“That was a rum ’un!” said he, and he sat there a long time looking at it.
It looked just as if it might be the boot of his brother who had gone down in the great storm last winter on his way home from fishing.
There was still something inside the boot too, but he durst not look to see what it was, nor did he exactly know what to do with the sea-boot either.
He didn’t want to take it home and frighten his mother, nor did he quite fancy chucking it back into the sea again; so he made up his mind to go to the parson of Brönö, and beg him to bury it in a Christian way.
“But I can’t bury a sea-boot,” quoth the parson.
The fellow scratched his head. “Na, na!” said he.
Then he wanted to know how much there ought to be of a human body before it could have the benefit of Christian burial.
“That I cannot exactly tell you,” said the parson; “a tooth, or a finger, or hair clippings is not enough to read the burial service over. Anyhow, there ought to be so much remaining that one can see that a soul has been in it. But to read Holy Scripture over a toe or two in a sea-boot! Oh, no! that would never do!”
But Isaac watched his opportunity, and managed to get the sea-boot into the churchyard on the sly, all the same.
And home he went.
It seemed to him that he had done the best he could. It was better, after all, that something of his brother should lie so near God’s house than that he should have heaved the boot back into the black sea again.
But, towards autumn, it so happened that, as he lay out among the skerries on the lookout for seals, and the ebb-tide drove masses of tangled seaweed towards him, he fished up a knife-belt and an empty sheath with his oar-blade.
He recognised them at once as his brother’s.
The tarred wire covering of the sheath had been loosened and bleached by the sea; and he remembered quite well how, when his brother had sat and cobbled away at this sheath, he had chatted and argued with him about the leather for his belt which he had taken from an old horse which they had lately killed.
They had bought the buckle together over at the storekeeper’s on the Saturday, and mother had sold bilberries, and capercailzies, and three pounds of wool. They had got a little tipsy, and had had such fun with the old fishwife at the headland, who had used a bast-mat for a sail.
So he took the belt away with him, and said nothing about it. It was no good giving pain to no purpose, thought he.
But the longer the winter lasted the more he bothered himself with odd notions about what the parson had said. And he knew not what he should do in case he came upon something else, such as another boot, or something that a squid, or a fish, or a crab, or a Greenland shark might have bitten off. He began to be really afraid of rowing out in the sea there among the skerries.
And yet, for all that, it was as though he were constantly being drawn thither by the hope of finding, perhaps, so much of the remains as might show the parson where the soul had been, and so move him to give them a Christian burial.
He took to walking about all by himself in a brown study.
And then, too, he had such nasty dreams.
His door flew open in the middle of the night and let in a cold sea-blast, and it seemed to him as if his brother were limping about the room, and yelling that he must have his foot again, the Draugs were pulling and twisting him about so.
For hours and hours he stood over his work without laying a hand to it, and blankly staring at the fifth wall.33
At last he felt as if he were really going out of his wits, because of the great responsibility he had taken upon himself by burying the foot in the churchyard.
He didn’t want to pitch it into the sea again, but it couldn’t lie in the churchyard either.
It was borne in upon him so clearly that his brother could not be among the blessed, and he kept going about and thinking of all that might be lying and drifting and floating about among the skerries.
So he took it upon himself to dredge there, and lay out by the seashore with ropes and dredging gear. But all that he dredged up was sea-wrack, and weeds, and starfish, and like rubbish.
One evening as he sat out there by the rocks trying his luck at fishing, and the line with the stone and all the hooks upon it shot down over the boat’s side, the last of the hooks caught in one of his eyes, and right to the bottom went the eye.
There was no use dredging for that, and he could see to row home very well without it.
In the night he lay with a bandage over his eye, wakeful for pain, and he thought and thought till things looked as black as they could be to him. Was there ever anyone in the world in such a hobble as he?
All at once such an odd thing happened.
He thought he was looking about him, deep down in the sea, and he saw the fishes flitting and snapping about among the sea-wrack and seaweeds round about the fishing line. They bit at the bait, and wriggled and tried to slip off, first a cod, and then a ling, and then a dogfish. Last of all, a haddock came and stood still there, and chewed the water a little as if it were tasting before swallowing it.
And he saw there what he couldn’t take his eyes off.
