The Emigrants (44 page)

“Speak up, Inga-Lena! Did you find any lice on me?”

“No-o.”

“Did you find as much as one single nit?”

“No-o.”

“There, you can hear, all of you! I am innocent! Kristina must get down on her knees to me! She must ask my forgiveness!”

“Never while I am alive!” exclaimed Kristina in disgust. “I would rather jump into the sea!”

“You and your man can undress each other! You two can pick the lice off each other! But now you hear that I am free of vermin, and you must ask my pardon! You have blasphemed God’s pure, innocent lamb!”

“Shall I ask
your
pardon, you old, inveterate sinner?”

“Down on your knees with you!” Ulrika’s eyes spat fire. “If you don’t, I’ll tear your eyes out!”

She was ready to spring at Kristina, as Danjel and Karl Oskar grabbed hold of her arms and held her back.

Kristina did not ask her forgiveness. But another woman stood by, ready to bend her knees: Inga-Lena was sad and ashamed and almost ready to cry. All turned to her. She held something between her thumb and forefinger, she held it up to her husband’s eyes. It was something that moved, something gray-yellow—a big, fat, body louse.

“Danjel—dear—look, I too—I have—”

Ulrika was innocent, but Inga-Lena had found a louse in her own undergarments. And now she stood there and fumbled for her husband’s hand, as if she wished to ask his forgiveness.

Danjel Andreasson examined the louse which his wife held up to his eyes. He said softly: This animal, too, was the created work of the Lord. They must therefore not hate and detest the creature, but accept it in quiet submission. It must remind them that they should wash themselves and keep clean here on the ship. The vermin were sent as a trial for them—for everyone’s betterment.

Karl Oskar could now feel a crawling along his spine. He went to his bunk, among the unmarried men, and began to undress; he soon found what he was looking for.

It turned out, by and by, that all the passengers in the hold were infested with lice, all except one. The only one to escape the vermin was Ulrika of Västergöhl, the old harlot.

—4—

Kristina at once began the extermination of the small crawling creatures. She saw other women sit around and pick lice from their clothes and kill them one at a time with their thumbnail against a wooden plate. But this required too much time and was, besides, not a reliable extermination. The soft soap she had taken along now came in good stead. In the galley she boiled all their underwear in a strong, seething soap-lye which no louse could survive. Then she took a quicksilver salve and rubbed it over the whole bodies of herself, her husband, and her children. With her splendid fine-tooth comb she went after the children’s hair so thoroughly that their scalps bled from the brass teeth.

It irritated her deeply that Ulrika of Västergöhl could walk around in malicious joy and feel superior to everyone on the ship. But Kristina did not believe that Ulrika had escaped the vermin because Christ lived in her. Uncle Danjel, no doubt, was more pious and Christian-spirited than Ulrika—yet the lice had not spared him.

She had accused Ulrika wrongfully, and she regretted it, but she could never force herself to ask forgiveness of that woman; that would be to admit that she was lower than the Glad One, the infamous whore. The one to ask forgiveness was Ulrika—she ought to ask forgiveness of all those women at home whom she had insulted when she gave herself to their husbands.

And Kristina half admitted to herself what had driven her to the accusation: she had watched Ulrika strut about in front of Karl Oskar; one could easily imagine how she would act if she were alone with him in a dark corner. Of course, he would never let himself be tempted, but Ulrika had a strange power over men. Karl Oskar had a strong nature, and he had slept alone here on the ship for many nights. So one could not be sure, not absolutely sure . . . The look which crept into Ulrika’s eyes when she turned them on the men, on both Karl Oskar and others, those disgusting eyes, radiating seething lust—in those eyes whoring gleamed.

And Kristina sought comfort in the thought that as soon as they landed in America, they would be rid of Ulrika of Västergöhl.

It turned out that the number of “free passengers” on the brig
Charlotta
was infinite—the greatest number of which probably were created on board. There was a great demand for quicksilver salve for their extinction, from the captain’s medicine chest—so much so that after a few days the second mate reported the ship’s supply was dangerously low, so many jars had been distributed.

