by Ola Larsmo
Members of the Swedish Salvation Army had taken up position on the open space below Inga’s house. There were five of them, both men and women, with a trumpet, guitars, and a drum. People had begun to gather, curious, circling around, hovering a short distance away—Swedes and Italians and Poles. More were coming up the path from the bottom of the Hollow.
Then they began to play, singing in Swedish. Säg känner du det underbara namnet and O Store Gud. The girl sat down next to her on the bench outside Inga’s house where a young Polish couple with four children now lived. Sometimes Anna wondered whether they knew that Inga was the actual owner of the house. She had papers to prove it. But there was no use making a fuss. At least that family let them sit here. She closed her eyes for a while and let the sun play over her eyelids. Red and black. Then she looked up again and her gaze fell on the young soldiers who were singing with open, smiling faces. One of the girls seemed to her strangely familiar, and she raised her hand to shade her eyes as she squinted. The young woman felt Anna’s eyes on her, so she turned toward her and smiled as she kept singing and strummed her guitar. When their eyes met, Anna knew.
It was definitely Lieutenant Gustafsson. But what she couldn’t understand was how the girl could still look so young and unmarked, with a childishly plump face, rosy cheeks, and curly hair sticking out from under her bonnet. Anna pondered this for a while and then grew tired again. She closed her eyes and allowed the music to carry her as Elisabet’s or Inga’s daughter held her hand. It was warm, and yet she was freezing. She was there and yet she wasn’t. This is me. Anna. It was time to go now. She had lingered too long, but now it was time. I’ll enter, Lord, to dwell in peace with thee.
Swede Hollow
December 1956
IT WAS NOT A REAL WINTER. Snow lay in scattered patches on the withered-yellow lawns in the neighborhood. All November and December the temperature had hovered around the thirty degree mark. Snow fell and melted away, then lingered when the sun didn’t shine. Yet Ellen could tell that she wasn’t dressed warmly enough; her long poplin coat wasn’t sufficient to keep out the cold entirely. She’d parked the car up on Margaret Street and then walked the rest of the way toward what remained of the Hamm mansion. The site was no longer cordoned off, and she thought it would be safe to go in. Most of the structure still stood there, and if you drove past in the evening—which she’d done more times than she was willing to admit, even to herself—you might convince yourself it was still intact. Until, that is, you saw the evening sky between the splayed and charred beams of what had once been the peculiar tower. Now, in full daylight, Ellen saw how the windows had shattered and the brick walls were covered with soot. For several decades the house had been a home for invalids, and when the last inhabitants were moved out, the place had stood empty for a year. Then a teenage arsonist had done his best to level the building to the ground, using a can of gasoline and a cigarette lighter. Rumor had it that when the fire engines arrived, he was standing in front of the burning house and singing hymns at the top of his lungs.
Ellen climbed over what was left of the collapsed fence and stepped onto the lawn, which was now a meadow that no one had bothered to mow in years. The grass stood three feet high in frost-covered clumps that brushed against her legs. When she was a child, she was deathly afraid of venturing onto this very lawn, and she’d kept an eye out for the Hamm watchdogs. Her eyes automatically settled on the flowerbed where her enchanting glass balls had once lain, but there was now no trace of either plants or ornaments. Nothing but grass and piles of charred wood below the gaping window frames. An acrid smell of smoke and rotting wood still hung in the air.
The stench instantly carried her back to Ellis Island and memories of the fire that had haunted her through so many nights, when she would wake up and think she could smell smoke from the burning wood. When that happened, the only thing that would help was to get up and light a cigarette until the smell went away. She didn’t have to actually smoke the cigarette; she could simply let it burn out in the ashtray. Then she’d be able to go back to bed.
The big wrought iron fence facing the slope was gone, replaced by a lower one made of wood, which was leaning precariously. She went as close as she could and looked down at the Hollow.
The view was better than she’d dared hope: the trees on the slope were wintertime bare, allowing her an unobstructed view across the Hollow, even down to the open space in front of the Drewry Tunnel. Through the trees she glimpsed their own house way down, on the left, with its sunken tar paper roof. Inga’s house stood where it had always stood, a little farther up, towering over the other shanties on its stone foundation. The only thing she didn’t recognize was the small white trailer off to the side and behind Inga’s house; it had been hauled there and adorned with a whitewashed crucifix on the roof. She realized it must be some sort of simple chapel. The widow Lundgren’s old house, where Elisabet and Matt had lived during the years they spent in the Hollow before finally returning north, was already gone. She could see no trace of it at the spot where it had once stood, right across from Inga’s house. A lot had happened in the fifteen years since she’d last paid a visit down there.
She hadn’t heard from her sister in a year, but she knew they still lived just north of Two Harbors, where Matt had opened a carpentry shop, which he still ran even though he was getting on in years. They had never wanted to go back to Duluth.
