Swede Hollow

by Ola Larsmo

  On their way home in the twilight one summer evening, she happened to walk beside Inga instead of with her sister. The other two girls were larking about as they walked behind, and Ellen didn’t want any part of it. Instead, she hurried to catch up with the older woman. At first they said nothing to each other as they walked along side by side. Silence never felt uncomfortable when she was with Inga. But after fifteen minutes or so, Inga said without looking at Ellen, “So I can see you want something else.”

  Ellen gave a start, as if Inga had said something dire, though she’d spoken calmly and kindly. But it was unsettling how the older woman had guessed at her thoughts. This was not the first time it had happened.

  “I’m not ashamed to be cleaning houses, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ellen replied. Without looking at Inga, she then added, “But it does get to be a little monotonous.”

  She could hear how wrong this sounded, because she knew that Inga had largely supported herself with these types of jobs since coming to this country. And she’d been willing to share the work with them when they needed money. But Ellen also knew how hard it was to lie to Inga. If she tried, Inga would merely stare at her without speaking, but her expression would say, “You can do better than that.” That’s how it had been ever since she and Elisabet were children.

  “I don’t think you should be ashamed of doing a decent day’s work,” Inga said at last. “But I know what you mean. I’ve been thinking that it’s time for you to try something new.”

  For a while they walked on in silence.

  “Let me talk to some people I know,” Inga said at last, as if she’d been pondering how to formulate her words properly. “I’ll let you know what they say.”

  The Tragic Story about Agnes Karin, David, and Horrible Hans, As Recounted by David’s Brother, Jonathan Lundgren

  FOR A WEEK autumn had hovered over the city like a lid. The colder air held down the coal smoke issuing from the chimneys, forming a gray veil above the higher rooftops on the other side of the Lafayette Bridge. And from the river, as gray and motionless as ever, could be heard the muffled steam whistles from the barges, shrouded in the cold that now rose from the gray water.

  They were on their way back to the Hollow, mutely walking along, their thoughts roaming at random. Neither of them had said anything for a long time. Jonathan carried his empty knapsack over his shoulder. In the morning it had held the bread Inga had given him, which he’d shared with Gustaf when they had a break from their work. Jonathan’s silence was of the burdensome kind, laden with words that he hadn’t yet sorted out. Gustaf, equally silent, was waiting patiently as he walked along beside this big, stooped companion of his. They had known each other ever since the Klars had arrived in the Hollow, and by now they’d been working together for six years. But Jonathan still talked very little about himself or his concerns; more often he would speak of the job or what tasks needed to get done. He was like an ever-present, soothing shadow when it came to everyday matters. But now something was weighing on him, and he wanted to unburden himself.

  Before they came to Seventh Street and the dark openings of the railroad tunnels, Jonathan began talking as he looked straight ahead. The words reached Gustaf through the evening’s dim light. He kept his head down and simply listened.

  Jonathan had tried to make it a habit, at least every other month, to go to the prison in Stillwater to see his brother. Gustaf no longer remembered much about David, other than that he was somewhat shorter, darker, and if possible even more taciturn than Jonathan. He also knew that Jonathan had gone there this past Sunday, traveling in the engine cab of one of the trains. At other times he would scrape together the money to take the streetcar all the way there. It got him closer but was more expensive. Now he was weighed down by something that had happened, and he needed to get it off his chest.

  Things were better at the prison now, Jonathan explained. David had arrived as a condemned murderer and was ranked the lowest of the low. He had to wear striped prison garb, and it had taken almost a year before he was allowed any visitors. When Jonathan went there the first time, he’d found David with a black eye. His brother either would not or could not tell him what he’d been through. Gradually David had worked his way up through the ranks. There were three kinds of prisoners, and having passed through a complicated points system, he had now reached the highest group. He was assigned to the workshop, and he wore a gray prison uniform. He was also allowed visitors once a month, and he could keep the tobacco that Jonathan usually brought for him.

  His most recent visits to the prison had all ended in the same way. David would ask about Agnes Karin and whether she would come to see him now that he could have visitors. Jonathan could only tell him the truth: that they had no idea where she was. She was no longer in contact with anybody in the Hollow, and no one had seen her or the children since the trial.

  One day when Jonathan was at work, Pastor Sandstrom, the Swedish Lutheran pastor, came to the Hollow on one of his rare visits and headed straight for the home of the widow Lundgren. Once again the widow asked Inga to come over, this time because she was feeling nervous about talking to the pastor. What Sandstrom wanted to discuss was David and Agnes Karin’s “civil status,” as he called it. Inga explained that they had never managed to get engaged, either formally or informally. When they made the strange decision to flee to Sioux City, it was no doubt their intention to get married, but there wasn’t time before the sheriff arrested both of them and took them back to Mankato.

