The Last Letter Home Read online

(The carpenter’s questions: This daughter was very dear to me, but before she was four years old she was taken from me and died in terrible pain. She died before she had had time to commit any crimes. Did God wish thereby to punish me for my transgressions? But one hears only of a God who is good and just. Can he who is good and just punish the innocent for the deeds of the guilty? Does he let my children inherit my sins? I have never wondered over this before, but now I do: Is our God good and just?)

  The first coffin he made was just big enough so that he could carry it alone when his daughter’s body was placed in it. He had carried it in his arms to the grave.

  That was a father’s labor for his child.

  The second coffin he had made many years later, in another country. He had made it in the very place where he now stood, in this workshop, at this bench. That work was done one summer when haying had just started and he had been rushed to do it during a few humid nights.

  They had found his dead brother’s body in the forest. He had returned from the gold-land with a deadly sickness in his body which they had known nothing about. They had thought he was telling them lies and wanted to cheat them with his false riches, but he himself had been the victim of a cheater.

  (The carpenter’s thoughts: We came from the same womb and you were my only brother, but we became strangers to each other. You lied and told tales until I couldn’t believe anything you said. But now I know that you yourself believed in the value of the money you wanted to give us. You brought us a gift, you wanted to share your abundance with your brother. But I could not trust you, and the hand I offered at parting was hard and fisted and hit you in the face.

  You said you forgave me. And now here at the bench I say my real goodbye to you: I prepare your last home. The same hand that hit you is now hammering together the walls that will forever be yours. The same hand that hurt you is now trying to make you a good resting place. Here you will lie protected from all that pursued you. And I will put the lid over a brother who was a riddle to me.)

  That had been the carpenter’s second coffin. By then he was experienced and could handle his tools, and the coffin had been a fine piece of work.

  It had been a brother’s labor for a brother.

  Again the years had run by, and now he stood here once more, in the same workshop, at the same bench, and performed the same labor he had completed twice before in his life. Now he was making a coffin for the woman who had been his wife, who had been his helpmeet, who had borne his children. Almost twenty years they had lived together. They had shared their home, their bread, and their bed. Twice, on two different continents, they had set up house together. Through all the years she had shared with him the day’s labor and the night’s rest.

  She had said: I have One I can put my trust in! There is One who will pull me through! Therefore you must not worry! You must have the same confidence as I! And I have surrendered to his hands! I’ll pull through! All will be well with me!

  She had said this to him on the path along the lake one evening in June. Now August counted its last days, and of his wife was left him only her lifeless body.

  (The carpenter had received his answer: She trusted in God, but he tricked her. She was a credulous child who surrendered to her Father in heaven. But the Father failed her. He let her die. Now I know what happens to one who trusts in God Almighty. If she hadn’t done so, she would be alive. She was taken from me and the children because she trusted in the Lord.

  Now I know: God is nothing for a human being to put trust in.)

  The carpenter stood in the night at his bench and worked in the feeble, fluttering light from a stable lantern. The plane moved evenly back and forth over the wood. It rasped and cut, its iron tooth scraped shavings from the oak plank. The shavings fell in coils from the bench and gathered around the carpenter’s feet. Above his plane the lantern swung slowly back and forth, setting in motion shadows on the walls where the pelts were nailed up; the crucified stood guard around the bench, saluting the carpenter with their extended, securely nailed limbs.

  Again the carpenter was busy at his work. It was his third coffin.

  It was a husband’s labor for his wife.

  XVII

  SONG UNDER THIRTY-EIGHT GALLOWS

  Fort Ridgely and New Ulm were relieved during the last days of August; the two portals to the Minnesota Valley remained closed to the Sioux. Little Crow was finally defeated at Wood Lake on September 23. His warriors were scattered and disarmed later in the fall.

  The Sioux uprising in Minnesota was the bloodiest Indian war in North America. More than a thousand white settlers were killed, a region two hundred by one hundred miles was ravaged and deserted, and thirty thousand people were homeless.

