The letter had come on a Thursday and he had not opened it until his sons were both out of the house. He had learned in thirty-six years as a father that the thinking he needed to do about his sons was best done at first without their faces in the room.
He had read it twice at the kitchen table, once standing and once sitting, and then he had put it back in its envelope and put the envelope in the drawer under the accounts ledger where he kept the things he meant to return to. Peder had come in from the barn later that evening and had not asked. Olav had come in from the boat-shed later than Peder and had not asked. He had been glad for both silences. He had taken the envelope out from the drawer again after both his sons were in bed and had read the letter a third time by the small lamp on the table, and he had sat with his hand on the page for a long time and had not, when he finally went up the stair to his own bed, made a decision.
That had been four days ago. The letter now lay folded once and set behind the almanac on the mantel, which was the place in the kitchen where a man who wished to keep a thing visible without keeping it in view kept such a thing.
This morning he went out to the upper field before the light was up.
The snow had held for nine days in January but had been softening these last three, and the path up from the yard was a dark broken line through a crust that still held weight in the places the sun had not yet reached. He took the long crook that had been his father's, and he took the small knife that had been his father's before that, and he went up by the stone wall that ran the east edge of the home-field and onto the cart-track that led to the upper ground. The cart-track had been laid in his great-grandfather's time. The stones at the edges of it had been set by hands he did not know. He had walked it every week of his life since he had been a boy carrying a lunch-pail for his father. The stones had not changed. The walking did.
He was fifty-two years of age this winter and his knee in the cold was a knee that belonged, on mornings like this one, to an older man. He did not mind it. A man's body asked him, at a certain age, to consult it before deciding the shape of a day; and to be consulted was not the same as to be ruled. He went slowly up the track and he set his right foot with more care than his left, and he thought, as he went, about what the letter said.
John Stensøy had written in the hand Jens remembered from letters John had written his father thirty years earlier. John was a careful man who used the paper to its edges. In the letter John said that the new schoonership Asta was taking a winter crew for a spring sailing to Shields and Lisbon and home by high summer, and that the captain had accepted a word for Jens's elder boy at the recommendation of John himself, who was one of the four owners. The wage named was fair. The term was the voyage, not to exceed one calendar year. The captain's name was Gjermund.
It was the name that had kept him four days at the letter without speaking.
He had sailed out of Stavanger between 1845 and 1856 and he had worked for one season on a ship where Gjermund was second mate, and the name had been known on the quay even then. Gjermund had not been unkind in the season Jens had sailed under him; Jens had been cook's-boy and later able seaman and had kept his head down in the manner of men who are not ready yet to know what they are, and Gjermund had passed him over for worse men. But the talk on the quay had been the talk a sailor learned to hear in the years when Gjermund had his own ship. A man Jens had sailed with on the Aase had come off a Gjermund ship in the summer of 1854 thinner than he had gone on, and angrier, and had signed onto a Danish bark that autumn rather than make a second voyage under Gjermund for twice the pay. The talk had said also that Gjermund was a man who had been promised things as a young man and had not got them, and had taken that into his captaincy.
This was the talk. Jens had been out of the sea for twenty years. Talk aged like anything else. A captain at fifty was not the captain he had been at thirty. A man could be changed by his own unkindness in some directions and not in others, and could have become, by fifty-four or wherever Gjermund was now, a competent man whom his own crews trusted.
Jens did not know whether Gjermund had so become. Nobody who had written him did.
He had come up to the upper field by this time, and he stopped at the wall at the top of the track and he looked down through the thinning snow at the farm below. The house-roof was dark with the damp of the night. The barn was dark. The smoke had begun to rise from the kitchen-chimney in a thin straight line that said Peder had risen and fed the stove. His father had done the same thing at the same hour for fifty years before him. He had done the same thing at the same hour for thirty years himself. Peder was sixteen now. By the time Peder was Jens's age the house would have been lived in by a man who had done the rising-at-five through six generations. It had been a long thing for him to think, as a younger man, about what the farm wanted of the men it kept, and what the men it kept wanted back of it. He thought about it now less as a question than as a weather one lived under.
Olav would not be, by midsummer next year, one of those men. He had known this since the summer Olav had been fourteen and had begun to look at the masts in the Stavanger harbor as if they were the lines of a thing he was reading, and not a thing he was only seeing. He had not told his boy that he had known. He had not believed it was for a father to tell. A man learned what he was on his own shoulders, and if a father had seen it before him the father was better off letting the seeing be a thing the son came to by his own way. He had come to his own seaward-looking by a way his own father had not intercepted, and he had been grateful for the not-intercepting, and he had meant to keep the same account with his own son.