  Sandstrom listened carefully and then said that in the midst of this whole sad story, that was probably a good thing, because yesterday he’d received a letter from Agnes Karin. She was now living in Rochester, and she had asked the pastor for a certificate from the Swedish Lutheran Church, verifying that she was a widow and not a married woman. She and a man named Anton Carlberg were planning to have marriage banns posted, and after the wedding she and the children would move with her new husband to San Francisco. Now she was simply waiting for the certificate from the church, which she had joined when they first arrived in the United States. Carlberg was a member of a Methodist congregation, and he wanted everything to be in order.

  When Sandstrom finished speaking, the widow Lundgren slapped her hands together and sighed heavily. She didn’t say another word during the pastor’s visit; instead, she let Inga carry the conversation.

  Jonathan had been turning these thoughts over and over in his mind the whole way up to Stillwater, trying to figure out how much to tell David. At first he’d planned to say nothing, not because he didn’t dare break the news, but because he had no answers to all the questions his brother was bound to ask. Nobody had known that Agnes Karin was living in Rochester, and nobody knew who this Carlberg was. But when the two brothers were sitting across from each other at the worn prison table, and David again asked after Agnes Karin, the words just spilled out of Jonathan’s mouth.

  David reacted the way he always did. He fell silent, and for a long time he merely stared down at the scratched tabletop. Jonathan thought that meant the visit was over, and he’d already taken out the packet of tobacco he’d brought along, turning to the guard for his nod of approval. Then, without looking up, David had begun to recount what had actually happened on that morning near the Blue Earth River.

  He’d been awakened in his little house by the wind blowing through the timbered wall because he hadn’t yet had time to seal the cracks. When he threw open the front door, he was met with a white world that struck him right in the face. No matter which direction he looked, he saw only stinging snow. He immediately began to worry about Agnes Karin and the girls. He didn’t know whether Horrible Hans was home or off on one of his begging expeditions. In the worst case, they were alone in this storm. He put on all the clothes he owned and began making his way up to their farmhouse, which was only in slightly better condition than his own cabin. The country road had vanished, and he could see only a few feet ahead, but he followed a row of fence
posts up the hill. As he came near the spot where the farm’s barn supposedly stood, he saw a shadow appear up ahead in the snowstorm. It was Agnes Karin. When he reached her, she screamed in his ear, “You have to help me, David!” Then she turned on her heel and walked back the same way she’d come. He followed her, as he’d always done.

  Just before they reached the house, he saw a dark shape on the white drift at the bottom of the steps. It was Horrible Hans, lying facedown in the snow. He was dead. Agnes Karin stood next to the dead man with her arms at her sides, waiting. At first David wanted to go inside the house to talk, but she stopped him. “The children and the old man are asleep,” she shouted to him. “I don’t want them to see this.” And then she repeated, “You have to help me!”

  There was nothing else to do but move the body away before the children woke up. First they dragged the corpse over to the sheltering wall of the barn, but when they got that far, Agnes Karin motioned for David to continue on. And he realized what she wanted. They should take the dead man all the way down to the bend in the river. But the snow was now knee-deep, and it was impossible to see the road. Agnes Karin kept on tugging at the corpse, though she could barely budge it on her own. So David went over and picked up the body of Horrible Hans, throwing it over his shoulder. And then they headed into all that whiteness, blindly following the slope down toward the spot where the river had to be. The wind was blowing in their faces, the snowflakes so sharp that their eyes filled with tears.

  After they’d gone quite a ways, Agnes Karin abruptly stopped and stood motionless in the whiteness, just as she’d done before. When David went over to her, she shouted into his ear, “I have to go back to the children before they wake up.” And then she began trudging back up the hill, and he was left there with the dead man lying at his feet.

  It took him a good hour to get the body down to the river. There were no tracks visible in the snow behind him, and up ahead he could see hardly anything. And he began to weep. He wasn’t ashamed to tell his brother that. It was cold and the storm tore at him, and the corpse got heavier for every step he took. He began to think he’d never make any progress at all. Instead, he’d be struggling forever in this swirling white darkness, with his dead rival as his only companion.

  Then he sensed rather than heard a crunching beneath his feet. He realized he was treading on clumps of reeds, bent down and almost entirely covered by a snowdrift. In front of him the riverbank sloped steeply down to the ice. He toppled the dead man over the edge and watched him disappear. Then he slid down after the corpse. He didn’t really care whether the ice held or not. He shoved Horrible Hans forward, little by little, until he caught sight of a stretch of open black water in the middle of the channel. The dark patch came and went in his field of vision. He lay down on his stomach and felt the icy cold seeping all the way through his shirt. Then he pushed the corpse forward, inch by inch, until he could feel the ice growing thinner underneath him. The next moment the dead man slid soundlessly into the water. Cautiously David backed away, using his hands to push himself toward shore until his foot struck a rock. Only then did he dare get up. He stood there in the wind, trembling.

