The Fish Can Sing (14 page)

Another example of Pastor Snorri’s strength of faith and spiritual power was when he gathered together most of the ghosts and goblins and demons which were then at large in the upper part of Borgarfjör
ur, including an assortment of lesser sprites which always infest a farm, imps and boggarts and byre-bogles and various other fiends, some of which had been conjured up against Pastor Snorri himself by those who envied him. Pastor Snorri brought all this assembly to Húsafell and made an appointment with them for sunrise on Whitsun morning at the Big Stone right at the corner of the sheep-pen at the far end of the home-field at Húsafell; there were twenty-one of these visitors in all. The pretext that Snorri used was that he was inviting this rabble to attend Black Mass, in which the Benediction, Lord’s Prayer, and Amen are reversed. But here the miscreants miscalculated badly; for no sooner had Pastor Snorri started on the
introitum
than he changed direction completely and poured over this congregation a torrent of searing and high-flown exorcisms in which the names of Jesus, as of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, were so inextricably interlocked, so balefully entwined and bound together, that in the face of such conjurations all this host shrivelled up and turned into toads; and then the whole assemblage crawled under the Big Stone at the corner of the sheep-pen at Húsafell and has never come out since; nor have any particular manifestations been noted around Borgarfjör
ur from that day to this. The great boulder that swallowed up all that ghostly crew is still to be seen at the corner of the Húsafell sheep-pen, and is sometimes called the Ghost Stone; and it will never open again until the last Trump sounds on Doomsday.

Pastor Snorri of Húsafell had many descendants in
Borgarfjör
ur; he was the progenitor of the younger Húsafell kin. Most men of understanding are agreed that there has never been a cleric in Borgarfjör
ur who was a better seaman, a more passionate champion of the faith, a greater snuff-taker, singer, poet and smith than he. His two daughters, Engilfrí
ur and Mikilfrí
ur, were also good smiths; but there are no reports that they could do cold-welding.

And that is the end of the story of Snorri, the pastor of Húsafell.

Have I not mentioned somewhere already the copper bell outside, which sometimes answered the silver bell in the living-room clock in our house?

“Someone is being buried today,” said the visitors, when the sound of the copper bell carried into our living-room from the churchyard. A short while afterwards one could also hear the strains of
Just as the One True Flower
floating over in the breeze.

“Yes,” said my grandfather, “it’s amazing how they are all dying off, these people. They are always dying. There were hordes of them dying last week, I can’t remember how many. Two funerals a day, sometimes.”

“Yes, they have plenty to do, these pastors,” said someone.

“Poor old Pastor Jóhann, he’s getting so shaky in the legs these days,” said my grandmother. “Many of these people are from other parts of the country and die in the hospital here, and it’s remarkable how he manages to keep up with them all, the old soul.”

“Will it not be getting too crowded in the churchyard, if they are going to bury the whole country there?” someone asked.

“Ah well, I’ve got my eye on a place for us two old bodies, and I hope we’ll be allowed to keep it.”

I always found it so agreeable and comfortable, when I was a
boy, to hear my grandfather and grandmother talking to people about death; and to see the funeral processions moving slowly through the churchyard and then start singing. The cathedral pastor’s black silken gown gleamed in the sunshine so that it looked almost blue; and the black horses which drew the hearse seemed almost green across the loins. I hope that famous critics will not class me with certain devotees of death and doom if I say here that I think that funerals in our churchyard gave me more entertainment than most other things when I was a little boy.

Suddenly and without any warning, so to speak, when one least expected it, in the middle of the day and the middle of the week, one would hear a single stroke of the clapper. Then a long, long time, almost a whole eternity, would elapse before it tolled a second time. When the first note sounded in the bell-tower over the mortuary in the churchyard, the funeral procession would just be setting off from a house somewhere up in Laugavegur, perhaps. Gradually the strokes of the bell would quicken, and the chiming would grow louder. I would sit a little distance away and wait for the black horses. Perhaps there had been rain that morning, there was such a fine scent from the tansies. I cannot have been more than about five years old. Soon the singing started. The birds and the flies sang too. The sound of
Just as the One True Flower
eddied in the breeze,
vox humana
and
vox celeste
by turns, and sometimes a spurt of panic-stricken tremolo in the gusting wind.

How very peaceful and comfortable it was to know that people went into the ground like this to the accompaniment of singing and the sound of bells when they had finished living. But I have to admit that there was one type of dead I felt a little sorry for: people who were washed ashore drowned, and others who had died forsaken among strangers and knowing no one, on a journey, for instance, or were simply foreigners here in Iceland. Old Jónas the policeman and another man sometimes brought these corpses up from town on a hand-cart and put them on a board which was laid across the seats in the mortuary, sometimes without any covering. I often kept watch at the mortuary window and peeped at the corpses; sometimes they were just stumps of people, without head or limbs, sometimes they were women with long
hair, and it looked as if their hair were pouring off the bier on to the floor. And now I shall shortly be telling you more fully about one particular funeral.

I was not very old by the time the breeze had wafted the funeral psalm
Just as the One True Flower
so often to my ears that I got to know it, and the melody as well. I recited for my grandmother the snatches I had managed to pick up from the psalm, and she filled in the gaps for me. Sometimes I was lucky enough to find a sea-scorpion which I first of all baptized and named after some man of note and then buried with great ceremony in a corner of the vegetable garden at Brekkukot, playing all the parts myself – pastor, procession, and black horse; then I would sing
Just as the One True Flower
at the top of my voice from beginning to end over this ugly fish.

One quiet summer’s day I was sitting up in the churchyard playing on the bench-shaped tombstone of the late Archangel Gabriel, which was so called because there was a marble angel kneeling on the top of it. I looked up all of a sudden and saw, not far off, a funeral procession approaching, if it could be called a funeral procession. There were no horses. Nor were there any singers. Four men were carrying a short, broad coffin out of the mortuary; I am sure it can only have been a stump of a corpse they were burying. Two of the coffin-bearers were the old men who often did odd jobs in the churchyard for the municipality, the third was the lame man who always drove the hearse-horses, and the fourth was the late Jónas the policeman with the gilt buttons on his tunic. Behind them came the funeral procession itself, which consisted of Pastor Jóhann, the old cathedral pastor, in his gown, and old Eyvindur the carpenter, who made the coffins; and that was all.

There was a wonderfully stimulating air about the churchyard that day, and indeed the old men were in excellent spirits. They caught sight of a little urchin not far off; his head only just reached over the top of the tombstones, and he was watching their movements with rapt attention.

“Come over here and talk to us, little boy,” said Pastor Jóhann. “We need a third man.”

I scampered over to them out on the path and shook hands with them, and Pastor Johann and Eyvindur the carpenter placed me between themselves and led me along behind the coffin as the third man in the funeral procession: everything comes in threes.

“I have seen you here in the churchyard when we have been officiating at funerals, little boy. You must be the foster-child of Björn of Brekkukot; I must have baptized you once, didn’t I?” said Pastor Johann.