The Settlers (65 page)

Sometimes I feel I would be glad to die, because then I would have the enduring rest which I long for. But I worry lest I die before my children can take care of themselves. If I should leave Karl Oskar he would be unable to handle the little ones alone; this you know. Ulrika is barely five years old and little Frank isn’t three yet. Therefore, I pray you, my creator and Lord, let me live still a few years, at least five years more, if you could grant me this. By then Johan and Marta will be nearly grown and can look after the others. Then I’ll be satisfied to die, if only you will receive me in your wonderful rest and peace.

I think often about the words of Robert, my brother-in-law: I’m unable any longer to fight against him who rules creation—I might as well try to lift the whole earth onto my shoulders or tear down the heavens above my head. Therefore, do with me as you wish! I am reconciled to all. Like him I submit to the lot destined for me. Then nothing ill will happen to me in death.

But dear Lord—I cannot think of being dead alone; in time I want Karl Oskar and the children with me in death. I do not wish to be alone in eternity.

Give me strength to last a few years more! Dear God, the first thing and the last I pray for this evening:
Don’t make my children motherless too soon!

Bless and keep all of us who sleep under this roof and all the settlers who have come to this foreign land! Amen!

—5—

It was Kristina’s habit, during this season of the year, to lie awake in the evenings after she had gone to bed and peer into the dark for that land where the evenings in spring were light.

In her thoughts she traveled the road back, piece by piece, mile after mile, down the rivers, across the prairie, over the sea. But the road each time seemed longer—she never reached the end, not even half or a quarter of the distance. She never reached her goal, she spent all her time on the road. And each time she journeyed a shorter distance, while the land receded farther.

By and by, as the land of her childhood and youth faded into a distant memory, it was transformed in her mind’s eye. And as she remembered it in later years, she no longer longed for it: she was already there.

As a small girl she had lost her doll one day, the first doll she had ever had, a china doll in a blue-flowered dress; it had fallen into the farmstead well at home in Duvemåla. She was inconsolable over her loss and cried and begged her father and brothers—wouldn’t they please get the doll out of the well for her? But the well was too deep; whatever was lost in it once remained there. So her doll had stayed at the bottom of the well. On clear days she could look down into the well and see the doll’s dress like a streak of bluing in the water. She would climb up on the fence around the well so that her parents had to forbid her to go near it. But whenever they were out of sight, she would steal back to peek in. She could see the rose cheeks of the doll fade away and the dress fade in the water. Her lost doll existed, and she knew where it was, yet it was lost to her forever.

At the next fair her father had bought a new and much bigger doll for her, with a still prettier dress, but this didn’t help; she could never forget the other one, her longing for the lost one was as great as ever. She talked only of her lost doll, she re-created it, put new dresses on it, envisioned it as the largest and most magnificent doll ever to be bought at a fair. At last it had become a doll no one had ever seen or ever would see.

So it was with her native land. She had lost it in a well so deep that she never could retrieve it. At first she had at times caught a glimpse of it with her inner eye, but during the past years it had sunk ever deeper and farther away from her. The land was there, and she knew where it was; she stood staring after it in the daytime, she had stretched her arms out to it in her dreams at night. But she would never reach it, never get it back. And she had no hope ever on this earth of seeing her beloved ones there at home.

But as the years passed and drew the homeland farther and farther away from her, the memories of that land came ever closer, and the light over them became clearer.

Thus, the same change had taken place with regard to her homeland as with the doll of the blue dress down in the well-bottom. She made a Sweden out of her own longing, a Sweden she carried within herself, a homeland that was hers and no one else’s. In so doing, she built recklessly from anything she could get hold of: all of childhood’s light and happy experiences in her home village, as they appeared across memory’s bridge; the dreams she had dreamed of her home while in this foreign land; happenings in Sweden she had heard others speak of; memories from the reading of the Bible and the saga books. She gathered up experience and dreams, guesses and suppositions, truth and fiction—from all these she wove a land that no one had ever seen and no one ever would see.

Kristina often told her children about Sweden. The two oldest had some faint memory of an earlier home far away, but to the other four, Sweden was only the land where Father and Mother had been born and where their grandparents lived. The mother often told them of her own childhood, her sisters and playmates, of schooling and games, about the seasons—a cooler summer and a warmer winter than here—about the first day of spring when she ran barefoot, about the first wild strawberries in summer and the first apples that fell from the tree in fall, about the wastelands blossoming heather in August, of the ripe-red lingon tussocks in September, the winter’s sleigh rides and the ice on the pond, about the Christmas morn journey to the early service in the light the crackling pitch torches cast over the snowy night.

She told it as it came to her, as the moment supplied her, and she changed it from time in time, added to, or deleted from it. Sometimes the children might find her out: But Mother, you told it
so
the last time! And now you tell it this way. Which way was it? And she couldn’t reply except to say that it was the way she told it, and that was the right way and it couldn’t be any other. Because that was how it was in Sweden where she was born and had lived as a child.

But her own children listened to her in the same way as they listened to fairy stories. To them, Sweden at last became one of those wonderful countries they read about in storybooks, where only good and pleasant things happened to the inhabitants—a country well suited for children. Once little Ulrika asked her mother: Did Sweden exist in reality? Was it actually a country on earth? Or was it, like that country with the proud prince and the beautiful princess, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon?

The mother, of course, replied that it did indeed exist and was on earth. Neither to herself nor to her children could she admit that she had described a country which no one beside herself had seen and no one ever would see.

Only one homeland is given to a person. Kristina had lost hers. But she had no home-longing any more, she no longer missed what she had lost; she had won it back in the only way possible to one who has lost her dearest possession.