  Many thousand Sioux were taken prisoner and a military court sentenced 303 of them to hanging. Abraham Lincoln reprieved 265 of these. The remaining 38 were hung at Mankato on December 26, 1862.

  —1—

  In October 1861, at Mankato, the Sioux chief Red Iron had pleaded his people’s situation to Governor Ramsey, and in the same spot, a little over a year later, the final reckoning took place between Indians and whites in Minnesota.

  A large warehouse was used as an Indian prison and to the stone floor of this building thirty-eight Sioux warriors were chained, awaiting their death sentence. When the date finally was set they asked to be permitted to dance their death dance in the prison yard the day before the hanging. This was refused them.

  Early in the morning on December 26, fifteen hundred soldiers were called to stand guard around the prison yard where the hanging would take place. An enormous gallows had been erected: a circular iron ring from which thirty-eight ropes dangled.

  It was a cold winter morning with a biting norther sweeping from the prairies across the prison yard. The prisoners were brought out in a group, their hands tied behind their backs. Not one of them uttered a defiant word. As soon as they were in the yard they saw before them the large gallows with the ropes swaying in the wind. Then a stir went through the group: They began to sing, all at one time. They were singing their death song in unison.

  An eerie, penetrating sound came from the condemned prisoners’ throats; it sounded like a prolonged ij: ijiji—ijiji—ijiji. One single syllable of complaint, the eternal, sad ijiji—ijiji—ijiji—ijiji. The Indians were singing their death song. It came from thirty-eight human throats, it was thirty-eight human beings’ final utterance: ijiji—ijiji—ijiji.

  The prisoners approached the great gallows—the iron ring with the thirty-eight swinging ropes—and they sang uninterruptedly as they walked, they sang the whole way. They sang as they climbed the scaffold, they sang as they stood under the ropes, they continued to sing as the ropes were placed around their necks. They sang in their lives’ last moment.

  At a given sign thirty-eight people dangled together from their ropes, a circular gallows of kicking, wriggling bodies. Then the song died, and after a few minutes the ropes hung straight with their catch and did not sway any longer in the wind.

  It was a cold winter morning with a biting norther. The song of the thirty-eight under the gallows ropes at Mankato was the death song of the Minnesota Indians. Thus ended their last attempt to drive out the intruders and take back their land.

  —2—

  The Indians had been put down, but The Indian remained.

  At the shore of Ki-Chi-Saga the hunter people’s watchtower of stone, the Indian head, still stood. The fall storms had been hard on him, tearing the green leaves from his summer-wreathed forehead. Bare, black branches sprouted from the skull and pointed heavenward, the red glow on his forehead was gone, and the cave-eyes had blackened and seemed to have withdrawn deeper into the cliff. And during the winter following the Sioux uprising, immense blocks fell from the Indian’s eyes to lie at the base of the cliff.

  The Indian was mourning. He was mourning his people’s decline. From his elevated position he looked out over the hunting grounds his kinfolk never more were to use, th
e clear lakes that never more would carry their canoes, he saw the islands and shores where their campfires never more would be lit.

  Above Ki-Chi-Saga’s water the Indian rose, rigid and silent in his sorrow, the prisoner chained in stone. He did not weep human tears, it was not water that flowed from his eyes, it was not drops of an evanescent fluid. He shed tears of stone—indestructible, eternal as the cliff itself. In these was his complaint—his sorrow over his people’s destruction, their decay and death. A new race had come to take the place of the vanquished.

  Thus one people obliterates another from the face of the earth, and the earth sucks the blood of the dead, and turns green and blossoms as before for the living.

  The Indian head still stands, green-wreathed in summer, bare and naked in winter. From his eyes still fall the boulders that gather at his feet. In his eternal petrification the Indian to this day mourns his dead.

