Swede Hollow

by Ola Larsmo

  She got up, gathered up her skirts, and rushed down the stairs.

  For the past week Elisabet had been sitting at the rows of sewing machines next to the window, sewing sleeves onto work jackets made of rough blue material. It was poorly paid work but, as Mangini said, it was a start. The sewing machines were a different type from those upstairs. The fabric was heavier so the machines were bigger and more cumbersome, with bigger needles. They ran on electricity, but if the fabric jammed, extra force could be applied by manually turning the drive wheel on the side. But you had to be careful not to look at the wheel instead of what you were sewing. That was a mistake you only made once, as the foreman said.

  Ellen caught sight of her sister the instant she came downstairs. Elisabet’s right hand was positioned under the needle bar. She was no longer screaming, but she was sobbing with her head cradled in her left arm. The needle had pierced through her hand, pinning it in place, and a dark splotch of blood was spreading through the wrinkled denim fabric. One of the Italian girls hurried over and tried to stop the blood flow with a scrap of white cotton material, which quickly turned red as well. Ellen looked around for Mangini, who now came calmly up the stairs; he too had been summoned by Elisabet’s screams. He went over to stand beside her and said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, “Okay, I’m going to pull the lever up now, okay? This is going to hurt a bit, but you’ll soon be free.” Elisabet nodded, keeping her head down on the crook of her arm. Only the knot of her hair was visible. She was crying quietly, her shoulders still shaking. “Ellen, hold your sister’s hand while I do this,” said Mangini. Ellen gripped Elisabet’s fingers, thinking it had been a long time since they had walked hand in hand, the way little girls do. Elisabet held on so tight that it hurt. It occurred to Ellen that it would be best if her fingers didn’t get injured too, because then neither of them would be earning any money. She dismissed the thought and tried to focus on her sister’s pain. But she couldn’t.

  Mangini quickly raised the needle bar, and Elisabet screamed again. Her fingernails bit into the back of Ellen’s hand, but she didn’t flinch. The heavy-duty needle was now free of the fabric, but it was still impaled in Elisabet’s hand, though the bleeding had stopped. Mangini swore. “Keep holding her hand while I go get a wrench, will you?” The cashier had emerged from his little glass cage, wearing a visor around his bald pate and protectors over his shirt sleeves. Mangini said to him, “Hey, Al, better call the doctor.”

  Elisabet was calmer now. Next to her stood some of the other girls, all of them Italian. They had no common language, but they made little cooing sounds, like doves, and stroked Elisabet’s back as she sat there, bowed over the bloodstained workbench.

  “What are they doing? I don’t want to look,” she said faintly as she cradled her head, still holding Ellen’s hand.

  “The foreman has gone to get some tools,” said Ellen. “And they’re calling a doctor to see to you.”

  When she heard the word doctor, Elisabet began crying again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she said.

  The comment almost made Ellen laugh, but she kept herself in check and quietly patted Elisabet on the back. “It’ll be fast,” she said.

  Mangini came back, bringing pliers and a wrench. “Hold her still,” he said brusquely to Ellen, a stern look on his face. Then he quickly unscrewed the whole needle bar as he snapped some words in Italian over his shoulder at the other girls. One by one they returned to their work. And the insect chorus resumed.

  It took almost an hour before the doctor arrived. While they waited, Ellen sat with her arm linked through Elisabet’s and held her hand in the air, as Mangini had told her to do. The big needle was still sticking straight through her hand, and Elisabet had turned away so she didn’t have to see it. Ellen had plenty of time to study the shiny needle sticking through the back of her sister’s hand. Around the steel a little mound of clotted blood had formed, and streaking her arm were lines that looked like rivers on a map. The whole scene exerted the same sort of enticement over Ellen as the drawings at the back of the newspaper—little puzzles that she had to strain to decipher. Yet she realized that the pain had not diminished in the slightest. She could feel Elisabet’s pulse racing.

