The Settlers (18 page)

So the woman stayed with the man, and in his bed nothing was left undone during the night.

Next evening he in turn went to her, only to meet a horrible disappointment. She would no longer give herself to him. She was deeply repentant and had decided never to repeat what had taken place the night before. And now she wanted, she insisted, yes, she demanded, that he should help her carry out her decision. She wanted him to join her in prayer for strength for both of them—first and foremost for her—to withstand in future their unclean thoughts and desires.

The man was greatly disturbed at this demand. He realized what great danger they might be in—the danger of their prayer being heard. Perhaps not so much when it came to strength for himself; he didn’t anticipate any change there. But he knew what could happen to a woman’s strength. Women were always on and off, back and forth, in between.

He made excuses: people must not pray for things that weren’t good for them. And it wasn’t good for them with separate beds. And too persistent and stubborn prayers were against the Almighty’s will.

But the woman refused to budge. He was a fellow criminal in a sin she had committed last night, it was his duty to help her stand fast. If he refused she would no longer remain in his house.

Thus he was forced to comply. He prayed with her, although without great fervor. The words came from his lips rather than from his heart, which was secretly sad over them.

Time passed; they lived apart as before. Neither one of them referred to that single good night when they had shared one bed. As far as the woman was concerned she seemed to have stricken it from her memory, and the man sensed it would not be wise to remind her of it.

Then one evening after he had gone to bed his door opened—the woman had come to him again. All her prayers had been in vain, her great weakness was upon her again, she could not resist it.

The man offered her all the comfort he was capable of. And that night too they left nothing undone on his couch.

Again the woman regretted her act and her weakness and insisted it would not be repeated. And he said nothing, only waited in patience. Now he knew she would be back in his bed again, as indeed she was after the expected delay.

By and by a regular order was established in their lives, with two bed communions a week. This satisfied the man. And to the woman the in-between-time of repentance was indispensable. She admitted that repentance to her was a bliss she could not do without. For the peace of her soul she needed the assurance that her sin was forgiven each time.

Luckily, she had passed a woman’s fertile years so they need not fear a pregnancy. Their bed play need never be known. People would have censored them severely if they were discovered. But only their Creator knew how things were between them, and they relied on his silence.

Thus everything turned out well with the man and the woman. They had both found the peace they sought in the New World, and the woman could besides enjoy the sweet repentance she felt after each new fall.

Thus this man and this woman lived happily together, and if they weren’t dead yet, they were probably still alive, concluded Jonas Petter.

Karl Oskar looked askance at the storyteller after he had finished his tale. He remembered a Sunday morning last winter when he had happened to have an errand at Jonas Petter’s house. He had knocked on the door but no one had opened it. Perhaps they had already gone out. To make sure he had looked in through the window and had seen Jonas Petter and Swedish Anna sound asleep in the bed under the window.

Karl Oskar had turned away and walked over to Danjel’s to visit for an hour. When he returned Jonas Petter was outside the house, inspecting the window.

So Jonas Petter had told this story to make it clear that he relied on the silence of the man who had seen him with Swedish Anna. Only Karl Oskar and the Creator were in the know.

Anders Månsson, however, had listened with the expression of one hearing a wonderful fairy tale. Jonas Petter’s stories struck him as being completely unreal, but he always listened intently and asked for more.

“That’s a good story, Jonas Petter! How can you make up such yarns?”

It was time for the men to resume their work on the roof in the humid heat of the Minnesota summer. As they began to nail down the shakes again, Månsson said, “There’s a small part of truth in that story—that part about the men-folks’ loneliness out here. It’s like a hot iron right through the heart, this terrifying loneliness in Minnesota Territory.”

The storyteller kept his silence. And the third roofer thought that never to a living being, not even to his wife, would he betray what he knew of the man and the woman who had been brought to share their bed through loneliness in the St. Croix Valley.

