She looks out the window, towards the water and towards the land, and the priest follows her gaze and sees how pretty it all is, naked granite and a light green cloud like smoke between the hills this early May. Evening sun, and the church roof glowing with a subtly different shade of red than it had this morning. In the churchyard, black and white crosses, an entire congregation.
“Do you think she doesn’t dare come in?” Mona wonders.
“Of course not,” Petter says. “We’ve already met them, and they know we don’t bite.”
“Well, yes,” Mona says, “but we should have said a time. There are all sorts of things I should be doing, and here I am just going from window to window.” But as she goes, she clears the dishes from the table and pours wonderfully hot water into the dish tub. “So I guess I’ll just get started,” she says. “Maybe it’s a way of getting her to come, as soon as I’m up to my elbows in the dishes.”
“I’ll fetch some more water,” he says. “And if she really doesn’t dare come in, I’ll see her. The well is down there by the garden somewhere, if I remember rightly.” He goes and comes back without seeing any sign of Signe, but the water is soft and sweet with a lot of meltwater, golden brown the way well water often is in the spring.
Mona finishes the dishes and puts Sanna on the potty for another session, and still Signe doesn’t come. “If they weren’t so friendly, I’d be really annoyed,” she says. “Do you think she misunderstood me? Do you think I should go to the barn by myself? But of course then she’ll be hurt that I didn’t wait for her. What a nuisance! I so wish we could be on our own.”
Mona Kummel is dying to go out to the cow barn. In the beginning, the congregation is going to think her enthusiasm for the two cows and three ewes is play-acting, to show that she’s trying to share their everyday lives in every way, but in fact there is no one on the Örlands with a more fanatical partiality for livestock than the pastor’s wife. As a child on her family’s farm, she liked the creatures in the barn and the stable rather more than the ones in the house, and even now that she’s got her beloved husband and, through him, a family of her own, she still loves the animals that first made her human. But this is not a sentimental attachment or romantic nonsense, because Mona Kummel sends animals to slaughter, punishes those that misbehave, and never says that she loves cows. She just keeps them with a passion. Rational and realistic as she is, she loves animals for their contribution to self-sufficiency and because these cows guarantee her family a life of its own.
She can’t rush out to the cow barn now, because she’s agreed to go with the verger’s Signe, but how is it possible that the verger’s Signe doesn’t show up at the hour when all of Finland, yes, all of Scandinavia, milks its cows?
“Maybe they milk their cows later here, since they don’t deliver their milk to a creamery?” says her husband, who sometimes shows evidence of a practical intelligence that amazes his wife. She admits that he may be right, and says it might be just as well to put Sanna to bed now. On the other hand, she needs to be washed first. There’s warm water on the stove, which it would be a shame not to use, so maybe after all … “If Signe comes you’ll have to take over.”
There is time to wash Sanna and tuck her in and give her a good-night blessing before Signe arrives. And not just Signe but the verger with her. They come in quite calmly, with no apology for being late, which in their own eyes they are not. The verger asks how the day has gone. He supposes that they’re tired and says that he and Signe can go to the barn by themselves so they can rest a bit.
“Out of the question!” Mona says. She is ablaze with anticipation. “It will be great fun to meet our cows. I saw that the pails had been washed—thank you so much, Signe—so let’s just grab them and go!”
It’s possible that the verger and Signe had in mind a somewhat longer prelude to the milking, but they adapt smoothly and follow her out into the passage where she makes an energetic racket with the milk pails and the strainer and grabs a package of cotton filters. “There’s soap in the cow barn?” she says, and Signe nods. The pastor explains that he’d be happy to come along but that someone has to stay inside with Sanna this first evening in case she wakes up and is frightened in her new surroundings.
Mona leads the procession to the cow barn. She’s wearing a milking smock from the old days, and she’s slipped into a pair of old, worn shoes in the passage, but on the inside she’s dressed for a ball. She opens the door and steps straight into the cow barn, no milk house of the kind she’s used to. Two stalls for the cows, an empty calf’s crib, and against the far wall a sheep fold with three ewes and a partition full of butting heads and wobbly legs that add up to a total of five lambs.
The cows turn their heads and moo. Signe introduces them. The bigger, older, dark red cow is Apple, and the smaller one with the lighter coat and gentler disposition is Goody. Both are pregnant and will calve in June.
Too late in the year! Mona thinks. And Signe says that the covering kept getting postponed. The old priest and his wife knew they were leaving and neglected the cows a bit. Now they’re going dry, but they’re still giving a litre or so every morning and evening, and of course even that much milk is always welcome.
Mona claps their flanks with a firm, practised hand and examines their udders, which are relatively small and firm, Goody’s in particular. They sniff at her cautiously and moo again to remind everyone of food. And yes, the haymow is attached, with a door between. There’s almost no hay left, but on the other hand the cows can soon be put out to pasture. The villagers who’ve run out have already done so.
“And so have we,” the verger adds. “Keeping them in hay over the winter is really a struggle. There’s not a lot growing right now, but they eat leaf buds and reed sprouts along the shore.”
Mona scratches around with the pitchfork and pulls together a clump of hay that she forks up in front of Apple, then Goody gets her own dusty, meagre share. In the whole cow barn not a trace of fodder grain. Apple and Goody both have tight round bellies around their pregnancies, but their hipbones stick out like knobs, and a woman from the hay barns of Nyland can see that they’re too thin.
“Spring is coming not a minute too soon!” she says. To herself, she’s thinking that the former priest took miserable care of his animals, but she doesn’t want to criticize. She searches around with the pitchfork and finds some dried leafy twigs for the sheep. Then she finds the dung fork and starts mucking out, in spite of the verger’s offer to do it for her. It’s easily done. These bony cattle have produced small, firm pancakes that stay in one piece, and this primitive cow barn actually has a drain that carries out the urine through a hole in the stone foundation. The verger shows her that the well in the corner is full of meltwater now, in spring, and he gets in ahead of her and pulls up a couple pails of water that he empties into their troughs.
The cows mumble peacefully and sweep up the dry hay while Mona and Signe wash their udders and sit down to milk. The next day, the verger and Signe are able to tell everyone that the priest’s wife milks better than anyone they’ve ever seen and that she has a way with animals that takes your breath away. Apple and Goody turn around to look and then turn around and look again, because in a cow’s life this is quite sensational. They don’t release a lot of milk, but still enough to produce a good stream when Mona Kummel sets to work.