No seed that had been sowed in the fields of Hogahult for a thousand years was so satisfying and sprouted so well as the rye the farmer measured up to the soldier.
So Jonas Petter ended his story at Karl Oskar Nilsson’s first wedding party.
XXI. THE BRIDAL CROWN WITH PRECIOUS STONES
— 1—
Within the span of a few years the Swedish population at Lake Chisago had doubled. Every spring new immigrants arrived, driven from Sweden by pure hunger, victims of the great famine. They came by the thousands from Starvation-Småland, where they had chewed on bread of lichen, chaff, and acorn. Their intestines were ruined, their throats sore and sensitive from famine bread. The new arrivals in the St. Croix Valley were pale as potato sprouts in a cellar in spring, they were gaunt, their flesh gone to the bone. They said themselves they ought to have traveled across the ocean for half fare.
To this peaceful and lush valley there immigrated during these years people who had known intense hunger in their homeland. The Smålanders said they could still hear the echo of tolling funeral bells. They came to a country where good times prevailed and everything was prosperous. There was building and planning, clearing and farming going on. More and more railroads stretched through Minnesota’s forests. Pastor Stenius preached against the line being staked out from St. Paul to Taylors Falls, for machines and steam engines turned thoughts to worldly matters and inflicted damage on the settlers’ souls. Yet the road was built in its entire length. More and bigger sawmills were built, steam-driven, and machines appeared that could cut the crops twenty times as fast as any scythe, threshing machines were invented that winnowed a bushel a minute. And people were needed to build and transport and work; the immigrants were received with open arms. Here there was still plenty of room.
For ten years now the Homestead Act had been in force, Abraham Lincoln’s great gift to the country’s farmers, the work of a farmer’s son, blessed by all immigrants who came to farm. Anyone who wanted land received 160 acres without paying a cent, the only requirement being that he clear and build on it. Through that law Old Abe had given homesteads to millions of the homeless. Nothing more important had ever happened to immigrants. The year before Lincoln was murdered he had proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a day of Thanksgiving on which to show the Lord God gratitude for the year’s crop. But innumerable immigrants, from all the old countries, turned on this day to Old Abe himself in his grave and thanked him for their fields and their crops. It was, after all, he who had given them the land.
Thus the Starvation-Småland people arrived in the St. Croix Valley at a happy time. Here they immediately found the living they sought. And to their countrymen who had arrived earlier they brought news of the famine and the starvation in the old villages, telling how even the crows had fallen dead from their perches since there was nothing to sustain life in them, how people had died by the hundreds, unable to exist on the chaff porridge spooned out at the church twice a week. But the lords and masters had their usual generous fare during the famine years. The so-called four estates, through constitutional amendment, had been abolished just before the famine — now, so the saying went, there remained only two estates: the well fed and the starving.
When Karl Oskar Nilsson heard of all the misery in Småland he was well pleased that he had sent his home parish a load of wheat.
Hardest to listen to were the stories of children the mothers were unable to feed at their breasts. Many of the babies born in Småland during the famine years left this world immediately. Mothers who had lost their children then became wet nurses in rich homes where they were given food in abundance: Their milk returned to their breasts to feed the upper-class children. Especially sought after were mothers of illegitimate children. The church condemned such women, but the lords liked them.
Ulrika of Västergöhl could remember a similar experience which she had often told to Karl Oskar in great bitterness: At the birth of her second bastard she had been ordered to Kräkesjö to give suck to the lieutenant’s newborn son, since his wife was too weak and nervous. She had been offered one riksdaler a month for her milk, and five meals a day of the best food she could eat. But Ulrika had refused the lieutenant’s offer: She wanted the milk for her own son. A child without a father ought at least to have a mother’s unshared breast. Yet, without sufficient food at home, she had not had milk enough for her baby and after four months it had died.
In Sweden the rich stole even mother’s milk from the poor. It was no wonder such great hordes had escaped across the ocean to the New World.
— 2—
Ulrika Jackson had become a widow last winter. During a preaching journey in severe weather Pastor Jackson had caught a cold which later turned into pneumonia; he died nine days later. The Stillwater Baptist congregation had given their minister a magnificent funeral.
Ulrika had not visited the Nilsson Settlement for several years, nor had Karl Oskar gone to see her in Stillwater. She had been Kristina’s intimate friend but he had never counted her among his. Nor did he do much calling. But he heard through rumor that Ulrika of Västergöhl had become a rich widow. A member of the congregation who had died a year before the pastor had willed all his property to Jackson. It consisted of four houses which Ulrika inherited at her husband’s death, and Mrs. Henry O. Jackson was now considered well-to-do.
One day in early summer Karl Oskar had an errand to the land office in Stillwater and he dropped in to pay a visit to the Baptist pastor’s widow. She had moved from the old home and lived now in one of the inherited houses, a spacious, beautiful building with a lush orchard sloping down to the very edge of the St. Croix River.
Mrs. Henry O. Jackson was delightfully surprised at the visit: “Welcome, Nilsson! It’s been a long time!”
“Thought I would call on you.”
“I’ve thought of calling on you many times, Nilsson!”
“Call me Karl Oskar as in the old days. You still speak Swedish, don’t you?”
“All right, Karl Oskar!”
Ulrika invited her guest into a room much larger than the living room in the old house. The furniture was new and must have cost much, everything was fine and shiny. Karl Oskar guessed it must look like an upper-class room in Sweden, even though he hadn’t seen many of those.
“What can I offer you?”
A young girl in a starched white apron had come into the room and stood waiting at the door for her mistress’s order.
“Would you like some cherry wine?”
“I’ll try anything you offer, Ulrika.”
She gave instructions in English to her maid. The girl went out and returned with a bottle of cherry wine. She poured it into glasses of so elegant a cut they glittered like snow in sunshine.
Karl Oskar drank; the wine had a good although sweet taste.
“So youve hired a maid, I see.”
“I have two girls.”
“Well, I hear you can afford it. Nice that you’re well off.”
“Yes, I have plenty of worldly goods,” Mrs. Jackson sighed softly, “but I have lost my husband. I’ll never get over losing Henry. Now I’ve only the Lord to comfort me.”