The Settlers (64 page)

Spring this year was the earliest since the Nilssons had settled in Minnesota. Already in March the powerful flow of sap in the sugar maples had risen, and Karl Oskar pushed his auger deep into their trunks to collect more sap than he had ever tapped before—fifty gallons during the spring of 1859, as he recorded in his almanac. And early in April the fields were dry enough for sowing.

And this spring Kristina’s Astrakhan apple tree bloomed. She had watered, weeded, fertilized her tree, but however much she cared for it, it grew too slowly for her. She wanted to see wider boughs, heavier foliage, more height from year to year. She felt the severe winters were hard on the roots and delayed the tree’s growth. Karl Oskar jokingly suggested she move the apple tree inside during the cold season. But now it had developed enough to bear fruit; unexpectedly it was covered with blossoms, a cope of beautiful white flowers lightly tinged with pink. Suddenly, at their east gable, a most decorative tree gladdened their eyes.

Next fall they would be able to gather a precious crop of juicy apples, refreshing apples with such transparent skin you could almost mirror your face in it. Astrakhan apples had a wonderfully fresh taste and a fragrance that filled the room; it was an apple as pleasing to the eye and nose as to the tongue.

In a few months Kristina would be able to eat apples from the tree that she had grown from a seed. Over the years she had tended the seedling as if it had been a living, feeling being. She felt close to this tree that had begun in one country and moved to another, sharing her fate.

Each morning, as soon as she awoke, Kristina looked out the window to enjoy the blossoms. The tree from Duvemåla, blooming so beautifully here in North America, gave her new comfort and confidence in her own strength.

But the tree bloomed for only a few days. Unexpectedly, one night there was a severe freeze; in the morning the ground was covered with frost, the flowers hung limp and dead. There remained nothing for Kristina to see other than how her tree shed its cope, how the wilted blossoms flew away with the first morning wind like a swarm of butterflies.

The Swedish tree had blossomed too early, but the tree itself was healthy and green, and it would grow and branch out and bloom again another spring.

The time had come for Kristina’s great spring washing, which she took down to the lakeshore to pound and rinse. It was her heaviest chore of the year, and her body felt stiff and clumsy already even though she was only in the beginning of her sixth month. Her back ached from being on her knees at the beating board and her washing dragged on longer than usual.

Toward the evening of the third day, as she was about to rinse the last few garments in the lake, a sudden pain cut through her back so sharply that she had to sit down and rest on the beating board.

She must have strained herself lifting the heavy washtubs or some other burden, she thought. If she remained sitting quietly for a few moments perhaps the pain would subside. Instead, it grew in intensity and spread from the small of her back through her whole body. And then she recognized it; it was not the first time she had experienced it: it was labor pain.

Johan was fishing in the reeds a short distance from her. She called to the boy: he must go and fetch Father, who was sowing wheat in the field.

The pain forced Kristina to lie down on the steeply slanted beating board, which was far from comfortable as a bed. As she lay on the board she suffered a sharper pain than any she had ever experienced in her seven childbeds. Afterward, she believed she must have fainted.

Karl Oskar came running; he would help her get inside the house. She bent double when she tried to walk; her legs failed to support her. He had to carry her to her bed. Once there she pulled off her clothes and discovered red runnels on the inside of her legs: the bleeding had begun.

Karl Oskar hurried to his nearest neighbor, Algot Svensson, to fetch his wife Manda to come and help. Meanwhile Kristina had another hemorrhage, and before Karl Oskar returned with their neighbor she had borne a lifeless child.

For a few days before this happened she had noticed a faint bleeding. She had not realized that this, and the backache, were the signals of an imminent miscarriage.

—2—

Ulrika sat at Kristina’s bedside. It was the day after her miscarriage, and Mrs. Jackson had hurried to New Duvemåla as soon as the message reached her.

Kristina lay spent, badly worn. A great weakness had come over her after the hemorrhaging, which had continued long after the stillbirth. Today the bleeding had finally stopped and now she felt as if she were torn to pieces inside. She was uninterested in everything about her and had only one desire: to lie still in bed.

