The Settlers (46 page)

Daily Robert saw one single face, the face of Man made in the image of the creator. This was barefaced Man, fighting for his one and only true religion, the one he confessed honestly in his heart.

And none of these men he saw pass through Spring Creek that summer knew that it was
water
alone Man could not be without.

During your stay in Spring Creek you thought you would never again have a master. You yourself had buried the last one, you alone had dug his grave and filled it with your own hands. You laid his body in a packing case and read a psalm over it. But you still had me. I am with you tonight, three years later.

Once you read in a medical home adviser: Ear diseases are often accompanied by so-called buzzing of various strengths and types. They may be experienced in daytime as well as at night, but they are especially strong at night when silence reigns. Then they can become a terrible plague . . .

That fits me, doesn’t it?

You wanted to get rid of all masters and that was why you set out to dig gold. But you discovered on the Trail that gold was the most severe of all masters. Even more exacting than I. Long before you reached the gold land it demanded your life, so merciless is gold. Was that something to search for?

You gave to the gold what you were forced to give; it was too late to refuse. The disease now consuming you entered your body that summer, as you guessed. But some diseases are in no hurry as they ravage and destroy a body. Sometimes they take many years for their work. They lull a person into hope in the meantime. But they are not slow because of mercy when they take years to turn a living being into a shell.

You’re a shell, Robert. That much you have at last realized while turning and twisting at night, trying to escape me; you have squandered the creator’s gift. How could you have acted so foolishly? You think you have a good answer: you didn’t know any better; your intelligence didn’t allow you to know better. Who else could have told you? No one, except the creator himself. And He failed. He let you waste your life while still a youth. He had made you such that you could do no better, knew no better.

The creator gave you strength to dream an immoderate dream—but he did not give you the strength required by an immoderate dreamer. And what can a weak person do? What did you do?

It is clear to you that what has happened was inescapable. You fought your lot in life. Your life is fated, Robert! Only thus can it be explained.

You never thought you could get free, you didn’t have the strength. You were caught, enclosed in the cubicle of your fate. There is a truth about this, and you are familiar with it: Concerning imprisonment in the Fate that is common to all creatures: only in imagination do they break free: all remain in their cubicles and live out their interminable days, one after another. They make their abodes there for all the days of their lives, until the last day comes and the weight of the earth, of which they are a part, covers them.

You’ve been lying now for several hours without the peace of sleep. You have been lying so long on your back. You ought to turn on your side for a change—onto the left side—your evil side—your pursuer’s side. If you turn on your side and dig me as deep as you can into the pillow, perhaps you can silence me a little.

And I will be kind to you tonight and relieve the bursting ache in here. I’ll pour out a little blood, only a few drops. Now you’ll feel how it helps. There now—can you feel the warm fluid? It feels as if someone had squirted tepid water into your ear, doesn’t it? And now it drips red on the slip, the new, clean one that Kristina put on today. Nothing feels as wonderful as the end of pain.

Now you’ll soon sleep! Again tonight you’ll sleep on a spotted pillow!

I don’t begrudge you a deep, wonderfully purling waterdream!

XXII

THE UNGET-AT-ABLE

—1—

On Friday morning Karl Oskar was up before daybreak, greased his oak-wheel cart, and made ready to drive to Stillwater. Already at sunrise it was evident the day would be very hot. It would be the first time he had undertaken a long drive with his young ox team. Animals were greatly plagued by the heat and the mosquitoes, and although his ox team by now was well broken in, he was afraid they might be unruly and hard to handle in this heat; that was why he wanted to get under way while the morning was still cool. He hoped to be back again with oxen and cart intact before sundown.

Last evening Kristina had gone through the two bundles of money, removing spots from the bills and ironing out those that were wrinkled. A few grease spots remained, but on the whole the bills now seemed clean and neat; they were at least as nice-looking as other American paper money they had had in the house.