It was never determined who had brought the disgusting vermin on board, but Captain Lorentz said to his second mate that he wondered how things actually were in old Sweden when even the lice emigrated to North America.

—5—

Robert went everywhere on the ship, and was a keen observer. He listened to the orders of the ship’s officers, and he watched the seamen execute them. He learned what it meant to “sheet home” and “hoist sail”; he learned to distinguish between tackle, boom, and stay; he knew what a block was, and he could point out to Arvid the spar, the hawse, the bollard, the shrouds, the bolt, and the winch. He knew that luff meant the ship went more against the wind, and fall away was to have the wind more to the side. He had made friends with the old sail-maker, who gave him all the information he might want. He was told that the ship’s earth-gray sails were never washed—except when God the Father Himself cleansed them with His rain and dried them in His sun and wind. He was informed that the strongest sails in the world were made in Jonsered in Sweden, and were known on all seas as “Jonsered sails”; he was told that the
Charlotta
carried her cargo of pig iron in her bottom, to make her lie deep in the sea; he was advised to eat all the peas and sauerkraut he could get—then he would not become sick of scurvy; scurvy was the most dangerous disease for emigrants—many succumbed to it during ocean voyages. But he must be careful and eat meat in small quantities—though salt pork was probably least dangerous.

Robert also kept close to the man in the broad-checked jacket and narrow pants—the one who was referred to on the ship as “the American.” Robert questioned him endlessly about things in the United States. To some inquiries he received an answer; others were ignored. The man said that the American President had forbidden him to tell all he knew about the country. He had held such posts over there that he was in possession of important secrets concerning the country’s government, and if he divulged them to outsiders he would never be allowed to enter the republic again. Robert wondered about this statement.

So far he knew only that the American’s name was Fredrik Mattsson. And now he thought of another man with the same first name—Fredrik of Kvarntorpet, who had made the famous America journey to Gothenburg and had afterwards disappeared. Robert thought that the stranger on board might be Fredrik Thron—it was rumored that he had gone to sea. Robert confided his suspicions to Jonas Petter, who had known the Kvarntorpet boy while he was growing up. Jonas Petter looked carefully over his fellow passenger when unobserved, and finally said that this man could be Fredrik Thron, the escaped farmhand. He was about the same height, and his face was similar. But he hadn’t seen the rascal in twenty years, and a person can change much from youth to manhood. He could not say for sure. Now, the American had said that his home parish was in Blekinge, and that might prove that he came from Småland, for Fredrik Thron lied at all times, except when he told the truth in momentary forgetfulness. But at such moments he always used to blush, he was so ashamed of it, said Jonas Petter.

Robert recalled that he had read somewhere about a President of North America—George Washington—who always told the truth and even confessed that he had cut down an apple tree; they now celebrated that day in the United States.

He decided to try to find out the truth about Fredrik Mattsson, the American.

After one week at sea, Robert was convinced that his place was on land. Nearly every chore of a seaman was dangerous. The farm service on land was hard, but it was never dangerous. How could the ship’s officers make the seamen climb up there in the mast-tops? The seamen worked their regular watches and were free in between, but real peace they never had; neither day nor night could they rest completely. One who served as seaman on board a ship was no more free than a farmhand. The farmhand must look after the horses night and day, Sundays and weekdays, without letup. And the seamen must lie there in their bunks in the forecastle, as closely packed as salted herrings. He and Arvid had had better quarters in the stable room in Nybacken, even though there was an abundance of bedbugs there.

A farmhand must eat salt herring all the time, but a seaman must eat rancid pork at every meal. And the seamen must live here year in and year out, imprisoned inside the rail; they couldn’t take a step outside—only forty steps lengthwise, and eight sidewise.

A farmhand on land had more freedom than a seaman at sea.

