“On an animal like that?” asked Arvid. “How could he sit straddle-legged on such a puny creature?”
They slowly continued their walk up Broadway. A great fat sow with a litter of pigs was poking about in the gutter on their side of the street. The mother sow was as long legged as a calf, but her teats hung so low they almost reached the ground; the little piglets were light brown, almost like whelps, and ran between the legs of the walkers so that Robert almost tripped. Arvid counted fourteen in the litter and observed that American swine were longer legged than Swedish.
Robert said the Americans didn’t seem afraid to lose their pigs, letting them run around at will, but the Finn informed him that every owner marked his swine with an ear cut; moreover, there were so many swine in America, no one cared much if an occasional litter were lost. All garbage and sweepings were thrown into the streets, and the swine kept the town clean, he added. Here slops were lying in piles, and some of the houses they passed smelled as though more slops were being prepared inside.
But the street smell of pigsties was familiar to the two youths from Swedish peasant communities. In Sweden or North America, in Ljuder Parish or New York City, they could find no noticeable difference in the smell of swine dung.
From time to time the Finn stopped and peered into windows as though he were looking for some particular place. Arvid and Robert stopped also, but as far as they could judge, every house was a shop, and every entrance had something written over the door in large, gilded letters.
At last the Finn stopped in front of a small house, not much bigger than a shed; it could be a shop, but there were no shop articles in the window. The Finn pointed to a placard nailed to the door:
NOTICE!
This shop is closed in honor of the King of Kings,
Who will appear about the twentieth of October.
Get ready, friends, to crown Him Lord of All.
“Now we’re near the place I’m looking for,” said the Finn. “This same notice was on the door last fall when I was here.”
Robert, who had begun to learn English from his book during the voyage, tried to read the notice on the door. He recognized some of the words but could not understand their meaning; he wanted to ask the Finn, but Arvid took the question from him: “What do the words say?”
The Finn explained: It had been predicted that the Day of Doom would take place in New York during October last year, and the owner of the shop had closed in advance to honor Christ on His return. The King of Kings had not appeared, but the shop still remained closed; perhaps the owner had starved to death by now.
There was another notice a little lower on the door, and the Finn bent down to read it: Muslin for Ascension Robes. Muslin to meet the King of Kings. 20 cents a yard.
The boys wanted to know what this notice said.
“Oh, just that the storekeeper sold wedding gowns for Christ’s brides,” said the Finn.
And now the Finn must attend to the captain’s errands. He told the boys to find their way back to the ship alone; it was not difficult, only turn right about and then to the left. And if they wanted to go to the end of the street, they could do so. Broadway was about three miles long and ran right through Manhattan. They would not lose their way if they stayed on Broadway.
The Finn nodded good-by and they saw him enter a saloon with the name Joe’s Tavern on the window; it was next door to the little shop which had been closed for the arrival of the King of Kings.
— 2—
Arvid and Robert continued alone up Broadway. It was only today that they had been released from their long imprisonment. A feeling of unaccustomed freedom filled them now that they were free to move unhindered on solid ground. Boldly they decided to walk to the street’s very end, however far it stretched. Then they would turn straight about and walk back to the harbor and their fellow passengers.
And so they continued along the most beautiful street in the world; they stopped and looked at the tall houses, they examined inscriptions over doors: Store, Steak House, Coffeehouse, Lodging House, Brown’s Store, Drugstore. They tried to interpret the inscriptions and guessed at their meaning. Could this be a tavern? Was that a hawker’s shop? Or an apothecary? The word store in particular impressed them, it appeared on one building after another. At last Arvid espied a small house, which he thought must be an outhouse, and he pointed for Robert to look, and laughed: “Look at that one! They call that a store too!”
“They must be bragging,” said Robert. But he did not mind this exaggeration; it was always true that the smaller you were the more you needed to seem bigger.
He tried to understand words and sentences he overheard, but everything was unintelligible, senseless jabber; not even one word, not a single syllable, was he able to recognize from his language book. He felt discouraged and disappointed. When he had stepped ashore he had thought he knew enough English to understand what he heard, even if he couldn’t answer properly; he began to think they had cheated him in Karlshamn by selling him an unreliable book.
The boys arrived at an open square where many booths had been erected, and they thought this must be a market day. Here they stood long and gazed; Robert had said they shouldn’t stand and stare because they might be laughed at, but this market fascinated them.
Wooden barrels stood in long rows, running over with potatoes, turnips, cabbages, carrots, peas, beets, parsnips, and many other roots which they saw for the first time; barrels in great numbers were filled with fruit — yellow, red, green, striped — apples, cherries, plums, and other fruits and berries which they never before had seen and the names of which they did not know. Between the barrels were long rows of baskets full of eggs and tubs full of butter, so fat that it seemed to perspire; on poles hung yellow, round, fat cheeses, big as grindstones; carcasses of animals, legs of pork, steaks, shortribs, and sides of bacon were stacked like firewood in high piles. Sizable, well-stuffed sausages hung in lines over tables on which stood vessels of ground meat and salted hams. There were booths with fowclass="underline" chickens, ducks, game birds; other fowl were stacked in hills of feathers, of all earthly bird colors, with a sprinkle of blood here and there on heads, necks, and wings. Four-footed beasts of the wild hung here in great numbers, hairy bodies of stags and does, hares and rabbits, known and unknown animals. In other stands were large tables with fish, long and short, broad and narrow, fat and spindly, black and white, red and blue; fish with striped bodies, misshapen fish, all head and protruding eyes, fish with ravenous jaws and sharp teeth like dogs’, fish with fins as sharp as spears, and fish with long tail fins by which they hung on hooks, swinging like pendulums as the shoppers brushed against them. On the ground stood wooden boxes in which crawled and crept shellfish, horrible-looking sea monsters, lizardlike creatures, frogs, crayfish, mussels, snails, animals in shells that opened up like caskets, and shellfish that crawled about and resembled who knew what; nothing they had ever heard of, seen, or known, now or ever in all their living days.
The barrels, baskets, tubs, tables, boxes, and buckets in this market place were filled to overflowing; the whole place seemed flooded with fruit and meat, pork and lamb, fins and feathers, shell and hides, flooded with food of endless variety. People shopping here tramped in food, hit their heads on food, were enveloped in food, tumbled about in food. Who would skin all these animals, pluck all these birds, scale all these fish? For strangers and new arrivals, there was a booth in the market offering samples of all the food products which the new land offered its inhabitants. Here they saw the Creator’s many gifts, fruits and berries, roots, herbs, and plants; they saw crawling, flying, swimming creatures, and meat from the cattle and beasts which God had created on the Sixth Day, before He created Man.