Unto A Good Land Page 18

  But in the split second before the man jumped from the wagon, Karl Oskar gave the outjutting log a kick with his iron-shod heel; he kicked with all the strength in his body, and the added strength of a man fighting for his life.

  The pile of logs started rolling onto the road. The young horse tossed his head, his whole body trembled, he snorted excitedly, jumped side-wise, and then bolted off in a wild gallop, pulling the light vehicle with the two men behind him, barely missing being crushed by the rolling logs.

  Karl Oskar saw the gig disappearing with the two men clinging to the seats for their very lives; they were still hanging on as the vehicle disappeared among the trees. Karl Oskar felt pleased—the kick had been sufficiently hard, they made good boots in Småland.

  But in his excitement he forgot all about the rolling logs behind him. Suddenly one of them hit his left leg with such force that he fell face forward over a small stump. He had the sensation of a sharp knife blade being stuck into his chest, and he heard himself cry out. He was in such intense pain that a wreath of red-hot sparks flashed before his eyes.

  He ground his teeth together and managed to rise. He had fallen over the stump of a small tree which had been felled by an ax, leaving large sharp splinters sticking up, and these had cut him like knife points. He pulled out one splinter sticking through his shirt: blood oozed out. He was aware of pain in his left leg, it felt stiff and useless. A shudder of terror ran down his spine—suppose his leg were broken?

  But he was able to stand on it. Slowly he moved the leg; he was able to walk. He noticed the milk pitcher which he had dropped in the fall, and he stooped to pick it up; then he limped along the rutty road, back toward the village; every step was painful.

  He did not look back for the bolting horse, the gig, and the two strangers. He had no further interest in his countryman who had promised to show him the way to a store where he could buy as much milk and bread as his children could eat; he was in a hurry to get back, back to the houses and the steamer, and to his own family. Slowly he hobbled along; the return took him a long time. He could still see sparks before his eyes, but his head was clear, and his injured leg was good enough to help carry him back.

  The steamer was still at the pier loading firewood. One passenger—gone ashore to buy milk and bread—returned, limping on his left leg.

  —5—

  Karl Oskar made his way toward the steerage. He walked slowly to hide his limp. Lill-Märta came running toward him, crying out jubilantly: “Here comes Father with milk!” For he still carried the tin pitcher in his hand. Kristina and Johan also ran to him expectantly. “Father has brought us milk! Come!”

  Silent and embarrassed, Karl Oskar stood with the empty pitcher in his hand.

  “You took your time,” said Kristina.

  He dropped his hand with the pitcher so they could see for themselves; it was empty.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” Kristina was saying; then she broke off as she looked into the pitcher. “You haven’t any milk?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “Not a single drop?”

  “No. No bread, either.”

  Kristina’s lower lip quivered in disappointment. “No luck?”

  “No, this time I had—no luck.”

  Johan pointed to his father’s chest: “There’s blood on Father!”

  “What are you saying, boy?” Kristina exclaimed.

  Karl Oskar’s shirt was of a reddish color, and the blood didn’t show much. But she touched his chest, and her fingers became sticky with blood. “God in Heaven! You’re bleeding! What happened?”

  “I fell over a tree stump, got a small splinter in my chest. Nothing to bother about.”

  “Mother, I was right!” Johan cried triumphantly. “There’s blood on Father!”

  “Only a very little blood,” corrected Karl Oskar. “Just a scratch from a splinter.”

  “I must bandage it! Go to your bed and lie down,” Kristina ordered Karl Oskar.

  Karl Oskar went over to their bunk and removed his shirt. Lill-Märta ran after him: “I want milk. Mother promised!”

  “Be quiet, child,” admonished Kristina. “I must bandage Father.”

  “But you promised us milk, Mother!” the child insisted.

  “Father fell down. Go away, children.”

  “Did you lose the milk when you fell?” Johan asked.

  “Did you lose every drop?” Lill-Märta echoed.

