by Ola Larsmo
Lisbet now spoke once in a while. The warmer they got, the more she seemed to thaw out. She said that one day she too wanted to have linoleum on their wood floors at home. And Ellen could only agree.
The tall windows in the big parlor faced the street, which was now teeming with people. The street vendors had set up their stalls, and the wind seemed to have subsided a bit. Muted sounds seeped in through the double panes and heavy drapes, which yielded an entire avalanche of dust when shaken. They had to carry the drapes downstairs and outside in order to beat the dust out of them.
Toward afternoon they were each given a glass of weak coffee and some bread and butter; otherwise they had been working without a break.
Then Mrs. Gustafson glided soundlessly in the door and told Inga that she had to leave to tend to an errand, but she would be back before they finished for the day. As Ellen polished the door handle with a chamois, she watched Mrs. Gustafson get ready to go out. The woman opened an upper cupboard and took out a big black hat adorned with a ribbon and a bunch of dyed cloth flowers in front. Then she leaned close to the hall mirror and carefully put on the hat, fastening it with a couple of long hat pins. Ellen kept on staring as her hand automatically rubbed the brass knob of the door handle. But then she met Mrs. Gustafson’s eye in the mirror and she lowered her gaze until she heard the apartment door close. It was the most beautiful hat she’d ever seen.
They didn’t stop working just because Mrs. Gustafson had left, but they did slow their pace. Afternoon fatigue had set in, and they dragged their feet as they moved through the big rooms where a peaceful silence now reigned in the owner’s absence. The big clock ticked steadily. The sound of voices came from the street below.
Lisbet Nilsson stood for a long time in front of a chiffonier that had a small crocheted cloth on top of the glass surface. The shelves above were crowded with small porcelain figurines. Swans swimming on a mirror, girls and boys dressed as shepherds, and a leaping deer. It was Lisbet’s job to dust all of them. For a long time she held a miniature blue porcelain basket in her hand. It was filled with the most perfect tiny porcelain roses, and she was reluctant to put it back where it belonged. Inga went to stand behind Lisbet and said calmly, without a trace of reproach in her voice, “It’s lovely, but she would notice it was missing the minute we went out the door.” Lisbet carefully set the little basket down and began polishing the dining table, even though she’d already done that. She kept her back turned, but Ellen could see that she was crying.
Just as they were wondering whether there was anything else for them to do, Mrs. Gustafson returned. They put all the cleaning supplies back in the kitchen cupboard in the big pantry. Lisbet was no longer crying, but she was once again just as silent and withdrawn as she had been in the morning. The two girls listened as Mrs. Gustafson counted out the coins into Inga’s hand. When that was done, they curtsied to her and put on their coats and shawls. Then they went down the stairs and stepped outside into the wind.
It had begun to snow. Sharp little flakes blew slantwise across the street, but above the rooftops the sky was the dove-blue dusk of spring. Feeling both light-hearted and tired, they made their way past the street vendors who were taking down their stalls and chatting to one another in various languages, none of them Swedish.
As they approached the bridge and stairs, Ellen quietly said to Lisbet so that Inga wouldn’t hear, “One day I’m going to have a hat like that.”
Lisbet merely nodded, as if not paying particular attention. But suddenly, as if speaking from the very depths of her own thoughts, she said, “It doesn’t seem right to be working for someone who speaks Swedish to us.”
That hadn’t occurred to Ellen, but when she heard the words spoken out loud, she understood exactly what Lisbet meant. Inga heard too, but she didn’t offer any comment. She simply walked faster, making it hard for the girls to keep up with her even though they were younger.
None of them said another word as they headed for home.
St. Paul Daily Globe
THEY HAD A FREE FIGHT
Row at Swede Hollow Led to Several Arrests.
