by Ola Larsmo
Ellen found it impossible to tear her eyes away from the tall windows, as if a story were being recounted inside and in order to know what happened next she had to take in every detail. She saw men wearing black suits and meticulously knotted ties, their hair smooth and shiny. The women wore dresses of gleaming green or oxblood red, some of them with glittering necklaces that caught the light from the thousands of crystal facets on the chandelier. The guests leaned close to each other, one of them saying something and the other laughing. If only Ellen could have heard their words, maybe she would have been able to glean the story of this other world in which people participated with such ease, as if they were on the other side of a surface, like fish that seem to pause, motionless and effortless, in the middle of the current on a hot summer day.
Scattered across the lawn were wrought iron poles that had been stuck in the ground. Crowning the tops were candles burning inside glass globes. A short time ago the Hamm chauffeur had surreptitiously walked across the garden with his uniform cap tucked under one arm. As the children watched, he waved at the dark entry facing the road, and a blond girl with short hair emerged from the shadows to follow in his footsteps. The man took her arm and led her forward while she covered her mouth with her free hand, trying to stifle her giggles. They hurried past the illuminated windows and disappeared.
“Oh yeah, it’s easy to see what those two are up to,” whispered Leonard as he stood between the Klar sisters. Ellen hated him for saying that.
But soon she had other things to ponder. A pair of low shadows came gliding across the lawn, heading for the dark area under the trees. At first she thought they were dogs, but they seemed too thin and delicate. As the children watched, two small spotted deer materialized out of the night, one full-grown and one a fawn that crept after its mother, prepared to flee at any moment.
“The dogs must be locked up for the night,” murmured Leonard, hardly moving his lips. “Otherwise the deer wouldn’t dare show themselves.”
The deer headed boldly for the flowerbeds and quietly began nibbling at the tulip buds that had already sprouted. The deer’s shadows fluttered back and forth in the flickering light from the glass globes. At that moment Ellen caught sight of something gleaming in the flowerbed where the deer were grazing.
Mrs. Hamm’s crystal balls. Ellen had seen them once before and was totally captivated. There were so many stories about the Hamms, and she had no idea which of them were true. But according to one story, Mrs. Hamm had become interested in spiritualism during one of the couple’s trips to Europe, and she’d bought several glass balls from someone claiming to be a medium. They were supposed to summon the dead, who would understand that the spirit of the person who lived here was open to the afterlife. Leonard had said the balls were made of German crystal, though Ellen had no idea why that was significant. Previously they had been kept in a big bowl on the veranda, some as big as the head of a child, others as small as marbles. But now they lay scattered over the flowerbed in the semi-darkness, as if someone had been playing with them a short time ago and then grew tired and left them behind. Ellen counted at least two dozen. The deer carefully stepped over them, interested only in what they could eat. Behind the tall windows, now closed, the lively dinner party continued, without a sound seeping outside. But Ellen no longer found it as interesting because she couldn’t take her eyes off those glass balls.
Leonard had started whispering amusing comments to Elisabet. Ellen moved away from them and went closer to the fence, not really caring whether someone might see her from inside the house. She began climbing up the wrought iron fence crossbars, which were so cold now that night had fallen. Inch by inch she climbed toward the menacing spikes, topped with barbs. Then she was straddling the fence, looking down in the direction of the flowerbed where the deer were still visible against the darker foliage of the rhododendron bushes. Ellen cautiously touched the nearest spike, which felt surprisingly blunt under her fingertip, and she wondered distractedly how anyone could end up getting pierced through by something like that. Then she pushed herself off and dropped down on the other side of the fence, nearly falling headlong.
In a flash the deer sped across the lawn to merge with the surrounding darkness under the trees. Now Ellen heard the other children whispering behind her. Leonard hissed her name, sounding perplexed, as if he thought she’d forgotten it herself. Quickly she ran over and snatched up some of the glass balls. They felt ice-cold in her hands and rougher than she’d imagined. She stuffed as many as she could carry in her apron pocket and then walked quietly back to the fence, expecting at any moment to feel a hand grab her shoulder or the back of her neck, but something inside her made it impossible to hurry. Then she was at the fence, preparing to climb.
