Sira Solmund was a little trifle of a man in appearance; it wasn’t easy to guess his age, but he was supposedly about forty winters old. He was not very shrewd and apparently didn’t possess an overabundance of learning, but he was an upright, pious, and moral priest. One of his sisters, an aging, childless widow and a wicked gossip, managed his meager household.
He wanted to be seen as a zealous servant of the Church, but he concerned himself mostly with paltry matters and common folk. He had a timid disposition and was reluctant to meddle with the gentry or take up difficult questions, but once he did so, he grew quite fierce and stubborn.
In spite of this, he was well liked by his parishioners. On the one hand, people respected his quiet and honorable way of living; on the other hand, he was not nearly as avaricious or strict when it came to the rights of the Church or people’s obligations as Sira Eirik had been. This was doubtless due to the fact that he was much less bold than the old priest.
But Sira Eirik had loved and respected every man and every child in all the surrounding villages. In the past people often grew angry when the priest strove, with unseemly greed, to secure the fortunes and wealth of the children he had conceived out of wedlock with his housekeeper. During the first years he lived in the parish, the people of Sil had a difficult time tolerating his imperious harshness toward anyone who overstepped the slightest dictate of Church law. He had been a soldier before he took his vows, and he had accompanied the pirate earl, Sir Alf of Tornberg, in his youth. This was all quite evident in his behavior.
But even back then the people had been proud of their priest, for he surpassed nearly all other parish priests in the realm in terms of knowledge, wisdom, physical strength, and courtly manners; he also had the loveliest singing voice. As the years passed and he had to endure the heavy trials God seemed to have placed on His servant because of his willfulness in his youth, Sira Eirik Kaaress?n grew so much in wisdom, piety, and righteousness that his name was now known and respected throughout the entire bishopric. When he journeyed to ecclesiastical meetings in the town of Hamar, he was honored as a father by all the other priests, and it was said that Bishop Halvard wanted to have him moved to a church which would have granted him a noble title and a seat in the cathedral chapter. But Sira Eirik supposedly requested to stay where he was; he gave his age as his excuse, and the fact that his sight had been failing him for many years.
On the main road at Sil, a little south of Formo, stood the beautiful cross carved from soapstone that Sira Eirik had paid to have erected where a rockslide on the slope had taken the lives of both his promising young sons forty years before. Older people in the parish never passed that way without stopping to say a Pater noster and Ave Maria for the souls of Alf and Kaare.
The priest had married off his daughter with a dowry of property and cattle. He gave her to a handsome farmer’s son of good family from Viken. No one had any other thought but that Jon Fis was a good lad. Six years later she had returned home to her father, starving, her health broken, wearing rags and full of lice, holding a child by each hand, and with another one under her belt. The people living in Sil back then all knew, although they never mentioned it, that the children’s father had been hanged as a thief in Oslo. The sons of Jon didn’t turn out well either, and now all three of them were dead.
While his offspring were still alive, Sira Eirik had greedily sought to adorn and honor his church with gifts. Now it was the church that would doubtless acquire the majority of his fortune and his precious books. The new Saint Olav and Saint Thomas Church in Sil was much larger and more splendid than the old one that had burned down, and Sira Eirik had endowed it with many magnificent and costly adornments. He went to church every day to say his prayers and to reflect, but now he only said mass for the parishioners on high holy days.
It was Sira Solmund who now handled most of the other official priestly duties. But when people had a heavy sorrow, or if their souls were troubled by great difficulties or pangs of conscience, they preferred to seek out their old parish priest, and they all felt that they took home solace from a meeting with Sira Eirik.
One evening in early spring Kristin Lavransdatter went to Romundgaard and knocked on the door of Sira Eirik’s house. She didn’t know how to bring up the subject she wanted to discuss, so she talked about one thing and another after she had expressed her greetings.
Finally the old man said a little impatiently, “Have you just come here to bring me greetings, Kristin, and to see how I am? If so, that is most kind of you. But it seems to me that you have something on your mind, and if this is true, tell me about it now, and don’t waste time with idle talk.”
Kristin clasped her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes. “I’m so unhappy, Sira Eirik, that my husband is living up there at Haugen.”
“Surely the road isn’t any longer,” said the priest, “than that you can easily journey up there to talk to him and ask him to return home soon. He can’t have so much to do up there on such a small one-man farm that he should need to stay any longer.”
“I feel frightened when I think of him sitting alone up there in the winter nights,” said Kristin, shivering.
“Erlend Nikulauss?n is old enough and strong enough to look out for himself.”
“Sira Eirik . . . you know about everything that happened up there, back in the old days,” whispered Kristin, her voice barely audible.
The priest turned his dim old eyes toward her; once they had been coal-black, sharp, and gleaming. He didn’t say a word.
“Surely you must have heard what people say,” she continued, speaking in the same low voice. “That the dead . . . still haunt the place.”
“Do you mean you don’t dare seek him out because of that? Or are you afraid the ghosts might break your husband’s neck? If they haven’t done it by now, Kristin, then no doubt they’ll let him stay there in peace.” The priest laughed harshly. “It’s mostly just ignorance—heathen nonsense and superstition—when people start gossiping about ghosts and the return of dead men. I fear there are stern guards at the door, in that place where Herr Bj?rn and Fru Aashild now find themselves.”
“Sira Eirik,” she whispered, her voice trembling, “do you believe there is no salvation for those two poor souls?”
“God forbid that I should dare judge the limits of His mercy. But I can’t imagine that those two could have managed to settle their debts so quickly; all the slates the two of them have had a hand in carving have not yet been presented: her children, whom she abandoned, and the two of you, who took lessons from the wise woman. If I thought that it might help, so that some of the misdeeds she committed could be rectified . . . but since Erlend is living up there, God must not think it would be of any benefit for his aunt to reappear and warn him. For we know that it is through the grace of God and the compassion of Our Lady and the intercessionary prayers of the Church that a poor soul may be allowed to return to this world from the fires of purgatory if his sin is such that it can be absolved with the help of someone who is alive and in this manner shorten his time of torment. Such was the case with the wretched soul who moved the boundary between Hov and Jarpstad, or the farmer in Musudal with the false documents about the millstream. But souls cannot leave the fires of purgatory unless they have a lawful errand. It’s mostly nonsense what people say about ghosts and phantoms or the mirages of the Devil, which disappear like smoke if you protect yourself with the sign of the cross and the name of the Lord.”
“But what about the blessed ones who are with God, Sira Eirik?” she asked softly.
“You know quite well that the holy ones who are with God can be sent out to bring gifts and messages from Paradise.”
“I once told you that I saw Brother Edvin Rikardss?n,” she said in the same tone of voice.