by Ola Larsmo
Ellen had never really understood what sort of town Duluth was. It didn’t seem to have any open spaces or parks, and the streets were laid out along the hillsides like terraces, all of them on their way somewhere else. The whole town seemed to her to be built on slopes. No one went down to the shore of Lake Superior, because that’s where the railroad tracks were, as well as warehouses that extended as far as the eye could see. It was impossible to get any overview of the town, and the wind blew constantly through the long, straight streets. But she found her way down to the train station.
Her parents were standing outside the waiting room door, and her father was holding an all-too-familiar worn suitcase. It was the one they’d brought from Sweden so long ago. From a distance they looked small and stooped, and Ellen hurried forward, as if afraid the wind might blow them away. But when she got closer and they looked up, she saw the steely look in her father’s eyes.
“Where’s Elisabet?” he asked.
Anna nodded and managed a thin smile.
“She’s at home,” Ellen told them. “She’s not very strong. It comes and goes.”
When she said that, her mother gave a start and stepped forward as if to hurry on, but she had no idea which way to go.
“She’s waiting for us,” said Ellen. “We’ll take the streetcar.”
She turned to lead the way, but her father stood still, with one hand resting on his wife’s shoulder, as if to hold her back.
“You’re not to pay for anything else,” he said. “We’ll walk.”
“But it’s a long way. And the streetcar isn’t expensive.”
He simply stood there, and at first Ellen thought they were going to have a big argument over this. But then Anna simply took her by the arm, and the two of them began walking up the hill. Ellen didn’t look back, yet she knew her father was following, staying a few steps behind them, as if to signal his disapproval.
They sat across from each other at the very back of the streetcar, which shook so much as it climbed the hill that it was hard to talk. Finally her father said something, and she leaned forward to catch his words when he repeated them. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear to indicate she was listening. He recognized the gesture and smiled briefly, a warm smile that for a moment took her back to another time and place. Then it passed.
“I asked you whether Sol is here.”
Ellen shook her head.
“Somebody had to stay home and see to the children,” she said apologetically.
“So they’re not coming either.”
It was not a question, but she shook her head.
“They didn’t know Carl,” she said quietly, as if to herself.
“We didn’t either,” said Anna without taking her eyes off the window. “Not anymore.”
There was nothing to see out there except the winter darkness and an occasional streetlight. After a while they were the only passengers in the streetcar.
“Why didn’t he come to us?” said her father.
That wasn’t meant to be a question either, and Ellen realized it was something he’d been repeating to himself, sometimes out loud, but most often silently: Why didn’t he come to us?
None of them spoke again until it was time to get off the streetcar.
When they came into the kitchen, they found Elisabet sitting there, waiting for them. On the table was a single, lit candle. Otherwise the room was dark. She got up and stood there, motionless. In the dim light she suddenly looked so small and girlish.
“Mother,” she said. “Father.”
She curtsied. They were standing in the doorway. Gustaf was still holding the suitcase, as if he didn’t dare set it down, afraid of shattering the fragile peace that had now closed so mercilessly around them. Anna stepped forward and took Elisabet’s hands. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other without saying a word. Then Elisabet collapsed into her mother’s arms. She started crying again, soundlessly, her back shaking. And Ellen thought, How small Mother has suddenly become.
She hadn’t personally viewed Carl’s body, which someone else had washed and dressed, probably Mrs. Janson. But Elisabet had seen him and, in a lucid moment, she said that he was unmarked and looked as if he were simply asleep. Now a coffin newly made of unpainted light pine rested in the middle of the wagon bed. It was the only bright spot in the yard; everything around them was gray. The wagon was headed for Oneota Cemetery, which wasn’t far, so the mourners could walk. It had been decided that Elisabet and her father should sit next to the wagon driver, and everyone else would follow on foot.
A group of people had gathered to make their way to the cemetery in the gray morning light—so many dark-clad figures. They were already standing in the cramped inner courtyard when the family stepped outside into the cold. It was overcast with a chance of snow.
Slowly the wagon set off. Ellen watched anxiously as the coffin began to clatter when they reached the uneven surface of the uphill slope. She reminded herself that the lid had been screwed down tight, but then she felt ashamed at the thought and lowered her eyes. Anna was clinging to her arm, looking so small and fragile. With her other hand she clutched the ends of her black shawl, which she had wound twice around her head because of the wintry cold. But she wore no gloves.
The wagon soon pulled away from the mourners, but the others in the group knew the way. Ellen didn’t recognize any of them except for Mrs. Janson and the tall man named Matt, who was silently walking at the very back. She had no idea who the others were. Neighbors, she thought, or maybe fellow workers. She had thought people would stay away because Carl had been in prison, even though it was for something he hadn’t done. But she saw fifteen mourners, not counting Matt and Mrs. Janson. The road continued uphill, the way every road seemed to do in this town.
