The Last Letter Home Read online

  He was promised thirty dollars recruit money the moment he was accepted. During his term of service he would receive fifteen dollars a month besides food and uniform. Old Abe was to his soldiers as a father to his children and saw to it that they received everything they needed, the Swedish captain had said. Karl Oskar would have nothing to worry about while he was in the war.

  Then came the physical examination and he was shown to another room where a doctor took charge of him. He had to take off every thread of clothing from his body, standing there so naked in that room that he felt ashamed even though only the doctor and another man were in there. The doctor looked over every part of his body, listened to his chest when he breathed, peeked down his throat, felt him in the groin, as if he must be able between the legs also, or whatever it was for. Then the doctor went to a corner and whispered words he had to repeat and showed him a picture with terribly small letters he had to read. And the medical inspector said the same thing as the captain: He was a fine soldier. Lungs, heart, vision, and hearing were as good as they could be in a human being, each part of his body was in excellent condition, all his faculties perfect.

  Finally he was asked to run across the floor, just to try the legs a little. He ran around, strutted about, and stretched out his legs and it did hurt a little in the left shank, as it always did when he moved it quickly. He always dragged that leg when he was tired. After a few turns the doctor asked him how long the leg had bothered him. He told the truth: He had injured it the first year he was in America and it had never healed properly.

  He was told to run a few times more. Then the doctor said: “Sorry, your left leg is not good enough for a soldier.” No one could go out in war with such a leg. He limped on it when he ran, and a soldier could not limp in any way, he must be able to run perfectly if need be. He should have taken care of his leg, attended to the injury while there still was time for it to heal right. Now it was grown together in such a way that he would have it as long as he lived.

  Karl Oskar himself felt that his leg had improved this last year, he had never for a moment thought it would prevent him from enlisting. Nor did he think it would be so important for a soldier to be able to run fast. The most important thing, in his opinion, was to hold his post and not turn and run away from the enemy. And he had told the doctor as much; he knew he was no runner, but he didn’t think the troops of the North would have to run away all the time. The doctor laughed and said, on the contrary, he was afraid Karl Oskar couldn’t run fast enough to pursue the enemy.

  Because of his left leg he had been rejected. The Swedish captain felt very sorry about it, and before Karl Oskar left, this nobleman made a speech and thanked him for having shown his loyalty as a citizen in honestly offering to do his duty to his adopted land. However, since he was a farmer he could still do great service to the Union. He could sow and harvest his crops and raise cattle; those who were in the war needed food, said the captain, probably to make him feel less bad because he had been rejected and was useless for military service.

  Kristina pricked up her ears at the last words: Perhaps he needed to be consoled. She said, “Now you can stay home without anyone reproaching you. I hope your conscience is at rest.”

  But she had understood right along that he wasn’t satisfied.

  “It’s galling to be a useless person,” he said, “one who isn’t quite worthy of full measure . . .”

  Kristina exclaimed hotly, “Are you ashamed because you aren’t worthy to slaughter people? That’s the silliest thing I’ve heard in my whole life!”

  “You don’t quite understand this sort of thing, Kristina.”

  “Oh no! It’s an awfully vain man who is ashamed because he can’t go out and kill!”

  “Well, I was a little disappointed and hurt when I was rejected as a useless weakling and not up to standard.”

  Kristina knew Karl Oskar had some great shortcomings, the shortcomings of all men. He suffered from pride and self-assurance, he thought he was good enough to do anything. This was the original sin in him. Deficient! Because he was rejected as a soldier! If she were a man she would be proud that she was found unsuitable to kill people!

  She resumed: When cattle were chosen for slaughter, usually the injured or old or deformed came first, worn-out oxen or cows that gave little milk. But when they sent men to slaughter on the field of battle then they took the healthy and young and perfect first! Those best fitted to live were sent away to die!

  Karl Oskar rose slowly from the table this evening. He set down his left foot heavily on the floor, as if he wanted to test it, to assure himself that the leg still was able to carry him. Then he shook his shoulders and threw out both his hands as if shaking off a burden of long standing: “Don’t let’s talk about it any more! You’ll have me here at home now as long as the war lasts!”

  If he had heard Kristina’s prayer the evening before, he would have known who had prevented him from going to the Civil War where he might have lost his eternal life.

  III

  THE FIRST COMMANDMENT FOR EMIGRANTS

  Thou shalt not regret Thy emigration,

  Thou shalt love America as Thy young

  Bride and Sweden as Thine Old Mother.

  —1—

  In the evening Kristina dug around the Astrakhan apple tree under the east gable of the house. With her fingers she pulled out quickroot and other weeds, with the spade she piled a bank of black earth round the trunk. In this way her old father in Duvemåla had attended to the fruit trees in fall. This tree, grown from a seed from her parents’ home in Sweden, was already taking on height and breadth. The sapling was now a young tree that had bloomed three springs. But as yet it had produced no fruit. Two springs in succession the blossoms had withered away from severe night frost. Last spring was warmer and the blooms remained, but at fruiting time the tree was covered with caterpillars which gnawed on the stems, and during a storm in June the unripe apples fell to the ground.

