Anna Hansdatter: Hunger In the Dale

Chapter 7

As the days grew shorter, and the nights colder, the extended family of Flaate settled into their life together. After the first snow, Ole began training Little Ole and Torger to drive the teams. The first day, they worked with Gerta’s team, the gentler of the two. The boys helped with the tack as Ole harnessed the horses, all the while calling them by name, speaking softly and gently, “Hello, Hans, here’s your harness now. Here Dale, that’s a good boy.”

He hitched the team to a small sledge, then took the reins as the boys stood on each side. He said, “The most important thing is never to be angry at the horses. They are only animals. They cannot be blamed for behaving badly. They basically like working, and we can persuade them do what we want much easier than beating them into it.

“These horses were trained very well when they were young. They know the basic voice commands. I use the reigns only a little. Watch.” He shook the reigns lightly. The horses shuffled their feet. He said, not very loudly, “Hey there, Hans, Hey, Dale!” and twitched the reigns again. The horses began walking forward slowly. After a few steps, he said, a little louder, “Hey!” The pace quickened. Then he said, “Ho! Ho, boys!” and pulled back gently. The team stopped. Ole said to the boys, “Once they get to know you, you can use either voice or reigns. You will seldom need both at once.” Without using the reigns at all, he said to the team a simple, “Hey!” They eased into a slow walk. “Ho!” They stopped. The boys were impressed.

He handed the reigns to Little Ole, who shook them and shouted, “Hey!” The team did not move. “Hey! Hey!” He shook the reigns harder. The horses fidgeted but did not go forward.

Little Ole suddenly remembered that he didn’t really like horses. When he was smaller, and his family had horses in Gausdal, he was frightened of them. He learned to ride, and enjoyed the mobility, but never trusted the animals. Then when they moved to the meadow, and had no horses, he forgot about the fear, and only longed for the mobility. Now the mistrust came back to him. He snapped the reins sharply, and shouted louder, “Hey! Hey, you idiots!” The team whinnied and balked.

“You voice sounds too angry,” said his grandfather. “I know you have heard other teamsters curse and threaten their horses, and whip them, but I get the best results with kindness. Torger, hold the reigns quietly for a moment.” Torger took the reins from his brother. “Little Ole, come here.” The two walked up front and faced the horses. Ole petted their noses and spoke softly, “It’s alright, now, this is Little Ole, he is a good man.” He stepped back, and nudged Little Ole toward them.

The boy reached up tentatively to the horses. He petted their noses gingerly and said, “OK, see, I’m OK,” but his voice sounded nervous and uncertain. The team eyed him suspiciously.

“Keep talking,” said Ole, “Try to make them trust you.”

Little Ole tried, but without much success. After several more minutes, he was able to start and stop the team with considerable effort. When it was Torger’s turn, the younger boy did a little better, but was at a disadvantage because his voice was still high and not strong. Ole went on to demonstrate two more voice commands, “Gee” for turning to the right, and “Haw” for left. At first he used the reins along with his voice, then he turned them with only his friendly shouts. The horses responded admirably. Again the boys tried their hand, and again the results were disappointing.

Poul and Nels watched the lesson from a short distance away. They were beginning to learn to ride, but were much too small to drive a team. Nels in particular was fascinated with Ole’s easy manner, and his remarkable control of the horses. “That must be how Pa drove,” he said. “I’ll bet he could just whisper to them, and they would do anything he wanted.”

“Yeah, well how come he died, then?” said Poul.

“He couldn’t help that, it was an avalanche. Pa was the best driver in Norway. I’m going to learn to drive just like him, like Grandpa Ole.”

“He’s not our grandpa.”

“He said I could call him that, and I like it.”

= = =

One of the buildings on the new farm was chosen to house the spinning wheel, dye vats, and loom. The women spent many productive winter hours there. As they worked, Roni often entertained the four young girls with nursery rhymes and stories, accompanied by the rhythmic sounds of the machines. As with the hymns, Mari could soon sing the old familiar nursery songs perfectly, but learning new ones was extremely difficult, and nothing seemed to carry over to her speech. Roni thought long and hard, searching for a way to bridge the gap.

As Mari sat at the wheel one day, Roni sang an old spinning song to the rhythm of the spindle,

Baa, baa, little sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, my hide is full.
Sunday trousers for your father,
Sunday trousers for your mother,
And a wee pair of socks
For your tiny baby brother!