  The doctor was an elderly man with white hair and a two-day stubble, equally white. He didn’t introduce himself, nor did he ask their names, uttering only a brief “Oi-oi” as he shook his head. Then he opened his bag and took out some cotton wadding and a bottle of sharply smelling iodine, which he used to wipe off the blood. He motioned to Ellen to take hold of Elisabet’s arm to keep her still. Elisabet turned her head away and shut her eyes tight. The doctor got out a pliers, pressed the girl’s hand onto the table, and yanked on the needle. Elisabet’s body tensed like a bow, but she didn’t scream. Round drops of fresh blood spattered over the already stained surface of the table.

  The doctor held up the needle to the light. “No bone,” he said. “That’s good.” Then he cleaned the wound and efficiently bandaged Elisabet’s hand. Yellow iodine seeped through the white bandage, but no blood.

  The doctor told Ellen that the bandage should be kept on for at least two weeks. If Elisabet developed a high fever or if her arm swelled up, she should go to Bethesda Hospital, which treated emergency cases. Did they know where the hospital was?

  Elisabet sat there with her eyes closed and didn’t seem to be listening to what was said. Her pale face was covered with tiny beads of sweat, and her breathing was shallow. But Ellen nodded and said she understood. The doctor closed up his bag and motioned to Mangini that he was done. Then he disappeared down the stairs.

  Mangini squatted down in front of Elisabet and in a calm and clear voice asked her whether she would be able to walk home. Elisabet nodded without opening her eyes. He told her to rest for a bit, and then he took Ellen by the arm and pulled her aside. “It would be best if you made sure she gets home all right. There will be pain after the shock wears off.”

  Ellen stood there, waiting, because Mangini clearly had more to say. He looked her in the eye. “It will take at least three weeks for her hand to heal. And depending on whether anything was damaged, she may not recover the full use of her hand. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “I can’t keep her on. By tomorrow I’ll have to hire someone else to take her place. Do you understand?”

  Again she nodded.

  Mangini sighed.

  “Elisabet never was able to pick up her pace. But you’re a good worker, Ellen,” he said. “I wish I had more like you. You don’t have any other sisters down there in the Hollow, do you?”

  No, she thought of saying, but I have a brother who’s dead. She merely shook her head.

  “Well, I need to ask you to take your sister home. And maybe you can explain things to her when she’s feeling better.” At first it looked as if he was going to shake Ellen’s hand, but then he simply turned on his heel and left.

  As they headed down Margaret Street, Elisabet leaned heavily on her sister’s arm. It felt strange to be outside in the warm spring weather in the middle of the day; a gentle breeze caressed their faces as they walked. When they came to Seventh Street, Elisabet let go of Ellen’s arm and said, “I can walk on my own.”

  “How does your hand feel?” asked Ellen.

  “It’s throbbing. But it’s better now. If only it doesn’t start bleeding again.”

  As they approached the stairs leading down to the Hollow, Elisabet paused to look below at the rooftops and the crowns of the trees. Then she began talking, her face averted.

  “I know I’ve made a mess of things,” she said. “You don’t need to tell me that. I heard everything the foreman said even though he was trying to speak quietly. And I know you were blamed for getting me hired.”

  “Unlucky hands,” said Ellen. “You’re not the first one to get a needle in her hand. And there are other jobs to be had.”

  Elisabet began unsteadily making her way down th
e stairs. She couldn’t hold on to the railing, so Ellen took her arm. Silently they walked side by side down the narrow staircase alongside the ravine and beneath the steep shadow of the railroad viaduct. Even though Ellen tried to put it out of her mind, she couldn’t help thinking about the dollar she would lose by being away from work for the remainder of the day.

  :: :: ::

