Swede Hollow Read online

  Swede Hollow

  Swede Hollow

  A Novel

  Ola Larsmo

  Translated by Tiina Nunnally

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis

  Frontispiece: Swede Hollow, circa 1910. Photograph by Albert Charles Munson. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

  The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Swedish Arts Council for the translation of this book.

  The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Hognander Family Foundation.

  Swede Hollow was first published in Swedish by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden. English translation published by arrangement with Nordin Agency AB, Sweden.

  Lyrics from “This Land Is Your Land” words and music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO copyright 1956, 1958, 1970, 1972 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. and Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, New York. Administered by Ludlow Music, Inc. International copyright secured. Made in U.S.A. All rights reserved, including public performance for profit. Reprinted by permission.

  Copyright 2016 by Ola Larsmo

  Translation copyright 2019 by Tiina Nunnally

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  ISBN 978-1-4529-5690-9 (ebook)

  A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  For Rita

  As I went walking I saw a sign there

  And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

  But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

  That side was made for you and me.

  —WOODY GUTHRIE, “This Land Is Your Land”

  Emigrant Contract

  Between C. W. Hällström, authorized emigrant agent in Göteborg,

  and the emigrants listed below.

  I, C. W. Hällström, do bind myself herewith, in the manner detailed below, to convey from Göteborg to New York in North America the Klar family, consisting of five persons, in return for an already fully paid and received fee of 118 Swedish kronor, which includes, upon arrival in America, the usual disembarkation fees.

  I

  Queenstown, Cork

  June 1897

  ANNA KLAR FOUND IT STRANGE that the fog lay so thick over the sea and land even though the sun was already up and clearly visible in the sky. She hadn’t seen anything like it since she was a child. And she recalled, right then and there, a morning when she was very young and had gone out before getting properly dressed. At that moment she’d imagined that she could gather up the heavy fog like an armful of wool she might hold close and carry back to show her mother. Even though she was freezing, she had gone all the way out to the ditch, which was a good distance beyond the fence. In the fog she saw a couple of long-legged silhouettes, and she took several steps forward with her arms spread wide but didn’t manage to clasp anything at all. In the winter-hardened field stood two birds, tall as men, with slender necks that slowly, as if in a dream, swiveled in her direction. Their eyes were shiny black buttons. She looked at them and then turned and silently ran back to the house. She had never seen such big birds before. Later she found out they were cranes.

  Now, inside the white fog, Anna could hear the shriek of gulls. She and the others sat in silence along the rail of the vessel’s foredeck, where they had gained free access after the seamen had opened the hatch and rolled away the sailcloth that otherwise covered the opening. Although it was early June, the morning was unexpectedly chilly. She was already hungry and would soon return below deck to wake the others, who seemed to have settled into the sort of clammy sleep that can come over people in stuffy, cramped spaces with not enough air. The panic she had initially felt when she opened her eyes in the stifling darkness had slowly dissipated out here under the white vault of the sky.

  She was sitting with three of the older women whose names she hadn’t yet learned and whose language she didn’t speak. She thought they might be from England. Or maybe Germany. They didn’t say a word as they looked toward land, their eyes focused on something she couldn’t see. One of them was smoking a pipe. All three had dark shawls draped over their shoulders. They had looked up and nodded, neither friendly nor unfriendly, before turning their gaze once more toward the invisible coastline.

  A blast from the big steam whistle high overhead shattered the silence. And as if the sound had somehow set the air moving, a very tall and pointed church tower took shape out of nothing.

  This was her time alone. Soon she would clamber down the worn wooden ladder, blackened from thousands of hands, to the steerage deck and make sure the others were awake for the morning porridge. The seagulls glided out of the fog on rigid outspread wings, looking exactly like the gulls back home. So far nothing had happened. This was the first morning after they had left England behind.

  “There should be five cups,” said Gustaf. “We bought five.”

  He peered at Anna from under the lock of hair falling into his face. Elisabet and Ellen stood behind her, each of them clinging to the waistband of her apron, as she’d taught them to do when onboard ship. Carl lay motionless on the mattress, but he was awake now, looking at them expectantly, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Again she searched the jute sack at the foot of the mattress, running one hand along the outside, the other rummaging through bundles of clothing all the way down to where Gustaf’s concertina lay hidden. Nothing. She felt his gaze on her back, unwavering and, it seemed to her, more and more stern, while out of the corner of her eye she saw the line growing longer at the foot of the ladder. They were going to be the very last in line. Then she noticed part of the straw mattress sticking up next to Carl’s head. She turned away, without meeting Gustaf’s eyes, and reached down. Her fingertips touched metal.

