Swede Hollow

by Ola Larsmo

  On some days she managed to make a whole dollar. The cashier, sitting near the exit, would pay the seamstresses every Saturday afternoon from a small tin box. The first time Ellen made five dollars for the week, she handed the full amount to her mother, who was so happy she clapped her hands. Then she said, as if it were unimportant, that maybe they shouldn’t tell Gustaf how much she’d made. At first Ellen didn’t understand why, but after a while it sunk in. A dollar a day was about as much as her father ever earned for a week’s hard labor.

  After that Ellen was more cautious. She made sure never to bring home more than four dollars a week. She worked as hard as ever, and she became more deft at sewing, but she would keep back a few coins in her apron pocket. When no one was looking, she would put them in a metal box under the porch where she kept the Hamm glass balls. She still carried a couple of the little balls with her, and whenever she felt nervous or tired, she would rub them together in her pocket, without taking them out. With the constant whirring from the sewing machines, she couldn’t hear the strangely captivating clicking of glass against glass, but she could feel it through her apron. And she found it soothing. Now the bigger glass balls in the box were joined by more and more coins, both big and small. There was a whole silver dollar and soon a couple of bills. She seldom counted the money, since what she saved was not the important thing.

  The Klar girls had made extra money before, when Inga shared her cleaning jobs with them, but the income was irregular. Now Ellen had a steady influx of coins, which she could place on the worn kitchen table. One day Anna sent Elisabet up to Larson’s grocery store to pay off what the family owed. That made Ellen mad. She felt stingy in a way that surprised her and almost brought her to despair. She didn’t say a word all evening, letting her silence speak for itself, though her mother pretended not to notice. Ellen had wanted to be the one to set the money on the shop counter and watch the clerk strike the credit from the ledger with the blue pencil he always had tucked behind his ear.

  Elisabet was given a little bag of polka mints for paying off the debt. With a big smile, she happily, and thoughtlessly, showed Ellen the mints. But when she saw her big sister’s expression, she immediately gave her half. They sat in the corner, letting each candy melt in their mouths. Without saying anything they felt like children again, as they looked at each other and smiled.

  On other days Elisabet would be cranky and peevish and act as if she were criticizing her sister for having a job to go to. Finally Ellen began asking at the Klinkenfuer factory whether any other seamstresses were needed, but so far there hadn’t been any openings. Yet life was different.

  Her father hadn’t said anything about the money, and Ellen didn’t want to mention it either. One day when they parted at the railroad viaduct, she glanced over her shoulder as she hurried along Seventh Street. Gustaf was still standing next to the stairs, and she couldn’t see his eyes under the visor of his cap. But it occurred to her that he wore a proud expression, standing there so straight-backed as he watched her go. Then he turned on his heel and dashed after the other men on their way down to the Great Northern’s rail yards.

  :: :: ::

  Almost no one was surprised to hear that Jonathan Lundgren and Inga Norström were going to get married. When the news spread through the Hollow, most people reacted by saying they had expected this to happen, and it was good to hear that Jonathan had finally found himself a dependable woman. Everybody agreed that Jonathan was the one to be congratulated in this regard. After saying as much, some people would feel obliged to add that Jonathan himself was a decent man and a good worker, but that was the extent of their praise. It was as if behind Jonathan’s calm presence they could always glimpse the shadowy figure of his brother, the Murderer.

  The couple planned to move into Inga’s house, since it was bigger, and besides, she now had papers naming her as the owner. The widow Lundgren would remain in her old house, which stood just across the path, so there would be no distance at all between them. Inga had already spoken to Jonathan, Gustaf, and carpenter Nilsson about a number of things that needed to be repaired in her house before she and Jonathan could live there together as a lawfully married couple. The roof leaked in a few places, and in the winter the wind seeped through the wallboards facing south. But the stone foundation was still solid.