Below, the fire department was on the scene. Men in protective dark overalls were moving insect-like among the houses. She could see a pair of big hoses winding their way out of the opening to the Drewry Tunnel; they were no doubt hooked up to the only fire hydrant up on Beaumont Street. She knew exactly where it stood. But at the moment the firemen were walking around with small spray canisters, drenching the house walls with what was presumably gasoline or some other flammable substance, although she couldn’t yet smell it from where she stood.
A crowd had gathered on the small ledge above the Drewry Tunnel on the other side of the Hollow. When she looked around, she saw that she was the only one on this side. She wondered whether any of the people over there were among the Hollow’s last inhabitants who had now come to watch their houses go up in flame and smoke. No, they were probably just curiosity seekers from the neighborhood up on Railroad Island. Nobody would want to see their own home burn.
And yet she was here. According to yesterday’s Minneapolis Tribune, the last residents had been fifty or so Mexican seasonal workers who had since moved into what the paper described as “decent housing.” She assumed it was their little chapel she saw behind Inga’s house; it too was about to go up in smoke. The Tribune had reported that the city’s health department had “discovered” that people were still living in the Hollow, and that Phalen Creek was “contaminated” with E. coli. The words had filled Ellen with a fury she couldn’t put into words. Nor could she explain how she felt to Sol, who had thought her anger over a newspaper article so comical that he’d laughed until his mirth dissolved into another, menacing coughing fit.
Down below, the firemen were moving back and forth, seemingly at random. Some of them even climbed up the slope to the open space below the Hamm Brewery, where they stopped to have a smoke, and she found herself sadistically hoping they’d catch fire and melt like tin soldiers.
She had clearly arrived much too early and briefly pondered whether she really wanted to wait around in the cold. But she stayed where she was. Sol had told her he’d be fine on his own, gesturing toward the living room. He had the TV and his Sports Illustrated, and the respirator was within reach. If he wanted a beer, he could manage to drag himself to the kitchen. When Ellen closed the front door behind her and went out to the car, she could practically feel his sense of contentment reaching her through the wall of the house. He enjoyed his time alone, even though he would never admit it. “We didn’t get married so you could be my nurse,” he’d sputtered one evening when they were having one of their arguments, which were rare these days.
Then the first big flames appeared, licking around the corner of Inga’s house far below. When Ellen turned her head, she could see how the fire had already reached the roof ridge of their own house. Suddenly she heard inside herself the sound of melting spring snow dripping from the eaves at daybreak, a sound that had often awakened her and Elisabet as they lay freezing in their too-short beds. (And she recalled, in a sudden flash of memory, the way her sister would wedge her cold feet between her own warm ones, which always made her give Elisabet a punch on the shoulder, though that never woke her.)
At first the fire moved slowly. But then it was as if the flames had worked their way through the winter-damp exterior of the wooden façade and reached the dry core. She stood and watched as the roof of their own house abruptly fell in, and new, yellow flames shot out through the remaining beams. Then the walls collapsed in a cloud of sparks and white smoke. That was that, she thought.
The firemen had gone over to the water-filled hoses and stood ready in case they might need to limit the spread of the fire. But from what Ellen understood, there was nothing in the Hollow that would be spared: even the contamination would be burned away, and the last shameful area of the city would be cleansed through fire.
As she stood there, she wished she’d had her grown children here to show them the spectacle. Not because she wanted their company, but so she could say vengefully, Now it’s too late. They had never visited the Hollow. In the beginning she was the one who had kept them away, as she now acknowledged. Later, when she had in fact wanted to show them some of the area, they hadn’t displayed the slightest interest. And by then everyone they might have known was gone. She didn’t really blame them.
Carl might have come with her if she’d asked him; he was nice and was willing to humor her impulses if he was in the mood. But he now lived in Phoenix, for the sake of the climate. She had many times greatly regretted continuing the name, sullied as it was with death. Sol hadn’t objected, though he insisted the boy should be given the double name of Carl Abraham, and that was what happened. But nobody called him anything but Carl. Not her, not Sol. His classmates had made a valiant attempt to nickname him Charlie, but it never caught on. He’d continued to be called simply Carl. If only she’d known how alike he would look as a child to her dead little brother, so alike that she sometimes feared what she’d done by giving him the same name. In 1942, when he’d disappeared in the Pacific, she was certain that she’d given him a curse that would be the death of him. When she found out that he’d been wounded in some strange place called Guadalcanal, she’d sat up all night in the dark living room, silently begging him for forgiveness. But he came back home with a Purple Heart, his arm in a sling, and a wound that never properly healed. It continued to torment him through several long Minnesota winters until his wife, Ruth, convinced him that they should move to dry, hot Arizona. After that they met mostly for Thanksgiving and sometimes Christmas. But these days Sol had a hard time handling long car rides.
Ellen had never managed to get AnnaBeth to come to the Hollow, no matter how hard she’d tried. The very idea of her mother’s foreign origins frightened her.