  XVIII

  ONE MAN DID NOT WISH TO SUBMIT

  —1—

  The unforgettable year of the Sioux uprising came to its close and another began its cycle.

  In the oldest homestead on Chisago Lake, they were one less in the family; there was no longer a wife or mother. The survivors tried to divide the chores of the dead one among them, but all the things she alone knew how to do remained undone. They were, and remained, one less in the house, a wife and a mother.

  Better news came from the world outside. For two years only defeats for the North in the Civil War had been reported, but now they could read in the papers of victories for the Union soldiers. Already in the spring the news was good, and at haying time—in the beginning of July—a still greater victory was announced. It had taken place in Pennsylvania, near a town called Gettysburg. The battle was the most important in the whole Civil War, said the papers, predicting that the rebels would give up before the year was out. Earlier in the year President Lincoln had proclaimed all Negroes free from slavery.

  But the rebels were not defeated, they won new victories, and at the end of this year also the war was still on. Now the North needed soldiers to replace those who had fallen, and at last conscription was resorted to.

  To Karl Oskar Nilsson the conscription brought no change. Once rejected he need not go, nor need he send a man in his place, as many ablebodied men did.

  The North still had plenty of men to fill the vacancies left by the dead, but in the South the manpower was running low, and that was why no one up north any longer feared the war would be lost.

  There were settlers at Chisago Lake who would just as soon see the human slaughter go on forever. During the Civil War the merchants made good profits. Klas Albert, Karl Oskar’s neighbor in Sweden, bragged that he had sold an old inventory at unexpectedly high prices. He could never have disposed of it except for the Civil War. Karl Oskar told him he ought to go to the war himself since he was strong and ablebodied and a bachelor besides. But Klas Albert replied that no one in his right mind would go to war unless he were forced, and he was still of sound mind. And when conscription was put in effect he hired his clerk to do the service for him.

  The Swedish church warden’s Klas Albert had, in a short time, prospered out here and was now Mr. C. A. Persson, owner of the biggest store in Center City. All day long customers thronged to his counter and money rolled in as fast as he could handle it. He had found an occupation that suited him, and in the right country. None of the emigrants from Ljuder was as successful as Mr. Persson.

  Karl Oskar was prejudiced against all merchants and did not like Klas Albert too much. He felt he grew rich on his fellow immigrants. Whether he bought or sold, he always managed it to his own advantage, and if the farmers hadn’t brought forth from the earth the things he bought and sold he would have had nothing to profit from.

  —2—

  The earliest settler at Chisago Lake changed to a remarkable degree after his wife’s death. He had always preferred to keep silent rather than speak unnecessarily and now he grew ever stingier with his words. At home, he divided the chores among his children and explained how to perform them, praised them when something was well done, scolded them when they were careless or negligent. Aside from this he seldom spoke. And even outside the home he became known as sparing of words. He would have less and less to do with people, he resigned from all his activities for the county and the parish. From now on he would not be a spokesman for others, only attend to his own business. He stopped going to parish meetings, and the Chisago people wondered and talked as Karl Oskar Nilsson never went to church after his wife’s death.

  The widower lived almost like a hermit, he closed himself off from the world outside his home and more and more turned inward. He faced each day in turn; he was able to endure his life only one day at a time.

  Only each day in turn could he face the loss of Kristina.

  The first weeks after her death he thought each morning as he awoke: I must live this day without her. And tomorrow I must live through the day without her. The same the day after tomorrow. So it shall be for me during all my remaining days. During all the time allotted me in life I will be without her.

  It was every morning’s reminder. And each day in turn was more than enough. Maybe he could manage one day? Maybe he could manage his whole life if he divided it into the small parts of single days. At first it had seemed, as it came over him in the morning, that he could not endure this heavy loss, and he began saying to himself each morning: This day I am without her. But only today. He pushed away the following day and the next day, and the next day, and all the following days, to let them take care of themselves. They had not yet come, and perhaps they never would come.

