“God, you must be! Listen to me, you must! Haven’t you created me? Then you must not abandon me! Without you I would be a miserable creature — lost and alone in the world.”
Kristina addressed her prayer to the black desolation of the November night, she called into the dark loudly, her prayer became a cry of anguish: “You must exist, God! I cannot fulfill my life’s lot without you!”
But when her voice had died down, silence again took over. Nothing more was heard, not even the faintest echo. No answer came; the night around her remained still. The night had devoured her prayer. It was as though she had hurled it into a black, yawning abyss. Her call to God had been devoured by a bottomless emptiness. The darkness around her kept silent, the desolation did not reply, nothing answered her.
— 4—
She did not know how long she had been sitting on the stump behind the house when something startled her. She rose as if suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Why was she here? She felt stiff and cold through and through. She strained her ears and listened; she could hear something. A sound had reached her ears, a very faint sound, the first sound her ears had caught out here tonight. It did not come from the leaves rustling in the trees, not from the dry cornstalks, not a screech from the crickets — it was the sound of a voice, however faint it seemed. And she felt in her heart someone was calling her.
She held her breath while she listened, her face heavenward.
Didn’t it come from up there? Wasn’t it God replying to her? Didn’t he call her: Kristina! Kristina! I hear you!
But no sound came from above. And it wasn’t her name she heard. Yet — she did hear a voice and she felt that it called her.
Someone near here was replying to her prayer of a moment ago. She heard a creature with voice and tongue. She was not alone in the world.
Just then her ears caught the sound clearly; it came from inside the house, a baby weeping, faintly, pitiably, and only one word was she able to understand: Mother! was one single word, and it was uttered faintly, but it was enough for her.
Heaven above her remained silent, deaf and dumb; it was not the father in heaven who called to her, it was her boy who lay sick with his throat infection. He had awakened and he missed his mother and now he called for her.
A wholesome, comforting calm descended on Kristina as she hurried in to her child. Tonight she needed to flee to a living creature who was more helpless than she.
XXXIV. PRAYER GRANTED
— 1—
Spring this year was the earliest since the Nilssons had settled in Minnesota. Already in March the powerful flow of sap in the sugar maples had risen, and Karl Oskar pushed his auger deep into their trunks to collect more sap than he had ever tapped before — fifty gallons during the spring of 1859, as he recorded in his almanac. And early in April the fields were dry enough for sowing.
And this spring Kristina’s Astrakhan apple tree bloomed. She had watered, weeded, fertilized her tree, but however much she cared for it, it grew too slowly for her. She wanted to see wider boughs, heavier foliage, more height from year to year. She felt the severe winters were hard on the roots and delayed the tree’s growth. Karl Oskar jokingly suggested she move the apple tree inside during the cold season. But now it had developed enough to bear fruit; unexpectedly it was covered with blossoms, a cope of beautiful white flowers lightly tinged with pink. Suddenly, at their east gable, a most decorative tree gladdened their eyes.
Next fall they would be able to gather a precious crop of juicy apples, refreshing apples with such transparent skin you could almost mirror your face in it. Astrakhan apples had a wonderfully fresh taste and a fragrance that filled the room; it was an apple as pleasing to the eye and nose as to the tongue.
In a few months Kristina would be able to eat apples from the tree that she had grown from a seed. Over the years she had tended the seedling as if it had been a living, feeling being. She felt close to this tree that had begun in one country and moved to another, sharing her fate.
Each morning, as soon as she awoke, Kristina looked out the window to enjoy the blossoms. The tree from Duvemåla, blooming so beautifully here in North America, gave her new comfort and confidence in her own strength.
But the tree bloomed for only a few days. Unexpectedly, one night there was a severe freeze; in the morning the ground was covered with frost, the flowers hung limp and dead. There remained nothing for Kristina to see other than how her tree shed its cope, how the wilted blossoms flew away with the first morning wind like a swarm of butterflies.
The Swedish tree had blossomed too early, but the tree itself was healthy and green, and it would grow and branch out and bloom again another spring.
The time had come for Kristina’s great spring washing, which she took down to the lakeshore to pound and rinse. It was her heaviest chore of the year, and her body felt stiff and clumsy already even though she was only in the beginning of her sixth month. Her back ached from being on her knees at the beating board and her washing dragged on longer than usual.
Toward the evening of the third day, as she was about to rinse the last few garments in the lake, a sudden pain cut through her back so sharply that she had to sit down and rest on the beating board.
She must have strained herself lifting the heavy washtubs or some other burden, she thought. If she remained sitting quietly for a few moments perhaps the pain would subside. Instead, it grew in intensity and spread from the small of her back through her whole body. And then she recognized it; it was not the first time she had experienced it: it was labor pain.
Johan was fishing in the reeds a short distance from her. She called to the boy: he must go and fetch Father, who was sowing wheat in the field.
The pain forced Kristina to lie down on the steeply slanted beating board, which was far from comfortable as a bed. As she lay on the board she suffered a sharper pain than any she had ever experienced in her seven childbeds. Afterward, she believed she must have fainted.
Karl Oskar came running; he would help her get inside the house. She bent double when she tried to walk; her legs failed to support her. He had to carry her to her bed. Once there she pulled off her clothes and discovered red runnels on the inside of her legs: the bleeding had begun.
Karl Oskar hurried to his nearest neighbor, Algot Svensson, to fetch his wife Manda to come and help. Meanwhile Kristina had another hemorrhage, and before Karl Oskar returned with their neighbor she had borne a lifeless child.
For a few days before this happened she had noticed a faint bleeding. She had not realized that this, and the backache, were the signals of an imminent miscarriage.
— 2—
Ulrika sat at Kristina’s bedside. It was the day after her miscarriage, and Mrs. Jackson had hurried to New Duvemåla as soon as the message reached her.
Kristina lay spent, badly worn. A great weakness had come over her after the hemorrhaging, which had continued long after the stillbirth. Today the bleeding had finally stopped and now she felt as if she were torn to pieces inside. She was uninterested in everything about her and had only one desire: to lie still in bed.
“This was my first ‘lost journey,’” she said. “My time was more than half gone. .”
“A miscarriage is harder on a woman than a natural birth,” said Ulrika. “It can be fatal to lose a brat before its full time.”
She asked how much blood Kristina had lost. Approximately how much — she knew Kristina couldn’t have measured it, but couldn’t she tell almost how much? It was difficult to judge, even approximately, said Kristina, but she guessed she must have bled at least a quart last evening and during the night. For a while, during the night, the blood had run as it does from a stuck pig.