Swede Hollow

by Ola Larsmo

  On his back Ola carried one of the mine ponies. The horse was alive but had an ugly wound on its back. As gently as possible, Ola lowered the animal to the ground. Then he straightened up, his spine audibly creaking, and again went back into the mine. Now several men followed him, carrying torches, and helped to bring out the four other mine workers who’d been trapped inside. Two had broken legs, and a third had a deep gash in his skull, but they were all alive. Small rocks were still falling from the ceiling of the mine shaft, and it could collapse at any moment. When everyone was out and Ola had been given a glass of weak beer, a foreman finally asked him, “Why did you bring the horse out first?”

  “I did it for your sake,” Ola replied, looking at the foreman who stood closest. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  Everyone shook their heads and said they didn’t understand. So Ola had to explain: “If one of us happened to die, nobody would be sad, because we’re a dime a dozen, and there are plenty of others ready to take our place. But fine ponies like this one don’t grow on trees. So I thought it was worth at least five workers.”

  He said this with a serious expression, but after a moment he couldn’t keep a straight face any longer and he started laughing. And the laughter spread to the mine workers standing all around, until everybody was bellowing with mirth. Except the foremen and engineers, that is. The laughter was said to stem from a sense of relief that everyone, including the horse, had survived. But after that Ola fell into disfavor, and he developed a reputation as a troublemaker and a communist, although he wasn’t a union member and had never hurt a fly. Suddenly he had a hard time finding any work at all, even though he was still big and strong. After a while he decided to move on, and he began working his way back south to his old haunts and neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

  And it was there that his story came to an end. Everyone agreed on that, even though no one who recounted the tale had been present when it happened.

  In September 1903, a strike broke out among several of the big mills at St. Anthony’s Falls in Minneapolis. Fifteen hundred workers rose up and walked off the job after being denied their demand for an eight-hour workday. Soon the strike spread to more of the mills, effectively shutting them down. And outside the Washburn Mill the striking workers gathered in great numbers, held back by rows of policemen wearing dark coats and armed with sturdy billy clubs. At first things were orderly. But after a few days barricades went up along Second Street—a palisade of boards that cut off the mills and the river from the city and the striking workers. A rumor soon began to spread about why the barricades were there—not to prevent the workers from getting in, but because the mills were bringing in students from the university as well as newly arrived immigrants who would be quartered in the warehouse buildings along the river and who would do the work behind the protection of the newly erected wooden planks. It was said that eight hundred strike breakers were already in place and more were on the way by boat. As the rumor spread, anger began surging through the ranks of the striking workers, and cries of “Scabs, scabs, scabs!” could be heard, at first only in occasional outbursts but growing steadily.

  After being in the city for a few weeks, Ola Värmlänning had taken a job at the Washburn Mill, where he’d worked many times before. When the workers rose up and called a strike, he initially wasn’t sure what to do, but rather than being left behind, he joined them. So that was the situation now. He had already been blacklisted up north in the mining district, and now it seemed as if things would be no better here, and the same might well happen to him in the Twin Cities.

  No matter where he turned, he could see traces of his hard work. He’d worked at all the mills. He’d also helped to build the Stone Arch Bridge on which the train crossed the river. The bridge was said to have been built by Hill, the railroad king, but Ola had never seen him even once during all the years it took to finish the construction. Ola had also worked on many of the big stone warehouses nearby. And it seemed to him so wrong that he would no longer be allowed to find work among these streets and buildings he had helped construct. The more he thought about it, the more angry he became. All around him workers were chanting louder and louder: “Scabs, scabs, scabs!” The police were growing nervous, and they had closed ranks so they now stood with linked arms, their billy clubs drawn.