“This was my first ‘lost journey,’” she said. “My time was more than half gone . . .”

“A miscarriage is harder on a woman than a natural birth,” said Ulrika. “It can be fatal to lose a brat before its full time.”

She asked how much blood Kristina had lost. Approximately how much—she knew Kristina couldn’t have measured it, but couldn’t she tell almost how much? It was difficult to judge, even approximately, said Kristina, but she guessed she must have bled at least a quart last evening and during the night. For a while, during the night, the blood had run as it does from a stuck pig.

“A hell of a lot! That sounds bad!” Ulrika was deeply concerned. “I read somewhere a person only has about three quarts in the body!”

“Well, I guess then I have only about half left.” Kristina’s pale lips attempted a smile.

In Alex Turner’s drugstore in Stillwater, Ulrika had bought several kinds of medicines, pills, and powders for her friend, which she arranged on the bedside table. She knew what was needed for a woman who had lost blood from a miscarriage. Here were the excellent blood pills; no one less than Mrs. Sibley, the governor’s wife, had written a testimony to their excellence; they had healed her. And this was the blood-rejuvenator-powder, discovered by a Swedish Methodist priest in Chicago; his pills were really miraculous even though he was lost in religious matters. And then she had brought a bottle of medicine called Gift of Blood, which had been manufactured in Washington, and she felt sure anything made there, especially medicines, must be first-class, for undoubtedly the President himself was sure to test and try the products of the capital.

But Kristina felt better from Ulrika’s presence alone. She looked at the label on the bottle: Gift of Blood. “Gift!? Does it mean the medicine has poison in it?”
¹

“Oh no! Not a drop! I wouldn’t want to poison my best friend!”

Kristina was overwhelmed by her thoughtfulness and concern. Tears of appreciation came to her eyes: “My dear Ulrika—you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for my sake . . .”

“You never take care of yourself, Kristina. I’ve told you before: you have too much to do. You wear yourself to a frazzle!”

Now she must rest and gain strength after her miscarriage, emphasized Ulrika. Staying in bed was utterly important. And she mustn’t do any heavy work for a long time. She would send Miss Skalrud over to take care of the household for a while. That Norwegian was a stubborn, bull-headed woman, but very capable if you left her alone and didn’t interfere with her work. Norwegians were easy to get along with if you let them have their way.

“Skalrud helped me through my last childbed.”

Last winter Ulrika had borne her third child since her marriage to Pastor Jackson. This time the ministerial family had been increased by a son.

Kristina asked, “How’s your little one?”

“My little priest! He’s wonderful! He weighs twenty pounds already. He eats like a pig, my boy. He’s as fat as a bishop. Who knows—perhaps the Ljuder parish whore has borne a bishop for America! Wouldn’t that be something, Kristina!”

The Lord had finally heard Ulrika and given her a male child, whom the mother long in advance had dedicated to the Church. She had been granted the deep grace to carry in her womb for nine months a man of the Church, and she enjoyed the honor, several times a day, of offering her breasts to a future dignitary of the Church. Only now did she feel fully recompensed for having once been denied the Holy Sacrament in Ljuder and excluded from the Swedish Church. By giving her a son, God had meant to poke the Swedish Church in the nose, give it a hell of a poke.

One of her wishes, however, could never be fulfilled. She had wanted to write Dean Brusander of Ljuder and tell him that in her marriage to an American minister she had herself given birth to a minister. Then Karl Oskar had told her the dean had died, and there was now no earthly post office where she could direct her letter. The dean had died before he knew whom he had pushed out of his church. Anyway, she was willing to let bygones be bygones and forget about the old insults and let them rest in their grave in Sweden. Perhaps God, too, was willing to forgive that devil’s ilk, the Swedish priests.

“Well, I guess I mustn’t be too proud and vain because I’ve borne a son,” added Mrs. Jackson in quiet modesty. “A human being mustn’t blow himself up till the skin bursts.”

Before she left she took Karl Oskar aside and warned him that undoubtedly Kristina’s misfortune had been caused by her heavy work. Why couldn’t he help her with the worst chores from now on? By now he ought to be Americanized enough to scrub the floor, milk the cows, and wash dishes.

