“It always blows here at Haugen,” replied Fru Aashild. “There’s no sign of a break in the weather.”
Then they sat in silence again.
“You mustn’t forget what fate she had intended for the two of you,” said Fru Aashild.
Kristin said softly, “I keep thinking that in her place I might have wanted to do the same.”
“You would never have wanted to cause another person to become a leper,” said Fru Aashild staunchly.
“Do you remember, Aunt, you once told me that it’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.”
“You didn’t dare because it was a sin,” said Fru Aashild.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Kristin. “I’ve done many things that I thought I would never dare do because they were sins. But I didn’t realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.”
“Erlend wanted to mend his ways long before he met you,” replied Aashild vehemently. “It was over between those two.”
“I know that,” said Kristin, “but she probably never had reason to believe that Erlend’s plans were so firm that she wouldn’t be able to change them.”
“Kristin,” pleaded Fru Aashild fearfully, “you won’t give up Erlend now, will you? The two of you can’t be saved unless you save each other.”
“That’s hardly what a priest would say,” said Kristin, smiling coldly. “But I know that I won’t let go of Erlend—even if I have to trample on my own father.”
Fru Aashild stood up.
“We might as well keep ourselves busy instead of sitting here like this,” she said. “It would probably be useless for us to try to go to bed.”
She brought the butter churn from the storeroom, carried in some basins of milk, and filled it up; then she took up her position to churn.
“Let me do that,” begged Kristin. “I have a younger back.”
They worked without talking. Kristin stood near the storeroom door and churned, and Aashild carded wool over by the hearth. Not until Kristin had strained out the churn and was forming the butter did she suddenly say, “Aunt Aashild—aren’t you ever afraid of the day when you have to face God’s judgment?”
Fru Aashild stood up and went over to stand in front of Kristin in the light.
“Perhaps I’ll have the courage to ask the one who created me, such as I am, whether He will have mercy on me when the time comes. For I have never asked for His mercy when I went against His commandments. And I have never asked God or man to return one penning of the fines I’ve had to pay here in my earthly home.”
A moment later she said quietly, “Munan, my eldest son, was twenty years old. Back then he wasn’t the way I know him to be now. They weren’t like that then, those children of mine . . .”
Kristin replied softly, “And yet you’ve had Herr Bjørn by your side every day and every night all these years.”
“Yes,” said Aashild, “that I have.”
A little later Kristin was done with forming the butter. Then Fru Aashild said that they ought to try lying down for a while.
In the dark bed she put her arm around Kristin’s shoulder and pulled the girl’s head toward her. And it wasn’t long before she could hear by her even and quiet breathing that Kristin was asleep.
CHAPTER 4
THE FROST HUNG ON. In every stable of the village the starving animals lowed and complained, suffering from the cold. But the people were already rationing the fodder as best they could.
There was not much visiting done during the Christmas season that year; everyone was staying at home.
At Christmas the cold grew worse; each day felt colder than the one before. People could hardly remember such a harsh winter. And while no more snow fell, even up in the mountains, the snow that had fallen on Saint Clement’s Day froze as hard as stone. The sun shone in a clear sky, now that the days were growing lighter. At night the northern lights flickered and sputtered above the mountain ridges to the north; they flickered over half the sky, but they didn’t bring a change in the weather. Once in a while it would cloud over, sprinkling a little dry snow, but then the clear skies and biting cold would return. The Laag murmured and gurgled lazily beneath the bridges of ice.
Each morning Kristin would think that now she could stand it no longer; that she wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, because each day felt like a duel between her father and herself. And was it right for them to be so at odds with each other right now, when every living thing, every person and beast in the valleys, was enduring a common trial? But when evening came she had made it through after all.
It was not that her father was unfriendly. They never spoke of what lay between them, but Kristin could feel that in everything he left unsaid he was steadfastly determined to stand by his refusal.
And she burned with longing for his affection. Her anguish was even greater because she knew how much else her father had to bear; and if things had been as they were before, he would have talked to her about his concerns. It’s true that at Jørundgaard they were better prepared than most other places, but even here they felt the effects of the bad year, every day and every hour. In the winter Lavrans usually spent time breaking and training his foals, but this year, during the autumn, he had sold all of them in the south. His daughter missed hearing his voice out in the courtyard and watching him tussle with the lanky, shaggy two-year-old horses in the game that he loved so much. The storerooms, barns, and bins on the farm had not been emptied after the harvest of the previous year, but many people came to Jørundgaard asking for help, either as a purchase or a gift, and no one asked in vain.
Late one evening a very old man, dressed in furs, arrived on skis. Lavrans spoke to him out in the courtyard, and Halvdan took food to him in the hearth room. No one on the farm who had seen him knew who he was, but it was assumed that he was one of the people who lived in the mountains; perhaps Lavrans had run into him out there. But Kristin’s father didn’t speak of the visit, nor did Halvdan.