The girls giggled and sang along, and soon Mari joined in, singing and nodding as she spun. At the end of one stanza, Roni suddenly stopped and said, still to the rhythm of the spinning wheel, “Shh! Now, speak!” and began chanting the verse in a speaking voice (it was often recited in that way). All four girls followed her lead, but Mari still sang the tune.

Suddenly, Anna began coughing. Mari quickly stopped the wheel, and swept the little girl into her arms. Anna wheezed and gasped, “Mommy …”

“Shhhh,” hushed Mari, gently rocking her daughter, as the other girls watched in frightened silence. Anna coughed harder and struggled for breath. Roni stoked the fire, and soon the teakettle was steaming. Mari held the girl’s face in the stream of vapor. After what seemed like a very long time, Anna’s coughing grew less violent. She was still wheezing, but was able to take in more air between spasms. Work began again in the wool-house.

= = =

In the early spring, as the snowdrifts shrank and buds swelled on the trees, the census taker arrived at Flaate. The King had ordered a complete count of all persons in Denmark and all of its holdings, including Norway. This was Scandinavia’s first comprehensive census, in which not only the tax-paying landowners but their entire families, along with all of the peasants and servants, were enrolled by name.

The census taker was a Dane named Klaus Brinck. He spoke only Danish, which would normally have been no great handicap, since most Norwegian dialects were similar enough to Danish to be mutually understood. But Brinck disliked Norway, and resented being sent there from his comfortable office job in Copenhagen. He brought with him a Norwegian university student as his clerk, and insisted that the clerk translate for him at all times. This was rather amusing, as the student’s translations often sounded almost exactly like the original sentence, using the same words in a different grammatical structure.

Anders, Ole, and Johan were all working at the stable, repairing a barn roof that had collapsed under heavy snow, when the visitors rode up. “Hello!” cried the Dane. “Hallo!” the student repeated.

The men inside looked at each other. Were those two greeting themselves? “Hallo?” said Ole tentatively. Anders and Ole stepped outside to greet their visitors. They squinted in the bright sunlight. Johan remained inside the barn.

“Where is the farmer?” asked Klaus Brinck. “Where the farmer be?” repeated the clerk, rearranging the same words into the Norwegian usage.

“We understand you well enough,” said Ole. “We are the farmers together.” The clerk continued to translate despite Ole’s objection.

“No, no” said Brinck, “I mean, who is the owner of this farm, uh, Flaate?”

“We are, all together,” repeated Ole, over the first words of the translator, who cut himself off, and proceeded to translate Ole’s answer.

Brinck waited until he finished, and asked, “But who has deed to the land?”

Again Ole interrupted the translator, “Myself, Anders Amundsen here on my right, and the widow Gerta Hansdatter share equal partnership in the deed.”

Again Brinck waited for the complete translation, and thought to himself, Widow! Partnership! On this dirt-farm, in the middle of nowhere? What next? Then he spoke. “Then I suppose I will need to interview all three of you, and take down the names and ages of everyone living here.”

“Let’s go to the kitchen-house,” Ole said. “It’s warm there, and that’s where Gerta and the other women are working.”

“Too noisy,” said Anders. “Let’s make a fire in the dwelling-house, where we can hear each other better. Gerta will bring some tea.”

“All right,” said Brinck, after the translator had finished, “but we mustn’t take too long. I hope to do three more farms today.”

Soon a fire was roaring in the parlor. Gerta and Mari came down from the kitchen with two kettles of tea. They all sang a brief hymn of welcome for their guests. The clerk translated the hymn to Brinck as best he could.

“Yes, yes, all well and good,” said Brinck, “but we must get to our business. Beginning with you, sir, what is your name, age, and occupation or relationship on the farm?”

“Ole Guttormsen, sixty-one, farmer.”

“And your family living here?”

“My only son, Johan, farmer, and his wife and children …” Ole went on to name them.

“Any servants?” asked the Dane.

“No.”

Anders was next to dictate his family, and to the question of servants, he said “No … but there is one other, a close friend who helps us, Rønog Iverdatter.”

“A friend who helps you, not a servant? Not a relative?” Brinck grew impatient.

“She belongs to the family,” replied Anders.

“Great. All right,” he said to the clerk, “for her relationship, just put ‘belongs to family.’ See how they like that back in Copenhagen. What is her occupation?”

“Uh … woodworker,” said Anders.

“And ‘Woodworker.’ Write it down. Seventy-eight years old. I suppose she goes out and chops down trees.”

“She carves figures.” Anders was growing impatient too.

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

After Gerta had given her information, Brinck turned to Mari. “And you, ma’am?”

Mari looked at Ole, then back at Brinck, and made a hand gesture toward her friend.