  “Here it is,” Anna said, keeping her tone even. Gustaf nodded curtly and headed for the line of people. The girls stayed where they were, holding on to her apron. She picked up Carl in her arms and handed him his cup. He must have been the one to hide it there. He’d grown so big, it seemed almost as if he’d done nothing but grow since they’d left Göteborg. The boy took the cup, then turned to look over her shoulder, searching for his father. They all went to join him in line.

  Behind her stood one of the older women she recognized from the crossing to England. Mrs. Lundgren was a widow traveling with her son, a dark-haired young man named David. Anna didn’t know Mrs. Lundgren’s first name. She seemed a retiring sort of person.

  “You should tie them together,” Mrs. Lundgren said now. “Ask the steward for one of those leather straps. There’s already a hole for them in the handle, but they don’t give out the straps because they want you to pay for them. Tie the cups together so they won’t get lost again. The same goes for the bowls and spoons.”

  Anna felt herself blushing. She didn’t know how the old woman had discerned their problem, although of course the door to “1A—married quarters,” as their section was called, had stood open. She mutely nodded her thanks and then pushed forward in line behind Gustaf as she wondered what to say to the steward and what “strap” might be called in English. She felt the girls’ hands holding tight to her apron and tugging in opposite directions, like
a pair of weights that kept her balanced and steady on the slightly sloping deck.

  Breakfast, which was served out on the foredeck, consisted of porridge and bread, still quite fresh and presumably brought from shore. Weak coffee was also served with the food. In a few days there probably won’t be much of either, Anna thought, trying to get the girls to drink their coffee, even though it wasn’t something they were used to. Elisabet made faces at the taste.

  Gustaf had sat down on a bench and was holding Carl on his lap, putting his own big cap on the boy’s head. It slid down over Carl’s eyes, making him laugh. Anna wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders and went over to the rail. The fog had gone. The church on shore was now clear to see, and what she’d earlier taken for an unusually pointed tower was actually just the beginning of one. The slender spire was still encased in scaffolding. In front of the church’s gray façade stood a row of small buildings, alternately brown and gray and almost impossible to distinguish from the rock face behind. And on their way out to the Majestic were two small, overloaded boats in which black-clad passengers were crowded all the way forward into the bow. They looked like insects, and everywhere she could see their big rucksacks, which some people were actually holding over the side, probably because every last inch of space had already been taken.

  Anna wasn’t happy about their reaching the ship. Only now did she realize why there were a few empty bunks in their section of the married quarters; she had thought they were simply lucky. She felt herself breathing faster, and even though it was getting colder, beads of sweat formed along her hairline.

  “There certainly are a lot of them. It’s going to get crowded.”

  She glanced over at Inga, who was from the west coast of Sweden. She’d talked to her during the train ride from Hull. Inga had dark hair and brown eyes and was no doubt a few years younger than she was. Inga had explained that she was traveling alone, headed for St. Paul in Minnesota to “find a place.” It wasn’t clear whether this meant a job she hoped to land or a need for greater space. She was short and plump and always wore a black apron with a floral pattern.

  “And we probably won’t be able to talk to them,” said Inga. “I’ve heard the Irish sometimes speak English, but more often they rely on their own language, which is impossible to understand. Do you speak any English?”

  Anna shook her head, a bit unsettled by the young woman’s talkative nature. “A few words,” she said then. “But where we’re headed, I think we can manage fine with Swedish.”

  “Maybe so,” said Inga. “Where is it you’re headed?”

  “Gustaf has several different places in mind,” she replied. “I suppose we’ll probably go to Minnesota. But he also says there’s a shoe factory in New York, so maybe we’ll stay there for a while until we make enough money to move on.”

  Inga shook her head.

  “Everything is more expensive in New York,” she said. “You’ll see. Some people get stuck there because they think they’ll be able to earn enough wages to save up for traveling farther. But if you go just a little farther inland, it’s easier to find work and things aren’t so costly.”

  “How do you know all this?” Anna asked, hoping she didn’t sound too nosy.

  “My cousin has lived in both New York and Minnesota,” said Inga. “She sent letters home and told us about everything. But now she’s back in Sweden, and she helped pay part of my ticket.”

  The sound of voices and boat motors was getting closer, and Anna saw that both ferries had begun to slow as they came alongside the hull of the Majestic.

  “It’s probably best if we go below,” said Inga. “Bring your children and husband and sit on your bunks. When the newcomers see how many you are, maybe they won’t spread out so much.”

  Inga nodded and then headed for the far hatch, which led down to the quarters for unmarried women. The younger woman seemed to take everything in stride, while Anna couldn’t get herself to budge. She swayed back and forth on the balls of her feet as she tried to keep her balance on the unsteady deck. Yet the ship still lay at anchor, and the inlet was calm, the surface of the water merely rippled by a light wind from shore. A week, she thought, eight days. It will go fast. She repeated these words to herself several times, like a litany, and the cadence finally got her moving. Behind her Anna heard the thudding of boat motors, and the sharp clang of a church bell. Voices speaking unfamiliar languages glided across the water, answered by the sailors on deck who began lowering the gangplank.

