The Weight of Water (6 page)

20 September 1867, the Isles of Shoals

My Dear Cousin,

You will he surprised to hear from me in a place different from that where I last wrote to you. I have moved north from the
city of Gloucester. Axel Nordahl, who you may remember visited us last year, came to Gloucester to tell myself and Erling
Hansen of the fishing settlement of which he was a part at a place called the Isles of Shoals. This is a small grouping of
islands nine miles east of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is not far north of Gloucester. I am now residing with Nordahl
and his good family on the island of Appledore, and I can report that he has a trawler here, and that he has found a bounty
of fish such as I have never seen before in any waters. Indeed, I do not think there are any waters on earth that are so plentiful
as these in which he has set his nets. A man can put his hand into this sea and fetch up, with his hand more fish than his
boat might bear. I am firmly of a mind to remain here through the winter with Nordahl and then burden his family no more as
I will build my own cottage on the island of Smutty-Nose, which has a strange name and which is also sometimes known as Haley’s
Island. When spring comes I will have saved enough dollars from my work with Nordahl to begin such a project. This is a better
life, Hontvedt, than that which exists in Laurvig, or in Gloucester, where I was lodged with fifty other fishermen of the
fleet and where my wages did not exceed one dollar a day.

I beg of you, John, to share this bounty with me. I beg of you to bring your brother, Matthew, who may be as pleased as I
am to fish in these fertile waters. I have selected on this island called Smutty-Nose a house for you to lease. It is a good
house, strongly built to withstand the Atlantic storms, and I might have taken up residence there myself if I had already
had a family. In the spring, if the Lord permits me to find a wife, I shall move from Appledore so that we may all be a family
in the Lord’s sight.

If you come, as I am hoping, you must go by coastal ferry to Stavanger, and thence to Shields, England. There you will take
the rail to Liverpool where you will join a great flood of emigrants who will take passage with you on a packet to Quebec,
where ships are landing now, preferring to avoid the higher tariffs charged in Boston and New York. For your voyage, you will
want fruit wine to alter the taste of the poor water, and dried fish. Grind some coffee and put it in a box. You will also
want to bake the flatbread and pack it in the round tubs you have seen down at the docks, and also cure some cheese. If you
have a wife and she is with child, then come before it is her time, as infants do not well survive the journey. Seven perished
on my own passage, owing to the diphtheria croup which was a contagion on board. I will tell you in truth, Hontvedt, that
the sanitary conditions aboard these ships are very poor, and it is too bad, but on my journey I was well disposed to prayer
and to thinking of the voyage as a deliverance. I was seasick all but the last two days, and though I arrived in America very
gaunt and thin, and remained so in Gloucester, now I am fat again, thanks to the cooking of Nordhal’s wife, Adda, who feeds
me good porridge and potato cakes with all the fresh fish you can imagine.

When you are here, we may together purchase a trawler in the town of Portsmouth. Send me news and greet all my friends there,
my mother, and all soskend.

Your cousin and servant unto death, Torwad Holde

May God forgive me, but I confess that I have truly hated the words of Torwad Holde’s letter and even the man himself, and
I do so wish that this cursed letter had never come into our house. It was an evil missive indeed that stole my husband’s
common sense, that took us from our homeland, and that eventuated in that terrible night of 5 March. Would that this letter,
with its stories I could not credit, this letter that bore with its envelope strange and frightening stamps, this letter with
its tales so magical I knew they must be lies, been dropped into the Atlantic Ocean during its transit from America to Norway.

But I digress. Even with the distance of thirty-one years, it is possible for me to become overwrought, knowing as I do what
came later, what was to follow, and how this letter led us to our doom. Yet even in a state of distress, I must admit to understanding
that a mere piece of paper can not be the instrument of one’s undoing. In John, my husband, there was a yearning for adventure,
for more than was his lot in Laurvig, desires I did not share with him, so content was I to be still near my family. And also,
I must confess, there had been that summer, in the Skaggerak and even in the Kristianiafjord, a fish plague that had greatly
lessened the number of mackerel available to the fisher folk, and though not a consequence of this, but rather as a result
of the importation of fish from Denmark, a simultaneous lowering of the price of herring in Kristiania, which caused my husband,
in a more practical manner, to look toward new fishing grounds.

