The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Blaðsíða 28

170
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
love to Sylvia, he reckoned, and so it would
be. The births of Glenn, Elaine, and Eric
followed, and Afi’s presence in their lives
would be no less indelible in their adoring
eyes.
He wasn’t a big man, about average
height, perhaps a bit shorter and wiry. He
was the Lake Winnipeg counterpart of “the
old man and the sea.” His face was a com-
plex landscape, rugged but warm, his life
told in the deep lines that furrowed every
corner. He was a good-looking man, this
despite the fact that he had no teeth. That
was the unhappy result of the thousands of
cups of coffee he drank before he was
forty, sucking each sip through his sugar
cube - “Mola Kaffi” as it was known
amongst the Icelanders. He had false teeth
made when his originals fell victim to the
dentist’s pliers, but he never had the
patience to get used to them, so they sat in
his dresser to be used “for best” as he used
to say. Remarkably, unless you knew or
were told, you never noticed that he had no
teeth. And even more remarkably, his
biggest challenge as a result was not eating
a steak, but chewing hamburger.
My Afi wasn’t a boy for long. His had
not been an easy life. The youngest of a
family of twelve, the primary burden of
taking care of his chronically bedridden
father and an elderly mother fell upon him,
the year he began his life as a fisherman.
His father died when he was 19 and he and
his mother were together on Hecla. They
had never owned the land on which they
lived and he was determined to change that.
A prime piece of land on the island, in the
middle of an area then known as Milnuvik,
came up for sale. By then, at his young age,
he had saved enough money to buy it. His
mother and he lived in a small shanty there
until he married and that small shanty was
the home in which my mother and my aunt
Solveig began their lives. In 1927, with fir
bought from lumber suppliers Brown and
Rutherford of Winnipeg, he built a beauti-
ful home on one of the choicest properties
on the island. Today, this home and prop-
erty remain emblematic of the island, oper-
ated for many years as the beautiful and
only guesthouse on the island, Solmundson
Gesta Hus. Whenever we were on Hecla as
kids, as we drove by, Mom always pointed
up to the second floor window on the
right, just above the balcony, to show us
where her bedroom as a girl had been.
The family was desperately poor and
his older sisters had to go to Winnipeg to
work. Whether they experienced or per-
ceived discrimination with respect to their
immigrant name and probably there were
elements of both, they made the difficult
decision to adopt a new name. So the
Jonsson girls became Jones’, and with them
the rest of the family, including Afi’s
brother Beggi, who was eight years older
than he. Afi took a different course. He had
a deep sense of who he was and who he was
not, at a very early point in his life. He
would become Brynjolfson. He chose a
name according to the ways of his forbear-
ers in a land he had never known or seen,
taking his father’s first name Brynjolfur
and adding “son.” Other than always
knowing that he was the Brynjolfson
amongst the Joneses,( and be assured that
names did not separate the ties that bonded
him to his brother Beggi and his nephews
Helgi, Binny, Beggie, and Harold), I never
once heard him, or anyone else, speak of
why or when he made that decision, but
knowing him you knew why. On a rare
occasion I heard him referred to as Malli
Jones, but only by his Cree partners on
Lake Winnipeg, who found Jones a lot eas-
ier to roll off their tongue than
Brynjolfson.
Afi’s fortunes rose and fell in perfect
synchronicity with the fish populations
over which neither he, nor anyone else, had
any control. When the catch was low, he
had to make do. But when the nets were
full and fish were pouring over the gunnels
of the Baby Spear (given as a gift by the
family to the Lake Winnipeg Museum in
Girnli where it sits today as a proud
reminder of another time), he knew the
simplest and most joyful power of nature’s
abundance. Financially, there were good
years; there were also many bad. But Afi
Malli spent all day, almost every day,
breathing the fresh Lake Winnipeg air and
feeling its spray, with his body working the
lines and his hands picking out fish, sum-
mer, fall, and winter. Later in life, he told