West of the Moon (18 page)

She smiles and starts to leave. “Keep the handkerchief, my girl,” she says, turning back. “When you are feeling better, there's something I'd like to ask you.”

She knows,
I think.
She knows everything.
She knows that although I paid only one person's passage, there are two of us. She knows that the sweet little girl who seems to be everybody's child, or no one's, is my sister and a stowaway, and the food we're eating is stolen, mostly. Maybe she knows I practically murdered my former master. She can probably tell all this just because she is the parson's wife. For if God is all-knowing and all-seeing, then the parson—and probably his wife as well—must be almost all-knowing and almost all-seeing.

F
or a few days I am too sick to respond to her. As a steerage passenger, I spend my days between decks. Most of that
time is spent on my bunk, which, along with Greta, I share with three other girls. All seems to be going along well enough, if you don't count the seasickness, when the girl with the pink cheeks with whom I traded herring for hairbrush starts brewing trouble.

First she plunks herself in front of me and turns her head sideways, so as to look me in the face.

“I've never got one gold coin out of my hair,” she says.

“Keep trying,” I tell her. “It doesn't work every time—”

“Maybe I'll tell my papa,” she threatens.

“—or for everyone,” I finish.

“Who is that little girl?” She points to Greta.

“How should I know?” I answer.

“Hmmpf!” she hmmpfs, and flounces away, her shiny hair bouncing on her back.

If anyone on this ship gets sold as a slave to the Turks, I hope it's her.

Now the girl approaches a woman who is rolling yarn into a ball. “Is that little girl there”—she points at Greta—“is she your little girl?”

The woman looks up and over at Greta. She can't help but smile—everybody loves Greta—but she shakes her head no. “I think she belongs to that family”—she points with her chin—“the one with all the girls.”

So Little Miss Busybody trots over to the mother of
that
family and raises the same question and gets the same sort of answer.

I watch her through the slits of my half-closed eyes, too weak to do anything. And what could I do about it anyway? If this girl with the well-brushed hair goes around to every mother on board and asks, “Is she your daughter?” and gets the same answer from every one of them, what will she do then?

T
he days go on, with the north wind buffeting or the south wind sweeping up big nauseating swells, or the west wind trying to push the ship back from whence it came. It seems we have to be tossed every which way by each of the winds except the one we need. Finally, the right wind finds us, and our ship, the
Columbus
, moves westward, all sails filled.

We steerage passengers are allowed—even encouraged—to leave our cramped quarters and go up to the top deck. There, people cook, eat, sew, and play cards. Greta runs about in a cloud of towheaded children, disappearing into one family and another. She's so good with the babies and the youngest of the toddlers, always willing to hold, coddle, and comfort them, that no one minds her at all. Everyone just assumes she is the child of some other family.

From the upper deck we can look down on the lounge of the first-class passengers and watch them while they talk, do their needlepoint, smoke their pipes, and read books.

When she doesn't know I'm watching, I stare at the parson's wife as she reads. She seems to disappear into the pages—as if everything around her dissolves and she is transported into whatever world inhabits the pages of that book. It's not like watching the goatman read at all. With him it was all darting eyes and shouting. The page was not a place to disappear into but a wall to bounce one's voice off of. Watching the parson's wife read makes me wish I could read, too.

S
ince there's a genuine parson on board, on Sundays everyone goes up on deck for services.

Even though I've gotten over the worst of the seasickness, I've managed to be ill every Sunday so far. Today I am on deck but standing at the rail, well beyond the congregation, as usual. And, as usual, queasy.

All the passengers are there, seated in two rows, the women and girls on one side and the men and boys on the other. The minister really has to use his deep voice to be heard above the wind, which wants to snatch his voice away.

“Suddenly,” he intones, “there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon each one of them.”

I cast my gaze off to the horizon, at the dark clouds massing there, crackling with lightning.

“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance,” the pastor says. He is telling all about Pentecost, when the apostles were suddenly able to speak in all the regional languages. I suppose it would be like if suddenly a Hallingdaler could speak the Telemark dialect.

It could be a lucky thing if we were all instantly able to speak English, which is what the Americans speak, and which nobody on this ship so far as I can tell knows a speck of.

What if a wind like that came up right now? It's not hard to imagine, given what we've been through already. And what if tongues of fire sat upon us the way it happens in the scriptures? Nobody seems the least bit worried about it. The sun shines in all its splendor down on their brass buttons and filigree brooches, on the colorful embroidered borders on their dresses and their white linen sleeves. They all look so fine, and they all seem to belong there, in their makeshift church.

Me? I am the black sheep, the ugly duck, the one spotted piglet in a litter of pink ones.

The Halling Dance

oday it is the thumping that brings me above decks.
Bang! Thump, thump, whump.
It's feet, I can tell that, lots of feet, but what are they
doing
?

There'll be no rest for me, of that I can be sure, so at last I climb the companionway stairs, up.

On deck, all is piercing light and whirling color. The fiddler saws away at his fiddle. There's a fellow with an accordion. And the deck swirls with dancing bodies. Then the Halling men start their high-kicking dance. Someone holds a long pole with a hat dangling at the end of it, and one by one, the dancers try to kick it off. They whirl and twirl to the music, then leap in the air—so high you must squint against the sun to see their legs scissor out, their white shirtsleeves flashing.

No one can reach that hat—who could? It seems as high as the pennants fluttering on the mainmast. But then one of the young men steps forward and gives me a little nod, and I give him a glance back. It's the blond-haired boy who came by the goat farm.

He wouldn't recognize me now, would he? Now that I'm all cleaned up, hair washed, the bruises faded? Still, my heart beats two or three times out of rhythm.

Oh, he's very fine, he is. He struts about with his head held high and his chest thrown out like a rooster's. He's nimble, too. He turns; he spins; he flips. All the while his arms swing by his side, casual-like, as if it's nothing much to him.

Then he whirls, winding up like a top on a string, and flings himself high as a wheeling seabird. There he goes—heels over head—and off the hat flies and away it sails into the sky, then down to the sea.

Oh! That creates a ruckus! People race to the rail. The owner of the hat shouts orders to “Nab my hat!”

While everyone rushes to watch where the hat will go, the boy saunters over to me, smooths his hair, and smiles.

“Do I know you?” he says.

“No,” I answer quickly.

“You seem familiar,” he says.

“You've seen plenty like me, I don't doubt,” I tell him.

“No, not like you,” he says.

Maybe he means that as a compliment, I don't know. But I suppose he wants a compliment himself, so I say, “You seem to know that dance well enough.”

“'Tisn't much,” he laughs. “But now I've lost the postmaster
his hat.” The boy does an imitation of the squat little man racing after his hat, and I can't help but smile.

“There, now!” the lad says. “A smile becomes you. Or perhaps you become
you
when you smile.”

“Whatever do you mean by
that
?” Maybe I snap a bit.

“I hardly know, myself,” he says, all sheepish-like. “But wouldn't you like to dance?”

“Me? Nay!” I tell him. “I have mending to do.” I show him the needle and length of thread I am holding—a gift from a kind woman so I can mend my stockings. The boy tips his head politely and goes back to his dance.

Now I suppose I'll have to avoid the parson's wife
and
the Halling boy. Well, I won't think about it. If I were to close my eyes, I could imagine myself home in the mountains, my back against a boulder, my bare feet in the warm sun, the dancers on the greensward, and none of that to worry about.