But bringing up a living fish with one’s bare hands? Who could be such a blasphemer as to put forth such lies against the
laws of nature?”

“I will not go to America,” I said to Evan on the landing at Laurvig on 10 March 1868.

I believe I spoke in a quavering voice, for I was nearly overcome by a tumult of emotions, chief among them an acute distress
at having to leave my brother, Evan Christensen, behind, and not knowing if I would see him or my beloved Norway ever again.
The smell of fish from the barrels on the landing was all around us, and we could as well distinguish the salted pork in wooden
cases. We had had to step cautiously to the landing, as all about us the rod iron lay for loading onto the ship, and to my
eye, this disarray seemed to have been made by a large hand, that is to say by the hand of God, Who had strewn about the pier
these long and rusty spokes. I believe that I have so well remembered the sight of this cargo because I did not want to look
up that day at the vessel which would carry me away from my home.

I must say that even today I remain quite certain that souls which take root in a particular geography cannot be successfully
transplanted. I believe that these roots, these tiny fibrous filaments, will almost inevitably dry and wither in the new soil,
or will send the plant into sudden and irretrievable shock.

Evan and I came to a stopping place amidst the terrible noise and chaos. All about us were sons taking leave of their mothers,
sisters parting from sisters, husbands from young wives. Is there any other place on earth so filled with sweet torment as
that of a ship’s landing? For a time, Evan and myself stood together in silence. The water from the bay hurt my eyes, and
a gust came upon us and billowed my skirt which had become muddied at the hem on the walk to the landing. I beat my fists
against the silk, which was a walnut and was cinched becomingly at the waist, until Evan, who was considerably taller than
myself, stayed my hands with his own.

“Hush, Maren, calm yourself,” he said to me.

I took my breath in, and was near to crying, and might have but for the example of my brother who was steadfast and of great
character and who would not show, for all the earth, the intense emotions that were at riot in his breast. My dress, I have
neglected to say, was my wedding dress and had a lovely collar of tatting that my sister, Karen, had made for me. And I should
mention as well that Karen had not come to the landing to say her farewells as she had been feeling poorly that morning.

The gusts, such as the one that had whipped up my skirt, turned severe, spiriting caps away and pushing back the wide brims
of the bonnets on the women. I could hear the halyards of the sloops slapping hard against their masts, and though the day
was fair, that is to say though the sky was a deep and vivid navy, I thought the gusts might presage a gale and that I would
be granted a reprieve of an hour or a day, as the captain, I was certain, would not set sail in such a blow. In this, however,
I was mistaken, for John, my husband, who had been searching for me, raised his face and beckoned me toward the ship. I saw,
even at a distance, that relief softened his squint, and I know that he had been afraid I might not come to the landing at
all. Our passage had been paid already — sixty dollars — but I had, for just a moment, the lovely and calming image of two
berths, two flat and tiered berths, sailing empty without us.

Evan, beside me, sensing that the fury had left my arms, released my hands. But though my wretchedness had momentarily abandoned
me, my sorrow had not.

“You must go with John,” he said to me. “He is your husband.”

I pause now as if for breath. It is very difficult for me to write, even three decades later, of my family, who was so cruelly
treated by fate.

In our family, Karen was born first and was some twelve years older than myself. She was, it must be said, a plain woman with
a melancholy aspect, which I have always understood is sometimes appealing to men, as they do not wish a wife who is so beautiful
or lively that she causes in her husband a constant worry, and our Karen was strong, an obedient daughter, and a skilled seamstress
as well.