  Kristina took the children by the hand, led them to Robert, and asked him to look after them while she took care o£ Karl Oskar. She was relieved about Johan, who had improved during the day, having vomited up all the poison of the pestilence—if the sickness had been that. But now that her son was better her husband was hurt.

  Karl Oskar had a deep wound just below his right nipple, blood had coagulated around the hole. The left side of his chest hurt when he breathed; he thought perhaps a rib was cracked.

  “How did it happen?” Kristina asked.

  “I told you, I fell on a stump. Accidents will happen.”

  Karl Oskar had not told a lie; that was how he had hurt himself. But how much more he should tell her, he didn’t as yet know.

  After her long sickness at sea Kristina had gradually regained her strength, but at the sight of coagulated blood like a wreath of fat leeches on her husband’s chest, she felt wobbly in the knees. Nevertheless, she had learned as a girl to look after wounds, when she had stayed with Berta, the Idemo woman, to have a gangrenous knee treated, and now she soaked a piece of linen cloth in camphor-brännvin and washed the wound clean. Then she applied a healing plaster which Jonas Petter had brought along. She tore up one of her old linen shifts into bandages which she tied around her husband’s chest. Berta had said that bandages must be tied as hard as though horses had helped pull them, in order to stanch the blood. Kristina tied the bandage as hard as her fingers were able to, but she thought regretfully she had not the strength of even half a horse.

  “I’ll change the rags if it bleeds through,” she said.

  Resting on his bunk, Karl Oskar reflected that he now had two bandages around his body, one of sheepskin and one of linen, one for his money and one for his wound. He had got the second because he must defend the first; the security belt for himself and his loved ones was still intact around his waist. But how near he had been to losing it—he had gone in a cart with a stranger, and this alone had been sufficient to endanger the lives of himself and his family. Yet who would have refused to go with the friendly Swede who offered to find as much healthy food as he and his family could eat?

  Sitting close by him, Kristina was still wondering: “How could you fall so awfully hard, Karl Oskar? You’re usually steady on your legs.”

  “When ill luck wills it, one might fall on an even floor.”

  “You must look where you step in America. They have signs in dangerous places.”

  “There was no sign in this place.”

  Those danger signs they had seen so often should be painted not only on posts and walls in this country, they should be written in flaming letters across the sky of all North America; from above they would shine as a warning to immigrants in every part of the country.

  “Your luck has left you,” mourned Kristina. “In spite of your big nose.”

  For this “Nilsa-nose” which Karl Oskar had inherited was said to be lucky.

  Yes, he, the father, was bleeding, and his children were without milk and bread. Another day and another night they must remain in this pest house with its unhealthy fare. But a little blood and a hurt leg could not be counted among the irreparable disasters of life. A whole family need not be destroyed by these misfortunes. He had merely fallen and hurt his leg, and a splinter had pierced his chest. Later, when all traveling dangers were behind them, he would tell the whole truth to Kristina. Then he would let her know how close she had come to continuing the journey without him, staking out and building the new home alone, a defenseless and penniless widow with three
children.

  It was not long before the bandages around his chest were saturated with blood.

  “You won’t bleed to death?” Kristina’s voice quavered.

  “Nonsense!” He smiled at her. “Only a little blood keeps dripping.”

  “It goes right through the rags!”

  “It drips a little from my nipple, like milk from a woman. It will soon stop.”

  He reassured Kristina: His superficial scratch would soon heal, his flesh was of the healing kind; he was in good health and could well afford to lose a quart of blood; it was good against the cholera; he had thought of bleeding himself anyway, now he needn’t use the bleeding iron. It had been different when a woman called Kristina had bled streams from her nostrils one night at sea; she must have lost many quarts that night. Then, indeed, it was a question of her life. It had been the most horrible night he had ever lived through.

  A warmth came into Kristina’s eyes: “You were good to me that night, Karl Oskar. If you hadn’t gone for the captain, I would not be alive today.”

