“If the farmers at home could see these fields they would die of envy!”
The brothers walked side by side along the edge of the field. Robert noticed that Karl Oskar dragged his left leg. “What’s the matter with you? You limp?”
The older brother replied, somewhat embarrassed, that it was only the old ailment in his left shinbone; the injury he had sustained when a couple of men had tried to rob him on their journey to Minnesota; it never had healed, it ached sometimes when he worked too hard, and perhaps he favored that leg while walking.
“You slave yourself to death on your claim!”
Robert seemed serious; nothing in this world was worth aches and limps. Not even the good earth of Minnesota was worth that much.
He was a youth no longer. He had grown so old that he advised his older brother.
They looked at the fat and well-cared-for animals in the stable. Each had been bred on the place except the cow, Lady. Robert had promised Karl Oskar money for a team of oxen but now his brother had raised a team himself. And this spring one of the heifers had taken the bull, so they would soon have five cows.
“I don’t want to have any more to milk,” said Kristina.
They went inside the deserted log cabin, which was now used as a toolshed and carpenter shop.
“Here I stand and fix things,” said Karl Oskar.
In the old log house he now spent rainy days at the workbench. The floor was strewn with shavings. On the wall, deer and calfskins had been nailed up to dry. It looked like a junk shop in there. But there they had lived for four winters. When Robert compared the log cabin with the new main house in the maple grove he could see that things had improved for his brothers family in New Duvemåla.
He asked about the shanty where they had lived the first fall, but Karl Oskar had torn it down, as the old shed only spoiled the looks of the new building. He had already built three houses for his family, and now he had begun the fourth in his head.
“Next time I build, Robert. .”
But the most unusual thing they had acquired while Robert was gone Kristina had waited to show him last: a small tree that grew at the east gable of the new main house.
Could he guess what kind of tree it was? A little sapling, about five feet tall, its top reaching to Robert’s chest. The tree had large, deep green leaves, healthy branches and foliage. But he couldn’t guess. Some kind of plum tree perhaps?
“An apple tree from home!” said Kristina.
“Kristina’s own tree!” added Karl Oskar.
This Astrakhan apple tree had sprung up from seeds which Kristina’s parents had sent in a letter. It had grown to chest height in a few years. Now it stood here at their gable, thousands of miles from Sweden. Wasn’t it like a miracle?
Robert lightly pinched a leaf of the sapling; he ought to have recognized an Astrakhan tree from its wide, thick leaves with fuzz on the underside.
Kristina said that she guessed it would take a few years more before the tree bore fruit, and no one could tell if it would have real Astrakhan apples — those juicy, large apples, big as children’s heads, with clear, transparent skin that she had enjoyed at home. Their neighbors, Algot and Manda Svensson, had said that crab apples might grow on trees planted this way from seeds. Branches ought to be grafted on a trunk if one wanted to be sure of fine fruit. But she couldn’t believe crab apples would sprout in America from the fine Astrakhan seeds from Sweden.
Robert stroked the branches; the leaves felt soft to his touch. “It’s come from the old country. . It too has emigrated. .”
“That sapling is the apple of Kristina’s eye!” said Karl Oskar.
From the tremble in her voice Robert had already understood as much. Everywhere on this claim, everywhere in the good earth round Ki-Chi-Saga, a great many plants grew; the land was verdant with crops of wheat and barley and corn and potatoes. But of all the planted and tended seedlings, of all the sprouting, thriving growth, this sapling was obviously dearest to Kristina.
And he himself felt nostalgia as he touched the tree, he felt a strange compassion for the little life, a desire to protect and guard it. He felt as if it were a living being — as if four people instead of three were standing here at the gable, four immigrants.
“This sapling. . it’s almost unreal!” said Robert.
And when they walked on he turned back to look, as if afraid the tender, sensitive life might not be able to withstand the merciless winter cold here in North America.
— 3—
Karl Oskar had put out his precious copies of Hemlandet for his brother. Robert did not know that a Swedish paper was printed in America; in the part of the country where he had been he had hardly met any Swedes and he had never heard anyone talk of Sweden. Now he sat the whole evening and read the paper eagerly, and learned about the most important happenings in the world during the last year.
A great war was ravaging the Old World but Sweden had as yet not been dragged into it. Hemlandet had predicted that war sooner or later must break out in the New World also — in the North American Union — between the faction advocating love of humanity and liberty and those wanting slavery. Lately a group of courageous men in Kansas had organized the Free-States Union with the intention of driving out all slave owners. But in Georgia a white man had been fined ten thousand dollars for spreading the rumor that his neighbor had black blood in his veins. In one state slave owners were thrown out, in another it was a great crime to hint that a person was related to a Negro.
Robert said that was just the way things were in America; every place was different from every other.
“You must read the installment story!” suggested Kristina. “There you can see how the white lords torture the poor blacks!”
The story in Hemlandet was called “Fifty Years in Chains” and was an American slave’s true description of his life. The story was so horrible and touched everyone so deeply that all readers were compelled to pray to God that He would abolish the curse of slavery, she said. Yes, Robert would read “Fifty Years in Chains” by and by, he told her, but for the moment he was looking for happenings here in Minnesota.
A terrible accident had occurred down in Carver County. A Swedish settler had been out hunting of a Sunday and when he returned home and started to clean his gun he was so clumsy that he shot his seventy-year-old mother-in-law to death. The paper emphasized the happening as God’s warning to the immigrants; they ought to keep the Sabbath and never hunt on this day.
Cities had begun to spring up in America like mushrooms on a rainy August day. In Minnesota Territory no less than eighty town sites had been planned and surveyed during the last year.
At this Karl Oskar interrupted in annoyance: “That’s cheating and swindling!”
He knew the true situation. Nearly all towns out here existed only on maps. No people lived in them, for there were no houses. The paper cities were founded by speculators who were too lazy to work the earth and merely speculated in lots. Parasitical critters who lived off honest settlers! He would like to take his gun and drive these rats and vermin out of the Territory.
Robert said that the richest cities were in California. In one of the smallest towns out there, New Home Town, lived the greatest number of millionaires on the smallest number of square feet in America.
Karl Oskar picked up the paper and read about the price of grain: winter wheat in Chicago brought a dollar fifty per bushel, while rye brought only seventy-five cents and oats thirty cents for the same measure. What he had suspected turned out to be true: wheat was the flour grain valued above all else in the New World. White bread, reserved for their lordships in Sweden, was on everyone’s table in America.