Now all the children from the Hollow were standing next to the fence, stupidly cheering her on. They kept their voices low, but she wished they wouldn’t make any noise at all. Leonard clasped his hands like a stirrup and stuck them through the fence so she could climb higher and get a better hold. The glass balls in her pocket rattled against the wrought iron as she clambered up. It seemed much harder going in this direction. Finally she was once again straddling the top crossbar. Again she abruptly dropped over the side, landing on her hands and knees with the glass balls clinking against each other. Without a word the children gathered around Ellen. She didn’t move.
Then they heard the sound of a door opening. She looked up at the house. One of the tall windows turned out to be a door to the dining room. It had swung open, and a man wearing a black suit stood there, the light forming a halo behind him. She couldn’t see the man’s face, but judging by his rotund shape, it had to be Mr. Hamm himself. Silently he peered into the dark. Through the open door streamed the faint sound of violins playing. Then he turned around and spoke to someone the children couldn’t see, but they heard him say the words “a doe.” Then the door closed again.
Ellen stood up. Her hands hurt, but otherwise she seemed to be in one piece.
“That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Leonard with admiration. “How many did you get?” He held out his hand as if he wanted her to give him the glass balls, but she merely shook her head without speaking.
“We need to go now,” he then whispered. “Right now. They’ll probably let out the dogs at any moment.” The children slowly began making their way down the steep slope. Only a minute later they heard the sound of the big hunting dogs whimpering excitedly as they picked up the scent of the deer out on the lawn. Ellen walked behind Leonard and Elisabet, heading toward the bottom of the Hollow where only a few windows showed any light. She kept running her fingers over the glass balls in her apron pocket. She counted five. And nobody was ever going to be allowed to touch them.
:: :: ::
Ola Värmlänning was the name of a young man who was no longer so young. He was still big and strong, and few could match his capacity for work—that is, on those days when he wasn’t overwhelmed by a lassitude that he personally, in a moment of weakness, had described as a form of homesickness. Although not the normal sort of homesickness. Everything that Ola Värmlänning did was on a grand scale, and that included these spells of gloominess. Whenever they overtook him, he would lean against a wall, shut his eyes, and snarl hostilely at anyone who came too close. He could stay like that for hours. If anybody asked him why his eyes were closed, he’d say he was using his inner vision. And if anybody ventured to ask what he was seeing, he would always reply at once, “The Klar River in the evenings, up near Forshaga.”
On other days he was back to normal. And then there was nothing wrong with his capacity for work. Or his thirst. He could be found here and there in the Twin Cities, always recognizable from quite a distance, with his mop of blond hair sticking up a head higher than anyone else’s. He was almost always in a good mood, but people said it was getting hard to keep pace with him in the beer halls. He drank three times faster than anyone else, which also meant that he often drank three times a
s much over the course of an evening. He could be found working at the big mills along the river, or in the rail yards. He never seemed to hold a job for very long, yet he always managed to find another one, big and strong as he was. And then he’d acquire new work pals who would gladly keep him company at the saloon table.
But there was a side to Ola that could make any newfound pal uneasy. For example, one night Ola got up and went out to the street. Many of the men seated at the table took this to mean he was answering the call of nature. But when someone went out to see what had become of him, he found Ola glowering at a wooden Indian with his nose only inches away from the statue’s face. At that time it was still common for tobacco shops in the Twin Cities to have the carved statue of an Indian out front, to advertise their wares, and not every shopkeeper bothered to bring the statue inside at night.
The men tried to drag Ola away from the statue, but he stood his ground, even when more men joined in.
“That old devil is glaring at me” was all they could get out of him when they tried to coax him back inside the saloon. Finally he seemed to come to himself and relented. But for the rest of the night he said very little.
