scvile
12-24-2010, 12:14 PM
Here's Chapter Two:
CHAPTER 2
“They are—“
The blonde young farmhand, his shirtsleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows to reveal tawny forearms downed golden, who had just opened his letter from the old country, had spoken the two words quietly, but he could not go on. His mouth had twisted into a grimace of pain. He stood with his heavy work boots rooted to Marta Olsen’s kitchen floor. But Marta did not see. Their backs were turned to each other, Marta’s because she was washing dishes, and Otto’s because he had instinctively turned away.
Otto was nineteen years old and tall—half a head taller than Marta herself, who was a big, sturdy woman—with the hard-muscled physique and sun-bronzed face of a young man who had spent his life plowing and planting, mowing and threshing, raising houses and barns, cutting and splitting firewood, and managing horses. The trousers that he wore tucked into his boots were loose, emphasizing a narrowness at the hip that made the customary suspenders that crossed over his wide shoulders a real necessity.
Marta’s first thought, as she turned from the breakfast dishes to see the young man’s broad back turned to her, was that the sun-bleached cotton shirt had already rumpled at the back and ought to be straightened.
“Tuck your shirt in at the back,” she chided good-naturedly, “or it will be up around our shoulders in an hour or two.”
Otto, who had already guessed it would be a hot day from the brightness of the morning, guessed that the shirt would be off in an hour or two, but he did not say so.
Marta expected he would turn and give her one of his looks—the kind he always bestowed on her attempts to mother him or, more likely—now that he had gotten so big
—he might laugh at her. He laughed easily.
When he was younger, her attempts at mothering had been met with quelling silences. But they had come to an understanding over the years since Otto had first come to the Olsen’s farm, an overgrown boy of twelve—a boy who had come over from Sweden alone. The understanding was this: He did not need a mother; he had a family of his own. He had parents and a little sister—Lisbeth, who had written so faithfully over the years—who would be immigrating to America by and by. The Lindstrom family would have their own farm here, their own place. It would be Otto’s determination, his efforts, his independence and strength that would bring it all about.
Marta was surprised when Otto stood silent and did not immediately turn to look at her. When he did turn, he did not quite meet her eyes and kept his sunburnt face expressionless and slightly averted. He had let the hand that held the letter fall to his side, and held the pages almost heedlessly. It was a firm, calloused hand, but with long, slim fingers, patient and precise—the hands of a fiddle player.
“They are dead,” he told her, his voice as expressionless as his face.
“Dead,” Marta whispered, clutching at her apron and not knowing which way to look. “Dead,” she whispered again, shaking her head.
“I didn’t expect it,” Otto began, “even though—“ but he realized he was not talking sense. He should have known.
“Your parents,” Marta said. “Not Lisbeth.”
“No. Not Lisbeth. She says—pneumonia—she wrote before that they were sick. I should have—“ Otto leaned his head back and slowly turned it from side to side, as if his neck ached or as if to express a negative.
“It was all those bad years,” Marta said softly, “the bad harvests. It breaks people
down—grinds them down, when they work and don’t have enough—“ she stopped, realizing that she sounded angry.
“I guess so.” Otto had not shared his family’s hardships. He had been better off here in America as a farmhand than his folks had been as freeholders in the old country. Here there was plenty to eat without picking the herring bones clean—plenty of everything, as he had told them all so many times in his letters. Well, they would never see this wondrous land now.
Lisbeth had written about several successive years of bad harvests in Sweden, but cautiously, in the way she had of always softening their troubles back home, and sweetened her letters with reminders of all the good things—apple blossoms and the church boats crossing the lakes on summer Sundays.
But the Olsens got old-country letters of their own, and these letters from family friends had been more candid about the hardships of the past few years.
Otto could not speak. He folded the letter and shoved it absently into his pocket, and walked out the kitchen door, where the midsummer sun accused him with its brilliance. Thor Olsen would already be busy with the mowing.
