The Weight of Water (7 page)

Before we had reached the age when we were allowed to go to school. Evan and I had occasion to spend a great deal of time
together, and I believe that because of this we each understood that in some indefinable manner our souls, and hence our paths,
were to be inextricably linked, and perhaps I knew already that whatever fate might befall the one would surely befall the
other. And as regards the outside world, that is to say the world of nature (and the people and spirits and animals who inhabited
that tangible world), each of us was for the other a filter. I remember with a clarity that would seem to be extraordinary
after so many years (these events having occurred at such a young age) talking with Evan all the long days and into the nights
(for is not a day actually longer when one is a child, time being of an illusory and deceptive nature?) as if we were indeed
interpreting for each other and for ourselves the mysterious secrets and truths of life itself.

We were bathed together in a copper tub that was brought out once a week and set upon a stand in the kitchen near to the stove.
My father bathed first, and then my mother, and then Karen, and lastly, Evan and me together. Evan and I were fearful of our
father’s nakedness and respectful of our mother’s modesty, and so we busied ourselves in another room during the times when
our parents used the copper tub. But no such restraints had yet descended upon us as regards our sister, Karen, who would
have been, when I was five, seventeen, and who possessed most of the attributes of a grown woman, attributes that both frightened
and amazed me, although I cannot say it was with any reverence for her person that Evan and I often peeked behind the curtain
and made rude sounds and in this way tortured our sister, who would scream at us from the tub and, more often than not, end
the evening in tears. And thus I suppose I shall have to admit here that Evan and myself, while not cruel or mischievous by
nature or necessarily to anyone else in our company, were sometimes moved to torment and tease our sister, because it was,
I think, so easy to do and at the same time so enormously, if unforgivably, rewarding.

When our turn for the bath had come, we would have clean water that had been heated by our mother in great pots and then poured
into the copper tub, and my brother and myself, who until a late age had no shame between us, would remove our clothing and
play in the hot soapy water as if in a pool in the woods, and I remember the candlelight and warmth of this ritual with a
fondness that remains with me today.

Each morning of the school year, when we were younger and not needed to be hired out, Evan and I rode together in the wagon
of our nearest neighbor, Torjen Helgessen, who went every day into Laurvig to bring his milk and produce to market, and home
again each afternoon after the dinner hour. The school day was five hours long, and we had the customary subjects of religion,
Bible History, catechism, reading, writing, arithmetic and singing. We had as our texts Pontoppidan’s Explanation, Vogt’s
Bible History and Jensen’s Reader. The school was a modern one in many of its aspects. It had two large rooms, one above the
other, each filled with wooden desks and a chalkboard that ran the length of one wall. Girls were in the lower room and boys
in the upper. Unruly behavior was not allowed, and the students of Laurvig School received the stick when necessary. My brother
had it twice, once for throwing chalk erasers at another student, and once for being rude to Mr. Hjorth, a Pietist and thus
an extremely strict and sometimes irritating man, who later died during an Atlantic crossing as a result of the dysentery
aboard.

In the springtime, when it was light early in the morning, and this was a pearly light that is not known in America, an oyster
light that lasts for hours before the sun is actually up, and so has about it a diffuse and magical quality, Evan and I would
wake at daybreak and walk the distance into Laurvig to the school.

I can hardly describe to you the joy of those early morning walks together, and is it not true that in our extreme youth we
possess the capacity to see more clearly and absorb more intensely the beauty that lies all before us, and so much more so
than in our later youth or in our adulthood, when we have been apprised of sin and its stain and our eyes habe become dulled,
and we cannot see with the same purity, or love so well?

The coast road hugged at times the very edge of the cliffs and overlooked the Bay, so that on a fine day, to the east of us,
there would be the harbor, with its occasional schooners and ferries, and beyond it the sea twitching so blindingly we were
almost forced to turn our eyes away.