  Then he had taken care of her, now she bandaged and cared for him. Then he had tried to stanch her blood, now she tried to stanch his. Blood was the very life inside one; when the blood ran away, life also ran away. Karl Oskar and Kristina were concerned for each other’s lives. It was between them as it ought to be between husband and wife: they were joined together to ease each other’s burdens, heal each other’s wounds. They were two people who in God’s presence had given the promise to love each other through shifting fortunes as long as they both should live.

  X

  THEIR LAST VESSEL

  The boatman is a lucky man.

  No one can do as the boatman can.

  The boatmen dance and the boatmen sing,

  The boatmen are up to everything. . . .

  (Old Mississippi River Boat Song)

  The Boat

  The Red Wing of St. Louis, B. Berger, Captain, Stuart Green, clerk, was an almost new side-wheeler, having started its runs on the Mississippi only two years earlier. It measured 147 feet in length, 24 in width, had one engine for each wheel, and a capacity of 190 tons. Toward the prow two tall funnels rose close together, like a pair of proud twin pillars. The Red Wing lay in the water like a floating house, long and narrow, well cared for and newly painted white. On either side of its prow a great wing had been painted, spreading its blood-red feathers. The steamer was named after a famous Indian chief, and its wheels plowed the same waters on which warriors of his tribe still paddled their primitive canoes.

  New steamers, new sounds: on the Red Wing’s deck no bell rang, instead the booming of a steam whistle reverberated through the river valley, drowning the sounds of Indian powwows. The steam whistle was new and alien in this region where until lately only the sounds of the elements and of living creatures had been heard on land and water.

  The rivers were the immigrants’ roads inland, and the Mississippi was the largest and most important of them all. No less than eight hundred steamers churned its waters, a fleet of eight hundred steamboats moved the hordes of travelers northward to a virgin wilderness. The Red Wing of St. Louis was one of the vessels in this river fleet, proudly displaying on its prow the Indian chief’s red feathers, as it plowed its way upstream, loaded with passengers.

  The River

  Broad and mighty, the Father of Waters filled his soft bed, like a mobile running lake with two shores, a lake now rising, now falling, yet never draining. From the lakelets of Minnesota in the north to the levees of Louisiana in the south the river flooded its shores and let them dry again; low, swampy shores, tall, rocky cliffs, grassy meadows, sand banks, and sandy bluffs, shores of tropical lianas, cotton fields, giant trees shadowing the water with their umbrageous crowns. Vast and varying was the river’s domain: now choppy as a sea whose mighty waves have been arrested after storm, now flowing smoothly, and overgrown with twisted brushwood, tangled masses of thorns, willows, sycamores, alders, vines, brambles, and cedars; here flowering blossoms stood high as altar candles in the swamplands, the nesting place of wading birds, here mountains and cliffs rose on either side, like tall, dark, triumphal arches through which the river roared like the procession of a proud ruler passing with much fanfare.

  Trees and bushes grew not only along the shores but also in the water. The river bed itself was a mass of root wreaths; when the trees fell, they fell into the water, and there they lay, their branches stripped of bark, naked, like fingers feeling the stream, like drowning human hands grasping for something to hold. The waves from the steamers’ wake washed the wooden skeletons along the shores, hastening their disintegration. Trees lost their foothold on shore and floated into the current; whirling, spinning in circles, the trees floated about, twisted together, caught in each other’s branches, as though seeking protection on their uncertain, thousand-mile voyage to the sea. Veritable islets of trunks, roots, branches, bushes, brush, bark, and leaves swam about on the surface. And down deep, in the river bottom, was the grave of dead forests.

  The Father of Waters embraced in his bosom other rivers, streams, brooks, becks, creeks; went on shore and stole plants, pulled trees out of the earth to make islands, seized all that was not anchored to the very rocks; the Mississippi, since the beginning of time the earth’s mightiest concourse of running waters—going onward for all eternity, onward to the sea.

