BREKKE FARM:

Thirty-eight-year-old Olav never could figure out why the rest of the family hadn't transferred to him the huge weight of respect and fear they'd shown his father. Guro simply ignored her eldest son. "I'm the heir!" he often muttered in barely bridled outrage. Each orphan in a long string of unlucky housegirls quickly learned to give him a wide berth.

These days, Talleiv's stutter rarely interrupted his speech, flaring up only when he and Olav were alone together. Ornery Olav assigned the seventeen-year-old more than his share of drudgery, venting his frustration on the slightly built young man.

Olav's voice was always the loudest around the dinner table, where the family ate according to his timetable and where, in the winter, he often spread out his leather tooling projects, crowding out everyone else. He snarled at his nephews, scowled at his infant niece, criticized Talleiv at every turn.

When twenty-eight-year-old Sveinung Saddlemaker brought home a wife, Olav's welcome was a surly, "Keep your children out from underfoot."

"An impossible task, with such huge troll feet you have," Sveinung cheerfully countered. "You'll have to watch where you step."

"Be glad I need your stitching skills, or I'd turn you out homeless in the world," Olav growled.

"Don't mind him," Sveinung Saddlemaker whispered to his flustered bride as they headed to their honeymoon lodging in a loft. "He's actually very well-mannered, for a troll. And we won't be living here long. Sveinung Byggland says we can move onto his tenant farm within a month or two."

Birgit despaired of ever wedding, for Olav insulted every young man who tried to come courting. "You're needed here to care for our mother, you ungrateful wretch," Olav snarled. "First you aggravate our father to his death, and now you want to abandon our beloved mother. For shame!"

"I'm not the invalid I was," Guro said as she hobbled in, leaning on her cane. "If you'd leave off terrifying the housegirls, we might find one who'd stay on. That'd be all the help I need."

"She's not marrying without my approval!" he snarled at his "beloved" mother. "And I'll not be quick to give it. Silly girls, like sheep. One does it, the others all want to follow suit." He stomped out.

Birgit's friend Hæge at Øvrebø had married the previous year and gone to live at a farm high above Håtveit, right on the ridge path between Øvrebø and the farm her husband came from in the dale of Ordal.

"You go to that dance Saturday evening," Guro told Birgit. "Never mind him."

Birgit puffed out her cheeks in despair. "He'll be at the dance, too, hounding my footsteps. He'd rather ruin other people's happiness than seek any out for himself." She still clung to her dream of escaping home by becoming a baker-wife. Only then would come time to hope for a husband.

Guro's friend, the wrinkle-faced Fru Hansdotter, often came for a visit, now that the late Hard Knut no longer ruled his wife's affairs. The childless widow earned her living as a baker-wife in the busy spring and fall flatbread-baking season. Birgit gathered up her courage one evening when Olav was out in the fields, and asked the crotchety woman for lessons in rolling dough.

"What, and lose paying customers in Morgedal?" The old kjerring glared. "You want to steal my livelihood, drive me into poverty?"

"Nei, nei!"

Guro sniffed at her friend's over-blown theatrics and went on peeling potatoes.

"I already have an assistant," Fru Hansdotter sniped. "After I die, you ask her to take you on, if you want to wait that long. I don't plan on dying any time soon." She turned back to Guro and launched into a piece of gossip from Ordal.

Birgit had to content herself with watching everyday farmwives making their humble version of flatbread at neighboring farms. She practiced rolling thinly with a lump of dough over and over until it grew tough. Always too stiff to stretch, or so sticky it gummed to rolling pin and breadboard. What was the secret to springy dough?

If she couldn't master the knack, how else could she support herself away from home? She'd have to hire out as a housegirl -- working for little more than room and board and a yearly pair of shoes, sleeping in an outbuilding with other servants. No guarantee the master would be any more human than Olav. No status, no future.

She knit her brows and mixed up another batch of dough. She would figure it out. She must.

.

BEHIND THE SCENES

"Bakste-kjerring" is the word for a baker-wife.

"Kjerring" means "woman," in general, and "wife" or "old married woman" in particular. It sometimes even carries the flavor of "crone" or "hag."