  His days without Kristina gathered into weeks, months, and years. He could already say: Last year when I lost my wife. Soon he could say: The year before last, when I lost my wife. And eventually it would be: The year I lost my wife, that was long, long ago. And by then the loss of her would be gone, with his own life.

  So Karl Oskar divided his sorrow into days and thought that in so doing it would be easier for him to bear.

  In the evening he might stop on the path from the stable to the main house, as if waiting for her. Here she would be coming with her milk pails, one in each hand, and he must help her carry them. He would always help her when he was about. Can I give you a hand, Kristina? She would reply: So kind of you, Karl Oskar! Now she no longer came along the path as she used to, and he stood there desolate. Didn’t he know it? Would he never understand it? There were no more pails to be carried for Kristina. He had no wife. He had raised a cross over her in the cemetery.

  On warm summer evenings he would tend the beds under the window, weed the peas and the beans and water them, and it sometimes happened that he caught himself listening through the open window: Wasn’t that Kristina’s sewing machine in there? No. Now there was no whir from the balance wheel, no noise from the pedals under her feet. And her loom stood silent. She used to sing while weaving, she wanted to muffle the loom’s noise, she said. But he liked the sound of the loom coming from inside the house, and he would stand there and listen for the shuttle.

  And so each time Karl Oskar found himself equally disappointed when he compared the past and the present: Kristina’s sewing machine had been put aside in a corner and emitted no sound, and from the loom her shuttle would never sing again.

  In such moments he spoke aloud to Kristina: If I had followed my common sense you would still be with me! If you hadn’t trusted in God you’d still be alive!

  But she had said a few words which he remembered and would keep well during his remaining years. They had once been uttered by her lips, they were heard by his ears, he would keep them well. It was her answer to him: Don’t worry about me, Karl Oskar. I’m in good keeping.

  —3—

  It was Whitsuntide Eve and the house was being cleaned for the holiday. Karl Oskar was on his knees on an old sack scrubbing the stoop floor. He dipped the brush into the hot soap lye and scrubbed the planks with all his m
ight, he scratched, he scrubbed, he rubbed. But whatever he did he couldn’t get the floor as clean and white as he knew it should be. The dirt seemed to be glued between the boards; it must be poor soap, he thought. When they first came out here he had made the soap himself, from ashes and pork fat. But Kristina had complained that it didn’t remove the dirt entirely. When she washed linen she refused to use his homemade soap and bought some from Klas Albert.

  Well, the stoop floor would have to be good enough the way it was. Many other things had to be good enough nowadays, even if they weren’t as they were before.

  “My goodness, Karl Oskar! Are you scrubbing the floor!”

  He recognized the voice, it was a woman’s. She stood behind him on the stoop, dressed in an ample coat and wide hat. The scrubbing brush had made such noise he hadn’t heard her coming.

  “Ulrika . . . !”

  “Good for you! Cleaning your house yourself!”

  He moved his hand to his left leg, sore from lying on the boards, and rose slowly with the brush in his hand. The scrub water dripped from his wet knees.

  He was a little embarrassed and it annoyed him.

  “Now you’re a real American, Karl Oskar!”

  “I wanted to help Marta tidy up a little. But I don’t care for housework.”

  “I bet you don’t!”

  And Mrs. Henry O. Jackson laughed the loud laughter of the Glad One: “You aren’t ashamed of it?”

  “Ashamed of woman-work? That’s only in Sweden.”

  “You bet! Not Svenske any more!”

  Ulrika knew that even while Kristina was alive he had started to help with milking and dishwashing, but so much had remained in him of the Swedish attitude that he had refused to scrub floors. Now she saw that this Swedish defect had left him.

  “At last you’re a real American!”

  “Shall I bow at the praise . . .”

  “The best praise I can give a man!”

  “But I’m not good at scrubbing . . .” He pushed the pail aside. “Nothing is in order with us . . . But come in, Ulrika! Long time since you were here.”