What the Waving Grass Revealed
- In the summer, Per Hansa is like a kid in a candy store. Every day, he works at his fields until he's too tired to stand up. He's getting ready to plant wheat for the season. He almost gets dizzy with all the plans he makes for his farm.
- One day, Ole and Store-Hans come home feeling super excited. They've found a pond nearby that has hundreds of ducks living around it. They want to find a way to kill and eat the ducks.
- And the something horrible happens.
- While walking around one day, Per Hansa finds a couple of stakes driven into the ground to mark off plots of land. He figures that Tönseten and Olsa must have driven them in, but when he takes a closer look, he sees the names O'Hara and Joe Gill carved into them. This means that someone else has already visited this land and claimed it!
- When Per Hansa goes home that night, he doesn't know what to do with himself.
- The next morning, he gets up before everyone else. But he doesn't realize that his wife Beret gets up almost immediately after him and watches him walk off. When he comes back, he seems agitated. He quickly heads back out, telling the boys to come with him. Out in the field, he tells them he has put down property stakes and wants to find them. But no matter how much the three of them look, they don't find anything.
- We find out that earlier that day, Per Hansa went out with a shovel and pulled up the stakes he found earlier. He also filled in their holes with dirt and grass so that no one would ever know anything was there.
- When he first returned to the house, he hadn't thought he'd been watched. But Beret had watched him go into the barn, and shortly after he left with the kids, she'd gone in herself and found the stakes he'd pulled out of the ground. She's destroyed by her husband's dishonesty. In Norwegian culture, ruining landmarks isn't just punishable by death. You're also cursed to be unhappy after death. That's how seriously people take their property.
- When Per Hansa gets home, he breaks the stakes down into kindling and burns them. He sleeps easy that night, while Beret lies awake and staring at the ceiling, wondering about the man she married.
- As time passes, Per Hansa dreads the moment when the owners of the stakes will no doubt come back to settle their land. Meanwhile, Beret tries to make excuses for her husband in her head, saying that there's plenty of land to go around.
- Then one day it happens. Ole is out riding his pony when he sees a couple of wagons heading toward the Norwegians' settlement. When the wagons arrive, Per Hansa, Hans Olsa, and Tönseten go to meet the people in them. Oops, just a false alarm. The people are German immigrants from Iowa and they're heading farther west.
- But then another group comes soon after them, and this time, it's the group that Per Hansa's been dreading. He goes out to meet them with Olsa and Tönseten. But the men in the wagons are rude. They claim that the Norwegians have settled on their land and will have to clear out. Hansa demands to see their papers, but they won't show any. The Norwegians show their deeds to the property, but the men in the wagon (who are Irish) don't care. They look for the stakes that they put in the ground the previous season, but can't find them.
- A fight ensues and Hans Olsa (who's always been quiet and gentle) manhandles the biggest Irishman. The other Irishmen quickly give up and move on.
- The next day, Per Hansa's two boys laugh at the Irish settlers and make fun of them. Their mother Beret tells them to pipe down, though, since she knows the truth about the Irish claiming this land before the Norwegians.
- Eventually, Beret can't take all the celebrating and she calls out Per Hansa for burning the Irish people's land stakes. Per Hansa tries to laugh it off at first, but then he owns up to what he did and everyone celebrates him as a hero. Now Beret knows that her friends have been corrupted by their lust for land.
- In the days that follow, Beret and Per Hansa don't talk much to each other.