Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

But this she had never told Karl Oskar. Nor had she told him that if, at the age of nineteen, she could have seen herself in labor seven times before she was thirty-one, she would probably have said no to his proposal and remained a spinster.

Ulrika had given her a real scare by saying that she could go on and bear children until she was forty-six; half of a woman’s fertile years still lay ahead of her. She could expect to give life to as many more children as she already had.

She had said at the time that she couldn’t survive that many births, of that she was sure. Each time she was more worn-out, more tired. She still felt the results of the last birth in her body.

Frank was now two years old, and as yet there had been no signs of a new life beginning. It was her strongest wish that he might remain the youngest. Kristina feared she could not survive one more childbed.

— 2—

Scarcely had their church been built when they lost their minister. Before Pastor Törner left he promised to find a replacement for the Swedish parish in St. Croix among the Lutheran synod of Chicago. But there was a dearth of Swedish ministers in America; few churchmen wanted to exchange their comfortable lives in Sweden for the dangers and privations of Minnesota. And there were those ministers who felt that these ungrateful people who had left their homeland were lost to God anyway and condemned to eternal damnation.

Meanwhile the emigrants at Chisago Lake must get along with visiting pastors from other parishes in the Northwest, and even though these came at frequent intervals there were many Sundays without a service.

One evening Karl Oskar came home from a parish meeting with sad news about their schoolmaster. Pastor Cederlöf, the Lutheran minister at Red Wing in Goodhue County, who had preached last Sunday and remained for the parish meeting, had told the members something greatly disturbing. In Mr. Johnson, their schoolmaster, he had recognized a false priest, Timoteus Brown, who had long traveled about in the Swedish settlements and — according to momentary suitability — pretended to be a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Methodist, or a Seventh-Day Adventist. Even the name Brown was false; the man’s real name was Magnus Englund, a drunken student from Uppsala, sent by his parents to the New World to cure his drunkenness. Once it had become known that he was a self-made minister he had given up preaching and taken to teaching school. As a teacher he was probably less dangerous. Pastor Cederlöf had not told England that he had been discovered, but he wanted to warn the parish council that their teacher was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; the Swedish paper had long ago published warnings about him.

Consequently, said Karl Oskar, the parish council had today sent for the schoolmaster to examine him, but that bird had already been warned and had flown from his nest at the school building. Someone had seen him board the steamboat in Stillwater.

The Swedish student Englund-Brown-Johnson, who for some time had given good instruction to the settler children, had disappeared and was never again heard of in the St. Croix Valley. So the new parish was for the time being without either minister or teacher.

Several weeks might sometimes elapse without a service in the new church, and Kristina stayed home even on Sundays. Then would come a Sunday with a new minister, always a new and unknown pastor, in the pulpit. It wasn’t as it had been earlier. To her, the services in the new country had been linked with the churchman who had given her the Sacrament in America for the first time and who had turned their old log house into a temple. Without Pastor Törner before the altar or in the pulpit, the church did not seem the same God’s house to her.

And Kristina had not yet heard church bells ring in America. An empty and silent steeple rose from their church in the oak grove at the lake, and no organ played inside. Their temple stood there mute, mum, and silent, as if not daring to voice a sound before the Lord. Each time she looked up at the empty steeple she thought: Like the bells at home, here too the peal from on high would have inspired reverence in the congregation; the Lord’s own voice from above would have opened the hearts of people before they entered his temple.

One Sunday it was announced that a well-known minister from faraway Chicago would conduct services in the new church. But when Kristina left her bed that morning she told Karl Oskar that he would have to go to church alone; she did not feel quite well today.

What was the matter with her? She couldn’t tell definitely, and he wondered. Was she lying to him about her sickness, he asked himself. He hardly remembered a single instance during their marriage when he had caught his wife lying.

During the night Kristina had dreamed that she had borne a child. It had been a very short dream but much had happened in it. She had been sitting in their new church and suddenly felt she was pregnant. She remembered it was her eighth time. The child in her womb felt well developed and she could not understand why she hadn’t felt her pregnancy before. When at the end of the service she was leaving the church, labor had overtaken her and she had borne the child on the steps outside, in view of all the worshipers. The child dropped naked on the top step and wailed loudly. At that moment Samuel Nöjd, the heathen fur trapper, whom she had never seen in church before, approached her with an evil grin. He picked up the child and ran away with it, carrying it by the legs, head down, as he would handle a dead rabbit. Then she herself had cried out, she tried to run after the kidnapper but was unable to do so and fell headlong down the church steps. On the top step she could see a big red mark: her own blood.

At the sight of this she had awakened. Her shift was drenched through with cold sweat, but a joyous relief filled her: only in her dream had she been pregnant. But today she was unable to mount the steps where she had experienced her birth dream.

Kristina had never believed that dreams came true or were a premonition. But the birth on the church steps had shaken her more deeply than any dream she could remember. What could it mean? She knew at least why she had dreamed this particular dream; two months in succession her bleeding had been delayed a whole week beyond the expected day. Twice in a row she had suffered a week of anxiety, waiting for her body to give the sign which meant comfort and peace for another month. And when the sign at last appeared she felt wild with joy for a few days. Fear of a new pregnancy had disturbed her sleep so that in a dream she had experienced what she feared. That must be it. That the repulsive heathen and whoring man Nöjd stole her child added to the horror of the dream.

For years now she had carried within her the fervent wish that God would make her barren for the rest of her life. But she had not dared voice her desire and pray to him to grant it. She had often wondered about this: a woman who refused the blessing of fertility and prayed for the curse of barrenness — didn’t she sin against God’s commandments?

In her fear of a new pregnancy, increased by the dream birth on the church steps, the old temptation returned to her. She thought it over, hesitated, doubted. She decided to ask the advice of Danjel Andreasson, and the next time she saw her uncle alone, she asked, “Would I commit a grave sin if I prayed God to relieve me of further childbirths?”

Danjel was accustomed to his niece talking intimately to him in matters she would not even mention to Karl Oskar, and he was not surprised at her question. He replied that the Almighty could see into the hearts of all his creatures. He knew all her thoughts, wishes, and desires. If she wanted to be relieved of bearing any more children, then this wish must already be known to God. And it was assuredly permitted for each person to pray according to his understanding; if she were praying for something that was good for her, then the Lord would grant her prayer, otherwise not.