The Ninth Daughter

She grew up on Huftarøy, a green piece of land in the sea, 40 kilometers south of Bergen. The ocean surrounded her, and in the farmyard they stood with their backs to the weather while their hands were at work. Her father was a boatbuilder and a farmer’s son. He sweated in {the}his workshop and hauled logs from the forest he had cleared himself. There was no electricity, no machinery, only his own hands and the inherited knowledge passed from father to son. But he never had a son.

Eleven daughters were born in that house. Gertine was the ninth. And she knew from childhood: she was not the son her father needed. He carried his disappointment like a silent bitterness in his eyes and said it aloud when he thought no one was listening—or perhaps precisely when they were.

It was her mother who held the house together. Kari from Drønen, a place that sounded like waves crashing on the rocks. She churned butter, cared for cows, sheep, chickens, and carried water all day long. Gertine did what her mother did. But while her hands milked cows and carried firewood, her mind was elsewhere: school, books, the future. Another place, another fate.

When she was fifteen, she asked her father if she could have money to attend business school in Bergen. He looked at her with the same gaze that had shaped a boat hull from the heart of a log: steady, hard, unyielding. "If you were a boy," he said, "you could have had whatever you wanted." She didn’t get a cent.

But her mother placed money in her hand—silently, like a secret word. And the girl left. For Bergen. There, she worked as a maid for a household of seven, washing dishes until eleven each night. Afterward, she read. She was tired, but she read. From four to eight every afternoon, she sat at a school desk, with aching fingers and dreams in her heart or breast. Her grades weren’t that good, but she made it through. It wasn’t her merits but her will that carried her.

Then came Ullevål Hospital in Oslo. She was accepted as a student at the nursing school. They were sixty-four young women. Many with dreamy eyes and silken hands, others with hands shaped by work. Gertine belonged to the latter. She worked twelve hours a day. Got up before the sun and went to bed long after it. They called her conscientious. She called it necessary.

Three years. Three winters. She was never sick, never on the list of those who needed rest. When she received her diploma, it felt like standing on the edge of something. A vastness, a world, a life. She had not only learned to care the sick. She had learned to hold on to herself in a world that constantly tried to push her limits. She was no longer just a girl from Huftarøy. She was a nurse.

When she was offered a prestigious job as a night supervisor in a hospital in Oslo in Oslo, she declined. She’d had enough night shifts. She wanted to live, not just keep others alive.

So she sewed her money into her belt and placed her Bible in her bag. She was heading to America. Alone. To a new language, a new country, with her own strength—and God’s hand over her.

The Black Woman

She stood by the railing and watched the Statue of Liberty rise against the morning sky. A green flame, a dragon of hope. Gertine had never seen anything so large, so unmoving, and yet so alive. Behind her lay the ocean. In front of her – America.

The ship docked. The air smelled of steam, coal, and food she didn’t recognize. People shouted, wagons rolled, and it felt as if the whole world had gathered in this one harbor. Gertine tightened the belt around her waist, where her money was sewn in. She held the Bible under her arm. But the sister who was supposed to meet her never came.

She waited. One day. Two. On the third day, she had no bread left, and it was too dangerous to stay. She asked around, but couldn’t understand the answers. The mouths moved fast, the words were foreign. The only thing she recognized was the desperation.

Then she saw her. A woman – tall, with dark skin and eyes that seemed to glow. She came toward her. Gertine froze. It felt like her blood stopped flowing. She had heard about people like this. Read about them in the Bible. Never seen them. She prayed silently, not even knowing what she was afraid of – except everything.

But the woman smiled. Something softened in Gertine. She reached out her hand. The woman said a name: "Travelers Aid."

With help from this organization, she was brought to a Norwegian family living uptown. Relatives, strangers but warm. They gave her bread, soup, a bed. That first evening, she sat and looked out at a street that never quieted down. Horses, cars, children screaming, people singing. It wasn’t like Huftarøy. It was like nothing she had ever seen before.

Gertine felt small. But she wasn’t afraid anymore. She had received help, and she knew more help would come. She opened her Bible. Her fingers flipped to Psalms. There it said: "He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul."

She blinked toward the light from the window. America didn’t sleep. But Gertine lay down and slept – with the belt around her waist and the Bible on her chest.

Bloomers

The journey continued to Minneapolis. A Norwegian pastor had written to the hospital there and said, "She doesn’t know much English, but she brings her hands and her heart." That was enough. She got the job.

The first days were like walking blindfolded. Patients spoke, but she didn’t understand what they were saying. One older man called her something that sounded like "the tail." She blushed and had to step out into the hallway to think. Did she have a tail? Another asked if she wore "bloomers" (long, loose underpants). She thought it meant nightclothes and answered, "Yes, I sleep in them every night." Laughter erupted from three beds.