“Seven years,” he thought, as he hitched a team to the hay wagon and drove them out to the field. “seven years I have waited.” His anguish made him almost was to curse God—curse God and die, like that fellow in the Bible.
Now the rest of the family would never immigrate. His parents were dead. Lisbeth would not make the journey to America alone—she had said as much in her letter. She could not leave their parents’ bones. He guessed it was a bad time for her. It was a hard thing to do—ja, he knew that—to cross the ocean alone, to come to a country where one didn’t even speak the language. Otto had done it himself, as a boy, with emotions that balanced precariously between excitement and terror. And, to Otto, Lisbeth was just a little girl—the flaxen-haired ten-year-old whom he had left standing on the shore seven years before. She would be seventeen now.
He had brought little with him. Only his clothing, some blankets, a little money, and his fiddle.
All these years he had been working, saving his wages, living every winter in the expectation that the following spring would be the one in which the family would be reunited in America.
Otto remembered how it had started. The Olsens were friends of the family. They had immigrated to America years before—before anyone else in Sweden had thought of such a thing. They had gotten the idea from a relative of theirs—some black sheep of the family, Otto gathered—who had gone to sea because of some indiscretion back in Sweden, and whose later indiscretions had made it prudent for him to betake himself to regions still more remote and inaccessible. In North America—in both Canada and the western territories of the United States—he had prospered in the fur trade. Or at least he had reported that he was prospering, but his accounts of peoples and places and manner of living had, for the most part, only baffled the Olsens. It was a rough kind of prosperity, a wandering and unsettled life, among people and places with strange names and stranger manners. Nor could the Olsens ever believe in any kind of prosperity that did not include a home, a farm, and crops and livestock.
Jacobsen—that had been his name—though it was usually spoken in hushed tones in the Olsen household—had never acquired any of these more solid blessings. But there was talk, in his letters, of gold, of travels, and of possibilities. Jacobsen was probably dead by now, but he had done one good thing in his life: His letters home had alerted his relatives to the beauty and riches and grandeur of America. Jacobsen had apparently had more lucid moments in which he realized that land was of more interest to his farming relatives back in Sweden—far more interesting than tales about the savages, or wild animals, or of prosperous dealing in beaver pelts. And so, more or less by accident, the Olsens learned through Jacobsen of free land in America. They came over, Thor and Marta, and took up land, free land. But time had passed and they had no children—and, hence, not hands enough for the work of the farm.
Wanting to do good to their friends back in Sweden, and help themselves at the same time, they wrote urging the Lindstroms to immigrate to America. More than that, they would help. Let the Lindstroms send their son, Otto, ahead of the rest of the family. The Olsens would pay his passage, and pay him good wages for his work on the farm. Then, when Karl and Anna Lindstrom had sold their own small farm in Sweden and saved their money, they could follow. Meanwhile, Otto would have saved for the many things the Lindstroms would need that could not be transported from Sweden. And he would know the land and the language.
Otto remembered how relentlessly he had promoted this offer the Olsens had made, even in the face of his mother’s objections, his father’s wish to temporize. Boys his age, he had argued, were sent to sea. He was nearly a man. But he was still enough of a child to be indifferent to the pain that the separation would cause his mother. She had already lost one child in infancy, and daughter named Ingrid, and she could not help but feel that sending Otto to America comprehended the loss of another—temporarily, at best. At worst, he might not survive the journey. There could be storms at sea, or a shipwreck—or an accident or illness might befall him. Who would care for him if he fell ill on the journey?
In the end, Otto prevailed.
The offer was too good, for one thing. For another, it was clear to Karl and Marta, even in the days before the really hard times began in Sweden, that their best hope for a better life lay in America.
For Otto, the victory over his parents’ misgivings was bittersweet. He had always believed that the rest of the family would come—next year. And when they did come, they would see. And Otto would feel that his pride, his independence, even his recklessness in insisting on such a course, would be vindicated.
