The Last Letter Home Page 7

  Karl Oskar took him by the shoulder and shook him—wasn’t he awake yet? He stank of whiskey, his head was still in a drunken stupor.

  “Are you still drunk? Can’t you talk?”

  Anders Månsson had lost his power of speech at the sight of the dead one in the furrow. It was incredible to him that his mother could have laid herself down in this way out in the field, could remain lying so quietly in the same position regardless of how long he looked at her.

  Karl Oskar felt sorry for him but couldn’t help showing his impatience: “You must know your own mother!”

  At last a word came from Anders Månsson’s gaping mouth: “. . . Mother . . . oh yes, yes . . . Mother . . .”

  Karl Oskar thought Fina-Kajsa had been dead for several hours, probably since early morning. And he also assumed that her son had been dead drunk since last evening and only now had awakened.

  Now he stood here irresolutely and stared at his mother, and it looked as if he could stand like that indefinitely without any intention of doing anything with her lifeless body. Could he possibly have in mind to let her have her grave here in the potato field furrow?

  “Help me, Månsson. We must carry her inside . . .”

  Karl Oskar loosened the hoe from the dead one’s grip. Anders Månsson bent down and took hold of her legs; his hands shook like those of a very old man. Together they carried her toward the cabin. Fina-Kajsa was not heavy, she was not a burden for one man alone, much less for two, but Karl Oskar felt that the son ought to help carry his mother home.

  They placed Fina-Kajsa on her bed, and Karl Oskar pulled a blanket over the corpse.

  He saw a whiskey keg beside the son’s bed, a five-gallon one from Fischer’s inn; Anders Månsson fed his drunkenness as long as the whiskey lasted. Karl Oskar would have liked to give the drunkard a good talking to: While drinking in bed he had let his mother work herself to death. But what use would there be in reproach? The dead body on the other bed was reproach enough.

  In his soul Anders Månsson was a decent person, and now he had double sorrow: his regret over what he had done to his mother.

  The two settlers went outside and sat down on the stoop. Karl Oskar said he would help as much as he could with the funeral. On his way home he would stop by at Jonas Petter’s and tell Swedish Anna to come and wash the body and dress it for the coffin. The Irish carpenter in Taylors Falls was sure to make the coffin.

  “Thanks, Nilsson. You’re good to me . . .”

  Karl Oskar replied that Anders Månsson had helped him greatly that first year they were out here; he was glad if he could help in return. Fina-Kajsa’s son breathed heavily and his voice was hoarse; he coughed hollowly, as if his cough came from a deep hole, an empty space in his chest, a hollow, vaulted cellar.

  “I don’t feel well. I’ve spoiled my health here in Minnesota.”

  His power of speech was returning. He felt his head; returning also was the hangover.

  “Life out here is hard on one’s health; not all can take it . . .”

  “But you must stop drinking, Månsson! You’ll wreck your life and everything . . .”

  “You mean I’ve wrecked my mother . . . ?”

  “You’re killing yourself as well! Stop your drinking!”

  “Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . ha . . . ha . . .”

  It rattled down in his throat, it almost sounded like an eerie, echoing laughter. Stupefied, Karl Oskar looked at him.

  But Anders Månsson was not laughing. There was some irritation in his throat; he coughed—he emitted a sound that was neither cry nor laugh, only an outcry from a man in hopeless despair:

  “Stop drinking! What the hell! That’s easy, ya betcha!”

  “What’s the matter? Are you still drunk?”

  “You said to stop drinking . . . as if it were that easy! Like stopping your job or something. Just quit! It isn’t that easy, Nilsson. You don’t understand my trouble! Not one little part of it!”

  “Have you tried to stop?”

  “Every second day for ten years!”

  “Why can’t you stop?”

  “Why!?”

  “Yes, tell me . . .”

  “Why . . . ? Because . . . because I’m afraid . . .”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Nilsson, you can’t . . .”

