One night toward the end of August Kristina was awakened by a great thunder. She was afraid of storms and she called her husband.
Karl Oskar sat up in bed and listened. It rumbled and thundered, and lightning flashed past the window. Shirt-clad only, he ran to stand on the porch, hands outstretched. An occasional fat raindrop fell; once it began there would be heavy showers. He could go back to bed and sleep again in the blissful knowledge that there would be rain.
He returned inside. Kristina was comforting the children, awake and frightened by the lightning and thunder.
Anna, the oldest child, was now in her fourth year and all were of the opinion that she had a mind far ahead of her years. She was wont to follow Karl Oskar in his work outside, close to him everywhere; if he drove or walked, the child was with him. He called her his big helper. Wise as an eight-year-old, he said.
The thunder boomed again, and Anna asked: “Will the lightning kill us tonight, Mother?”
“No! What nonsense! Who has given you such an idea?”
“Father. He said we are to die — all of us.”
“Yes, yes, but not tonight.”
“When will we die, Mother?”
“No one knows, no one except God. Go back to sleep now!”
And Kristina’s eyes turned questioningly to Karl Oskar: What had he said to the child? He smiled and explained. When he had gone with Anna through the pastures recently they had found a dead baby rabbit, and then she had asked if they were to become like the rabbit, if they were all to die. He had replied in the affirmative. He could not lie about such things to a child. But ever after the girl asked whomsoever she met when they were to die. The other day she had embarrassed her grandmother with the same question. He had had to assure his mother that the question was the child’s own idea. She was a strange child, Anna.
Karl Oskar was very proud of this daughter, his big girl.
A clap of thunder sounded, louder than before, and the lightning pierced their eyes, sharp and blinding.
Kristina let out a shriek.
“Did it strike?”
“If so, it was near.”
But the heavy rain was slow in coming; only an occasional few drops smote the windowpanes. Karl Oskar could not help the rain to fall, and he went back to bed. Before he was asleep the window was again brilliant, with a new light; but this time it was not lightning cutting through the dark and disappearing. This time the light remained, mobile and flickering.
The young farmer leapt up.
“There is a fire!”
“My dear God!”
“It’s burning somewhere!”
As Karl Oskar reached the window he could see that the light came from the hay meadow.
“The meadow barn! The meadow barn has caught on fire!”
He ran outside, only half dressed, followed by his wife. By now Nils and Märta also had awakened in their room, and Kristina called to them to look after the children.
Karl Oskar ran to the well where two water buckets stood filled from the forest spring; he thrust one bucket at his wife and they rushed down the meadow with a pail each in their hands. The water splashed to and fro, and when they arrived at the burning hay barn hardly more than half of it was left. Nor did it matter; the fire by now had reached such proportions that a couple of buckets of water would be of no help. The whole barn was burning, flames leaping high from the dry shingled roof which went up like tinder. A fierce, voracious lightning-fire was burning, and it had found delicious fare: an old dry barn filled with the harvested hay.
The owners of the hay barn — the young farm couple — approached the fire as closely as they could for the heat. They stood there, water pails in their hands, and watched the fire; they just stood and watched, like a pair of surprised, amazed children listening to a cruel and horrible tale which — God be praised — could not be true.
People from neighboring farms had already seen the fire and come running. They too soon realized it would be hopeless to try to stop this fire. The conflagration had the barn within its scorching jaws — no one could hinder it from swallowing its’ prey.
Luckily, there was no wind. But the neighbors remained to see that the fire did not spread; what might not happen once it were loose in the drought-dry woods?
Already the rain was over; a few heavy drops had fallen, hardly enough to wet the stones on the ground.
Swiftly the meadow barn was burned, and hay and all became embers and sullen ashes. Karl Oskar and Kristina walked back to the farmhouse; there had been nothing for them to do, they had done nothing. On the way home they walked quite slowly, they did not run, nothing was urgent any more. In their hands they still carried their buckets, half full of water; without thinking, they, carried the water home again.
At the meadow stile they met Nils on his way to the fire, hobbling on his crutches. He had managed half the way when his son and daughter-in-law told him to turn back. But he sat down on the stile to rest; for many years he had not walked so far from the house.
Watching the fire, Karl Oskar and Kristina had not exchanged a single word. They had only looked at each other a few times; perhaps they had been thinking the same thoughts.
Now on the way home Kristina said, “Do you remember the harvest this summer? When you threw the hay upwards?”
“Yes.”
“It happened as you asked.”
Karl Oskar kept silent; he could find no answer.
She continued: “It was the punishment. God allows no mockery.”
Karl Oskar in Korpamoen walked back to his home carrying his bucket. He walked with bent head and looked at the ground. What Kristina had said was true. This time the Lord had answered his prayer — He had taken the rest of the hay.
— 2—
The east wind blew and no rain fell. Those who could read in the book of the future predicted that rain would never fall again. Last time the Lord had wished to destroy mankind through flood, now He intended to do it through drought, and this time no Noah would be saved with wife and children to propagate a new race.
Karl Oskar sowed his winter rye on the fallow land, strewn with hard clods of earth — gray, lumpy, and unfertile as a field of crushed stone. Even below the topsoil the earth was scorched. It seemed futile planting here, he might as well sow in the ashes of his hearth. Last spring he had sown four bushels of barley in one field; now in autumn he harvested four bushels in return. What did he gain by all his work? Why should he plant seed corn in the earth when the earth did not multiply it? Nothing would germinate here before the rains came and loosed the hard crust of the field.
He entrusted the seed rye to his field without confidence; he had lost his confidence in the earth. Who could tell if it would bring him one single grain in return? It might have been wiser to grind the seed corn and make bread of it.
When God drove the first man from paradise He said: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. No words in the Bible were more true than these, for Karl Oskar. The Lord had also said to Adam that the earth would bring forth to him thorns and thistles. Hadn’t he pulled up thistles in every field of this his stone kingdom until his back ached? The Bible’s words were still in force, at least as far as the local fields were concerned.
It was rumored that rain had fallen in other places, in other parishes and counties. But here the earth was accursed.