There were also moments when the farmhand Robert Nilsson from Korpamoen was filled by other thoughts than those of the dangerous, chained life on three-fourths of the earth’s surface, the sea: “. . . but he who learns to understand why the water takes so much space shall therein see a proof of the Creator’s omnipotence and kindness.” For hours on end he would stand and gaze toward the mast-tops. Up there—in dizzy heights above the deck—the forest pines stretched their heads: those widely traveled trees, those debarked stems of the large, prolific family of evergreens. These pines had lost their branches and crowns, and instead had been decked in clothes of sail. Dressed in these, they rose here at sea higher and more proudly than ever in the forest. From their fenced-in wood lot they had been let out on the world ocean, there to sail for life. But for each fir cut for a mast, one hundred remained rooted, sentenced for all time to the drab and dreary life at home. There they stood—fifty, sixty years—then they were cut down for rafters or used as timbers in a house, byre, or barn. Then there they lay, in their deep disgrace for a hundred years or more, growing hairy with moss and green with mold, brown-spotted from cow dung, hollow and filled with cockroach nests. Slowly, very slowly, they would rot down in the unromantic stable wall, and when the old building at last had served its time and was torn down, they would be thrown away with odds and ends on the woodpile, to end their lives in the fire—to succumb at last under a peasant pot in which potatoes for the pigs were boiling.

Such is the fate of pine trees which remain at home.

But the chosen mast trees fly the sails which carry ships across the oceans. They help people emigrate from continent to continent, in search of new homes. Their graceful heads carry the winged sails, they are the wingbones of the sailing ships. They may be broken in their youth by storm and shipwreck, or they may sink with their ships in old age, but they will never end in smoke and ashes under a pot filled with potatoes for swine. And when the ship goes down, the masts follow her to the bottom of the sea and proudly lay themselves to rest in the roomiest, deepest grave in the world.

Such is the fate of seagoing pines.

One hundred remain rooted while one is let free to sail on the sea that covers three-quarters of the earth.

And for each farmhand who emigrates across the sea to the New World, hundreds remain at home. There they sit, in their dark stable rooms in the Old World, and gaze through the small fly-specked windows during dreary Sunday afternoons, rooted in their home communities, in their service, until one day they die an ignominious death in bed in a corner of some moss-grown cottage, or as a pauper in the home of some charitable soul.

Such is the lot of home-staying farmhands.

XVII

“ . . . THE SHIP WAS COVERED WITH WAVES . . .”

On the North Sea the emigrants encountered their first rough weather.

It began to blow in the evening—at midnight the captain judged the wind to be the ninth grade, according to Beaufort’s Scale. The
Charlotta
’s topsails were now bottom-reeved, and in the log the first mate wrote: “Storm.”

Robert:

He awakened. Something heavy had rolled on him—his brother’s body.

He had gone to sleep as usual in his bunk next to Karl Oskar. He had already had time to dream. His dream had been about a word, “dead sea.”

He had stood on the afterdeck at dusk when one of the seamen had said, they were almost in a dead sea. It had sounded horrible—as if they were sailing over a sea where they were to die. The sailmaker had told him what it meant: waves that were remnants of an old storm—after-waves, so to speak. They were the ghosts of the sea, threatening billows that came from some place where a ship shortly before had gone down. They came with a message from the drowned ones—the dead ones told about their shipwreck.

Someone had said: Dead sea is a foreboding of storm; the wind has shifted to northwest.

Round the ship rose steep, high knolls—white-topped—swelling like rising bread in the oven. Suddenly a wave had broken over the deck where Robert stood, soaking his trousers to above the knees. He had become frightened, and had wanted to run away, when he heard one of the seamen—a young boy of his own age—laughing at him and his wet pants. Then Robert had pretended that it didn’t matter, and had remained there.

Until now he had known the sea as a pleasant splash against the hull at night. But the kind, friendly sea was changing: a beast with thousands of high, seething humps coiled around the ship. He heard the first mate’s command: Batten down the main hatch!

He had been about to wring the water from his wet trouser legs when suddenly the whole deck became a steep, slippery downhill. The brig
Charlotta
listed to one side. He grabbed the rail with both hands so as not to slide away, and there he hung, waiting anxiously for the
Charlotta
to get back on an even keel—which she did, only to roll over on the other side: downhill became uphill.