The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  Coast of Sweden 1899

  HIGH IN THE RUGGED HILLS above the coast of Sweden, a terse young couple packed a few belongings into a worn leather satchel. A newborn son, slung in a woolen wrap around the thin woman’s shoulders, cried and two pale eyed two-year-old-boys, and a tall and lanky five-year-old girl, all light and fair like sun and snow mixed amongst beams of summer: blonde-white headed children with white-blue eyes like slivers of sun on water, hung like moist dew around the stone steps of a sod hut. The father gathered his family together like a small herd of sudden light.

  The small sod house had been their home, the home of that Morrison’s father, and then that father, son of Morris before that, that small sod house, was now closed and hammered shut. Osmond, a devout and religious man, took a pottery bowl to the old water well in offering to some ancient god, long forgotten, and dropped the empty bowl into the cistern, the act symbolic of the emptiness of the last lean years, the bowls of the household mostly lacking in potatoes or turnips. He then slipped some iron fittings into his pocket for the gods ahead. These he would cast into the ocean, the watery world between the land and the realm of all gods, not only his own Christian God, but the gods of his forefathers: the gods whose offerings were strewn across this Norse landscape, bone and stone, hammer and claw. Below the stone steps were the bones of reindeer and elk, and those bones had been offered early in the bountiful years by his own grandfather. But the times had changed, and the past and the present must give way to some unknown future, something even he could not foretell.

  The bewildered children would not dare cry, and they would not dare think of not returning to the home they had known, but some hidden intuition swarmed in the cool air and the future seemed a darkening cloud of uncertainty.

  “We will go now,” said the father, and they obeyed, the children and the woman too.

  They all made their way down the small, beaten trail they had traveled since birth, following the muscular red-headed man known as Osmond, the man with a large red mustache. The bitter cold air of October threatened another harsh winter, and the potatoes of the last harvest withered in small pathetic bushels: not enough food for the coming winter, as sparse as the winter before and then, the sparser winter before that. The children were thin, as the mother and the father. The potatoes, even in plenty could not account for the substance and the energy needed for clearing rocks out of the land for more potatoes, nor could beef or cheese be had as the livestock had died in the terrible year. The family had clung to some frozen hope the next year, and then the next, and stayed another year after that: but the bitter bore down in blizzard after another. The soups got thinner through the years, onions and beets, turnips and potatoes; when the beef went, so the butter, milk and cheese, and the proud red-head with knuckles as rough as the small stones he dug from the earth, and forearms as hard as the hard roots of stubborn wood that wormed over the rocky soils, and elbows like terse gravel, and a face as clear and pale as the morning sky, that red-headed man would rather see his family starve than admit they were starving. So it was that year with an entire village, the thin lanky Norsemen, caught like stranded cattle in their own snowbound villages, their energy wafting away like spent seed.

  Only then the talk started, the rumor of America, and land that sustained and fed rather than diminished and drained. The rumors grew large and bountiful, and the even the most stubborn of the villagers began to host the vivid idea of change. And down near the oceans, cattle boats filled with beef and pork and manure left each day towards the new shores, and the captains, clever and calculating, sold space amongst the stalls of urine and manure: the sure thing was the beef, the human element an afterthought. One day a starving man sold his entire parcel of land for passage to a new world, and then another, and soon a whole village drained like spring snow, but the land was fallow and unused and along the hills the empty huts would crumble into the earth before interest rose again to make the captain a very rich man.

  The young family cast themselves into the cultural migration of the late 1800s like frozen seed; they joined battalions of immigrants responding to some instinctual impulse demanding movement and thus the hope and necessity of survival. They left the sod houses of their Norse homelands to find new and more promising worlds and, like Aeolian plankton riding the winds to long distant soils, they cast themselves into the trembling winds that moved them hither across the seas; the winds gathered them like small seeds and spiders and spores, propelling the Norse species onward, intent on survival, moving the immigrants in creaking ships filled with cattle and manure and the hope of what lay ahead, and on, and on, and on, across the ocean as if it were a mere puddle in a future meadow.

  The hefty ships swelled away from their homelands like wayward logs caught on tumultuous waves, crashing against the distant shores with the suddenness of all arrivals.

