by Ola Larsmo
The men exchanged a few words. It sounded as if they were repeating the word Swedish, though in their own dialect.
Then the Gavin boy looked up and smiled, saying only, “Come.” Both men turned and disappeared into the dark. Gustaf called to the children, who hesitantly emerged from the shadow of the train station. The family gathered up their belongings, and then they all began following in the footsteps of the two Irishmen, who were ten feet ahead, walking along the snowy street. No one spoke. The men merely glanced back a few times to see if the family was still following. The wind had subsided, but it had started snowing again with big flakes falling straight down from the dark sky.
Later Anna would become very familiar with the route from the train station to the Hollow, simply because many people went there to work every morning. But on that night the distance seemed endless—a tunnel of darkness and falling snow. Both men eventually veered off the street, which had become a well-trampled and frozen path, and headed down a narrow stairway to the river that was almost completely covered with ice. Off in the distance, on the opposite bank, which seemed impossibly far away, she could see occasional yellow lights flickering through the cold mist above open spaces in the wide river current. They walked past a row of barges, some of them apparently abandoned while others were covered with sailcloth and barely visible in the swirling white darkness. Then both men climbed back up the steep slope, and Anna had to help the girls to the top, holding them by the hand, before she went back down to help Gustaf carry all their bags. Elisabet whimpered quietly to herself. Anna still didn’t know where they were. They seemed to be standing in the middle of nowhere, and the snow was still falling.
The two Irishmen walked slowly along the edge of the bluff and then stopped. One of them hefted his sledgehammer, holding it by the middle of the shaft, and cautiously struck it against the ground. The sound of a small farm bell suddenly rang from under the snow, a dreamlike sound that oddly seemed to slice right through Anna’s weariness.
When she drew closer, she saw they were standing on a railroad embankment. Both young men began tapping here and there on the snow-covered track, prompting a dull ringing sound. It seemed as if they’d forgotten all about the family who’d come with them. Then the older boy straightened up and pointed the shaft of his sledgehammer toward what looked like a rock face. “Swede,” he said and began walking.
What Anna took for a bare hill turned out to be a railroad tunnel made of stone. As they drew closer, she saw there were in fact two tunnel openings, side by side. Both Irishmen walked quickly into one of the wide tunnels and disappeared into the dark. Gustaf, who was carrying Carl, followed without hesitation.
She could hear the boys’ footsteps and their voices as they calmly chatted in the soft tones of their own language. She took Ellen’s hand. All of them, except for Carl, had to carry some of their belongings. Elisabet was still whimpering tiredly, but she didn’t lag behind.
It was so dark that at first Anna didn’t realize when they’d come out the other side of the tunnel, but then she noticed the snowflakes brushing her face and the echo of their footsteps diminishing. The boys had stopped and were saying something to Gustaf, repeating words that he didn’t seem to understand. Then one of them struck a match, and their faces appeared in the tiny light issuing from his cupped hand. She looked away. When her eyes had again grown accustomed to the dark, she saw that the ravine below the railroad embankment was not filled with shrubs, as she first thought, but with the roofs of low, dark sheds.
The Gavin boy came over to Anna and placed his hand on her arm to get her to turn around. He pointed into the darkness, trying to make her see something that wasn’t visible. “There,” he said. “Swede.” He gave her a friendly nod, and she understood that this was where their ways parted. She said loudly, “Thank you,” in English. He touched his finger to his cap and turned on his heel, as if he’d already forgotten her. Then both boys climbed down the embankment, slipped in among the wooden shacks, and were gone.
“It must be over there,” said Gustaf, his voice now sounding stronger. They picked up their bags and continued along the track. She tried to set her feet firmly on the railroad ties in the dark as she thought over and over, Surely there are no trains at this time of night.
A candle was burning in a candlestick in the upstairs window of a house made of bare boards. Gustaf went over to the little door and knocked. Once. Then again. They stood in silence at the bottom of the steps, waiting. Anna’s head felt as if it were reverberating with exhaustion. Then she heard the sound of a wooden hasp being thrown back. The door opened a crack, and a gray head appeared.