  Along with Anna, she had once again filled several old crates with soil and then planted bulbs that bloomed in the spring. She had gotten Gustaf and Jonathan to put up a low board fence around a little garden patch next to the steps, even though not much would grow in the hard clay. Gustaf had hurriedly put together a similar fence reaching down to his own family’s house, but there was only enough whitewash for Inga’s side, and half of theirs, so part of their fence remained unpainted over the winter and summer.

  Many people shook their heads at these notions of Inga and Anna, saying they were trying to seem better than their neighbors. But the following spring several of the small houses farther down in the Hollow also had crates filled with soil, with Easter lilies blooming next to their doorsteps.

  From the beginning Inga had made it clear that the wedding was not to be anything out of the ordinary, thereby making it sound as if the couple could have celebrated in grand style if they’d chosen to do so. The ceremony itself would take place in the Swedish Lutheran Church at Eighth Street and Maria Avenue immediately following the regular Sunday service. That seemed most suitable since no one had to go to work on Sunday, and there wouldn’t be any additional expenses. Inga had already spoken to Pastor Sandstrom, who had agreed to marry them. Then the couple would host a reception with coffee and cake at their home. And that would be that.

  Most people who lived in the Hollow were not big churchgoers. Carpenter Nilsson’s family and a few others attended the First Swedish Baptist Church; an equal number of the Swedish families went to the Swedish Lutheran Church, although not every Sunday. The Italian families were more faithful about attending church, going to St. John’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street. At first some of the Irish also went to St. John’s, but later they preferred to walk all the way to Assumption Church on Seventh Street, where the congregation was predominantly Irish and the priest also spoke Irish.

  Otherwise there was little sign of any church activities within the Hollow, except when members of the Scandinavian Salvation Army on Minnehaha Street would come to visit. Then people would gather to listen to the music. A group of little Irish boys, led by the younger Flaherty brother, would often show up to shout “Soupers!” at the Salvation Army representatives. The boys would throw stones and try to puncture the big bass drum that one of the male soldiers carried in front of his sizable stomach. Finally Leonard and some of the older boys would chase them away.

  On this particular morning folks emerged from their houses well before the service was to begin at ten o’clock. The bells were ringing at the Swedish Lutheran Church, the sound clearly audible through the branches of the deciduous trees, bare of leaves now that autumn had arrived. In the summertime the groves of trees on the steep slope hid the view of the Hollow from the street above. Most of the people now headed in long lines for the stairs up to Seventh Street were wearing the best clothes they owned. Gone were the gray or dark-blue work jackets, gone were the faded aprons that made up their everyday attire. Today many of the men wore dark jackets and waistcoats. Those who didn’t have any Sunday clothes had at least made the effort to put on a white shirt. Most of the women wore dark dresses and shawls. Walking with her family at the very back of the line, Ellen couldn’t help thinking that it looked more like they were on their way to a funeral rather than a wedding. She tried over and over to erase this thought from her mind, the way she might swat at a pesky fly, but it kept coming back.

  Pastor Sandstrom stood on the church steps to welcome everybody. Ellen wondered whether he did this every Sunday and whether the church was normally as full as it was today. Those who’d come from the Hollow ended up in the very back. Before Ellen sat
down, she noticed the tall figure of Jonathan dressed in black and sitting next to stout Inga in the front pew. Like all the other women, Inga had on a black dress, but she wore a wreath with a white bridal veil on her head. Ellen had never seen anything like the veil in Inga’s house, so she assumed it had been borrowed from the church.

  It was clear that many people who had come for the wedding were not accustomed to attending church. The men muttered and whispered to each other, drawing reproving looks from a number of women seated closer to the front.

