Melt (7 page)

An iron pot sat on a flat stone in the fire, its oily contents simmering.

She reached into the fire with a cloth wrapped around her hand and lifted the pot out, setting it on the hearth. She stirred through it with a metal spoon to check that all the seal blubber was melted. This would be enough oil to fill their lamps for a couple of weeks, she estimated.

Confused, she stared into the oily pot to catch her hazy reflection, seeing long, light-colored hair pulled back from her face. She reached up and pushed an errant strand back, noting the coarse texture, noting also how large and strangely colored her hand was. It was pale and marked by a network of ruddy freckles. This was not her hand…and yet it was. She felt oddly within and without her body at the same time.

She glanced around the room. Like her hand, it looked familiar and strange all at once. It was no more than twelve feet across, with a hand-hewn wooden table and chairs and a cramped workspace along the wall adjacent to the hearth. An oil lamp stood on the table, cold. Next to a heavy wooden door there was one window with open shutters letting in a feeble light. On the worktable stood a pitcher, some cups, a pot, utensils and a basin of water. On a peg by the door hung her overcoat, and beside the door was the wooden bucket she used to milk the goats.

The confusion sifted out of her mind as all of these familiar objects reminded her who and where she was. She was Asa, daughter of Torvald, wife of Bjarni, and she was home.

As she stood upright, she felt the kick of her child in her belly. She recalled Bjarni’s cold gray eyes when she had told him about this one, another child on the way. He was not happy. Not like the first time, when his firstborn Alrik arrived. He had cried with joy at the sight of his son. That was twelve years ago. So much had changed since then. Bjarni was unhappy most of the time now. Their crops had failed again and many of the villagers had died from the winter sickness. Others had left on a desperate overland journey to reach Brattahlid, hoping that their brethren to the south were better off. That was last year. Nobody knew if they had made it or what they had found if they did. They had promised to send help, but so far there had been only silence.

No help was coming from any source, Asa had concluded. There were never any ships, not anymore, but the sagas told of a time when there were. The ships used to come every summer, bringing grain, timber, livestock, cloth, tools and even new settlers. They were huge, beautiful ships that could hold many people and travel great distances. Asa had never seen such a sight. She had been born here in Greenland in this village. Her husband Bjarni had been born here too. And this child, son or daughter of Bjarni and Asa, would also be born here.

She glanced at the cross hanging above the hearth and wondered again if God had forgotten about His tiny flock freezing on this rock, that He had brought them another short, cold summer with poor crops, poor hunting and no food for their animals. As always, she felt ashamed of the thought. God never abandons any of us; that’s what she’d been told. If He doesn’t hear you, you’re the one at fault. You need to pray harder or work harder or be better.

That cross was one of her few possessions that had come from Norway. It had been in her family for several generations and had gone to Iceland with them. It had made the journey here with her grandparents. Now that her grandparents and parents were gone, it was hers. Like the blue crockery she used for their table. The table itself had been made by Bjarni from scraps of lumber scavenged from an abandoned farm. He wasn’t a very good carpenter. The table, like most things he made, was rough and ill-proportioned, but it served its function. The luxury of beauty belonged to the past. Or some other world, as she had heard stories of.

She sighed as her daughter Gudny pushed open the door and burst in from outside, bundled in her wool jacket patched in many places, her little face peeking out from her hood with a carefree smile, her blue eyes shining. She ran up and flung her arms around Asa’s legs. Asa embraced her, lifted her up and kissed her cheek, pushing the hood off her beautiful blonde curls. Gudny was always happy. She seemed not to know all the reasons not to be. Oh, what a foolish child to be so happy in the face of so much hopelessness! Asa laughed and gave Gudny a squeeze.

“Do you want some milk?” she asked, setting Gudny on the floor.