  The Captain of the Steamer

  The travelers from Ljuder had seen many ships and boats since they left Sweden, but the steamer Red Wing of St. Louis was the most beautiful of them all.

  When they stepped on board and showed their tickets, the captain himself came up to them and spoke in a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian which they could understand: “Ah, Svensker! Welcome aboard! I’m a Norseman—we have the same king.”

  Captain Berger of the Red Wing was well past middle age, with gray hair, and a beard that grew thick, covering his face to the eye sockets, except for his red nose tip. The immigrants had observed many bearded men, both at home and during their journey, but Captain Berger was the most richly bearded man they had ever seen. He was also the first Norwegian they had met.

  “We Norsker arrived before you,” continued the captain. “We were wondering how soon you Swedes would come along.”

  They couldn’t understand all the Norwegian he spoke through his beard, but by and by he and his passengers were able to carry on a conversation. At last on this journey they seemed to have come upon good luck; after the cholera-infested steamer, they were now on a clean boat where the pestilence had not made its appearance, and where the captain himself welcomed them warmly as if he had long known them. The Red Wing was their sixth vessel, and here they felt more secure than on any of the other five, even though Captain Berger warned them that the river was so crooked a steamer sometimes met itself on the curves.

  The Passengers

  The travelers were now on the last stretch of their journey; the Mississippi was their last river, the Red Wing their last vessel.

  The Father of Waters was emigrating to the sea, the steerage passengers on the side-wheeler were immigrating against the current to the northwest country. Yet both the river and the travelers were on the same errand—seeking new homes. Captain Berger said that all types of people were aboard his ship: settlers, traders, fur hunters, lazy rich men, restless farmers, high government officials, cardsharps, honest working people, happy-go-lucky adventurers. But the greatest number of his passengers were immigrants on the last lap of their journey.

  There were German peasants who said Bayern at every second word—was it the name of their home parish? They were blond and wore blue linen shirts over their clothes, shirts with outside pockets like coats. Their women had thick legs covered with blue woolen hose; both men and women wore small, funny-looking caps. Among all the immigrants, the Germans alone still had something left in their food baskets. A sausage was always discovered in some bundle; the Germans were always eating sausage.

  The Iris
h immigrants spoke loudly among themselves, seeming to be in a constant quarrel. About half of them were dark haired, the rest red haired. They drank whisky from large wooden stoups, as calves would gulp down sweet milk. Captain Berger said an Irishman would not work unless someone stood with a club over his head: he would no longer use them as crewmen, he preferred Negroes. But a German must be threatened with a club before he would quit work. The two races differed in another way: an Irishman could never get enough to drink, a German never enough to eat.

  Then there was the large Jewish family which the bearded captain pointed out to the Swedes: a father bringing his ten sons, four daughters, five daughters-in-law, four sons-in-law, twenty-two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren; all together forty-nine people. The old father, the head of the family, was a little man; he had a longish face with a black beard and a long crooked nose; he didn’t seem over fifty or fifty-five years of age. He always wore a small round cap without a visor, and when the family gathered together, he was always in the center. The little family father sat there, calm, silent, sure, smoking his long pipe, surrounded by his many descendants. Captain Berger guessed that this Jewish family was the largest one that had ever emigrated to North America, which to the children of Israel was the New Canaan; Jacob and all his sons were well represented here.

  Karl Oskar asked himself how he could be so filled with concern for his own family of six, when he saw this little Jew with eight times as many.

  The crewmen on the Red Wing were both colored and white; there were also men with yellow-brown skin, offspring of white fathers and black mothers. All seemed dirty, as if rolled in mud. All were half-naked. Deep down in the steamer’s bowels they stoked the engines; in the evenings they gathered on their own separate deck, sitting in clusters, singing their songs—or song, for it seemed they sang the same tune over and over again. In the evenings, when heavy darkness fell over the river, their song rang out over the black, wandering Mississippi:

  We will be free, we will be free,