Unto A Good Land

by Vilhelm Moberg

  That day when they sat down at table there was no bread. No one said a word about it, no one asked about the missing bread. How could questions help them? The men had long dreaded the day when bread would be missing—it was no surprise to them. Nevertheless, Karl Oskar and Robert glanced from time to time at the empty place on the board where the bread used to lie. Did they think it would suddenly appear?

  At the next meal little Johan began to complain: “Mother! I want bread! Where’s the bread?”

  “There is no bread, child,” said the mother.

  “Mother, you must bake,” Johan told her. “I want bread.”

  None of the others at the table said a word, but the boy kept repeating: “Mother! Why don’t you bake?”

  No other food satisfies a human stomach like bread, no food will keep hunger away like bread. Nothing can take the place of bread for grownups or children, but a growing child-body suffers most from the lack of it.

  And a mother suffers when she must deny her own child who hangs on to her skirts and cries persistently: “Mother, I want bread!”

  It was the same at every meal. No one said anything except the child, but it was almost more than Kristina could endure. She knew only too well how things were with them; they had used all their money. At length she had to speak to Karl Oskar: Their children must have bread to stay healthy until spring; growing children needed bread. Couldn’t he manage to get hold of a small sack of flour—only a very small sack?

  This problem had been ever in his mind since the bread had been missing from the table; one sack of flour. . . . But their last money had been spent for seed grain which Karl Oskar had ordered for spring. The seed grain was more important to them than anything else—it was next year’s crop. If they had spent the seed money for this winter’s food, they would starve to death next winter.

  Kristina argued: It did not matter which winter they starved to death—this one or next. What help would their spring seed be to them if they couldn’t survive until spring? How could they put the seeds in the ground if they themselves were already under the ground?

  Karl Oskar said he would go to Danjel and ask for a loan. This was the only way out. He would not be trusted by anyone else. Here everyone asked for cash. If he wanted to buy a penny’s worth in a store, the owner would first ask if he had cash. Cash was an American word he now understood quite well, he had learned what it meant. Cash! Cash! Cheap for cash! How many times he had heard it! It began to sound like the rustle of paper bills. He could hear the same rustle in the voice of Mr. Abbott, the Scots storekeeper in Taylors Falls: “Do you have cash, Mr. Nilsson?” A settler’s life—or death—depended on cash.

  He was embarrassed to borrow from Danjel again; he still owed his wife’s uncle one hundred daler for the mortgage interest on Korpamoen; his lost years at home still weighed him down. And now Danjel wasn’t much better off than he was himself; Danjel too had a large family to feed, he had bought a half share in the ox team, he had lent thirty dollars to Anders Månsson, he was very generous to Ulrika and her daughter, he helped people without being asked. He had been extravagant with the cash he had on arrival, he too would soon be impoverished.

  But Karl Oskar went to Danjel, and came back with five shining coins in his hand: five silver dollars: “Now we can buy a sack of flour!”

  Kristina said: As long as there was one single human being who felt for his neighbor, the world was not lost.

  The settlers in Taylors Falls had bought their winter supplies in early autumn, and Mr. Abbott had run out of flour long before Christmas; new supplies would not arrive until the river opened. Karl Oskar must therefore go to Stillwater for his sack of flour. This would not be so long a trip as the settlers’ first walk to Taylors Falls. After all, Karl Oskar and his family now lived nine miles nearer Stillwater. Besides, the walk through the forest was shorter than the wandering way by the river; still, it was at least six miles longer than the walk to Taylors Falls. He had already carried home many burdens from Mr. Abbott’s store, both on his back and in his hands. During the last half year he had struggled with more burdens than in his whole previous life. But the road northeast through the forest to Taylors Falls was only nine miles; southeast to Stillwater it was fifteen; and to walk that distance back and forth in one day, and carry a sack of flour on his return walk, would be a hard day’s work. And he must start out early enough to reach home while it was still daylight.

