Unto A Good Land

by Vilhelm Moberg

  When they rounded a corner, their guide stopped and pointed to a stone pedestal near the street: “On that foundation stood the last king who reigned in America.”

  The mass of stone was at least twenty feet high. Robert asked: “What was the king’s name?”

  “I don’t remember. He was an English king. He was made of lead!”

  “Oh, I understand; it was a statue?”

  “That’s right, boys! It was a lead statue of a king!”

  The Finn explained: The English king reigned so poorly and so tyrannically that the Americans went to war to get rid of him. But they had a scarcity of bullets for their guns, so they melted down this leaden image of their king. When the English came to chastise the obstinate Americans, they were greeted by pieces of lead from their own king. The fine bullets hit them right between the eyes! So the Americans won the war and became a free people. That’s what happened to the last king in America.

  And who could tell—perhaps the European people one day would put their king statues in pots, and boil and melt them and make bullets of them. Then they too might be free.

  Robert nodded; he understood: because kings were forbidden in America, one might speak as one would about them.

  Now they turned right and entered a wide street. In great pride the Finn held both his hands out over the street as though to show something particularly his own, something his hands had made: this was Broadway, the most beautiful street in the world!

  They had been sucked into a solid mass of people moving slowly about their errands, as it was impossible to hurry, giving way always to the right to avoid bumping against one another. So the boys did likewise. The walkers did not look each other in the face when meeting, no one stared in curiosity at anyone else. Robert and Arvid kept as close to the Finn as they could; they were jostled and pushed a little when they failed to give way fast enough, and they felt dizzy and bewildered in this multitude, faced with the endless horde passing on this street, said to be the world’s broadest.

  Robert tried to estimate the breadth of Broadway and he thought it must be more than seventy-five feet wide. The Broad Way, he knew the meaning of the name from his language book. Once he had seen a picture with the same name, and this picture had illustrated the road Man walked through life, crowded with people indulging in sin. That road had led to the Gates of Hell. On this street, also, wherever it led, was a jostling crowd. Most people he saw had white-skinned faces and were shaped like his own people. But the great difference in dress surprised Robert. Here walked men in elegant, well-brushed, expensive clothes, with clean, white-shining linen around their necks and polished boots on their feet. He saw other men, too, in worn-out, ragged garments, dirty shirts, and with their feet wrapped in old rags; some even went barefoot; they must burn their feet on these hot stones. He thought those poorly dressed men must be new arrivals in this country; they had not yet had time to get rich.

  He saw many Negroes, all going about free and unchained. He had thought that black people held as slaves were in chains and led by guards, like dogs on leashes. He noticed Negroes laughing so broadly that their teeth gleamed white against their dark lips; but others looked so sad, shy, and downtrodden that the sight of them hurt him deep inside. He guessed that those who laughed had kinder masters than the others.

  The Finn said the houses on this street were the highest ever built in the world. Some were, indeed, as tall as six stories, and taller houses could not be built.

  “Danjel says we have arrived at the Tower of Babel,” volunteered Arvid.

  “Babel’s Tower fell long ago,” Robert informed his friend.

  They looked at the houses along Broadway; some were built of wood and stone, and painted in many colors—white, clear red, black, and yellow. Some houses even had walls with white stripes of plaster; this was a curious sight, striped houses.

  In the middle of the street rode men in black coats and high hats, their horses well fed, newly curried, with flanks shining. Wagons rolled by, gilded spring wagons bearing women in fine clothes; there were plain carts loaded with ale barrels, carriages with white teams, cabs, gigs, clumsy wagons drawn by oxen, light vehicles drawn by horses small as colts, four-wheelers, two-wheelers, big and small wagons, light and heavy ones. Everything that could be put on wheels and pulled by animals rolled by on this street.

  Arvid pointed in amazement at a small, gray, long-eared, long-haired animal which stood quite still between the shafts of a cart: “That thing is neither horse nor ox!”

  “It’s an ass,” said the Finn.

  Robert hurried to show what he knew: “One can ride on them too,” he said. “It’s told in the Bible that Jesus rode on an ass into Jerusalem.”

  “On an animal like that?” asked Arvid. “How could he sit straddle-legged on such a puny creature?”

  They slowly continued their walk up Broadway. A great fat sow with a litter of pigs was poking about in the gutter on their side of the street. The mother sow was as long legged as a calf, but her teats hung so low they almost reached the ground; the little piglets were light brown, almost like whelps, and ran between the legs of the walkers so that Robert almost tripped. Arvid counted fourteen in the litter and observed that American swine were longer legged than Swedish.

  Robert said the Americans didn’t seem afraid to lose their pigs, letting them run around at will, but the Finn informed him that every owner marked his swine with an ear cut; moreover, there were so many swine in America, no one cared much if an occasional litter were lost. All garbage and sweepings were thrown into the streets, and the swine kept the town clean, he added. Here slops were lying in piles, and some of the houses they passed smelled as though more slops were being prepared inside.