  Then someone starting throwing bricks. There were bricks scattered around a vacant lot down the street, and several men ran over there and began lobbing bricks to those who stood closest to the lines of police. Several bricks flew over Ola’s head and landed on the ground between the first rows of workers and the police, who retreated a few steps until they stood with their backs against the board fence. For a moment everyone fell silent, and that’s when they could all hear the sound of hammering on the other side of the barricade. That made the demonstrators even angrier. But Ola didn’t think they were especially good at throwing bricks. Without further ado, he grabbed a brick away from a thin, young millworker standing next to him and said, “This is how you should do it.” And he assumed the stance of a baseball pitcher, spun halfway around, and then hurled the brick at breakneck speed.

  It sailed over the policemen without touching even a hair on their heads before knocking a hole right through the board wall behind them and disappearing on the other side. No one made a sound. Ola turned around and said something to the younger strikers behind him, something like “That’s how you throw a brick.” But what he didn’t see as he stood there, turned away, was the brick that came flying back from the other side of the fence, not at quite the same speed, but very nearly. As if seeking the exact spot where it had started its path, the brick fell in a wide arc toward Ola and struck him on the back of the head, making a sound like steel against iron. Ola broke off mid-sentence and dropped to the ground. Everyone standing close to him had to jump aside so as not to land under the falling giant, and everybody agreed that he was already dead before his wide forehead struck the pavement.

  There he lay, big and broad and very dead. It was difficult to move him, but finally they managed to turn him over so that his wide-open blue eyes were looking up at the sky. They had to find a door to use as a stretcher, and it took eight men to lift it so they could take Ola away. There he lay on the door as the men carried him through the crowd. Afterward people said he looked calm, almost happy. And yet he was dead. All the striking workers removed their caps as his body was carried past—Swedes, Irish, Poles, and Italians alike. A great silence settled over Second Street.

  A few days later the strike ended. In early October those who were allowed to go back to work did so, but most had to look around for other jobs. And the fence was torn down. Nobody knew where Ola’s body had been taken, and it will do no good to try and find his headstone. No one knew what his real last name was, since he was always called simply Ola Värmlänning. Some thought his name was Johansson; others said his real name was Gustafsson. A small group of his former colleagues claimed he was called Bergstrom. But even if any of these names were correct, it would still be impossible to find him. Because there are so many gravestones with those sorts of names in the city’s cemeteries.

  The Story about Gustaf Klar, As He Personally Recounted It to David Lundgren in the Minnesota State Prison, Stillwater

  IT SO HAPPENED that Inga fell ill just when Jonathan was about to head out to visit his brother, David, in the prison in Stillwater. It was hard to know what was wrong with her. It was not because her cough had returned, but even though no one said anything aloud about the matter, it could be—at least Anna had mentioned as much to Ellen—that Inga was pregnant. Yet it was not at all clear whether that was the case, because lately she’d put on a good deal of weight. And Jonathan said nothing, of course.

  But on the evening before he was due to leave, Jonathan came over to the Klar family’s house and asked to speak to Gustaf. He didn’t come inside but asked Gustaf to step out on the porch, where they talked for a while in the winter darkness. Gustaf was in shirtsleeves
and waistcoat. Then he came back inside and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Jonathan can’t go to Stillwater tomorrow,” he said, “because he can’t leave Inga on her own.”

  “I can look after Inga,” Anna started to say, but then she fell silent because something in Gustaf’s demeanor indicated he had already decided to go.

  “The problem is that if nobody goes to visit David, he won’t get any tobacco for the month,” said Gustaf. “And things are hard enough for him in prison as it is.”

  They had all heard Jonathan say that David was nevertheless managing as best as any man could in a place like the Minnesota State Prison. At least he hadn’t complained in such a way that Jonathan felt a need to share what his brother said.

  “Jonathan will pay for my streetcar ticket,” Gustaf went on. “And the tobacco, of course. There might even be a little extra for me. He’s hoping I’ll be willing to go.”

  Anna nodded her agreement.

  The prison had its own stop on the Twin City Lines; it was the very last stop. Aside from the conductor and the driver, Gustaf was the only one onboard. He sat as close to the coal-burning heater as he could in order to absorb some of the heat. But soon he had to get off the streetcar. The driver barely paused before turning the streetcar around and heading back toward Stillwater, with the wires on the streetcar’s roof crackling blue light that flashed across the snow.