I see us now sitting at my father’s table in the simple but clean room that was our living room and dining room and kitchen
and where also Karen and I slept behind a curtain, and where we had a stove that gave off a great deal of heat and always
made us comfortable (although sometimes, in the winter, the milk froze in the cupboard), and I am struck once again by how
extraordinarily different I was from my sister, for whom I had a fond, though I must confess not passionate, regard. Karen
had dun eyes that seldom seemed to change their color. She had had the misfortune, from a young age, to have fawn-colored
hair, a dull brown that was not tinged with golden highlights nor ever warmed by the sun, and I remember that every day she
fixed it in exactly the same manner, which is to say pulled severely behind her ears, with a fringe at her forehead, and rolled
and fastened at the back of her head. I am not certain I ever saw Karen with her hair free and loose except for those occasions
when I happened to observe her make herself ready for bed. Normally, Karen, who had great difficulty sleeping, was late to
bed and early to rise, and I came to think of her as keeping a kind of watch over our household. Karen did have, however,
an excellent figure, and was broad in her shoulders and erect in her posture. She was a tall woman, some five inches taller
than myself. I was, if not diminutive, then small in my proportions. Like Karen, I too had broad shoulders, but perhaps a
less plain face than hers when I was twenty. I did not possess, however, her obedience, nor her excellence as a seamstress.
Though I would say otherwise at the time, I took a foolish pride in this when I was a girl, preferring the world of nature
and imagination to that of cloth and needle, and I know that in my heart I set myself up as the more fortunate of us two,
and I believed at the time that if ever I should have a husband, he would be a man who would be drawn to a woman not solely
for her domestic skills, which has always seemed to be the measure of a woman, but also for her conversation.

In our family there was only the one other child besides Karen and me, Evan, my brother, who was two years older than myself,
and so it happened that we were raised as one, so close were we in age, and so far from Karen. At that time, there were many
deprivations visited upon the fisher-folk. Because of the shortness of the fishing season near to our home, our father, in
order to feed his family, had sometimes to leave us for months at a time during the winter, to fish not by himself in his
skiff, which he preferred and which better suited his independent nature, but rather to join the fishing fleets that sailed
along the west coast and further north after the cod and the herring. When our situation was very bad, or it had been a particularly
harsh winter, my mother and sometimes my sister had to hire themselves out for washing and for cooking in the boarding house
for sailors on the Storgata in Laurvig.

But I must here dispel the image of the Christensen family in rude circumstances, hungry and in poverty, for in truth, though
we had little in the way of material goods in my early childhood years, we had our religion, which was a comfort, and our
schooling, when we could make our way along the coast road into Laurvig, and we had family ties for which in all my years
on this earth I have never found a replacement.

The cottage in which we lived was humble but of a very pleasing aspect. It was of wood, painted white, and with a red-tiled
roof, as was the custom. It had a small porch with a railing in the front, and one window, to the south, that was made of
colored glass. In the rear of our home was a small shed for storing nets and barrels, and in front there was a narrow beach
where our father, when we were younger, kept his skiffs.

How many times I have had in my mind the image of leaving Laurvig, and seeing from the harbor, along the coast road, our own
cottage and others like it, one and a half stories tall, with such a profusion of blossoms in the gardens around them. This
area in Norway, which is in the southeastern part of the country, facing to Sweden and Denmark, has a mild climate and good
soil for orchards and other plants such as myrtle and fuchsia, which were in abundance then and are now. We had peaches from
a tree in our garden, and though there were months at a time when I had only the one woolen dress and only one pair of woolen
socks, we had fruit to eat and fresh or dried fish and the foods that flour and water go together to make, such as porridge
and pancakes and lefse.

I possess so very many wonderful memories of those days of my extreme youth that sometimes they are more real to me than the
events of last year or even of yesterday. A child who may grow to adulthood with the sea and the forest and the orchards at
hand may count himself a very lucky child indeed.