Karl Oskar pushed the two bundles down in the sheepskin pouch Kristina had sewn for him when they left Sweden and which had served as a hiding-place for their Swedish money. In this pouch—worn as a belt under his clothing—he had, during the crossing from Sweden, secreted five hundred riksdaler, all he had owned after selling the farm and the cattle. Now it hid thirty times as much in American money, sufficient to buy ten farms as big as Korpamoen. This according to the value printed on the bills. Today he would ask the bank in Stillwater if the money was acceptable.

While he was yoking the oxen Algot Svensson, his companion for the journey, arrived. He was always punctual. Today Karl Oskar was to be a witness for his neighbor at the land office, concerning Svensson’s right to his claim in section 35 of Chisago Township.

Before Karl Oskar got into the cart he said to his wife that today he was setting out on the most important errand he had undertaken so far in America. And he had almost the same anxious expectation as on that day when he had gone to her father’s home in Duvemåla to ask for his daughter Kristina as bride: no one could tell in advance what the reply might be.

Then he stepped up into the cart and it started on its clumsy, thudding way down the road along the lakeshore. The sheepskin pouch was under Karl Oskar’s shirt; his riches were on the way to a better place of safekeeping, a right place of safekeeping.

—2—

This Friday turned out to be the summer’s warmest day in the St. Croix Valley. The heat bothered Kristina as she sewed and she had to lie down and rest for a moment now and then. She had a burning headache and she saw black every time she tried to thread the needle. Her discomfort from her pregnancy increased with the hot weather; all smells became vile, nauseating her, and if she saw a blowfly light she wanted to vomit. A woman was only half a person during the first months of this condition; taste, smell, and appetite were completely awry.

Robert had found a cool place to rest under the sugar maples near the house. He was not going to visit the Indian today; it was too hot in the forest. She had also noticed how tired and short of breath he became after his walks. Kristina picked up her sewing and went outside to sit in the shade with her brother-in-law. The heat was not quite so oppressive here as inside the house. Robert was reading the latest issue of
Hemlandet.
He had just discovered an advertisement:

HELP WANTED

Youth for Hemlandet’s Printing Office.

Applicant should be able to read

Swedish; if he also can write, so much

better. If he has a good head, lack

of knowledge can gradually be

remedied . . .

“Do you think I should apply for the job, Kristina?”

“You with your riches needn’t work any more!”

And she reminded him that the very first evening he had said that he had done all the work he intended to do and had had his last master.

His bad ear was turned toward her; probably he didn’t hear what she said; he was absorbed in his reading.

“Here is something for you, Kristina.”

He read aloud:

“Hemlandet
has been considering the printing of a nice, neat Swedish A-B-C book. For this, however, several Swedish letters and decorative signs will be required, and the readers are asked for contributions of fifty cents each which can be sent to the printing office. We have also decided to print Luther’s Little Catechism, word for word according to the Symbolic Books, and without the improvements or worsenings which have been made to this little bible, in this country as well as elsewhere. This Catechism will be the first Swedish book printed in America.”

“That’s good news!” exclaimed Kristina.

“Yes, you said the other day Johan and Marta did not have any A-B-C book or catechism.”

“We need those books! I’ll tell Karl Oskar to send in money at once!”

She sat on the ground, the cloth she was sewing on on her knee. Robert was lying in the grass, reading. He had returned last Monday; today was Friday. He had been in their house four days. But she felt that during these four days as much had happened as during the four long years he had been gone.

If there was anything else of importance or interest, would he be kind enough to read it to her, she asked? He replied that there wasn’t much in the paper today except for a funny piece about a false Swedish priest—quite a long article.

