The Settlers Page 8

  He had had the same unhappy childhood in England as she had had in Sweden. She had lost her parents when four, he when three years of age. She was sold at auction to the lowest bidder, to be brought up, Henry had been put in a foundling home. Her foster father had raped her and taught her whoring, in the orphanage Henry had learned to steal. He stole food to satisfy his hunger. At the age of fourteen he had escaped from the home and continued to steal his food until he was caught and put in prison for three years. When he was released he had signed up on a ship to America. In New York he had lived among thieves and whores until he met a Baptist minister who converted him. He was baptized and given help to study for the ministry. For fifteen years now he had been a pastor.

  Kristina listened, confused and embarrassed, and at first without taking much store in what she heard. But Ulrika couldn’t have made up all these tales.

  “Henry is an old thief—I’m an old whore. We’re two of a kind and very happy together!”

  Kristina thought Ulrika would feel hurt if she now tried to excuse her and her husband: “All that is now passed, all of it,” she stammered.

  “Yes, Henry and I have been immersed and live now in new bodies. We’re forgiven by God. We’re reborn. Our hearts are cleansed.”

  “I’ll never forget your husband’s kindness when we landed here. I couldn’t believe he was a churchman. He was so kind and helpful.”

  Pastor Jackson of Stillwater was as different from the church officials at home as his rough-timbered church across the yard was different from Ljuder’s stone church.

  “Henry has suffered,” said Ulrika. “People who have suffered are kind to other people.”

  Jackson was a nobler and stronger Christian than she, and she wanted to make that clear. He was a help to her when the temptation of her old body came upon her. She couldn’t pretend to be better than she was. The old serpent tempted her; at times she could feel him tickle her weak flesh.

  When she married Jackson, no man had been in bed with her for four long years. It was not easy for her to hold herself until after the wedding; she almost crept near Henry before that time. But she wanted so to wait until after the ceremony, to show him that she had conquered her old sinful flesh. And he had not tempted her—he was not that kind of raw and selfish man. And in this way he had helped her endure and preserve her new body innocent until the bridal ceremony was over.

  When at last the time had come to pull on the bridal shift she had felt like a virgin. She couldn’t quite explain it, but she almost felt like a girl going to woman for the first time when at last they got down to business. And in her new body, rebaptized and all, she really was a virgin, untouched by men. She was still in her best years, and it had felt so wonderful to be able to use her body for the purpose for which it had been created, now that God had joined them together.

  Henry himself had had hardly any experience at all when they married. He had slept a few times with ordinary waterfront whores in New York but that had been fifteen years ago. So she had had to instruct him and guide him. He had really had so little experience that he could be called a beginner at bed play.

  “Jackson pushed in too fast in the beginning, that was the trouble . . .”

  Before Kristina had time even to suspect what Mrs. Jackson was describing, with this last sentence, Ulrika had jumped up; she had just dunked a second butter cake in her coffee and had barely swallowed a bite of it when she suddenly groaned loudly and rushed to the kitchen, her hands on her stomach.

  What was the matter with Ulrika? But before Kristina could ask, her friend had returned to the living room. She dried her mouth with the back of her hand, jolly and happy as ever:

  “Excuse me for running out!”

  “Did you get something in your windpipe?”

  “No, it was only my ‘priest.’ He’s on his way now.”

  Kristina looked out through the window but could see no one outside. “Is Mr. Jackson coming?” she asked.

  “No, not Henry. I meant the priest I’m going to bring into the world. I went out to reek a little.”

  “Reek a little?”

  Ulrika sat down again at the coffee table: “I’m in the family way, you see.”

  Ulrika used the English words and it was a few moments before Kristina understood. Ulrika went on to explain. She had decided long ago that her first son should be a minister, the same as his father. With a son in the pulpit she would be redeemed in the eyes of Dean Brusander at home, he who had excluded her from his congregation.

  “I haven’t had my regulars for two months and I puke like a she-cat. I’m pregnant.”