  At night I would wake up with my hand throbbing. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it felt like a little animal was living its own life inside my hand. At first I was scared and kept an eye out for what the doctor had said I should watch for, in case the wound swelled up or my arm got big or if red streaks appeared under my skin. But nothing like that happened. It just throbbed, sometimes hard, sometimes weaker, as if my heart had moved down into my hand. I lay in the dark and listened to the others sleeping and felt my pulse beating, and it was actually quite calm even though it kept me awake. Mother wanted to wash the bandage, because after a while it turned completely gray, but Ellen thought it was best to leave it be, at least for the first week, while new skin formed underneath. So Mother did as she said. I didn’t really know what to do with myself, it no longer hurt to move my fingers, but I couldn’t wash the dishes or cook. Ellen said it would take whatever amount of time it needed to take, at least a couple of weeks, that’s what the doctor said. Ellen and Inga were away all day, and Mother had her own chores to do. It was lovely, warm weather, cooler than up on the street, because half the Hollow was always in shadow. Leonard kept me company whenever he could; he was working too, of course, but sometimes he’d have a day off in the middle of the week because he did shift work, which meant working for days in a row on the freight train to Fargo; he could do several trips in a week without getting off the train even once. I’d never been to Fargo, but he said the ride there was nice, even though there wasn’t a lot to see; in fact, it was like traveling across an ocean although not with water but with grass in every direction, and I thought that sounded lovely. And he said there were antelopes. I didn’t know what they were, but he said they were like deer only bigger and they could jump awfully high. Sometimes they got run over by the train, and then the birds would gather overhead to get themselves a good meal, and the next time you rode past there would be nothing left except maybe the horns. When Leonard was home we would go for a “promenade,” as he said, even though we never left the Hollow but just kept to ourselves, walking among the trees below the Hamm mansion, or near the spring on the hill. At first we’d sit in the shade down by Phalen Creek, but after a week the water began to smell really bad, the way it always did in the spring and summer. If nobody was looking, he liked to hold my hand. The houses stood very close together up on the hill, because then the slope got suddenly steep, and when you walked from the spring down to the open space in front of Inga’s house, there was a cranny between two houses that was always in shadow. That’s where carpenter Nilsson used to leave his ladder and any boards he had left over. You could slip in there from the wooded side without anyone seeing you and stand in the shade in case it was too hot outside. Leonard wanted to go in there because he said it was so hot, and he tugged at my good hand. When we got inside the shade he started kissing me; he’d done that before, but now he kept at it for a long time. We leaned against the wall and stood still as he breathed down my neck and I got very hot. Then he began touching me, like that boy did in Elliot Park, but this was Leonard, after all, and I didn’t have anything against it. Long ago I realized that one day he and I would end up together, but I wasn’t in any hurry. But he was, and maybe that’s because he was older. He touched me through my clothes, and we stood there and closed our eyes for a while. But when he began to fumble with my dress, I grabbed his hand and said I was scared somebody might come. Then he stopped. But I could see that he was mad even though he pretended not to be.

  A few days later Inga came over, like she often did, but it was me she wanted to talk to, not Mother. She thought we should take a little walk up on the street, so I went with her. After a while she started talking. She said she didn’t think it was good for a girl my age to just sit around at home. She thought I should start thinking about what I was going to do when my hand was healed instead of just waiting around for better days. So she wanted to show me a few places. We walked along Seventh Street, and she pointed out several laundries, really big places with heavy white smoke pouring out of pipes that stuck out of the wall in the alley next door. I could feel the heat, and it smelled of wet clothes. When Inga saw me wrinkle my nose, she said it was a good job, and you didn’t have to be Chinese to handle things when it got a little hot and damp, because lots of Swedes worked there, and you could keep yourself clean and the pay wasn’t much worse than at Klinkenfuer’s. “We won’t go inside today,” said Inga, “because that ugly bandage on your hand might frighten them, but I want you to think about it, and then I can come back here with you later.” On the way home, Inga said in a serious voice, “I know that Anna needs you girls to help out right now, but it’s uncertain how long Ellen will be staying here. So you have to think about how the family will manage things then.” It felt good to have Inga talking to me like that, because I realized she considered me to be a grown-up now, but I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that Ellen might look for work someplace else. “But where would she go?” I asked Inga. “She has a good job at Klinkenfuer’s, so why would she leave?” “You never know,” said Inga a bit sharply. “All of a sudden folks are just gone.” That’s all she said, and I understood it was best not to ask any more questions at the moment, because I realized she was thinking about what happened in Sweden when her parents died and that was something she never wanted to talk about.