After a few years of waiting, being right meant less to him, especially when Lisbeth’s letters told of Marta’s being too often ill during the winter, or of some minor injury of Karl’s that had laid him up too long in the spring. Otto, sorry to hear of such mishaps, and full of youth and strength himself, had regarded these accounts in the light of transient troubles, and not as portents of declining health. Thor and Marta’s old-country letters told of the bad harvests, which Lisbeth only hinted at in her letters to Otto. Surely there would be a better harvest next year. Surely his parents’ health was not so bad, or would improve. Or, wouldn’t they immigrate anyway and find their health improved in a hopeful new land?
“Well,” he thought, as he forked the hay into the wagon and the day grew hot, “that is all done with now,” and felt his face grow hot with shame for having sundered the family, probably broken his mother’s heart—and maybe contributed to his parents’ early decline and death by his absence, to no purpose. Had he been in Sweden, perhaps he could have helped. Perhaps the harvests would have been better, and there would have been more to eat.
It had been a beautiful dream he had cherished all these years, the dream of the fields green with corn and gold with ripening grain, the deep peace of cattle in the pastures, the dooryard lively with geese and other fowl, a dream big with barn and byre and sweet with fields of clover, and a family home, a home that would be presided over by parents whom his imagination would admit to having grown a little older, but which included a flaxen-haired sister who would remain forever a child.
That dream would never be.
Marta came out to the field at mid-day with lunch and ginger-water. Otto watched her draw Thor aside. She was telling him about the letter. Otto ate and drank and wiped the sweat from his brow and felt his hair prickling the back of his neck and sticking to his face, and felt as drenched in guilt and shame as his body was with sweat.
Days passed, and weeks. Marta saw that Otto had sunk into despondent silence. She was fond of him, maybe too fond. His silence disturbed her.
Otto had never been highly sociable; he was too independent for that. His skill as a fiddler had made him sought after far and wide, so that they sometimes had to dispense with his help on the farm so that he could travel to some distant town to play for a wedding or a dance. But his frequent attendance at social gatherings had never made him outgoing, even in their own small community, where he spoke the language. He was often invited to play the fiddle for social events among English-speaking people, where he was an oddity—in the early years in America, a blonde boy who was precocious in music, yet scarcely able to speak English. Gradually he learned English, and grew less awkward when demands for his music sent him out to English-speaking communities. He even enjoyed a musician’s kind of popularity—of being generally admired yet seldom getting a chance to participate in the talk and laughter and dancing. But sometimes there were other musicians to talk to and to learn from.
There were girls in the neighborhood—and, Marta suspected, in several other neighborhoods—who had an eye for Otto. But he never seemed aware of it. It was the resolute single-mindedness he had about the reunion of his family in America. He waited, and with an intensity that was visible in everything he did, even to small gestures such as shoving that mane of golden hair out of his face, or the way his eyes would flash blue when company spoke of places where new land was being opened up for settlement. And you could see it, too, in the way he played his fiddle in the evening. You could see that he was dreaming over the music, dreaming, perhaps, that he played for his distant family, or at the Lindstrom place that was going to be.
You could see it in the way he applied himself to learning English. He was glad to be invited to play at the English-speaking settlements, even though it must have been painful for him, at first, to go among people with whom he could hardly communicate, were it not for that remarkable power he had to make his music speak for him. By now he was fluent in English, and could read and write it too. Otto had been helped to master English, and the reading and writing of it, by a minister in one of the English-speaking towns—for he often stayed with a minister’s family, especially if he was providing music for a wedding. One minister in particular had befriended him, loaned him books, and taught him, whenever he could spare the time. The old man had a fine library, and Otto learned to love novels and poetry written in English.
The Olsens were pleased by this taste for reading and writing English. His fluency had been a help to them on several occasions, and it would be a help to the Lindstrom family, as well, when they came.