Then one evening a man arrived with whom Lavrans Bjørgulf søn had had a score to settle for many years. Lavrans went out to the storeroom with him. But when he returned to the house, he said, “Everyone wants me to help them. And yet here on my farm you’re all against me. Even you, wife,” he said angrily to Ragnfrid.
Then Ragnfrid lashed out at Kristin.
“Do you hear what your father is saying to me? I’m not against you, Lavrans. You know full well, Kristin, what happened south of here at Roaldstad late in the fall, when he traveled through the valley in the company of that other whoremonger, his kinsman from Haugen—she took her own life, that unfortunate woman he had enticed away from all her kinsmen.”
Her face rigid, Kristin replied harshly, “I see that you blame him as much for the years when he was striving to get out of sin as for those when he was living in it.”
“Jesus Maria,” cried Ragnfrid, clasping her hands together. “Look what’s become of you! Won’t even this make you change your mind?”
“No,” said Kristin. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
Then Lavrans looked up from the bench where he was sitting with Ulvhild.
“Nor have I, Kristin,” he said quietly.
But Kristin knew in her heart that in some way she had changed —if not her decision, then her outlook. She had received word of the progress of that ill-fated journey. It had gone easier than anyone could have expected. Whether it was because the cold had settled in his wound or for some other reason, the knife injury which Erlend had received in his chest had become infected. He lay ill at the hostel in Roaldstad for a long time, and Herr Bjørn tended to him during those days. But because Erlend had been wounded, it was easier to explain everything else and to make others believe them.
When he was able to continue, he transported the dead woman in a coffin all the way to Oslo. There, with Sira J
on’s intervention, he found a gravesite for her in the cemetery of Nikolaus Church, which lay in ruins. Then he had confessed to the Bishop of Oslo himself, who had enjoined him to travel to the Shrine of the Holy Blood in Schwerin. So now he had left the country.
There was no place to which she could make a pilgrimage to seek redemption. Her lot was to stay here, to wait and worry and try to endure her opposition to her parents. A strange, cold winter light fell over all her memories of her meetings with Erlend. She thought about his ardor—in love and in sorrow—and it occurred to her that if she had been able to seize on all things with equal abruptness and plunge ahead at once, then afterward they might seem of less consequence and easier to bear. Sometimes she thought that Erlend might give her up. She had always had a slight fear that it could become too difficult for them, and he would lose heart. But she would not give him up—not unless he released her from all promises.
And so the winter wore on. And Kristin could no longer fool herself; she had to admit that now the most difficult trial awaited all of them, for Ulvhild did not have long to live. And in the midst of her bitter sorrow over her sister, Kristin realized with horror that her own soul had been led astray and was corrupted by sin. For as she witnessed the dying child and her parents’ unspeakable grief, she thought of only one thing: if Ulvhild dies, how will I be able to endure facing my father without throwing myself down before him, to confess everything and to beg him to forgive me and to do with me what he will.
The Lenten fast was upon them. People were slaughtering the small animals they had hoped to save before the livestock perished on its own. And people were falling ill from living on fish and the scant and wretched portions of grain. Sira Eirik released the entire village from the ban against consuming milk. But no one had even a drop of milk.
Ulvhild was confined to bed. She slept alone in the sisters’ bed, and someone watched over her every night. Sometimes Kristin and her father would both sit with her. On one such night Lavrans said to his daughter, “Do you remember what Brother Edvin said about Ulvhild’s fate? I thought at the time that maybe this was what he meant. But I put it out of my mind.”
During those nights he would occasionally talk about one thing or another from the time when the children were small. Kristin would sit there, pale and miserable, understanding that behind his words, her father was pleading with her.
One day Lavrans had gone out with Kolbein to seek out a bear’s lair in the mountain forest to the north. They returned home with a female bear on a sled, and Lavrans was carrying a little bear cub, still alive, inside his tunic. Ulvhild smiled a little when he showed it to her. But Ragnfrid said that this was no time to take in that kind of animal, and what was he going to do with it now?
“I’m going to fatten it up and then tie it to the bedchamber of my maidens,” said Lavrans, laughing harshly.
But they couldn’t find the kind of rich milk that the bear cub needed, and so several days later Lavrans killed it.
The sun had grown so strong that occasionally, in the middle of the day, the eaves would begin to drip. The titmice clung to the timbered walls and hopped around on the sunny side; the pecking of their beaks resounded as they looked for flies asleep in the gaps between the wood. Out across the meadows the snow gleamed, hard and shiny like silver.
Finally one evening clouds began to gather in front of the moon. In the morning they woke up at Jørundgaard to a whirl of snow that blocked their view in all directions.
On that day it became clear that Ulvhild was going to die.
The entire household had gathered inside, and Sira Eirik had come. Many candles were burning in the room. Early that evening, Ulvhild passed on, calmly and peacefully, in her mother’s arms.
Ragnfrid bore it better than anyone could have expected. The parents sat together, both of them weeping softly. Everyone in the room was crying. When Kristin went over to her father, he put his arm around her shoulders. He noticed how she was trembling and shaking, and then he pulled her close. But it seemed to her that he must have felt as if she had been snatched farther away from him than her dead little sister in the bed.