  The following morning, one hour before daybreak, Karl Oskar set off with an empty sack under his arm. Johan woke up and called happily to his father in the door: “Buy flour, Father! Then Mother can bake!”

  “Be careful of your nose,” admonished Kristina. “Remember what happened to Jonas Petter in this cold winter.”

  But the weather was now mild, had been for almost a week; the snow had thinned down, it was hardly more than a foot deep; the cold was not noticeable, the sky was hazy, with a flurry of snow now and then. Karl Oskar had walked through the forest to Stillwater only once before, but he had taken notice of landmarks and was sure he would find his way. He followed the east shore of Lake Ki-Chi-Saga, almost in a southerly direction; he passed by places he recognized—a fallen giant trunk over a brook, a deserted wigwam, an oak hill with an Indian pole, a mound like a bread loaf. Having crossed the brook, he followed an Indian trail until he reached the logging road used by the Stillwater lumber company, and from there on he could not lose his way.

  The walk to Stillwater was easy; his whole burden was an empty sack, he walked with good speed and arrived before noon. He went to visit Pastor Jackson, the kind minister, as he had done last time he was in town. Pastor Jackson had now moved into a comfortable new house near the little whitewashed wooden church where he preached. But Jackson’s door was locked, and no one opened for him. The minister must be on one of his many preaching journeys through the Territory.

  Karl Oskar walked around and inspected the Baptist church. This was the first non-Lutheran church he had been close to. It was a simple building of wood, made of timbers faced with boards—it was the smallest God’s House he had ever seen. He sat down on a bench outside the church and ate what he had brought with him—a piece of venison and a few boiled potatoes, which he gulped down without feeling satisfied. Then he walked the street at the river’s edge and looked at the signs and tried to read the inscriptions: Pierre’s Tavern; Abraham Smith, Barber and Druggist; James Clark, Hardware—Tools. Outside some houses horses stood hitched—the farmers near Stillwater were already so well off that they used horses.

  He studied particularly one large sign in front of a ramshackle shed:

  CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

  PHYSICIAN AND HOUSE-BUILDER

  CARPENTER AND BLACKSMITH

  Caldwell was the name of the doctor who had taken care of Jonas Petter’s frostbitten nose; this must be his house. Jonas Petter had said that the doctor had built his own house. He was a very learned doctor who could heal all kinds of ailments, he was also a carpenter and a capable smith. He had been busy shoeing a horse when Jonas Petter arrived, and after attending to the horse’s hoofs he had cared for Jonas Petter’s frostbitten nose. He administered equally well to the needs of people and livestock. Such learned and capable doctors were not available in Sweden. Karl Oskar thought he must remember the doctor’s name; in case any of his family should be sick he would seek Dr. Caldwell.

  But he must attend to his errand in town, he must buy his sack of flour and get on his way homeward.

  He entered the finest and largest store he saw: Harrington’s General Store. He knew that store was the American name for a shop, but he could not understand the meaning of the word general. In Swedish, general meant a high military man; perhaps the owner had been a general in the army.

  Behind the long, high counter of Harrington’s General Store stood two clerks dressed exactly alike: they wore gray cotton shirts, white aprons, and bowlers; the clerks in America kept their hats on inside; apparently they did not stand on ceremony
with the customers.

  While the two clerks waited on some fat men in skin jackets, Karl Oskar looked around the store. He espied a small wooden barrel with an inscription: Kentucky Straight Whisky Pure 14 G. Karl Oskar had learned the American measurements for both fluid and solid goods and he understood that the barrel contained fourteen gallons of the strong American brännvin. But in this country he could not afford brännvin; at home in Sweden he had distilled his own spirits.

  Many articles of food were displayed in the store; on the counter lay heaps of fat sausages, dried and smoked; large, shining, yellow cheeses were piled on top of each other, breads of many sizes and colors were displayed. Over the counter hung hams and pieces of meat, whole sides of pork, short ribs; a steelyard in its chain hung near the meat, as if calling out: “I’ll weigh up all of this for you!”

