“There’ll be a great sickness in Ljuder for some time,” predicted Karl Oskar. “People will be sick with jealousy!”
Kristina had noticed his eagerness to show Klas Albert around. “I think you boasted a little too much,” she said.
“To point out the truth is not to boast!”
Now many more would follow the example of the one they had belittled and derided. His old neighbors had already started to come here; Ljuder parish was being transplanted to this valley. And he felt sure the settlers would in time outshine the home parish. The looked-down-upon emigrants — that pack of Gypsies — would win out over their slanderers. And he began to realize he had shown his countrymen the road to a new and greater homeland.
— 4—
About the same time that Karl Oskar from Korpamoen and Klas Albert, the churchwardens son, met in America, the successor of Dean Brusander sat in his office in Ljuder parsonage every day and handed out emigration papers which his parishioners came to ask for. On the top line of each page in the parish register he wrote after the emigrant’s name: Moved to N. America. But those words he only wrote once on each page; below, on the following lines, he wrote Ditto. It was sufficient. From the first line to the last there were many dittos. And every line of every page of the large parish register was filled with the names of Karl Oskar Nilsson’s followers.
XXXI. A BLESSED WOMAN’S PRAYER
— 1—
Ulrika had given Kristina a mirror which she had hung on the long wall above the sofa in the living room. In that position the mirror could be seen from any place in the room and was convenient to look into. A red rose had been painted on the glass in each one of the four corners, and when Kristina sat on the sofa and turned her head she was confronted by her own image.
As a girl Kristina had often been told that she was beautiful. And perhaps it had been the truth since so many had said it. But where now was the girl who so many times had blushed at the words, “You are beautiful!” Where now were her full cheeks with the soft little dimples of laughter? What had become of her nicely rounded chin? Where was her blossom-tinted color? Where the young girl’s quick and clear glance? What had become of the lips once full as wild strawberries?
The flower of her youth had passed and was gone. The mirror showed her a face already marked by age. It was always there, reflecting back at her; she could not escape the face of a woman getting on in years.
Every day she met this depressing sight. Was this she? She herself? These gaunt, wrinkled cheeks, this pale-gray color, this sharply etched chin, these tired, fading eyes without a glint, this caved-in mouth with teeth missing — this was she herself, what was left of the once beautiful girl Kristina of Duvemåla! And the face seemed to her doubly old and doubly pale as it looked back at her between the four red, cheerful roses in the corners of the mirror; they should instead have served as a frame for a youthful, blossoming girl’s face.
Kristina no longer wished to acknowledge her face. She would be just as pleased if she never saw it again.
“How silly of me to put up the mirror,” she said to Karl Oskar. “I would know anyway that I look worse each day.”
“We all must age,” said Karl Oskar comfortingly. “But the years are harder on us emigrants; we age faster than others.”
The years had set their mark on him too; he no longer moved about with such quick steps and easy gait as before, and at times he complained of the old ache in his left leg which made him limp occasionally. But she had fared worse than he; the neighboring wives had guessed she must be older than her husband, even though she was two years younger. The burden of childbearing fell on the woman; that made the difference.
Frank, the youngest in her flock, had come as a birthday present: he had been born on her thirty-first birthday, two years ago. She had barely been twenty when she had her first child, her daughter Anna, who had died at an early age in Sweden. In the eleven years between her first and her youngest, she had endured seven childbeds and borne eight children. During that time she had also gone through their emigration to a new continent, the building of a new home. All the things that had happened to her were bound to leave their mark on her.
“I want to put away the mirror,” she said, “somewhere in a dark corner.”
“But it’s a nice decoration,” said Karl Oskar. “And when Ulrika comes here she’ll need it to look at herself.”
“She doesn’t age,” said Kristina, with a trace of jealousy of her best friend.
“No, that is remarkable.”
“Her color is like fresh cream even though she has had six children.”
“Six?” he wondered. “I thought it was more. But those bastards she had at home I guess she didn’t count very carefully.”
Kristina tried to tell herself that it was childish to regret that she no longer looked like a young girl. And deep in her heart she knew that her vexation was not primarily directed against her changed face; she regretted her youth which had run away from her during her isolation in a wild and foreign country. Her youth was suddenly gone before she had had time to enjoy it. And she blamed the emigration which had devoured her joyous years. As a young girl — with great expectations for the future — she had not counted on a change of home and homeland.
It seemed to Kristina the great majority of people enjoyed much good and experienced much happiness in life which she had been denied. Most of them had participated in wonderful experiences that she would never have. She had been denied so much and she felt it was the emigration that had robbed her of this. Thus she had never been able to adjust herself to her lot as settler.
But this she had never told Karl Oskar. Nor had she told him that if, at the age of nineteen, she could have seen herself in labor seven times before she was thirty-one, she would probably have said no to his proposal and remained a spinster.
Ulrika had given her a real scare by saying that she could go on and bear children until she was forty-six; half of a woman’s fertile years still lay ahead of her. She could expect to give life to as many more children as she already had.
She had said at the time that she couldn’t survive that many births, of that she was sure. Each time she was more worn-out, more tired. She still felt the results of the last birth in her body.
Frank was now two years old, and as yet there had been no signs of a new life beginning. It was her strongest wish that he might remain the youngest. Kristina feared she could not survive one more childbed.
— 2—
Scarcely had their church been built when they lost their minister. Before Pastor Törner left he promised to find a replacement for the Swedish parish in St. Croix among the Lutheran synod of Chicago. But there was a dearth of Swedish ministers in America; few churchmen wanted to exchange their comfortable lives in Sweden for the dangers and privations of Minnesota. And there were those ministers who felt that these ungrateful people who had left their homeland were lost to God anyway and condemned to eternal damnation.