Now the cluster of houses below was in flames, and the sound of the fire reached all the way up to where she was standing. A hot wind gusted up the slope, making the bare tree branches sway; all around her the frost on the grass was slowly melting. As she watched, the roof of Inga’s house silently fell in and the walls began to lean. The small white trailer chapel was also burning, with a thicker black smoke that swirled up to her, making her eyes fill with tears.
All of a sudden she wondered what she was doing there, so she turned on her heel and left. As she fumbled for the car keys in her pocket, she saw the light from the fire flicker over the soot-covered brick façade of what had once been the Hamm mansion. When she got beyond the hot fiery wind coming from the Hollow, she realized how cold she was and began hurrying toward Margaret Street and into the white glow of the streetlights.
Yet she sat in her car for a long time, watching the light from the fire in her rearview mirror.
She was pondering one thing that she couldn’t forget, something that slowly worked its way forward through all those years until it was no longer hidden away but emerged as a truth about her life. If a diffident and unassuming man by the name of David Lundgren, more than seventy years ago, hadn’t become insanely obsessed with the equally reserved Agnes Karin, none of them might have ended up where they did and lived the lives they had. Those were the circumstances she’d pieced together from what people told her; it was the letter from Jonathan Lundgren to his mother back in Sweden that had set everything in motion toward this particular spot on the map. She no longer really remembered how any of them looked. They weren’t even related. But there was no getting around the fact that it was because of them that she now sat here in a freezing car on a dark backstreet, waiting for that idea to once again settle in her mind, the way a cat curls up and falls asleep on the living room sofa.
Finally she turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb, heading down Seventh Street toward University Avenue, which would take her into Minneapolis and across the river at Hennepin to Lyndale and toward their home in Edina on the other side of the city. She could no longer remember where the glass balls had ended up. But in the back of her mind, and at any time, she could still hear the soothing, dry, squeaking sound they used to make.
Swede Hollow
June 2007
DURING LUNCH BREAK he went to get his bicycle parked outside the university building and put on his helmet, lemon yellow and brand new. It was a present from Judy, and he’d promised her that he’d wear it from now on. A cloud-free sky and a light breeze from the river. He took Midway down toward Como Park, pedaling fast on his Trek Domane bike with the graphite-gray aluminum frame. Today he wanted to feel the speed.
He took a short cut through the park’s open, grassy areas until he reached the bike path, which he usually took all the way around the lake. When he came out on Como Boulevard again, he was starting to sweat, and the tracks on the railroad crossing made the thin, hard tires of his bike rattle so much that his whole body vibrated and he laughed out loud. A few workshops and low wooden houses flew past on both sides.
He’d calculated it would take him about half an hour in each direction, but now he realized that had been optimistic. He wouldn’t make it back in time for the afternoon meeting. But he kept on pedaling through the early summer heat. They’d probably be annoyed whether he came in late and sweaty or didn’t show up at all; it was too nice a day to sit inside, and he’d given himself a specific task to carry out.
He biked along the sidewalk of Phalen Boulevard for quite a ways; it was almost one o’clock and the heat was starting to feel unbearable. He hadn’t brought any water with him. He looked around for a neighborhood store but didn’t see any nearby, so he decided to keep going.
Then he turned onto the Bruce Vento Trail, leaving the traffic behind. The bike path veered away from the street, taking him down a steep hill and through the greenery. He passed the old railroad viaduct below Phalen Boulevard and suddenly everything fell quiet. The road now followed what was previously the Duluth train embankment, and unpruned foliage and bushes reached out over the pavement. He sl
owed down and kept to the shady side. From Minnehaha Avenue high overhead came the sound of traffic, muted and faraway, as if he were underwater.
Now it was downhill the whole way. Farther down the hill he saw what had been the Hamm Brewery, long since shut down, with its enormous smokestack. He released the brakes and let the bike carry him until he came to the open space where the path split. That’s where he stopped, unsure which way to go.
He hadn’t set foot in the Hollow since he was a child. This morning he’d prepared for the excursion by studying a bike map, and he was still thinking it would be easy to find his way. But he hadn’t remembered how big the Hollow was, and he had no idea where his family’s house had once stood. He recalled his great-aunt holding his hand and pointing urgently, There. But it had been winter back then, and he’d seen only trees.
It didn’t matter now. Nowhere in the Hollow was there any remaining trace of human habitation. The place looked the way you might picture an area of untamed nature.
He biked a little farther until he heard from below the murmur of Phalen Creek, where the water, almost invisible, flowed between the shrubbery covering the slopes. Sweat ran down into his eyes, and he was very thirsty. He unfastened his bike helmet and wiped his forehead.
For a second he felt discouraged, as if the whole expedition had been a mistake, some sort of half-baked idea. Yet even this morning he’d pictured it all so clearly: this was an important task for him. He didn’t know why, and it was probably just for his own sake, but he’d made the decision, and now here he was. He looked around. He seemed to be all alone in the Hollow; the sun was blazing down on him from its zenith. Then he cleared his throat and shouted as loud as he could, “Ancestors of mine!”
The sound of his own voice echoed across the slope.