Mona can put up with the sailboats. It’s fun for Petter to socialize with people from Helsingfors, and they’re pleasant enough and, on the whole, take care of themselves, stay on their boats, in cabins where they can’t stand up straight, sleep in bunks where they can’t even sit up, and live on canned goods they’ve brought with them and on fish and bread they buy in the villages. But all the relatives and friends who come to visit are another thing entirely.
It’s no exaggeration to call it an invasion. They come like outright raiding parties, and primarily of course it’s Petter’s rabble that can’t stay away. Petter stands on the steamboat dock and receives them with a warm smile and a hearty welcome, while he timidly wishes there was a custom that required parents to keep their distance during the first few years of a child’s marriage. For his part, he takes boyish delight in showing them his church and all the villages and people in his parish, his cows and sheep, his sailing skiff and his nets, but he is keenly aware that Mona is not happy, although she controls herself. “Two weeks!” she cries. What did she expect? That they’d make that long journey merely to turn right around and head back?
“You know they’re unpretentious, don’t ask for much. They want to get to know Sanna and see how we’re getting along. Mama will be happy to help with the housework if you’ll let her.”
Mona snorts. As if she’d want to have her mother-in-law pottering around in her kitchen! She cleans frenetically before they arrive, sure that the old lady will criticize and complain about everything that’s not absolutely perfect. She’ll inspect and examine and scrutinize. Nothing Mona does will be good enough for her eldest, idealized son. Mona is angry, angry, angry before they come, takes Sanna by the arm, hard, “Not a peep!”, snaps at Petter when he comes in with water buckets so full they splash over the sides, lies awake at night foaming and steaming. When he’s fallen asleep, she lies awake repeating quietly to herself, “And here I’m supposed to be their servant and cook their meals and take care of them from morning to night. Not a moment’s peace all day long while you can at least take a rest now and then and have a really good time as their guide in this beautiful weather! And I slave on, have the coffee poured and the meals ready whenever it pleases them to saunter in. All you have to do is sit down at the table. Cook, maid, hired girl all in one, but their chamberpots they can carry out themselves!”
And so on. Her exhaustion black as night. But she also has a motor that shoves her out of bed when the alarm clock rings and it’s time to go out to the cows, which have all of Church Isle for a pasture but usually come when she calls. “Come bossy, bossy! Come!” Apple first, the lead cow, ploughing her way through the bushes under protest, gentle Goody in her wake. As a teacher, you can’t have favourites, but with cattle it’s allowed. Gentle Goody following temperamental Apple because it’s her sweet nature.
Cows calm and comfort people, or anyway they do Mona. She milks them promptly, feeling almost happy, talking to them a little when no one can hear. But she hurries—strains the milk, carries the can to the well, peels off her dairy smock on the steps, quickly in through the door. Petter has built a fire in the stove. Sanna is up, they’re eating breakfast. Happy, at this stage. Thank God they’ll be arriving by cargo boat this afternoon, not in the middle of the night. But they will soon have that experience too, for who arrives in the following wave but Petter’s brother Frej and his wife Ingrid. Then a long series of Petter’s cousins, and when they’ve all been placed, yet another one shows up unannounced: “I figured I’d surely be able to find a room in the village in case you have no space for me.”
“Church Bay Inn”, it should say on the door. “Free food and lodging, first-rate service” in smaller letters underneath.
In a family, there’s always something. The worthy Kummels show only a cursory interest in their granddaughter and in Petter’s domains. He remembers what he got when he was a boy and showed them something he had made—a pat on the head. They’ve other things on their minds. They arrived worn and harried, and both of them take him aside for endless conversations he doesn’t have time for. Petter is twenty-eight years old but has never yet felt free of his parents. Papa has to be kept in good humour, Mama needs help and sympathy. Now that he’s an adult himself, he has to be their marriage counsellor. They’re over sixty—in heaven’s name, why can’t they accept the fact that they’re married and stop having all these crises?
They’ve been belabouring the present problem for years, with all its branches and offshoots. Papa is retired and has gone to ground on Åland with no intention of returning to the schoolhouse on the coast of Finland, which he has come to loathe. Mama stubbornly continues to teach there, despite the fact that she now has the right to retire. He thinks she ought to move to Åland and take care of him. She is hurt that he has abandoned their conjugal home in Finland and allows her to struggle on alone, without his help. Now, when they come out to the Örlands, they haven’t seen one another for nine months, and they are not happy to do so now.
Mama suffers from her famous sense of duty, and both she and Petter know how it will end. But not right away. Not with some kind of smiling resignation. First there must be a great deal of talking, sympathizing, commiserating, soothing noises, and the speaking of quiet words of wisdom. While more and more time passes. Mama is aware that Papa, in frail health and completely impractical, will have a hard time getting through another winter alone. “It was awful,” she says, “to come into the house and see the way it was, as if he’d been living in a lumber camp. Burned food stuck to the frying pan, indescribable rags in the bed, the whole place messy as a den of thieves, soured milk in the pitcher, everything to make me feel as bad as possible. I know I can’t leave him like that for another winter.”
Her certainty makes Petter’s compromise proposal sound almost welcome. “How about this? You live in peace at the school for one more year. Then you can get your pension and move to Åland. If this is a long, hard winter, Papa can live here for six months, let’s say from November to April. The Örlands are still part of Åland, and new faces would make a little change for him. What do you say?”
While Mama is thinking it over, Petter speaks cautiously to Mona, who is surprisingly agreeable. She likes her father-in-law better than her mother-in-law, and why not? The parsonage attracts a lot of visitors, and if father Leonard entertains them, maybe Petter will get a chance to work on his pastoral examination. Papa is immediately keen on the arrangement, always happy to sit down to a good meal. Mama needs to carry on a good deal longer about her duties and about everything she will have to leave behind—relatives, friends and clubs, villages and the landscape itself, Helsingfors with its shops and cultural amenities, but it is clear that she finds the suggestion attractive. Much can happen in a year. Of course she cannot wish that Leonard, sickly, nervous, impractical, might be called to his forefathers, but some great intervention from above is nevertheless not beyond the bounds of possibility, and a year, which has not yet even begun, seems at this stage a satisfying length of time.
With all these complicated negotiations going on, and with all the time-consuming emotions they engender, there is still the hay harvest to plan, in all haste. Mona has been looking forward to it eagerly, under the verger’s supervision. The Holmens, who lease one of the church’s meadows in the western villages and do a couple of days’ work each year in payment, usually get called upon when it’s time to make hay. “Of course they’ll come. They’ve been waiting for this since the day you arrived! It’s always been done this way.” The verger promises to come himself and help with the mowing but is surprised when Petter sticks his head in one evening and suggests the next morning. “This early?” he wonders, almost shocked. “No one starts haying here until sometime in July.”