Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

The mother, of course, replied that it did indeed exist and was on earth. Neither to herself nor to her children could she admit that she had described a country which no one beside herself had seen and no one ever would see.

Only one homeland is given to a person. Kristina had lost hers. But she had no home-longing any more, she no longer missed what she had lost; she had won it back in the only way possible to one who has lost her dearest possession.

Now when Kristina lay awake during the dark spring nights in Minnesota, her longing soul sought another land in which there was no difference between night and day.

NOTE

1. Gift in Swedish means poison.

— 1—

The whitewashed fireplace was trimmed with fresh leaves and a young birch had been placed in each corner of the big room; outside, a birch had been raised on either side of the entrance door, and above them the lush foliage of the sugar maples spread its greenery. Above the door, between the birches, hung a wreath of cornflowers, poppies, morningstars, and bluebells. The path to the door had been well swept, and great leaf rushes had been placed on either side, forming a festive arch over the pathway.

It was Midsummer Eve and Karl Oskar and Kristina had raised the summer festival’s green arch before their home. Following the custom of the homeland they had wished to create a holiday air by decorating with young leaf trees and fresh summer blossoms. But they could not make it entirely like the homeland; the light northlands summer night was missing.

They sat behind the birches on the stoop while the short moment of twilight sped by. Today was a great day of remembrance for them: their new Swedish almanac, printed by Hemlandet, was dated 1860; the brig Charlotta of Karlshamn had landed them in New York on Midsummer Eve 1850. Ten full years to the day had passed since they took their first steps on American soil.

And now Karl Oskar and Kristina went over their memories of the long years they had spent in their new land. They went through it all from the beginning: their first shanty of boughs and twigs where the storm in the late fall had been so hard on them, the first long and severe winter when they often went without food. Then came their first spring when Karl Oskar broke ground and planted their first crop. They recalled the first autumn they had a crop to harvest, the smallest ever but the most important of them all; they took the first sacks to the mill and baked the first bread from their own rye flour. It had been one of the greatest joy days in the new land when this bread was taken from the oven, steaming and warm — what a taste!

And they remembered also the heat of their first summers, and the intense cold of the winters in the log cabin, snowy winters that seemed as if they would never thaw out in spring. Their thoughts lingered on the good crops and the poor, on the births of their children, their baptisms, the first Sacrament in their house, the first service in the new church, Robert’s return with the wildcat money, his death and funeral — on all the happenings which during ten years had varied from their daily routine. Three new lives had been added to the family and there would have been still one more, if the birth had taken place in its right order. This one would have been about a year old now at Midsummer, ready to try its first steps across the floor.

But the greater part of the thousands of days encompassed by their ten years in America were gone and lost to their memory. Those were the quiet working days when nothing had happened, nothing except the labor of their hands, the innumerable days which were only work days, work from morning to night, each day confusingly like the next. Now, in retrospect, these uncountable laboring days seemed like one day, one single long day of patient struggle. And that day was of greater importance than any of the others: during its course they had started out, from the very beginning, for a second time in their lives, and for the second time built a home.

That Midsummer Eve when, tired and spent from the long voyage, they had walked down the gangplank in New York harbor was now part of a distant past that seemed incredibly long ago. The ten years of their lives that belonged to America had lengthened in their minds and seemed so very long because they had been years of great changes.

Kristina looked down toward the lake, out over the water which sparkled peacefully in the sunset; her eyes lingered along the shores.

“It has changed since we first came. I can’t recognize a single spot.”

“That would have been hard to imagine when we settled here,” said Karl Oskar. “And that it would change so soon!”

All around the lake the shores were now cultivated. On every surveyed claim stood a house in which lived a settler and his family. The very name of the lake had been changed: the heavy Chippewa word, Ki-Chi-Saga, was almost forgotten and was never used by the settlers when they spoke of the old Indian lake. The metamorphosis of the wilderness where Karl Oskar and Kristina had settled in 1850 was complete.

Karl Oskar sat on his stoop and looked out over the slope where his fields, bearing beautiful growing crops, stretched away; nearly all of the meadow had been turned into cultivated land, almost forty acres of it. And next to this field was a piece of ground with heavy oaks where the topsoil was equally deep; before he was through he wanted to cultivate that piece too, even though it would require heavier labor and take a longer time because of the large oak stumps he would have to dig out.

He was pleased with the work accomplished during these ten years. They had arrived practically penniless, bringing only their poverty. All they owned now they had won for themselves on their new farm. They were far from well-to-do but they had earned security, they got along well. Still it had taken more years than Karl Oskar had thought it would to reach their present situation.

Work itself was as hard and as heavy in the new land as it had been in the old. But there was one great difference between America and Sweden: in America your struggles brought some return, here you were rewarded for your labor.

“We have improved since we settled here, don’t you think so, Kristina?”

“We are better off than I dared hope for when we slept in that shanty the first fall.”

Karl Oskar appraised the sturdy walls of their house, built with seasoned pine of the finest kind obtainable in the forest, fine-hewn on both sides. But this house would be six years old this fall. Next time he built. .!

“But everyone does not improve his lot here in America,” added Kristina.

She could have enumerated several of their countrymen. She could have mentioned the names of two youths, men who had emigrated to find early graves in America. But she needn’t — Karl Oskar knew this as well as she.

And he admitted that the success of an immigrant did not depend on the country alone, it depended as much on the man.

A short silence ensued. Out here on the stoop it felt comfortable this evening; a light breeze from the lake caressed their cheeks. The real summer heat had not come yet — it seldom made its appearance before Midsummer.

“At home the youngsters dance around the Maypole on Midsummer Eve,” said Kristina. “All the old folk dances—‘I weave you a wreath,’ ‘Find the shepherd,’ ‘Catch your partner.’”

It was as if now she had given utterance to the thoughts she had had all the time they had been sitting out here.

“Well,” said Karl Oskar, “I guess everything is as it used to be there.”

He could not imagine that much had changed in his home village during the ten years since he left it forever. In Sweden no changes or improvements ever took place. There people lived as they had always lived, performed their chores over and over as their forebears had performed them. That ancient kingdom was ruled by the Law of Unchangeableness. In the United States new ideas were tried and greater changes took place in one year than happened in a hundred years in Sweden.