Vilhelm Moberg - The Emigrants

Watching the fire, Karl Oskar and Kristina had not exchanged a single word. They had only looked at each other a few times; perhaps they had been thinking the same thoughts.

Now on the way home Kristina said, “Do you remember the harvest this summer? When you threw the hay upwards?”

“Yes.”

“It happened as you asked.”

Karl Oskar kept silent; he could find no answer.

She continued: “It was the punishment. God allows no mockery.”

Karl Oskar in Korpamoen walked back to his home carrying his bucket. He walked with bent head and looked at the ground. What Kristina had said was true. This time the Lord had answered his prayer — He had taken the rest of the hay.

— 2—

The east wind blew and no rain fell. Those who could read in the book of the future predicted that rain would never fall again. Last time the Lord had wished to destroy mankind through flood, now He intended to do it through drought, and this time no Noah would be saved with wife and children to propagate a new race.

Karl Oskar sowed his winter rye on the fallow land, strewn with hard clods of earth — gray, lumpy, and unfertile as a field of crushed stone. Even below the topsoil the earth was scorched. It seemed futile planting here, he might as well sow in the ashes of his hearth. Last spring he had sown four bushels of barley in one field; now in autumn he harvested four bushels in return. What did he gain by all his work? Why should he plant seed corn in the earth when the earth did not multiply it? Nothing would germinate here before the rains came and loosed the hard crust of the field.

He entrusted the seed rye to his field without confidence; he had lost his confidence in the earth. Who could tell if it would bring him one single grain in return? It might have been wiser to grind the seed corn and make bread of it.

When God drove the first man from paradise He said: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. No words in the Bible were more true than these, for Karl Oskar. The Lord had also said to Adam that the earth would bring forth to him thorns and thistles. Hadn’t he pulled up thistles in every field of this his stone kingdom until his back ached? The Bible’s words were still in force, at least as far as the local fields were concerned.

It was rumored that rain had fallen in other places, in other parishes and counties. But here the earth was accursed.

Every evening Kristina read the “Prayer Against Persistent Drought” and sometimes he himself joined in. She was frightened by the lightning-fire which had burned down their meadow barn, and she believed the drought also was a chastisement from the Lord. Now she wished Karl Oskar would go to the dean and pray for absolution because he had blasphemed that time during the harvest; he must do it before they went to Holy Communion together again.

But he paid no heed to her admonition.

“Doesn’t your conscience bother you?” she asked.

“Not because of that sin.”

No. Karl Oskar would not turn to the dean: he had not committed murder, nor was he lying on his deathbed. What he had done in the field was done in sudden anger, which he had regretted, and God would by now have had time to forgive him such a small trespass and needn’t plague man and beast with drought because of it. Nor was God so petty that He burned down the barn because of that small tuft of hay. One mustn’t think the Highest One was an incendiary.

But Karl Oskar must know, retorted Kristina, that no one except the Omnipotent decided where lightning was to strike. And she continued urging: he ought to seek absolution before he prepared himself for his next Communion. No one except Dean Brusander could decide whether his sin was great or small. And they were on good terms with the dean, who commended them both as frequent churchgoers.

But she could not persuade Karl Oskar to seek out the dean; he was so obstinate he would not unbend even for God. And as Kristina looked back over the years of their marriage, she wondered if she ever had managed to sway him. What he wanted to do, he did; what he didn’t want to do was never done. His sister Lydia had said that her brother was difficult because of this stubbornness, but Kristina had never thought of him as being so before they married. Persistence was right for useful undertakings and good deeds. But Karl Oskar was equally stubborn in useless and foolish undertakings; large-nosed people were held to be stubborn.

“Your obstinacy is in your nose; that’s why it is so large.”

Until God gave him another nose he must use the old one, was Karl Oskar’s answer. But he had noticed that it extended far enough to annoy some people.

Otherwise Kristina had no reason to complain of her husband. He seldom drank more brännvin than he could handle, and he could handle a great deal; she never had to drag a drink-fouled husband from Christmas parties, as did other wives. And there were married men who went to Ulrika of Västergöhl, the “Glad One,” the most sought-after whore in Ljuder. To poor men she sold herself for twelve shillings or a quart of brännvin, but to homeowners her price was a whole riksdaler. In her youth Ulrika had been a beautiful woman, and she was not ugly yet. It was said that the churchwarden himself, Per Persson in Åkerby, had frequented the whore in her better days. Karl Oskar would never degrade himself to such an extent that he would stir in other pots.

But Kristina worried because lately he had been so closed-up, and at last she asked him point-blank what was on his mind.

“Worries about living,” he said. Where would food come from? And with more and more of them to feed.

Kristina was in her fifth month, soon they would be eight people in Korpamoen. The people increased, but not the land; the number of acres would never be more than seven.

Kristina did not like the reference to her pregnancy. “Leave the worries about the unborn to God.”

“If I only could!”

“Do you think you are wiser than God?”

“No. But I don’t think He would feed our children if we sat with our arms in our laps.”

Her temper flared up and she exclaimed angrily: “Is God supposed to feed all children you make?”

“Kristina! What do you mean?”

“I mean you must not blame the Lord when you make your wife with child!”

He gazed at her. “But, my dearest — I have never denied my part in it.”

She burst into tears. “You complain because we get to be more and more. Exactly as if it were my fault — because the lives come from me.”

“I’ve never blamed you!”

“I don’t want it! I’ve told you so! You mustn’t think that!”

“I do not think anything.”

“But now — when you walk about in silence, as if you accused me — what am I to believe?”

And she cried into her apron.

A pregnant woman was sensitive and easily hurt; he forgot it at times, and didn’t watch his words.

He left her alone till she quieted, then he asked: How could she imagine that he disapproved of her? He kept to himself because he was depressed from worries, that was all. And how could she think that he reproached her for being pregnant again? He was not so unfair! She must realize how happy he was over the children she had borne him before. His children and his wife were his dearest possessions on earth. This he had shown her. She must have noticed, for example, how attached he was to Anna. And he would surely be as devoted to the new one as he was to the other three. But it was natural that he worried about food for the children in years of adversity and crop failure.

Kristina was drying her tears. “Do you mean that you like me as well as you used to?”

“You must know that I do!”