  But the street smell of pigsties was familiar to the two youths from Swedish peasant communities. In Sweden or North America, in Ljuder Parish or New York City, they could find no noticeable difference in the smell of swine dung.

  From time to time the Finn stopped and peered into windows as though he were looking for some particular place. Arvid and Robert stopped also, but as far as they could judge, every house was a shop, and every entrance had something written over the door in large, gilded letters.

  At last the Finn stopped in front of a small house, not much bigger than a shed; it could be a shop, but there were no shop articles in the window. The Finn pointed to a placard nailed to the door:

  NOTICE!

  This shop is closed in honor of the King of Kings,

  Who will appear about the twentieth of October.

  Get ready, friends, to crown Him Lord of All.

  “Now we’re near the place I’m looking for,” said the Finn. “This same notice was on the door last fall when I was here.”

  Robert, who had begun to learn English from his book during the voyage, tried to read the notice on the door. He recognized some of the words but could not understand their meaning; he wanted to ask the Finn, but Arvid took the question from him: “What do the words say?”

  The Finn explained: It had been predicted that the Day of Doom would take place in New York during October last year, and the owner of the shop had closed in advance to honor Christ on His return. The King of Kings had not appeared, but the shop still remained closed; perhaps the owner had starved to death by now.

  There was another notice a little lower on the door, and the Finn bent down to read it: Muslin for Ascension Robes. Muslin to meet the King of Kings. 20 cents a yard.

  The boys wanted to know what this notice said.

  “Oh, just that the storekeeper sold wedding gowns for Christ’s brides,” said the Finn.

  And now the Finn must attend to the captain’s errands. He told the boys to find their way back to the ship alone; it was not difficult, only turn right about and then to the left. And if they wanted to go to the end of the street, they could do so. Broadway was about three miles long and ran right through Manhattan. They would not lose their way if they stayed on Broadway.

  Th
e Finn nodded good-by and they saw him enter a saloon with the name Joe’s Tavern on the window; it was next door to the little shop which had been closed for the arrival of the King of Kings.

  —2—

  Arvid and Robert continued alone up Broadway. It was only today that they had been released from their long imprisonment. A feeling of unaccustomed freedom filled them now that they were free to move unhindered on solid ground. Boldly they decided to walk to the street’s very end, however far it stretched. Then they would turn straight about and walk back to the harbor and their fellow passengers.

  And so they continued along the most beautiful street in the world; they stopped and looked at the tall houses, they examined inscriptions over doors: Store, Steak House, Coffeehouse, Lodging House, Brown’s Store, Drugstore. They tried to interpret the inscriptions and guessed at their meaning. Could this be a tavern? Was that a hawker’s shop? Or an apothecary? The word store in particular impressed them, it appeared on one building after another. At last Arvid espied a small house, which he thought must be an outhouse, and he pointed for Robert to look, and laughed: “Look at that one! They call that a store too!”

  “They must be bragging,” said Robert. But he did not mind this exaggeration; it was always true that the smaller you were the more you needed to seem bigger.

  He tried to understand words and sentences he overheard, but everything was unintelligible, senseless jabber; not even one word, not a single syllable, was he able to recognize from his language book. He felt discouraged and disappointed. When he had stepped ashore he had thought he knew enough English to understand what he heard, even if he couldn’t answer properly; he began to think they had cheated him in Karlshamn by selling him an unreliable book.

  The boys arrived at an open square where many booths had been erected, and they thought this must be a market day. Here they stood long and gazed; Robert had said they shouldn’t stand and stare because they might be laughed at, but this market fascinated them.

  Wooden barrels stood in long rows, running over with potatoes, turnips, cabbages, carrots, peas, beets, parsnips, and many other roots which they saw for the first time; barrels in great numbers were filled with fruit—yellow, red, green, striped—apples, cherries, plums, and other fruits and berries which they never before had seen and the names of which they did not know. Between the barrels were long rows of baskets full of eggs and tubs full of butter, so fat that it seemed to perspire; on poles hung yellow, round, fat cheeses, big as grindstones; carcasses of animals, legs of pork, steaks, shortribs, and sides of bacon were stacked like firewood in high piles. Sizable, well-stuffed sausages hung in lines over tables on which stood vessels of ground meat and salted hams. There were booths with fowl: chickens, ducks, game birds; other fowl were stacked in hills of feathers, of all earthly bird colors, with a sprinkle of blood here and there on heads, necks, and wings. Four-footed beasts of the wild hung here in great numbers, hairy bodies of stags and does, hares and rabbits, known and unknown animals. In other stands were large tables with fish, long and short, broad and narrow, fat and spindly, black and white, red and blue; fish with striped bodies, misshapen fish, all head and protruding eyes, fish with ravenous jaws and sharp teeth like dogs’, fish with fins as sharp as spears, and fish with long tail fins by which they hung on hooks, swinging like pendulums as the shoppers brushed against them. On the ground stood wooden boxes in which crawled and crept shellfish, horrible-looking sea monsters, lizardlike creatures, frogs, crayfish, mussels, snails, animals in shells that opened up like caskets, and shellfish that crawled about and resembled who knew what; nothing they had ever heard of, seen, or known, now or ever in all their living days.