Algot Sundstrom, 575 Bradley; Charles Lindgren, 575 Bradley; Albert Swanson, No. 10, Swede Hollow; and Coleman McDonough, 81 Tennessee Street, are all at their respective homes, suffering from cuts, bruises and injuries received in a free-for-all fight in Swede Hollow shortly before 6 o’clock yesterday afternoon.
Coleman McDonough got the worst of the deal and has a number of small cuts on his body, one of which is under the heart and is quite severe. He was attended by Dr. Hall. The other men suffered mostly from cuts about the eyes and bruises on the face.
John Metz and Albert Metz were arrested in connection with the case shortly afterwards on the charge of assault with a dangerous weapon, and are at the Margaret Street police station. Patrick O’Tierney and John McDaley were arrested on the charge of disorderly conduct.
It seems that Swanson and Lindgren were coming down the Hollow, when they met John and Albert Metz, Patrick O’Tierney, and Coleman McDonough, with some others, “rushing the can.” Swanson and Lindgren claim that the men insulted them and they ordered them to get out of Swede Hollow, as it was not the place for them.
This started words between them, and before anyone really knew what had happened, the entire gang, with several more denizens of the Hollow, were throwing stones and taking clubs at each other whenever they got a chance.
Albert Swanson, who lives at No. 10 Swede Hollow, was bruised about the face and head and claims his jaw is broken.
Albert Metz, however, did not seem to relish his cell as a bedroom and made an attempt to break jail by breaking off a leg of the bunk and using it as a bore to make a hole in the floor. He had succeeded in making a hole about eight inches wide when Sergeant Flanigan heard a suspicious noise. He immediately had Jailor Hoefer investigate and the hole was discovered.
Swede Hollow
April 1898
HALFWAY DOWN THE SLOPE in the Hollow stood a long and narrow gray building with a sagging roof beam. It was one of the older houses, and no one really knew who had lived there in the beginning. It was set at an angle, as if there had been no other nearby houses to consider when it was first built, and it was downstream from the row of outhouses set on stilts out over Phalen Creek. No one lived in the house anymore, but on a number of evenings each week the widow Larson would serve beer in the long and narrow space furnished with only a couple of chairs and a rickety table. There were two small windows in the room, which was always dimly lit and smelled of spilled beer. Outside, the corners of the building stank of urine. Children were not allowed to go anywhere near the place, yet they would occasionally venture over there in the daytime when no one was around. They would climb onto each other’s shoulders to peer in the windows, even though there was nothing to see. Before becoming a saloon, the house had had an entirely different sort of history, which was still remembered by those grown-ups who had lived the longest in the Hollow. The Lindgren sisters, who were the last two occupants of what had once been a household of a dozen women, had finally wasted away in a sanatorium far out on the prairie, succumbing to the effects of an advanced case of syphilis. Now the serving of strong drink was all that remained of those previous activities in the house, and some people thought that was bad enough. But now, just as in the past, the house lured customers from far up the street.
The widow Larson lived upstream in a small house that had once been painted white. Nobody knew or cared what her first name actually was, though she was always called Lame Lotta. She bought the beer by the bucket from workers at the Hamm brewery at the top of the slope. The beer they sold her was the sort that would have otherwise been poured out into the creek. Whenever there was beer to be bought behind Mr. Hamm’s back, Lame Lotta’s place would be open for business, but not at other times. The beer was served in smaller buckets called “growlers.” Two or three men would buy a growler, which they would pass around. If the weather was good, the custo
mers would stand outside, drinking and smoking. The following day the widow Larson could be seen rooting through the bushes along the creek and taking the stairs up to Seventh Street to collect all the discarded growlers, which she would need the next time her place was open. If there was trouble, she would always blame the Hamm workers, saying they had sold her beer that was too strong or in some other way defective and should have been poured out. If anyone contradicted her, she claimed that it was not the alcohol itself that caused bad tempers but everything else that was found in bad beer. And if anyone wanted something better to drink, all they had to do was go up to the street and pay three times the price for a Hamm pilsner. On a good day, the beer was the same in both places.
