THE MEMORY STONE
Most people say that the bride was rather gloomy. . As the saying goes, things learned young last longest.
In the Mary Church in Old Stavanger leans a great stone from ages ago, smoothed along one side and then carved in runes so tall that they stretch from edge to edge: Kjetil made it and erected it to the memory of his dear wife Jorunn. Who they both were is forgotten.
When Birgitte and Olav were wed in that church, he promised to remember her as well as Kjetil did Jorunn, at which Birgitte said: Not good enough. I’ll expect you to follow me.
Yes, wife, I’ll follow you… — at which his drunken cousin clapped him on the back.
She was a girl with a star at her throat and her scarf’s narrow ends hanging straight down below her breast. Then she was a goldenhaired young mother clenching her hands against the cold, and every morning she rocked the cradle, singing the song of the spider and the brooch, but their baby died.
She was never well; she was always as whiteskinned as a young wooden house. When her doom grew certain, she leaned against him, and slowly they walked up the hill, looking down over the steep roofs of the wooden houses at the narrow, streaming brilliance of the Vågen. The Østhavn was empty but for one or two great ships; the picket fence was going grey with dusk; the maple leaves were already black.
Again he swore to ride the day-ship and the night-ship, with the sail his wife should weave for him; and so she passed the rest of her life, vomiting and fainting, rolling her sailcloth upward on the warp-weighted loom as she formed the stuff. Just as a woman in her moon-bloody shift runs round the barley field before her husband sows it, so that the earth will bear, thus Birgitte uttered all her paling magic into the cloth she made, until her lips turned black. After she could no longer speak, she still stretched her arm toward him whenever he came to sit with her. Her hand closed tremblingly around his fingers. She learned how to make the good death once the leaves were new.
Because her life and death were in part secret to others, Olav’s nightmares grew brighter than the sea. Beside their child he buried her in her finest cloak, pinned with a golden trefoil brooch. Her stone read: Olav made this in remembrance of his dear wife Birgitte. As far as others were concerned, she had now been cast away, forgotten beneath the grass, avoided like dead wet leaves on the path — his mother spoke of fresher women, and the slanders of others resembled fallen poison-berries crimson on rock stairs — but Olav took mind of his promise, although he felt uneasy enough, to be sure, because where Birgitte had gone was as dark as a forest at a glade’s end.
Just as in a green hollow, a school of obedient dark stone heads stands aligned — a cemetery — so his nights now ranked themselves until a certain old witch in a double-brooched scarlet dress finished weaving the sail, spitting onto it to give it more woman-power.
Now the time had arrived for Olav to set out upon his journey, but first he wished to visit the husk of her whom he sought. Because he had paid the witch what she asked and more, she grew friendly, and even accompanied him that day, carrying the shovel. The church was cold. A man and boy bent over the votive candle which they had just impaled upon one of the equatorial spikes of the skeletal iron globe whose North Pole was a black cross, and when they had departed, Olav entered the churchyard, while the witch stood watch, reading the sun. An hour and more it must have been. Grimacing, she said: Do it now. I’ve locked the gate.
So he opened Birgitte’s grave, kissing her rotten face most lovingly, whispering in the hole where her ear once was that he would come to her now, and when he touched the heart-mud between her ribs, her lead cross went white with reflected gold-light, its triple rows of runes shining copper-red in their grooves. — Now she knows, said the witch. I wish I’d had a husband like you.
On the following day, Olav left home, with the witch-cloth rolled under his arm. The witch called up a breeze for him, then went her way. He said: Birgitte, prepare to welcome me. — Rainy wind on the slippery mossy rock, beech trees bursting from the dark rock, these sang to him when he put his feet in the two ovoid footprints, because in this very stone, dead people had made clean long ship-carvings: three vessels, one over the other, with people or animals or other beings on them. But what they had meant by it no one could say. Olav carried a silver neck-ring for his wife. Glorious white flowers were all he sorrowed to leave behind. Here he unrolled his sail. The keel sprouted before his feet. The wind caught him up.
Olav flew above the tongue of city into the Østre Havn, with small islands ahead: Plentingen on his left and Natvigs Minde on his right. Just like a duck paddling rapidly in cold black water, then diving, so his night-ship scored a wake in the day, then descended to the sea. His day-ship slit open the night; his night-ship found light; his day-ship carved darkness. Sometimes a sound as of wind came beneath the hull, but more often he heard slappings and sloshings; while after dark the ocean always sang like the choir back home in Stavanger. He grew as lonely as a dandelion flower high on its stalk. From Karmøy to Bukkøy he sailed, through shade and silver-wet grass, way-lit by the thunderglow of silver-blue lichen on black boulders, wife-lit, rune-lit, his ship’s swan-neck so dark-lit by water that it seemed to be its own thing, a snake; and as he travelled he began to wonder whether he crossed waves or was but a shadow upon blackberries and petroglyphs by the sunny sea, so many broken shells and mouse skulls did he pass over upon that cracked rock-shelf with its black and silver-white lichens and grasses growing up gold in the cracks, until after sailing through many rains he began to forget some of this Birgitte whom he sought, voyaging ever more lightly over green island-heads in the pale blue water. But he would not release his grip on her memory. He kept dreaming of her dead breasts because he sailed between rosehips as large as suns, while her dead womb became a red crabapple in autumn.
Ahead came the desired land, and on the grass, the outspread arms of rock. Olav kissed Birgitte’s neck-ring. The ship became an eight-legged horse whose eyes were dandelions. He sailed into the rock’s embrace where white water leaped up out of the dark water it struck, the rock pale and nearly green in the light. He hovered over green moss and lichens, breasting the leaves which waved at the sheep-clouds on the grass-sky. Cloud-sheep grazed on the green horizon.
He called out to Birgitte, but she did not yet answer. So he rode his horse across the trees, watched by blurred Dorset faces on a wand of antler. — Now I’ll roll up this horse and carry him under my arm, he said to himself. — He leaped across the dark lake, then across the river like a silver sword.
Far away where the blue-grey sea was writhing under a double bank of purple cloud, the sky glowing whitish-yellow at sunset, he approached the steeply tapering wooden roofs of Valhalla. Up rose mead-worthy woman-ghosts: Ingrid, Mari, Signe, Johanna, Karen, Elisabeth, Anna, Margaretha, Inga, Juliane — but Birgitte happened to be the one on whom he’d set his heart. So again he mounted his horse whose eyes were dandelions and rode down to Hel, whose dark hills are wound-gashed with red leaves. The ogres were greyish-blue like cold clay, and the trolls were as black as berries in a wall of green thorns; the giants were boulder-hearted, and the night-elves were pond-eyed. Sometimes they were grandly terrible; then they became as leaf-shadows. Scattering them all, even the monster with an ovoid head and closed ovoid eyes, he lifted a stone, and up rose Birgitte.
She wore a brooch made of crumbling green rust; perhaps he had once given it to her. Her hair had grown longer, and she was younger. She declined to open her arms. She was whiter than a birch tree, and her fingernails were paler than evergreen tips.