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. “Gällinge.”
“Gällinge,” 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 svartbröd. 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 Gällinge 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 Gällinge; 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.
But Papa was determined. She won’t miss me, he told him. One less mouth to feed, a few more coins for the rest. Sick babies. The youngest, his brother Sven, not even a year old, had starved to death a month before.
And so he set sail with the captain and his small crew, across and back and around the world. As months turned into years, his past began to recede. He sent money to his mother, and talked, as all the sailors did, about going home, but the more time he spent away from Gällinge, the less he missed it. He didn’t miss tripping over his brothers and sisters, not to mention the cow. He didn’t miss that dingy hovel with its slop pail in the corner and the rank smell of unwashed bodies. The dank confines of a ship’s belly might not have been much of an improvement, but at least you could rise from its depths onto a wide deck and gaze up at a vast sky sprinkled with stars and the yolk of a moon.
IT’S SURPRISING THAT Papa knows as much as he does about farming, given that he grew up in a hovel and spent his twenties at sea. Mother says he’s just a quick study at whatever he puts his mind to. He restored the inn to a family home, raises cows and sheep and chickens for milk and meat and wool and eggs. He plants corn and peas and potatoes in the rocky soil, rotating them yearly, and he set up a farm store on the property to sell them. His customers come by boat from Port Clyde and St. George and Pleasant Point, loading their dories with produce and rowing back to where they’re from.
Having discovered that seaweed in the fields keeps the ground moist and the weeds down in the summer, Papa corrals Al and Sam and me to collect and distribute it. It takes two of us, our hands encased in thick cotton gloves, to steer a heavy wheelbarrow down to the water’s edge at low tide. We rip the kelp from the rocks, pulling up barnacles and crabs and snails, and load the barrow with spongy green strands bubbled at the ends and flat, wide strips fluted like piecrust. The gloves are stiff and unwieldy; it’s easier to grab it without them, so we take them off, rinsing our hands in ocean water to wash off the slime. Then we push the wheelbarrow up the hill to the newly furrowed field, where we grab big handfuls of cold kelp, squishing it between our fingers and scattering it down the rows. “Push it back,” Papa calls from where he’s hoeing. “Don’t smother the plants.”
Papa is always dreaming up projects to make money. His flock of sheep is growing, and though he sells wool to local people, one season he decides to box up the bulk of it and send it away to be carded and spun and dyed and sold out of state for a higher price. The following summer he constructs a fishing weir with a neighbor in the cove between Bird Point and Hathorn Point. Now that it’s winter, he’s decided that he will harvest freshwater ice, which can be loaded onto ships and transported easily and cheaply by steamer ship on the nearby sea-lanes to Boston and beyond. He’ll store it in an icehouse Captain Sam built that has been standing empty for decades.
Like any crop, ice is delicate and mercurial; bright sun or a sudden storm can ruin it. There’s no guarantee, until the ice is received in Boston, that Papa will get paid. He waits until February, when the ice on Vinal’s Pond is fourteen to sixteen inches thick, and offers money to other farmers to help him clear the snow with horses and plows. Up before dawn on frigid mornings, they use a workhorse to pull the clearing scraper, a series of boards attached together to create a flat bottom that angles back about eight feet wide, and a three-foot-wide snow scraper to remove heavier, wetter ice. Several men saw through the ice with handsaws fused to long iron T-bar handles, shedding coats and scarves and hats as they warm up. It is hard work, but these men and horses are accustomed to hard work.
When a slab of ice is cut and floating, twelve inches above the syrupy water, the men hold float hooks, long poles with spiky ends, to keep the ice where they want it. After this comes the tedious work of cutting and loading these floats onto flatbed trailers behind horses that will transport them to the icehouse behind the barn. There the blocks will be stacked and stored in sawdust, some set aside to sell to locals and the rest to wait until a carrier bound for Massachusetts is ready in the cove.
The morning of the harvest, after Papa has left the house, I dress in the dark, layering sweaters and trousers over my long underwear and pulling on two pairs of socks. I meet Al in the downstairs hall and we head out into the mist, blowing our breath at each other, and make our way toward Vinal’s Pond to watch the horses harnessed to plows trek back and forth on the thick ice, deepening the grooves. Snow falls softly, like flour through a sifter, accumulating in drifts.
We spot Papa in the distance, leading Blackie and the plow. He sees us too. “Stay off the ice!” he shouts. When Al and I reach the edge, we stand silently watching the men do their work. Blackie prances skittishly, tossing his head. He’s a nervous horse; I’ve spent hours in the paddock devising routines to calm him. He’s wearing the choke rope I fashioned around his neck several days ago to control him when he gets spooked.
One of the men has broken his float hook in a block of ice, and everyone is distracted, offering suggestions, when I notice that Blackie is sliding in slow motion toward the lip of the ice. All at once there’s a high-pitched whinny. His eyes roll in terror as he plunges into the breath-stopping cold, flailing and churning in the water. The plow teeters on the edge. Without thinking, I run toward Papa across the ice.
“Damn it, get back!” Papa yells.
“Grab the choke rope,” I call, motioning to my own neck. “Cut off his breath!”
Papa gestures to some of the men, and they join arms, elbow to elbow, Papa in the middle and several holding his belt. He leans far out over the horse’s head and grasps the rope, pulling it tight. After a moment, Blackie quiets. Papa manages to pull him up onto the slab by his harness, forelegs first, then belly, and finally his powerful thick haunches. For a moment the horse stands as if frozen, front and back legs apart like a statue. Then he dips his head and shakes his mane, spraying water.
At the supper table that night Papa tells Mamey and Mother that I am the orneriest and most stubborn child he has, and the only reason he didn’t wring my neck for running onto the ice is that my quick thinking probably saved Blackie’s life. A drowned horse, we all know, would’ve been a big loss.
“I wonder where she gets that from,” Mother says.