Winter

Christmas passed quietly at Vestbø, with only the three of them at the table and the weather closing in from the northwest.

His father's sister came up from her house on the other side of the hill on the morning of Christmas Eve and brought the lefse and the pickled herring and a small bottle of the aquavit she brewed from her own caraway. She stayed an hour. She had her own stove to tend. She kissed Olav on the forehead the way she had kissed him since he had been a small child — without bending; the forehead she kissed was now at her eye-level. She asked him if he was eating. He said he was eating. She said he was thinner than he had been in the summer. Jens said he would be less thin by midwinter. She said she would bring bread again on the third Sunday. Then she went. Jens walked her up the road with a lantern as far as the church. When he came back he did not speak. He sat at the table. He looked at the fire.

The winter came hard after that. The bay froze out to the stake on the third of January and did not open again until the last week of February. Olav had not been home in a hard winter since he had been a boy with a broken arm that had kept him from helping his father with the boats, and he had forgotten the small winter work of a Finnøy farm — the cutting of ice for the pantry, the bringing-in of the net-stakes before the ice thickened, the repair of the barn roof over the stall where the older cow wintered, the splitting and re-splitting of the wood that the summer's work had not made dry enough. He and Peder did the work together. Peder worked the way he had done everything since he had been small: without hurry, and without putting a foot on a rock when he could put it on the stone beside the rock. He turned sixteen at the end of January, and their father gave him at supper that evening a new clasp-knife in a leather sheath that Peder put in his belt and did not take out again for the rest of the evening, even to admire.

His father did less of the work than he had done the summer before. The knee was worse in the cold. He did not say it was worse; he said the weather was hard; but he walked more stiffly, and Olav saw the way he set the knee before he put weight on it, as if he were checking a door that had been warped in the damp. In the evenings he sat at the table with the accounts ledger or with a piece of line he was splicing. He did not ask Olav about the voyage that was past. He did not say what he thought about a voyage that might come.

One morning in January, Olav and his father took the small boat from the shed and carried it out together and set it on the trestles outside to look at a seam that had been working loose in the summer. The boat was eight years old; his father had bought it from a man at Judaberg in the spring of 1868, when Olav had been eleven. His father ran his hand along the seam, and then along the keel, and then along the seam again. He said the caulking would hold a season more but that by the summer after next the boat would want a new garboard strake. Olav said he would do the strake in the autumn when he was home. His father said the autumn when he was home was a long way off, and that he himself would do the strake when the time came. Olav did not argue. His father rested his hand on the rail of the boat for a long moment and did not lift it again until he had spoken a sentence Olav did not quite follow, about the way the grain went in the old Stjernerøy oak and the way the grain went in oak that had been grown in a stand where the wind came off the sea, and then he turned and went back into the shed to look for the chisel. Olav stayed at the boat.

On the second Sunday of January the three of them walked the road to Hesby for the service.

The minister Lindbergen was at the pulpit in his black coat and his stole and the small spectacles that sat so low on his nose they were always slipping. The people sat in the pews their families had held since the building of the church. Olav sat between his father and Peder and sang the hymns he had known since his confirmation, and between the hymns he listened without listening to the sermon, which was on the text and behold a great wind from the wilderness came — a text the minister had given out on the second Sunday of January for as long as Olav could remember.

In the pew across the aisle a young man of twenty-three or twenty-four named Karsten Tjørn sat with his mother. Karsten was a farmer on the upper ground above Østhusvik. Olav had gone to school with his younger brother. Karsten had his head bent over his hymnal, and the winter light that came in through the small window above the pulpit fell on the back of his neck and on the hair that had grown over his collar. Olav looked back at his own hymnal before he knew he had looked. Jens gave him the page for the next hymn. He found it.

After the service the three of them went out with the rest. His father stopped in the yard to speak to Knut Tjørn about a fence, and Olav stood apart with Peder, and Karsten passed them on the path with his mother on his arm and nodded to Olav and went on. Olav returned the nod. Peder, who had seen the exchange without attending to it, asked Olav if Karsten had been at school in Olav's year or one of the younger years, and Olav said a younger year, and they did not speak of Karsten again that morning or for a long time after.

January kept the bay frozen. February was colder. In the last week of January the wind went northerly and held for nine days, and the snow that had been soft was made hard by it, and in the fields above the house the crust of it would hold Olav's weight where he stepped, so that he could walk above the drifts and hear his own boot come down on the snow like a board set down on a board.

He thought more than he had done at sea. On the ship there had been a bell coming, and the bell had taken the place of thinking. At home there was no bell. There was only the light coming up in the morning and going down in the afternoon earlier than it had any business to, and the stove to be fed, and the chores to be done at hours the winter had fixed long before anyone alive now was alive. After supper, when the work was done, he sat at the table with the small Bible his father had given him at confirmation — the Bible in which he had written, at the back, the one line about slip three at Rutherford & Co., Hebburn — or he listened to his father read. He did not write to Henrik.

One evening in February Olav went with Peder to the barn to feed the older cow. Peder had built her stall in the autumn with beams he had cut and drawn himself, and the work he had done to it over the winter had been the filling and refilling of the bedding straw, the banking of the stall-wall with old hay to hold the warmth in, and the small repair of the drinking-trough that a kick had cracked in the first week of ice. Peder did the feeding; Olav held the lantern.

The cow took her hay. She ate slowly, which was the way of older cows in winter. Peder stood at her shoulder and watched her eat for a minute, and then he went to the bucket at the stall's back wall and broke up a layer of ice that had formed on the water with the new clasp-knife.

He said, not turning from the trough, "He has been at the ledger at night."

"I saw."

"Longer than he was at it in the autumn. And twice he has closed it and not opened it again."

"Is that a new thing."

"It is a new thing."

Peder slid the knife shut and put it back in the sheath at his belt. He said, "You should know. I am not asking you to do anything."

"I understand. There is a way he sets his mouth in the accounts."

"Yes."

The cow had finished with the first armful of hay. Peder gave her the second. They left her eating and walked back across the yard with the lantern in Olav's hand and Peder's hands deep in his coat pockets against the cold. It had started to snow again — small dry flakes, the kind that came down when the wind had fallen and would not add to the drifts.

In the second week of February there came a letter from Stavanger.

It came up the road from Judaberg on a Thursday with the Finnøy postman — a slow man named Bjørn, who had been walking the route since his father had been the postman before him, and who in winter used a small sledge he pulled by hand. Bjørn handed the letter over the yard wall to Jens without stepping into the yard, said the day's weather to him, and continued up the road to the next farm. Jens did not open the letter at the yard. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat. When he came into the house he took it out and put it on the mantel above the stove. He did not say whom it was from.

Olav, at the table with a piece of cordage he was splicing for Peder's net, looked at the letter on the mantel. He did not ask. He went back to the cordage.

Peder came in from the barn and saw the letter. He did not ask either. The three of them had supper. They did not speak of the letter. Peder went out to see to the lamp in the barn. Olav took the cordage out to the boat-shed, because he had finished the splice and wanted to test the set of it against the wear of a real line, and in the shed he lit the small brass lamp and worked for an hour with his hands cold on the cordage. When he came back to the house the letter was not on the mantel.

He did not ask where it had gone. His father was at the table with the ledger. Peder was at the stove with a cup of something hot. The kettle was on. Nothing in the kitchen had been rearranged, and nothing about his father's face had been rearranged either.

He accepted the cup Peder handed him and sat at the table. The three of them sat at the table. The kettle steamed on the stove.