  For a moment Gustaf stood still, as if to take his bearings. A front of dove-gray clouds hovered over the hills to the west. Then he walked up the stone steps and proceeded to the main entrance of the prison. A thin layer of new fallen snow, as yet unmarked, stretched out before him.

  The portal was tall enough to allow a freight train to pass beneath its vault. Beyond the metal bars he glimpsed what reminded him, strangely enough, of the tower and pinnacles of a castle. The guard, who stood in a sentry box made of brick, eyed Gustaf up and down before demanding to see his papers. Without a word, the guard then let him into a large paved inner courtyard where the snow was swirling around in peculiar, restless gusts. Another guard motioned mutely with his billy club toward an open doorway in the nearest building. Gustaf stepped inside a long and narrow room with yellow-painted walls. The man seated behind the counter asked for his name and address and then told him to empty his pockets. Gustaf placed the few coins in his possession on the counter and then slid toward the man the tobacco packets, which were wrapped in a red handkerchief. “You can give the tobacco to the prisoner,” said the guard, “but not the handkerchief.” Not once did he look Gustaf in the eye.

  Then the guard opened the door that was bolted with two locks. The door opened to a hall with low wooden tables set in a row. Light slanted in through the barred windows high up near the ceiling. Sitting at one of the tables was a gray-clad figure with hunched shoulders. Gustaf had nearly reached the man before he could determine that this was in fact David Lundgren. He seemed to have shrunk during the ten years that had passed since Gustaf had last seen him. David’s hair was still thick, but it had turned an iron-gray.

  David looked up, his expression impassive, though there seemed to be a trace of a smile on his lips.

  “So Jonathan couldn’t come today,” he said at last. “He’s always been good about visiting me here.”

  Gustaf was relieved that David recognized him. He’d been worried that the years in prison might have clouded the man’s mind, as he’d heard sometimes happened to those who couldn’t endure their time inside. But the man sitting across from him seemed calm and matter-of-fact. He asked Gustaf about his family and then wanted to know what had prevented his brother from coming to Stillwater on this particular February afternoon. The more he talked, the more he seemed like his younger self. When Gustaf mentioned that Inga was having health problems, David smiled in a strange way, which made Gustaf wonder again whether the man might be mentally unstable. But then David said, “I’d heard that Jonathan had finally found himself a woman, and I’m glad. It’s about time. But it took a while before he told me it was Inga. She’s a good, dependable person, that one.” This last remark he said without even a hint of a smile, his expression deeply serious.

  Gustaf slid the tobacco packets across the table. David picked them up and immediately stuffed them in the pockets of his gray prisoner’s jacket. Then he cast a glance around, even though they were alone in the room. He seemed extremely wary.

  “That’s as much as they’ll let us have,” said David. “But sometimes it doesn’t always last—if we’re allowed to keep any of it at all, that is.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment, but neither of them was willing to end the visit. It had taken Gustaf the better part of a day to get here, and he didn’t want it to be a wasted trip, though he wasn’t sure exactly what was expected of him. Finally he pointed at the white stripe on David’s sleeve and asked what it signified. David looked down and smiled.

  “It means that I’m a ‘number one,’” he said. “A first-class prisoner.”

  He spoke as if this were self-evident, as if someone had asked him for the time of day. But then he explained. The prisoners were divided into three groups. The most disorderly and dangerous men wore striped prison garb. Those classified as less troublesome wore gray. Those who were regarded as conscientious and were specifically assigned to the better prison jobs were given a white stripe.

  “Sometimes it can be risky,” David went on. “It riles some of the other men, who try their best to take you down a notch by picking fights and so on. Or by stealing your stuff.” He patted his pockets where he’d stowed the tobacco.

  “But mostly it’s fine. The guards think I’m okay. In the best case, it means you might get out a year ahead of time.” And then he added, “Not that I’m in any hurry.”

