Unto a Good Land (23 page)

Sitting close by him, Kristina was still wondering: “How could you fall so awfully hard, Karl Oskar? You’re usually steady on your legs.”

“When ill luck wills it, one might fall on an even floor.”

“You must look where you step in America. They have signs in dangerous places.”

“There was no sign in this place.”

Those danger signs they had seen so often should be painted not only on posts and walls in this country, they should be written in flaming letters across the sky of all North America; from above they would shine as a warning to immigrants in every part of the country.

“Your luck has left you,” mourned Kristina. “In spite of your big nose.”

For this “Nilsa-nose” which Karl Oskar had inherited was said to be lucky.

Yes, he, the father, was bleeding, and his children were without milk and bread. Another day and another night they must remain in this pest house with its unhealthy fare. But a little blood and a hurt leg could not be counted among the irreparable disasters of life. A whole family need not be destroyed by these misfortunes. He had merely fallen and hurt his leg, and a splinter had pierced his chest. Later, when all traveling dangers were behind them, he would tell the whole truth to Kristina. Then he would let her know how close she had come to continuing the journey without him, staking out and building the new home alone, a defenseless and penniless widow with three children.

It was not long before the bandages around his chest were saturated with blood.

“You won’t bleed to death?” Kristina’s voice quavered.

“Nonsense!” He smiled at her. “Only a little blood keeps dripping.”

“It goes right through the rags!”

“It drips a little from my nipple, like milk from a woman. It will soon stop.”

He reassured Kristina: His superficial scratch would soon heal, his flesh was of the healing kind; he was in good health and could well afford to lose a quart of blood; it was good against the cholera; he had thought of bleeding himself anyway, now he needn’t use the bleeding iron. It had been different when a woman called Kristina had bled streams from her nostrils one night at sea; she must have lost many quarts that night. Then, indeed, it was a question of her life. It had been the most horrible night he had ever lived through.

A warmth came into Kristina’s eyes: “You were good to me that night, Karl Oskar. If you hadn’t gone for the captain, I would not be alive today.”

Then he had taken care of her, now she bandaged and cared for him. Then he had tried to stanch her blood, now she tried to stanch his. Blood was the very life inside one; when the blood ran away, life also ran away. Karl Oskar and Kristina were concerned for each other’s lives. It was between them as it ought to be between husband and wife: they were joined together to ease each other’s burdens, heal each other’s wounds. They were two people who in God’s presence had given the promise to love each other through shifting fortunes as long as they both should live.

X

THEIR LAST VESSEL

The boatman is a lucky man.

No one can do as the boatman can.

The boatmen dance and the boatmen sing,

The boatmen are up to everything. . . .

(Old Mississippi River Boat Song)

The Boat

The
Red Wing
of St. Louis, B. Berger, Captain, Stuart Green, clerk, was an almost new side-wheeler, having started its runs on the Mississippi only two years earlier. It measured 147 feet in length, 24 in width, had one engine for each wheel, and a capacity of 190 tons. Toward the prow two tall funnels rose close together, like a pair of proud twin pillars. The
Red Wing
lay in the water like a floating house, long and narrow, well cared for and newly painted white. On either side of its prow a great wing had been painted, spreading its blood-red feathers. The steamer was named after a famous Indian chief, and its wheels plowed the same waters on which warriors of his tribe still paddled their primitive canoes.

New steamers, new sounds: on the
Red Wing
’s
deck no bell rang, instead the booming of a steam whistle reverberated through the river valley, drowning the sounds of Indian powwows. The steam whistle was new and alien in this region where until lately only the sounds of the elements and of living creatures had been heard on land and water.

The rivers were the immigrants’ roads inland, and the Mississippi was the largest and most important of them all. No less than eight hundred steamers churned its waters, a fleet of eight hundred steamboats moved the hordes of travelers northward to a virgin wilderness. The
Red Wing
of St. Louis was one of the vessels in this river fleet, proudly displaying on its prow the Indian chief’s red feathers, as it plowed its way upstream, loaded with passengers.