  In Sweden when a woman was pregnant she was said to be on the thick, and it sounded as if she were afflicted with a shameful disease, said Ulrika. That was why she used the English words for her condition, it sounded fine and elegant in some way. Furthermore, this was the first time she was married to the father of a child of hers, and it seemed strange to her, but not unpleasant.

  “I wish you all luck!” said Kristina. “I’ll carry your first-born to baptism as you carried my last-born.”

  “I’m sorry, but he won’t be baptized until he is grown. We intend to immerse our brats in our own religion.”

  That was true, the Baptists did not christen their babies. Kristina was apt to overlook the fact that Ulrika had embraced a new religion.

  “You’re tardy with your pregnancy,” said Kristina. “You’ve been married two years now.”

  “Yes, it’s taken so long I was getting worried. I myself have borne four brats in my life but I was beginning to wonder if Henry was useless. Having born the others outside wedlock, I’m anxious to have a few real ones too.”

  Kristina sighed; the childbed Ulrika impatiently looked forward to she herself feared. Each month she trembled lest her period stop. And her apprehension had increased since Dan stopped suckling; she thought she had noticed that suckling was an obstacle.

  Ulrika added that she had already bespoken a midwife, a Norwegian woman, Miss Skalrud, who had been maid of honor at her wedding. Miss Skalrud usually helped the women of their congregation at childbirth, and she had promised to help the little one through the portal into this world.

  Toward evening Pastor Jackson returned from his journey to Franconia. He carried his bag with books and pamphlets and also a parcel which turned out to contain five pounds of wheat flour and three pounds of fresh butter, his wages for the sermon. In the doorway, he took his wife in his arms and patted her devotedly on the cheek with his big, hairy hand.

  “Ollrika, my dear, forgive me! I’m late. My dearest Ollrika—and we have a dear guest . . . !”

  The pastor welcomed his wife’s good friend warmly. With blessing-like gestures he took Kristina’s hands and smiled at her, the same good, kind smile she remembered.

  Ulrika’s husband had put on weight since Kristina had last seen him. His cheeks had filled out, his pants were tight around the waist, his stomach had begun to protrude. Ulrika had said, “I cook good food for Henry, don’t forget it!”

  The Jacksons spoke to each other in English, and Kristina again was left out. Once more she felt like a deaf-mute, excluded from the company. But Pastor Jackson was not one of those who would laugh at her, he talked to her through his wife. Was everything well with them on the claim, how were the children, had they enough food, was there anything he could help them with? And she replied through Ulrika that all was well at home, that several new neighbors were moving in this summer, beginning with a farmer from Sweden with his wife and three children.

  But after a while it became rather tiresome to speak to another person through a third one. Nor was she sure her own words always were interpreted correctly. Kristina wished dearly that she could use the English language, if for no other reason than to be able to talk to Pastor Jackson directly; he was her true friend. Without understanding a single one of his words she felt the warmth from them in her heart.

  —2—

  Ulrika made a bed on the liv
ing room sofa for Kristina. She would leave early next morning on the lumber company’s ox wagon.

  When the sun came up and Kristina had eaten breakfast, she thanked her friend for the hospitality and made ready to pick up her basket of groceries. Ulrika, to her surprise, brought her another basket, new and made of willow. A cloth was spread over it.

  “A small present from the two of us, Kristina!”

  Behind Ulrika stood Pastor Jackson, nodding eagerly as if he understood the Swedish words.

  Mysterious cackling and chirpings could be heard from the basket. Kristina lifted a corner of the cloth and peeked. In the bottom of the basket sat a live brown-and-white speckled hen. But hers was not the only life in the basket: tiny chicks poked their heads through the wings of the mother, the little beaks shining like pink flower buds.

  Kristina cried out joyfully. “Chickens! A hen!”

  “We hope you like them! She’s hatched twelve, a whole dozen!”