It wasn’t so much the taste as the low price that prompted many customers to go down to the Hollow to seek out Lame Lotta’s place. Late at night a virtual migration of men could be seen heading over from the Irish sector and also coming down from the street. They all wanted to find out whether she had any beer left when the other pubs were about to close.
That was the situation on one night in April. Gustaf was on his way home after a late work shift, having been given a few extra hours raking cinders out of the big coal-burning smokestack over by the Northern Pacific’s engine shed. In the gathering dusk, beneath the crackling light of a single electric arc lamp, he and ten other men had wielded big scrapers to rake up what was still usable coal so that none would go to waste. Finally the faint light and the clouds of coal dust made it impossible to keep working. The foreman blew his whistle and handed out their wages. Gustaf was tired, coughing, and shivering in the early spring night, and he wanted to go home. Yet he decided not to head through the Irish Connemara sector next to the tunnel and instead went to Seventh Street to go down the stairs.
Halfway there he heard men shouting drunkenly in several different languages. For a moment he hesitated, but then he continued on. He was anxious to get home.
Suddenly a man came flying out of the dark at the bottom of the stairs and rammed into Gustaf, knocking him off-balance. He put up his hands, as much to protect himself as to fend off the man, and he instantly felt something warm running over his fingers. In the faint light his hands looked black, and he wiped them on his pants, without giving it much thought. The man bent over the stair railing and stuck his hand under his jacket for a moment. When he pulled it back out, he looked in surprise at the blood on his palm. Then he said something incomprehensible in Irish and sank down onto the bottom step, where he sat motionless, looking as if he might never get up again.
Other men appeared in the dim light issuing from the one gas lamppost up on Seventh Street. Words in broken English, Swedish, and what sounded like German whirled through the air. Gustaf peered into the darkness, recognizing one man. It was Albert Swanson, who lived a little farther down in the Hollow and sometimes worked on the railroad. He wore a waistcoat and a shirt that had once been white but was now covered with big dark patches. When Swanson came closer, Gustaf saw blood dripping from his mouth. His gray hair stood on end, and he had a wild look in his eyes. “Get those bastards out of here!” he said over and over. “Get those bastards out of here!” He was having trouble talking, and he kept wiping his mouth on his wrist, but the bleeding didn’t stop.
More people emerged in the semi-darkness, until there was an entire crowd at the bottom of the stairs. Gustaf saw men in their shirtsleeves and women who had hurriedly draped shawls over their heads and were now silently tugging at their husbands’ arms, trying to get them to leave. Three men had pushed their way over to the foot of the stairs and now stood next to the seated Irishman, but Gustaf recognized only one of them, O’Tierney, from the houses on the other side of the tunnel, a man he’d also noticed working at the switchyard. The other two, whom he’d never seen before, were trying to pull the man sitting on the step to his feet, but he kept falling out of their grasp as he clutched at his chest. Then O’Tierney made another lunge at the bystanders, wildly swinging his fists like windmills and yelling something incomprehensible. His eyes were wide, like a horse racing at top speed, and he landed a punch on someone in the crowd who fell down with a shriek of pain. “Fucking hell!” Swanson now shouted in a thick voice, wielding a piece of wood as he launched himself at O’Tierney. The wood struck the Irishman’s skull with a dry-sounding smack and promptly broke in half, but O’Tierney was so enraged that at first he didn’t seem to notice he’d been hit. Finally four men grabbed hold of him, and then he seemed to collapse, hanging limply in their arms. Two of these men were the Gavin boys from the ship, and Gustaf murmured to them in the best English he could muster, “Get him away before they kill him.” The Gavin brothers nodded and began dragging the semiconscious man toward the tunnel entrance. The crowd parted before them like the Red Sea. There were mostly women present now, both Swedish and Irish.