Later Ellen would not remember what the pastor had said. She could recall the faces of those standing nearest, but her own gaze was swallowed up by the grave. The pale winter light was such that the freshly dug grave opened to an impenetrable, steep black shadow. It was impossible to look down into the hole without speculating on how deep it must be. Six feet. It might as well have been a door open to the night. The coffin stood next to it, with the ropes at the ready. But not yet. And she noticed that her sister, who stood beside her, was also feeling dizzy from the darkness at their feet, yet she too kept looking down into the grave. Neither of them sang along with the simple hymn, and only a few days later Ellen tried in vain to remember whether the words had been in Swedish or not.
Then the moment arrived. Four men stepped forward and placed the ropes around their shoulders. They were familiar with the procedure; they’d done this before. The pine coffin looked so lightweight as it slowly sank into the darkness. The men didn’t seem to strain at all; they looked calm and composed. Then it disappeared forever. The ropes came back up into the light.
That was when Elisabet fell to her knees on the frost-covered grass. At first Ellen thought her sister wanted to follow the coffin into the grave, so she stepped forward and placed her hands on Elisabet’s shoulders, but through the thick wool of her coat, her body felt as hard as stone. At first she refused to budge. She did not move closer to the edge of the grave, nor did she get to her feet. She stayed where she was, unyielding and withdrawn.
Gustaf had also taken a step forward, but Ellen met his eye and shook her head. They looked at each other, as he stood very close to his daughters.
As if from a great distance the pastor again began to speak. He said a few brief remarks in English, and Ellen heard the sound of frozen gravel falling onto the lid of the coffin down below, but her eyes were fixed on Elisabet’s blonde head. She had to remain alert; anything could happen. But her sister didn’t move as she knelt there, and that’s where she stayed for the rest of the graveside service.
Afterward everyone hurried away in small groups, as if to leave the family in peace. The pastor came over and said a few words in English to Gustaf, who shook his head as if he didn’t unde
rstand, though Ellen knew he did. Then her father put on his cap and they both squatted down next to Elisabet. Speaking in a gentle voice that Ellen hadn’t heard since they were children, he said it was time to go. Then they each took Elisabet by the arm and lifted her up. She seemed to weigh so little, and her feet hardly touched the grass. She was still staring down at the black opening of the grave, and she didn’t say a word. The three of them then walked arm in arm toward the cemetery gate, with Anna following two steps behind, until all of them were out on the cobblestone street.
Elisabet looked around as if just awaking, and now she was able to stand on her own. They chatted with her for a good while, as if they wanted to make sure she was really there. She seemed to be herself again and responded lucidly. They talked about whether to go back to the apartment building, where Mrs. Janson was no doubt waiting to serve coffee. Then Elisabet gave a bland smile, seemingly out of habit. As her family hunched their shoulders against the cold wind blowing off Lake Superior, she said, “I suppose it’s time to go home.”
“Yes,” Ellen heard herself say without looking at her parents, who were standing off to one side, like a couple of shadows at the edge of her vision. “Yes. Let’s go home.”
Swede Hollow
May 1928
GUSTAF HAD ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED by the way the big wheels of the locomotives turned, the way the eccentric shaft started up and then, moving back and forth, actually shoved the wheels around and set the whole enormous engine in motion, along with all the train cars. He’d been thinking about it ever since that accident happened so many years ago, the one that had cost engine driver Rossi his life. The way the eccentric rod had shot straight through the steel wall and speared his body, presumably before he had time to notice anything. It must have shot through with tremendous force. And yet, what pressure, depending on a single little nut and bolt that had to carry all the force that was needed, not just once but for years. If folks knew that, Gustaf sometimes said, they’d never dare travel by train.
Ever since he’d started working inside at the locomotive repair shop, he’d pondered these sorts of things, sitting in the evening with pen and paper and trying to figure out how the various mechanisms functioned. Not that he was personally responsible for such matters—that was the job of the foremen, who told the men what had to get done. But Gustaf lived in dread of making a mistake. Somebody had made a mistake and that had cost Rossi his life. A cracked nut or a loose screw, and everything could literally be transformed into a hell of twisted metal and hissing steam.
Anna told him not to brood about it so much. After all, he knew what he was supposed to do when asked, and he was very handy.
These days they had the evenings to themselves. In spite of everything that had happened, Elisabet was still living up in Duluth with Matt, her new Finnish beau whom they’d hardly seen except at the funeral. And Ellen and her mysterious Solomon, whom they’d met only at the wedding and on a few occasions afterward, lived far away on the other side of Minneapolis. So Gustaf and Anna had plenty of time to talk and pay attention to other things. But he tired more easily now, and that was one reason Foreman Lawson had finally found him a job indoors. Yet Gustaf couldn’t get thoughts of the mechanism out of his head. Especially the part about the circular disk.
Lately Gustaf had been dwelling more and more on matters like the “eccentric,” which was often talked about at the shop. He picked up words and associations during the course of his work, without really thinking about it. One evening he sat down and cut up pieces of cardboard from a box he’d found behind Larson’s grocery store and brought home. He asked Anna for some thread and needles. Then he sat with his carpenter’s pencil and her sewing box in front of him on the table and tried to put together wheels and axles so they would move. He hadn’t worked with needle and thread since he stopped making shoes, and his fingers quickly faltered. But finally he got the model put together.