That could have been a one-time occurrence that might have been explained as the result of cheap beer on an empty stomach. But only a week later lots of people witnessed Ola walking down a street in the center of St. Paul, and as soon as he came close to a wooden Indian—and there were many in that part of town—he would throw a punch with his mighty fist and knock the statue to the ground so hard that it often cracked when it struck the pavement. The shopkeepers were furious but also afraid. It had been a long time since they’d seen a man as big as Ola. As he headed down the street, toppling wooden Indians, Ola shouted at the top of his lungs, “AWAY WITH THESE WOODEN DEVILS!!!”
No one dared stop him. But that same evening, one of his work pals at the Washburn Mill came upon Ola sitting at a rickety table and holding a mug of beer in an unsteady hand. He seemed once again calm and composed. After chatting about one thing and another for a while, the mill worker took a risk and asked Ola why he hated Indians. At first he seemed surprised by the question. Then he said that he had nothing against Indians; the few he’d met were pleasant enough folks. “Then why,” his work pal stammered, “do you hate wooden Indians so much?” “That’s altogether a different matter,” replied Ola. “They glare so wickedly at anyone who walks past,” he said and then added almost in a whisper, “I suppose when they stare at me so critically I’m reminded of my old man back home in Kristinehamn. And then I get so devilishly angry and aggrieved that I can hardly stand it.”
They talked no more about that subject.
In the end, no tobacco sellers in the Twin Cities dared to leave any statues outside after closing, in case Ola should happen past in the night, drunk and raging. If they did, only wooden splinters would be left of the statues in the morning. Eventually wooden Indians became a rare sight. By the time that Ola himself, inevitably, passed away, it was no longer the custom to use wooden Indians for advertisement purposes, and nobody was inclined to resume the practice. Maybe the statues that survived his attacks are up in some attic, staring fiercely into the dark, on the lookout for Ola, who has now forever more escaped the judgmental and vacantly glaring eyes of his father.
:: :: ::
It was late one evening in May, and the view of the lower part of the Hollow was already hidden by the burgeoning leaves on the trees. At this time of year no one felt the need to heat their homes anymore, nor did they waste any candles. In the twilight a dog barked insistently somewhere down by the low houses clustered near the tunnels in the Irish sector.
The evening was beginning to turn to night when a woman’s scream echoed up through the ravine. The cry rose and fell, almost like a song, but the woman kept on screaming until her voice broke into a hoarse scratching sound. Yet she still didn’t stop. Doors opened all around the Klar family home, and footsteps could be heard crossing the gravel. Ellen’s father got up from the table, stuck his feet in his boots, and went out to the porch in his shirtsleeves. Both of the girls joined him, peering across the Hollow.
The screams were coming from halfway down the slope, near the place where Horrible Hans and Agnes Karin had once lived. The sound seemed to be coming from the creek bed itself. The girls followed their father as he slowly and without a word headed down the footpath toward Phalen Creek. Ellen came last, keeping one hand wrapped around the two smallest glass balls that she always carried in her apron pocket. She had hidden the others under the porch where the sandy soil was loose.
More people came rushing out of their houses and out to the path; everyone was headed in the same direction. The whole time the screaming continued from the creek bed, the sound fading a bit but then starting up with renewed strength. A bunch of gray figures had already gathered near the single pier upstream from the outhouses where the women sometimes did their washing if the creek was running sufficiently high. Ellen tried to push her way forward, thinking at first that everybody was staring at something in the creek bed. Then she noticed that they had tilted their heads back to look up and she raised her eyes. Beside her Elisabet suddenly uttered a squeal, as if she’d been struck with something sharp, and then she covered her face with her hands. Ellen realized at once she should have done the same. Over the coming nights, what she now saw would come back to her without warning just as she was falling asleep, and the sight would recur at regular intervals for the rest of her life.
A man appeared to be hovering beneath the crown of the tree. That was what she saw first. He was spinning around in the air, with his hands at his sides. Then she understood. He wore a gray coat and pants, and he had wet himself. From his neck a rope rose up to the thickest branch above his head.