“Ja,” Otto had agreed, “what a help it will be to them, to come here and have a son who speaks English. Nobody will be able to fool them or cheat them the way they do some people who come here not knowing English.” He had blushed when he said this, and Marta thought it was all modesty over such an accomplishment.
The truth was that he blushed because reading books in English had long since ceased to be a matter of plodding dutifully through dry and difficult prose. A minister of a church in another town had lent him books to stir a young man's imagination, and Scott’s novels of war, adventure, and romance stirred him more than he liked to give out, and Burns’ poems set him dreaming, when they did not shock him with their frankness. He admitted only to himself that reading of books in English, which had started out as a Herculean labor, had become a secret joy. And he never told the Olsens the words to most of the songs he played on the fiddle, because they were so often love songs. But sometimes he thought Marta suspected him
Now, when he played the fiddle in the evening and Marta sat over her sewing admiring the beauty of the music almost as much as she admired the burnished golden good looks of the musician, his face ruddy from the sun, Otto did not tell her the words to “The Last Rose of Summer” or “Silent, O Moyle,” either. Yet the words echoed in his thoughts as he played:
“When shall the swan,
“Her death note singing,
“Sleep with wings in darkness furled?
“When shall heaven,
“Her sweet bell ringing,
“Call my spirit from this stormy world?”
And when he played Moore’s “Last Rose of Summer,” the unsung words tore at his heart:
“’Tis the last rose of summer,
“Left blooming alone;
“All thy lovely companions
“Are faded and gone.”
The tunes were memorized from a book of Thomas Moore’s songs, borrowed from the old minister, and the sadness of the music alone must have been enough to tell Marta that they were songs of loneliness, and that they spoke of death.
When Marta looked at him across the table at mealtimes, she saw that all the purposefulness of the past had gone out of him and had been replaced by dumb pain. And Marta could sense that Otto’s relationship to her and Thor was shifting, a rift was forming between them.
“He will not be staying on here,” she told her husband one night. “You know that, don’t you?”
Thor surprised her by nodding his head reflectively over some piece of nonsense he was whittling away at, but without looking up to see the lines of worry that furrowed her brow as she sat in her split-bottomed chair, bent over her sewing. It was hard to make the tiny stitches when there were tears in her eyes. The Lindstroms had been her friends, back in the old country—so long ago, it now seemed—especially Anna. Marta was genuinely grieved to think that they were gone, but she grieved still more over their son’s misery, and even more over the way his grief had made him silent and remote.
“Ja,” Thor said with resignation, “he’ll be going soon, I think.”
“Where will he go?” Marta asked. She knew that young men set off on their own, but it was beyond her powers imagination to suppose where they went or what they did.
Thor remained silent, apparently without information as to that question.
“Did he tell you he will be leaving?” Marta asked.
“Ja,” Thor replied again, briefly. “He didn’t say much. But you know how the boy is. When he says something, it is because his mind is made up to it.”
Thor and Otto had been mending harness in the barn when Otto had spoken about it. Before the letter, it had been a companionable job, and there would have been conversation about how things went on with the animals and the crops. Or maybe Otto would have commented on Marta’s cleverness in planting sweet peas by the garden gate, and how fine they were to look at now that they were in bloom.
Since the letter, Otto had spoken of these things as if he only forced himself to pretend to take an interest in them, and mostly he had not spoken at all. But that evening in the barn, he had finally spoken about what was really on his mind.
“I think I will be going soon,” he had told Thor, without preamble. He had gotten in the habit of saying things out of the blue like that. It was a sign of the way his life was becoming disconnected from theirs—disconnected from everything.
Thor heaved a sigh. He had seen it coming. He was not as thick-headed as Marta thought.
“Where will you go?” Thor asked resignedly. They had no hold on the youngster, he thought. No rights, as if he were a son of theirs. He was a hired hand—that was the way it was supposed to be, the way Otto wanted it. But Thor did have a responsibility for the boy.
Otto was silent for a long time, until Thor began to doubt that he would answer, or that Otto even knew, himself, where he was going.