  Pastor Jackson smiled his kind smile: “Twelve young chickens!”

  Ulrika said, “Henry is as proud of the chicks as if he himself had hatched them. The hen was given to him by a young couple in Taylors Falls as payment for a marriage service.”

  Kristina choked, weeping with joy. If there was anything she had missed on the claim it was chickens. Now her throat was so full she couldn’t say thank you the way she would have wished; she could only mumble.

  Ulrika gave her a small bag of rice for chicken feed: “Be careful with the basket! The little lives are delicate.”

  Pastor Jackson picked up the grocery basket and Ulrika the basket with the hen and chicks, and the two of them accompanied Kristina to the lumber office at the end of the street. It was almost an hour before the wagon was loaded, but her friends remained with her until the driver was ready to start. When the wheels had already begun to roll, Ulrika called to her once more: she must be careful with the newly hatched feather-lives there on the driver’s seat.

  Each time Ulrika had come to visit Kristina in her home she had brought gifts to her and the children. Once Kristina had complained of rats and rodents in their cabin that gnawed at the food and spoiled much of it for them, and next time Ulrika had brought a cat. The cat was a good mouser, but after a time they had found him in a bush near the house, bitten to death; some wild animal had torn out his throat.

  And now she was driving home with Mr. and Mrs. Jackson’s most welcome gift. During the whole journey she sat with the basket on her knee and held on to it with both her hands, listening in quiet joy to the hen’s cackling and the peeps and chirps of the chicks. When the wheels rolled over stumps, or down into holes in the forest road, and her seat fell and rose, she clutched the basket more firmly.

  In trees and bushes, along the whole stretch of the road, Kristina heard the spring birds of the forest, but she was unaware of them; their song was drowned by the determined chirping from the domestic birds on her knee. A hen, chickens, eggs! An egg each Sunday, eggs for cooking during the week! Egg bouillon, egg milk, egg pancakes! This was what the chirp from the chickens meant. Boiled eggs, fried eggs, eggs in omelets, eggs in the pan, eggs, eggs, eggs!

  If she now had decent luck so that at least half of the twelve chicks were pullets! A rooster was good for only one meal, devoured at one sitting, but hens’ eggs would be food year in, year out.

  Kristina’s thoughts turned gratefully to Ulrika and her husband. Her friends in the Stillwater parsonage had proved themselves her friends in every need. The Jacksons were the kindest people she knew in the world, despite the fact that both had led such wretched lives in their homelands. Here they had turned into new beings, they had become transformed in America. She had herself seen how Ulrika had blossomed in this country.

  The same thing had happened to a great number of the immigrants. When they no longer had masters over them but could live their own lives as they wished, they became different people. When they could make their own decisions and need not obey others, they became new beings.

  Kristina recognized that she herself had changed some out here; she valued people differently. In Sweden she had gone along with the common opinion and valued those whom others valued, looking down on those whom others looked down on. And at home there were those of a higher class whose opinions one should heed, for their ideas and actions were considered the right ones. But here she knew of no particular persons who were held up as examples; in this country, it seemed, people did not care what anyone thought or said about others.

  And since no one out here was considered better than anyone else, each one must form his own opinions. She herself must stick to what she felt for others and knew of their deeds. She must make judgments that she considered right. Thus it came about that she now valued people differently. In this way she explained to herself the feelings she had about her friends in Stillwater.

  Kristina had visited in a home where the husband had been a thief and the wife a whore. But this couple were her honest, devoted, indispensable friends. Outside her family, her best friends in America were the former thief and the former whore.

  III

  PLANNING AND PLANTING

  —1—

  As soon as Petrus Olausson had raised his log house, his wife and children arrived. His wife’s name was Judit. She was a tall, rather lean, woman with small, quick, sharp eyes, a strong nose, and a severely compressed mouth which seemed distorted—the right corner was pulled up higher than the left. The couple had a girl fourteen years old and twin boys barely twelve.