“Yes?” said a voice in pure Swedish. “What is it?”
It took a moment for Anna to realize the voice was familiar. Then memories came rushing back to her. It was the widow Lundgren, whom she hadn’t seen since they said goodbye in Battery Park.
“Oh. I thought it was David or Jonathan coming home from the night shift,” the woman said, speaking in the same kindly tone of voice that Anna remembered from the ship. “But it’s not yet time. So. The Klar family. And you’re here now. Well, Inga said you might well turn up one day.”
Mrs. Lundgren raised the candlestick as if she could light up the entire hollow for them and then pointed at a dark wall of wood on the other side of the path.
“Inga lives over there in what used to be the Olssons’ house. It’s a bit drafty, but I’m sure she’ll have enough room for you to stay the night. If it gets too crowded, you can send the little girls back over here to me. It’ll be fine.”
They went over to the house across the way while the widow stood in her doorway, holding the candle. Anna knocked. It took a while, but then the door slid open, and Inga came into view, tousled dark hair framing her round face.
“Oh, how nice to see you!” she said cheerfully, as if she’d been waiting up for them to arrive. “Come in, dear Anna.”
She opened the door wide, and the whole family stumbled into a room that smelled of wood smoke and tar. Inga lit a candle stump that had been stuck in a bottle on the table. Anna saw a tiny kitchen with a sofa bed in one corner and in the other a small potbellied woodstove. A plain wooden table and a few chairs. That was all.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much I can offer you in the middle of the night,” said Inga apologetically, “but I assume you must be tired. Did you just arrive?”
Anna didn’t have the energy to reply. All she wanted was to stretch out full length on the floor and go to sleep.
“Yes,” she heard Gustaf say. “About an hour ago. We had a hard time finding our way here. I’m sorry about putting you to so much trouble, but we didn’t know where else to turn.”
“Nonsense,” said Inga. “Things will be better in the morning. There’s room enough, but I don’t have many beds. The children can sleep on the kitchen sofa, and maybe the Lundgrens have a few extra blankets we can borrow. I sleep up in the loft.”
Inga kept on talking in the same calm tone as usual, asking the girls what they’d thought of the trip. They answered in monosyllables, already half-asleep. Anna sank down on a chair, suddenly noticing how wet her shoes and stockings were. She wanted to lean forward, place her arms on the table, and rest her head so she could fall asleep right there, but at the moment she couldn’t take her eyes off Inga. She was walking around wearing only a white shift and what looked like heavy socks big enough for a man. She showed no sign of embarrassment.
“It’ll probably warm up soon,” said Inga, “now that there are so many of us here, but maybe we should light the stove all the same. For the children’s sake.”
She bent down to open the stove door, then poked at the ashes to see if there were any embers still burning. She touched a wood shaving to the candle flame and then added a couple of pieces of kindling. When she leaned forward and blew on the wood, her dark hair shone red in the glow of the fire. Then she straightened up and smiled. “Welcome to Swede Hollow,” she said.
:: ::
::
In the morning everything looked different. Anna sat with Inga on the front stoop, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, and gazed out across the Hollow. Inga and the widow Lundgren with her two sons had managed to find these two small houses—she would have used the Swedish word torp, or cottage, to describe them, but apparently that’s not what people called them here in America. They stood high on a hill with a view of the lower part of the Hollow, toward the railroad viaduct the family had walked along in the night. Today several trains passed every hour. The rail traffic had started up in the middle of the night, and Anna couldn’t believe they’d dared come that way with the children and all their bags. But Inga said the Irish regularly took that route, and the Swedes did too when they headed for their jobs with the railroad. It wasn’t dangerous if you knew the schedule of the Duluth train.
