Verwandte Artikel zu Haymaker in Heaven

Haymaker in Heaven - Softcover

Hoem, Edvard

 
9781571311290: Haymaker in Heaven
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1571311297 ISBN 13: 9781571311290
Verlag: MILKWEED ED, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century.

The year is 1874. Nesje is a recent widower with a young son, working as a haymaker on an estate in the town of Molde and steadily clearing his own small holding. Then he meets Serianna—an outsider, looking for work, who takes him fishing and smokes a pipe and is thoroughly unlike anyone he’s met before. Soon the two fall in love and marry, and Nesje begins to dream of a prosperous future.

But prosperity is hard to come by. Some Norwegians—including Serianna’s spirited sister, Gjertine—have begun to immigrate to the American West, attracted by the glimmer of land and commerce. One of Nesje’s sons follows, while another moves to the city and becomes a wealthy merchant, and another is adopted by Serianna’s childless brother and sister-in-law. In Norway and in America, however, the turn of the century is approaching: mechanization is superseding skilled labor, the moneyed classes are growing ever more powerful, and sacrifices don’t always deliver what was promised.

Haymaker in Heaven is a sprawling saga—drawn from Edvard Hoem’s own family history—and a vivid portrait of two countries at a critical moment of intersection.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edvard Hoem is the author of Haymaker in Heaven. He has been one of Norway’s leading literary writers since his breakthrough with the Critics’ Prize–winning novel The Ferry Crossing in 1974.

Tara Chace is the translator of Haymaker in Heaven Her translations from the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish include work by Jo Nesbø, Per Nilsson, Lene Kaaberbøl, and Agnete Friis. She lives in Seattle.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

The haymaker’s name was Knut Hansen Nesje, but folks just called him Nesje and they called the farm he leased on the hillside above the small town of Molde on the west coast of Norway “the Nesje parcel.” Nesje was my great-grandfather, and during my childhood I heard many stories about him from my grandfather, Edvard Hoem, and my father, Knut.

But, although I know the key dates in his life and have a few documents about how he lived, when I went to write about him, it was not enough. I had to invent him out of air and nothingness, out of the light over Molde and Rekneslia, out of the wind that tousles my hair and the rain that falls over the fields and the people, both in his day and in mine.

On June 17, 1874, he woke up earlier than usual in the house he had built below the horizon. The pocket watch on the chair beside his bed said five o’clock. His heart beat erratically the way it did when he was short on sleep, and he thought, as he usually did when it thumped like that, that our minds bear many a worry that we do not comprehend.

He lay still a while before it dawned on him that today was his birthday and he would be thirty-six. Two years had passed since his wife Guri had died on him. For the first time, he now felt that time was easing his pain and longing.

He swung his feet over the side of the bed, descended the steep attic stairs, and went out behind the house to pass water. The summer morning was waking up with floral scents and the sod steaming. He heard birdsong farther up the hillside, first a song thrush, then a chorus of starlings, chaffinches, and willow warblers.

He went back inside and drank his fill from the dipper that stood in the rainwater bucket, before pulling on a pair of wadmal pants that had once been his Sunday best, a linen shirt, a vest, and a neckerchief. The window was open. A pair of starlings was rearing a brood of chicks in a nest under the eaves. He buttered a heel of bread and drank a mug of milk with it. He did not usually make coffee on weekdays, but if Claus Gørvell’s servant girls should offer him a cup later in the day, he would not turn them down. In his youth he had allowed himself a dram on his birthday, but he had not tasted the stuff since he had been left alone with the boy. A cotter or a tenant farmer has no time for drinking or idleness. Summer days at the Gørvell farm were long and hard, and when the haymaking was finished there, he still had to do his six mandatory days of mowing at Reknes, because Reknes was where he had leased his land from. Apart from the seasonal farm work, Nesje also made tools at the workbench and in the forge, and he took care of those Danish draft horses Claus Gørvell was so fond of. During the haymaking, he always led the line of five scythesmen. He set the pace for their mowing. His work at the Gørvell farm meant that he needed to mow his own parcel of land at night, so during the busy season in the summer that usually meant no more than three or four hours of sleep. In the winter he would work in the woods for Gørvell. He worked for a half dalar a day, or sixty skilling as people called it, which was less than a day’s wages for a day laborer, but Nesje worked at the Gørvell farm year-round. In the spring and fall, he spent every free moment he had clearing, sowing, and harvesting the four acres of land he had leased in Rekneslia. In only ten years he had cleared and ploughed two and a half acres. He had one and a half to go before he was done. He did all the tilling work with a spade and a mattock. Only for the ploughing had he borrowed a horse. By his fortieth birthday, he should have all the land under his control converted to hayfields and cropland. That was his plan, and so far he had stuck to it precisely.