“All right,” he said, showing Anna the model, which he’d placed on the table. “The piston goes down here and shoves the rod that way. And then the wheels turn. What’s so ingenious is that first you get movement that goes around like a wheel, and then it changes to an up-and-down motion—which is transformed again into a turning motion, without losing too much power. That’s the part that’s so strange.”
He tugged at the cardboard pieces to show her what he meant, and she politely pretended to be interested.
It was one thing to figure out how things functioned so that he wouldn’t seem like a Swedish idiot on the job, but in fact he was utterly fascinated with the mechanisms. For decades he had worked alongside train engines, observing their movement out of the corner of his eye, and over time he’d become more and more hypnotized by the motion. The wheels turned, the eccentric rod moved back and forth, but then there was the circular disk, the eccentric itself, which drove the whole locomotive by virtue of being offset. It rotated poorly, as he said to himself; the disk was the misfit detail, the one thing that didn’t function like all the other parts. But without it, the train could not be driven forward. It moved out of sync with the rest of the machinery, as if it actually was loose and risked coming off. But that’s how it was supposed to be. Otherwise nothing would function.
Gustaf tried to explain to Jonathan Lundgren what he was thinking, because there weren’t many others he could talk to about these matters. But Jonathan gave him an odd look and finally said, “You probably shouldn’t talk so much about the eccentric when anyone is listening, or pretty soon they’ll be making that your nickname at work.”
And of course Jonathan was right. Yet there was something about it that meant Gustaf couldn’t let go. It was the most important part of the machinery, the one thing on which everything depended because it did not move in a balanced and harmonic way. It was purposely different, and it was indispensable. This signified a truth that he couldn’t put into words. He was unable to explain what he was thinking either to his wife or to his best friend and workmate.
But there was a deeper reason why he was having such a hard time letting these thoughts go. It was because he had the same sort of movement going on inside him. All of a sudden something would swerve inside his chest, catching him in midstride so he almost blacked out and for a moment his pulse would quicken. Then everything would return to normal. At first this didn’t happen very often, but gradually it began occurring almost once a week, on his way to work as he walked up the stairs to Seventh Street, or on the steep slope while going through the tunnel toward Beaumont Street. Whenever it happened, he would pause for a moment and lean against the stair railing or tunnel wall as he thought, It’s the eccentric—the part that has been rotating so asymmetrically and yet prompted forward motion so that you got where you were supposed to go. It was that specific, unbalanced part that was always necessary for a functioning machine. Then the sensation would pass.
Yet Gustaf knew that wasn’t really the crux of the matter.
“Eighteen ninety-four and the Pullman strike,” said Jonathan Lundgren. “You weren’t here at the time. And the workshop strike of 1922. Those were the worst years. In ’94 and ’95, I ended up working as a lumberjack for a while, but then I was able to come back here. A lot of men couldn’t. I was so young back then, and I had no idea what was really going on.”
Lately Lundgren’s hair had begun to turn white; it started with his beard stubble and then worked its way up to his head. Gustaf thought this seemed strange because his friend’s face still looked young, with only a few wrinkles; or maybe it was because he was so used to seeing Jonathan on a daily basis that he simply didn’t notice the changes creeping in. In Gustaf’s mind, Jonathan looked the way he’d always looked. And he still moved like a young man; time didn’t seem to have slowed him down any. That was not the case with Inga. After giving birth to two children, she found it increasingly difficult to get around. She never complained, but it was evident that she was in pain whenever she was forced to walk any distance.
Inga k
ept bringing over newspapers and brochures from Chicago that she’d subscribed to, both in Swedish and English. These publications wrote about such things as the execution of the Italians Sacco and Vanzetti over in Massachusetts. Gustaf didn’t care for the fact that his friends Jonathan and Inga talked so much about things that took place far away in other states, incidents that would only provoke anxiety if you let yourself get too immersed in them. Every day Gustaf was forced to listen to Jonathan’s opinions about one thing or another. Although he found it interesting to know that Sacco had apparently also started out as a shoemaker.
Personally, he’d always been more inclined to take one day at a time. He didn’t know how anyone could do any different; you had to deal with whatever was right in front of you, otherwise you’d never make it to the next problem that needed to be solved. If you raised your eyes too far off what you were dealing with at the moment, you’d fall over and not be able to get up again.
Gustaf didn’t understand what was at the heart of it all, but everything led back to David, who had now been in prison for more than twenty-five years. The thought that his brother had apparently not committed the actual murder had been gnawing at Jonathan ever since the first time he’d told Gustaf about it. This was a matter of justice, and Lundgren gradually got more and more obsessed with the issue. He couldn’t make peace with the situation the way David seemed to have done. The more it gnawed at him, the bigger the hole became where justice ought to be. But it often got to be too much for Gustaf when Lundgren started ranting about the subject. He would simply give up trying to follow his arguments, even though he walked along beside him every day, listening to him say things like, “Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, just like Joe Hill was.” But when Lundgren tried to drag Carl, Elisabet’s Carl, into the discussion and repeat Inga’s claim that the boy had been unjustly sent to St. Cloud, Gustaf could no longer keep silent. “Leave Carl out of it!” he said.