The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

long-neglected folder in the Portsmouth Library. I take a deep breath and
     close my eyes.
    Maren Hontvedt. The woman who survived the murders.

Maren Hontvedl’s Document
    TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY MARIT GULLESTAD
    19 September 1899, Laurvig
    It is so please the Lord
. I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of that incident which continues to haunt
     my humble footsteps, even in this country of my birth, far from those forbidding, granite islands on which a most unforgivable
     crime was committed against the persons whom I loved most dearly in all the world. I write this document, not in defense of
     myself, for what defense have those who still live, and may breathe and eat and partake of the Lord’s blessings, against those
     who have been so cruelly struck down and in such a way as I can hardly bear to recall? There is no defense, and I have no
     desire to put forth such. Though I must add here that I have found it a constant and continuous trial all these twenty-six
     years to have been, even by the most unscrupulous manner of persons, implicated in any small way in the horrors of 5 March
     1873. These horrors have followed me across the ocean to my beloved Laurvig, which, before I returned a broken and barren
     woman, was untainted with any scandal, and was, for me, the pure and wondrous landscape of my most treasured childhood memories
     with my dear family, and which is where I will shortly die. And so I mean with these pages, written in my own hand, while
     there are some few wits remaining in my decrepit and weakening body, that the truth shall be known. I leave instructions for
     this document to be sent after my death into the care of John Hontvedt, who was once my husband and still remains so in the
     eyes of the Lord, and who resides at Sagamore Street in the town of Portsmouth in the state of New Hampshire in America.
    The reader will need sometimes to forgive me in this self-imposed trial, for I find I am thinking, upon occasion, of strange
     and far-away occurrences, and am not altogether in control of my faculties and language, the former as a consequence of being
     fifty-two years of age and unwell, and the latter owing to my having completed my last years of schooling in an interrupted
     manner.
    I am impatient to write of the events of 5 March 1873 (though I would not visit again that night for anything save the Lord’s
     admonition), but I fear that the occurrences of which I must speak will be incomprehensible to anyone who has not understood
     what went before. By that I mean not only my own girlhood and womanhood, but also the life of the emigrant to the country
     of America, in particular the Norwegian emigrant, and most particularly still, the Norwegian emigrant who makes his living
     by putting his nets into the sea. More is known about those persons who left Norway in the middle of this century because
     the Norwegian land, even with all its plentiful fjords and fantastical forests, was, in many inhospitable parts of this country,
     unyielding to the ever-increasing population. Such dearth of land, at that time, refused to permit many households even a
     modest living in the farming of oats, barley, mangecorn and potatoes. It was these persons who left all they had behind, and
     who set intrepidly out to sea, and who did not stop on the Atlantic shores, but went instead directly inland to the state
     of New York, and hence from there into the prairie heartland of the United States of America. These are the emigrants of our
     Norway who were raised as farmers in the provinces of Stavanger and Bergen and Nedenes, and then abandoned all that they had
     held dear to begin life anew near the Lake of Michigan, and in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and in other states.
     The life of these emigrants was, I believe and am sorry to have to write, not always as they had imagined it to be, and I
     have read some of the letters from these wretched persons