VI

STARKODDER THE OX

—1—

To plant and to seed, to harvest and to thresh, that was the order of the chores from spring to fall, the cycle of labor, year in, year out. Karl Oskar Nilsson had cut, harvested, and threshed his third crop from the clearing. His old Swedish almanac contained blank pages between the months, intended for a farmer’s notations; on these he had written down his harvests in America:

Anno 1851 I harvested 18 bussels

Rye, 11 bussels Barley and 32 bussels

potatoes, all ample measure;

Ditto 1852 harvested 24 bussels Rye,

16 and a half bussels Barley and 48

bussels potatoes, ditto measure.

Now he continued on the same page—between the harvest month of August and the autumn month of September:

Ditto 1853 I harvested 38 bussels

Rye, 26 bussels Barley and 69 bussels

potatoes, ditto measure;

He was getting along on his claim; his third crop was more than double his first.

What he missed more than anything was a team of his own. For three whole years he and Kristina had been their own beasts of burden. How much hadn’t they carried and dragged during that time! They had carried home all their necessities, trudged long roads with heavy loads. From Taylors Falls to Ki-Chi-Saga, they had carried their burdens in their hands, in their arms, on their shoulders, on their backs. They had trudged and shuffled along, and lugged and carried and pulled, until their backs were bent and their arms stretched beyond their normal length. Out here they had indeed undertaken labor which in Sweden was relegated to animals.

There were two kinds of immigrants in the Territory—two-legged and four-legged. The people were few, the animals fewer, but the latter were indispensable to the former. Animals were therefore imported; cattle were driven in herds, or freighted on the rivers, from Illinois. Many of the animals died during the long and difficult transportation, and those that survived were so expensive on arrival in Minnesota that a squatter could not afford them. “Oxen for Sale! Cheap for Cash!” Karl Oskar had seen these signs in Stillwater and St. Paul. But the cheap cash price for a team was still eighty, ninety, or a hundred dollars, and that much money he had not as yet held in his hand at one time since they settled here. What cash he received for surplus hay or other crops was needed for groceries, tools, and implements. He must himself raise his cattle. Meanwhile he must continue to lug his own burdens, while Lady’s and Miss’s bull calves grew into oxen.

But one day, on an errand to the lumber company in Taylors Falls, Karl Oskar learned that one of the company’s oxen had broken both of his front legs and that they had been forced to slaughter the animal; now its mate was for sale. Karl Oskar looked over the beast and made an offer: he had come to collect twenty dollars for hay which he had sold the company—he would write a receipt for that money and pay ten dollars more for the single ox if he might owe them this sum until next summer, when he would sell them more hay.

Thirty dollars was cheap for a thirteen-hand ox but the company manager accepted the offer even though the whole sum was not in cash.

“I trust you, Mr. Nilsson!” he said.

This was the first time in America that Karl Oskar had received credit. Before, when he asked for a few nails or a spool of thread, cash had been required. In his dealings with people, no one had trusted him until today. He felt as if he had been singled out for an honor, even though the sum was only ten dollars. As a squatter he had managed to remain on his claim for three years—perhaps the Americans at last realized that he intended to stay.

So Karl Oskar returned to Duvemåla the owner of a sturdy old ox. The beast had an enormous belly, his horns were thick and nicely curved, his coat black with a white spot in the middle of his forehead like a shining star. A stone-hard enlargement on the neck, with the fur entirely worn off, told of the many heavy loads this ox had pulled; this yoke mark, the bald lump, was the beast’s letter of recommendation.

“That’s a lordly ox!” exclaimed Kristina as Karl Oskar came up, leading the animal. It had a lumbering walk, moving slowly, one foot after the other, but it held its horn-crowned head proudly in the air. It was indeed a lord among oxen.

From a thick oak log Karl Oskar sawed off four trundles—the wheels of a settler’s wagon; he also made a single yoke for the ox’s neck. Now he had his own wagon and his own beast to pull it.

Up to now he had shared the lot of cotters and other poor people back in Sweden, who walked and carried their burdens on their backs, while the farmers loaded theirs on their wagons riding and snapping their whips confidently. After only three years on his claim he could now ride his own ox wagon and feel like a farmer who owned something in America.