  On the floor stood boxes full of eggs and fish in wooden buckets; in a corner were sacks full of flour, rice, peas, beans; in smaller boxes were stick candy, nuts, dried berries, and fruit; on the shelves lay bundles of all kinds of fabrics in all colors, rows of earthenware and china vessels. On small shelves in the window were jars and bottles of all shapes and sizes, round, flat, oblong, and square, containing salves, drops, and other medicines. From the ceiling hung pots and pans, pails and baskets, saddles and yokes, wheels, saws, guns, hats, boots, skin jackets; on the floor stood plows, churns, fire pokes, axes, hoes, spades, shovels. Karl Oskar felt that if he looked carefully in all the corners of this store he wouldn’t find lacking a single object a person would need or wish for in this world; his eyes lingered on tobacco pouches and pipes, snuff boxes, powder horns, books as large as Bibles and as small as almanacs, hymn-books, playing cards, dice. The store offered for sale everything a beginner might want in the wilderness for his spiritual and bodily needs.

  In this store there was ten times as much as in Mr. Abbott’s store in Taylors Falls, and Karl Oskar sighed as he beheld all the accumulated fortune; a feeling of hunger came over him: his eyes saw and his nose smelled all the tempting food—the fresh bread, the smoked hams and sausages, the fat cheeses. The people in Stillwater had sold their forests and grown rich from all the lumber, they could afford to buy anything they wanted in this store. . . . It must be an old general or some other very high person who owned this store and all it contained.

  But Karl Oskar was only a poor squatter—the multitude of good things was not for him. He had come to buy a sack of flour which he must carry fifteen miles on his back; he was an impoverished settler without bread.

  One of the clerks came up to him and Karl Oskar held up his empty sack, pointed toward the rye flour in the corner, and said: “Five dollar!”

  He held out the five fingers of his right hand. The clerk kept up a constant flow of talk, the words spilling from his mouth with such speed that Karl Oskar was unable to understand a thing he said. He could explain his needs to Mr. Abbott in Taylors Falls, they understood each other’s language. But each time he met a new American the same thing happened to him: he could neither understand nor be understood. It was as though he had to learn English anew whenever he met a stranger; he felt each time equally foolish and annoyed, standing there tongue-tied. As yet, however, he had not met a single American who poked fun at a newcomer because of his language difficulties. Instead, all were eager to help him, trying to guess what he wanted to say.

  The clerk filled a wooden measure twice and emptied the rye flour into Karl Oskar’s sack: “Five dollars’ worth,” he said.

  Karl Oskar lifted the sack—it weighed about a hundred pounds, was probably about two bushels. He had hoped to get another twenty-five pounds for his five silver dollars. He tried two English words: “No more?”

  The clerk shook his head. “No! This is cheap because of cash.”

  Karl Oskar could only comfort himself with the thought that the sack would be easier to carry; he should be able to manage only two bushels. He swung the sack onto his back.

  “Too heavy to carry! Have you oxen outside?” asked the clerk.

  Karl Oskar heard the word oxen, the clerk must think he had a team outside; he shook his head, “No, no—farväl!” In his confusion, he said good-by to the clerk in Swedish.

  Karl Oskar Nilsson started on his way home from Stillwater with a hundred pounds of flour on his back. Now the weather was clear and colder. There was no wind, the snow crunched and squeaked under his booted feet, all indications were for strong frost tonight.

  He stopped to pull on his woolen mittens. As always here, the change in weather had come on suddenly; no one could have guessed in the morning that it would freeze before night. He had left his thick wadmal coat at home and wore only his short sheepskin jacket, as it was easier to walk when dressed lightly. Now he regretted not having brought the heavy coat as well.

  In the store he had handled the flour sack like a light burden, swinging it onto his back with the greatest of ease. And during the first part of his return walk he was little aware of its weight. But after a few miles the sack began to sag down his back, he felt it against his thighs; time and again he stopped to shove it up onto his shoulder. The sack grew heavier the longer he walked; the flour seemed to increase in weight the farther he got from the store.

