“You know you’ve brought no gold with you. But no one holds it against you. We are glad you’re back, glad you are alive!”
“You think I haven’t anything. .? You think I lie. .?” Robert sounded deeply hurt. “All right! All right!”
He turned quickly on his heel and walked through the door into the bedroom.
“You will only drive him away!” said Kristina, reproaching Karl Oskar. “You could have waited, at least this first evening.”
“I can’t bear this nonsense! And I had to talk honestly with my only brother.”
But Robert returned in a moment with his new rucksack in his hand. His brother and sister-in-law looked puzzled as he put it down on the kitchen floor and unlatched the thick leather thongs that secured it. From the sack he pulled out a small leather bag which looked as if it had been badly worn. He opened it and pulled out a paper bundle. Without a word he handed it to Karl Oskar. Again he stuck his hand into the bag and pulled out a second bundle of rustling paper which he laid on Kristina’s knees.
“These notes are for you. I don’t have any gold in my sack. But these have the same value as gold.”
Karl Oskar stared at the bundle of bills in his hand. Kristina looked down at her apron; on it lay a bundle of paper money.
“I drew out a little cash for pocket money.”
Robert put the leather bag back into the rucksack and leaned over the cradle holding the fretful baby; the little girl was restless and wouldn’t go to sleep.
Robert smiled at the child as he spoke casually to her parents: “It’s your money. Take it and enjoy it.”
He had taken out some of the contents of his leather bag and given to his brother and sister-in-law. After this they became silent, dumbfounded. Now it was only Robert who talked, to the little girl in the cradle, pretending she answered.
Then he turned to Karl Oskar, as if he too had been a little child in need of instruction and advice. In order to make use of gold it had to be turned into money. A bank in Bloomfield, Indiana, had changed the gold into notes. The bank had taken one seventh of the gold value for its trouble; American banks were awfully greedy. But at least he had his possessions in safekeeping and he could draw money whenever he needed cash.
“These few bucks are for you, Karl Oskar and Kristina.”
Karl Oskar looked embarrassed, as if his brother had tricked him in some shameful way, as if his brother had cheated him with this gift.
The evening darkness was beginning to fill the kitchen; Karl Oskar lit a taper in the wooden candlestick on the mantel; then he took a note from his bundle and inspected it in the light. He turned it: it was green on one side and black on the other, the colors he had always seen on American notes. And on both sides, in all four corners, was imprinted: 100. In eight places it was clearly indicated the note was worth one hundred dollars.
And in the center of the green side Karl Oskar could read in big black letters: INDIANA STATE BANK, BLOOMFIELD, INDIANA.
At last he spoke again, mumbling as if dazed. “If someone hasn’t hexed my eyes this must be a hundred-dollar bill.”
And he began to look through the bundle which Robert had tossed to him like waste paper: all the bills were identical. They were wrinkled and spotty, soiled by dirty fingers, but the value of each was the same — one hundred dollars.
Karl Oskar counted them slowly; there were twenty in the bundle. He counted them again, he wet his fingers and counted them a third time; they still amounted to twenty.
“You gave me five dollars when I left,” said Robert. “I am paying you back with interest.”
Kristina had not yet touched the bundle in her lap; she only sat and stared at it as if it were a bird that suddenly had flown into the kitchen and perched on her knee. Now she handed the bills to Karl Oskar.
He counted his wife’s money also; the bills were exactly like the ones in his own bundle, and there were also twenty of them.
“Four thousand dollars in cash. .” He spoke as in a deep trance. “Four thousand in cash. .!”
And Robert called this pocket money.
“I promised to share with you when I came back from California.”
Karl Oskar Nilsson looked askance at his younger brother. He was deeply embarrassed, feeling that he had been wrong, but he could not force himself to admit it.
His sight must be failing; he must try to see aright again. He held a couple of the bills against the candle flame, turned them, rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger, let the light shine on them again, thumbed them again: were they real money? Wasn’t the whole thing some swindle?
Robert smiled. “You can see the money comes from the Indiana State Bank. If you think I lie. .”
He added that he had delivered four sacks full of nuggets to the bank in Bloomfield. He had asked for smaller bills — fifty and twenty dollars — but the bank didn’t have enough on hand to let him have all he wanted; they were printing new notes as fast as they could. A great many gold diggers had returned from California and turned in their sacks at the same bank. It would probably take a couple of months before all he owned could be exchanged for ready cash.
“You mean you have more. .?” Karl Oskar’s voice was thick.
“Of course! Much more!”
Robert had given his brother and sister-in-law four thousand dollars in cash. And as yet they had not said one word of thanks. Karl Oskar and Kristina could not thank him, they could say nothing at all, because they were overwhelmed by such a gift.
This was something they must think through, it took time, they must get their bearings.
“Now go out and buy what you need, Kristina!”
She grabbed Robert’s hand with both her own, tears gushing. “You told the truth. . You have had luck. . You give us all this. . God bless you, Robert. .!”
“Now don’t let’s talk of gold any more.” He yawned and grinned broadly, seeming thoroughly tired of the subject. “I can’t tell you how sick of it I am — I’ve got too much of the damn stuff!”
Kristina leaped up. “I must make your bed! You must be dead tired. .”
She had noticed him moving his hand to his left ear time and again; he had had an ache in that ear ever since his master, Aron of Nybacken, had boxed it so hard that something sensitive inside it had broken.
“Does your ear still bother you?” she asked compassionately.
“Yes, it carries on something awful in there.”
And in a lower voice, as if wishing to share a confidence with Kristina, he said something strange she was to remember afterward: “My ear can talk! Do you understand. .? You should only hear what it tells me during the nights!”
— 2—
Robert went to bed, but Karl Oskar and Kristina sat up late on this strange, confusing evening.
Karl Oskar spread the forty hundred-dollar bills before him — they covered most of the table. He sat and stared at this new tablecloth of green and black.
Four thousand American dollars were worth the same as fifteen thousand Swedish riksdaler. Before he emigrated he had sold his farm, Korpamoen, for fifteen hundred riksdaler. Ten times that sum was now spread before him. On the table in his kitchen this evening lay the value often farms. A fortune!
The money spread under his eyes could change their whole life.
If only there wasn’t something wrong with his sight. If these green-black papers on the table were what they were supposed to be. For he couldn’t entirely believe. . he wasn’t quite convinced. . It had happened too suddenly. Would this evening, with the turn of a hand, bring to an end his five years’ struggle for cash?
“I felt right away that Robert wasn’t lying this time,” said Kristina.