Burial Rites (40 page)

THE REVEREND IS TALKING TO
me, but I can’t hear what he is saying, it is as though we are all underwater, the light keeps flickering overhead and I can see the Reverend’s hands wave in front of me, he takes hold of my wrists and lets go, he looks like a drowning man trying to catch hold of something to bring him up to the surface. He looks like a skeleton. Where has all the water come from? I don’t think I can breathe.

Agnes, he is saying. Agnes, I will be there with you.

Agnes, the Reverend says.

He is so kind, he is reaching around me, he is pulling my body closer to his, but I don’t want him near. His mouth is opening and shutting like a fish, the bones of his face like knives under his skin, but I cannot help him, I don’t know what he wants. Those who are not being dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp, until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it. I am barren; nothing will grow from me any more. I am the dead fish drying in the cold air. I am the dead bird on the shore. I am dry, I am not certain I will bleed when they drag me out to meet the axe. No, I am still warm, my blood still howls in my veins like the wind itself, and it shakes the empty nest and asks where all the birds have gone, where have they gone?

‘AGNES? AGNES? I AM HERE
. I am with you.’ Tóti looked at Agnes anxiously. The woman was staring at the floor, breathing hard and rocking, making her stool creak. He felt the prick of tears at the back of his throat, but he was aware of Margrét, Jón, Steina and Lauga behind him, and the servants, waiting in the doorway to the kitchen, watching.

‘I think she needs some water,’ Steina said.

‘No,’ Jón said. He turned around to where the farmhands waited. ‘Bjarni! Go get some brandy, would you?’

The bottle was fetched and Margrét brought it to Agnes’s lips. ‘There,’ she said, as Agnes spluttered on the mouthful, spilling most of it on her shawl. ‘That will make you feel better.’

‘How many days?’ Agnes croaked. Tóti noticed that she was digging her fingernails into the flesh of her arm.

‘Six days,’ Tóti said gently. He reached across and took up her hands in his own. ‘But I’m here, I won’t let go.’

‘Reverend Tóti?’

‘Yes, Agnes?’

‘Perhaps I could beg them, perhaps if I go to Blöndal he will change his mind and we can appeal. Can you talk to him for me, Reverend? If you go and talk to him and explain I think he would listen to you. Reverend, they can’t . . .’

Tóti put his trembling hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘I am here for you, Agnes. I am here.’

‘No!’ She pushed him away. ‘No! We have to talk to them! You have to make them listen!’

Tóti heard Margrét click her tongue. ‘It’s not right,’ she was muttering. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘What?’ Tóti turned to her. ‘Did she talk to you?’ Someone was crying behind him, one of the daughters.

Margrét nodded, her eyes welling up. ‘One night. We stayed up late. It’s not right,’ she repeated. ‘Oh, Lord. Is there something we can do? Tóti? What can we do for her?’ Before he could respond, Margrét gasped and shuffled out of the room, her hands to her eyes. Jón followed her.

Agnes was shaking, staring at her hands.

‘I can’t move them,’ she said quietly. She looked up at him with wide eyes. ‘I can’t move them.’

Tóti took her stiff hands into his own again. He didn’t know who was trembling more.

‘I am here for you, Agnes.’ It was the only thing he could say.

I DO NOT CRUMBLE, I
think of the small things. I concentrate my mind on the feeling of linen next to my skin.

I breathe in as deeply and as silently as I am able.

Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there, licking the grass flat upon the ground, not caring whether the soil is at a freeze or thaw, for it will freeze and thaw again, and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow.

REVEREND TÓTI STAYED UP WITH
Agnes well into the night, until finally the woman fell asleep. Margrét watched the Reverend anxiously from the corner of the badstofa. He, too, had fallen asleep, and sat slumped upright against the bedpost, shivering violently under the blanket she had carefully pulled over him. Margrét considered waking him and moving him to a spare bed, but decided against it. She didn’t believe he would be easily moved.

