A Piece of the World(14)
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.
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 G?llinge, 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.