Daily Robert saw one single face, the face of Man made in the image of the creator. This was barefaced Man, fighting for his one and only true religion, the one he confessed honestly in his heart.
And none of these men he saw pass through Spring Creek that summer knew that it was water alone Man could not be without.
During your stay in Spring Creek you thought you would never again have a master. You yourself had buried the last one, you alone had dug his grave and filled it with your own hands. You laid his body in a packing case and read a psalm over it. But you still had me. I am with you tonight, three years later.
Once you read in a medical home adviser: Ear diseases are often accompanied by so-called buzzing of various strengths and types. They may be experienced in daytime as well as at night, but they are especially strong at night when silence reigns. Then they can become a terrible plague. .
That fits me, doesn’t it?
You wanted to get rid of all masters and that was why you set out to dig gold. But you discovered on the Trail that gold was the most severe of all masters. Even more exacting than I. Long before you reached the gold land it demanded your life, so merciless is gold. Was that something to search for?
You gave to the gold what you were forced to give; it was too late to refuse. The disease now consuming you entered your body that summer, as you guessed. But some diseases are in no hurry as they ravage and destroy a body. Sometimes they take many years for their work. They lull a person into hope in the meantime. But they are not slow because of mercy when they take years to turn a living being into a shell.
You’re a shell, Robert. That much you have at last realized while turning and twisting at night, trying to escape me; you have squandered the creator’s gift. How could you have acted so foolishly? You think you have a good answer: you didn’t know any better; your intelligence didn’t allow you to know better. Who else could have told you? No one, except the creator himself. And He failed. He let you waste your life while still a youth. He had made you such that you could do no better, knew no better.
The creator gave you strength to dream an immoderate dream — but he did not give you the strength required by an immoderate dreamer. And what can a weak person do? What did you do?
It is clear to you that what has happened was inescapable. You fought your lot in life. Your life is fated, Robert! Only thus can it be explained.
You never thought you could get free, you didn’t have the strength. You were caught, enclosed in the cubicle of your fate. There is a truth about this, and you are familiar with it: Concerning imprisonment in the Fate that is common to all creatures: only in imagination do they break free: all remain in their cubicles and live out their interminable days, one after another. They make their abodes there for all the days of their lives, until the last day comes and the weight of the earth, of which they are a part, covers them.
You’ve been lying now for several hours without the peace of sleep. You have been lying so long on your back. You ought to turn on your side for a change — onto the left side — your evil side — your pursuer’s side. If you turn on your side and dig me as deep as you can into the pillow, perhaps you can silence me a little.
And I will be kind to you tonight and relieve the bursting ache in here. I’ll pour out a little blood, only a few drops. Now you’ll feel how it helps. There now — can you feel the warm fluid? It feels as if someone had squirted tepid water into your ear, doesn’t it? And now it drips red on the slip, the new, clean one that Kristina put on today. Nothing feels as wonderful as the end of pain.
Now you’ll soon sleep! Again tonight you’ll sleep on a spotted pillow!
I don’t begrudge you a deep, wonderfully purling waterdream!
XXII. THE UNGET-AT-ABLE
— 1—
On Friday morning Karl Oskar was up before daybreak, greased his oak-wheel cart, and made ready to drive to Stillwater. Already at sunrise it was evident the day would be very hot. It would be the first time he had undertaken a long drive with his young ox team. Animals were greatly plagued by the heat and the mosquitoes, and although his ox team by now was well broken in, he was afraid they might be unruly and hard to handle in this heat; that was why he wanted to get under way while the morning was still cool. He hoped to be back again with oxen and cart intact before sundown.
Last evening Kristina had gone through the two bundles of money, removing spots from the bills and ironing out those that were wrinkled. A few grease spots remained, but on the whole the bills now seemed clean and neat; they were at least as nice-looking as other American paper money they had had in the house.
Karl Oskar pushed the two bundles down in the sheepskin pouch Kristina had sewn for him when they left Sweden and which had served as a hiding-place for their Swedish money. In this pouch — worn as a belt under his clothing — he had, during the crossing from Sweden, secreted five hundred riksdaler, all he had owned after selling the farm and the cattle. Now it hid thirty times as much in American money, sufficient to buy ten farms as big as Korpamoen. This according to the value printed on the bills. Today he would ask the bank in Stillwater if the money was acceptable.
While he was yoking the oxen Algot Svensson, his companion for the journey, arrived. He was always punctual. Today Karl Oskar was to be a witness for his neighbor at the land office, concerning Svensson’s right to his claim in section 35 of Chisago Township.
Before Karl Oskar got into the cart he said to his wife that today he was setting out on the most important errand he had undertaken so far in America. And he had almost the same anxious expectation as on that day when he had gone to her father’s home in Duvemåla to ask for his daughter Kristina as bride: no one could tell in advance what the reply might be.
Then he stepped up into the cart and it started on its clumsy, thudding way down the road along the lakeshore. The sheepskin pouch was under Karl Oskar’s shirt; his riches were on the way to a better place of safekeeping, a right place of safekeeping.
— 2—
This Friday turned out to be the summer’s warmest day in the St. Croix Valley. The heat bothered Kristina as she sewed and she had to lie down and rest for a moment now and then. She had a burning headache and she saw black every time she tried to thread the needle. Her discomfort from her pregnancy increased with the hot weather; all smells became vile, nauseating her, and if she saw a blowfly light she wanted to vomit. A woman was only half a person during the first months of this condition; taste, smell, and appetite were completely awry.
Robert had found a cool place to rest under the sugar maples near the house. He was not going to visit the Indian today; it was too hot in the forest. She had also noticed how tired and short of breath he became after his walks. Kristina picked up her sewing and went outside to sit in the shade with her brother-in-law. The heat was not quite so oppressive here as inside the house. Robert was reading the latest issue of Hemlandet. He had just discovered an advertisement:
HELP WANTED
Youth for Hemlandet’s Printing Office.