Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [65]
Exuberant to be homeward bound, and renewed by the strong press coverage they received in Minnesota, they now knew their distinctive accomplishment intrigued others. They looked to the future to write and illustrate the book, apparently confident they would finally receive the $10,000 to solve their family’s difficulties. When they read the newspaper’s glowing and thorough accounts of their adventure, they gathered copies of the articles to take home to show Ole and the children. These two treasured articles of their triumphant trip eventually became the only thin membrane of memory that kept this story alive.
18 LOST AND FOUND
Take care of this story, honey.
—HELGA TO GRANDDAUGHTER, THELMA
Helga and Clara returned to a husband and family overwhelmed by tragedy and filled with grief and hostility. “Johnny’s dead too” were probably the first words Helga heard after arriving home.1 She came back to Spokane more as a villain than a heroine. The memory of a cherished family life and home had motivated Helga to extraordinary efforts; it was what she longed to save. But after thirteen months of absence, the loving home she and Clara remembered no longer existed. Depending on when they arrived back, their home was probably still under quarantine. The children were not allowed to attend school or church, no one dared visit their infectious home, nor was Ole welcomed into other people’s home after caring for his two dying children. The family suffered for weeks without comfort in their anguish.
Bertha’s and Johnny’s death did not just take the children, but became the breeding ground for anger, blame, and lifelong bitterness toward Helga for leaving. She had flagrantly broken the most basic code of Victorian and Norwegian motherhood: mothers belong in the home. Helga heard the particular agonies of the children’s dying days and saw her husband’s heartbreak and sense of failure. She felt the bewilderment and resentment of the remaining children who spent such terrifying days alone in the cold shed. This all added to her deep grief and guilt. The weight of the unspoken question, “Would she have been able to save them?” was unanswerable, but also unlikely. And she carried the burden of knowing that she missed giving her children a mother’s comfort in their dying days.
Helga left a husband and seven children at home for a year in pursuit of an inconceivable, dubious, and ultimately unsuccessful venture in an era when the belief in separate spheres for men and women still prevailed. Norwegians traditionally embraced a more rigid separation of men’s and women’s roles than even Americans, a pattern they brought as immigrants to a new land. In the “Little Norway” enclave of Mica Creek, disapproval was strong, which added to Ole’s humiliation among his Scandinavian neighbors. “It wasn’t looked upon well by the local farmers,” recalled Nels Siverson. Even more telling was the moral reason he gave. “It wasn’t the right thing to do.”2
Perhaps even more galling to her Scandinavian neighbors was how her very act was a public admission of her husband’s inability to provide and demonstrated a lack of submission to his authority or influence. She chose to direct her own destiny, to make up her own mind. An interview in the Spokesman-Review the day she left on the trip quoted Helga admitting, “It is easy to figure it out on paper, but it will be quite another thing to do as we have planned, but we have made up our minds as well as all arrangements.”3
If criticism existed before she left, the crescendo against Helga’s abandonment peaked when neighbors learned of the death of the children. This tragedy reinforced the mantra of motherhood that insisted a mother belonged in the home. Clergy, inspirational writers, and literature for and about women often espoused this viewpoint.