They came into Stavangerfjord on the twenty-first of December at first light, with the mountains standing sharp-edged and black against a sky that was still more night than morning.
He had the wheel. Captain Dahl had given it to him at the change of watch with a word about steering on the lee bow of the pilot-boat, and the spokes felt different under his hands now than they had six months ago — heavier and at the same time more willing. There was a crust of ice on the rail and on the rigging, and a fine powder of snow on the deck that the morning would melt off, and a cold in the air so clean that Olav could feel each breath separately from the one before it. Over the starboard bow the first gleam of Tungenes light had already gone down with the rising day. Over the larboard bow the shoulder of Finnøy rose out of the water the way he had watched it sink six months before.
The pilot-boat handed them a man and fell astern. The pilot was elderly, grey at the beard, spoke to the captain in a dialect Olav could not quite follow because it was neither Stavanger nor Finnøy but something older than either, and took the wheel from Olav at the right moment without looking at him. Olav stepped back to the rail. He watched the mountains come nearer and the harbor begin to show between them, and the dark roofs of the city come up one by one out of the shadow. By eight o'clock the anchor was in the bottom off the outer pier, and by nine the crew had the sails furled and the ship tidied, and by ten Captain Dahl had said the words that ended the voyage, and the men were free to muster out.
Olav went below to pack his chest. He packed it in the order his aunt had packed it for him six months ago, though his aunt would not have packed it the way he packed it now, because he had learned things about what went where in a chest that would be moved by hand. He put the Bible at the top and the knife with the bone handle beside it. He folded the two wool shirts, which had faded, and the trousers, which fit differently because he was thinner in the belly and thicker in the shoulders than the trousers had been cut for. He put the sailor's needles in their leather roll on top of the folded trousers. He put the ledger in which he had written the line about Hebburn & Company on top of the needles. He closed the chest.
Thorvald was leaning in the doorway of the forecastle when he turned.
"I am going down to the office for my papers," Thorvald said. "You will have yours by the clerk in half an hour. Then you are done."
"Thank you."
"Thank you for what, Finnøybu?"
"For the six months. For showing me the yard. For the talks in the galley on the middle watch."
"I did not show you the yard. I pointed you toward the yard. You showed yourself the yard." Thorvald looked at him. Then he looked away. "You are welcome. Come and sign with Captain Dahl again in the spring. He will want you. I will recommend it."
"I will think on it."
"Think on it without hurry. Your father will have things to say in the matter."
"My father has always had things to say."
"That is a father's right."
He went up with his chest to the main deck and found Henrik there with his own chest waiting for the ferryman. They sat together on the hatch-coaming for ten minutes without speaking. When the ferry came they went down into it together, and parted on the pier with a handshake and a word about meeting in the spring, which Olav was fairly sure neither of them meant as a promise. Henrik went up the street toward the city with a lightness in his walk that Olav could not match.
He stood on the pier with his chest and looked about for Lars.
Lars was not there. Olav had not written ahead — there had been no port from which to write in the last weeks — and there had been no way to tell anybody which day the Sigrid would come. He carried the chest himself to the steamboat landing at the inner end of the harbor, where the little coaster Rogaland was taking passengers for the islands, and paid a half-krone for his passage and for the stowing of the chest on deck, and found a seat on a bench under the awning aft and did not speak to anyone for the hour and a half it took to reach the Finnøy landing at Judaberg.
From Judaberg he walked.
The walk was across the island, three miles or a little more from the east shore to the west. He had his chest on his shoulder at first and set it down once every five minutes to rest and switch shoulders, and after the first mile he was setting it down more often. The road ran up from the landing through a cutting in a low ridge and came out onto the high fields above the church, and the church bell was ringing for noon as he came up through the cutting, and he stopped there at the top with the chest beside him and looked across to the west shore where the smoke from his father's chimney was visible as a thin straight line against the cold sky.
He thought he would cry at that moment and found he did not.
He picked up the chest and walked on. The road went down through the fields toward the churchyard at Hesby, and then along the line of the shore past the cluster of houses at Østhusvik, and then turned inland between two low hills, and then out onto the west fields, and by the time he came over the last rise he could see the roof of Vestbø and the barn beside it and the square of the yard with the landing below it and a boy at the landing coiling a line.
The boy was Peder.
Peder was at the rope because a man had come in that morning with a cod he had promised Jens, and had tied up to the landing, and drunk a cup of coffee, and gone out again. The mooring-line had been left in a poor coil. Peder, because he had been brought up to take a rope off a post properly whether it was his own or somebody else's, had gone down to re-coil it. He was on his knees. He was not looking up the road. Olav set the chest down in the middle of the yard and stood there.