That wasn’t all. That was not the worst of it. She now heard the train to Duluth and the two blasts of the steam whistle before it passed through the tunnel at the bottom of the Hollow. Then came the sharp white spotlight dancing between the trees, making its way through the branches. And lighting up the hanged man’s face.
His tongue had been forced out farther than she’d ever imagined possible. And his eyes were literally popping out of their sockets, looking like two tiny bird’s eggs clinging to his face. But it was still possible to recognize Patrick O’Tierney. And the woman who was now soundlessly screaming from down by the creek was Mrs. O’Tierney. When Ellen looked away from the dead man, she saw how the woman seemed to be clawing at the air, in an attempt to take down what had so recently been her husband. But she was too short to reach him.
The body continued to hang there for well over an hour before several men climbed the tree, equipped with knives and a saw. During that time, trains passed two more times up on the embankment, and the engine’s headlight cast its harsh white glare on the body, making its swaying shadow stretch out over the walls of the surrounding houses and over all the bystanders. Ellen shut her eyes but she could feel the shadow passing over her face on a gust of chilly evening wind. Many of the Irish and Italians in the crowd repeatedly made the sign of the cross. None of them said much. She was freezing, and she kept close to her father. Gustaf made no effort to help take down the corpse, but neither did he turn to go back home, and as long as he stayed, Ellen would stay with him. She kept her hand wrapped around the glass balls in her pocket until they became slick with sweat and difficult to hold. She noticed how the same words kept reverberating inside her head, keeping time with the turning of the little glass balls: Get me out of here. Get me out of here. She didn’t yet know what those words meant. They were like the refrain of a ballad. But she stayed where she was.
Some of the men were preparing to catch the body. They had waded out into Phalen Creek, holding taut a tattered old sheet between them. The other men up in the tree began motioning to them, and for some reason the men in the water started chanting, “Heave-ho, heave-ho,” as if the sheet they were holding was a sail they were about to raise. Then one of the men in the
tree gave a signal and the rope was cut. The body dropped toward the water, breaking right through the old sheet and landing in the creek with a sound like a sack of coal hitting pavement. Mrs. O’Tierney, now utterly silent, waded over to the heap in the middle of the current and tried to drag it ashore, but she couldn’t budge it. Several of the men hurried over, now drenched and covered with mud. They picked up the dead man by the feet and under the arms. And while Ellen averted her eyes, scared that she might again catch sight of the face, she happened to notice Elisabet and Leonard Hammerberg. Her sister had collapsed into his arms, and judging by the way her back was shaking, she was crying. Flat-faced Leonard stood there, stroking her hair with what looked like a pleased smile. His eyes met Ellen’s, and his smile got even bigger. As if he wanted to say, “See? I’ve won.”
:: :: ::
The weeks twined together into a thin gray rope of mornings and evenings, without beginning or end. Walking at dawn to various homes along Payne Avenue or on Seventh Street where spring cleaning waited to be done. Sometimes heading to cross streets like Minnehaha Street. That’s where many families lived who went to the same church as carpenter Nilsson and his wife. Sometimes venturing even farther to neighborhoods where she didn’t know the street names or recognize a single face among the crowds. Always with Inga leading the way like a commander. Ellen would follow with Elisabet and Lisbet, the Nilsson daughter who wasn’t crazy. They didn’t always know where they were headed on the days when Inga summoned them.
On a few occasions they’d gone all the way over to the big houses around Lafayette Park, where all the furnishings seemed to be made of dark, polished wood. Ellen knew that the wages they received were a little higher in those parts of town, but she wasn’t fond of the days when they worked there. Those homes seemed so silent and stifling, as if the people who lived in them never spoke, neither English nor Swedish. And they were paid by a “housemaid,” who wore a cap and a starched white apron that never seemed to bear the slightest trace of housework. The housemaid didn’t speak either as she counted out the coins into Inga’s reddened hand. Ellen thought there was something strange about hiring a servant woman, who in turn paid others to do her work. But she accepted her wages without a word.