  But something seemed to have thawed inside David now, and he leaned back in his chair and began talking about his time in prison. He explained that if you landed in trouble and got on the bad side of one of the vicious guards or if you got into a serious brawl with another prisoner, then you could end up in the Hole. That had never happened to him, but he’d heard what it was like. The Hole was a narrow cell with double doors, the first made of wood, the second of iron bars. If you landed in the Hole, the guards fastened your handcuffs to the highest crossbar so that your feet could barely touch the floor. Then they closed the wooden door so it was right in front of your face, and that’s all you had to look at. You had to hang there like that for half a day before they came to take you down. And you had to piss and shit right where you were. If you were a bad case, you might spend several weeks in the Hole. David had never seen any man come out of there untamed. One man had stopped talking afterward and hadn’t uttered a word in years.

  “But you’ve managed,” said Gustaf, mostly just for something to say.

  David nodded.

  “They say it’s not worth it to try and rile me, because I never get mad. Sometimes it helps to be a murderer.” He smiled.

  Gustaf realized the remark was meant to be a joke, but the words slowly began to set something in motion inside him, though at first he couldn’t identify what it was.

  David kept on talking. He said it also helped to stay on good terms with the Italians. For a long time he’d shared a cell with a Sicilian, who also happened to have relatives living in the Hollow, and they’d talked a bit. The Italians stuck together in the prison, and few men dared to harass them. David had made sure to stay in the shadow of his cellmate as long as possible. There were also plenty of Swedes and Norwegians in the prison, as well as a few Finns, but they mostly kept to themselves, so they didn’t offer much help.

  As Gustaf listened to David, entirely new thoughts arose in his mind. They were all centered around that one, bright-red word: murderer.

  Finally David fell silent and looked at Gustaf expectantly. Gustaf was completely calm as he began to speak.

  “Jonathan told me,” he said. “He told me about what really happened when Horrible Hans died.”
r />   David looked at him without saying a word.

  “I don’t think you did it,” Gustaf went on. David shrugged, as if to say, It no longer makes any difference.

  “But there’s something else I want to talk to you about,” said Gustaf. “It has to do with me.”

  Then he started talking, though he had no idea how much David knew about his past, about what had happened, and where he and his family had come from. These were things that people learned about each other if they lived in the same place for a long time, although both David and Jonathan were men of few words. During the crossing from England so many years ago, Gustaf had tried to say as little as possible. All that was now so long ago that it might have been about someone else entirely, someone whose son was still alive. But what happened before that had suddenly come vividly alive inside Gustaf.

  “This was before, when we had three children at home,” he said. “That’s why I decided to protest. I thought we deserved a little better.”

  As he spoke he stared down at his hands, which lay palm up on the table in front of him. Even his hands seemed to belong to somebody else.

  “What happened,” he went on, “is that there were eventually a lot of us employed by the shoemaking shop. Twelve of us worked together as a team in one of the buildings, and ten in the other. It was actually an old cowshed that had been fixed up. The boss had spent several years over here in the States, mostly in the area around New York, saving his money so he could make a fresh start back home. When he got back to Sweden, he started his own workshop, though now he wasn’t interested in running just a shoemaking shop; instead he called it a ‘factory.’ And he appointed Jerk Ersa as foreman to supervise the work. That’s when the trouble started. Jerk had never liked me or my brother, so he kept a close eye on us and was always ridiculing our work, even though it was just as good as anyone else’s, if not better. And we had to keep increasing our speed. That was Jerk’s assignment: to get us to work faster. Finally three or four of us said, ‘If we’re going to work faster, then we should get a krona more per week.’ ‘We’ll have to see how it goes,’ was all the boss said, and that was that. But Jerk had decided we were troublemakers, and he wanted to get rid of us. He was no longer satisfied with merely criticizing our work; now he began to sabotage us. On at least one occasion I personally saw him ripping apart the seams of shoes that I’d made.”