came, and he swung his net and caught three of them. The fourth time he lifted it, a stone fell from the edge of the cliff above him, and snapped the pole of his fowling net. Of the ten feet of its length, only a stump of three or four feet was left in his hands. It seemed to him as though God Himself had smitten off his hand; he bowed his head and gave God thanks: ‘I have deserved no better,’ he said. Then he went home with the three birds.
His wife could hardly bear to look at him when he came home, he looked so downcast. He put the stump on the beams, hung the fulmars on a nail the other side of the byre door, and sat down to change his stockings.
Kálvur was not at home.
‘I can’t do anything more about that whale-meat bill,’ he told his wife. ‘I don’t see any way through now.’
‘I understand, my dear,’ said his wife, seating herself by the fireplace. ‘I’m more troubled for your sake than for the shame of it, and I grudge those people who wish us ill the pleasure of seeing the District Sheriff in the house.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ketil, ‘but I would never dare to look folk in the eye again, if the District Sheriff came in to distrain on us. Have you counted up the bit of money we have?’
‘That’s soon done.’ They went into the bedroom and locked the door, and the old woman fetched out a little box from under the bed. From one of its compartments she took out some crumpled notes and a little small change, slightly over a hundred kroner altogether. They sat silent on the edge of the bed for a time, staring at the little heap.
Then the old woman said, ‘I think we’ll have to sell the cow.’ She looked away and silently wept.
Ketil blanched and felt a singing in his ears. ‘That would be like losing one’s right hand. She’s the only living creature we’ve got, and we’d be without milk for two years.’
They both went out again, opened the byre door, and stood there looking at their cow. She lay there so clean and beautiful on her bedding, chewing the cud. Ketil hid his face in his hat, while the old woman buried her eyes in his chest.
Before anyone was afoot the next morning, Ketil and Kálvur left the house, taking their cow with them.