“Her name is Mari Nelsdatter,” said Ole. “She cannot speak, but she understands us perfectly well.”

“Hmm. Didn’t I just hear her singing?”

As Mari made several gestures, Ole spoke again. “Yes, she can sing a little bit, but she can’t speak.”

“You don’t say? Hmm. What is her age?”

Only Mari knew the answer. She frowned, “S … sev …” Suddenly she remembered vividly a familiar scene from her childhood. Her mother, with Mari on her lap, would often “read” passages aloud from the family Bible. She could not really read, but had marked the several passages she knew by heart with colored pieces of yarn. She would open the book to the correct color, and recite the passage to Mari from memory.

On the first page of the Bible, the priest had written the names and birth dates of family members. Mari’s mother would show her that page, point to the entry of her birth, and chant her name and birth date in a sing-song voice. As Mari grew older, she taught herself to read after a crude fashion. She did not learn to write, except to copy her first name and birth date from that Bible page. She would study the entry, and practice forming the letters and numbers with a stick in the dirt, or a burned stick on a flat rock.

Mari gestured to the clerk, requesting his pen and paper. The clerk looked at Brinck.

“Now see here,” said the census taker, “Paper is expensive, and we are wasting time as well.”

“I have a scrap here that is of no use to us,” said the clerk.

“Oh, all right, but hurry up.”

Everyone watched in astonishment as Mari took the pen and paper, and very slowly wrote her name and date of birth. They were stunned by what happened next. Looking at her work, Mari chanted in a sing-song voice, “Ma-ri, seventh of May, seventeen hundred and fif-ty.”

“Mari! You spoke! You spoke!” exclaimed Gerta.

“And wrote!” added Anders.

Mari, beaming, said, “I … I … I …” She cast her eyes downward and blushed.

“Yes, yes, all well and good,” said Brinck. “Let’s see, fifty-one years old then. Occupation?”

Mari gestured once more toward Ole.

“Widow,” he said. Mari nodded.

“Children?”

Ole continued for Mari. “Poul Poulsen, ten years old, Nels, eight, and Anna, four.”

“Just a moment,” said the clerk. “Are you sure about those ages?”

Ole glanced at Mari. She nodded. “Yes.”

Doing the mental arithmetic, the clerk said dubiously, “Then she bore her three children at the ages of forty-one, forty-three, and forty-seven? Surely there is some mistake. Isn’t she their grandmother?”

Looking directly at the clerk, Mari shook her head firmly, then pointed toward his ledger sheet and nodded.

“All right, all right,” said Klaus Brinck. “I don’t care if it’s true or not. I am charged with taking the census. I was not given the the time nor the help to verify every fool story they come up with. Have we now listed every person on this farm?” All agreed that they had. “Then thank you, and good-bye.”

As they rode away, with the family still singing their hymn of farewell, Brinck was muttering to himself. Seventy-eight year old female ‘woodworker.’ Not related, but ‘belongs to the family.’ Young mother, fifty-one years old. Mute, but sings. And writes. It’s a regular widows’ asylum. He asked his clerk, “How many more farms are left for us to count?”

“About twenty.”

“Good. Less than a week and we’ll be on our way home. I can almost taste the sweetbreads and Danish beer.”

“I prefer German beer,” said the clerk, trying to sound worldly.

“I’ll buy you one then. As soon as we’re out of this godforsaken backwater.”

After the census-taker left, Ole and Anders returned to their work in the barn, where Johan was laboring alone. “How did she do it?” said Anders. “I might have guessed she could write her name, but her birth date? And then read it out loud!”

“There’s more behind those green eyes than any of us know,” replied Johan.

Upon that casual comment, Ole felt a stirring within him. He looked at his son, and they both knew what the other was thinking. Johan’s mother’s eyes had been green in her prime, before age had faded them to gray along with her hair. Not a deep and opaque green like Mari’s, but bright and brimming with the freshness of spring.

Mari and Gerta returned to the kitchen-house, where Gerta practically bubbled over with the news of Mari’s accomplishment. “I could scarcely believe my own eyes! She snatched that pen from the clerk, and wrote down her name and her birthday! Then she read it to them out loud, without a hitch. Didn’t you, dear?” Mari blushed and stammered, even shrugged, but her face fairly shone as she nodded shyly. She wondered if, even without speech, she could learn to properly read and write. So far, she only knew how to write four letters and a few numbers. And her reading was rusty at best.