  The congregation sang a hymn that Ellen hadn’t heard before. Then Pastor Sandstrom stood in the pulpit and began preaching in Swedish, which made Ellen happy as she sat squeezed in between her mother and Elisabet. She wasn’t used to hearing her own language used in that fashion, and the pastor’s words rose up to the vaulted, white-painted, wooden ceiling high overhead. He welcomed everyone on this morning, offering a special greeting to those who had come to attend the wedding, which would take place immediately after the service. Then he began singing a hymn without opening his hymnal. It was “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” one of the few hymns that Ellen knew. The whole congregation launched into singing the verses, and even though their voices were not especially beautiful, they sang with such vigor that the pew she was sitting in shook in time to the music. Then Ellen couldn’t help thinking about Horrible Hans’s old father. From what she’d heard, he had died and was now buried somewhere far out on the prairie, in a place where he could never have imagined he’d end up one day. And no one visited his grave. The thought made her mood turn gloomy again, until she glanced at Elisabet, who was singing with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. Then she had to laugh.

  While the pastor gave his sermon, Ellen almost dozed off. The church was getting hot even though it was early October. As she sat there with her eyes half-closed, she noticed something odd. The church seemed to be divided into two sections. The people sitting up front near the tall windows wore lighter clothing. Those who sat toward the back, underneath the gallery where she was sitting with her family, wore dark clothes. There was also a faint smell of sweat, along with a lingering trace of booze on the men’s breath from their Saturday night drinking. When several men sitting in the pew in front of Ellen began muttering to each other, they again received sharp glances from the women in the forward pews.

  Suddenly she seemed to picture the entire scene, as if her soul had floated upward and turned a dreamlike somersault near the ceiling and was now observing from a great distance those congregants unaccustomed to attending church. They were crowded together under the gallery, enclosed in their own atmosphere of sweat-stained waistcoats and round collars, garments that exuded an air of boiled root vegetables, rotting wood, the previous day’s quiet drunkenness, and the pinches of snuff that some of the men hadn’t had the sense to spit out before climbing the church steps. It made her dizzy, and she felt the same slight nausea she’d sometimes experienced as a child when she went up the stairs to Seventh Street and then turned to look back and saw from above the treetops and patched roofs of the Hollow.

  She had never observed herself or those she knew in this way before, as if from outside. Now she realized how they must look from up front: like a dark, shapeless mass crowded into the very back of the church. Their particular smell filled her nostrils so she could hardly breathe. She wanted to jump up and dash outside into the fresh air. But she sat in the middle of the pew, squeezed in, with people on both sides. And she didn’t want to embarrass Inga. This was her day.

  When the service was over and the notes of the last hymn died away, the wedding was to take place at once, with no pause in between. Yet some of the women in the front pew stood up and silently walked down the side aisles, their eyes fixed on the thick red carpet. They did not look at the people sitting in back as they passed.

  Pastor Sandstrom cleared his throat a few times as he watched the women leave. Then the doors to the church closed once again with a quiet sigh and the marriage ceremony began. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. Ellen thought Sandstrom looked both pleased and happy, as if he truly meant every solemn word he said, and she thought it must be more enjoyable to marry people than to bury them. Everyone stood up and sang. Jonathan and Inga were standing at the front of the church. The bride’s face was bright red under the white veil. In her hand she held a flower bouquet, and Ellen had to wonder where they’d found flowers at this time of year. Later Inga would tell her that it was a bridal bouquet that could be borrowed from the church, dried flowers that had been hand painted in various colors. Ellen could almost see the heat radiating off Inga, standing there in her dark dress, and it struck her with great force that Inga was beautiful, practically glowing. She had never thought of Inga in that way before.

  Afterward they clustered together, standing in the wind blowing across the yard in front of the church. Everyone agreed that it was a lovely wedding. Jonathan and Inga were still inside with Sandstrom, because apparently a number of papers had to be signed when someone got married.

  Elisabet was restless and anxious to get moving, just as she always was when they were children. She’d been sitting in one place for nearly two hours, after all. Finally, the two sisters headed arm in arm down Seventh Street while their parents lingered behind. Elisabet was still feeling elated, chattering on about the bouquet and what sort of cakes Inga might be serving. Ellen wanted to talk about something else entirely, and finally she hissed, “Did you see those women? The ones who left?” Elisabet hardly looked up as she replied, “I suppose they had to go home to make dinner.”