Hemlandet
warned against a self-styled minister who traveled about among the Swedish settlements in Illinois and Minnesota. He called himself Timoteus Brown, but it was a false, assumed name. He was not ordained, only a former student with a whiskey flask in his bag. But he preached, married couples, baptized children, and gave the Holy Sacrament. He had an unusual gift of speech and could entirely at will turn his listeners’ heads, and that was why many Swedes had been fooled and availed themselves of the services of the false priest. Timoteus Brown had such remarkable gifts that he could preach in any religion he chose; one teaching was as easy to him as another. If he came to a Lutheran settlement he preached the Lutheran teachings, but among the Methodists he was an accomplished Methodist preacher, and among the Baptists he preached the Baptist doctrine better than anyone they ever had heard. And he did call himself “the cleverest minister in America.”

Nor had Brown hesitated to falsify the Holy Sacrament: not one drop of wine had been added to the fluid in his cup; only water, into which fruit juice and vinegar had been mixed with syrup to make it sweet. In some settlements the participants had been seized with stomachache and diarrhea from his false sacramental wine. The self-made minister himself insisted that he gave the sacrament according to Christ’s ordinance which forbad alcoholic spirits. But this, the paper said, was a false interpretation, exaggerated temperance zeal. He not only hurt people’s bodies, but more important, their souls when he married trusting couples without being ordained. In the Swedish colonies, in Illinois and Minnesota, many otherwise honest and decent people now lived in sin and fornication, not knowing how deeply they had fallen in sin and iniquity.

Hemlandet
urged the Swedish settlers to drive away Timoteus Brown, this blasphemer and derider. He was described as a wolf gifted with a sheep’s mild appearance which aided him in bewitching people.

Robert was interrupted in his reading several times by his persistent cough. Now that Kristina sat close, she looked at his face: it was caved-in, ravaged, wan. And his body was barely skin and bone; he had never appeared so worn-out as he did today. He must surely be suffering from a much more serious ailment than his bad ear.

She must try again:

“Have you never been to see a doctor, Robert?”

“Hadn’t thought of it. I’m only twenty-two. I can’t go to a doctor—I’m supposed to be healthy!”

“You have caught something dangerous. I don’t know—but it might lead to your death . . .”

“Death . . . ?”

The word escaped him in a quick breath.

Robert pulled up his upper lip in a great smile, or sudden surprise, and exposed decayed teeth in the back of his mouth. He turned from the paper to his sister-in-law.

“Kristina—you don’t believe I’m afraid of death?”

“All people fear death!”

“Not I!”

“You too—now you only brag!”

“No, I mean it. Death cannot really do anything to me. It cannot touch me.”

“Stop! That’s blasphemy!”

Kristina’s body had straightened up with the last word, now she fumbled with the needle so that it pierced her thumb instead of the cloth.

“Do you mean you are above death? Above the Almighty?”

“All I said was, death cannot touch me.”

Robert threw down
Hemlandet
in the grass and rose to a sitting position. He leaned his elbows against his knees and bent his long, lean torso toward Kristina.

“No, not even death can hurt me or get at me any longer.”

“That’s terrible of you to talk like that! It’s arrogance! Conceit!”

Kristina stuck her thumb into her mouth and sucked a few trickling drops of blood. She sat and stared at Robert, horrified at his talk; was his mind affected? Even yesterday she had wondered if he wasn’t out of his head at times.

“Nothing touches me any more. Neither good nor evil affects me. Do you know why?”

“No, you must explain it, Robert!”

“Ill try . . .”

The cough prevented him from going on. She sat in suspense, waiting for his explanation.

When Robert at last had finished coughing, it came slowly and simply:

“I have reconciled myself to my lot. That’s all.”

He had pulled up a few tall spears of grass and began chewing them. As he looked back on his life, he told Kristina, he understood everything that had happened to him. It was the way he was created that explained his life. If he had been an obedient and willing farm hand, he would never have tried to steal rest periods while he dug ditches, and then he would not have been given a hard box on the ear by his first master, and would have escaped his earache. And if he had had the temperament of an obedient and satisfied farm hand he would never have emigrated. And even if he had emigrated, he would have remained with his brother Karl Oskar and worked on his claim in Minnesota and been satisfied with that life. Then he could have lived his whole life in one place, in constant peace of mind.