The Settlers (11 page)

Kristina choked, weeping with joy. If there was anything she had missed on the claim it was chickens. Now her throat was so full she couldn’t say thank you the way she would have wished; she could only mumble.

Ulrika gave her a small bag of rice for chicken feed: “Be careful with the basket! The little lives are delicate.”

Pastor Jackson picked up the grocery basket and Ulrika the basket with the hen and chicks, and the two of them accompanied Kristina to the lumber office at the end of the street. It was almost an hour before the wagon was loaded, but her friends remained with her until the driver was ready to start. When the wheels had already begun to roll, Ulrika called to her once more: she must be careful with the newly hatched feather-lives there on the driver’s seat.

Each time Ulrika had come to visit Kristina in her home she had brought gifts to her and the children. Once Kristina had complained of rats and rodents in their cabin that gnawed at the food and spoiled much of it for them, and next time Ulrika had brought a cat. The cat was a good mouser, but after a time they had found him in a bush near the house, bitten to death; some wild animal had torn out his throat.

And now she was driving home with Mr. and Mrs. Jackson’s most welcome gift. During the whole journey she sat with the basket on her knee and held on to it with both her hands, listening in quiet joy to the hen’s cackling and the peeps and chirps of the chicks. When the wheels rolled over stumps, or down into holes in the forest road, and her seat fell and rose, she clutched the basket more firmly.

In trees and bushes, along the whole stretch of the road, Kristina heard the spring birds of the forest, but she was unaware of them; their song was drowned by the determined chirping from the domestic birds on her knee. A hen, chickens, eggs! An egg each Sunday, eggs for cooking during the week! Egg bouillon, egg milk, egg pancakes! This was what the chirp from the chickens meant. Boiled eggs, fried eggs, eggs in omelets, eggs in the pan, eggs, eggs, eggs!

If she now had decent luck so that at least half of the twelve chicks were pullets! A rooster was good for only one meal, devoured at one sitting, but hens’ eggs would be food year in, year out.

Kristina’s thoughts turned gratefully to Ulrika and her husband. Her friends in the Stillwater parsonage had proved themselves her friends in every need. The Jacksons were the kindest people she knew in the world, despite the fact that both had led such wretched lives in their homelands. Here they had turned into new beings, they had become transformed in America. She had herself seen how Ulrika had blossomed in this country.

The same thing had happened to a great number of the immigrants. When they no longer had masters over them but could live their own lives as they wished, they became different people. When they could make their own decisions and need not obey others, they became new beings.

Kristina recognized that she herself had changed some out here; she valued people differently. In Sweden she had gone along with the common opinion and valued those whom others valued, looking down on those whom others looked down on. And at home there were those of a higher class whose opinions one should heed, for their ideas and actions were considered the right ones. But here she knew of no particular persons who were held up as examples; in this country, it seemed, people did not care what anyone thought or said about others.

And since no one out here was considered better than anyone else, each one must form his own opinions. She herself must stick to what she felt for others and knew of their deeds. She must make judgments that she considered right. Thus it came about that she now valued people differently. In this way she explained to herself the feelings she had about her friends in Stillwater.

Kristina had visited in a home where the husband had been a thief and the wife a whore. But this couple were her honest, devoted, indispensable friends. Outside her family, her best friends in America were the former thief and the former whore.

III

PLANNING AND PLANTING

—1—

As soon as Petrus Olausson had raised his log house, his wife and children arrived. His wife’s name was Judit. She was a tall, rather lean, woman with small, quick, sharp eyes, a strong nose, and a severely compressed mouth which seemed distorted—the right corner was pulled up higher than the left. The couple had a girl fourteen years old and twin boys barely twelve.

