A Plea for Eros

neighboring house—one large and one small. As they watched, her father spoke to her in a low voice. “We must pray,” he said, “and eat onions.” She remembered a total eclipse of the sun, and she said she was told that the world was going to end. They dressed themselves in their Sunday clothes, sat down in the house, folded their hands, and waited. She remembered being told about the
nokken
in the well, a water monster that pulled little children down to the depths where it lived and probably ate them. Clearly meant to scare children from getting too close to the well and drowning, the story lured little Matilda straight to it. And there she tempted fate. She laid her head on the well’s edge and let her long red curls dangle far down inside as she waited in stubborn, silent horror for the
nokken
to come.
    But there is another small story I heard only once that has lasted in my mind. When she was a child, she lived near a lake in Minnesota in Otter Tail County; and during the winter, when that lake froze, she and the other children would take their sleds onto the lake and fit them out with sails. I can’t remember what they used for sails, but when the wind was up, the sails would fill with air and propel the sleds across the ice, sometimes at great speed. When she told me this, her voice communicated her pleasure in this memory, and I saw those sleds from a distance, three or four on the wide expanse of a frozen lake gliding noiselessly across it. That is how I still imagine it. I don’t see or hear the children. What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.
    My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a sea captain. There is a painting of his ship that my uncle has now. She was called
Mars.
It may be that I have linked that painting of a great sailing ship on the ocean with the tiny ships on the ice in landlocked Minnesota, but I’m not sure. Tilly’s family came from Underdahl in the Sogne Fjord. She never went there, but I saw Underdahl with my parents and sisters as we traveled by boat down the fjord where the mountainsides are so steep that farmers have traditionally used ladders to descend into the towns below. Underdahl has a tiny church. From the boat, the white structure looked almost doll-like, and the name for me has come to mean not only my grandmother but that miniature building.
    The Depression hit my paternal grandparents hard. They weren’t alone, of course, but my father’s life was and is shaped by that hardship—of this I am certain. He has many stories about the people he grew up with, but his inner life and the pictures he carries with him, in particular the most painful ones, are hidden to me. I know that my father began working on other farms when he was ten years old. I know that my grandmother made and sold
lefse,
a flat potato cake, to bring in money. I know that there was a twelve-hundred-dollar debt on the farm that couldn’t be paid once the Depression hit. Forty acres of the sixty-acre farm were lost. I know that after the United States entered the war my grandfather, like so many others, found work in a local defense plant. He was transferred to a town in Washington State and had to leave the family. He worked building the plant where the atomic bomb would later be manufactured. But he didn’t know this until years later. Many people in that community worked themselves sick and silly, and their labor didn’t prevent catastrophes of weather or economy, and people died of them— physically and spiritually. It has become a truism to say that there was much that was unforgiving and brutal about that life, but it is nevertheless a fact, and by the time I saw the world where my father had lived as a child, a kind of stasis had set in. I remember how still my grandparents’ farm was. The enormous sky and the flat fields and the absence of traffic on the road that ran past that place were only part of it. There was an inner stillness, too.
    High in the mountains above the town of Voss, in western Norway, lies the farm that gave me my name: Hustveit. At some point, the
tveit
became
tvedt,
a different spelling for the same word, which means an opening or a clearing. I have been there. The place is now owned and cared for by the Norwegian government. You have to climb a mountain to reach Hustveit, and a landscape more different from the Minnesota prairie could hardly be imagined. I