It goes so well it’s as if they had worked together always, with Mona and Tyra raking up and Petter driving and tramping down and Ruben loading. No friendships arise as effortlessly as those formed at work. Like old friends, they throw themselves down by the barn and drink coffee that has stood in glass bottles wrapped in thick wool socks along the south-facing wall. Cheese sandwiches and rolls have been inside in the cool darkness. The food is good, just right for haymakers, and their conversation is just right for four pairs of ears. But of course that’s precisely when a couple of the sailboaters come wandering by and ask if they can help. Since the war, the whole country has learned to smell its way to coffee and fresh-baked bread, and Mona has to go back to the house for more cups and to butter some more bread. They certainly don’t need their city help. They just confuse things and fail to see what needs to be done. Petter puts them in the haymow in the barn, which is already nearly full, and asks them to tramp down the hay so there’s room for more. They’re willing enough, but it’s harder work than they’d imagined, and sweatier, and itchier, and hard stalks push right through their deck shoes.
Unnecessary extras that need to be humoured. Things never turn out the way you think. The next time someone asks if they don’t get lonely out here, they’re likely to get a punch in the nose!
She looks around. They’re not going to get in all the hay this evening, but if all goes well they can finish the next day. If so, the hay will be of very good quality and will last a long time. They can collect leafy twigs as a complement for the sheep, but leaves aren’t plentiful either, and the cows eat the reeds as soon as they stick up their heads.
“The way we have to work for fodder!” Tyra says. “We’re so happy to have the church meadow. I don’t know how we’d manage otherwise.” She tells how they used to go to the outer islands when she was a girl and rake up a little grass here and there. “After Easter, our cow had to eat moss and twigs. Every day Mama went to the barn to see if the cow was still alive.” Mona realizes that she’s been afraid the pastor and his wife would take back the meadow for their own use, since they’ve shown themselves to be such serious farmers. And it had been a close call. If the organist hadn’t explained that the church meadows beyond Church Isle have always been leased in exchange for work. “There are those who could hardly manage otherwise,” he’d said, and the pastor gave in.
Tyra goes on. As nice as the weather is, they’ll surely get their grass cut and into the barn before it’s time for the fishing. The meadow isn’t so big that they’ll need to borrow a horse. Ruben can carry it in on his back, she can tramp it down, and the children can rake.
“An admirable desire to stand on his own two feet,” the priest says later to the organist, but the organist looks uneasy and says he offered his horse, but Ruben has a hard time accepting help. He’d rather break his back with a tumpline. “The worst part is that everyone needs to get in their hay at the same time. So the fishermen have to wait, and then it starts to rain on the dry hay before they can get it under cover.”
Although the pastor and his wife see themselves as small-holders and active farmers, putting new land under cultivation, they have a privileged situation. No matter how collegial they try to be, there is a gap between them and others. They can always fall back on his salary, the others must depend on what a capricious Mother Nature can provide. It sounds cheerless, but in fact the Örlanders are like the fish they catch, quick and glittering. They smile as they talk about the toil of the autumn fishing, how hard they work, how little sleep they get, how exhausted they are. It is something they look forward to as they labour at the haying. The pastor’s wife has her hay literally high and dry when the weather grows unsettled and the Örlanders start cutting. Every time Petter has been in the village, she asks him how the hay harvest is progressing. Surprisingly slowly, he has to admit. No one likes haymaking, it’s heavy and boring, they tell him, and Mona is amazed. It’s fishing that’s hard work! Not boring, but still hard. Night work, cold and raw, deadly dangerous in a storm, expensive nets that can drift away if luck is against them.
Yes, but people are full of stories, the fishing is what life is about. It’s where they find their identity and their self-image and the pictures that describe their lives. They value variety and risk-taking more than security and routine. Standing on a safe piece of meadow, turning wet hay, is deadly dull. Struggling in rain and wind in an open boat, that’s life! You’re thrown around like a rag doll, but you come ashore weighted down with herring.
They still come to church on Sundays and make little detours to look at the pastor’s well-raked meadows and to peer through the cracks in the overstuffed barn and stare out across the potato patch that seems to flourish somewhere far to the south of the Örland Islands. What they have to say about all of it is not so clearly heard, but when the parsonage cows come strolling along, blooming matrons, they remark loudly that, well, for those who have good grass …
For his part, the pastor has paid close attention to the popular mood at the prospect of the autumn fishing and in his sermons makes many allusions to the fishing in the Sea of Galilee and to the fact that the disciples were fishermen, recruited beside their boats. The congregation picture their own shores and boathouses, and after the service, the former verger tells the pastor straight out that if you didn’t know they were Jesus’s disciples and became apostles and evangelists, you’d have every reason to think it was very wrong of them to just wander off in mid-season and leave all the work to the poor women and children.
“And the boats lying there to dry out in the sun!” he adds disapprovingly, aware that the Lord moved in a warm, dry climate.
“Yes indeed,” says the pastor. “I’m sure everyone on Galilee agreed with you. But that’s what’s so remarkable about Jesus— that he gets us to drop everything and follow him.”
Silently, to himself, he’s thinking what a tough battle it would be if Jesus were to appear and ask Mona to abandon everything and follow him. Petter could burst out laughing when he thinks how successfully she’d struggle. “Impractical,” she’d call him, with reason. “Visionary. Dreamer.” And Petter himself, trying to mediate between them, with nothing but weak arguments in both directions.
He’s in the process of acquiring a little kingdom on earth, with brimming barns and root cellars. An example for the parish, which, however, has its eyes firmly on the sea. The Örlanders work hard at the autumn fishing, up before dawn so they can be out at sea when the sun comes up and raise their nets, gut the fish, rinse them, pack them in barrels in neat rows, salt them, then rest in the afternoon, if they have the time, before heading out again with their herring nets. A long trip out to the fishing waters, a long way home. From Church Isle, you can see dark boats far in the distance working their way through rain and waves.
Several people have mentioned how important the church is to them when the weather’s bad and it’s hard to see. Even though they know the right heading and know where they are, when the church appears on the top of its rocky knoll it’s still a reassurance that they’re headed right and will make it home this time too.