Margrét finally laid down her knitting. She was reminded of when Hjördis died. She hadn’t given so much as a thought to that dead woman since the first days of Agnes’s arrival. But this – the sombre expectation of death, the light burning too late into the night, the weeping into exhaustion. This reminded her. Margrét looked out over the rest of the sleeping household. Lauga, she noticed, was missing from her bed.

Margrét eased herself up off the chair to find her daughter, and almost immediately fell into a fit of coughing that pushed her to her
knees. She hacked at the floorboards until a thick clot of blood was expelled from her lungs. It left her feeble, and she waited there on all fours, breathing hard, until she felt strong enough to rise.

It took Margrét several minutes to find Lauga. She was not by the warmth of the hearth in the kitchen, nor in the dairy. Margrét shuffled into the darkness of the pantry, holding a candle aloft.

‘Lauga?’

There was a faint noise from the corner where the barrels stood together.

‘Lauga, is that you?’

The candlelight threw shadows over the walls, before lighting on someone behind a half-filled sack of meal.

‘Mamma?’

‘What are you doing in here, Lauga?’ Margrét stepped forward and brought the candle closer to her daughter’s face.

Lauga squinted in the light and hurriedly stood up. Her eyes were red. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Are you upset?’

Lauga blinked and quickly rubbed her eyes. ‘No, Mamma.’

Margrét studied her daughter. ‘I’ve been trying to find you,’ she said.

‘I only wanted a minute to myself.’

They regarded each other for a moment in the ragged light of the guttering candle.

‘To bed, then,’ Margrét finally suggested. She handed Lauga the candle and silently followed her out of the room.

THERE WAS NO PURSE. FRIDRIK
never found the money he wanted. Agnes, Agnes, where did he bury it, is it in the trunk? But
it was too late, my fingers were slippery-thick with the whale fat all rubbed into the wood and mingled with the blood on the floor and the lamp was already dashed on the boards and Sigga had already screamed at the sound of glass breaking.

They try to make me eat, but, Tóti, I cannot do it. Don’t feed me or I will bite you, I will bite the hand that feeds me, that refuses to love me, that leaves me. Where is my stone? You don’t understand! I have nothing to say to you, where are the ravens? Jóas has sent them all away, they never speak to me, it’s not fair. See what I do for them? I eat stones, I shatter my teeth, and still they will not speak to me. Only the wind. Only the wind speaks and it will not talk sense, it screams like the widow of the world and will not wait for a reply.

You will be lost. There is no final home, there is no burial, there is only a constant scattering, a thwarted journey that takes you everywhere without offering you a way home, for there is no home, there is only this cold island and your dark self spread thinly upon it until you take up the wind’s howl and mimic its loneliness you are not going home you are gone silence will claim you, suck your life down into its black waters and churn out stars that might remember you, but if they do they will not say, they will not say, and if no one will say your name you are forgotten I am forgotten.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EXECUTION
, the family of Kornsá sat together in the badstofa. Steina, tear-streaked, had gathered as many lamps as she could find, lighting them and placing them about
the room to dispel the shadows that lingered in the corners. The servants sat on their beds with their backs against the wall, dumbly watching Tóti and Agnes as they huddled together on her bed. They were holding hands, the Reverend whispering quietly to her. She gazed at the floor, shivering.

Jón came in from feeding the stock, and eased himself down on the bed next to Margrét, bending down slowly to untie his boots. Margrét took the knitting out of her lap and stood to help him out of his jacket, and then hovered there, holding the frayed coat out from her.

‘Mamma?’ Steina got up from her place beside Lauga, who was staring impassively at the dancing wick of the lamp at her side. ‘Mamma, let me take that.’

Margrét pressed her lips together and silently handed Steina the wet coat. Then she slowly got down on her knees and, stifling a cough, shuffled closer to her bed. Her daughter watched as she reached beneath the bunk. ‘Steina?’