But there was scarce time for learning. The women’s work on the farm was very demanding, with the textile work added on top of it. As the men plowed and planted, Ole continued to train Little Ole and Torger to drive the teams. Both of them could drive a wagon now, but the plow was too heavy and cumbersome for them to manage along with the team. Nels observed closely whenever he could, and often volunteered to help with stable duty, just to be near the horses.

Mari wandered far each day in search of certain roots and lichens best gathered at this time of year. Although her gait was still awkward due to her partial paralysis, she could still cover long distances. When she had gathered enough, it was dyeing day.

From the bloodroot came a bright reddish-orange dye, and from the lichen, vivid yellow-gold. They were the last two colors to be dyed before the bulk of the weaving could begin. Mari tended the two dye-pots boiling briskly on the stove of the wool-house, while Kari worked at a large tub where yarns were pre-soaking in a solution of fixative salts.

Roni recited an old nursery rhyme to the girls,

Ride, ride straight
To the miller’s house,
Nobody’s home
But a cat and a mouse.
Leave our grain,
Take our flour,
Ride, ride straight.

As usual with rhymes that were spoken instead of sung, Mari moved her lips to the words, but made no sound. Gerta remembered the way Mari had spoken the other day, a sort of sing-song chant, and said out loud, “I know! Let’s sing the next verse!”

Roni said in surprise, “You can sing this one? I have never heard it. How does it go?”

Gerta had never heard it sung either. She just intoned in that same childish sing-song voice,

Ride, ride straight
To Grandma’s house,
She’ll be home,
Then we’ll stop.
Cookies in the oven,
Candies in the parlor,
Ride, ride straight.

And sure enough, by the end of the verse, Mari was singing too. Of course the girls all joined in, laughing and joking as they chanted,

Ride, ride straight
To Uncle’s house.
Play with cousins,
Eat some supper,
Stay all night,
Then gallop home,
Ride, ride straight.

Before the women could congratulate Mari on this new bit of progress, Anna began to cough. This time, the wheezing was more restricted, and she started gasping for breath almost immediately. Mari picked her up and hurried to the stove. Holding the girl over her shoulder, she backed up until the steam from the two dye-pots was full in the youngster’s face.

Anna’s body stiffened in her mother’s arms. She made a strangling sound and stopped breathing altogether. Mari gasped. She turned around and sniffed the steam. It was clear, and seemed almost odorless at first, but at just the point where the two columns came together, there was an acrid edge that made even Mari’s breath clutch for a moment. She was horrified.

Mari began to sweat; her hands and feet felt cold. She remembered something she had done several times as a midwife, to start a newborn breathing. She lay Anna down on the bench and knelt beside her. She pinched the child’s nose shut, pressed her lips to the other’s, and breathed, gently at first, into her mouth. The airway was closed; no air would enter. Anna’s eyes were wide and her lips were turning blue. Mari grasped her daughter’s jaw to hold her mouth open, and tried again, more forcefully. A small amount of air passed into the girl’s lungs. As it escaped, Mari thought she heard her whisper “Mama.” Mari breathed into her mouth again. This time, very little air passed in, and none came out. Her daughter was gone. Kari, having seen Mari’s reaction to the steam, quietly removed the dye-pots and slipped them behind the stove.

Mari’s body was racked with sobs as she took the dead child in her arms. They were violent, wrenching sobs, but strangely quiet. It was a long minute before the other women began weeping, and moving toward the bereaved mother. They hesitated in fright and confusion over Mari’s attempt to resuscitate her daughter. On one hand, it seemed sinister and dark, like some kind of sorcery. On the other, it showed strong common sense, to coax air into a body starving for lack of it. Either way, they had seen nothing like it before. They struggled in silence to take it in. But soon, the other women were holding each other and Mari, sharing in the deepest grief a mother can know. Roni and Syne held the three Andersdatters close as all wept together.

By and by, Gerta went outside and called to the menfolk, who were dispersed in the fields. The boys came in too, and the rest of the day was spent in quiet mourning. Anna’s body was washed, dressed in clean clothes, and laid on a bed in the dwelling-house. Ole rode to the Praestegaard to fetch the priest. The family wept, and prayed, and sat together until he arrived a few hours later.

The new priest in Froen, Father Monsen, was a kind man at heart, although he sometimes seemed aloof and difficult to approach. This was especially true for the Brethren, for while Monsen carefully followed the Bishops’ policy of non-interference with their activities, his personal disapproval kept him at an emotional distance. But in this time of tragedy, he gave what comfort he could, and even permitted them to wash his feet, and to sing their welcome for him. He stayed with the family until Anna was buried the next day.