Suddenly a woman shouted in perfectly clear Swedish, “Stop! This man is dying!” Out of the corner of his eye, Gustaf saw someone leading away Albert, who was still bleeding. But that was not who she meant.
He realized it was Inga who had shouted. When he made his way through the crowd, he saw her squatting down next to the bleeding Irishman, who was now practically lying on the step, his face ghastly pale. His eyes were still open wide, but his breathing was rapid and shallow. Inga glanced up and recognized Gustaf. “Help us carry this man,” she said. He grabbed the Irishman’s legs while the two Germans stood on one side and lifted his torso. Inga helped lift on the other side. It was strange how heavy such a thin young man could be when his body was so limp. They nearly dropped him several times, and all the while he kept gasping for breath. Carefully they carried him up the stairs to Seventh Street, where they laid him on the ground in the glow of the streetlamp.
They heard footsteps racing toward them over the cobblestones. When Gustaf looked up, he saw police constables come running along the street, holding their billy clubs. Two of them seized hold of the Germans and the third slammed Gustaf so hard against the cold iron of the lamppost that his whole back shuddered. The policeman was breathing heavily, and the smell of old beer fumes hovered around his lips.
Then Inga came over and said calmly in a clear voice, “That’s quite unnecessary, Constable. He was just trying to help.”
The policeman apparently spoke Swedish, but he was reluctant to let Gustaf go.
“That man lying on the ground is the one who needs help,” Inga went on, pointing to the Irishman stretched out on the cobblestones. Then she grabbed Gustaf by the arm and said curtly, “Let’s go.”
They headed down the stairs without looking back. A few people were still standing at the bottom, but most had already left now that the police had shown up.
Together Inga and Gustaf walked along the creek. Gustaf kept on wiping his hands on his pants legs. Neither of them said a word until they had to go their separate ways.
Then Inga said, “So what were you doing there?” There was a trace of reproach in her voice. He couldn’t see her face in the dark but he felt her eyes fixed on him.
“I was on my way home from work,” he said indignantly. She merely nodded. That much he could see.
“That policeman could have arrested me,” he said, sounding calmer now. “They thought I was the one who did it.”
“Not him,” said Inga calmly. “His name is Olsson. He used to live in the Hollow. They’ll probably send him down here tomorrow to find out what happened, and I’ll tell him exactly what I saw. I think they’ll send both a Swede and an Irishman.”
She nodded again and then headed for her own house up on the slope.
Gustaf paused before going on. He crouched down to rub his hands over a remaining patch of snow, feeling the cold practically burn his skin. In the dark he couldn’t tell whether he’d managed to get rid of all the blood between his fingers and under his nails, so he kept scraping the palms of his hands over the hard ice crystals until he worried that he too might bleed. It felt as if he’d never get clean. There was n
othing he could do about the bloodstains that had now dried on his pants legs, but he didn’t want to even think about coming home once again with bloodied hands.
Swede Hollow
April 1898
THE ENTIRE RAVINE was surrounded by railroad tracks. No matter in what direction you went, there were trains. To the south, on the other side of the tunnels and the Irish sector, the landscape was a virtual wasteland of tracks, with a railroad yard that no one was allowed to cross unless specifically authorized. Passing through the Hollow itself were the two tracks leading to Duluth and farther north past Hinckley, with side lines to Center City and Taylors Falls. Inga had said that a lot of Swedes lived up that way, but nobody she knew from back home had settled there, so she knew very little about those people. Running along the river, before the tracks reached the Hollow, was a double track that disappeared across the water over its own narrow bridge, heading for the big granary on the opposite bank. Farther up, toward Bradley Street and the school, the railroad tracks divided and continued on in separate directions into the distance, toward places out on the prairie, toward the West Coast, and toward Canada. Few people had ever gone far enough from the Hollow to see the tangle of tracks unravel and stretch out in different directions, with one end even heading into an underground tunnel. But the men who worked on the railroad and sometimes caught a ride on the trains knew that it was so.