  Osmond and Matilda Morrison and their four children arrived on Ellis island along with a herd of three hundred and fifty Guernseys and two hundred Swedes and Norwegians the very day the last board was pounded onto the stairwell of the yellow Victorian and eleven years before Maggie’s own house was built.

  The Morrisons settled in the northern most part of Minnesota, like many Swedes before them, where the coldness of the flat marsh-like tundra made the land available, but it was the flatness of the land that made it exciting and tillable: the thought of this land, this kind of flat oxen-friendly land kindled to warmth in the black-blue eyes of Osmond. He had crossed the seas like Vikings before him and set himself to finding the rhythm of this new land and the people living in it.

  On Sundays he walked. He walked from the outskirts of the small northern settlement of Roseau, Minnesota, to the outlands of Green-bush, where the land livened with pea clover and ripe green grass. He walked some Sundays twenty miles: he walked through bogs of mosquitoes and over the gumbo soils, the silt too fine, onward towards more tillable land, his beak-like nose stuck in the wind as if he would know his land by the smell of it, as if his land might smell as familiar and sweet as the cheek of his own child, as fresh as an infant’s cry, familiar as his own wife, as if this land were already known, already tilled, already planted with his seed and he would simply be finding it again, and so he walked and walked, intent on the horizon beyond to the land he knew awaited, the land he would know when he felt it. He trudged over acres of ribbed corduroy roads where timbers stretched crosswise and over the sticky silted swamps through the fogs and mists outward towards this dream, a deep raging dream, a simple dream, common, intense, practical, divine: the flame of land.

  Each step bonded him closer and closer to the new fresh earth of this new fresh land: America, this new and chosen land. He scooped the earth in his hands and smelled it. He knew the taste of good land and the bad; he knew the bite of alkaline salt that would turn a crop yellow and dry. He knew the deeper green of fecundity that erupted into abundant flowers rooting the most fertile meadows, where the dark of grass stretched beyond the scud. He knew his land by the sweet taste of the dirt in his mouth. He rolled the dirt around his tongue, then rubbed it between his palms, sprinkling it slowly back into itself. The dirt spilled into a burnished Viking mustache drooping to the firm-set Norse jaw and twisted out like red handle-bars. He closed his eyes, imagining the farm already there: cabin, barn, oxen and plough. He filed his claim on a section of land. This was the land Maggie’s father would grow on, the land where she would be born, and the land she would leave when her own father turned his back on the soil.

  On the new homestead, the Swedish immigrants lived close to the earth, in the same manner they had lived before, tending the land and the animals that sustained and fed them. The comfort of the daily chores and the sameness of habit beat in the thick Norse blood, and they found adventure in the land and the way it yielded or rebuffed them. They worked hard at simple tasks and did not question God’s bounty or lack of it; they ate the lambs and beef fed and raised by hand. They ground wheat for bread and milked the cows for sweet c
ream, milk and butter. They slaughtered hefty calves each fall, but once, when the rains came and the rivers spilled over into the fields, they slaughtered the entire herd since there would be no way to feed the stock with the fields in ruin.

  They sipped boiled pig’s blood, the Norse delicacy of blood soup. They ate pickled pig’s feet and imported herrings and lutefisk soaked in lye, a dish that caused the Christmas silver to turn black and tarnished. In the winter, they tunneled through the solid land of snow to feed the stock stabled in the musty, smelly barn where dairy Guernseys shifted from one hoof to another while blizzards raged outside.

  Osmond Morrison’s extraordinary tenacity had earned him the respect of his fellow farmers early on. He’d homesteaded the best land, almost two sections, and set to taming it like a man possessed. The first timbered house was small but stout and built strong, reinforced with extra sod against the long cold winters, and built with timbers milled from wood floated down the Roseau river from up near the big lake. After building the house, he set about clearing the land of fieldstone to make it tillable. He’d heard of a difficult pair of mules that were causing problems in the neighboring community of Badger and traveled fifty miles to buy the team known as the Badger runaways. He got them cheap since no one could handle them. At home, he harnessed the mules and put them to plow in the rough fields. They plodded on for only a short time before breaking into a runaway gallop, with Osmond dragging behind them. The muscled man held hard on their mouths and headed them to a pile of field stones already gathered in the center of the field. The mules’ frantic escape landed them in a shattering wreck of stone and rein that they never forgot. The team never ran away again. Osmond would twirl his red mustache with a twinkle in his eye as he retold the story, his lively eyes sparking like sun on sweet water. The stubborn streak in the Morrison blood jumped a generation, skipping Maggie’s fair-natured father, fueling the ire of Osmond’s first grandchild, Maggie.