  When he turned around, he saw nothing. He couldn’t even make out the open patch in the ice in the midst of all that emptiness. He realized he was soaked with sweat, and his whole body began shuddering with cold. Soon he too might fall victim to the cold if he didn’t keep moving and turn his back to the wind. He headed back the same way he’d come, plodding for an eternity up the slope to the spot where he hoped to find the house. At last he caught sight of the gray timbered wall of the barn and realized the snow storm was finally subsiding.

  He stumbled inside the home’s biggest room, which was the kitchen, and slammed the door behind him. The house was quiet, with a small fire burning in the woodstove. All his attention was focused on getting warm, and with hands outstretched he dropped to his knees in front of the stove. After a while he turned his head and noticed Agnes Karin calmly sitting on the bench with an old gun leaning against the wall next to her. He saw no sign of the children or of Horrible Hans’s deaf old father, so he assumed they were still asleep behind the wallboards. He had no idea what time it was, and it was impossible to guess. Outside the only window in the room, the wind was still gusting white. He got up and went over to Agnes Karin. Without a word she pulled down the front of her blouse and moved her hair aside so he could see the fiery red marks at her neck.

  “This time he was going to kill me,” she said. “When I woke up he was trying to strangle me. I got away and ran outside, but he came after me with the gun. I tore it out of his hands and shot him. And that was that. Then I set off to get you.”

  David merely shook his head without saying anything. But as he told Jonathan five years later while sitting at a table in the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater, he’d always wondered how Horrible Hans had ended up getting shot in the back. If things had happened as she’d said, that is. But he and Agnes Karin had never discussed the matter. Not a word did they exchange about the events of that morning during the few short months that followed, when they lived together as man and wife. That was when, for the first time in his life, David felt happy.

  All this Jonathan Lundgren, who was usually so taciturn, told Gustaf as they stood freezing next to the arched entrance to the railroad tunnel below Seventh Street. And Gustaf didn’t need to ask whether the story was actually true, because he realized that no matter what, Jonathan believed his brother. When he asked whether they were going to tell anyone about this, Jonathan shook his head. “David doesn’t want to,” he said. He would tell Inga, and it was all right for Gustaf to tell Anna. But otherwise they would let it be. He wasn’t planning on telling his mother, because it would only upset her. She had resigned herself to what had happened and merely hoped that she’d live long enough to see David released from Stillwater someday. And when they parted, David had made his brother promise not to do anything about what he’d heard. He said it would serve no purpose, and it would be best to leave well enough alone. If nothing else, for Agnes Karin’s sake.

  :: :: ::

  It took Inga several months to come up with something for Ellen. They hadn’t spoken of the matter since that late summer evening when they were walking home from Lafayette Park, and Ellen hadn’t wanted to broach the subject. If Inga found out anything, she’d say so. Since then they’d had a number of cleaning jobs in the neighborhood around Minnehaha Street with no mention of the topic. But one evening at the end of September, Inga came over to the Klar family home and seemed to have a lot to tell them. The first thing she said was that she was going to buy her house.

  She said she wanted Anna to be the first to know, because soon a lot of talk would be going on in the Hollow, where rumors always spread fast. The other day Inga had gone down to the Ramsey County courthouse to have a talk with the clerks. When they realized it wasn’t going to be easy to get rid of her, they finally explained what she needed to do. It turned out that it was possible to register as the owner of a house in Phalen Creek if no one else was already listed as the owner.

  That all sounded so strange. At first Anna couldn’t figure out what Inga was talking about. Gustaf wasn’t yet home from work, but the girls drew closer to listen.

  “But isn’t Waggoner the one who owns all the houses?” said Anna. “We pay him rent every month.”

  That was both true and not true, Inga explained. It was true that Sheriff Waggoner had registered the area as an “addition” when the city plan was drawn up. And he might well insist that the property was his. But back then a number of the houses were already in place. And the house in which Inga now lived alone was one of the oldest in the Hollow. It had undoubtedly been there long before Waggoner thought up a scheme for making some ready cash.

  “So I asked to see the city plan and the map they have down there at the courthouse. At first they refused, but you know how stubborn I can be, Anna. Finally they gave in. And you can clearly see t
hat when Waggoner registered the land twenty years ago, there were already four or five houses here. And one of them is mine. Or at least it will be mine. It’s going to cost me twenty dollars, but when I get the papers, I’ll be the official owner.”

  “And you have the money?” said Anna.

  “It’s almost everything I’ve managed to put aside. If there’s trouble, I think Waggoner will have to give in, because he registered the land when people were already living here. And even though none of those people live in the Hollow anymore, the houses are still here. I asked the clerk at the courthouse how to go about things, and he showed me the papers, because otherwise he’d never have gotten rid of me. I have to go back next week and bring the money, and then they’ll stamp the papers and the house will be mine. It’s debatable who owns the actual ground the house stands on, of course, but when Waggoner registered the property, there was no mention of the houses that were already here. But you can see them on the map. And they’ve got the map down at the courthouse.”

  Anna and the girls thought this was very strange, but Inga sat there at the kitchen table, defiant and stubborn, looking delighted by her efforts.