But the letter was a different thing.
A letter was an invitation to a specific voyage under a specific captain on a ship with a specific name. A letter was a door that a father could, by saying a word, close. If he closed it now and told John Stensøy by return post that the Asta was not the ship, John would understand. John would find another berth in April or May; Olav would wait the six weeks and go where John sent him; the matter would not be spoken of between father and son. Olav would not know the door had been closed. He would know only that the April voyage had taken longer to find than the winter had led him to expect.
He could do that. He had the father's right to do that. He did not, standing at the wall at the top of the cart-track, know whether he would.
He took the knife out and looked at it for a moment in his hand. The blade had been sharpened since his grandfather's day by whoever held it and had wanted to cut a thing with it, and it was shorter now than it had been. The handle was a handle of horn he himself had cut and fitted in 1861, the spring Olav had been four. He put it back in the sheath at his belt. He had no cutting to do up here this morning. He had come up for the walking, which was the thing he had done all his life when he had to think a thing through to its end, and he had not yet thought it to its end, and he would walk the perimeter of the upper field before he went down.
The field had been his grandfather's before his father's before his. The stones at the edges of it were the stones Jens had pulled out of the ground with his own hands at the age of eleven, when his father had given him the summer's work of stone-picking in the year after the new plow had broken on one too many of them. He walked the east edge first. The snow was harder on the east edge where the wind had come across. He walked the north edge and the crust gave in one place under his left foot and he did not fall; he steadied himself with the crook and went on. He walked the west edge. At the west edge the ground dropped away to the hollow where the sheep had been pastured when they had had sheep, and where the plow-blade his grandfather had broken in 1831 was still buried in the bank because nobody had ever dug it out.
He stopped at the west edge. He looked down at the hollow. He thought: a ship under a captain who feeds his men badly. He thought: a boy of nineteen. (Olav would be nineteen when the Asta reached her first port: he had done the arithmetic in the night, sitting with the letter, and had done it again standing at this wall.) He thought: a boy who had not yet learned what he was.
He did not know what particular kind of man Olav was on a ship. He did not know if Olav had come into it yet. He had noticed, across the winter, a quietness in his son that had not been the quietness of a boy who had been away and come back; it had been the quietness of a boy who had brought something with him from the voyage that he did not yet have a place for in the house. Jens had not asked what the something was. He had noticed the quietness the way he had noticed the knee: as a thing that was, and that one consulted one's response to, and that did not have to be named to be accounted for.
He stood at the west edge until the sun had come up over the eastern ridge behind him and the light on the snow in the hollow had turned from grey to the yellow-white of late February.
Then he went down.
The walk down took less time than the walk up. Peder was at the stove when he came in. The kettle had begun to sing. Olav was at the table with a piece of line in his hands that he had been splicing the evening before and had put down without finishing. He looked up when his father came in and he looked down again. Jens took off his coat and hung it on the peg and washed his hands at the basin. He took the letter down from behind the almanac on the mantel and put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He would write to John this afternoon. That was what the walk had been for.
He sat down at the table. Peder brought his coffee. He took a sip of the coffee, which was good, and he looked at the cloth on the table. His wife had woven it in 1860. She had been nine years dead. He had kept the cloth folded in a chest until the morning after her funeral, and he had used it, in rotation with two others like it, every week since.
The kitchen had not altered in the thirty years he had kept it. The stove was the one his father had put in. He had made the table himself in the year after his marriage. He did not, on this morning or on any morning he could foresee, intend to change either. All of it would be here in April when Olav was on a ship out past Tungenes and beyond the horizon where Jens himself had been at nineteen and had come home at thirty-two with a knee and a wife and a will not to go out again.
Olav would come home in August of the following year. Perhaps. Olav would come home knowing whatever he would know.
Jens finished his coffee and he put the cup down on the table and he said, because it was all he had to say on the matter today, "We will go after the plow-shoe this afternoon. I have put it off long enough."
Peder said, "I will go with you."
Olav said, "I will go with you also."
Jens said, "Good."
He put his hand on the table for a moment where the cloth was worn thin at the edge, and then he took his hand off the table, and he went to put on his boots.