  The Olsons, Maggie’s mother’s family, farmed to the south of the Morrisons in a twenty-eight by twenty-eight foot wooden house with a large root cellar and an upstairs loft for the six children; the youngest was Emma, Maggie’s mother. In the worst years, the children ate slabs of lard on white bread, and some years there was little bread, but later the lard tuned to hefty slices of beef or pork or lamb. In the fall of 1928, with the new addition to the wooden house, came a new wood stove that warmed not only the children, but the tractor, too, wintered inside that year and each year after that so the men could tear apart the engine, bolt by bolt during the cold months and rebuilt it for the coming season. They greased and tightened, and put it all back together again for the hard work of Spring and Summer.

  The woman and children cooked lefse, mixing mashed potatoes with flour and cream, rolling the dough into small balls, then flatting the balls of dough with a grooved rolling pin into doily sized circles. A slim ruler-like turner was slid under the circle of dough to lift it onto a hot surface where it cooked quickly. The younger girls, Alpha and Hazel, rolled the dough, while Helga, Emma’s mother, slipped the delicate dough onto the griddle, watched the dough bubble slightly, then took the long spatula-like turner again, slipped it under the warming dough, turned the pancake like bread to brown on its other side. The potatoes, brushed clean of dirt and stacked carefully in the root cellar in beds of clean straw, furnished a food supply before the Olsons could afford meat at dinner. The one cow furnished milk and cream and soft churned butter. Lefse and potato pancakes and potato soup and mashed potatoes graced the table morning, noon and night. By then, General Mills sold flour in pretty patterned sacks that the thrifty Olson women used as cloth for dresses and hand towels and dish clothes. They sewed them by hand and washed them in rain-water collected in large barrels during the summers and falls. During the winter they melted snow on the wood stove for household use. Helga Olson made soap from lard and lye and every fall scrubbed the Sunday woolens in crocks of gasoline, her own particular form of dry cleaning, and hung them out in the crisp fall days until the smell evaporated. Helga Olson had baked for a hotel when she was a young girl, and that is where she met Ollie Olson who had just homesteaded a half section of land. Helga grew a reputation of her own through her skill in the Olson farm kitchen, and Emma, her youngest child, inherited the Swedish way with food. Years later, the artistic attention to detail that fine cuisine demands grew differently in Maggie.

  Zihuatanejo

  After putting out the cigarette, she goes to the marketplace so she won’t have reflections to think about. The marketplace is full of the present; she winces at the pale taupe flesh of pickled pigs feet, shakes her head in disgust at blackened chicken claws, tied and bundled, and the worm’s nest of purple tripe; a large fleshy tongue, curled in disbelief, seems to be wagging as if speaking in some ancient dialect, revealing some dark and unbelievable secret. She hasn’t always been a vegetarian, but she’d never sipped on blood soup like her mother; she’d grown on hefty beef stews and potatoes and roasts baked until tender, and later on, she’d fed on California hamburger barbecues and corn-on-the-cob. She’d grown tall and thin eating meat and potatoes, but in the newer rendition of Maggie, the thought of meat revolted her: she frowned at the stark display of beef, ribs and thin platters of toughened steak and more textured tongues crawling with flies and there, an iguana that a man offered to kill and dress for her, no gracias, no gracias, she says, but comforts herself somehow amongst the unusual and foreign.