“You ought to stay on here,” Thor advised, “at least until you can find a girl and settle down. You can still—“ Thor broke his sentence in half, aware that he was getting into dangerous territory, “you can still have your own place, you know.”
What Thor said was true, Otto thought, as he oiled the leather straps. But he had no inclination to court any of the local girls. It was a bad time, all right. Maybe, in time, he would feel like getting married, starting his own family, but not now. And in the meantime, it was too painful to stay on here.
Sure, he could take up land on his own and look for a wife later. But he had seen men who did that. It was not a good kind of life. It was all wrong—a farm without a circle of domesticity to bless it. He had seen how men who did that lived slovenly and indifferent—harness lying on the kitchen table next to a plate of dried-up beans. The chimney of the lamp that sat on the same table would be so blackened with soot as to give scarcely any light. These bachelor farmers went unshaven most of the time, buttons missing from their coats and shirts. Mostly, Otto guessed, there was too much work in such a life for a man alone, so that the most ordinary refinements and even decencies were neglected, and men had no talent or training for delicate touches that made a home.
Without fully understanding the reason for it, Otto felt that such a life was not for him—too often, such men doomed themselves to perpetual bachelorhood by their habits, and by the isolation of their lives.
“Why don’t you set up a little shop in town, then?” Thor went on. “You’ve saved quite a bit, haven’t you? One of the Olafson boys is looking to do that, only he needs someone to throw in with him. It’s a profitable line.” The lines around Thor’s eyes crinkled humorously. “Some think it’s better than farming—more profit for less work. Meet a lot of folks that way, too.”
Otto’s lips curved as if the thought struck him as humorous.
“I don’t think I’m fit to meet folks,” he observed.
Thor eyed him narrowly.
“You would be, once you got started. Time changes things. Look here, now,” Thor advised cautiously, “life goes on. Do you think my folks back home are still alive? I can tell you they’re not.” Thor looked like he was remembering the old country, with fondness, and not with grief. When his own father had died, it had not even seemed that sad. It had been at the end of a long, good life, and Thor had always felt that his father had gone to his reward, and in contentment. “Life goes on,” Thor repeated.
Otto was still silent.
“You have to do something,” Thor commented.
“Well,” Otto began, almost tentatively, even though Thor knew form experience that there was rarely anything tentative about Otto’s remarks, “I have been thinking about that Jacobson fellow.”
“I don’t know why anyone would be thinking about him,” Thor told Otto with a frown that reminded him that the Olsen’s were not exactly proud of this particular relation—on Thor’s side of the family, and he was sensitive about it. “Darned fool!”
“He gave you some pretty good advice,” Otto responded, feeling, for the first time in weeks, almost ready to laugh at Thor’s discomfort.
“Ja,” he did that,” Thor agreed, “and we come over here and found everything just like he said. But we never did see Jacobson himself. I sent off letters to some of those places way off in the wilderness where he said he might get to, to fetch a letter. But I never heard a word.”
“Maybe he thought you’d send the law after him. Or maybe he thought you’d come calling and catch him with a pretty French girl.”
“Not likely, either way,” Thor grumbled. “Maybe the second….. I dunno…. And why have you been thinking about such a rascal as that?”
Otto had always been curious about the exact nature of Jacobson’s sins—the ones that had driven him so far from civilization—but he’d never gotten an answer in seven years, and didn’t think it very likely that Thor would confide in him now. Otto let it lay.
“I’m going west,” he said, with a quiet finality, “be a trapper.”
Thor looked at him as if he’d gone mad.
“Maybe I’ll do some trading.” Otto was beginning to warm to his topic, in spite of Thor’s horrified look. “I could outfit myself. Maybe even trade with the Indians out west. The fur trade is booming. We get good prices for what we can trap around here.”
