Independent People by Halldor Laxness

EVERYONE took it for granted that the ghost was active again in Summerhouses, so Gudny had a servant-girl sent from home to keep her company, and round the death of Rosa were spun strange stories, the stranger the greater the distance of their origin, but all in agreement as to its cause and all, indeed, of a pattern with the tales that had been told of this lonely croft from time out of memory. Great concern was therefore felt for the moor-crofter's future, especially as events had taken such a course in his very first year, and a few days later, when the Sheriffs Officer ran across Bjartur up-country, he intimated that he might have a workman's job vacant any time now and hinted that the difficulties in which it was expected Bjartur would shordy find himself might sooner or later become the concern of the whole parish; here he was, a widower left with an infant child on his hands, what was he going to do? He said he had heard that the Rauthsmyri people might be persuaded to take the child to foster, without the usual fee even, though with the stipulation that the land be returned to them free, "and in your shoes I would say I was well rid of it on such liberal terms."

Bjartur, however, thought that if the Rauthsmyri people were offering him liberal terms for anything it was certainly not before time, even though the offer did reach him by a circuitous route. "It may be possible that you parish-council potentates call it good riddance to pack your kids off to be fostered at Rauthsmyri," he declared. "But I don't call it a good riddance. For it so happens that I was fostered by this same Rauthsmyri crew myself for eighteen years. And as long as I can call myself an independent subject of this country and can pay my way with God and men, I intend to see that it is I that brings up my children and not the Rauthsmyrians."