  The family who took the unoccupied bunks had eight members, and their name was Gavin. That much she understood. Five of them—the parents and three little girls—were quartered in the married section, while the two older sons and a daughter were housed in the sections for bachelors and single women fore and aft. They protested when the steward said they had to be separated, and that led to a heated exchange. Anna and her family merely sat on their bunks the whole time, pretending not to pay attention. She saw Gustaf’s jaw tense as he clenched his teeth without saying a word.

  The steward led away the three youths, still protesting, and then the father of the family, a short, pale man with a mustache and unruly brown hair, turned to Gustaf and said something in English. It sounded like a jocular remark, but Gustaf merely shook his head. The man gave a brief nod and turned back to his own family, which now occupied a large portion of the long and narrow space. Anna felt as if it were her family that was now quartered with the Gavin clan instead of the other way around.

  There were no portholes, which made the space stuffy and sweltering. Onboard were eight hundred people traveling in steerage class. Inga had told her that. Down here below the foredeck, they numbered close to three hundred, while there were many more in the other third-class section in the stern, even though the space was about the same size. Anna refused to think about what that must be like; it wasn’t something she could even investigate, because the section for cabin passengers was located in between, with locked gates on either side.

  There were people everywhere, but before they docked at Queenstown she had thought they would have part of the between-deck to themselves. That was no longer the case. In their section of the quarters for married people, there were now thirty adults, and she awoke every morning with a pounding headache and a growing sense of panic. The girls, who slept with her in the same bunk, were restless too, constantly kicking and wriggling. Later she would ask herself whether she’d slept at all during the crossing. Some of the Finns at the far end had hung up an old, tattered sheet on the other side of the doorway that led to the ladder, partitioning off the space and creating a semblance of privacy. But that left her family on the other side and alone with the Gavins, who talked far into the night. It was mostly the mother who talked. She was a small, thin woman who always wore a black shawl as she carried the youngest daughter in her arms. She would subject her husband to endless torrents of words. Eventually he would snarl a retort and then try to escape by going up on deck or turning over in his bunk. Anna had no idea what they were saying. And even if she had understood English, she didn’t think that was the language the woman was speaking. Her harangues were filled with hissing sounds, rising and falling in tone. It sounded a bit like Finnish, but it wasn’t. She was able to recognize spoken Finnish and English, but that was the extent of her knowledge. The Gavin little girls seemed to be always hungry, and they would complain long after night had fallen. Only the youngest would remain quiet when the mother nursed the child in her bunk. Then a certain calm would settle over the space.

  Anna would lie in bed with her daughters next to her and listen to the Finnish voices on the other side of the stained sheet. And she would count the days.

  The food onboard was not as bad as she’d heard it would be, but it was unspeakably dreary. Always potatoes and carrots, boiled too long, and tough pieces of meat that had been cut up and simmered. All of it was served along with the same bread and coffee they had for breakfast, with the previous day’s meat and potatoes
mixed together in a big pot. None of it tasted of much, but at least it was a hot meal. Inga said it was called Irish stew, and the Irish passengers onboard ate it with gusto. But as they sat at the long, rough table mid-ship eating their food, Anna was already dreading having to wash the dishes. That and using the toilet were the worst moments of the day for her. The girls always ate slowly, and she often held Carl on her lap, feeding him pieces of potato, so they were usually the last to finish. By then the hot dish water in the trough on deck would have gone cold, and it was transformed into a glistening greenish soup of potato peels and gristly scraps of meat with bits of fat floating on the surface. She would stick their plates into the water, one after the other, barely dipping them in for a moment, and then wipe them off with her hand. Ellen tried to be helpful and follow her example, peering up at her mother to see if she was doing it properly. Then they would set the plates against the side of the bunk to air dry, but the dishes tipped over whenever the ship rolled.

  Gustaf was usually among the first to get up after eating. He would try to disappear as much as was possible in the limited space allotted to the steerage passengers. They could go halfway mid-ship before coming to the locked gates that led to the section for cabin passengers. They could also go forward to the bow, where the men gathered to smoke whenever the wind wasn’t blowing from that direction. Gustaf was getting increasingly restless. Sometimes he tried to start up a conversation with crew members if they had a few minutes to spare. He did his best to learn some English words from them, and occasionally Anna saw him sharing a laugh with one of the deckhands or the steward. After one visit mid-ship, Gustaf came back with some leather straps, which he’d managed to talk someone into giving him without charging a fee. Then he sat on the bunk and deftly tied their plates and cutlery together in an ingenious way so that they could be taken apart without undoing the knots. She’d seen this trick before, which involved tying various big knots that could be twined together. It took Gustaf fifteen minutes to get the task done. Then his restlessness returned.