  He stopped. He seemed to have lost his speech again. He looked through the open door into the cabin. He could see the foot end of the bed, he could see a pair of feet in dirty white, worn-out woolen socks, a pair of old feet which today had tramped the earth for the last time.

  He leaned over with both hands to his face. His body began to shake.

  “What are you afraid of, Månsson?”

  He did not reply, only mumbled again: “Mother!”

  Karl Oskar waited. Fina-Kajsa’s son must have time to gather his senses. Unprepared, he had seen his mother lying dead in the field—that was about as much as a man could take, even when he was well.

  After a moment Anders Månsson began to talk again. He lowered his voice and looked about as if afraid some outsider were listening:

  “I’ll tell you, Nilsson . . .”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “The madhouse . . .”

  “The madhouse . . . ?”

  “Yes—do you understand, Nilsson . . . ?”

  “No, Månsson, I don’t understand at all.”

  But in the next moment he understood. Fina-Kajsa’s son was talking about the insane asylum.

  “That place—you know. Can you understand my trouble now?”

  Anders Månsson crouched and looked about as if danger lurked, as if something were round the corner of the house that he didn’t want to see, as if the madhouse were quite close, on his own ground. Yes, wasn’t it back there, beyond the field? He had seen it many times, it came closer each time he looked at it. Next time it might be right here, in his own field, opening its doors for him.

  “The madhouse . . .”

  Right here at his doorstep! Cozy and nice! Come right in, Anders Månsson! The doors are wide open! This is your home! Come in!

  Fina-Kajsa’s son saw things that weren’t there, and Karl Oskar had received an answer to his question.

  —4—

  Anders Månsson had once confided in Kristina that when he came to the Territory there were hardly any people there except Indians. For months on end he had no living soul to speak to; he could not have felt more alone and lost if he had been the only human being in the world. The loneliness made him long for the homeland. Perhaps he could have gathered together enough money for a return ticket but he felt ashamed to go back as poor and empty-handed as he had been when he left. Everyone would call him a failure. And when he left for America he had been so proud and uppity that he had called Sweden a shit-country, and said that he would rather be eaten by carrion than be buried there. He had emigrated with the thought of never returning, and if he went back he would have to suffer for his pride; he would have to eat every word he had uttered about the old country. He was ashamed to go back. Then he had written his parents a letter of lies: He liked it in America, all went well with him, he had a fine farm. They could come and live with him in their old age—he invited them because he was sure they would never come. But one day his mother had arrived and surprised him, and she had asked, where were his fine mansion and his vast fields he had written about? She would never believe he had lied so cruelly to her. As the years went by she became a little peculiar—at the end she thought her son was hiding his fine farm somewhere deep in the forest. And she kept asking, “Anders, where is your American estate?”

  And while longing for Sweden Anders Månsson had begun to drink; he kept thinking about what he had done and worried about it, but once having changed countries he could never change back. Thus he had become the eternal whiskey-thirster.

  Today Karl Oskar viewed one countryman’s plight. But he could neither advise nor help.

  He said, “Whiskey is a poor
comforter, Månsson.”

  “Better a false than none . . .”

  “But afterward you lie sick in your bed . . .”

  Fina-Kajsa’s son took a firm hold of Karl Oskar’s sleeve, his eyes wild: “Yes, yes! And the worst is to wake up. It feels like my head were boiling in a caldron, a slow boil . . . Then I get scared to death! That’s when I see the madhouse! The madhouse! Then there’s only one help . . . one help . . .”

  What did it help to warn or advise here? No outsider could lessen a burden or ache in someone else’s body or soul. Anders Månsson fled from his torture to whiskey; he woke up with the same plague and fled again. He was in a vicious circle, he had walled himself in in a prison and each time he escaped he locked himself in more securely.

  Fina-Kajsa’s son turned about and looked inside the cabin. He could see two old feet in a pair of old socks, worn and muddy from the potato field. And by and by his eyes began to run, tears streamed down his cheeks and watered his matted beard—he was able to cry.

  “. . . Mother . . .”