Kristina felt a little shy with her neighbor the first time she came to call; her tongue was slow to converse with her. Judit Olausson, in her black, tight-fitting dress with a white starched lace collar which came all the way up to her chin, did not seem like an ordinary settler’s wife but rather like a matron on a well-to-do farmstead. There was something austere and commanding about her, whether it came from her penetrating look or the wry mouth; Kristina did not feel on equal footing with her neighbor. Olausson’s wife was also fifteen years older than she.

Later in the spring two families from Småland settled at Fish Lake on the east side of the valley. It was a great distance from this lake to Ki-Chi-Saga and the names of the newcomers were not known, nor which parish they came from.

But with the Olaussons’ arrival Karl Oskar and Kristina at last had close neighbors. The settlers gave each other a hand when need be; Karl Oskar lent Olausson a few tools, although the newcomer had brought along more implements than Karl Oskar had owned when he staked his claim. And it seemed the Helsinge farmer also was fairly well supplied with cash.

Petrus Olausson immediately suggested that the families hereabouts meet every Sunday at each house in turn to enjoy the comfort of religion and help each other with matters.

At these Sunday meetings, Olausson read from the Bible and gave a brief explanation of the passage he had read. Each time he mentioned the punishment he would have suffered in Sweden had he there attempted to explain the Bible.

He told them about the persecution he had experienced at the time he and his wife were Erik Janson’s apostles. The prophet had one day come to their home at Alfta to sell wheat flour—he was called Wheat-flour Jesus. At that time Janson was of a world-renouncing mind and adhered strictly to the Bible, considering all other religious books to be false. Because of this, the clergy had asked for his imprisonment and sent the sheriff after him. For several weeks they had hidden him under their barn floor. Three or four times a day they had carried food to him and later they had followed him to North America. The prophet from Biskopskulla had founded Bishop Hill, Illinois, where he intended to build the New Jerusalem. And Erik Janson had seemed to his followers as humanity’s great light, sent by God to restore Christianity. Here in America he would found a new and cleansed Lutheran Church.

His teachings had been honest and humble in the beginning, but he soon became puffed up with self-righteousness and destroyed himself thereby. No longer was he God’s representative on earth, he set himself above God. On the Illinois prairie he treated his people worse than the Americans treated their slaves; he ruled them as if they were his personal possessions. When a married man wanted to sleep with his wife he must first report his desire to Janson. And when the prophet gracefully had condescended to the bedding, then it must take place in full view of the whole congregation. Such was the shameless man’s pleasure. When people grew sick or old or useless for work, he simply commanded them to lie down and die. If the sick did not obey him and failed to die the same day, they were excluded from the colony.

The overbearing man brought on his own evil end: a murderer’s bullet.

And Petrus Olausson spoke of the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church, of Baptism and Methodism, and explained the differences in the religions which decided where a human was to spend eternity—in Heaven or in Hell. To Kristina the whole seemed confusing and difficult to understand. But she understood how easily a person could become ensnared in a false religion which would lead to eternal damnation. God himself had not given clear instructions about the right road, and an ignorant, simple sinner like herself could not find it without guidance. That was why ministers were essential.

Man did not obey God when obeying authority, said Olausson, and that too sounded strange and confusing to her. As a child she had been taught that no authority existed except that which derived its power from God. But her previous instruction, it now seemed, was a falsification of the Swedish clergy, according to the Helsinge farmer. The sheriff who had chased Erik Janson under the barn floor and put Bible-reading persons in prison on bread and water had not received his office from God but from the Crown. The provincial governor was a successor to Pilate, who had sentenced Christ to crucifixion. And nowhere in the Bible did it say that God had ordained sheriffs to plague Christian people who read the Bible in their homes. The sheriffs in Sweden were successors to the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus at the order of civil authorities.

In her catechism, however, Kristina had learned that she ought to respect and obey authority for the Lord’s sake, and she often felt that her neighbor was mistaken.