  As they walked along, Ellen caught a whiff of that same faint stink of hopelessness emanating from her sister’s familiar, brown-patterned dress. Their mother had sewn an additional strip of fabric to the hem when it got to be too short for Elisabet. And Ellen wondered whether the smell would ever leave her.

  :: :: ::

  Ola Värmlänning was a man who had a hard time finding his place in the world. He was restless and quickly grew tired of being in the same place—or it could be that what had once seemed the right place for him now belonged to the past and he could no longer return there. He came and went. He could be found at various work sites in both St. Paul and Minneapolis, and then even farther afield, anywhere he could find a job that would last a couple of weeks, where he could earn a little money and then move on. Yet he was someone whom other people noticed. Big and tall, he towered over everyone else with his mop of blond hair, which was at first a buttery yellow, then gray, and prematurely turned completely white. His face continued to be round and boyish. No one knew exactly how old he was, and it really didn’t matter as long as he could do the work of two or three men.

  A year into the new century he became an increasingly rare sight on the city’s streets and in the taverns, and people began to wonder where he’d gone. There was always someone who knew his whereabouts, not because he’d personally seen Ola, but because he knew somebody else who had seen him. Apparently he’d been working his way north, making it all the way to the iron mines of the Mesabi Range. Plenty of people had seen him there, in the expanding mine district around Hibbing, Grand Rapids, and Virginia, Minnesota. He seemed to thrive among the Swedes and Finns up there; he’d said it was almost like being back home in the Finnmark area of Värmland. Others said they’d met him in the ore shipping ports of Duluth and Two Harbors. He seemed to be in so many places. But there was only one Ola Värmlänning, as demonstrated all too well by the story that began to circulate about the time he was working in the mining district—a story that was finally brought to the Twin Cities by the Swedes who returned after spending time in the north.

  For several months Ola had been working for Union Mining outside Virginia. It was a mine that was growing rapidly, and great risks were taken to get at the ore as quickly as possible. Explosives were used extensively, and frequently there were workers who didn’t understand the warnings, because a number of different languages were spoken in the mine. Anyon
e who joined one of the various unions was blacklisted and fired. So the workers simply had to accept the risks and keep going. Or move on. Ola Värmlänning hadn’t planned to stay very long, but he enjoyed the camaraderie down in the mine shafts because there were lots of Swedes from the same part of Sweden where he came from. Virginia was a town on the rise, and soon there were so many taverns and gambling halls that on any free evening there was a new place to try. Ola said that he had everything he needed close at hand, including a spruce forest. He was happy to stay in Virginia for a while, though he had a hard time keeping his mouth shut whenever he thought the mine managers were driving him and the other workers too hard. There weren’t many foremen who dared speak against Ola if he was within earshot, but they did keep an eye on him. Yet he worked harder than most.

  Then came the big explosion. A blasting went wrong, which happened now and then, though it never slowed the pace of work. But this time a wall of rock shifted, causing a mine passage to collapse and shutting it off from the rest of the mine. It took hours to determine whether anyone was inside and who they were. It turned out that five men were missing. Ola Värmlänning was one of them.

  They dug all night in the light from burning torches, not knowing whether they’d be able to pull anyone out alive from all the rubble. Just as the first light of dawn appeared over the tops of the pines on the ridge, there was movement amid the piles of rock. It seemed as if someone was shoving at it from inside. Now they renewed their efforts, using both shovels and their hands.

  The man on the other side was Ola, of course. His face was black, but otherwise he seemed in one piece. When he caught sight of the men outside, he merely grunted and went back into the mine without saying a word. After a while he reappeared, seeming to stagger as he moved forward. When he emerged into the light of day, everybody understood why.