As we walked, Evan would be wearing his trousers and a shirt without a collar and his jacket and his cap. He wore stockings
that Karen or my mother had knit, wonderful stockings in a variety of intricate patterns, and he carried his books and dinner
sack, and sometimes also mine, in a leather strap which had been fashioned from a horse’s rein. I myself, though just a girl,
wore the heavy dresses of the day, that is to say those of domestic and homespun manufacture, and it was always a pleasure
in the late spring when our mother allowed me to change the wool dress for a calico that was lighter in weight and in color
and made me feel as though I had just bathed after a long and oppressive confinement. At that time, I wore my hair loose along
my back, with the sides pulled into a topknot. I may say here that my hair was of a lovely color in my youth, a light and
soft brown that picked up the sun in summer, and was sometimes, by August, golden near the front, and I had fine, clear eyes
of a light gray color. As I have mentioned, I was not a tall girl, but I did have a good carriage and figure, and though I
was never a great beauty, not like Anethe, I trust I was pleasant to look upon, and perhaps even pretty for several years
in my late youth, before the true responsibilities of my journey on earth began and altered, as it does in so many women,
the character of the face.

I recall one morning when Evan and myself would have been eight and six years of age respectively. We had gone perhaps three
quarters of the way to town when my brother quite suddenly put down his books and dinner sack and threw off his jacket and
cap as well, and in his shirt and short pants raised his arms and leapt up to seize a branch of an apple tree that had just
come fully into bloom, and I suspect that it was the prospect of losing himself in all that white froth of blossoms that propelled
Evan higher and higher so that in seconds he was calling to me from the very apex of the tree.
Hallo, Maren, can you see me?
For reasons I cannot accurately describe, I could not bear to be left behind on the ground, and so it was with a frenzy of
determination that I tried to repeat Evan’s acrobatics and make a similar climb to the height of the fruit tree. I discovered,
however, that I was encumbered by the skirts of my dress, which were weighing me down and would not permit me to grab hold
of the tree limbs with my legs in a shimmying fashion, such as I had just witnessed Evan performing. It was, then, with a
gesture of irritation and perhaps anger at my sex, that I stripped myself of my frock, along that most travelled of public
roads into Laurvig, stripped myself down to my underclothes, which consisted of a sleeveless woolen vest and a pair of unadorned
homespun bloomers, and thus was able in a matter of minutes to join my brother at the top of the tree, which gave a long view
of the coastline, and which, when I had reached Evan, filled me with a sense of freedom and accomplishment that was not often
repeated in my girlhood. I remember that he smiled at me and said, “Well done,” and that shortly after I had reached Evan’s
perch, I leaned forward in my careless ebullience to see north along the Laurvigsfjord, and, in doing so, lost my balance
and nearly fell out of the tree, and almost certainly would have done had not Evan grabbed hold of my wrist and righted me.
And I recall that he did not remove his hand, but rather stayed with me in that position, his hand upon my wrist, for a few
minutes more, as we could not bear to disturb that sensation of peace and completeness that had come over us, and so it happened
that we were both late for school on that day and were chastised by having to remain after school for five days in a row,
a detention neither of us minded or complained about as I think we both felt the stricture to be pale reprimand for the thrilling
loveliness of the crime. Of course, we had been fortunate that all the time we had been in the tree no farmer had come along
the road and seen my frock in the dirt, a shocking sight in itself, and which doubtless would have resulted in our capture
and quite likely a more severe punishment of a different nature.

At school, Evan was well liked, but though he did join in the games, he did not take extra pains to become popular in the
manner of some boys of the town. He was not a boy, or ever a man, who was filled with anger or resentments as some are, and
if a wrong was done to him, he needed only to correct it, not exact a punishment for the crime. (Though I am sorry to say
that Evan was eventually to learn, as were we all, that there was no righting of the ultimate wrong that was done to him.)
In this way, I do not think I have measured up to him in character, for I have often felt myself in the sway of intense emotions
that are sinful in their origin, including those of anger and hatred.

Evan was always substantially taller than myself, and for a time was the tallest boy in the Laurvig school. Although he had
slightly crooked teeth in the front, he developed a handsome face that I believe resembled our father’s, though, of course,
I never saw my father as a younger man, and by the time I was old enough for such impressions to register, my father’s cheeks
were sunken and there were many wrinkles on his face, this as a consequence of the weathering that occurred at sea and was
a feature of most fishermen of that time.

When our schooling was finished for the year, we often had the long days together, and this was the very greatest of joys,
for the light stayed with us until nearly midnight in the midsummer.

I see us now as if I were looking upon my own self. In the woods, just west of where our home was situated, there was a little-visited
and strange geographic phenomenon known as Hakon’s Inlet, a pool of seawater that was nearly black as a consequence of both
its extraordinary depth and of the sheer black rock that formed the edges of the pool and rose straight up to a height of
thirty feet on all sides, so that this pool was, with the exception of a narrow fissure through which seawater flowed, a tall,
dark cylinder. It was said to be twenty fathoms deep, and along its walls were thin ledges that one, with some practice, could
navigate to reach the water and thus swim, or fish, or even lower a boat and paddle about. Yellow stone crop grew in the fissure,
and it was altogether a most magical place.