Petrus Olausson urged the Swedish settlers in the valley to get together and build a church without delay. Karl Oskar pointed out that they also needed a schoolhouse; their children were growing up and they needed Christian schooling unless the parents wanted them to become heathens. Johan was already of school age and Lill-Marta only a year younger. He and Kristina had tried to teach the brats as best they could, but they had no Swedish spelling book and no catechism. Karl Oskar had taught Johan the letters of the alphabet from the Swedish almanac, but it was not very good for spelling since it had so few words in it. The boy learned too slowly in this way, and Karl Oskar was not much of a teacher. And both Johan and Lill-Marta would soon need to learn the contents of other books as well; it would be useful for both the boy and the girl to be able to read and write.

Karl Oskar had often discussed the building of a schoolhouse with Danjel Andreasson. There were three children in New Kärragärde, older than their own, whom their father had instructed so far.

The Olaussons too, had instructed their children, first and foremost in the true Lutheran religion, in order to instill in them from tender years the pure faith. Olausson thought they could use the church they intended to build as a schoolhouse, but Karl Oskar thought they should not wait—building a church might take several years—and they could not get along without a schoolhouse for so long, or their children would have become too old to go to school.

There were many matters for the settlers to attend to. They must build and build again—temples for God, houses for people, schoolhouses for children, shelters for the cattle, barns for the crops, storehouses, implement sheds. Karl Oskar had laid the foundation for a new living house which he hoped to have roofed by next year, and that was only a poor beginning. As he thought of the coming years he could see himself constantly occupied with eternal carpentry, eternal sill-laying for new buildings.

—2—

In order to please Kristina, Karl Oskar had named his new home Duvemåla, and had written to his wife’s home for apple seeds and had planted an Astrakhan apple tree for her: this was his remedy for her homesickness. He wanted to know if it had helped and asked her if she still suffered as much as before. She replied that she thought perhaps her longing for home had died down a little.

Now Kristina could say: I live again at Duvemåla, this is my home, I hold it dear, here I will stay as long as I live. And she was pleased with the little seedling that had grown from the apple seeds. She looked after it constantly and tended the small plant as if it were a delicate living being.

Thus far all was well. But neither the name, Duvemåla, nor the seedling could divert her thoughts from her old home. On the contrary, they now turned more often to her native country.

Even during the night she would return in her dreams, in which she moved back to her homeland, with husband and children. Happily there, she wondered over her foolishness ever to have undertaken the long journey out into the world. What business had she had far away in America? She had a good home here. Well, anyway, everything had turned out all right, all of them were unharmed, back in their old village. She might even dream that the whole emigration had been an evil nightmare.

But in the morning she always awakened in America.

Kristina tried persistently to suppress this longing, this desire for and loss of something she would never have again. She wanted to conquer her weakness and be as strong as Karl Oskar. She had made her home here forever, she must learn to feel at home, become part of the foreign country. But in this, her will would not obey her; something in her soul refused to obey.

And spring in Minnesota, with its dark evenings, was her difficult season; then she yearned for the land with evenings of another hue. She longed for Sweden as much as ever, but she kept this from her husband. She must carry this incurable soul-ache in secret, hide it like a shameful disease, as people hid scabby and scurvy sores on their bodies.

How many times hadn’t Kristina wished that she could write a letter to her parents! But Swedish women were not taught to write. Perhaps if she herself had insisted, when she was little, she might have learned to write. But how could she have known what was in store for her? As a little girl she could not have imagined that her life would be spent on another continent. Nor had anyone else at home imagined that a woman of their village would move so far away from her relatives that she needed to write letters to her parents. Her fate had not been anticipated by the village school laws.

Now she was separated from her dear ones; not a word from her could reach them except through another person. After Robert had left for California, Karl Oskar had written a few short letters for her to her parents. Robert had helped her to express her thoughts, but Karl Oskar had difficulty in forming the sentences and capturing her feeling in writing. The letters became the same, almost word for word: she was well, all was well with them, her father and mother must not worry about their daughter, her daily thoughts were with them in her dear old Duvemåla. These last were the truest words in the letters.