The Indian was mourning. He was mourning his people’s decline. From his elevated position he looked out over the hunting grounds his kinfolk never more were to use, the clear lakes that never more would carry their canoes, he saw the islands and shores where their campfires never more would be lit.
Above Ki-Chi-Saga’s water the Indian rose, rigid and silent in his sorrow, the prisoner chained in stone. He did not weep human tears, it was not water that flowed from his eyes, it was not drops of an evanescent fluid. He shed tears of stone — indestructible, eternal as the cliff itself. In these was his complaint — his sorrow over his people’s destruction, their decay and death. A new race had come to take the place of the vanquished.
Thus one people obliterates another from the face of the earth, and the earth sucks the blood of the dead, and turns green and blossoms as before for the living.
The Indian head still stands, green-wreathed in summer, bare and naked in winter. From his eyes still fall the boulders that gather at his feet. In his eternal petrification the Indian to this day mourns his dead.
XVIII. ONE MAN DID NOT WISH TO SUBMIT
— 1—
The unforgettable year of the Sioux uprising came to its close and another began its cycle.
In the oldest homestead on Chisago Lake, they were one less in the family; there was no longer a wife or mother. The survivors tried to divide the chores of the dead one among them, but all the things she alone knew how to do remained undone. They were, and remained, one less in the house, a wife and a mother.
Better news came from the world outside. For two years only defeats for the North in the Civil War had been reported, but now they could read in the papers of victories for the Union soldiers. Already in the spring the news was good, and at haying time — in the beginning of July — a still greater victory was announced. It had taken place in Pennsylvania, near a town called Gettysburg. The battle was the most important in the whole Civil War, said the papers, predicting that the rebels would give up before the year was out. Earlier in the year President Lincoln had proclaimed all Negroes free from slavery.
But the rebels were not defeated, they won new victories, and at the end of this year also the war was still on. Now the North needed soldiers to replace those who had fallen, and at last conscription was resorted to.
To Karl Oskar Nilsson the conscription brought no change. Once rejected he need not go, nor need he send a man in his place, as many ablebodied men did.
The North still had plenty of men to fill the vacancies left by the dead, but in the South the manpower was running low, and that was why no one up north any longer feared the war would be lost.
There were settlers at Chisago Lake who would just as soon see the human slaughter go on forever. During the Civil War the merchants made good profits. Klas Albert, Karl Oskar’s neighbor in Sweden, bragged that he had sold an old inventory at unexpectedly high prices. He could never have disposed of it except for the Civil War. Karl Oskar told him he ought to go to the war himself since he was strong and ablebodied and a bachelor besides. But Klas Albert replied that no one in his right mind would go to war unless he were forced, and he was still of sound mind. And when conscription was put in effect he hired his clerk to do the service for him.
The Swedish church warden’s Klas Albert had, in a short time, prospered out here and was now Mr. C. A. Persson, owner of the biggest store in Center City. All day long customers thronged to his counter and money rolled in as fast as he could handle it. He had found an occupation that suited him, and in the right country. None of the emigrants from Ljuder was as successful as Mr. Persson.
Karl Oskar was prejudiced against all merchants and did not like Klas Albert too much. He felt he grew rich on his fellow immigrants. Whether he bought or sold, he always managed it to his own advantage, and if the farmers hadn’t brought forth from the earth the things he bought and sold he would have had nothing to profit from.
— 2—
The earliest settler at Chisago Lake changed to a remarkable degree after his wife’s death. He had always preferred to keep silent rather than speak unnecessarily and now he grew ever stingier with his words. At home, he divided the chores among his children and explained how to perform them, praised them when something was well done, scolded them when they were careless or negligent. Aside from this he seldom spoke. And even outside the home he became known as sparing of words. He would have less and less to do with people, he resigned from all his activities for the county and the parish. From now on he would not be a spokesman for others, only attend to his own business. He stopped going to parish meetings, and the Chisago people wondered and talked as Karl Oskar Nilsson never went to church after his wife’s death.
The widower lived almost like a hermit, he closed himself off from the world outside his home and more and more turned inward. He faced each day in turn; he was able to endure his life only one day at a time.
Only each day in turn could he face the loss of Kristina.
The first weeks after her death he thought each morning as he awoke: I must live this day without her. And tomorrow I must live through the day without her. The same the day after tomorrow. So it shall be for me during all my remaining days. During all the time allotted me in life I will be without her.
It was every morning’s reminder. And each day in turn was more than enough. Maybe he could manage one day? Maybe he could manage his whole life if he divided it into the small parts of single days. At first it had seemed, as it came over him in the morning, that he could not endure this heavy loss, and he began saying to himself each morning: This day I am without her. But only today. He pushed away the following day and the next day, and the next day, and all the following days, to let them take care of themselves. They had not yet come, and perhaps they never would come.
His days without Kristina gathered into weeks, months, and years. He could already say: Last year when I lost my wife. Soon he could say: The year before last, when I lost my wife. And eventually it would be: The year I lost my wife, that was long, long ago. And by then the loss of her would be gone, with his own life.
So Karl Oskar divided his sorrow into days and thought that in so doing it would be easier for him to bear.
In the evening he might stop on the path from the stable to the main house, as if waiting for her. Here she would be coming with her milk pails, one in each hand, and he must help her carry them. He would always help her when he was about. Can I give you a hand, Kristina? She would reply: So kind of you, Karl Oskar! Now she no longer came along the path as she used to, and he stood there desolate. Didn’t he know it? Would he never understand it? There were no more pails to be carried for Kristina. He had no wife. He had raised a cross over her in the cemetery.
On warm summer evenings he would tend the beds under the window, weed the peas and the beans and water them, and it sometimes happened that he caught himself listening through the open window: Wasn’t that Kristina’s sewing machine in there? No. Now there was no whir from the balance wheel, no noise from the pedals under her feet. And her loom stood silent. She used to sing while weaving, she wanted to muffle the loom’s noise, she said. But he liked the sound of the loom coming from inside the house, and he would stand there and listen for the shuttle.
And so each time Karl Oskar found himself equally disappointed when he compared the past and the present: Kristina’s sewing machine had been put aside in a corner and emitted no sound, and from the loom her shuttle would never sing again.