“No reason for you to stay on, then, is it?” Father again. “Now that he’s gone.”
“Be quiet!” Mother barked across the room.
“I can speak in my own house!”
“This is barely a house!”
“What is in your tin, Little Brynhild?” Olina wanted to change the subject. She did not like them arguing and hoped that my surprise would cool their tempers.
“Lefse,” I said, “from the farm, with regards.”
“How nice of them.” Mother’s face twisted up with spite. “Nice to know they have enough to spare.”
“Don’t you start with that again.” Father spat on the floor.
I opened the tin and set it on the table. Their fingers were like talons, sinking into the soft bread. Olina closed her eyes when she licked the sugar from her fingers. I ate a piece of my own and savored the sweetness of it. To have this every day, I thought, and never want for anything . . . I looked at my mother and thought her a fool for having settled for so little.
After we ate, I read new letters from my sisters aloud. Nellie wrote that she would be pleased to welcome me in Chicago, and was sorry to hear there had been trouble.
“How does she know?” asked Mother.
“People talk,” I said.
When we set to answer, I added another few lines to Nellie. Little Brynhild is still having a hard time, I wrote. Any little amount will help, so she can join you in America and leave this all behind.
6.
The Atlantic Ocean, 1881
Idid not enjoy the sea. My family caught fish in mountain lakes and creeks, and I was not used to salt water. My body did not agree with the dancing motions of the waves and revolted. I vomited into the sawdust on deck, and then I went back inside and ate the dry crackers and drank the poor tea they served to the passengers in steerage. I held my chin high despite the sickness. I knew it would not last. I knew there was nothing to do but endure—and that every hour that passed was an hour closer to freedom. Nevertheless, I was sick all the way from Trondhjem to Hull, and barely recovered on the train to Liverpool, where we boarded the steam liner to New York.
I had embarked on the Tasso in Trondhjem with Sigrid, another young woman traveling alone who wanted a companion for security and comfort. Her aunt knew Nellie in Chicago and the two of them had made the connection between us. I did not like her much. Sigrid was as pretty and cheerful as could be, could cook and clean but barely read. She helped me when I was sick, though: made sure my trunk was not lost in England and wiped my slick brow with a cloth.
The steam liner was a crowded, noisy place. I had never experienced anything like it: the roaring sound of the engine, the scent of oil, the sight of water foaming off the hull. The reek of so many people stacked in bunk beds along the walls. Water was scarce in steerage, and we did not get to wash much. People lived and slept in their clothes. We did not remove our shoes at night, as there was no trust between us. Some passengers had brought their own food supplies with them, scared by letters from relatives who had already made the journey and suffered. The Norwegian stretch of the compartment smelled strongly of salted herring and infants’ filthy bottoms.
At night, the Scandinavians gathered around a table bolted to the floor. The women in worn headscarves knitted socks and dreamed aloud about acres of land and herds of cattle. They sent sideways glances to the neighboring tables where noisy Irish and Germans laughed and spoke in garbled tongues. Farther down the room, some men played cards from the sounds of it. Sometimes they played the fiddle too.
They danced some nights, in filthy sawdust on the deck. Young girls laughed, old men leered. Empty bottles were thrown in the sea. Sigrid danced too, encircled by the arms of some handsome Swede or Dane. I did not. I sat with the elderly women, hands folded in my lap. I did not want to be a part of the swirl of life around me. I did not want to make friends. Whatever could my fellow passengers offer but more stories of failure and hunger? I could see the desperation that had sent them running hiding behind their smiles. Their hardships were carved on their faces in deep furrows and lines. I knew enough about poverty and strife already—I was there to forget all about it. Still I woke up at night pressing my fists to the soft of my belly, just as I did as a child when falling asleep without food. Maybe it was the reek of them, all those bodies stacked in the beds. Maybe it reminded me of home, of dark winter nights with nothing in the pot. My mother’s silent anger when she had to pull on her shawl and walk down to the valley to beg for scraps, again. My father’s muttered curses, his endless complaints about this man or that who owed him something or offended him somehow. It took nothing then, to have that fury in him flare to life and leave bruises in its wake.
That ship reminded me of hunger.
Four years I worked hard to make it happen; saved everything I could and kept the money with me always. Nellie sent me money too: foreign bills enclosed in letters. When I rose before dawn at R?dde farm to milk and cook and clean, it was all that I could think of, how the drops of sweat on my brow would become coins and bills to help pay my way across the sea. Every spiteful word I took, every humiliation, was a part of the price I had to pay.
Sigrid had no such concerns. Her ticket had landed in her lap, prepaid. Her aunt had done well in America, it would seem.
“She has so many children,” she told me one day while we were sitting on deck. She was mending a shawl while I was fighting another bout of sickness. “She needs someone to look after the younger ones.”
“Her husband must be rich,” I muttered, head bent, breath labored. We were so far out at sea by then there was not a bird in sight; the sea around us rippled like silver in the sunlight. I could not look at it much as it made me feel worse.
“Not really”—Sigrid’s needle paused in midair—“but he might be one day, my aunt says.”
“Is he a tailor too?” Many Norwegian men left their pitchforks for pretty seams in Chicago. Back home they would have been laughed at, but not so over there.
“No, he works at a brewery.” The needle descended into the red cloth. I wished I could have a shawl like that, fine-spun and bold in color.
“Men can be all sorts of things in America, it seems.”
“My brother left last year. He never wanted to farm, so it was a good thing for him.”
“Not much land to farm, either, even if he had stayed.”
Sigrid put her sewing down in her lap. “What about you, Brynhild? What will you do in Chicago? Help your sister out or seek service?”
“I am done with service.” I spat bile down in the sawdust. “I want to have a household of my own.”
She smiled. “You want to get married, then?”
“Don’t we all?”