The leave-taking from the relatives took little time. Lydia had a day off to say farewell to her brothers. Karl Oskar called his sister aside and begged her to look after their parents, particularly later as they grew older and couldn’t manage for themselves: he would pay her for this. Märta took each of her grandchildren into her arms and said: “May God protect and keep you, you helpless little creature!” The sons shook hands with their parents, a bit awkwardly, perhaps shamefacedly, almost like little boys who had been disobedient but were embarrassed to ask forgiveness. Neither one of them had ever said that he intended to return. Now Karl Oskar remarked, with an attempt at a smile, that when he had earned enough money in America he would come home and buy the manor at Kråkesjö, and for his sister Lydia he would buy back Korpamoen. All knew he was joking, but no one smiled. Nils and Märta felt they were seeing their sons for the last time this bleak April morning.
Kristina had already said goodby to her parents, a few days earlier in Duvemåla. She had not cried while there, but returning home she had been unable to hold back the tears any longer as she thought of her mother’s parting words: “Remember, my dear daughter, I wish to meet you with God.”
All that they owned in this world was now on the wagon. The load was high and wide, with the two large sacks on top; yet Karl Oskar thought there was room for more — it still didn’t reach the sky!
Nils and Märta stood on the stoop.
“Drive carefully through the gate,” said Nils to the boy who drove. Those were the last words his departing sons heard him utter. And the admonition was pertinent: the gate was narrow for such a broad wagon, the steering shaft caught one of the posts, and the team with the load could barely make it through the gate.
“Everything is narrow, here at home!” said Robert.
Karl Oskar was sitting next to the driver with Johan on his knee. Kristina sat behind with the smaller children, who in spite of the early hour were fully awake, looking about them with their clear eyes. Robert sat on the horses’ hay sack on top of the load.
As they reached the village road Karl Oskar turned a last time and looked toward the house: his father and mother were still on the porch, watching the departing ones — his father gnarled and stooped and hanging on his crutches, his mother close by her husband’s side, tall, her back straight. Here on the wagon sat the young ones, departing — there stood the old ones, left behind.
Karl Oskar could not see either of his parents make the slightest movement. As they stood there on the stoop, looking after the wagon, they seemed to him as still and immobile as dead, earth-bound things, as a pair of high stones in the field or a couple of tree trunks in the forest, deeply rooted in the ground. It was as if they had assumed that position once and for all, and intended to hold it forever. And as he saw them in the half-mist, this early morning, so they were forever to return to his mind: Father and Mother, standing quietly together on the stoop, looking after a cart driving through the gate and onto the road and after a minute disappearing among the junipers at the bend. In that place and in that position his parents would always remain in his mind. After many years he would still see them standing there, close together, looking out on the road, immobile objects, two human sculptures in stone.
Kristina did not mention to Karl Oskar that she had happened to hear a remark by Nils as the wagon was ready to depart: “I must go outside and behold my sons’ funeral procession.”
— 2—
The spring was late this year; the ground lay frozen still. There had been a freeze during the night, and the April morning was chilly; the sky was overcast and it was not yet full daylight. The load was heavy but the wheels rolled lightly on the frozen road.
From his high seat on the hay sack Robert could see the horses’ manes waving below him like young birches in the wind. Their strong-muscled necks rose and sank at regular intervals, their hairy flanks moved in soft billows, and the sharp horseshoes cut sparks from the stones in the road. Anticipation without measure filled his breast: this was no ordinary mill-wagon, this was not a slow timber load, nor was it a depressing Sunday church carriage. At last he was riding the chariot of adventure.
He would reach the sea tomorrow.
They passed Nybacken, and as the wagon gained speed downhill on the other side of the farm, Robert began to whistle. He could not hold back any longer, and his brother and sister-in-law said nothing about it.
He whistled a piece again as they passed the parsonage: he wondered if it could be considered sacrilegious. He had not asked for his papers, and he could hear the dean call his name at all the yearly examinations: Farmhand Robert Nilsson, not heard from since 1850. And the dean would write: Whereabouts unknown. After ten or twenty years it would still be written about him: Whereabouts unknown.
Every time they came to a gate on the road Robert jumped down to open it. Before they reached Åkerby Junction he had opened five. He counted them carefully, he was to be gate-boy, he must count all the gates on the road to America.
The road also went through pasturelands, where the gates had been removed for the winter; but Robert still counted the openings as gates on the America road — if their emigration had been delayed a month, these gates too would have been closed.
Lill-Märta and Harald had gone to sleep in their mother’s arms, rocked to sleep by the movement of the wagon, Johan played driver, holding on to one rein and shouting at the horses. Karl Oskar and Kristina sat silent and serious, their eyes tarrying on well-known places: this is the brook with the swimming hole, we are passing it for the last time; in this meadow we will never see the lilies of the valley in spring again. We want to remember what these places are like, we are anxious to remember them — they were once part of our youth. .
The emigrants had agreed to meet at Åkerby Junction, and the other wagons awaited them there. Danjel of Kärragärde had hired a team from Kråkesjö. He too had a heavy load — his wife, his four children, and Ulrika of Västergöhl. Jonas Petter of Hästebäck drove his own single-horse wagon and was accompanied by his hired man, who was to drive the horse back from Karlshamn. Two of the people from Kärragärde, unable to find room on Danjel’s wagon, rode with Jonas Petter — the farmhand Arvid, and Ulrika’s daughter Elin.
The wagon from Korpamoen had, besides its load, four full-grown persons, and Jonas Petter thought it should be made lighter; Robert therefore moved over to him and found a seat between the driver and Elin. Behind him, next to Jonas Petter’s hired man, sat Arvid, who now welcomed Robert with a broad grin; the two farmhands from Nybacken were journeying together to the New World after all. Otherwise things weren’t going as they had planned during their nightly combats with the bedbugs in Aron’s stable room: they didn’t sneak away in secrecy on a load of timber, nor were they alone on their journey.
There were nineteen of them at the meeting at Åkerby Junction this morning. Three drivers were to return from Karlshamn. The emigrants were sixteen, nine grownups and seven children. Together they made a suitably large family, said Jonas Petter as he counted them. But who was to be head of the family?
All looked at Karl Oskar. He said he could hardly be head of them all, he was the youngest of the three farmers.
“You are the oldest one, Jonas Petter.”
“But you were the first one to decide on this journey, Karl Oskar. I was the last one.”
The loaded wagons started moving again, toward the province of Blekinge. Jonas Petter drove first, he knew the roads, and Robert continued to jump off and open gates. They drove a wagon length apart and mostly at a slow trot, or letting the horses walk to save their strength, as it was fifty long miles to Karlshamn. On steep downgrades they kept still farther apart, to give the horses more room.