“Good enough,” Thor agreed. Talk of prices and practical matters was soothing to him. “But you’d be a darn fool to go into that country where there’s nothing but savages. The way I hear it, the trappers out west are worse than the savages, themselves. You’d turn into a darn—” Thor was beginning to sputter from the strain of avoiding stronger language than his sense of decorum would allow, “—darned savages!”
Such Indians as were still seen in these parts made Thor nervous. He regarded them as sneaky folk—so soft-footed that you might turn around at the general store and find one standing behind you in some outlandish garb. Years ago, before Otto came to the Olsen farm, they used to come into the farmhouse uninvited and stand around Marta’s kitchen. One of the local farm women had nearly caused an Indian war by driving them out with a broom. For several weeks afterward, local settlers were troubled by Indians skulking around the bushes outside their cabins—presumably waiting for someone to stumble over them and be killed. But nothing ever came of it.
Otto laughed—the first time he had really laughed since the letter.
“Y'er set on it?”
“I am.”
“Darn fool.”
Predictably, Marta liked the idea even less than her husband. Thor told her about their conversation as she sat over her stitching. Her response was a deep, disapproving frown.
“We’ll manage okay,” Thor told her gently.
“It’s a shame,” Marta said feelingly. “He didn’t come from that kind of folks. It seems like if we let him go, it’ll be as good as letting him go bad. You could talk him out of it, if you tried,” she accused.
“You know how he is.”
Marta did know.
“I’m not worried about us being all right,” Marta added. “Will he write?”
“I guess so. You better ask him.”
“Ja, and we’ll send off letters to some god-forsaken fort out west and never hear a word back—” Marta found herself studiously avoiding the Jacobsen’s name.
Thor scratched his head. “When a man’s got himself set on something….”
“He’s just a boy!”
“Nope. Not any more. He’s taller than you are,” Thor pointed out. “Gonna be taller than me.”
“And twice as stupid!”
“That’s a fair amount of stupid,” Thor agreed, turning away so that Marta would not see his smile.
For the next few weeks, they watched helplessly as Otto outfitted himself. There were trips into town to buy traps, a rifle, some blankets—even a new pair of boots and a hat—and not the kind farmers wore, either. He bought winter clothes—black woolens. The prices for such necessities would be outrageous out west, if they could be had at all.
Marta surreptitiously put cedar chips among the woolens, but she did not tell him. Let him discover them in his packs when it turned cold, she thought. Maybe then he would write.
The day Otto had designated for his departure finally came, and they said their goodbyes in Marta’s kitchen, over coffee.
“You better write!” Marta insisted, her eyes clouding. “You better not go without writing and let us think you are dead, like that Jacobson.”
“Ja,” Otto agreed, leaning forward in his chair, “I’ll be sure to write.”
“You wrote your sister, I guess.”
“Ja, You can write to me at Fort Pierre. That’s where I’m going.”
“You’re going all the way to the Missouri!”
“I’m going across the Missouri.” He looked determined.
If he were a son of hers, Marta thought, she would lay into him! But she didn’t have the right.
But Otto did a surprising thing—something he had never done before. He stood up and walked over to stand beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder—one of those fine; fiddler’s hands, with their long golden-tanned fingers. It seemed to Marta that he had gotten taller—or maybe just thinner. He hadn’t been eating much lately.
The hand on her shoulder was a gesture of affection—a rare thing coming from Otto, who had always seemed to feel that if he allowed himself to become too close to the Olsens it would somehow be a betrayal of his own family. But now that orphaned resentment, that refusal to let himself be adopted, was gone. He really was a man, Marta realized. He did not need to insist on his independence any more: He really was independent; he was going. He was finally free to make those gestures of affection that had been withheld till now.
Otto bent to place a kiss on the top of Marta’s head. Otto had always been a gentleman. He had always been gentle, too—with animals. And he had always been considerate. It was just that he had drawn a line in the dirt, when it came to being family. Until now, it had made him seem to Marta as if he had a streak of coldness. Marta knew for the first time how much this tragedy had changed him—or maybe it had only freed him.
