How had the wife Inga-Lena Andersdotter used her life — the forty years that had been given to her? A funeral officiant on a crowded emigrant ship could seldom know anything about those over whom he read his prayers. His passengers had been removed from their parish registers on leaving home, and had not yet been recorded elsewhere. They were registered nowhere — the emigrants on his ship were homeless, they had no plot in a churchyard. Only the sea opened its depths to them. The sea had room for all of them.
These peasants often feared death at sea, because of the final resting place — they wanted to be put in consecrated ground, and the ocean was not consecrated. But they were caught in deep superstition: this water where so many good seamen had found their graves ought to be a good enough resting place for the wretched land-rats.
Perhaps the wife Inga-Lena Andersdotter had died, too, in fear of the unconsecrated burial place of the ocean. Her forty years she had lived on solid ground, bending over the earth in her potato furrows and barley fields, poking in pens and manure piles, tramping between byre and barn. Yet she would find rest in the sea, in the most extended churchyard in the world, where nothing marked the graves. She would not be registered anywhere — she was an emigrant who had failed to reach her destination, a wanderer in the world.
But this peasant woman had still left her mark after her on earth: she had borne four new citizens for the North American republic.
With his stiff fingers, wasted and gray from the salt of the sea, Captain Lorentz picked up his pen to add a few lines on the small paper: “Died June 17, 1850, on board the brig Charlotta of Karlshamn, on voyage to New York. Certified, Christian Lorentz, Master.”
— 2—
It was a calm and beautiful June morning on the Atlantic Ocean. The emigrant vessel sailed with a feeble southerly breeze. The sun mirrored itself in the water, its rays reflected like burning flames. This morning at sea the emigrants had their first feeling of summer.
A group of passengers were gathered on the Charlotta’s afterdeck. The people stood in a semicircle around an improvised bier: a few planks had been laid upon two low sawhorses, and on these was placed an oblong bundle wrapped in canvas. The emigrants had donned their Sunday best — the men, gray or black wadmal jackets; the older women wore silk kerchiefs. Those of the crew who were free mingled with the passengers.
The men stood bareheaded, the women’s covered heads were bowed. All faces reflected the gravity of the moment. They were an immobile, solidified group of people, gathered around the bundle on the improvised bier. A human body was wrapped in the white canvas; the bier leaned toward the water, the feet touching the rail.
The Charlotta’s flag was lowered to half-mast. The captain emerged from his cabin and issued a quick order: the mainsail was braced, reducing the slow speed of the ship to almost nothing, hardly enough for steering. The brig Charlotta’s voyage was delayed for the sake of a human corpse on the afterdeck this beautiful summer morning.
The captain had exchanged his oilskins for a black redingote; on his bare head his thick gray hair now lay smoothly combed. He went to the head of the bier, then looked for a moment into the rigging as if to see how his ship carried her sails. Under his arm he held a prayerbook. As he opened it the emigrants folded their hands and their faces took on — if possible — a still more serious mien.
Captain Lorentz turned a few pages in his prayerbook, turned them back again, made a jerky, impatient movement with his shoulders when he was unable immediately to locate the place: he must remember to turn the page at “How to Bury a Corpse.” And what was the number of the hymn they were to sing?
While he was looking for the prayer he happened to notice the man standing beside him: a small peasant with a bushy brown beard. He remembered that man well. The first day out he had stumbled on him praying on deck. Now the little man held a baby in his arms; beside him stood three other children. Together they were four children and a father.
Lorentz quickly turned his eyes away from this group and looked about him on the deck. There was something he needed — there, at his feet, it stood, the wooden bushel measure half filled with earth. In it was stuck a small shovel, resembling a winnowing scoop.
He found the page in the prayerbook and began to read. His voice was clear and resonant, trained during many years at sea to rise above the roar of the waves and the storms:
“O Lord God! Thou Who for the sake of sin lettest people die and return to earth again, teach us to remember that we must die, and thereby gain understanding. . ”
Now all the people present held their hands folded, in reverence they bent their heads and listened to the words of the prayerbook. The ocean’s water played softly against the side of the ship, a breath of air lifted a few tufts of hair on the captain’s uncovered head. With the last words someone was heard sobbing, but the sound was quickly drowned in the captain’s powerful voice.
The seagulls had returned, and they swarmed this morning in large flocks through the rigging. Life was again visible on the sea.
The funeral officiant took up a hymn. It began haltingly, and he had to sing half of the first stanza alone. But gradually the people joined in — slowly as the rolling of the ship the singing proceeded:
“You wicked world, farewell!
To heaven fares my soul,
To reach her harbor goal. .”
When the last notes of the hymn had rung out over the sea, the captain bent down and from the bushel at his feet picked up the little scoop. Three times he filled it with the earth his ship carried with her from the homeland, three times he emptied it over the dead body in front of him. With a soft thud the soil fell on the canvas. But heavy and terrifying fell the captain’s words over the bent heads of the people: “Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return. Jesus Christ shall awaken thee on the Day of Judgment! Let us pray.”
Heavy was the truth, but the prayer was a mild comfort. Someone cried out at the words “Day of Judgment.” It was not a cry of hope, it sounded rather like a bird’s eerie and hopeless cry. It might be a sea bird calling, and some of the people turned their eyes toward the rigging — it might be a gull disturbing the solemnity of the funeral. But the cry did not come from a hungry seagull — it came from a child.
On the canvas-covered bundle there still remained the sprinkling of earth, three unshapely little mounds with a few pinches of mold in each, three ugly gray-black spots on the clean white cloth. But before the captain had finished reading the ritual, the lighter particles of earth separated from the mounds and trickled down the side. With the bier leaning toward the rail, toward the water beyond, some earth ran slowly across the rail, into the sea.
This was soil that had traveled a long way. It came from the land where the feet of the dead one had tramped the earth during her forty years, where she had struggled with her potato baskets and her barley sheaves, where she had carried milk pails and water buckets, where she — in concern for the food of her dear ones — had locked the larder every evening, where she had lived out her summers and her winters, all her autumns and springs — all except this single spring, when she had followed her mate out on the sea. It was a little earth from Sweden, a little of the three shovelfuls which accompany the words about creation, destruction, and the resurrection, which now trickled into the sea as if anxious to reach it before the human body which had just been consigned to its watery grave.
But no one noticed the movement on the canvas. As the grains of earth separated and rolled on their way the group now sang the second and last hymn of the rituaclass="underline"