  The seasons in America were unpredictable and unreasonable. Her Astrakhan tree had suffered badly from exposure so far each year. But the Sweden sapling was still in its early youth and it would surely bear fruit in another year.

  The bank of topsoil was ready and Kristina straightened her back and rested her foot on the spade. She had not yet done the evening milking. Johan and Harald had driven the cows into the corral at the barn. Round and about lay the fields where the stubble left from harvested crops shone golden brown in the clear evening light. The sugar maples to the front of the house had changed the color of their leaves to deep yellow and the oaks beyond the field stood rust-red. Already in the mornings a sprinkle of frost, like drops of milk, glittered on the grass. And gusts of wind had begun to feel chilly against the cheeks—the autumnal wind which harrowed the ground with rough strokes.

  Soon winter would knock at the door, Kristina’s twelfth winter in North America. She wondered if she would still be alive when the next snow melted and next spring arrived.

  Since her miscarriage two and a half years ago she had not enjoyed the same health and strength as before. However little she worked she felt tired and her limbs weak. Her body strength simply would not return. After her childbeds she had quickly recuperated, but perhaps it was harder for a woman to bear a stillborn child than a living one. She suffered also in her soul: the sorrow that she—in bearing a lifeless offspring—had brought death into the world.

  From time to time she was bothered with pain in her lower abdomen. The pain might disappear for a few days but it always came back. She wondered if this had anything to do with her great fatigue. Every evening when she went to bed she feared she might be unable to rise next morning. And how she would have liked to stay in bed in the morning! She felt as if she had only just tasted the rest, barely sipped of the refreshment. She would have liked to stay in bed for weeks and months and only enjoy herself. Perhaps this tiredness would remain in her body as long as life itself remained.

  But death did not frighten
her any more. The day before Robert walked into the forest and lay down to die at the side of a brook he had pointed out to her how he had reconciled himself to leaving this world: He had stopped complaining to the Lord about life and death and was satisfied with man’s lot in life: Believe me, Kristina, Death can bring nothing evil to me—I am untouchable! Now she herself had gained the same conviction: She had conquered the worldly; death could not reach her soul. Why should she fear death which could take nothing from her except this earth, which everyone must lose?

  She had over the years harbored longings for earthly things and tried to be satisfied with this world. It bothered her that life offered so much of goodness and beauty which others enjoyed but which she never would have an opportunity to partake of. She suffered because the lot of the emigrant had fallen on her. Year after year she suffered here in America from the thought that never would she return to the land of her childhood and youth. A homeland had once been given to her—she had lost it, and she could never have a new one. Her mind would never be at peace because of her longing for home. She lived as an unhappy and strayed creature and was afraid she might be lost to eternity. Until God rough-handedly showed her the right way and she accepted her lot; until she got rid of her worldly inclination and opened her mind to the thoughts of eternity. Only then did she know that her soul-suffering and inner disturbance were not caused by her inability to liberate herself from the old homeland, but rather that she was unable to give up this world.

  The emigration was not her unlucky fate. How could a move on this earth affect a person? What did it matter if she lived her fleeting days in one place on the globe or another? Why was she concerned about dying in one spot or another? In the New World or in the Old? In Sweden or North America? She had her permanent home in a land she could never lose.

  There was only one move now that meant anything to Kristina: her soul’s liberation from the body, the move from one life to another, from temporal life to eternity. From this belief sprang her understanding of her life on earth.

  And once she had reconciled herself to her fate no more uneasiness disturbed her. Nothing that happened in this world worried or frightened her. But for her husband who shared her life and for the children she had borne into this world she harbored love’s anxiety. She had entrusted them to the Creator: Give me strength to endure a few years more! Don’t make my children motherless as yet!

  Every evening Kristina thanked God that she had been granted another day with Karl Oskar and her children.

  —2—

  Another day was counted out of her life. She leaned the spade against the house and went into the kitchen for her milkpans.

  Karl Oskar had driven to Taylors Falls today and was not yet back. She wondered why he was late. She had sent him on an errand to Anders Månsson’s since he anyway was so close.

  As Kristina sat on her milking stool in the stable, her thoughts wandered to Anders Månsson, who had come here before them and had housed them in his cabin during their first months in the Territory. He had been struck by the same misfortune as she—homesickness. But he had sought other aid than she: He tried to drink away his regret over his emigration. He ruined himself and his possessions with the American brännvin. She had heard that he had been forced to sell his last cow, and she felt sorry for Fina-Kajsa and her son that they had now no milk. Her thoughts went to the day when Anders Månsson had lent them the milch-cow Lady during their first winter in the wilderness. The milk had helped her save the lives of her children that winter. Now they themselves had a cow that had just calved and today she had sent milk and some biestings-pudding to the Månssons with Karl Oskar.

  Before she was through with the milking she heard the sound of a spring wagon as it stopped before the stable door: Karl Oskar was back. A few moments later he came into the stable.

  She noticed at once that his expression was not his usual one. He was tense; his lips were contracted, and his eyes under the wrinkled brows were severe.