***

2

Before Nesje left the house, he yelled up to the attic to wake his fourteen-year-old son, Hans, who was working as the errand boy at the Gørvell family’s mercantile this summer. Nesje received no response. He grabbed his ax and pounded on a rafter with the poll of the ax until the boy came stumbling down the stairs.

“Stop, I’m awake!” mumbled Hans. He ladled water into a small basin and headed out the door to wash the sleep out of his eyes. Then he came back in and started putting on his clothes, which were sitting on a chair. Then it hit him.

“Happy birthday, Pa.”

“Thank you.”

Nesje looked at his son. He was tall. He had really shot up nicely the last couple years. He had curls in his hair that he tried to flatten down every morning with water. He had a gentle face, almost delicate, and he tended his hands and fingernails well, like so many other members of the Nesje family. Hans would be confirmed next spring. Some said children are only ours on loan, but Nesje hoped the boy would settle nearby when he grew up. After all, it was just the two of them. Although who can know what the future will bring? So many people were setting out across the Atlantic to America these days, without any regard to their parents, who were left behind in misery and destitution.

Nesje’s voice caught a little as he reminded the boy to be on his best behavior, as he had every day thus far. The boy eyed him and in a placating voice replied, “I will be, Pa.”

Nesje picked up his whetstone from the table and a whittling knife in a sheath, which he secured to his belt. Then he walked down the big stone steps and paused for a moment in front of the house. The mountains on the far side of the Molde Fjord were an incomparable sight on this misty morning. The view of the mountain range had been an important factor in his decision to settle so high on the hillside. Some of the mountains across the fjord were down near the water, others were farther inland, but they were all spectacular from here, like one contiguous chain of mountaintops with more than seventy peaks. There was still snow on most of them. The surface of the fjord was smooth and still. In the mornings the islands and islets out there looked like they were floating on the water.

Nesje jogged down the hillsides and did not stop until he reached the top of the hill at Rekneshaugen. He paused there for a bit, giving some thought to his age. I’m an adult now, he thought, but not yet old. He looked out over the landscape. He lived here, and here was where he would continue to live. He was a thin man with a full beard and hair that curled when he worked up a sweat. He always wore a hat when he worked in the field, so his face would not become too sunburned, but his forearms and hands were dark brown. There was nothing a laborer could do about that.

Below him lay the little town of Molde, which had grown up on the land belonging to the Reknes estate and, just across the Molde River from that, Moldegaard Manor. A row of houses lined both sides of the old carriage road between Reknes Hospital and Moldegaard, and each year new buildings were added.

Nesje walked down the path to the right of the large garden called Humlehaven, the “hops garden.” It was all fields around here with no buildings, an area on the outskirts of Molde, technically still a part of Bolsøy, the neighboring municipality. The hillside was fenced in to keep grazing animals out, and several hundred plant species had been planted and now in early summer they were in peak bloom. The garden was called Humlehaven because Judge Advocate Koren, who at one time had owned the large Reknes estate, had raised hops there for brewing beer. Humlehaven belonged to the Dahl family now, and the skippers of Nicolay Dahl’s ships, who sailed many oceans, had been instructed to bring home seeds, rootstock, and cuttings from all the exotic flowers, shrubs, and...

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Verlag
MILKWEED ED
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1571311297
ISBN 13 
9781571311290
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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