So she kept watch over the ill child. Her tears spilled out; she wept without a sound and without moving. Her face was as gray and stony as ever, although gradually the whites of her eyes and her eyelids turned blood red. If anyone came near her, she would quickly wipe her face and simply sit there, stiff and mute.
And yet it took so little to thaw her heart. If one of her big sons came in, cast a glance at the tiny child, and spoke a few kind and sympathetic words to him, then Kristin could hardly keep from bursting into loud sobs. If she could have talked to her grown-up sons about her anguish over the infant, she knew her heart would have melted. But they had grown shy around her now. Ever since that day when they came home and learned what name she had given their youngest brother, the boys seemed to have drawn closer together and stood so far away from her.
But one day, when Naakkve was looking at the child, he said, “Mother, give me permission . . . to seek out Father and tell him how things stand with the boy.”
“It will no longer do any good,” replied his mother in despair.
Munan didn’t understand. He brought his playthings to the little brother, rejoiced when he was allowed to hold him, and thought he had made the child smile. Munan talked about when his father would come home and wondered what he would think of the new son. Kristin sat in silence, her face gray, and let her soul be torn apart by the boy’s chatter.
The infant was now thin and wrinkled like an old man; his eyes were unnaturally big and clear. And yet he had begun to smile at his mother; she would moan softly whenever she saw this. Kristin caressed his small, thin limbs, held his feet in her hands. Never would this child lie there and reach with surprise for the sweet, strange, pale pink shapes that flailed in the air above him, which he didn’t recognize as his own legs. Never would these tiny feet walk on the earth.
After she had sat through all the arduous days of the week and kept watch over the dying child, then she would think as she dressed for church that surely she was humble enough now. She had forgiven Erlend; she no longer cared about him. If only she might keep her sweetest, her most precious possession, then she would gladly forgive the man.
But when she stood before the cross, whispering her Pater noster , and she came to the words sicut et nos dimittibus debitoribus nostris, then she would feel her heart harden, the way a hand clenches into a fist to strike. No!
Without hope, her soul aching, she would weep, for she could not make herself do it.
And so Erlend Erlendss?n died on the day before the Feast of Mary Magdalena, a little less than three months old.
CHAPTER 7
THAT AUTUMN BISHOP Halvard came north through the valley on an official church visit. He arrived in Sil on the day before Saint Matthew’s Day. It had been more than two years since the bishop had come that far north, so there were many children who were to be confirmed this time. Munan Erlendss?n was among them; he was now eight years old.
Kristin asked Ulf Haldorss?n to present the child to the bishop; she didn’t have a single friend in her home parish whom she could ask to do this. Ulf seemed pleased by her request. And so, when the church bells rang, the three of them walked up the hill: Kristin, Ulf, and the boy. Her other sons had been to the earlier mass—all of them except for Lavrans, who was in bed with a fever. They didn’t want to attend this mass because it would be so crowded in the church.
As they walked past the foreman’s house, Kristin noticed that many strange horses were tied to the fence outside. Farther along the road they were overtaken by Jardtrud, who was riding with a large entourage and raced past them. Ulf pretended not to see his wife and her kinsmen.
Kristin knew that Ulf had not set foot inside his own house since just after New Year’s. Things had apparently gotten worse than usual between him and his wife, and afterward he had moved his clothes chest and his weapons up to the high loft, where he now lived with the boys. Once, in early spring, Kristin had mentioned that it was wrong for there to be such discord between him and his wife. Then he had looked at her and laughed, and she said no more.
The weather was sunny and beautiful. High over the valley the sky was blue between the peaks. The yellow foliage of the birch-covered slopes was beginning to thin out, and in the countryside most of the grain had been cut, although a few acres of pale barley still swayed near the farms, and the second crop of hay stood green and wet with dew in the meadows. There were throngs of people at the church, and a great neighing and whinneying of stallions, because the church stables were full and many had been forced to tie up their horses outside.