“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.