Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

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.

— 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 earth, 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.