  Did he bring a message of accident or misfortune?

  “Has anything happened?”

  “Don’t be upset. Nothing has happened to me, but when I came to Anders Månsson’s this morning . . .”

  During the last days Fina-Kajsa and her son had often been in Kristina’s thoughts. Perhaps it had meant something?

  She received the answer as she now heard what Karl Oskar had to relate.

  —3—

  Anders Månsson’s place had seemed completely desolate and deserted when he had arrived there. Not a living soul was in sight outside. The fields were neglected; a rusty plow lay in one field but no fall plowing had been started, some scythes had been left in the grass, the barn door hung askew on one hinge, and by the wall stood the old ox cart—the screech-wagon—with broken wheels. In the potato field were still the frozen, black stalks—the potatoes had not yet been picked in spite of the night frost.

  The cabin door was bolted from the inside. Karl Oskar banged at it but no one opened. Not a sound inside. He tried to peek through the window but the curtains were drawn.

  He could not discover a sign of life at this place and he got a feeling that something was wrong.

  Looking again toward the potato field he noticed something unusual. In among the blackened stalks lay some sort of bundle, a gray pile, it looked like. He thought he recognized pieces of clothing and went over to investigate.

  It was old Fina-Kajsa, stretched out on her back in a furrow. She had the hoe beside her. She lay as immobile and still as the earth under her body; her eyes were half-open and stared at the sky. There was something final and finished about the old woman’s position, something fulfilled and irrevocable. Karl Oskar guessed at the first glance how things stood.

  As far as he could see Fina-Kajsa was dead. No one except a dead person could lie so peacefully in a furrow in a field. The old one had been hoeing up potatoes and it seemed natural that one laboring in the earth should assume this position at the last. Fina-Kajsa wore her dark gray shawl, the same color as the earth she rested on. Her body lay there like a hummock in the ground, as if it already were part of the soil.

  At her head stood a basket, the bottom barely covered with a few great, oblong, reddish tubers, the best kind of America’s potatoes. Her hands still held on to the handle of the hoe. The old hands seemed only sinews and bone under the skin, almost bare bones, and the fingers branched out like thin, peeled twigs. Fina-Kajsa had been miserably lean and scraggly the last years—now she seemed small as a child. Her body seemed mainly a pile of clothing, a heap of bundled-together rags. Her mouth was open, a toothless hole. The caved-in face was brown and scabby but the whites of her eyes shone like white daisies in withered grass in early spring. In those eyes life had remained longest.

  The furrow the old one had begun to pick was long, stretching from one end of the field to the other. She had hoed only a few yards when she fell; before her lay much unfinished labor, perhaps she had mumbled to herself before she fell, chewing on her disappointment: She was never to see the great farm and the handsome buildings her son had painted in his letters from North America.

  Fina-Kajsa had been hoeing in long, forceful strides. Karl Oskar could see her work here on the field, he could hear her voice mumbling: Hoe on, hoe on! The furrow is long! The field is big! Ackanamej! America is a big country! I’ll never get there! Hoe on, Fina-Kajsa, old woman! Ackanamej! Ackanamej!

  The farm woman from Öland, Sweden, had hoed her last in life. The furrows had been long, the field large, and in her basket were only a few potatoes at the bottom. Yet, even after death she had not let go of the hoe.

  Karl Oskar remained standing there with the milk pail and the pudding from Kristina. Too late; now the gift could be used at her funeral.

  But where was Fina-Kajsa’s son? At the German Fischer’s inn in Taylors Falls? Or did he lie dead drunk in his bed? Where to look for a son who let his worn-out, aged mother pick potatoes alone while he himself—well, where did he keep himself?
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  As if in reply a noise was heard from the log cabin. The heavy door opened slowly inward and Anders Månsson stepped out on the stoop. Karl Oskar’s banging a few moments ago must have awakened him. He did not look toward the potato field, but went to the corner to let his water.

  Karl Oskar hurried toward him.

  Fina-Kajsa’s son was bareheaded, his hair stood up straight as nails from the top of his skull, his cheeks were covered with a matted red beard. He was already stooping like a broken man. He peered at the caller with blood-shot, watery eyes as he greeted him.

  “How goes it, Nilsson?”

  Perhaps it seemed unusual to be lying inside in the middle of forenoon, a sunny, beautiful weekday, and he added apologetically, ashamed: “I was just resting a moment.”

  He was still walking half in his sleep, it seemed.

  Karl Oskar had no time for greeting. He said tartly, “Your mother lies in the potato field—she’s dead!”

  Anders Månsson slowly opened his mouth, looking at his countryman as if he had not understood.

  Karl Oskar took him by the arm and together they walked to the field. The son looked in silence at his mother lying so still on her back, her fingers clutching the hoe handle. Openmouthed he beheld the picture before him. Then he rubbed his running eyes and scratched his wild beard. After staring a few moments at the old body in the black-gray shawl he turned questioningly to his countryman beside him, as if Karl Oskar must explain this sight to him—as if he himself understood nothing.