The Settlers

by Vilhelm Moberg

  Petrus Olausson urged the Swedish settlers in the valley to get together and build a church without delay. Karl Oskar pointed out that they also needed a schoolhouse; their children were growing up and they needed Christian schooling unless the parents wanted them to become heathens. Johan was already of school age and Lill-Marta only a year younger. He and Kristina had tried to teach the brats as best they could, but they had no Swedish spelling book and no catechism. Karl Oskar had taught Johan the letters of the alphabet from the Swedish almanac, but it was not very good for spelling since it had so few words in it. The boy learned too slowly in this way, and Karl Oskar was not much of a teacher. And both Johan and Lill-Marta would soon need to learn the contents of other books as well; it would be useful for both the boy and the girl to be able to read and write.

  Karl Oskar had often discussed the building of a schoolhouse with Danjel Andreasson. There were three children in New Kärragärde, older than their own, whom their father had instructed so far.

  The Olaussons too, had instructed their children, first and foremost in the true Lutheran religion, in order to instill in them from tender years the pure faith. Olausson thought they could use the church they intended to build as a schoolhouse, but Karl Oskar thought they should not wait—building a church might take several years—and they could not get along without a schoolhouse for so long, or their children would have become too old to go to school.

  There were many matters for the settlers to attend to. They must build and build again—temples for God, houses for people, schoolhouses for children, shelters for the cattle, barns for the crops, storehouses, implement sheds. Karl Oskar had laid the foundation for a new living house which he hoped to have roofed by next year, and that was only a poor beginning. As he thought of the coming years he could see himself constantly occupied with eternal carpentry, eternal sill-laying for new buildings.

  —2—

  In order to please Kristina, Karl Oskar had named his new home Duvemåla, and had written to his wife’s home for apple seeds and had planted an Astrakhan apple tree for her: this was his remedy for her homesickness. He wanted to know if it had helped and asked her if she still suffered as much as before. She replied that she thought perhaps her longing for home had died down a little.

  Now Kristina could say: I live again at Duvemåla, this is my home, I hold it dear, here I will stay as long as I live. And she was pleased with the little seedling that had grown from the apple seeds. She looked after it constantly and tended the small plant as if it were a delicate living being.

  Thus far all was well. But neither the name, Duvemåla, nor the seedling could divert her thoughts from her old home. On the contrary, they now turned more often to her native country.

  Even during the night she would return in her dreams, in which she moved back to her homeland, with husband and children. Happily there, she wondered over her foolishness ever to have undertaken the long journey out into the world. What business had she had far away in America? She had a good home here. Well, anyway, everything had turned out all right, all of them were unharmed, back in their old village. She might even dream that the whole emigration had been an evil nightmare.

  But in the morning she always awakened in America.

  Kristina tried persistently to suppress this longing, this desire for and loss of something she would never have again. She wanted to conquer her weakness and be as strong as Karl Oskar. She had made her home here forever, she must learn to feel at home, become part of the foreign country. But in this, her will would not obey her; something in her soul refused to obey.

  And spring in Minnesota, with its dark evenings, was her difficult season; then she yearned for the land with evenings of another hue. She longed for Sweden as much as ever, but she kept this from her husband. She must carry this incurable soul-ache in secret, hide it like a shameful disease, as people hid scabby and scurvy sores on their bodies.

  How many times hadn’t Kristina wished that she could write a letter to her parents! But Swedish women were not taught to write. Perhaps if she herself had insisted, when she was little, she might have learned to write. But how could she have known what was in store for her? As a little girl she could not have imagined that her life would be spent on another continent. Nor had anyone else at home imagined that a woman of their village would move so far away from her relatives that she needed to write letters to her parents. Her fate had not been anticipated by the village school laws.

