The dog heralded Ketill’s arrival before any of us knew he was coming. She whined and clattered her toenails and huffed at the window. It was Saturday, late morning, which found the three of us hiding from the feeble, low-slung sun, each in our respective chairs, each with our respective books. Pabbi had already accomplished his chores and checkups on the bovine maternity ward and seemed relatively content to do nothing for a little while, since Mamma was home. We were one of those rare families that liked being together.
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Pabbi groaned when he saw the ratty old flatbed rolling in. He disliked Ketill, but had to stifle it because diplomacy was perhaps his core value, and because Ketill was a neighbor whose years of hard-won dubious experience in homesteading and machine maintenance were occasionally called upon in times of emergency at our place, and because Ketill was unfailingly, maddeningly generous.
“I’m not at home,” Pabbi said. I could never tell when he said this whether he was quoting Bilbo Baggins or had simply become Bilbo Baggins.
Mamma gathered up her book and made for the back room. “I’m not either,” she said. She didn’t need a reason to dislike Ketill, and though she taught politics, diplomacy was not her thing.
“I guess that leaves us,” I said to the dog, cramming my bare feet into a pair of insulated rubber boots and taking a heavy down jacket from the overburdened rack.
Rykug preceded me, barking with menace and joy, and she scrabbled her claws all over Ketill’s paint job. Fortunately Ketill did not give a damn about his paint job. The old farmer unfolded himself like an arthritic insect, lanky and unbending, his false teeth clacking in his mouth. He grinned at me.
“The prodigious son returns!”
“Hey, Ketill.”
“Home from the big city, I see. Slumming it with the peasants.”
This was one of Ketill’s favorite tactics: calling attention to his erudition with facetious mockery of his ignorance. It was a sword with an impossible number of edges.
“You on break?” he said.
“Not for another couple of weeks. Just thought I’d bring some classwork home, start vacation early.” I was careful, always careful, to avoid any suggestion that Pabbi needed help. Not only would it inspire scorn from Ketill—worse, it might inspire his help.
Ketill nodded knowingly. He produced his plastic flask of neftóbak, Icelandic nose tobacco, tipped a line of the coarse snuff onto his hand, and disappeared it in a couple of hearty contemplative snorts.
“How is the beautiful lady of the house?” he said, with a leer in his voice. Mamma may not have needed a reason to dislike him, but if she had, his insistence on calling attention to her appearance would have been sufficient. Sometimes he worked in bizarre references to her background when delivering his lascivious compliments. He once called her a “framandi hornkýr,” or exotic horned cow. We’d spent weeks afterward trying to decide whether he understood the anti-Semitic implications, or if he referred only to the rareness of horns among Icelandic cows. That was a regular game in our house: Did Ketill know what he was saying?
“Fine. She’s in the shower,” I said, and then instantly regretted it, assuming Ketill’s mind would jump at the opportunity to picture her there. “What are you up to, old man?”
“Ah, just picking up some hay for the critters.” Ketill, who had no outbuildings that weren’t stuffed with machine parts, stored his square bales at our farm. In return, we used a few as bedding in the maternity ward. “Any babies on the ground?”
I looked over his shoulder, as though I might see a calf lying in the barnyard instead of the gory smear from Fús being dragged off. I’d always been mystified by how blood could leave a tenacious stain in concrete, snow, gravel, dirt.
“Nope.”
We stood in companionable silence for a minute, Ketill watching with a look of beleaguered amusement as Rykug chased his little Icelandic sheepdog, Gúrka, around the buildings, humping him relentlessly. It didn’t matter, of course, that Rykug was female. This was her place, and she would express her dominance however she saw fit. She hadn’t been socialized particularly well, way out in the sticks, and she also seemed to resent the fact that Gúrka was uncut, oozing useless hormones. They still liked each other, but in a toxic way.
“Your dog is a rapist,” Ketill said. “Where did Viðir ever get such a horrible thing?”
I let the insult wash over me. Rykug was Pabbi’s dog, but whenever I was back home, she was mine. Pabbi sometimes made a show of objecting to this, calling her “traitor” when, in the morning, he discovered that she’d slunk from my parents’ bedroom and relocated to mine, the better to nose me at the first sign of waking.
“You abandoned me,” he would say to her. “Fickle beast.”
But we both knew, and we knew Ketill knew, that Rykug could run literal circles around the rest of the country’s native canine stock. In theory, she could outperform the border collies that now outnumbered Icelandic sheepdogs, at least among pragmatic farmers. Border collies only worked the head, and were of course deeply neurotic, seldom able to acknowledge when the workday was over.
Rykug was an Australian kelpie, rust-red and long-legged, and though her coat was wholly unsuited to the climate, her intelligence and drive made her an indispensable farmhand, or would someday. Pabbi had worked long and hard to find a pup of her breeding, rare outside of Australia, and to wade through the rigid bureaucracy that tried to prevent her immigration. Then he’d waited impatiently during her long quarantine on Hrísey. Maybe it was on the cusp of paying off. She was three years old now. They say kelpies never tire, not ever. They can work the heel just as well as the head, depending on what’s required. Pabbi showed me a video once where a kelpie disappeared into the scrum of a chute packed with nervous sheep only to reappear moments later on top of the herd, using their wooly ovine backs as a promenade. Rykug was untested in that regard, but she certainly knew how to conserve energy: Once indoors, warming on the floor, she turned it off like a switch. The only things that made her somewhat disagreeable were horses. She didn’t do so well with them: They hated her, and she hated them. Fortunately we didn’t have any. Also, she was an incorrigible yapper. Pabbi trained her not to do it in the house, but she just replaced the barking with whines and whistles and other alien sounds of the same volume and pitch, and in such speech-like intonations that she seemed part raven.
Ketill could cast his aspersions if he liked. I’d known the old man since I was an infant, when he held me in one arm and bellowed Icelandic folk songs, which I apparently found reassuring. His retrograde fumblings about ethnicity and religion could be chalked up to a lifetime spent among Icelanders, along with a perverse, ill-conceived desire to prove to everyone just how enlightened and unintimidated he was. As far as he was concerned, his admiration for my mother’s appearance was just more evidence of his progressive attitude, and therefore allowed him liberties in his speech. He allowed himself many liberties. And case in point: Weren’t he and I great friends? Wasn’t he, for all intents and purposes, my godfather? He certainly thought so.
After a little while, Rykug came back in a lather and collapsed at my feet, conserving her spirit until the next big thing. Gúrka, looking spent, retreated to the cab of Ketill’s truck. Neither of us was in a hurry, though I’d begun to feel the cold through my thin cotton pants.
“Ah, the farming life,” Ketill declaimed.
We stared toward the Þverá, where a feeble cloud of steam was rising from the ice. The wind got hold of a cracked five-gallon bucket and bounced it into a ditch.