Petrus Olausson came to inspect his neighbor’s new beast: “I too will buy an ox! Then we can team up and break land together.”

A few days later Olausson came home with a thirteen-hand ox, entirely white, that he had bought in Stillwater.

Karl Oskar measured the animal and said, “Our team is the strongest in the whole valley!”

The two men yoked the black and the white oxen together and helped each other break new fields during the fall, plowing the same number of days on each claim. They used Olausson’s plow, which had an iron bill and cut deeper than Karl Oskar’s wooden plow; but however deep they plowed, the team managed.

Before the frost came and stopped their work, Karl Oskar had added five more acres to his field. Already he had more acres to seed than he had had in Sweden.

The black ox became their most valued and beloved animal. He was strong, good-natured, untiring. Standing there, sated with rich grass, chewing his cud which dripped down the tuft of his chin, he was a picture of true contentment. His enormous belly was round as a barrel, he was heavy and immobile as a huge boulder, encompassed in a superior calm which nothing in the world could disturb. The black ox radiated his security to his owners.

Karl Oskar named the beast Starkodder. It was a name he had taken from the saga of a brave Viking; Starkodder had been a hero strong as three men and endowed by the god Odin with a life span of three ordinary humans. It was the hero’s strength Karl Oskar had in mind when he named his ox. The saga warrior had also been headstrong, unruly, evil-tempered; when at last he fell in combat, his decapitated head had bitten into the turf and chewed the earth angrily.

Thus the temperament of the Viking did not fit the ox Starkodder, who was calm and tractable in all his activities. He became the Nilssons’ devoted helper, breaking their land, pulling home their supplies, and relieving them of much drudgery. They lifted their burdens off their shoulders and backs and laid them all onto his neck; everything was loaded on his bald, thick neck-swelling. And the old beast received it all patiently.

Starkodder was a sacrificial animal: he sacrificed himself for them.

—2—

Pastor Erland Törner had stayed with the Swedes in the St. Croix Valley and had conducted services throughout the summer and fall. Now he was recalled to the Swedish settlement in Moline, Illinois, where newly arrived immigrants had brought cholera with them. It had raged among the settlers, who urged his return, for there were no ministers to conduct funeral rites. The timber and boards purchased for the new church in Moline were now being used for coffins for the cholera victims. Decent death couches and resting ground must be found for the dead ones before a house of prayer could be built for the living. The Illinois settlers found no time for their autumn plowing, for they spent their days digging graves in death’s field. Instead of sowing their winter wheat they now put friends and neighbors into the earth. A minister would have much to do in Moline and Galesburg and neighboring villages, and Pastor Törner intended to remain through the winter. His mission to the St. Croix Valley had been to give spiritual comfort to the settlers and lay the foundation for a Lutheran congregation. Now as he was about to leave the Swedes, they wished to pay him for his sermons. They collected twenty dollars for the young pastor, a dollar or two from each homestead.

When Kristina learned that Pastor Törner was to move away she made a decision: she would ask him to church her before he left. She regretted she had not asked him to perform this ritual the first day he came to their house; she ought not to have received Holy Communion without first being cleansed from her childbed. But now at last it would take place.

She made her decision a little too late; the following day she discovered she was pregnant.

No minister would church a woman who was again carrying a life. And here she was, pregnant without being cleansed and blessed from her earlier birth, so indifferent and negligent had she become in religious matters. How would God view her neglect? Would he make a special dispensation for a settler wife who had both participated in the Lord’s Supper and become pregnant again without churching?

Almost three years had passed since the birth of her youngest child and she had hoped it was her last. Her fervent wish was to remain barren for the rest of her life. She had already borne six children, four of whom were living, and she would be twenty-eight next St. Michael’s Mass. The strain of so many pregnancies and the heavy work over the years had begun to leave their marks on her. The bloom of youth was gone, her rounded girl-cheeks thinner, her face lined with wrinkles. Recently she had lost her front tooth, and as she showed it, lying in her palm, to Karl Oskar she said, “This is the first sign of old age.”