Now when Kristina lay awake during the dark spring nights in Minnesota, her longing soul sought another land in which there was no difference between night and day.

NOTE

1
.
Gift
in Swedish means poison.

XXXV

TO RECONCILE ONESELF WITH FATE

—1—

The whitewashed fireplace was trimmed with fresh leaves and a young birch had been placed in each corner of the big room; outside, a birch had been raised on either side of the entrance door, and above them the lush foliage of the sugar maples spread its greenery. Above the door, between the birches, hung a wreath of cornflowers, poppies, morningstars, and bluebells. The path to the door had been well swept, and great leaf rushes had been placed on either side, forming a festive arch over the pathway.

It was Midsummer Eve and Karl Oskar and Kristina had raised the summer festival’s green arch before their home. Following the custom of the homeland they had wished to create a holiday air by decorating with young leaf trees and fresh summer blossoms. But they could not make it entirely like the homeland; the light northlands summer night was missing.

They sat behind the birches on the stoop while the short moment of twilight sped by. Today was a great day of remembrance for them: their new Swedish almanac, printed by
Hemlandet,
was dated 1860; the brig
Charlotta
of Karlshamn had landed them in New York on Midsummer Eve 1850. Ten full years to the day had passed since they took their first steps on American soil.

And now Karl Oskar and Kristina went over their memories of the long years they had spent in their new land. They went through it all from the beginning: their first shanty of boughs and twigs where the storm in the late fall had been so hard on them, the first long and severe winter when they often went without food. Then came their first spring when Karl Oskar broke ground and planted their first crop. They recalled the first autumn they had a crop to harvest, the smallest ever but the most important of them all; they took the first sacks to the mill and baked the first bread from their own rye flour. It had been one of the greatest joy days in the new land when this bread was taken from the oven, steaming and warm—what a taste!

And they remembered also the heat of their first summers, and the intense cold of the winters in the log cabin, snowy winters that seemed as if they would never thaw out in spring. Their thoughts lingered on the good crops and the poor, on the births of their children, their baptisms, the first Sacrament in their house, the first service in the new church, Robert’s return with the wildcat money, his death and funeral—on all the happenings which during ten years had varied from their daily routine. Three new lives had been added to the family and there would have been still one more, if the birth had taken place in its right order. This one would have been about a year old now at Midsummer, ready to try its first steps across the floor.

But the greater part of the thousands of days encompassed by their ten years in America were gone and lost to their memory. Those were the quiet working days when nothing had happened, nothing except the labor of their hands, the innumerable days which were only work days, work from morning to night, each day confusingly like the next. Now, in retrospect, these uncountable laboring days seemed like one day, one single long day of patient struggle. And that day was of greater importance than any of the others: during its course they had started out, from the very beginning, for a second time in their lives, and for the second time built a home.

That Midsummer Eve when, tired and spent from the long voyage, they had walked down the gangplank in New York harbor was now part of a distant past that seemed incredibly long ago. The ten years of their lives that belonged to America had lengthened in their minds and seemed so very long because they had been years of great changes.

Kristina looked down toward the lake, out over the water which sparkled peacefully in the sunset; her eyes lingered along the shores.

“It has changed since we first came. I can’t recognize a single spot.”

“That would have been hard to imagine when we settled here,” said Karl Oskar. “And that it would change so soon!”

All around the lake the shores were now cultivated. On every surveyed claim stood a house in which lived a settler and his family. The very name of the lake had been changed: the heavy Chippewa word, Ki-Chi-Saga, was almost forgotten and was never used by the settlers when they spoke of the old Indian lake. The metamorphosis of the wilderness where Karl Oskar and Kristina had settled in 1850 was complete.

Karl Oskar sat on his stoop and looked out over the slope where his fields, bearing beautiful growing crops, stretched away; nearly all of the meadow had been turned into cultivated land, almost forty acres of it. And next to this field was a piece of ground with heavy oaks where the topsoil was equally deep; before he was through he wanted to cultivate that piece too, even though it would require heavier labor and take a longer time because of the large oak stumps he would have to dig out.

He was pleased with the work accomplished during these ten years. They had arrived practically penniless, bringing only their poverty. All they owned now they had won for themselves on their new farm. They were far from well-to-do but they had earned security, they got along well. Still it had taken more years than Karl Oskar had thought it would to reach their present situation.

Work itself was as hard and as heavy in the new land as it had been in the old. But there was one great difference between America and Sweden: in America your struggles brought some return, here you were rewarded for your labor.

“We have improved since we settled here, don’t you think so, Kristina?”

“We are better off than I dared hope for when we slept in that shanty the first fall.”

Karl Oskar appraised the sturdy walls of their house, built with seasoned pine of the finest kind obtainable in the forest, fine-hewn on both sides. But this house would be six years old this fall. Next time he built . . . !

“But everyone does not improve his lot here in America,” added Kristina.

She could have enumerated several of their countrymen. She could have mentioned the names of two youths, men who had emigrated to find early graves in America. But she needn’t—Karl Oskar knew this as well as she.

And he admitted that the success of an immigrant did not depend on the country alone, it depended as much on the man.

A short silence ensued. Out here on the stoop it felt comfortable this evening; a light breeze from the lake caressed their cheeks. The real summer heat had not come yet—it seldom made its appearance before Midsummer.

“At home the youngsters dance around the Maypole on Midsummer Eve,” said Kristina. “All the old folk dances—‘I weave you a wreath,’ ‘Find the shepherd,’ ‘Catch your partner.’”

It was as if now she had given utterance to the thoughts she had had all the time they had been sitting out here.