  The barrels, baskets, tubs, tables, boxes, and buckets in this market place were filled to overflowing; the whole place seemed flooded with fruit and meat, pork and lamb, fins and feathers, shell and hides, flooded with food of endless variety. People shopping here tramped in food, hit their heads on food, were enveloped in food, tumbled about in food. Who would skin all these animals, pluck all these birds, scale all these fish? For strangers and new arrivals, there was a booth in the market offering samples of all the food products which the new land offered its inhabitants. Here they saw the Creator’s many gifts, fruits and berries, roots, herbs, and plants; they saw crawling, flying, swimming creatures, and meat from the cattle and beasts which God had created on the Sixth Day, before He created Man.

  The two youths beheld the earth’s abundance in a market next to the most beautiful street in the world. This much they understood: there was food in sufficiency in North America; it would be enough for them too, and for the seventy immigrants who had arrived with them today; they knew, from what their own eyes told them, that they had entered a new world.

  —3—

  The day was nearing its warmest hour, the heat lay like a heavy weight over the city, making breathing difficult for the crowds on the street. People sought the shade and sat with their backs against house walls, drowsy, resting with their eyes closed; little babies slept at their mothers’ breasts, women sat leaning their heads against men’s knees. A half-naked Negro boy with a shoebrush in one hand and a jar of shoe blacking in the other strolled about, calling: “Black your boots! Black your boots!”

  Robert and Arvid dragged their steps, burdened by their heavy wadmal clothes. Their hair, grown long during the voyage, felt sticky and uncomfortable. They pushed their way among brown pigs poking in the gutter, they squeezed themselves in between the carts of fruit sellers; now and again they were hailed by peddlers offering them wares; once a man stopped and spoke directly to them. Robert had learned what to say when accosted by an American: he had the sentence ready on his tongue, he was glad to use it now for the first time: “I am a stranger here.”

  But the man only stared at him. Robert repeated the words, carefully, clearly, he pronounced each syllable as directed in the language book. But the man only shook his head.

  How could this be possible? He had practiced this sentence so many times. Yet the American failed to understand him. The book must be wrong.

  A man in fiery red pants and a tall black hat kept following them. On a leash he led two sharp-nosed, starved-looking dogs. “You want to buy a dog?” Robert did not understand these words. He looked at the dogs whose long, red tongues were hanging out of their mouths; they seemed fierce and dangerous. Robert was afraid of the obtrusive man; now he had taken his arm. He did not know what the man wanted, but he wanted to get away. At last he managed to free himself from the man’s grip, and he and Arvid hurried their steps until the stranger was lost in the crowd.

  Now Robert began to contemplate their situation, and he became fearful: here they walked about, entirely alone, in a town where everyone was a stranger, every tenth man a criminal; they were unable to say anything to anybody, they understood nothing that was said to them. If danger should overtake them they could not even call for help. Perhaps the Finn had exaggerated, probably only one man in twenty was a robber, but even so it was unpleasant. They did not know what robbers in America looked like, but they had seen many faces behind which an evil and treacherous soul might be hidden. He suggested that they return to their company. He did not wish to scare Arvid, he only said the others might be apprehensive if they stayed away too long. He was not afraid for his own sake, nor did he think Arvid had anything to fear; still—

  “I have my nickel watch,” Arvid reminded him, and began nervously fingering the broad, yellow brass chain which hung on his vest.

  When Arvid left home his father had given him this watch, his dearest and most expensive possession. The father had said that the watch must be considered his paternal inheritance, given to him at this time because of his emigration. It was of fine nickel and had cost twelve riksdaler with the chain. During the forty years Arvid’s father had worked as cotter under the manor of Kråkesjö, it was all he had been able to save as inheritance for his son. The cotter would not have given Arvid his inheritance in cash, even if
he had had any; he would have been afraid Arvid might spend it on snuff and brännvin. But a watch he would always keep with him: he had admonished his son never to sell or lose his Swedish inheritance.

  Now Arvid was walking about in the dangerous town of New York, surrounded by robbers and swindlers, and he was carrying the watch with him.

  “Put it in your pants pocket,” advised Robert. For it occurred to him that the shining brass chain on Arvid’s stomach might attract robbers. Arvid unhooked the chain and put the watch in his trousers pocket.

  So they continued their walk up the street. Arvid wanted to go farther, he was happy today; Robert had never seen him so excited and gay. Arvid said that as long as he was back on land again, he wanted really to use his legs, he wanted to walk all the way to the end of the street. Now that they were in America and could go anywhere dry shod, he was willing to walk the whole way to where they would settle, however far it was. He was sure he could walk there, because he was one of those who could use their legs.

  A blond girl in a red dress held out a basket of fruit to the boys—black-red, juicy cherries. Robert shook his head; in vain he tried to remember a suitable English word from his language book; he would have liked to tell the girl (even if it was not true) that he had just bought a bagful of cherries.