At this pool, on a June morning, I see a small girl of eight years of age, who is standing on a ledge, holding her dress above
the water, revealing her knees and not caring much, as there had not yet been between herself and her brother any loss of
innocence, nor indeed any need for false modesty on the part of either, and beyond her, perched upon a nearby shelf of rock,
with a rudimentary fishing pole in his hands, her brother, Evan. He is smiling at her because she has been teasing him in
a pleasant manner about the fact that he has grown so tall that his pants rise a good inch above his ankles. He is, upon his
rock, the embodiment of all that Norwegian parents might wish in their boys, a tall and strong youth, with the thin pale hair
that we have come in this country to favor so, and eyes the color of water. Presently, the boy puts down his fishing pole
and takes from his sack a small dark object that he quickly flings out over the water, and which reveals itself to be a net
of the finest threads, intricately woven, a gauze, more like, or a web of gossamer, catching the light of the sun’s rays that
hover and seem to stop just above the surface of the pool. The girl, intrigued, makes her way to the ledge on which the boy
is standing and sees that the net is large and comments upon this, whereupon the boy tells her that he has made it deep so
that it will sink low into the pool and bring up from its depths all manner of sea creatures. The girl watches with fascination
as the boy, who has had a not inconsequential amount of experience with fishing nets, and who has fashioned the present one
from threads from his mother’s sewing cabinet, expertly spreads the net over the surface of the black water and allows it,
with its weighted sinks, to lower itself until only the bobbers at the four corners are visible. Then, with a deft movement
of his body, and indicating that the girl should follow him, he hops from ledge to ledge, dragging the gathering net behind
him. After a time, he lets the bobbers float closer to the wall of the pool, where he then snags them and slowly brings up
the net. He hauls his catch up onto the ledge on which the pair are standing and opens it for their inspection. In the net
are wriggling bits and sacs of color the girl has never seen before. Many of these sea creatures have lovely iridescent colorings,
but some appear to her grotesque in texture, like mollusks without their shells. Some are translucent shapes that reveal working
innards; others are heaving gills flecked with gold or round fat fish with bulging eyes or simple dark slivers the color of
lead. Some of the fish the girl recognizes: a sea bass, a codfish, several mackerel.

But the girl is frightened by the grotesque display, and is fearful that the boy has perhaps trespassed in the unnatural world,
and has brought up from the black pool living things not meant to be seen or to see the light of day, and, indeed, some small
peacock-blue gelatinous spheres begin to pop and perish there upon the ledge.

“Maren, do you see?” the boy asks excitedly, pointing to this fish and to that one, but the girl is both attracted and repulsed
by the catch, wanting to tear her head away, yet not able to, when suddenly the boy picks up the four corners of the net and
upends the catch into the water, not realizing that the girl’s foot is on a part of the net, whereupon the gossamer tears
and catches on the girl’s bare ankle, and with one swooping movement, she plunges into the water, believing that she might
kick the net away whenever she wants to, and then discovers in a panic (that even now I can taste at the back of my throat)
that both feet have become entangled in the threads and the skirt of her dress has become weighted with water. In addition,
in her fright, she is surrounded by the sealife that had been in the net, some of which swims away, and some of which floats
near to her face. She flails with her arms and tries to swim, but cannot find a suitable ledge to hang on to. And Evan, who
sees that his sister is in great distress, jumps into the water after her, caring little for his own safety, but greatly concerned
for hers. I can hear my voice that is filled with the utmost terror, calling out
Help!,
and then again,
Help!,
and Evan’s voice, not yet broken and matured, a melodious voice that was most welcome at the Christmas Hymns each year, calling
out,
I’ll get you, Maren.
I remember now the strength of his hand under my chin, holding my mouth above the water so that I could breathe, while he
splashed about most terribly and took in a great deal of water himself, and was as panicked as I, though he would never say
so later. It was only by the greatest good fortune that we drifted, in this agitated state, across the pool, to a ledge a
meter above the water and that Evan, by the grace of God and by a strength not commonly known to children of that age, grasped
that ledge with his free hand and thus saved us both.