She wrote down every word she heard. On scraps of paper. On the back of her hand. In the margins of her hymnal. She didn’t read Shakespeare, but she read the Psalms. She learned English from the Bible, verse by verse. It became a language with undertones of judgment day and grace. When she said, "I will serve," it sounded like a prayer.

The soldiers stopped laughing – they listened. The young men with bandages across their chests called her "our Norwegian angel." She came with soup and devotion, with quiet hands and warm eyes. One of them wrote her a note before being sent home: "I believe in God because of you."

She found friends among the other Norwegian nurses. Women who had also left small houses in Western Norway. They shared the same language, the same songs. They prayed together, laughed together, and looked out for one another.

After a few months, she could answer in English – with an accent, but with confidence. She had enough words to pray, to comfort, to hold someone’s hand as life slipped away. That was all she needed.

And one evening, as she stood at the window and watched the snow fall over Minneapolis, she thought: I belong here. Not because I understand everything, but because I want to understand. Because God brought me here – and never let go.

The Snake Slayer of Marlin

His name was Øystein, and he came from a farm in Minnesota, but had settled in Marlin, Washington – a place so small it didn’t even have street names. There was dust, grass, and a sun that burned in your eyes all day. No electricity. Water had to be drawn from the well. But Øystein had land, and Øystein wanted chickens.

Gertine said yes. She married him and moved with him. On the farm, they built a home out of planks and hope. She had thought it would be a stepping-stone. A place to begin, not to stay. But Marlin – this speck of a town – became her home. It was four rooms without electricity, without running water. The wind sang through the cracks in the walls. There was a kitchen table, a woodstove, and a woman who refused to give up.

She cried the first day. Sat on the bed and thought she had crossed an ocean for this. But then she stood up. And began.

The neighbor came by with a horse and wagon. Asked if they needed manure. She said yes. They got twelve loads. She dug, hauled, spread. Planted. And it grew. Beans, peas, potatoes. It became a garden, and the garden became proof: it was possible.

She bought chickens. Eight chicks that crawled into her hands, ate from them. She talked to them like children, and they answered with chirps and tiny, pattering steps. One day, when she went out to feed them, a huge snake lay beneath the chicken coop. Its head raised. Tongue flicking. She ran for a stick and struck. And struck again.

The snake lay in the dust with a crushed head, and she stood there, chest heaving, hands covered in dirt. She had saved the chicks. Saved herself. Later, they ate the meat, and the neighbor kept the rattler's tail.

She had no training for this. No one had taught her to build a chicken coop or draw water with a bucket and rope. But she knew how to work. And people noticed. Neighbors came. Some brought bread, others brought advice. One came with a head full of temptations, but she shut the door. She had come to live, not to lose herself.

She wrote to her sister in Bergen: "We don’t have electricity, but we have grace. I can’t read the newspaper, but I see the world in the faces of those who knock on our door."

And every night, when the darkness came, she lit a kerosene lamp and read aloud to Øystein from the Bible. They read about Moses and the desert, about Ruth and a new beginning. And she knew: this was her desert. But something grew here too. Strength grew. And peace.

I Birthed My Child

It was in Marlin, out on the dry plains, that Gertine felt the labor pains begin. She was home alone. Øystein had gone to fetch the doctor, but the road was long, and no one knew when – or if – he would return.

She had helped many others, but now it was her own body that had to go through it. She paced the wooden floor, sang softly to herself, prayed quietly, while the sun hung low over the ridge. She had prepared water, clean towels, and placed the hymnal by the bed. She knew what she was doing. She couldn’t afford to be afraid.

When the pain intensified, she called the neighbor – a woman from Dakota who had never helped at a birth before. "You don’t need to know anything," said Gertine, "just hold his foot and give him a smack so he knows he's alive."

She gripped the table leg with one hand. The other guided through the pain, led, felt. The baby came, and as he lay there between thigh and linen, she said, "Hold the light steady."

She lifted the newborn, blue and glittering from the world’s first cold. He didn’t cry, but she knew what to do. She laid him across her thigh, rubbed him with her palm, tapped gently between his shoulder blades. "Come now," she whispered. "Come."

And he came. A gasp, a wail, a life.

The neighbor trembled, holding the lantern. "You’re crazy," she said.

Gertine laughed, a laugh that cracked through her tears. She held the baby to her chest and felt a warmth that came not from the stove or the wool blanket. She looked down at his face. Eyes closed, breath steady. A son.

When Øystein returned with the doctor close behind, she was sitting up, eating a slice of bread. "I didn’t have time to wait for you," she said. "He wanted out, and I was ready."