The River

Broad and mighty, the Father of Waters filled his soft bed, like a mobile running lake with two shores, a lake now rising, now falling, yet never draining. From the lakelets of Minnesota in the north to the levees of Louisiana in the south the river flooded its shores and let them dry again; low, swampy shores, tall, rocky cliffs, grassy meadows, sand banks, and sandy bluffs, shores of tropical lianas, cotton fields, giant trees shadowing the water with their umbrageous crowns. Vast and varying was the river’s domain: now choppy as a sea whose mighty waves have been arrested after storm, now flowing smoothly, and overgrown with twisted brushwood, tangled masses of thorns, willows, sycamores, alders, vines, brambles, and cedars; here flowering blossoms stood high as altar candles in the swamplands, the nesting place of wading birds, here mountains and cliffs rose on either side, like tall, dark, triumphal arches through which the river roared like the procession of a proud ruler passing with much fanfare.

Trees and bushes grew not only along the shores but also in the water. The river bed itself was a mass of root wreaths; when the trees fell, they fell into the water, and there they lay, their branches stripped of bark, naked, like fingers feeling the stream, like drowning human hands grasping for something to hold. The waves from the steamers’ wake washed the wooden skeletons along the shores, hastening their disintegration. Trees lost their foothold on shore and floated into the current; whirling, spinning in circles, the trees floated about, twisted together, caught in each other’s branches, as though seeking protection on their uncertain, thousand-mile voyage to the sea. Veritable islets of trunks, roots, branches, bushes, brush, bark, and leaves swam about on the surface. And down deep, in the river bottom, was the grave of dead forests.

The Father of Waters embraced in his bosom other rivers, streams, brooks, becks, creeks; went on shore and stole plants, pulled trees out of the earth to make islands, seized all that was not anchored to the very rocks; the Mississippi, since the beginning of time the earth’s mightiest concourse of running waters—going onward for all eternity, onward to the sea.

The Captain of the Steamer

The travelers from Ljuder had seen many ships and boats since they left Sweden, but the steamer
Red Wing
of St. Louis was the most beautiful of them all.

When they stepped on board and showed their tickets, the captain himself came up to them and spoke in a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian which they could understand: “Ah,
Svensker!
Welcome aboard! I’m a Norseman—we have the same king.”

Captain Berger of the
Red Wing
was well past middle age, with gray hair, and a beard that grew thick, covering his face to the eye sockets, except for his red nose tip. The immigrants had observed many bearded men, both at home and during their journey, but Captain Berger was the most richly bearded man they had ever seen. He was also the first Norwegian they had met.

“We
Norsker
arrived before you,” continued the captain. “We were wondering how soon you Swedes would come along.”

They couldn’t understand all the Norwegian he spoke through his beard, but by and by he and his passengers were able to carry on a conversation. At last on this journey they seemed to have come upon good luck; after the cholera-infested steamer, they were now on a clean boat where the pestilence had not made its appearance, and where the captain himself welcomed them warmly as if he had long known them. The
Red Wing
was their sixth vessel, and here they felt more secure than on any of the other five, even though Captain Berger warned them that the river was so crooked a steamer sometimes met itself on the curves.

The Passengers

The travelers were now on the last stretch of their journey; the Mississippi was their last river, the
Red Wing
their last vessel.

The Father of Waters was emigrating to the sea, the steerage passengers on the side-wheeler were immigrating against the current to the northwest country. Yet both the river and the travelers were on the same errand—seeking new homes. Captain Berger said that all types of people were aboard his ship: settlers, traders, fur hunters, lazy rich men, restless farmers, high government officials, cardsharps, honest working people, happy-go-lucky adventurers. But the greatest number of his passengers were immigrants on the last lap of their journey.

There were German peasants who said
Bayern
at every second word—was it the name of their home parish? They were blond and wore blue linen shirts over their clothes, shirts with outside pockets like coats. Their women had thick legs covered with blue woolen hose; both men and women wore small, funny-looking caps. Among all the immigrants, the Germans alone still had something left in their food baskets. A sausage was always discovered in some bundle; the Germans were always eating sausage.

The Irish immigrants spoke loudly among themselves, seeming to be in a constant quarrel. About half of them were dark haired, the rest red haired. They drank whisky from large wooden stoups, as calves would gulp down sweet milk. Captain Berger said an Irishman would not work unless someone stood with a club over his head: he would no longer use them as crewmen, he preferred Negroes. But a German must be threatened with a club before he would quit work. The two races differed in another way: an Irishman could never get enough to drink, a German never enough to eat.

