The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

Asgeirsdottir of Gunnars Stead. A certain Arnkel, from a farmstead in Siglufjord, had declared his intention to marry her, but then nothing was heard of this, and Arnkel returned to his steading. Folk in Vatna Hverfi district said how handsome Margret was and how large her marriage portion would have been had Asgeir managed to hold on to all of his farm, but now any man taking on Margret could well be taking on a family of dependents who would drain his own wealth. It was true that Gunnar and Margret were rich in fine things, for the men of their lineage had been abroad and the women had been skilled craftswomen, but there were more fine things inside the farmhouse than there were sheep in the fields or cows in the byre. Folk also remembered how proud and determined to have her own way Helga Ingvadottir had been, and sometimes these habits, it was said, did not appear until a woman had her own house and dairy. Arnkel told people in Siglufjord that he had had some conversations with the woman, but in fact she made him uneasy, with her way of waiting to speak a long moment after he had spoken, and keeping her eyes on his face the whole time, so that he was tempted to say more and more, and ended up feeling that he was a simpleton.
    Another thing Margret did that was not usual for a woman was to go off into the mountains above Gunnars Stead in all seasons and come home with not only herbs and medicinal plants, but also birds she had snared and eggs she had gathered. Like her uncle Hauk, she was outside more than inside, and always in pursuit of some quarry. Five willow cages hung from the beams in the Gunnars Stead farmhouse, and in them were Margret’s little birds, wheatears and larks, who chattered and clamored all winter in a way that most of the neighbors considered unlucky and unpleasant.
    The farm folk at Gunnars Stead were considerably diminished in the spring after Asgeir’s death, so that only Margret, Gunnar, Olaf, and Ingrid were left, along with one shepherd, Hrafn, and two women servants, Hrafn’s wife Maria, and Gudrun, a young girl. There were also two menservants to help Olaf with the farming. Hrafn and Maria had two children, boys, who went with their father into the sheep meadows early in the summer. Ingrid now spent her days and nights in her bedcloset, for she could no longer stand, or even sit up. No torches or lamps were brought to her, because she didn’t know night from day, and she would sometimes call out to Gunnar to bring her some sourmilk and dried sealmeat mashed with butter for her breakfast or her dinner when breakfast or dinner was long past. Gunnar always did so, and Ingrid would tell him fragments of old stories that he remembered from his childhood. At other times Nikolaus the Undir Hofdi priest and his “wife” would sit with her and pray with her, for she hadn’t been to the church in a number of years.
    The farmstead belonged to Gunnar, but he did as little work in the fields as ever, and cared as little for the sheep, although he sometimes rode one of the old horses, leaving the two younger ones to Olaf. The amount of yarn he spun in his idle time was more than Gudrun and Maria had time to weave into cloth, and so he learned to dye and weave, and laughed, too, when people laughed at this. Folk in the district said that Gunnars Stead was an upside down household, and considered this unlucky, but indeed, the winters after the coming of the bishop were so cold and stormy, and the summers so short that every household in the settlement did things in ways that had never been done before. Only the folk at Gardar and at a few other farmsteads had enough hay and other provisions to last through these cold springs, and many Greenlanders were so weakened by hunger and the bleeding disease that they succumbed to vomiting and coughing ills as if they were plagues.
    It seemed that nothing could induce Gunnar to work. If it was cold, he would lie silently under his polar bear coverlet until it