Anna glanced at her friend sitting beside her and wondered if Inga ever thought anything was dangerous. An alternate route was via the Drewry Tunnel a bit farther up the hill, and then along the street. But there they had to watch out for the brewery’s dray horses, which could gallop past at a perilous speed, and then there was the wooden stairway up to Seventh Street, which was difficult for children.
It was above freezing now, and the eaves were dripping. The snow on the Hollow’s hillside gleamed yellow in the sunlight, which off and on shone through the wispy clouds. Across the way Anna caught a glimpse of tiled roofs and a tower beyond the treetops. Inga turned to see what she was looking at, as eager as ever to point out things and explain.
“That’s the Hamm mansion,” she said. “Mr. Hamm owns the brewery on the hill. They only hire German workers. Tell the children to stay away from his house, because he’s mean and he has dogs.”
Below stretched the Hollow, rooftop next to rooftop, set at all different angles, with the dilapidated houses wedged into whatever space could be found, like a patchwork quilt in various hues of brown, white, and black. Anna had never seen a neighborhood like this before, where no order seemed to exist. But Inga had said that she knew nearly all the houses down there. The Irish mostly kept to themselves on either side of the railroad bridge. A couple of Italian families had also moved in farther up, and they were nice enough.
“Every once in a while there’s an empty house, whenever a family is able to get a real house up on the street,” Inga said. “Then they simply move out. I think there are two or three empty places a little farther down the slope. You’ll have to see what you can find.”
An hour earlier Gustaf and the girls had left, with David Lundgren as their guide and interpreter. They were going to see if they could find a roof over their heads for the coming nights. They’d gone down into the ravine while she and Inga stayed behind with Carl, who was asleep on Inga’s kitchen sofa. He’d been restless and whiny almost all night, but now he was sleeping soundly. Anna was waiting for the right moment to bring up the topic she wanted to discuss before the others came back.
Inga had been living alone in the house for about a month, ever since the Olsson family had found a place to live on Railroad Island, which was closer to work and school. At first she’d stayed with the Lundgrens, but it was too crowded there with both boys at home. The Olssons had offered their place to her first, since they wanted a Swede to have the house before any Italians took it. Inga had agreed, even though in spots the roof was about to give way. “It’s just a matter of moving in when you find an empty house,” Inga said. If you wanted to establish proof of where you lived, you had to fill in the paperwork at city hall, but not many bothered to do that. Sheriff Waggoner’s man came once a month to collect two dollars, and as long as you could come up with the payment, nobody asked any questions.
The Olsson house was one of the oldest in the Hollow. No one knew its age for certain, but it had undoubtedly been built before any Swedes arrived. The house had a good foundation, and it was in a nice, high position for when the spring floods came. Apparently the creek could get quite wild in March and April.
“Right now everything’s covered in snow,” said Inga. “And that’s a blessing because you can’t see all the trash people have thrown everywhere. And it doesn’t smell of all the shit and dead animals.”
She saw that Anna was surprised by what she’d said, so she pointed down at the creek, where the brown water could be glimpsed through the bare alderwood thickets.
“Just after we arrived in the summer, we saw the body of a calf down there. Somebody must have stolen it up on the street, taken what could be eaten, and then left the rest there. The corpse lay there, stinking, until I got some of the boys to bury it up on the slope. I don’t even dare think about how it would have smelled if it was still there when the weather turned hot.
“Winters are hard here,” Inga went on. “Worse than back home. But so far it hasn’t been too bad. Pretty much like today. The summers are very hot.”
“But they can’t be as hot as in New York,” Anna interjected.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” said Inga. “It’s a long time until summer.”
She told Anna how she’d “taken on cleaning” for some Swedish ladies up on Seventh Street, which meant long hours, but decent pay, although one of the ladies who paid best had now gone away for an indefinite length of time to nurse her sister in Wisconsin. She’d have to see if there would be more work when the woman came home.
“But I’m sure we’ll find something,” said Inga, not sounding worried at all. “There are always the laundries, and if you’re in luck, you can get a job working up on Payne, in one of the Swedish shops. But you mustn’t say that you’re from the Hollow.”