  Karl Oskar had nothing more to say. He knew of no way in which to help the man beside him who kept crying—a man who had locked himself in and every day kept walling up the door to his prison.

  —5—

  The Swedish parish in Chisago County had lost its oldest member: Fina-Kajsa Andersdotter had been seventy-seven years old.

  She was buried under the silver maples, on the beautiful promontory beside the lake that had been set aside for burial ground. All the surviving members of that group of immigrants she had come with to the Territory in 1850 followed her to the grave. There were, besides her son, thirteen people, adults and children, who stood by and watched as the earth was shoveled onto her coffin. Only two of the original group were missing: Arvid Pettersson, who lay in an unknown grave, and Robert Nilsson, who had come to this plot before her.

  The mortality rate had until now been low in the parish, as most of the immigrants were people in their best years. Only some twenty graves had been dug in the new cemetery, and many of these held children of a year or less. Old age would not for many years become an important cause of death among the immigrants of the St. Croix Valley.

  A few weeks after Fina-Kajsa’s funeral Jonas Petter came to Karl Oskar’s and said that Anders Månsson had disappeared. People looking for him had found his cabin unlocked and deserted. He had not been seen in Taylors Falls for some time, not even at Fischer’s inn, where he used to go daily. The German had begun to wonder why his whiskey customer did not show.

  His gun was still hanging on its peg in the cabin; he was not out hunting. But some accident could have happened to him in the wilderness, some stray Indian might have murdered him, or he might have done himself some harm. Perhaps he had left because he couldn’t endure living alone after his mother’s death. But in that case, since he was a good old hunter, he ought to have taken his gun with him.

  Jonas Petter wanted Karl Oskar to join him in a posse to look for their missing countryman. Danjel Andreasson and his son Sven would also come, and a few American settlers, old hunting friends of Månsson who wished to participate.

  All told there were about a dozen men in the posse to look for the missing man. They searched the forest near his claim but found no sign of him. The posse stayed in the wilderness several days without discovering any clues to explain his disappearance. The men dragged the little pond near his cabin but caught only the half-rotten carcass of a drowned elk calf and an old canoe of the kind the Indians used.

  Finally the posse gave up. They knew as little when they stopped as when they had begun. What had happened to Anders Månsson? Was he alive or dead?

  The mystery was solved some time later.

  A boy from Franconia was fishing at the rapids below Taylors Falls when he noticed a hat that had stuck between two stones in the St. Croix River. The boy fished up the hat with his hook. It looked as if it had been long in the water. And in the hat was a clue to its owner: two big letters printed on the sweatband in red ink, now somewhat blurred but still quite legible: A. M. And there was no doubt to whose head this hat had belonged, since Mr. Fischer in Taylors Falls recognized it as belonging to Anders Månsson. He had once forgotten it at the inn.

  All thought that Fina-Kajsa’s son had himself jumped into the stream. He could possibly have fallen in while fishing, but he never fished in the St. Croix River, and he could have had no other errand to the rapids.

  His body was never found. Undoubtedly it had floated a long way from the place where his hat was stuck between the stones. During the fall rains the strong current might carry a corpse with it to the still greater stream, the Mississippi, which then would take charge and carry it to the big sea.

  Anders Månsson had been the first Swedish settler in the St. Croix Valley, but no grave opened for him under the silver maples in the settlers’ cemetery. He himself undertook the one emigration that remained for him.

  One single decision had decided his life, the great decision to emigrate, the irrevocable, the irreversible. To him had been put a strong command which he was unable to follow, the first commandment in the emigrants catechism: Thou shalt not regret Thy emigration!

  IV

  THE SETTLERS’ HOLY DAYS

  —1—

  That autumn Karl Oskar cleared and plowed the last of the meadow that had originally stretched from the forest down to the lake. Thus he had turned into a tilled field the entire slope which had at first attracted him and made him select this lakeside for his farm. He had now broken more than thirty acres and no more meadow ground for tilling was available on his claim. And Kristina thought they now had enough without further clearing.