  Now she was separated from her dear ones; not a word from her could reach them except through another person. After Robert had left for California, Karl Oskar had written a few short letters for her to her parents. Robert had helped her to express her thoughts, but Karl Oskar had difficulty in forming the sentences and capturing her feeling in writing. The letters became the same, almost word for word: she was well, all was well with them, her father and mother must not worry about their daughter, her daily thoughts were with them in her dear old Duvemåla. These last were the truest words in the letters.

  It was always her father who answered, as her mother too, being a woman, could not write, and he wrote equally short letters, using direct biblical words: their daughter must put her trust in the Lord in North America, she must bring up her children in the Lord’s ways and with strict discipline, as she herself had been brought up in her home, she must obey the Ten Commandments and live irreproachably so that they might meet in Heaven.

  His final words confirmed her belief that she never again would see her parents and brothers and sisters on this earth. And she asked dejectedly: Why must the world be so immensely large? Why must the roads across it be so dreadfully long?

  Kristina suffered because the world was so large that she never again would meet her relatives from the homeland in life.

  —3—

  When the tall drifts round the cabin melted away in the spring, the landscape seemed empty and bare. Without their winter covering the log walls appeared in all their wretchedness. Now their home looked like a simple outhouse, a hay barn or a shed. There was nothing to indicate that this was a human habitation. A flower garden was what was needed.

  Flowers cheered one up and were a decoration outside a home, and company for one when alone. When she was first married, Kristina had planted a flower bed against the wall of their house in Korpamoen—resedas, asters, sunflowers, larkspur, lavender, daisies, and other flowers.

  This spring she would prepare a flower bed in front of her new home. She hoed a patch under the south window, and decided to try to get the same kind of flowers she had planted at home, if they were obtainable here.

  Mr. Abbott, the Scottish storekeeper in Taylors Falls, had all kinds of seeds for sale. And shortly before Whitsuntide she had an opportunity to ride to Taylors Falls with Jonas Petter and Swedish Anna. Like her they were going to the Scotsman for their holiday purchases.

  All three had finished their shopping and were sitting on the wagon, ready to return home, when Kristina remembered that she had forgotten the flower seeds. She jumped off and walked back to the store alone.

  Mr. Abbott, behind the counter, greeted her with a lift of his white cap and adjusted the pencil behind his right ear; he was much more courteous to women than to men. The tall Scot was one of Ulrika’s rejected suitors. But a couple of years ago he had married the daughter of the German Fisher, and his wife had borne him a daughter who already managed to crawl about on the floor, both behind the counter and in front of it.

  Kristina had become acquainted with him and was able to buy from him, even though they did not understand each other’s language, since he usually guessed what she wanted and would point to the shelves where his wares were displayed. But she did not know where he kept his seeds, nor did she know what they were called in English. Perhaps flowers had the same names in both languages. She tried the foreign tongue for the first time:

  “I wanta planta blooms . . . blommer . . .”

  The storekeeper listened without changing expressio
n. He did not understand her and answered in words she in turn did not understand. In vain she looked around the shelves for seed bags. He must keep them in a drawer—but which one?

  She grew embarrassed and annoyed at herself; was she unable to buy a few seeds for her own patch? She would take any kind, whatever he had, for it would be futile to stand here and ask for aster, lion-hearts, and other Swedish flowers she wanted. The question now was, could she get any seeds at all?

  Then she saw a paper hanging from a shelf with a red flower painted on it. Relieved, she pointed to the paper and exclaimed:

  “I wanta this! Blommer!

  Mr. Abbotts face lighted up:

  “Ah—you want seed, Mrs. Nelson?”

  But she knew the meaning of the word “seed.” Karl Oskar had bought seed for their field, she did not want rye or barley.

  “No! No! Not seed! I wanta blommer!

  Mr. Abbott brought out a heap of small bags and spread them on the counter; he opened one of them to show her that it was seed. Well, perhaps it was the right kind; she could see the seeds with her own eyes, but the English printed on the bags she could not read; she must buy blindly.