It was a farewell kiss.
CHAPTER 2
“They are—“
The blonde young farmhand, his shirtsleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows to reveal tawny forearms downed golden, who had just opened his letter from the old country, had spoken the two words quietly, but he could not go on. His mouth had twisted into a grimace of pain. He stood with his heavy work boots rooted to Marta Olsen’s kitchen floor. But Marta did not see. Their backs were turned to each other, Marta’s because she was washing dishes, and Otto’s because he had instinctively turned away.
Otto was nineteen years old and tall—half a head taller than Marta herself, who was a big, sturdy woman—with the hard-muscled physique and sun-bronzed face of a young man who had spent his life plowing and planting, mowing and threshing, raising houses and barns, cutting and splitting firewood, and managing horses. The trousers that he wore tucked into his boots were loose, emphasizing a narrowness at the hip that made the customary suspenders that crossed over his wide shoulders a real necessity.
Marta’s first thought, as she turned from the breakfast dishes to see the young man’s broad back turned to her, was that the sun-bleached cotton shirt had already rumpled at the back and ought to be straightened.
“Tuck your shirt in at the back,” she chided good-naturedly, “or it will be up around our shoulders in an hour or two.”
Otto, who had already guessed it would be a hot day from the brightness of the morning, guessed that the shirt would be off in an hour or two, but he did not say so.
Marta expected he would turn and give her one of his looks—the kind he always bestowed on her attempts to mother him or, more likely—now that he had gotten so big
—he might laugh at her. He laughed easily.
When he was younger, her attempts at mothering had been met with quelling silences. But they had come to an understanding over the years since Otto had first come to the Olsen’s farm, an overgrown boy of twelve—a boy who had come over from Sweden alone. The understanding was this: He did not need a mother; he had a family of his own. He had parents and a little sister—Lisbeth, who had written so faithfully over the years—who would be immigrating to America by and by. The Lindstrom family would have their own farm here, their own place. It would be Otto’s determination, his efforts, his independence and strength that would bring it all about.
Marta was surprised when Otto stood silent and did not immediately turn to look at her. When he did turn, he did not quite meet her eyes and kept his sunburnt face expressionless and slightly averted. He had let the hand that held the letter fall to his side, and held the pages almost heedlessly. It was a firm, calloused hand, but with long, slim fingers, patient and precise—the hands of a fiddle player.
“They are dead,” he told her, his voice as expressionless as his face.
“Dead,” Marta whispered, clutching at her apron and not knowing which way to look. “Dead,” she whispered again, shaking her head.
“I didn’t expect it,” Otto began, “even though—“ but he realized he was not talking sense. He should have known.
“Your parents,” Marta said. “Not Lisbeth.”
“No. Not Lisbeth. She says—pneumonia—she wrote before that they were sick. I should have—“ Otto leaned his head back and slowly turned it from side to side, as if his neck ached or as if to express a negative.
“It was all those bad years,” Marta said softly, “the bad harvests. It breaks people
down—grinds them down, when they work and don’t have enough—“ she stopped, realizing that she sounded angry.
“I guess so.” Otto had not shared his family’s hardships. He had been better off here in America as a farmhand than his folks had been as freeholders in the old country. Here there was plenty to eat without picking the herring bones clean—plenty of everything, as he had told them all so many times in his letters. Well, they would never see this wondrous land now.
Lisbeth had written about several successive years of bad harvests in Sweden, but cautiously, in the way she had of always softening their troubles back home, and sweetened her letters with reminders of all the good things—apple blossoms and the church boats crossing the lakes on summer Sundays.
But the Olsens got old-country letters of their own, and these letters from family friends had been more candid about the hardships of the past few years.
Otto could not speak. He folded the letter and shoved it absently into his pocket, and walked out the kitchen door, where the midsummer sun accused him with its brilliance. Thor Olsen would already be busy with the mowing.
