At any rate, the dean had done his duty as teacher and pastor. And he was pretty sure this farmer would be alone in his America ideas. This desire for emigration among the peasantry, which had broken out here and there throughout the kingdom, would probably die down as quickly as it had flared up. Twenty years from now there would be no one in the land with a mind to emigrate.
“You shall have your papers!”
A silence ensued. Only the quill’s scratching against the paper was heard from the desk. Karl Oskar took a step backward, as if wishing to leave the dean undisturbed with his writing.
Dean Brusander turned and handed the farmer the extract from the parish register.
“Once I gave you Christian baptism. Once I prepared you for the Lord’s Supper. I’ve baptized your children. Now I pray God to bless you and yours during your voyage to a faraway land. May you never regret your bold decision!”
Karl Oskar bowed. “Thank you, Mr. Dean.”
Brusander extended his hand. “May you be within God’s protection! Such was the blessing of our forebears at times of parting.”
“Thank you most kindly, Mr. Dean.”
And Karl Oskar bowed once more, this time perhaps deeper than he had ever bowed to the dean before. After all, it was the last time he would bow to his parish pastor.
Dean Brusander wrote a few words in the parish register, words which he never before had written about any one of his parishioners: he noted that homeowner Karl Oskar Nilsson of Korpamoen, on the twenty-eighth of March, 1850, had requested extracts from the records for himself and his household for emigration to N. America.
And the remaining blank pages in the parish register were in time to be filled with the repeated notation: “Moved to N. America.” Through years and decades they were to be filled, page after page, with the names of Karl Oskar Nilsson’s followers.
XI. ONE EMIGRANT PAYS NO FARE
— 1—
In the newspaper Barometern, to which some of the farmers in the village subscribed, there appeared early in spring a news item about a lost emigrant ship: “Owing to absence of communications of any kind, one is now forced to admit the sad foundering and total loss of the small schooner Betty Catharina, built in 1835, measuring 80 lasts, on voyage from Söderhamn to New York. The schooner had taken on a load of pig iron in Söderhamn. On board the vessel were 70 emigrants who had left their fatherland to seek a precarious living in a foreign country. The Betty Catharina sailed through the straits of Öre Sund on April the 15th of last year but since that date her owner, the firm P. C. Rettig et Cie., has had no word from her. Since now almost a year has passed without the slightest information as to the ship’s whereabouts, notice of the deaths of the crew — nine men — has been published in their respective home communities. The ship’s Master was Captain Anders Otto Rönning. The emigrants came from different parishes in Helsingland; among them were 25 women and 20 children.”
This copy of the paper was widely read in the village, and no wonder, in those days; it was even lent to families who did not subscribe. Berta of Idemo brought it to Korpamoen, and Kristina read about the ship whose sailing time was supposed to be about five weeks yet after fifty weeks had not reached her destination. The Betty Catharina’s passengers had not arrived in a new land; they had emigrated to the bottom of the ocean.
A stab of pain went through Kristina’s heart as she tucked in her three little ones that evening—“. . among them were 25 women and 20 children.” All her earlier anxiety returned and pressed upon her. The children were left in her care by God — wasn’t she an irresponsible mother to take her helpless little ones out in a fragile ship to cross the forbidding ocean? She did not fear for her own life; but had she the right to endanger her children? If they went down with the ship, then it was she who drowned them, and God would ask accounting for them on the Day of Judgment: How did you look after your children? What did you do with them? Who forced you out on the ocean? Weren’t you warned of the danger?
Wasn’t the notice of the lost ship a last warning from God, arriving as it did on the eve of their departure?
Karl Oskar said that most people on land died in their beds, yet people went to bed every evening. Only fools were frightened by stories of wrecks. Robert wasn’t afraid either. He wasn’t old enough, he didn’t have his mature senses as yet. As if it were a pleasure to him, he now read a horrible piece to Kristina from his History of Nature, about “The Billows of the Sea.”
“Because water is a liquid which can be stirred up, so it is also moved by wind and storm. This causes billows which are great or small depending on the wind’s intensity and the size and depths of the sea. In heavy storms on the great seas the billows rise above each other to a height of thirty or forty feet; then they fall down with unbelievable power and crush all in their way. When such a huge billow falls over a ship it may break away large pieces of the vessel, splinter yard-thick masts, yea, even fill the whole ship with water, making it sink immediately.”
“Think of it, Kristina!” exclaimed Robert excitedly. “Waves three times as high as this house!”
“Are you trying to make me feel better about the voyage?”
And she couldn’t help smiling at the boy. He didn’t care what might happen as long as he became free and got out into the world. But he had only his own life to account for.
Kristina did not wish to approach Karl Oskar with her worries. She had once agreed that all should be as he decided, and she couldn’t take back her words. He had once and for all assumed responsibility for their emigration. She liked to lean on him and have confidence in him. He was headstrong and stubborn, but she liked a husband who could order and decide for her at times; what woman would be satisfied with a weakling, a shillyshallying husband? All the men in the Nilsa family, born with the big nose, were said to have been like Karl Oskar; unafraid, perhaps even a little refractory, not to be swayed, never yielding. Of all the men she knew, Karl Oskar was the one who most definitely knew what he wanted, and because of this she liked him.
Kristina had not felt well lately; she was weak and had lost her appetite. At first she thought this might be caused by her worrying about the America journey. But when — on getting out of bed one morning — she had to run outside behind the gable and throw up, she knew how things stood with her. She had had this ailment before, four times. It always followed the same course: her monthly bleeding was delayed beyond its time, then came weakness, loss of appetite, worry and mental depression; and at last the vomiting, as a final confirmation. Everything fitted in, there was no longer any doubt, she was pregnant again.
She had feared a new pregnancy. She still gave the breast to the little one and intended to continue to suckle him — Berta of Idemo had said that women would not become pregnant while still suckling a baby. Berta herself had suckled each of her children three years, and within a month after stopping each time she had become pregnant again. It had never failed. Occasionally there might be a wife in the neighborhood who suckled her children until they started school; when the children had to eat from food baskets they must stop suckling and eat the food of grownups. Rarely did it happen that a mother went with her child to school in order to feed it from her breast in between lessons; children who didn’t stop suckling at school age were usually dull-witted; they hung on to their mother’s apron-strings, always hungry, always pulling up a chair for her to sit on.