  I didn’t really want to work in a laundry. Getting a needle through my hand was one thing, and it was starting to heal, but I’ve always been afraid of burning myself. I’ve often had nightmares about that. After the fire on Ellis Island when I was little, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though we were never truly in danger back then. For a while I thought of telling Inga when I had a chance, because she’d been there too. But then Leonard came back from Fargo and I talked to him instead, and he said that the laundries weren’t especially dangerous places. Of course you sometimes read in the newspaper about someone who got scalded from the steam and died, but the same thing could happen working on a train; lots of things were dangerous, but a person had to work. “And have you ever thought about how many people go to work at a laundry here in town?” he asked. “There must be several hundred.” And there were several thousand working on the railroad. It was true that from time to time the papers reported that someone had been killed by falling off a train or someone got badly burned in a laundry, but those incidents were only reported because they were especially bad cases. Most of the time nothing happened, but the papers didn’t write about that. “Just think,” he said, “what if it said Betsy Klar went to work and then she went home and nothing happened? There wouldn’t be space to report anything else, and who would want to read about that?” Lately he’d started calling me Betsy. He was the only one who did that. We were sitting on the hill behind Inga’s house, and he was chewing on a blade of grass when he said all this to me, and I gave him a sidelong glance and laughed a little, as if he was joking, but actually it all sounded very sensible. He talked about his job being dangerous, but things always went fine. And just imagine if nobody wanted to work as a brakeman, he said, then things would be even more dangerous. Soon they’d think up other ways to brake the train cars than having someone do it manually, and they were already doing that on passenger trains because the cars weren’t as heavy. But by the time that day arrived, he’d already be working as a fireman or even an engine driver. He talked for a while longer, and then he grabbed my good hand and wanted us to go in between the houses again, but this time I said no.

  The fact that he’d talked so much about the newspapers made me sit down and page through a few that Ellen had brought home. She often picked up papers that other
s had left behind, copies of the Svenska Amerikanska Posten and sometimes papers in English. I thought those were hard to read, but I was looking through the Swedish paper when Ellen came home from work. The paper had started printing color pictures on Saturday, it was the only newspaper that did that. “You’re reading the paper?” she asked me. “Yes,” I said. “I have nothing else to do.” But I thought it was annoying how a long article might end at the bottom of the page and then you had to search a while to find where it continued, sometimes on a different page. Ellen read the paper differently; she would choose a page at the beginning or at the end and read up and down each column, from start to finish. “What are you reading?” I asked her, and without looking up she told me it was the list of job openings. Then I felt a slight chill and thought about what Inga had said the other day. Later when Inga came over to have coffee with Mother, I told her that Leonard and I had talked about the laundry jobs, and he thought it might be worth a try too. “Did he really say that?” said Inga, giving me that look of hers that sometimes made you wonder whether she might need spectacles, because she would stare as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing. “Yes, he did,” I said, and I almost felt annoyed with her, but it was hard to be mad at Inga. Some people were a little scared of her, but I wasn’t. The next day I took off the bandage and the wound was practically healed. My hand was all yellow under the bandage, so at first I was afraid something was wrong, but then I realized the color was from the iodine the doctor had put on it. There was a big scab that tugged and itched, but I managed not to pick at it. Mother washed the bandage for me, and then hung it up to dry on the front stoop, and when I put it back on, it was still warm from the sun. When Leonard came over, he noticed at once that the bandage was clean, and he wanted to know how my hand was. “Almost as good as new,” I said. “By next week I can probably leave off the bandage permanently.” We took a walk up to the spring, and while we were sitting there, the Duluth train went past; you could barely see it above the rooftops, only the plume of smoke was visible, billowing between the tree branches. It was a fine, warm evening, and we sat there in silence until we could no longer hear the train. Then Leonard took me by the arm and quite firmly led me in between the houses to our little cranny that was empty except for the ladder and boards. The mud on the ground had dried and cracked so it was almost like a real floor. Leonard looked strangely serious, and he kissed me very hard, and it was hotter in there than usual, so I started to sweat. My hand throbbed under the bandage, but it didn’t hurt. He put his arms around me and then ran his hand down my skirt so it slid up against the wall, moving up inch by inch, and the wall plank felt warm against my skin as I stood there. “You’re not wearing anything underneath?” he said with a smile, and I told him that was probably something only posh ladies did, the kind that wore silk dresses, though I wasn’t sure if that was true, but if I worked at the laundry, maybe I’d find out things like that and also how to take care of fancy clothes.