Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

Karl Oskar looked toward the corner of the room where his brother’s old bed still stood. With great concern he said, “My brother has been gone more than two years now.”

“He said he wouldn’t be back without gold,” Kristina reminded him. “And he writes the same way.”

“Who knows if he is alive at this moment,” said Karl Oskar, thinking that of twenty-eight gold seekers only four had survived. And again he reproached himself. Couldn’t he have prevented his brother from going on this dangerous journey?

“He says he’ll give you a pair of oxen when he gets back,” said Olausson, handing back the letter to Karl Oskar.

The latter expressed no opinion about that promise. But he asked the older settler:

“He writes something I don’t understand—‘play a lone hand’? What does he mean?”

“Your brother wants to go his own way.”

“Well, he certainly did when he left for California. .”

Karl Oskar put the letter back in the Swedish chest, and turned to Olausson. “Let’s look at the livestock,” he suggested.

While Kristina cleaned up after the meal, the men went out to look over the frontier farm. Karl Oskar wanted to show his neighbor what he had done during three years as squatter.

To the north side of the cabin he had started a stable, as yet only half finished. A cow and a heifer each stood in a stall. From the German Fisher in Taylors Falls they had three years ago bought a pregnant cow, and her calf had now grown into this heifer which had just taken the bull. With two cows they would have milk all year round. The cow was called Lady — after a borrowed animal they had had the first winter — and the heifer was called Miss.

“When she calves we’ll have to call her Missus,” laughed Karl Oskar.

The stable, he pointed out, would have plenty of room for more stalls whenever they got more animals. The men looked at the sheep pen: two ewes with three lambs, already a little flock of five. Sheep were satisfying animals, easy to take care of, and their wool was always needed for socks and other clothing. Two pigs poked in the pigpen; of all the animals pigs were the easiest to buy, and they fed in the forest as long as the ground was bare. Pork was indeed the cheapest food. One corner of the stable was to be used for a chicken coop, but the roosting perch was still unoccupied; a laying hen cost five dollars.

In the empty coop Karl Oskar kept his new American tools. He showed with pride the cradle, its five wooden fingers attached to the scythe handle, so much more efficient than the old Swedish scythes. The cradle was heavy and difficult to handle but once he had learned to use it he couldn’t get along without it. Then the grub hoe with an ax on one edge and a hoe on the other — a most ingenious device; while clearing ground and removing roots one need only turn this tool to switch from one kind of work to the other.

Olausson voiced his approval of Karl Oskar’s imitating the Americans and using their clever inventions.

When they walked out to inspect the fields, Olausson eyed the furrows of the meadow:

“You’ve broken a sizable field.”

“About ten acres. I plowed up most of it the first year.”

By now he would have had three times as big a field if he had had a hundred dollars to buy a team of oxen. When he borrowed a team from the timber company he had to pay five dollars a day. He was short of cash and this was his greatest obstacle. Much of the field he had broken himself with his grub hoe.

Olausson’s respect for Karl Oskar rose after seeing the tools and the field; this man was not a beginner working in the earth, he was not in need of an older farmer to tell him what to do.

Karl Oskar showed him his winter rye, almost ready to head, lush and healthy. The spring rye had just been sown, and next to it was the field where he intended to plant potatoes. Next fall he planned to sow wheat for the first time, that new kind of bread grain the Americans harvested in such quantities. Wheat had not been used much by the farmers in Småland, but it was said to be suitable for the fertile soil here. He thought it would be a fine thing to harvest his own wheat. In Sweden they had paid a great deal for the soft, white flour, and had only used it for holiday bread.

“I sure will like to taste my own wheat bread!”

Olausson advised him to raise Indian corn, which could be used as food for both people and livestock. The corn gave a fifty-fold return down in Illinois.

“You must plant the corn on high ground! It needs dry land,” he added, and pointed up the hill.

Karl Oskar thought to himself that he knew best where his field was dry and where it was wet. But he put aside the thought and led Olausson a bit up the hill to a grove of tall leafy trees. Shaded by enormous sugar maples lay the foundation for his new house.

“Here’s where I’ll build our new home! I’ll have a real house here!”

He pointed to the foundation. The house would be forty feet from gable to gable, eighteen feet wide, with two stories. They would have four or five times as much space as they now had in the cabin. And this time he wouldn’t build with fresh logs as he had done earlier; the logs had dried out and left cracks that let in cold and wind in winter. But for his new house he had felled the timbers during the two winters past and had dressed the logs on all sides so that they had dried out well. He had intended to build the house this summer, but he must first raise a threshing shed so he needn’t do his threshing down on the lake ice as he had done last winter. But next year his house would rise here under the shade of the maples. From the windows here on the south side he would be able to look out over his fields and the lake; they would be able to see all the way to those islets out there.

As he talked Karl Oskar became excited; he would not let the visitor interrupt. He talked about the house which didn’t as yet exist, about roof and walls not yet raised, about the view from windows still imaginary. He touched the sills, the heavy timbers he alone had put in, he touched them as if caressing them: here would be the main room, here a bedroom on each gable, and just here — all this space for a large kitchen. And, pointing up toward the sky, up there would be a second floor with two large or four small rooms, as yet he hadn’t decided which. .

Petrus Olausson had paced off the foundation: “Too much of a house! Remember I told you so, Nilsson! You can’t build that much!”

Kristina had told him the same thing, but a woman couldn’t understand much about building, he had thought. Now, when his new neighbor raised the same objection, he became thoughtful. Perhaps he had laid out too big a house, perhaps it would be too much for him to build. Possibly he might have to shorten the foundation timbers. .

But there was still something to show Olausson, something near the east gable. There, six or eight feet beyond the sill, Karl Oskar pointed downward with the look of one disclosing a great secret:

“Look here! See that thing growing there? It is from Sweden!”

In a little dug-up bed a small plant, six or seven inches tall and tied to a stake, poked its head up from the black soil. The plant had a few small dark-green leaves, and the bed around it was well tended.

“It came from home!”

Olausson bent down and pinched the leaves of the tender plant. “An apple seedling, eh?”

“A real fine tree! An Astrakhan apple tree!”

“From Sweden? Well, well. .”

It was for his wife’s sake he had planted the seedling, said Karl Oskar. She longed for home at times and it would be a pleasure and something to divert her thoughts to have a growing plant from Sweden to tend and look after. He had written to her parents for seeds from an Astrakhan apple tree, and they had arrived a year ago last fall, glued to a sheet of paper and well preserved. And so he had planted them here at the east gable of their new home, at a depth five times their own thickness, as they used to do when planting trees at home. And this seedling had come up; it was growing slowly, but it was growing.