  He had carried sacks twice as heavy in Sweden, but never such a long distance; the more he thought about it, the more he realized that this was rather a heavy burden for such a long road. Apparently he must pay twice for his flour—first in money, then in bachache.

  The crooked sled tracks showed him the way through the forest; here and there on the glittering snow lay fresh ox dung, like dark loaves of bread on a white platter, and here and there were yellow stains from ox urine; axes could be heard at a distance, a logging camp must be close by.

  The sack grew heavier, his right boot chafed his heel, the cold increased. But Karl Oskar gave himself no time to sit down and rest, he tramped on; he must not lose time, he hurried his steps to cover the stretch between the end of the logging road and Lake Ki-Chi-Saga before dusk; once at the lake he could follow the shore all the way home, but he had several miles yet to walk through deep wilderness, and he would have trouble finding his way after dark.

  The logging road came to an end. From here on he had only his own tracks of the morning to follow. Some snow must have fallen in the forenoon, in places his tracks were filled up.

  Mostly he kept his eyes on his own boot prints but he found familiar landmarks—he passed a deserted wigwam; as soon as he reached the brook with the wind-fallen oak trunk over it, he would be close to the lake.

  Karl Oskar walked on, his boots crunching in the snow; he struggled with his sack up steep hills, down inclines, he forced his way through thorny thickets, he bent low under trees and branches, with the sack on his back. Dusk fell sooner than he had expected, and he found it more and more difficult to follow the tracks which showed him the way. The frost sharpened, his fingers went numb inside the thick mittens; his boot still chafed his heel, and the sack sagged all the way down to his legs. The sack would not follow him docilely any longer, it crept down below his waist, down the back of his legs, it wanted to get down on the ground. He felt the sack on his shoulders, on his back, against his legs, his knees, in his feet, in his hands.

  After a few hours’ walk the flour weighed two hundred pounds—had they given him four bushels instead of two? And he had yet a long way to go—his burden would grow heavier still.

  The cloak of darkness spread quickly among the trees, it soon grew so dense that he could not see the marks of his steps from the morning. The snow shone white; otherwise everything in the forest was black, dark as the inside of a barrel with the lid on. No longer did Karl Oskar waste his time in looking for his earlier tracks; he followed his nose, he tried to walk northward; to the north lay the lake, and at the lake lay his home.

  But he hadn’t yet come to the brook with the tree trunk over it, and this began to worry him; he had crossed the brook quite a stretch after leaving the lake shore
. What had happened to the brook? It was frozen over so he couldn’t hear it.

  Now he walked more slowly, plodding along among the trees. In the dark he could not see the low-hanging branches which hindered his path, snatching at the flour sack on his back like so many evil arms. He held on to his burden with stiff, mittened fingers; time and again he tore his face on twigs and thorns, he could not see in front of him. There would be a moon later, the stars already shone brightly, twinkling through the tall treetops. But nothing lighted his way except the snow, and the snow no longer showed him the way by his morning footprints—not even with the stars out.

  The wanderer struggled through the dark with the flour on his bent back. But he did not reach a lake, he did not find a brook, and the forest grew thicker around him. He had not brought his watch—he never brought it along on walks in the forest for fear he might lose it—and he did not know how much time he had spent on the homeward trek. But many hours must have elapsed since he had left the logging road; if he had followed the right path he ought to have reached Lake Ki-Chi-Saga long ago.

  At each step he hoped to see the forest come to an end, he hoped to see a white field—the snow-covered lake surface. As soon as this happened he would only have to follow a shore line until he reached a newly built log cabin where his wife and children were waiting for him. But instead he seemed to go deeper and deeper into the forest.

  He repeated to himself, over and over: If I walk straight ahead, I must come to the lake. I’m walking straight forward, I’m on the right road! But the hours went by and the thick forest around him testified to his mistake.

  At last the stiff fingers inside the mittens lost their hold: Karl Oskar let his sack drop onto the snow and sat down on it. The truth had now been forced upon him: he was wandering aimlessly, he did not know in what direction home was—he was lost.