Then there was the large Jewish family which the bearded captain pointed out to the Swedes: a father bringing his ten sons, four daughters, five daughters-in-law, four sons-in-law, twenty-two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren; all together forty-nine people. The old father, the head of the family, was a little man; he had a longish face with a black beard and a long crooked nose; he didn’t seem over fifty or fifty-five years of age. He always wore a small round cap without a visor, and when the family gathered together, he was always in the center. The little family father sat there, calm, silent, sure, smoking his long pipe, surrounded by his many descendants. Captain Berger guessed that this Jewish family was the largest one that had ever emigrated to North America, which to the children of Israel was the New Canaan; Jacob and all his sons were well represented here.

Karl Oskar asked himself how he could be so filled with concern for his own family of six, when he saw this little Jew with eight times as many.

The crewmen on the
Red Wing
were both colored and white; there were also men with yellow-brown skin, offspring of white fathers and black mothers. All seemed dirty, as if rolled in mud. All were half-naked. Deep down in the steamer’s bowels they stoked the engines; in the evenings they gathered on their own separate deck, sitting in clusters, singing their songs—or song, for it seemed they sang the same tune over and over again. In the evenings, when heavy darkness fell over the river, their song rang out over the black, wandering Mississippi:

We will be free, we will be free,

As the wind of the earth and the waves of the sea. . . .

—1—

On a small deck near the prow, set aside for steerage passengers, the immigrants from Ljuder were gathered in a group. The deck was roofed but open at the sides, and in the melting heat the passengers sought their way up here to find coolness; some even slept here at night. They had lived so long on the water that a deck now felt like home to them.

A heavy thunderstorm had passed over the valley in the early morning, and fiery swords of lightning had crossed each other over the blue mountains; but the relief it brought had been of short duration. They could feel in the air that the thunderstorm was still near. The travelers from cooler regions sat listless and lazy in the stifling heat and gazed apathetically at the green countryside with its immense fertility, plants and herbs in great numbers spreading far on either side of the river. They pointed out to each other an occasional tree, a bush, or some clinging vine with unusual leaves; or their eyes might follow the flight of some unknown bird, whose name they would ask.

From time to time the river narrowed or broadened; at its greatest width they thought the distance must be about two American miles. At times the strong current slowed down their speed. But the steamer kept to the center of the stream and met the oncoming current with such force that water splashed over the forecastle. Behind them the smoke from the funnels hung in the air like serpentine tufts of hair behind a fast runner.

Time dragged for the immigrants; at sea the wind had delayed them, here on the river the stream hindered them. It was already the last week in July.

Fina-Kajsa lay outstretched full length on the dirty old blanket which she had shared with her mate before he was buried in the North Sea.

“Oh me, oh my! We’ll never get there, never! Oh me, oh my!”

From the lips of the old woman two questions constantly issued forth: Had anyone seen her iron pot? Would they never arrive?

With each day since landing in New York her health had improved, and by now she was as well as anyone in their company. She liked the heat; her old backache, a constant plague in the wet climate of Öland, had entirely disappeared. If they could put Fina-Kajsa into a well-fired oven and keep her there for a while, Jonas Petter had remarked, she might come out with new life and hop about like a young girl.

“Oh me, oh my! We’ll never get there! Oh me, oh my!”

If they ever arrived, they would meet Anders, her only son, who had emigrated five years before. And now as they were nearing their destination her fellow travelers began questioning Fina-Kajsa about him. She told them: As long as he had stayed at home he had been an obstinate and unmanageable scoundrel; she and her husband had beaten him harder than an unbroken steer to make him tractable. He was lazy, evil-tempered, drunken, and ready to fight anyone; he had spent his time in the company of loose women, obeying neither father nor mother. When he was only ten years old, they had realized his nature: at one time they had refused to let him go with them to a Christmas party, they had locked him up. When they returned, the boy had broken out and given vent to his unchristen nature by smashing nearly all the furniture, from their fine chiffonier to the porcelain chamber pot. But after he had gone out into the world he had regretted his behavior; a few years ago he had written from America, asking his parents’ forgiveness. Out here he had become a different person, he worked hard, and he was capable. And he had written and told them about his fine home and the extensive fields he owned in Minnesota. She was sure she would find security and comfort with her son Anders as soon as they reached his beautiful farm. And he would help them all get settled, for whatever else she might have said of her son, he was capable, he knew what to do. According to his letters, there would be farms for all of them where he lived; as soon as they reached Anders all their worries would be over.

“But America has no end. We’ll never get there! Oh me, oh my!”

Karl Oskar still kept the piece of paper with Anders Månsson’s address. “Have patience a little longer, Mother Fina-Kajsa. We’ll get there,” he comforted the old woman.