Here among the savages she could only trust to God’s protection.
— 3—
Unexpectedly they had a change in the weather. One morning they awakened in their hut shivering — frozen through and through by a cold wind. An icy northwester was sweeping through their shanty, they felt as though the walls had fallen down during the night, as if they were lying in the open. The merciless wind seemed to strip them naked, it penetrated their thick woolen clothing, pinched their skin until it hurt, clawed with sharp talons, and blew right into their bodies.
When they looked out through the door at this weather, it seemed as if the crust of the earth might blow away. The grass lay flat to the ground like water-combed hair on a head. At the edge of the forest great trees were blown over, the exposed roots stretching heavenward like so many arms. All the haystacks in the meadow had blown over. They wondered that their little shanty still stood.
Now they could not use their fireplace, which lay to windward of the storm; but they managed to make a fire on the lee side of an enormous oak trunk. When they walked against the wind, they had to stoop in order to move. The unrelenting northwester swept away anything not tied to the earth.
Kristina said that none among them had ever known what a wind was, until they came to North America.
The children were blue-red from the cold; Lill-Märta and Harald coughed, and the noses of all three were running. Kristina put an extra pair of woolen stockings on each of them and wrapped them in woolen garments; she herself bundled up as much as she could, until she felt wide as a barrel; she was now in her last month. But clothes did not help against this ferocious wind, big and little shivered and shook; nothing helped. In the daytime they could get some warmth from the fire behind the oak, but how were they to keep warm inside the shanty during the nights if this weather continued?
“Has the winter come so soon?” Kristina wondered.
“It couldn’t come so suddenly,” Karl Oskar said anxiously. “It would be too bad for us — the house not yet ready. . ”
They had heard of the unexpected changes in temperature hereabouts, and that the thermometer could fall forty degrees in one minute (but American degrees were said to be shorter than Swedish ones). Now the sudden cold and wind had come upon them while the timbers for the house still lay and waited. The men would come as soon as they had put the roof on Danjel’s house. It was expected to be ready in a week or so. Now Karl Oskar tightened the shanty as best he could; he nailed extra pieces of boards to the windward side and closed all cracks and holes with moss and wet clay. Inside, he laid a ring of stones for a fireplace and cut a hole in the roof for the smoke; now they could heat their hut. During the second night they were able to keep a fire alive, and they covered themselves with every piece of clothing they had, but the cold still penetrated — they froze miserably. The children whined and whimpered in their sleep like kittens. Many times during the night Kristina rose and put a kettle on the fire and boiled a meat soup, which they drank to warm their insides — though nothing could help their outsides.
In the morning the hurricane died down a little, but toward evening it increased again, with heavy showers of hail. Inch-long pieces of ice, hard as stones, fell and remained in drifts on the ground. But on the third morning the wind abated, and by evening the storm had spent itself.
After the three days’ frightful weather the sun warmed them again. The hail drifts melted away, the air was so still that not the smallest leaf moved, and the grass that had been combed flat rose again. Mild, late-fall weather reigned once more.
But the new settlers in the shanty on Lake Ki-Chi-Saga had experienced the touch of the blizzard on their bodies, they felt as if they had been saved from death. The winter had discharged a warning shot to show what miserable shelter they had against the cold north winds; to survive, they would need a tighter, better house, and soon.
And early one Monday morning their helpers arrived and began to raise the house. They were three carpenters — Karl Oskar, Danjel, and Jonas Petter — with two helpers, Robert and Arvid. Now there were rushed days for Kristina, who must prepare food for all of them over a fire in the open, while she kept an eye on the children. But the break in their loneliness was welcome, now there was life on their place with the menfolk building, and new strength came into her as she saw their house rise on the foundation timbers. Back there, under the great sugar maples, the walls of their new home grew, higher for each meal she prepared for the builders. Often she walked back to watch them and felt as if she herself were participating in the building.
The house was to be eight feet high at the eaves. The timbers were roughhewn, and now the men smoothed the upper and under sides of the logs to make them lie close together. Karl Oskar would later fill the cracks with moss, which he intended to cover with a mixture of clay and sand. The timberman’s most complicated task was the fitting of the logs together at each corner. “When a corner you can lay, you get a timberman’s pay” was an old saying at home, often quoted to a carpenter’s helper. Karl Oskar had learned building from his father, but he did not feel he was a master; working now as a timberman, he was glad his house had only four corners.
The long, heavy logs were hoisted into place on the wall by the combined strength of all five men; each log was fastened to the underlying timber by means of thick pegs driven into the lower log and fitted into auger holes in the next one above. There was a racket all day long from three ax hammers; three axes were busy, three timbermen timbered. And the sound of axes against wood was no languid, depressing sound, it was bold, fresh, stimulating — it was a promise, an assurance of security. Here something took place of lasting import — not for a day, or a year, but for future times; here a human abode was raised. And the echo from the timbermen’s axes rang out over the forest in the clear autumn air, it was thrown from tree to tree — the axes cut and hammered, and the echo returned from the other side of the lake.
Jonas Petter was the master among the three timbermen; his ax corrected and finished where the others had begun. And in rhythm with his ax blows against the timbers, he sang “The Timberman’s Song,” which his father and grandfather before him had sung at house-building in the homeland, a song that had been sung through centuries when walls were raised for Swedish peasant houses, a song always sung to the music of ax and hammer — a song stimulating to the timberman, suitable for singing at his work, and now for the first time sung in Minnesota Territory:
What’s your daughter doing tonight?
What’s your daughter doing tonight?
What’s your timberman’s daughter doing tonight?
Timberrim, timberram, timberammaram—
What’s your daughter doing tonight?
Your daughter is making a bed,
Your daughter is making a bed,
Your daughter is making a timberman’s bed—
Timberrim, timberram, timberammaram—
Your daughter is making a bed.
Who shall sleep in your daughter’s bed?
Who shall sleep in your daughter’s bed?
Who shall sleep in your daughter’s timberman’s bed?
Timberrim, timberram, timberammaram—
Who shall sleep in your daughter’s bed?
I and your daughter, that’s who
I and your daughter, that’s who
I and your timberman’s daughter that’s who. .
“The Timberman’s Song” was fully ten verses long; Jonas Petter knew only three verses and part of the fourth; his father had sung the song to him when they worked as timbermen together, and he had managed to sing it from beginning to end while he set one log in place. The verses Jonas Petter had forgotten described the occupation in the timberman’s bed; but he couldn’t for the life of him remember how it went, except that in the timberman’s bed was made a timberman’s tyke, by a timberman’s “stud.” But, asked Jonas Petter, could there be anything easier than to be a stud, when you had the bed and the woman? He thought it might be more difficult not to.