  Kristina fingered the small bags and chose five. As far as she could see, there was different printing on each one, so at least she would have five kinds of flowers.

  She told Karl Oskar when she came home that she had blindly bought five kinds of flower seed for her patch under the window. She thought it would be amusing to see what she had picked; she hoped some of them would be the same varieties she had grown in Korpamoen.

  Her new flower bed lay against the long front side of the house, on the south facing the sun; they would surely grow here. And she cleaned the earth well, picking away roots and weeds before she put the seed in the ground. She pushed it down in rows, one kind to each row, filled the holes with earth, evened out the bed, flattened it with a piece of board, so that it looked neat and orderly.

  Flowers would grow near the house, they would be at the entrance, the place of honor. Flower beds belonged to a home. No one planted flowers in front of a barn, a stable, or a pigpen; a flower bed distinguished a home from animal shed.

  Here her flowers would grow right under the window so they would catch her eye as soon as she looked out. And people would see from a distance that human beings lived in this cabin of rough timbers.

  When Kristina finished her planting and had her flower bed in order she felt she had moved a little patch of ground from her homeland to the settlement at Ki-Chi-Saga.

  —4—

  Minnesota’s hot season was approaching. Each day the sun felt warmer. The earth dried out, and Kristina watered her flower bed every evening. Flowers responded to the care given them, they grew better if they were watched and cared for, they appreciated water and attention. And flowers changed from one day to another; in the morning sun they proudly raised their heads, in fog and rain their heads were bent, sad and depressed; as with people, their appearance often changed.

  Karl Oskar kept busy hoeing turf on the new-broken field; with a team he could have plowed and enlarged his field faster. Here lay the whole meadow with wild grass which was good only for hay. How much more wouldn’t it give him if it were cultivated! It had been lying here in fallow ever since the day of Creation. Now the tiller had arrived, and the time for the earth to give bread to people. At the house wall Kristina had planted her own little field. The flower bed would amuse her, and perhaps lessen her thoughts of longing. She needed something different to occupy her here, something to shatter her homesickness.

  Each morning as Kristina rose she looked out at her flower bed: had they come up yet? The days went by but nothing was seen aboveground. It took time . . . but she asked Karl Oskar what he thought; was it possible that Mr. Abbott had sold her old seeds that wouldn’t grow? He assured her that he had bought seed grain and seeds for rutabagas and carrots and parsnips and all had come up.

  Then Karl Oskar too began to look at the flower bed. Each day he seemed more thoughtful. And one morning he said to his wife:

  “Come and have a look at your claim, Kristina!”

  In a headlong jump she was out of bed: small, awlsharp blades were shooting up from the earth. In the early sun they glittered like grain shoots. These were not tender flower stems; what she saw were shoots of grass.

  “That’s what I thought!” she exclaimed, annoyed. “He gave me old seed—only weeds are coming up!”

  “Weeds do not grow in rows,” said Karl Oskar calmly.

  “In rows?” A new thought struck her. “You don’t mean I’ve planted . . . ?”

  She bent down and looked closely. He was right: the grass grew in row after row—in five long rows.

  “Exactly where I planted the seeds! Good Lord, what’s this . . . ?”

  Karl Oskar pointed and explained: “Here at the edge grows timothy, the next row is clover . . .”

  “My Lord, how I’ve been fooled!”

  Kristina had planted fodder grass instead of flowers in her garden bed. And when Karl Oskar mentioned clover she realized what had happened: when she asked for seeds in Mr. Abbott’s store she had pointed to a paper with a red flower—a clover blossom!

  Neither asters nor resedas came up outside her window, neither daisies, nor sunflowers, neither larkspur nor lavender. Clover plants grew there, stands of timothy, and other grasses, rough, reddish, American fodder grass, unknown to her. But these plants she need not cultivate—they grew wild in abundance around the house, they stood yard-high everywhere, there were such quantities of them they could not save half.

  “Laugh at me, Karl Oskar! Poke fun at me! I’m a fool . . .”

