“Why do you draw the house so much?” I ask him one day when we’re sitting in the kitchen.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, shifting on the stoop. He stares into space for a moment, drumming his fingers on the floor. “I’m trying to capture . . . something. The feel of this place, not the place itself, exactly. D. H. Lawrence—he was a writer, but also a painter—wrote this line: ‘Close to the body of things, there can be heard the stir that makes us and destroys us.’ I want to do that—get close to the body of things. As close as I can. That means going back to the same material again and again, digging deeper every time.” He laughs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I sound like a crazy person, don’t I?”
“I just think it would get boring.”
“I know, you’d think it would.” He shakes his head. “People say I’m a realist, but truthfully my paintings are never quite . . . real. I take away what I don’t like and put myself in its place.”
“What do you mean, yourself?”
“That’s my little secret, Christina,” he says. “I am always painting myself.”
THERE’S A SINGLE bed with a rusty creaking frame—my old bed—in the room upstairs where Andy has set up his easel. When Al finishes his chores in the afternoon, he often goes up there and watches Andy paint for a while before drifting off for a nap.
One day, offhandedly, chatting in the doorway with Al and me before heading upstairs, Andy mentions that he doesn’t like being observed. He wants to work in private.
“I’ll stop coming up, then,” Al says.
“Oh, no, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Andy says. “I like it when you’re there.”
“But he’s watching,” I say. “We’re both watching.”
Andy laughs, shaking his head. “It’s different with you two.”
“He’s himself around you,” Betsy says when I relay this conversation to her. “Because you and Al don’t need anything from him. You let him do what he wants.”
“It’s our entertainment,” I tell her. “Not much happens around here, you know.”
And it’s true. For so long this house was filled to the dormers. I used to wake every morning to a cacophony of sounds coming through the walls and the floorboards: Papa’s booming voice, the boys pounding up and down the stairs, Mamey scolding them to slow down, the barking dog and crowing rooster. Then it got so quiet. But now I wake in the morning and think: Andy is coming today. The day is transformed, and he hasn’t even gotten here yet.
1900–1912
On winter afternoons, when the sun goes down by 3:30 and wind howls through the cracks, we huddle near the woodstove wrapped in blankets, drinking warm milk and tea in the dim light of a whale-oil lamp. Papa shows Al and Sam and me how to make the knots he learned as a sailor: an overhand bow, a clove hitch, a sheet-bend double, a lark’s head, a lariat loop. He hands us wooden needles and tries to show us how to knit (though the boys scoff, refusing to learn). He teaches us to whittle whistles and small boats out of wood. We line them up on the mantelpiece, and when the weather warms, we take these boats down to the bay to see whose sails best. I watch my tall, large-limbed father, his blond shaggy head bowed over his miniature boat, muttering to himself in Swedish, coaxing the vessel along in the choppy water. Mamey told me that several months before I was born, Papa’s brother Berndt sailed over from Gothenburg to spend the winter here, and the two of them built a crib for me and painted it white. Berndt is the only Olauson who has ever visited us.
On a low shelf in the Shell Room, behind a giant conch, I discover a wooden box filled with a motley collection of objects: a whalebone comb, a horsehair toothbrush, a painted tin soldier from a long-ago children’s set, a few rocks and minerals. “Whose is this?” I ask Mamey.
“Your father’s.”
“What are all these things?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
So later that afternoon, when Papa comes in from the milking, I bring him the box. “Mamey said this is yours.”
Papa shrugs. “That’s nothing. I don’t know why I kept it. Just bits and pieces I brought with me from Sweden.”
Weighing a black lump of coal in my hand, I ask, “Why did you save this?”
He reaches for it. Rubs his fingers over its metallic ebony planes. “Anthracite,” he says. “It’s almost pure carbon. Made from decomposed plant and animal life from millions of years ago. I had a teacher once who taught me about rocks and minerals.”
“In your village in Sweden?”
He nods. “G?llinge.”
“G?llinge,” I repeat. The word is strange. Yah-lee-nyeh. “So you kept it to remind you of home?”
He blows out a noisy breath. “Perhaps.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Not really. I miss some things, I suppose.”
“Like . . .”
“Oh, I don’t know. A bread called svartbr?d. With salmon and soured cream. And a fried potato cake called raggmunk my sister used to make. Maybe the lingonberries.”
“But what about . . . your sister? And your mother?”
And that’s when he tells me about the squalid, low-ceilinged two-room hut in the village of G?llinge that his family of ten shared with a cow, their surest hedge against starvation. His father, a drunkard with two moods, brooding and raging, who terrorized him and his seven younger siblings and worked occasionally at a peat farm as a day laborer when he was desperate enough. Papa’s own constant stomach-churning hunger. More than once, he says, he avoided jail by eluding police on a long chase through cobbled streets after stealing a rasher of pork, a jug of maple syrup.
From an early age he knew there wasn’t much of a future for him in G?llinge; no jobs, none he was qualified for even in the big city of Gothenburg, sixty miles away. Though a quick study, he paid little attention in school, knew how to read only the simplest stories. Never learned a trade. He taught himself to knit so he could help his ma, who earned a few coins making scarves and mittens and hats, but that was no job for a man, he says.
So when he heard about a trading ship bound for New York, he rose in the dark to be the first at the dock at Gothenburg Harbor.
The captain scoffed. Fifteen years old? Too young to leave your mama.