The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page B

with you on a packet to Quebec,
     where ships are landing now, preferring to avoid the higher tariffs charged in Boston and New York. For your voyage, you will
     want fruit wine to alter the taste of the poor water, and dried fish. Grind some coffee and put it in a box. You will also
     want to bake the flatbread and pack it in the round tubs you have seen down at the docks, and also cure some cheese. If you
     have a wife and she is with child, then come before it is her time, as infants do not well survive the journey. Seven perished
     on my own passage, owing to the diphtheria croup which was a contagion on board. I will tell you in truth, Hontvedt, that
     the sanitary conditions aboard these ships are very poor, and it is too bad, but on my journey I was well disposed to prayer
     and to thinking of the voyage as a deliverance. I was seasick all but the last two days, and though I arrived in America very
     gaunt and thin, and remained so in Gloucester, now I am fat again, thanks to the cooking of Nordhal’s wife, Adda, who feeds
     me good porridge and potato cakes with all the fresh fish you can imagine.
    When you are here, we may together purchase a trawler in the town of Portsmouth. Send me news and greet all my friends there,
     my mother, and all soskend.
    Your cousin and servant unto death, Torwad Holde
    May God forgive me, but I confess that I have truly hated the words of Torwad Holde’s letter and even the man himself, and
     I do so wish that this cursed letter had never come into our house. It was an evil missive indeed that stole my husband’s
     common sense, that took us from our homeland, and that eventuated in that terrible night of 5 March. Would that this letter,
     with its stories I could not credit, this letter that bore with its envelope strange and frightening stamps, this letter with
     its tales so magical I knew they must be lies, been dropped into the Atlantic Ocean during its transit from America to Norway.
    But I digress. Even with the distance of thirty-one years, it is possible for me to become overwrought, knowing as I do what
     came later, what was to follow, and how this letter led us to our doom. Yet even in a state of distress, I must admit to understanding
     that a mere piece of paper can not be the instrument of one’s undoing. In John, my husband, there was a yearning for adventure,
     for more than was his lot in Laurvig, desires I did not share with him, so content was I to be still near my family. And also,
     I must confess, there had been that summer, in the Skaggerak and even in the Kristianiafjord, a fish plague that had greatly
     lessened the number of mackerel available to the fisher folk, and though not a consequence of this, but rather as a result
     of the importation of fish from Denmark, a simultaneous lowering of the price of herring in Kristiania, which caused my husband,
     in a more practical manner, to look toward new fishing grounds.
    But bringing up a living fish with one’s bare hands? Who could be such a blasphemer as to put forth such lies against the
     laws of nature?”
    “I will not go to America,” I said to Evan on the landing at Laurvig on 10 March 1868.
    I believe I spoke in a quavering voice, for I was nearly overcome by a tumult of emotions, chief among them an acute distress
     at having to leave my brother, Evan Christensen, behind, and not knowing if I would see him or my beloved Norway ever again.
     The smell of fish from the barrels on the landing was all around us, and we could as well distinguish the salted pork in wooden
     cases. We had had to step cautiously to the landing, as all about us the rod iron lay for loading onto the ship, and to my
     eye, this disarray seemed to have been made by a large hand, that is to say by the hand of God, Who had strewn about the pier
     these long and rusty spokes. I believe that I have so well remembered the sight of this cargo because I did not want to look
     up that day at the vessel which would carry me away from