  Why had she been so dumb as to try to speak English when she knew she couldn’t? Why hadn’t she asked Jonas Petter or Swedish Anna to help her buy the flower seeds? And where had her senses been when she was planting—she knew the difference between flower seeds and grass seed. She had thought the flower seeds looked unusual, but then, everything in America was different . . .

  It was a little annoying, said Karl Oskar, but nothing to take seriously. He too in the beginning had made mistakes when he bought things. The English language was so confusing, it was hazardous to speak it, some words were so mixed up in that tongue. He had had great trouble when he bought seed rye: as long as the rye grew in the field it was called crop but as soon as it was harvested and threshed it was called grain, even though it was rye all the time. She was not the only one to make a mistake.

  But Kristina was a perfectionist. Therefore, it was of no comfort to her that Karl Oskar could make similar mistakes. It did not worry her so much that she made a fool of herself to others, but she felt a fool in her own eyes, dejected, and that was worse.

  “Someone like me ought to stay home. I ought not to poke my nose beyond the claim. I am so stupid in English I ought not to mix with other people.”

  “But this mistake is easily remedied!” exclaimed Karl Oskar.

  She could plant the bed with new seeds; he would buy the right ones for her next time he had an errand in Taylors Falls or Stillwater.

  But after all her worry and concern for the plants she had thought would become flowers, she did not wish to start all over again this summer.

  She pulled up the grass plants, each and every one, hoed the bed, and planted cabbage instead.

  She should have learned this much by now: it was, and remained forever, difficult to transplant the homeland in foreign soil. A person could not change countries and make a foreign place into home overnight. Perhaps she would not even live long enough to do that.

  One thing was sure—it would be some time before she again tried to speak English.

  IV

  GUESTS IN THEIR OWN HOUSE

  —1—

  Spring brought potent growing weather; it was dry during seeding and planting time, then when the fields were prepared a generous rain fell for several days without letup; it poured down in sheets from low-hanging, pregnant clouds. The ca
bin’s sod roof began to leak and the Nilssons brought out all available vessels to catch the drip. The roof had never leaked before, but this was the most persistent downpour they had experienced in Minnesota.

  During one of the rainy nights Karl Oskar was awakened by his wife touching his elbow: “Someone is knocking on the door!”

  He sat up in bed and listened. Out there in the black night the rain was pouring down, beating against the window. It dripped from the ceiling and splashed in the vessels on the floor. But above the sounds of the rain came a heavy banging against the door.

  “There’s someone out there—it woke me,” said Kristina.

  Karl Oskar pulled on his pants and lit a candle on the table. Who would come at this hour of the night? Someone must have lost his way and was seeking shelter from the rain.

  Kristina too slipped out of bed and pulled on her petticoat. She whispered, “Ask who it is before you open!”

  It might be one of the new neighbors in need of help. But they could expect unfriendly callers day or night and must not be taken unawares; their door was always well bolted at night.

  Before Karl Oskar had time to ask, a man’s voice was heard through the cloor: “I’m a lone wanderer. Please give me shelter, good people!”

  These pleading words were in Swedish and that was enough for Karl Oskar; he pushed back the heavy bolts.

  A man in a long, black coat and a black, broad-brimmed hat stumbled across the threshold, his legs unsteady. His coat was covered with mud and soaked through with rain; it hung on him limply. Water splashed in his boots with every step. He sank down on a chair, collapsing like an empty sack, and breathed heavily, “Much obliged. Thank you, my good Swedes.”

  Utterly confused, Karl Oskar and Kristina eyed their unexpected night caller, a thin young man with a pale, narrow face and large blue eyes. He carried a handbag of shining black leather, and his muddy clothes were of fine quality. He had white, well-cared-for hands, like those of a scrivener or a nobleman. The stranger looked like a gentleman, not a trapper or a settler. Why was he wandering about in the wilderness in this ungodly weather?