Vilhelm Moberg - The Emigrants

The peasants ate food which they had brought along and drank brännvin with it, and one of them gave Robert a slice of bread and a dram. He dunked the bread in the brännvin as children were wont to do, and he was a little conscious of this, now that he was almost grown.

The men had driven their grain wagons far alone, and now in company they were conversing loudly and noisily. Jonas Petter of Hästebäck stretched himself full length on some empty sacks in front of the fire. He was a tall-grown man with fine black side whiskers.

Below the mill room the grindstones went their even pace and rumbled softly, like thunder at a distance; it was otherwise peaceful and quiet in here. Robert sat in front of the fire next to Jonas Petter. He was not going to work as a hired man, and his heart was light.

“We all remember old Axelina here at Åbro,” said Jonas Petter, “but does anyone remember how she got the mill and became the richest wench in the parish?”

The answers from the other peasants all were negative. No one had such a good memory as Jonas Petter; he knew all the old stories of the region, and now he must tell about Axelina, whom he remembered as the owner of the mill while he was still a youth.

She was an ingenious and clever woman, this Axelina. She came as a maid to Frans the Miller, who had owned the mill for many years and had had time to steal so much flour from the sacks that he had become as rich as ten trolls. At this time he was old and sickly, and Axelina made up her mind that she was to inherit from him. And now she went about it in the only way a woman can under such circumstances: she tried to inveigle him into carnal connections with her. In the evenings after he had gone to bed she would come into his room in her shift, and as often as she could she displayed her attractions. But Frans was played out, slow in the blood — no longer to be tempted.

One cold winter evening, however, as he returned from a Christmas party where he had drunk more brännvin than was good for him, he happened to fall into a snowdrift. When he did not turn up, Axelina took a lantern and went out to look for him. She found him frozen through and through. She helped him home, put him to bed, and gave him a pint of brännvin to revive his body warmth. Frans drank the brännvin but complained that he still felt cold. Then, said Axelina, she knew only one more remedy which could help him, and that one he probably wouldn’t use. Frans was afraid he might contract a deadly sickness and he asked what kind of remedy she knew. Well, replied the maid, she must lie next to him and warm him with her own body. She had heard this was the best remedy against chills. Frans was a little startled, but he had drunk a lot of brännvin and said that if she believed she could help him in this way she might come and lie next to him. She would do it only to save his life, she insisted, and he must promise not to touch her. This he promised willingly — he had no such thoughts while shaking and shivering in his bed.

So Axelina lay down with her master, and she knew how to manage: it ended with the master and the maid being as close to each other as is possible. She used to say later that it took only half an hour until Frans the Miller lost the chills, and she could leave him.

Forty weeks after this happening Axelina bore a son who so much resembled Frans that no one needed to ask the father’s name. Frans never forgave his maid who had taken advantage of him, and marriage between them was never talked of. But he was much attached to his boy, and when he died a few years later he left all he owned to the child, with a relative as guardian. Axelina did not get a penny.

However, the boy caught smallpox and died when he was four years old. Axelina then inherited from her son. She received the Åbro mill and all Frans’ other possessions, and became the richest woman in the parish: owner of more than forty thousand riksdaler, And she bragged later that she had earned it all in one half-hour, the half-hour when she lay in Frans the Miller’s bed and warmed him after his exposure in the snow. Nor was it difficult work — she had lain quite still. No woman in the whole world, not even a queen or an empress, had earned so great an hourly pay as Axelina in her master’s bed that evening.

Yes, said Jonas Petter, and sighed, women could earn easy money if they liked: only to lie quite still.

Robert stared at Jonas Petter; he always told such unkind stories about women. It was said that he did this because he himself was tormented by a wicked wife. The couple in Hästebäck lived so ill together, and quarreled so loudly, that people could stand on the road outside the house and hear every word they said; horses had become frightened and bolted from the hubbub. It sometimes happened that Jonas Petter had to sleep in a stall in the byre because he could not sleep within the same four walls where his wife Brita-Stafva slept.

Robert stretched out on the floor before the fire and contemplated the cracked, sooty beams in the ceiling of the mill room. Again he thought of the farmhand who had chosen the left road instead of the right one.

Presently he asked Jonas Petter: “Do you remember Fredrik of Kvarntorpet who disappeared from home?”

“Fredrik Thron? Yes, I remember him, that cuckoo!”

He was a rascal, continued Jonas Petter. He was as lazy as a well-fed Christmas pig, and would rather steal than work. If anything was lost it was easy to know who had found it. Fredrik stole for pleasure rather than gain, but in either case it was unpleasant for the loser. And he was given to all kinds of pranks: he broke down gates, let the horses out of the church stables while people were in church, brought snakes into the church on Sundays. Every farmer in the parish was disgusted with the knave from Kvarntorpet.

The boy’s father was a cotter under the manse, and he had persuaded the owner, Lieutenant Rudeborg, to hire his son as a farmhand and try to make a man of him. When Fredrik had been in Kråkesjö for a week, he was asked by the lieutenant to fetch a pair of oxen bought at the Klintakrogen fair. They were fine animals, well broken in, and a child could have driven them this short distance with a loose thong. But Fredrik, who was twenty, could not manage it; he arrived at the manse with another pair. The lieutenant had never seen these animals before; the ones he had bought had measured seventy-eight inches around the chest, and now his farmhand brought a pair of steers measuring hardly sixty-six. These animals were not worth half the price he had paid for the oxen at the fair. Lieutenant Rudeborg was in a red-hot rage at his new man.

On the way home from the fair Fredrik had done some trading of his own, and had exchanged the master’s oxen for the smaller ones — with money in his own pocket, of course. But the damned fool swore up and down that these were the same beasts he had received: their color was identical, red with a white spot on the forehead. Fredrik was clever. These looked somewhat smaller, he admitted, but they had shrunk because they had been without fodder the whole day — that was all, they were indeed the same oxen.

Nevertheless, Lieutenant Rudeborg had witnesses who said the animals were not his, so Fredrik couldn’t wriggle himself free that time. Rudeborg, however, felt sorry for the boy’s parents. He didn’t want to put his servant in jail, but he couldn’t stand the sight of the fellow. He therefore suggested to his neighbors that they send Fredrik to North America; he would pay half the fare if they chipped in and paid the other half.

That country would suit Fredrik perfectly, said the lieutenant. America was a land for all rogues and misfits who could not live in law and order at home. Out there he could trade oxen with other villains to his heart’s content. If he remained at home and they put him into prison, he would be on their hands again as soon as his sentence was over. But once in North America, they would be rid of him for time and eternity.