Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [24]
Living with the sorrow of losing her twelve-year-old son, the fear of losing the home and land she loved, and the danger of losing her emotional and physical health, Helga was thinking and praying for a solution during the spring of 1896. They had been in dire straits before—during the treacherous winter of 1880 in Minnesota—and survived. After suffering from a dangerous fall on Spokane’s streets, she had sued the city, won a lawsuit, and found a female surgeon who helped restore her health. She still fervently believed that America abounded with opportunity for immigrants willing to work and take risks. Looking back at these events, she even believed that, eventually, their difficulties worked out for something good.
But a mortgage debt for a family with limited income created immense anxiety in the late 1800s. America provided no “safety net” to offer protection, nor did the immigrant Estby family have extended family nearby to turn to in times of trouble. Another Norwegian immigrant mother, who claimed a homestead in 1874 very near the Minnesota prairie land of the Estbys, described the weight of this anxiety for mothers in Grass of the Earth: The Story of an Immigrant Family in Dakota. As women rarely earned significant income outside of the home, the helpless anguish over an unpaid mortgage could control a life. Aargot Raaen recalled the shadow that enveloped their family life because of debt. When the family feared they could not even pay the 10% interest on their farm, Aargot (the oldest sister) brooded over the burden until she sometimes thought of nothing else. While the other children played, she would sit hidden by some low swinging bough and stare at the river; she watched the water bugs in their hopeless struggle against the swift current of the stream.
The children could not understand how the signing of a paper could change everything, but it did.… Moor (their mother) was very different. She went about as if she were carrying a burden. She often sat lost in thought. When alone, the children asked, “Moor, what was that paper you signed?”
“They called it a mortgage; it gives those who left the horses and the money the right to take our home unless we can pay them so much money every year for a certain number of years, besides paying the value of the horses and the money they left.” A chill stole over them all. Moor and the children had barely been able to live before. How could they take over the new burden?8
Helga’s own burning anxiety about losing the farm mirrored Moor’s, but she was adamant against sitting passively by and staring at the river. The move to Mica Creek had created some of the happiest years for their large loving family, and she knew this beloved place blessed her children.
In these April days of sorrow and stress, Helga likely carried a handful of spring flowers to place beside her son’s simple headstone. As she mulled over their family’s threatening situation, she fought against her fears. Helga also carried within her a memory from a pivotal experience in an elementary school in Christiana (now Oslo) that gave her courage during dark times. She often shared this story with her own children. One day, when Helga was a little girl, she attended a religion class where the teacher taught the children the biblical story of “Jonah and the Whale,” of how the whale swallowed Jonah and later spit him out to the sea. Her next class had been in science with a different teacher. Norway has a great seafaring tradition of whaling, and that particular day the children were studying the anatomy of whales. Helga learned that whales have small throats.
The following day Helga boldly approached the teacher in the religion class and announced that Jonah’s story could not be possible because a whale’s throat was not large enough to swallow