Peder looked up.
He did not rise at first. He sat back on his heels with the rope half-coiled in his hands and looked at Olav across the yard as if he were checking that his eyes were not deceiving him. Olav watched him check and said nothing. At last Peder put the rope down on the stones and stood up and walked across the yard with his old gait, a little unhurried and a little heavy on the right foot, and came to a stop three steps from Olav and looked at him.
"You did not write."
"There was no port to write from."
"You could have written from Newcastle."
"I did not think of it."
"You are thinner."
"Yes."
"Father is in the house. He does not know you are here."
"I will go in in a minute."
"Go in now."
"I will in a minute."
They stood there. Peder looked at the chest. Peder looked at Olav's hands. Then Peder walked around Olav and took hold of one end of the chest and lifted it, and Olav took hold of the other, and they went into the house with the chest between them, Olav at the lower end, and Peder at the upper end, and nothing said.
His father was at the table with the accounts ledger open before him and a cup of coffee at his elbow that had gone cold. He had not heard them come into the yard because the door had been shut against the wind. When he heard the chest come through the outer door he turned his head and did not stand up at first, and then he stood up and stood still at the table with one hand on the back of his chair and looked at Olav across the room.
"You are home."
"I am home."
"Sit down. Peder, put on the kettle. Boy, come here first."
Olav set his end of the chest down and crossed the room and his father came around the table and took him by the shoulders with both hands. He did not embrace him. He looked at his face and at his hands where they hung at his sides and at the set of his head on his neck, and then he let him go and turned to Peder, who had the kettle on the hook already. "Give him a cup before anything else," he said. "He will have been on his feet since Stavanger."
"I have."
"Sit."
He sat. Peder brought him a cup. His father sat across from him and closed the ledger and pushed it aside, and his father's eyes were dry, but the skin at the corners of them was thinner than it had been in the summer, as if weight had gone out of him too in the months of waiting. The cold coffee in the other cup sat where it was. Peder stood at the stove and did not sit down with them yet.
"Tell me it went well."
"It went well."
"Tell me Dahl was the man I was told he was."
"He was that man. He will take me back in the spring if I wish."
"And you wish it."
"I wish it."
"Then the matter is decided. We shall not speak of it again today. There is bread and there is cod from this morning and there is coffee when Peder is finished seeing to the kettle. Peder, come and sit with us. Boy, eat."
Peder sat. The three of them ate the bread and the cod and drank the fresh coffee his brother had made. Nobody asked him about the voyage. His father asked about the ship's passage up the river at Newcastle. Peder asked about the crossing of the Skaw in the northeast wind. Each of them took in turn some small piece of the voyage that could be told without Olav having to tell any part of the voyage that mattered, and Olav gave them the pieces they asked for. The bread was the bread his father's sister baked. It was the bread he had been dreaming of on nights when there had been no bread on the Sigrid that was worth the eating, and it tasted in his mouth the way he had dreamed it would taste, and he did not say so.
After the meal, his father stood up and put his cap on.
"I will go to the upper field. Peder will show you the changes in the barn. I will be back by dark."
He went out.
Peder waited for the door to close and then said, "He has been sleeping less."
"Since when."
"Since autumn. He has counted the days through December. This morning he did not."
"Thank you for telling me."
"I tell you because I do not think he will tell you. He will say he slept fine."
"He will."
Peder stood up from the table and said, "Come and see the barn," and Olav got up and went with him to the barn, and they spent the remainder of the afternoon in a tour of the small changes — the new stall Peder had built for the older cow, the repair to the north wall where a beam had been replaced, the newer pitchfork his father had bought in October — and by the time Jens Hestby came back from the upper field at dusk, the brothers had walked through the whole of what had been done at home in Olav's absence, and Olav had noted that Peder had done more of it than he would have imagined a fifteen-year-old could do.
That night he lay in his old bed in the room he had left in the summer. The bed was narrower than he remembered. The window was smaller. The quilt was heavier and warmer than any blanket he had used on the ship. He lay on his back in the dark and waited for sleep and the sleep did not come.
After an hour he got up and went to the window.
The moon was a quarter behind a cloud and the fields were silver where the cloud let it through and dark where the cloud held it. He could see the shape of the barn and the shape of the low wall at the edge of the yard and the line where the yard ended and the fields began. He could not see the sea from this window. The sea was over the shoulder of the hill to the west. He stood there a long time and thought of the sea he could not see and of the deck of the Sigrid under his feet that was no longer under his feet. He thought also of his father lying awake across the passage and of Peder asleep in the room beside his. He had come home to a house in which he was now one person and they were another. Neither side would ever know precisely where the line had been drawn.
He went back to the bed. He lay down.