  Kristina felt a little shy with her neighbor the first time she came to call; her tongue was slow to converse with her. Judit Olausson, in her black, tight-fitting dress with a white starched lace collar which came all the way up to her chin, did not seem like an ordinary settler’s wife but rather like a matron on a well-to-do farmstead. There was something austere and commanding about her, whether it came from her penetrating look or the wry mouth; Kristina did not feel on equal footing with her neighbor. Olausson’s wife was also fifteen years older than she.

  Later in the spring two families from Småland settled at Fish Lake on the east side of the valley. It was a great distance from this lake to Ki-Chi-Saga and the names of the newcomers were not known, nor which parish they came from.

  But with the Olaussons’ arrival Karl Oskar and Kristina at last had close neighbors. The settlers gave each other a hand when need be; Karl Oskar lent Olausson a few tools, although the newcomer had brought along more implements than Karl Oskar had owned when he staked his claim. And it seemed the Helsinge farmer also was fairly well supplied with cash.

  Petrus Olausson immediately suggested that the families hereabouts meet every Sunday at each house in turn to enjoy the comfort of religion and help each other with matters.

  At these Sunday meetings, Olausson read from the Bible and gave a brief explanation of the passage he had read. Each time he mentioned the punishment he would have suffered in Sweden had he there attempted to explain the Bible.

  He told them about the persecution he had experienced at the time he and his wife were Erik Janson’s apostles. The prophet had one day come to their home at Alfta to sell wheat flour—he was called Wheat-flour Jesus. At that time Janson was of a world-renouncing mind and adhered strictly to the Bible, considering all other religious books to be false. Because of this, the clergy had asked for his imprisonment and sent the sheriff after him. For several weeks they had hidden him under their barn floor. Three or four times a day they had carried food to him and later they had followed him to North America. The prophet from Biskopskulla had founded Bishop Hill, Illinois, where he intended to build the New Jerusalem. And Erik Janson had seemed to his followers as humanity’s great light, sent by God to restore Christianity. Here in America he would found a new and cleansed Lutheran Church.

  His teachings had been honest and humble in the beginning, but he soon became puffed up with self-righteousness and destroyed himself thereby. No longer was he God’s representative on eart
h, he set himself above God. On the Illinois prairie he treated his people worse than the Americans treated their slaves; he ruled them as if they were his personal possessions. When a married man wanted to sleep with his wife he must first report his desire to Janson. And when the prophet gracefully had condescended to the bedding, then it must take place in full view of the whole congregation. Such was the shameless man’s pleasure. When people grew sick or old or useless for work, he simply commanded them to lie down and die. If the sick did not obey him and failed to die the same day, they were excluded from the colony.

  The overbearing man brought on his own evil end: a murderer’s bullet.

  And Petrus Olausson spoke of the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church, of Baptism and Methodism, and explained the differences in the religions which decided where a human was to spend eternity—in Heaven or in Hell. To Kristina the whole seemed confusing and difficult to understand. But she understood how easily a person could become ensnared in a false religion which would lead to eternal damnation. God himself had not given clear instructions about the right road, and an ignorant, simple sinner like herself could not find it without guidance. That was why ministers were essential.

  Man did not obey God when obeying authority, said Olausson, and that too sounded strange and confusing to her. As a child she had been taught that no authority existed except that which derived its power from God. But her previous instruction, it now seemed, was a falsification of the Swedish clergy, according to the Helsinge farmer. The sheriff who had chased Erik Janson under the barn floor and put Bible-reading persons in prison on bread and water had not received his office from God but from the Crown. The provincial governor was a successor to Pilate, who had sentenced Christ to crucifixion. And nowhere in the Bible did it say that God had ordained sheriffs to plague Christian people who read the Bible in their homes. The sheriffs in Sweden were successors to the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus at the order of civil authorities.

  In her catechism, however, Kristina had learned that she ought to respect and obey authority for the Lord’s sake, and she often felt that her neighbor was mistaken.