Coffee in the parlour as promised. A braided coffeecake, brushed with egg, sprinkled with pearl sugar. Please help yourselves! Deathly silence, all the more noticeable because it’s normally impossible to get the Kummels to shut up. Only Mrs Hellén converses, and Hellén himself rumbles agreement in his bass. “Good coffee cake,” Mrs Hellén says. “You can certainly bake—better than I.” That almost makes Mona smile, because she’s not wrong. In adversity, when there’s no way out, Mrs Hellén escapes into diversionary remarks, just now about the food, the wind, the temperature. The Coast Guard, the boat trip, seasickness, the length of the trip, the relief of getting back onto dry land. She continues with friendly questions to the surviving Kummel siblings about their jobs and homes, their future plans and hopes. She gets a conversation going, although the young people shake their heads and signal each other that they can’t believe their ears. All her life, Mona has found her mother’s refusal to confront unpleasant situations annoying. Now she suddenly sees that it has some advantages, can even save her from a still more unpleasant situation, namely, that her self-control might run the risk of collapsing. If she has an ally in this assembly, it is, to her astonishment, her mother.
And when everyone has been assigned a place to sleep in the guest room, study, dining room, parlour, or attic, and when it’s been decided who the pallbearers will be, and a number of other exhausting questions have been answered, Mrs Hellén says in friendly conversation that she doesn’t suppose the Co-op will have a black veil. And therefore she has brought an old veil with her, which she can help Mona fasten to her hat. In fact, she is wrong—Adele Bergman promptly delivered a veil—but the thought was excellent and allows Mona and Mrs Hellén to withdraw to the bedroom while the others cluster at the other end of the house with their sighs and tears and their gestures of complete helplessness whenever Mona’s situation is cautiously broached.
Mama has her own funeral hat with her in a carton and Mona brings out the pretty black felt hat she had to buy for Petter’s ordination. The veil would fall better if the hat had a broader brim, but it will do. The veil her mother brought hangs nicer and smells better than the stiff, unused one from the Co-op, which has absorbed the stink of tobacco smoke and kerosene in the store. “Thanks,” Mona says. She starts sewing it to the hat right away, while Mrs Hellén stitches on her own. Mona knows what she looks like in it, but Mama sees her eldest daughter in mourning for the first time. As soon as she’s hidden behind it, her shoulders begin to tremble and there is a snuffling sound, as if she were sobbing. Quickly, she throws it back over her hat. “Oh, just because I’m wearing a veil, I think I have to start crying.”
Mrs Hellén smiles evasively, the way she does, and says, “Yes, yes. It’s hard. It’s dreadful, having all of us here in the house. Tell me if you think there’s anything I can do. I’d really like to help, even though I’m the way I am.”
Mona gives her a quick evaluating look. “If you could keep your old friend Martha from interfering constantly, that would be a real boon. If you talk to her, she can’t talk to me.”
“True enough,” Mama says. “And I can spend time with the girls. Read to them, for example.”
“They’re going to be hopelessly spoiled!” Mona says. “No routines and no rules. They’re impossible if they get too much attention.”
While the two women sit in the bedroom, the verger comes in through the kitchen right into the group of funeral guests, like living proof of the saying that no matter what you’re doing, you’ll be interrupted. Surprised, he excuses himself for his work clothes—he has come to help the widow with the evening milking. Whereupon they all start talking at once. For heaven’s sake, Mona can’t possibly go out to the cow barn under the circumstances! Can’t someone else go? Is there no one who knows how to milk? No one to ask? This is terrible!
No one in the group knows how to milk a cow or else they would. With pleasure. Finally the verger himself raises his voice to say that it’s Mona herself who insists on going. “She says she wants to go by herself, but I go with her anyway. And I must tell you”, he adds with all the weight of his office, “that I don’t know how we’d get through this without the cow barn, because in the cow barn she can weep.”
That gives them something to think about. Mona too heard him come and emerges from the bedroom followed by Mrs Hellén. “You came this evening too!” she says. “You know I can manage by myself. But let’s go. If Berg and Skog arrive while I’m out, make them some tea. I’ll come and throw together some supper for everyone when I’m done. In the meantime, make yourselves at home.” A general invitation, but the order to make tea is directed to Mrs Hellén and banishes the elder Mrs Kummel to the outer circle. Nothing more to be said, she closes the kitchen door, puts on her milking coat in the hall, pulls on her boots, and then off she goes with the verger in her wake.
Almost as if they’d been waiting around the corner of the house for a signal, Berg and Skog come in. When the Coast Guard unloaded the mourning relatives at the church dock, Berg and Skog continued to the west villages, where they prepared the next day’s funeral service with the organist. They ate and talked and are now going to spend the night in one of the attic rooms at the parsonage.
Mrs Hellén thinks that Berg looks terribly down in the mouth, while Skog can hardly contain his desire to arrange and direct. As Petter’s predecessor in this parish, he had, on his own initiative, decided and announced that he, who knows his Örlanders, would deliver the sermon. Until he was informed that Berg had been asked to conduct the funeral, he had simply assumed that the call would come to him. Hard to explain why they’ve chosen the colourless Berg from the neighbouring parish, who has had very little contact with the Örlands, while Skog himself, with the ability to play on the Örlanders’ emotions like a keyboard, must content himself with a sermon. Well, he can say a lot in that sermon! In the course of the discussion at the organist’s table, he has expressed his views on a great many subjects and was irritated by Berg’s tenacious resistance. It seems that he and the widow have made all the decisions and that they have completely won over the organist to their point of view.
Well, what’s done is done. But now they have to greet the relatives from the mainland all over again, having met them once already, on the boat, and make a much greater effort with those who came from Åland to the west—the grieving parents and the male representatives of Petter’s father’s home farm. Many think them empty phrases. Even Fredrik Berg thinks his words sound hollow, although he means it from the bottom of his heart when he says that he, who counted Petter as a friend and brother, knows better than most what they have lost. It is difficult to pull his thoughts together into something personal when the food seems to have a higher priority than the death. Mona’s mother, Mrs Hellén insists on serving tea to the new arrivals, although they try to insist on waiting until Mona returns. “These are Mona’s orders,” Mrs Hellén says as she pours. “It seems to be a rule of the house that everyone must get something warm in their gizzard as soon as they come through the door. Drink this now, and then you can have a second cup with the rest of us.”