Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen Page B

cod—as Jonathan assured her they did, in order to cover his tracks. And he had for the first time sensed the life of the village: she and everyone in her store (the usual assortment of lounging kids, bored young mothers, and hurried fishermen) knew he was the American who had come to live with them. Everybody in town knew him. Of course: in a village of four hundred people, a visitor from outer space would not go unnoticed. He found a certain comfort in this, for it relieved him of the burden of self-explanation. A deeper comfort lay in this evidence that the tree falling in the forest made a noise. Life was not restricted to what went on in his head; life surged along on a tide of gossip and common interests, one of which was his unaccountable but real presence.
    So, he had a verifiable existence. Cheered, Jonathan went over to Sigurd’s store to get help.
    Sigurd diagnosed the problem immediately. “Full septic tank,” he said. But septic tank in Faroese wasn’t within Jonathan’s ken, so there was an interlude of diagram drawing on a scrap of brown paper. Particularly explicit was the overflowing heap of turds Sigurd inked into his cross-section of Jonathan’s front yard, stopping occasionally to hold his nose so there would be no doubt what he was representing. Pleased with his drawing, Sigurd beamed at Jonathan and said, “Full, completely full of shit.” Shit , an Anglo-Saxon word, was easy to recognize.
    “What shall I do?”
    “Empty it.” Sigurd nodded. “With a wheelbarrow.” Wheelbarrow necessitated another sketch.
    This must be a joke, thought Jonathan. “That would take forever,” he objected. “Also, I don’t have a wheelbarrow.”
    “I’ll send my brother Jens Símun.”
    “He’ll help?”
    “He has a wheelbarrow.”
    “Where am I going to put it?”
    “In the sea,” said Sigurd.
    Jonathan went home in a downcast mood.
    Jens Símun had one blue eye and one brown eye, and he was in Jonathan’s kitchen before the water for tea—which Jonathan had put on as soon as he got home—had come to a boil. He was bigger and rougher-looking than Sigurd, but these seemed to Jonathan good qualities in a person who was going to demonstrate shoveling shit.
    “So, so, so,” said Jens Símun, shutting his blue eye. He sat down at the kitchen table. “A temun ,” he said.
    Jonathan produced a bachelor’s temun: bread, butter, plum jam, tea with plenty of milk. Jens Símun ate three pieces of bread with condiments, then asked for cake. Cake was the real point of a temun , Jonathan knew. What was it about island living that nourished a sweet tooth? He thought of the English and their treacle, the ranks of bad eclairs in the bakery on Mount Desert.
    “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any cake.”
    “So, so, so.” Jens Símun took another slab of bread.
    “What am I going to do with that?” Jonathan asked, leaning in the direction of his front yard.
    “I have to look at it, to see how bad it is.” He chewed his bread slowly. “Sometimes you have to stir.”
    “Stir?”
    “Sometimes it’s too hard to get it out.”
    Jonathan shut his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t have to stir.
    But, of course, he did have to stir, Jens Símun proclaimedafter lifting what looked like a big manhole cover at the edge of the lawn. He shook his head: this was a very bad case indeed. As they stood looking into the dark depths, Jonathan’s next-door neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word, came out and joined them. He and Jens Símun flanked Jonathan, both shaking their heads. Then the neighbor disappeared behind his house and returned a minute later with a hose, dripping water, and a long pole. He handed these to Jonathan.
    The idea was to run the water into the tank while stirring with the pole. This would “soften things up,” Jens Símun explained, and make it easier to remove the contents with the shovel that the neighbor, Petur, had brought after a second trip behind his house. Then, fill the