Anna listened to her friend’s voice, which sounded like music to her ears. She understood only half of what Inga was talking about, but it was soothing merely to hear her speak.
Then Inga fell silent, as if she’d realized she’d been gabbing for a long time.
Anna was cold sitting there on the stoop. She wrapped the blanket more tightly around her. “There’s a reason why we decided to leave Sweden,” she said at last.
Inga didn’t say a word.
“We were forced to leave.” Her voice felt unsteady, so she paused for a moment and swallowed hard.
Inga stared down at the long valley, her hair frizzy under her blue kerchief. The sound of running water could now be heard clearly. Anna felt the tears spill down her face, but her voice didn’t falter as she again spoke.
“Gustaf stabbed a man with a knife. A foreman at the shoe factory. Gustaf was paid the lowest wages of anybody, even though he had children to feed. And he was just as skilled as all the other workers. That man was always after him. And finally Gustaf stabbed him in the throat.”
Inga still said nothing.
Anna didn’t look at her as she went on, speaking as if to no one in particular.
“Things went badly, and the man bled a lot. He wasn’t dead before we left, but I don’t know what happened later. Everyone saw what happened.”
She wiped her eyes and rubbed her face. She sighed heavily and then said in a stronger voice, “It was hard to wash away all that blood on his shirt, all the blood that wasn’t his.
“The police came, asking for Gustaf, but we left before they could come back. We’d already been thinking about leaving, though at the time it seemed more like a game we were playing. But our papers were all in order. Gustaf’s paternal grandfather paid for the tickets when we had to leave in a hurry. And then we just left. Now I don’t know whether I even dare write home. The family doesn’t know where we are.”
“Wait for a while,” said Inga firmly. “Wait until you know a little more.”
“Gustaf is not a bad man. He doesn’t drink anymore. And he hardly drank much before either.”
“I know he’s not a bad man,” said her friend.
“I wanted to tell you about this, Inga. In case someone should come here asking questions.”
Inga gave Anna a searching look, a little smile tugging at her lips.
“You
should know that lots of people have brought one sort of baggage or another from back home. And then they end up here. What’s important,” she went on, “is to leave all that behind in Sweden. Then everything will be fine. If you carry your worries with you, things might turn out badly. And there are others here in the Hollow who worry me more than Gustaf Klar. People who can’t leave things behind. Like David Lundgren, for instance.”
Inga said no more, merely nodding at the path that Gustaf and the girls had taken, as if it were down there that her worry lay. And Anna remembered from their time on the ship how she’d thought that David Lundgren seemed to be bursting with something that was pressing on him from inside, something that might explode if it found no release. Yet he was always calm and friendly, though somewhat preoccupied, no matter what he said or did. She hadn’t been able to make him out back then, but she’d had so many other things to worry about and ponder.
Anna now sat here, taking deep breaths and blinking away the last of her tears. She felt as if she’d emerged from a long and feverish illness. Soon Carl would wake up, and he’d be hungry. She longed for some coffee but didn’t dare ask Inga if she had any.
The sun broke through a small gap in the low-lying clouds above the Hollow. For a moment light played over the roofs and bare treetops. In the sunshine she saw Gustaf and David with the girls in tow as they calmly walked up the path, chatting as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Then the light moved on and everything looked the same as before.
Swede Hollow, St. Paul
February 1898
EVERYTHING BEGAN with one of the world’s largest lakes, which long after it disappeared was given the name Lake Agassiz. The melt water from the glaciers collected until the rushing current broke through the remaining layers of earth and, during a single dramatic week that was witnessed by no one, it formed the enormous body of water that now flowed through the channels carved into the landscape by the ice. The Ojibwe named it Misi-ziibi, meaning “the great river.” When the ice retreated farther north and the waters diminished, these channels remained in the land. One of them stretched south from what would eventually be called Lake Phalen.