She didn’t know how she had managed to endure. She hardly remembered why she was enduring, but, lethargic and mute with pain, she managed to stay on her feet and did not collapse.
Then a couple of planks were pulled up in the floor in front of the altar of Saint Thomas, and a grave was dug in the rock-hard earth underneath for Ulvhild Lavransdatter.
It snowed heavily and silently for all those days the child lay on the straw bier; it was snowing as she was laid in the earth; and it continued to snow, almost without stop, for an entire month.
For those who were waiting for the redemption of spring, it seemed as if it would never come. The days grew long and bright, and the valley lay in a haze of thawing snow while the sun shone. But frost was still in the air, and the heat had no power. At night it froze hard; great cracking sounds came from the ice, a rumbling issued from the mountains, and the wolves howled and the foxes yipped all the way down in the village, as if it were midwinter. People scraped off bark for the livestock, but they were perishing by the dozens in their stalls. No one knew when it would end.
Kristin went out on such a day, when the water was trickling in the furrows of the road and the snow glistened like silver across the fields. Facing the sun, the snowdrifts had become hollowed out so that the delicate ice lattice of the crusted snow broke with the gentle ring of silver when she pressed her foot against it. But wherever there was the slightest shadow, the air was sharp with frost and the snow was hard.
She walked up toward the church. She didn’t know why she was going there, but she felt drawn to it. Her father was there. Several farmers—guild brothers—were holding a meeting in the gallery, that much she knew.
Up on the hill she met the group of farmers as they were leaving. Sira Eirik was with them. The men were all on foot, walking in a dark, fur-wrapped cluster, nodding and talking to each other; they returned her greeting in a surly manner as she passed.
Kristin thought to herself that it had been a long time since everyone in the village had been her friend. Everyone no doubt knew that she was a bad daughter. Perhaps they knew even more about her. Now they probably all thought that there must have been some truth to the old gossip about her and Arne and Bentein. Perhaps she was in terrible disrepute. She lifted her chin and walked on toward the church.
The door stood ajar. It was cold inside the church, and yet a certain warmth streamed toward her from this dim brown room, with the tall columns soaring upward, lifting the darkness up toward the crossbeams of the roof. There were no lit candles on the altars, but a little sunshine came in through the open door, casting a faint light on the paintings and vessels.
Up near the Saint Thomas altar she saw her father on his knees with his head resting on his folded hands, which were clutching his cap against his chest.
Shy and dispirited, Kristin tiptoed out and stood on the gallery. Framed by the arch of two small pillars, which she held on to, she saw Jørundgaard lying below, and beyond her home the pale blue haze over the valley. In the sun the river glinted white with water and ice all through the village. But the alder thicket along its bank was golden brown with blossoms, the spruce forest was spring-green even up by the church, and tiny birds chittered and chirped and trilled in the grove nearby. Oh yes, she had heard birdsong like that every evening after the sun set.
And now she felt the longing that she thought had been wrung out of her, the longing in her body and in her blood; it began to stir now, feeble and faint, as if it were waking up from a winter’s hibernation.
Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn came outside and closed the church door behind him. He went over and stood near his daughter, looking out from the next arch. She noticed how the winter had ravaged her father. She didn’t think that she could bring this up now, but it tumbled out of her all the same.
“Is it true what Mother said the other day, that you told her
. . . if it had been Arne Gyrdsøn, then you would have relented?”
“Yes,” said Lavrans without looking at her.
“You never said that while Arne was alive,” replied Kristin.
“It was never discussed. I could see that the boy was fond of you, but he said nothing . . . and he was young . . . and I never noticed that you thought of him in that way. You couldn’t expect me to offer my daughter to a man who owned no property.” He smiled fleetingly. “But I was fond of the boy,” he said softly. “And if I had seen that you were pining with love for him . . .”
They remained standing there, staring straight ahead. Kristin sensed her father looking at her. She struggled to keep her expression calm, but she could feel how pale she was. Then her father came over to her, put both arms around her, and hugged her tight. He tilted her head back, looked into his daughter’s face, and then hid it against his shoulder.
“Jesus Christus, little Kristin, are you so unhappy?”
“I think I’m going to die from it, Father,” she said against his chest.
She burst into tears. But she was crying because she had felt in his caress and seen in his eyes that now he was so worn out with anguish that he could no longer hold on to his opposition. She had won.
In the middle of the night she woke up when her father touched her shoulder in the dark.
“Get up,” he said quietly. “Do you hear it?”
Then she heard the singing at the corners of the house—the deep, full tone of the moisture-laden south wind. Water was streaming off the roof, and the rain whispered as it fell on soft, melting snow.
Kristin threw on a dress and followed her father to the outer door. Together they stood and looked out into the bright May night. Warm wind and rain swept toward them. The sky was a heap of tangled, surging rain clouds; there was a seething from the woods, a whistling between the buildings. And up on the mountains they heard the hollow rumble of snow sliding down.