The day before Christmas Eve, that year, Kristina gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The boy was sickly and was given emergency baptism by Dean Brusander; he died within a fortnight. The girl lived and was christened Märta, after Karl Oskar’s mother. She would afterwards be known as Lill-Märta.
After three years in Korpamoen Karl Oskar had now one cow less in the byre and seventy riksdaler more debt than at the time of taking over. And yet during every day of the three years both he and Kristina had worked and drudged to their utmost ability. They had struggled to get ahead, yet it had gone backwards for them. They could not sway the Lord’s weather, nor luck with the animals. Karl Oskar had thought they would be able to get along if they had health and strength to work; now they were aware that man in this world could not succeed through his work alone.
“It’s written, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread,’” said Nils.
“Aye — nor am I even sure to get bread through work and sweat,” retorted Karl Oskar.
Karl Oskar, as well as his father, knew the story of the Fall from his Biblical history; the dean used to praise him for his quick answers at the yearly examinations.
Karl Oskar had got what he wanted, but it wasn’t good for a person always to have his will. Most people thought he was a man with luck and of good fortune. He had two royal names, given him at baptism and formally recorded. He had the big Nilsa-nose—“Your nose is your greatest heritage,” his father used to say. But what help now were the names of kings and princes? What help now was a nose that extended a little further into the world than another’s? The day still seemed approaching when Sheriff Lönnegren might arrive at the farm and take something in pawn.
During his younger years Karl Oskar had often been teased by other boys about the big nose which distorted his face. He had always answered that it was the best nose he had. And he had believed his parents’ stories about members of the family in generations gone by from whom his nose had been inherited — he had always believed it would bring him good fortune in life. Kristina did not think his nose was ugly; it would have been different in a woman, she thought, but menfolk it suited. She did not believe, however, that his big nose would have anything to do with his success in life. That would be a heathenish thought. Kristina sprang from a religious home, and she knew that God shifted people as He saw fit, according to His inscrutable and wise ways. Since they now suffered adversity in Korpamoen, this was only in accord with God’s will.
— 6—
So began the year 1848. Karl Oskar had bought an almanac from the schoolmaster, Rinaldo, for four shillings. He now read that the year was the five thousand eight hundred and fiftieth from the creation of the world. It was also the forty-eighth since “the High Birth of Oskar the First’s Majesty and the fourth since Its Ascendance on the Throne.” It was also the fourth of Karl Oskar’s possession and farming of Korpamoen.
He read about the movements and appearance of the greater planets in the new year. He was familiar with the constellations whose signs were printed in the almanac for each day: the ram, with his great bowed horns, the scorpion, with its horrible claws, the lion, with his wide and beastly jaws, and the virgin, so narrow around the waist and holding a wreath of flowers. Weather and wind and perhaps also the destiny of man depended on the meeting of the wandering planets with these constellations.
Before the close of the old year people had already noticed alarming signs: wide parts of the Milky Way where the stars used to shine clear and brilliant were now nebulous and dark — the heavenly lights had disappeared. This could mean war and unrest, rebellion and dire times, sickness and pestilence. Intense cold and a “crow’s winter” set in before Christmas; those who ventured out to the early service on Christmas morning came home with frozen ears. New Year’s Day opjened with high winds; the steeple in Elmeboda blew down, and also the great mountain ash at Åkerby Junction, and this the thickest tree along the whole church road. On the exposed wastelands where the spruce were poorly rooted in the sandy soil the wind mowed along like a sharpened scythe in morning-dewed grass. And Noah’s Ark, which had not been seen since the dry year of 1817, appeared again in the heavens, with all its sinister majesty. The Ark was formed by clouds stretching from east to west, thereby obstructing all running waters and streams and preventing rainfall for the coming year.
Throughout the winter and spring there were strange portents in the weather. February was warm, while the spring month of March was windy, dry, and cold. The winter rye fared ilclass="underline" wide gaping stretches appeared in otherwise green fields after the winter snow had melted.
During the last week of April — the grass month — it seemed as if at last spring had arrived. And early in the morning of May Day Eve Karl Oskar pulled out the wooden harrow from its shed, intending to begin the preparation of the fields for the sowing. Then it started to snow; it snowed the whole day; in the evening a foot of snow covered the ground. The cattle recently had been let out to graze; they must now be put in their stalls again. The April snow covered flowers and grass which had only begun to grow. Again, the spring had frozen away.
Karl Oskar pulled the harrow back into the shed. He sat silent at the food table this May Day Eve, and went to bed with a heavy heart. As far back as men could remember it had never boded so ill for the crops as during this peculiar spring.
The young couple in Korpamoen lay together under the cover, the one Kristina had stitched. It had now warmed them at their rest during four years — more than a thousand nights. Many of these nights Karl Oskar had lain awake, thinking about the mortgage interest, and in many of these nights Kristina had risen to quiet the children when they awoke and cried. Four springs had stood green, four autumnal stubble fields had been turned since for the first time they enjoyed the embrace of man and woman under the cornflower-blue bridal quilt.
That evening in the autumn, when they had sat together on the potato basket in Idemo, now seemed so long ago — it might have been an experience in another world. It belonged to their youth, and they spoke of their youth as something long gone by; they had been young before they were married, and that was once upon a time.
Karl Oskar had recently had his twenty-fifth birthday; Kristina would soon be twenty-three. Not so long ago she was a child herself; now she had brought four children into the world. Three lived and slept now in this room; she listened to their breathing, ever anxious.
Kristina thought at times about the happenings of her young life and the relation of events. If she hadn’t fallen from the swing in the barn at home in Duvemåla, and injured her knee, she would never have gone to Berta in Idemo to seek a cure for gangrene. Then she would never have met Karl Oskar and they would never have become a married couple. They would not have owned and farmed Korpamoen together, and she would not have had four children by him. Nor would they lie together here tonight under the bridal cover which she had made. She would not have Anna, Johan, and Lill-Märta, those three small beings sleeping so close to them.
Everything important in her life had happened because once she had made a swing from an ox-thong, at home with her parents, and had fallen from it. God surely had willed that she put up the swing; He it was who had directed all this for her.