With the child came a new seriousness and a new joy. Life in Marlin took deeper root. They cultivated more land, got more chickens, and the days passed in faithful rhythm – but Øystein’s health worsened, and it became increasingly difficult to get help where they lived. It was far to both doctors and jobs.

So they made a decision: for their son’s sake, for their future, they would move. Spokane was several days’ journey away, but Gertine had said it already the first time they drove through town: "This is where I want to live, and this is where I want to die."

In Spokane, Gertine began working at the hospital. There, she could finally make full use of what she knew. She was not just a nurse – she was Gertine from Norway, the one who could stand firm in the storm and receive new life as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

And for her, it was.

A Norwegian Angel

She earned a reputation for being calm and fearless, for showing up when she was most needed – and staying until the worst had passed. She took little payment, often none at all. In the neighborhood, people knew that if something happened, they could send for Gertine. And she came. She always came.

An old man she saved after a heart attack said, "I thought God had forgotten me. But then you came." Another, a woman on her deathbed, said, "I saw the angel before you walked in. Then I saw you – and realized it was the same being."

Gertine quietly laughed at that. She didn’t think she was an angel. But she believed that God could use people – and that grace could walk hand in hand with a needle and thread.

Even after years of working, she had to get an American nursing license. It wasn’t easy. She wasn’t allowed to use a dictionary and had to explain illnesses in a language she learned late in life. She brought the New Testament to the exam, recited Psalm 91, and wrote what she knew. She did not fail.

But she had to fight to keep her faith. While working at a Catholic hospital, Sacred Heart, she refused to attend mass. She didn’t want to pray to Mary – only to God. "You have changed God’s word," she told the nuns. They didn’t like that. Her stay there didn’t last long.

She learned more English from Bible verses than from dictionaries. And she learned the most from children – how they pronounced words, what made them laugh, which words carried power. She wrote it all down. But she never stopped reading the Psalms out loud – even when no one was listening.

Gertine refused to give up. And when people asked what kept her going, she answered, "I believe. I believe there’s a purpose. And I believe it matters to stand firm, even when the storm comes."

The Sister

Gertine still saw her sometimes in her mind – standing in the shadow of the living room window, hands folded, not in prayer, but in a quiet absence. Anna, the sister who came before. The wise one, the strong one, the one who was a nurse before Gertine even knew what that word meant.

It was Anna who had urged them to leave. She spoke of opportunities, of the new country, the vast promise. She had been the first to feel the American wind in her face. But the new country never truly welcomed her.

For Anna, there was never a home. She had no children. She had no land to sow. She had work, yes – she was skilled and respected. But over time, life took from her everything she didn’t actively hold on to. And that was a lot.

She claimed a homestead, but lived alone. She cared for patients, but let no one in. And when she grew old, she sat in a rocking chair with her eyes fixed on a wall clock that ticked without sympathy.

Gertine held her hand when she died. Eighteen hours without sleep. She stroked her sister's forehead and asked, "Are you ready, Anna?" And Anna nodded. "I love the Lord. I know I’m going home."

There was a divide between them – not just in age and life choices, but in the unseen things. Where Gertine had opened the door to life, Anna had kept it shut. She had moved through the world as someone who never truly believed she belonged. And Gertine understood: the sorrow of what one never receives can consume the joy of what one actually has.

Still, they carried each other, with the bonds of childhood, of Drønen, of sheep barns and boatbuilding. But life shaped them differently.

Gertine had welcomed and received. Children, work, soil, light. She had dug with her own hands and set roots in another prairie. Anna had kept the soil at a distance, as if waiting for something that never came.

That was the difference. Between a dream that broke, and a dream that grew – not because it was easy, but because it had been given space. Because she opened herself to it, even though it cost her everything she carried from before.

She had stood at bedsides where people died, and where new lives began. She had scrubbed floors. She had made headcheese from pigs’ heads and read the Psalms in hospital rooms with drawn curtains. She had been afraid, yes – but never paralyzed. Never without faith.

She didn’t need more answers. She had received the most important one. She had felt the joy of belonging.

_{Biography:
Gjertine Karia Hjortedal (1894–1990) was born as Gjertine Eriksdatter Storebø on Huftarøy in Hordaland, Norway. She worked her way through business school in Bergen and completed her nursing education from 1921 to 1924. After working in Haugesund, she emigrated to the United States in 1925, where she worked in hospitals in Minneapolis and Chicago. She married Øystein Hjortedal and settled in Washington. They had two children. Gjertine worked as a private nurse for 17 years and later became director at Riverview Terrace in Spokane. She passed away in 1990.}

_{Source:
Rasmussen, J. (Interviewer). (1984, August 22). Interview with Gjertine Hjortedal. Pacific Lutheran University, Archives and Special Collections.}

_{Cover Image for illustration only}