And Karl Oskar retorted that quite often it happened that he milked the cows and washed dishes. But he was still Swedish enough so that he had never scrubbed a floor. Perhaps he had better rid himself of this Swedish trace.

—3—

Kristina enjoyed eight days of bed rest while Miss Skalrud took charge of the house for her. Meanwhile, Ulrika returned at intervals to see that her friend followed her advice and took the blood-giving, blood-strengthening, and blood-renewing pills, powders, and medicines. But rest itself was Kristina’s best medicine. Her births had become more difficult each time because she didn’t have the strength for them, thought Ulrika.

Kristina as well as other settler wives ought to learn from the Indian women; they lay down on their backs and rested completely for two days each time their period came. That was why they had such easy and quick labor. It was quite simple for a squaw to have a child: she simply squatted down to expel the infant, in the same way as she took care of her needs.

The wife at New Duvemåla was soon on her feet again, but she was still weak and tired. She must do only lighter chores for some time. Karl Oskar lugged in wood and water and milked the cows for her; she need not do any outside chores this spring. Marta, now twelve, was willing and handy and quite a help to her. After some weeks Kristina again felt fairly well physically, but her spiritual welfare was far more important to her at that time.

A killing frost had this spring ravaged her apple tree and her womb. A life that had grown and increased for more than twenty weeks inside her had suddenly left her body. As it left, she had felt as if part of her inner organs had gone with it, a part of dead, bloody tissue. She had managed to give it only one horrified look; it appeared as if the life had been choked by her own blood. While the child was still within her, she had felt it move many times. It had been alive in her womb, but it could not live outside it. A human being had begun its life inside her but had been forced from its mother-shield too early and had perished. And the mother who was unable to become a mother to her child did not even have a grave to tend. The child in her dream, born on the church steps, had also been taken from her, but it had been alive, and its cries, as Samuel Nöjd carried it away, still echoed in her ears. Her stillborn child had been mute, a lifeless lump of flesh and blood. Thus the dream had come true in one way, but not in another: a half-true dream, as it were.

After her miscarriage, Karl Oskar had taken the child away, and she realized he must have buried it somewhere in the forest. Where was the . . . ? she had once asked. He would never tell her, he had replied. And perhaps it was as well. She knew herself:
the child had been returned.

One secret remained between God and her. She had prayed to be relieved of another birth, and she had been. He had granted her prayer. He had taken the child back. He had not dared trust it to her, for she had prayed to be relieved from fertility and wished for barrenness, she had rejected blessing and prayed to be cursed. Now it was clear to her: she had sinned with her prayer in the oak grove on the hill that evening last summer.

And she had committed a still greater sin with her dark doubt in the night last fall. She had doubted the Almighty—in a moment of great weakness her faith had faltered until she had doubted that God existed.

She had been given her reply; she had been rebuked. He had taken his creation away from her womb.

Thus Kristina had encountered the father in heaven in all his severity. His punishing hand had fallen on her that her blind eyes might be opened and she might see what she had done. A blessed woman had received the answer, both to her prayer and to her questions of doubt in a moment of despair. God had shown her that he existed, and he had shown it to her in such a way that she never again need doubt.

Now there remained for her only to submit.

—4—

A Settler Wife’s Evening Prayer:

Tonight again I pray for forgiveness, as I did last night and the night before, and all evenings since I lost my child. I have confessed my sin and endure my punishment with patience, but soon I hope to feel that you have forgiven me a little. I want so to feel that you haven’t turned your face away from me. Otherwise my despair will be great. I have no one to turn to, no one but you. Karl Oskar is kind and thoughtful about me, but my husband can be my staff only in worldly matters. When I worry about my soul, then he can’t help me—no, no more than any other wretched human being.

I’m a simple and ignorant woman but I have repented and wish to better myself. From now on I will patiently endure the life which you in your grace and blessing give me. I will take care of the little ones with all the strength you give me. I shall try as well as I can to look after the other children you have given me. But you know how tired I get at times; in the evenings I feel worn out, and in the mornings I wonder if I will be able to get up.