Gudny nodded eagerly. Asa removed the child’s coat, then gave her a cup of goat’s milk in a chipped blue cup. They had two goats left. It would have been none, but Bjarni’s brother had died of the sickness and Bjarni took his animals and furniture. There was almost nothing left for the goats to eat, though, so they wouldn’t last much longer. Once the snow covered the ground, the goats would starve. Then her family would eat the goats like they had the sheep and cows before them. Then what? No milk. No cheese. They would eat fish, Bjarni said. And seal meat. They already ate fish and seal meat. But without any milk to cook the dried fish in, it would be nearly intolerable. You can live on fish and seal meat, Bjarni insisted to his family. The Skrælings do it. When he had mentioned the wild, dark people, his mother Hild had protested, saying, “We are not Skrælings! We are Norsemen. We must have bread and milk. Have faith. God will provide.”

They could survive on fish and seal meat like the Skrælings, but even the fishing and hunting didn’t seem as good as they used to be. In days past, according to the elders, there were so many seals and walruses, they could take as many as they could carry back to the village. And no trouble either with the Skrælings. They lived further north. They were hardly ever seen. But now they were seen more often, parties of hunters in their long narrow boats gliding past in the ocean beyond the ice. When they appeared, a ripple of fear and loathing ran through the village and all the men became alert and watchful. There had been recent violence between the two groups. Several months before, a party of men had brought down a walrus. As they butchered it, they were attacked by a half dozen Skrælings who stole the walrus and left two men injured.

Asa had never seen a Skræling except from a great distance. All she knew about them was that they were brown-skinned savages to be abhorred and avoided.

Her mother-in-law Hild was bitter and unhappy. Since Bjarni was the only male left of her family, she blamed him for everything that was wrong. Her husband had died years ago. Her other son and his entire family had been taken by the sickness last winter. Her youngest child, a daughter, died in childbirth. Bjarni sometimes got angry at his mother and told her she should have gone with the others, the ones who left last year for Brattahlid.

“How could I leave my family?” she had answered. At that time, Bjarni’s brother and his family had still been alive. “Besides, you know they never made it.”

Most of the villagers had assumed the party couldn’t make it. The weather was rarely mild long enough to allow such a journey on foot. It would have taken a miracle, more than one person had declared, for that party to have made its goal. Even some among those who left expected to die. They gave their possessions to those who remained and wished them well, saying farewell with a grim resignation. If they had had dogs and sleds like the Skrælings, Asa reflected, they might have made it.

But the villagers weren’t past hope. They still hoped for a good summer each year, for healthy crops and animals, for good fishing and hunting. And, most importantly, they were still alive.

Asa smiled at her daughter with her milky upper lip.

The sound of excited voices outside drew her attention. She pulled on her coat and opened the door, seeing a group of men nearby. Bjarni saw her and walked rapidly toward her, his towering frame bulky in his layers of clothing. He grinned and pointed toward the shore.

“We got a whale!” he said triumphantly. “We’ll have a feast!”

He brushed the hood off his head, letting his ginger hair fall loose. His lined face was rugged, his jaw hard and square, his chin broad. His thin lips were stretched into a seldom seen exultant smile.

“A whale!” she exclaimed.

“Big enough to feed everyone for weeks.”

As the thankful villagers butchered the whale, the story of the hunt was told and retold by each of the hunters to his friends and family members. They had spotted it close to shore and had gone after it in two boats. Halvard had been first to land a clean hit with his harpoon. The wounded animal had put up a fight, but was overwhelmed by several weapons. While they were battling the whale, three Skrælings had appeared in one of their narrow boats. The men had vowed that they would not lose another catch to Skrælings, so while one boat finished off the whale and lumbered toward shore with it, the other boat put itself between the Skrælings and the whale. They shadowed each other into shore where all three vessels were pulled onto the rocks and the whale was secured. The Skrælings ran toward them, brandishing spears and yelling. There were only three, so five of the men ran out to meet them. A hand-to-hand fight took place with knives and clubs. One of the Skrælings was killed by a stab wound to the chest. The other two then ran back to their boat and paddled away.

“They ran away!” the men boasted, proud that they had defended themselves and their catch successfully this time. “And left their dead brother to be eaten by bears.”

“Heathen dogs,” Bjarni chuckled. He was still excited by the day’s events.