  She’d been waiting over an hour. I checked my watch to confirm that because it was obvious that she expected someone. She’d already smoked another cigarette since she’d admired herself in the brass-framed mirror and strolled through the meat market, but she hadn’t yet eaten the whole orange. Prettily, she turned a half circle and went back onto the street to wait. I watched from my hiding place, my solitary figure cloaked and hidden in the shadow of this small dark dream. There seemed something of eternity in her manner, as if she’d just stepped out of some page written perhaps another century. An eternal woman in the off-white pages of a dream, lingering with some melancholy memory, her eyes canceled stamps; I look one last look before I left, moving away in my awkward manner.

  Maggie lit another cigarette and curled her pretty tongue around the smoke and blew; the smoke ring turned and made a small migration over the street, blending with the live iguana who still posed as if a small cement statue. She thought it strange to feel dusty and foggy in the same moment; she sucked more smoke and let the stream exhale in a long thin line.

  Dream a little dream …

  IN THE NEWER MORE MODERN DREAM where Maggie grew, the migration to the drowsy warmth of California offered Emma and Johnny Morrison another kind of existence. In the long months of summer-like sun, they found a unique freedom from their terse heritage and their escape from the cold, and the bleak drudgery of winter survival seemed at once a wonder and a blessing. They settled on Grant Street, in the town of Redlands, between Olive and Brookside avenues in the small house whose tree-laden back yard opened onto a sprawling green park. Here in the land of summer and heat, they forged new dreams, dreams that seemed far smaller in terms of acreage and dawn to dark labor and far larger in terms of comfort and living and pleasure. The intoxicating nature of the climate a raison-d’être.

  The small house sat up the street from the Redland’s Bowl, an outdoor theatre with an ornate facade of cement columns around the open-air stage and an amphitheatre of wooden seats, that sloped up towards Grant Street. The grand old Bowl filled with people on summer nights for concerts and ballets and graduating seniors in June, but during the day the seats were empty and the ornate stage belonged to Maggie. She had to sneak past Mrs. Ferguson’s house, another old Victorian, under the thorned pyracantha, over the squished berries on the sidewalk and then down past Coe’s house to get there. Even as a small child she tended to wander as her fancy wished to all the exotic places in the neighborhood, places her mother had forbidden, and down at the Bowl she crawled over the rows
of wooden seats, rolled down the grassy hills to her heart’s delight, and bothered the stuffy musicians practicing for evening concerts. The squeak of violins and the honk of trumpets intoxicated the summer days of music and light and wonder. The wide streets of childhood seemed empty of other children, and Maggie grew alone and independent in her small, blonde, and stubborn Swedish way, seeking magic amongst the green grasses of her tiny yard that hid the delights of sow bugs and worms and snails that all wound around the violets and ferns and iris; she felt wonder at the lively musicians practicing for concerts, awe at the stark columns of the empty stage that she seemed to fill entirely when alone, and less so when others were present; she often sought the stairs to the balcony where she found the sudden urge to jump, declaring herself as winged and dangerous and delightful and illusive as the fairies and ghosts that inhabited her imaginative mind.

  On summer nights, the small family would walk down the street and spread a wide blanket on the grassy slopes of the Bowl to watch the dramas unfold or hear the music resound, and once a week they’d trek over to Sylvan Park, across from the public pool, to large outdoor dance floor where the square dance was held. Before the dance, when folks were waiting and talking, Maggie would slink up next to the women on park benches and wonder if she’d ever smell as good and as fresh and powdery.

  The dark summer air smelled of fresh cut grass crushed under patent-leather shoes and rustled with the starched swish of petticoats, and, high, high over the dance floor, the stringy fronds of palm trees rustled in the slight breezes, and towered over the dance floor like stately stringy umbrellas.

  The fiddle always sang out first, the loud clear yodel stirring the crowd of people into excited movement. The plucky beat moved everyone hurriedly onto the dance floor, and slung above the dancers were strings of sparkling lights and beyond the decorative lights, the fronds of palm seemed to twinkle as well, and beyond all that, the astonishing array of constellations in the Southern California starlit sky added luster and wonder to the enchantment of night: and there, under the summer fresh sky, she’d be her daddy’s first partner; Maggie put her small feet on top of her father’s worn leather shoes to dance round and round and round the large dance floor, dancing on her daddy’s toes, spinning and spinning under the cool night lights, and laughing and laughing in the twirl of moment.