  But Karl Oskar liked to sit at the gable window and look out at the oak stand on the out-jutting tongue of land to the east of the house; those mighty, high-breasted oaks with their enormous crowns grew in topsoil at least three feet deep, a ground that was as fertile as his fields. The grove back there called for a tiller as it were; it would add fifteen acres to his field!

  Up to now the tiller of these shores by the Indian lake had only needed to put the plow into the ground and turn the turf. It was easy enough to break new fields on even meadowland, it was something else to tackle a heavy oak forest. But those great trees—a mixture of white oak and red oak—kept challenging him: Try to make a field here if you can! Our roots are thick and strong and go deep into the ground—try to pull us from our hold! Here your strength won’t suffice! Come and try!

  This oak grove had trees that were four to six feet in diameter. The felling alone would be an immense labor. And afterward the greatest hindrance would remain: the stumps. How could he get rid of them? He pondered this problem at great length. Oak stumps in America were as much of an obstacle to a tiller as stones in Sweden.

  How could Karl Oskar conquer these mighty oaks, so securely rooted in the deep soil? Well, his sons were growing up, and becoming stronger; he must wait with this new ground breaking until they could help him. As soon as Johan and Harald could do a full-grown man’s work, they would tackle the oak grove; then the strength of the tiller would be measured against the oaks.

  He was also planning for his new buildings. But with the Civil War came dear times. Prices on implements made of iron and steel rose quickly. Everything he needed to buy for his house building grew more expensive. He must wait awhile. He had hauled thick oak logs to the steam mill in Center City, where they had been sawed into planks and boards for the new house; he had a tall pile of timber already. And this year he planned to cut sills and foundation logs.

  But the war delayed all activity, all building in this part of the country. There must be an end to destruction and ruination before new undertakings could be started; one could not build a new house while the old was still burning.

  —2—

  A mile and a half from their farm stood their church, a modest building of rough timbers, deep in the forest. But the church pointed a little wooden spire toward Heaven, indi
cating it was a God’s house, a Lord’s temple. The Swedish immigrants had sacrificed many days of labor on their church, they had gone in debt for it and had not yet been able fully to pay for it.

  Karl Oskar and Kristina went to the timber church every Sunday unless blizzards or other bad weather prevented them. Once in a great while they would stay at home out of pure tiredness and celebrate their day of rest in the home. But the distance between the church and their home was not so great that they could not hear the ringing of the bell which had been hung last year. The bell had cost all of ninety dollars and was paid for by the “nuisance tax”—fines levied against parish members who in one way or another had misbehaved during the service. Petrus Olausson himself, the church warden, had suggested this tax, and he was greatly lauded for it when at last it bought the church a bell. To the poor parish, barely able to support a pastor, ninety dollars was a great sum. First and always, it was cash that the settlers lacked.

  Kristina could again hear the ringing of a church bell. On days when a favorable wind carried the sound it seemed quite close to her. But to Kristina’s ears the new bell did not have the thunderous, sacred tones of a real church bell. As a child home in Ljuder, when she heard the bells she would shudder deep in her heart: The sound came from the heavens, like the thunder of the doomsday trumpet. The ringing from on high called to communion or service. But the settlers’ bell here in America had an entirely different tone. It almost sounded like a dinner bell on a farm, calling to an ordinary meal; it was better suited to a weekday than a Sunday. The bell did have a light, quite beautiful tone, but it jingled rather than rang. The sound was pleasing to Kristina’s ears but found no response in her soul.

  To her the church bells of Ljuder signified weddings and funerals, peoples union in life and their departure from it, the move into a new home and the move to eternity. On Sundays the bells from the parish church hurled a mighty command to the inhabitants: It was the Sabbath, they must go to church to confess and shed the burden of sins accumulated through the working week, cleanse body and soul. At the first sound of the bell on Sunday morning her father used to say: Now I hear it is Sunday! I feel it is a holy day! Time to wash and change shirts! Those bells instilled piety in the minds of the listeners.