During the course of harvesting the whale flesh, they were surprised at the discovery of a broken-off harpoon tip embedded in the whale’s side. It was a Skræling harpoon made of bone, not iron like their own. The hunters grew less boastful after that, understanding that the first blow landed on this whale had not been Halvard’s after all.

The villagers went to their chapel and gave thanks to God for providing food and asked for protection from the Skræling devils.

Asa said a special prayer for her unborn child, that he or she would not live in suffering. What she meant by that, she didn’t allow her imagination to pursue.

Chapter Seven

Kelly stumbled again and went down, landing on two hands and a knee. She lowered herself to rest on the rock she’d tripped on. Her legs were wearing out. The few miles between their break spot and town belied the difficulty of the journey. Without finding the official trail, she was left to scramble over loose rocks, climb steep hills and skirt dozens of lakes. She had ended up having to backtrack for an entire mile at one point because the route she had chosen dead-ended at an impassable fjord. Now she was a quarter mile into crossing a low area that had seemed like an easy path when she’d chosen it. But it had been a mistake. It was a bog. Her boots were soaked through. Her legs were splattered with mud up to her knees.

If it was winter,
she thought,
my feet would freeze and fall off
. But it wasn’t winter. What would she be doing here in winter anyway? She shook her head, realizing she was having trouble staying focused.

She again conjured up the image of the coconut bunny cake and tried to remember if she had gotten her first bicycle for that birthday. Or was it Christmas? Her memories from that early age were too sketchy. She began to realize that she couldn’t really even remember the bunny cake itself. The clear memory she had of it wasn’t a memory of the actual cake at all. It was the memory of a photograph taken that day. In the photo, she sat on a booster seat at the kitchen table, wearing a pastel yellow dress with a yellow ribbon in her hair, her eyes wide with the prospect of the amazing cake. Her mother faced the camera, standing beside her with the most wonderfully happy expression on her face. That was why she loved that photograph so much. It was because of her mother’s beaming smile. That sort of happiness had gone out of reach for her later, in times Kelly remembered much better. But the photo proved it had once been possible.

Photography was a kind of magic. Some aboriginals wouldn’t allow themselves to be photographed because they thought the image would steal their souls. Remembering that photo of her mother, Kelly could see how one could imagine it had stolen something from her. Because there it was in the photo, a joyful vitality in her eyes that had gone out in later years. But the magic of a photo wasn’t that it stole your soul. It was that it stopped time.

In those days, her mother had dutifully put the photos in albums in chronological order. Like everyone’s albums, the pictures were of special occasions—holidays, birthdays, vacations. The albums ended by the time Kelly reached her teens. That was when everything fell apart and happy family occasions no longer took place. Pretend happy took place for a while. Then even that ended. Dad left and their house became a place of mourning.

Some people grow stronger from defeat. Wiser and more determined, they take life’s lessons into the future with them. Some people let disappointment break them. That’s what her mother had done. Her disillusionment turned to despair and she remained stuck there, full of bitter regret, to the present day. When anybody asked her if she would ever remarry, she would answer, “Why? So I can be tossed on the trash heap again?” She was afraid to risk her heart. But one thing Kelly knew was that you can’t win if you don’t throw the dice.

No, Kelly didn’t remember that birthday. She couldn’t have said who else was around that table or whether or not she got a bicycle or who took the photo. It was her mother’s happy memory, not hers. Funny how you think you remember something when there’s a photo. It begs a philosophical question: what was the difference between a memory of an event and the memory of a photo of the event?

In a way, those ever-joyful photos could seem ironic, and that’s how her mother saw them. Her mother looked at them and thought,
It was all an illusion
. But it wasn’t like that for Kelly. The photos were her proof that for many years they were all happy. At the time, life was wonderful, and the fact that the happy period ended didn’t change that. It had still happened. It was her childhood. She thought it was a mistake to turn bitter about the good times just because they didn’t last forever. The way to avoid regret over the past and fear of the future was to live in the moment. For Kelly, a photograph was a symbol of that philosophy. It was a true, unchanging glimpse of a moment in time.