“Seven years,” he thought, as he hitched a team to the hay wagon and drove them out to the field. “seven years I have waited.” His anguish made him almost was to curse God—curse God and die, like that fellow in the Bible.
Now the rest of the family would never immigrate. His parents were dead. Lisbeth would not make the journey to America alone—she had said as much in her letter. She could not leave their parents’ bones. He guessed it was a bad time for her. It was a hard thing to do—ja, he knew that—to cross the ocean alone, to come to a country where one didn’t even speak the language. Otto had done it himself, as a boy, with emotions that balanced precariously between excitement and terror. And, to Otto, Lisbeth was just a little girl—the flaxen-haired ten-year-old whom he had left standing on the shore seven years before. She would be seventeen now.
He had brought little with him. Only his clothing, some blankets, a little money, and his fiddle.
All these years he had been working, saving his wages, living every winter in the expectation that the following spring would be the one in which the family would be reunited in America.
Otto remembered how it had started. The Olsens were friends of the family. They had immigrated to America years before—before anyone else in Sweden had thought of such a thing. They had gotten the idea from a relative of theirs—some black sheep of the family, Otto gathered—who had gone to sea because of some indiscretion back in Sweden, and whose later indiscretions had made it prudent for him to betake himself to regions still more remote and inaccessible. In North America—in both Canada and the western territories of the United States—he had prospered in the fur trade. Or at least he had reported that he was prospering, but his accounts of peoples and places and manner of living had, for the most part, only baffled the Olsens. It was a rough kind of prosperity, a wandering and unsettled life, among people and places with strange names and stranger manners. Nor could the Olsens ever believe in any kind of prosperity that did not include a home, a farm, and crops and livestock.
Jacobsen—that had been his name—though it was usually spoken in hushed tones in the Olsen household—had never acquired any of these more solid blessings. But there was talk, in his letters, of gold, of travels, and of possibilities. Jacobsen was probably dead by now, but he had done one good thing in his life: His letters home had alerted his relatives to the beauty and riches and grandeur of America. Jacobsen had apparently had more lucid moments in which he realized that land was of more interest to his farming relatives back in Sweden—far more interesting than tales about the savages, or wild animals, or of prosperous dealing in beaver pelts. And so, more or less by accident, the Olsens learned through Jacobsen of free land in America. They came over, Thor and Marta, and took up land, free land. But time had passed and they had no children—and, hence, not hands enough for the work of the farm.
Wanting to do good to their friends back in Sweden, and help themselves at the same time, they wrote urging the Lindstroms to immigrate to America. More than that, they would help. Let the Lindstroms send their son, Otto, ahead of the rest of the family. The Olsens would pay his passage, and pay him good wages for his work on the farm. Then, when Karl and Anna Lindstrom had sold their own small farm in Sweden and saved their money, they could follow. Meanwhile, Otto would have saved for the many things the Lindstroms would need that could not be transported from Sweden. And he would know the land and the language.
Otto remembered how relentlessly he had promoted this offer the Olsens had made, even in the face of his mother’s objections, his father’s wish to temporize. Boys his age, he had argued, were sent to sea. He was nearly a man. But he was still enough of a child to be indifferent to the pain that the separation would cause his mother. She had already lost one child in infancy, and daughter named Ingrid, and she could not help but feel that sending Otto to America comprehended the loss of another—temporarily, at best. At worst, he might not survive the journey. There could be storms at sea, or a shipwreck—or an accident or illness might befall him. Who would care for him if he fell ill on the journey?
In the end, Otto prevailed.
The offer was too good, for one thing. For another, it was clear to Karl and Marta, even in the days before the really hard times began in Sweden, that their best hope for a better life lay in America.
For Otto, the victory over his parents’ misgivings was bittersweet. He had always believed that the rest of the family would come—next year. And when they did come, they would see. And Otto would feel that his pride, his independence, even his recklessness in insisting on such a course, would be vindicated.
After a few years of waiting, being right meant less to him, especially when Lisbeth’s letters told of Marta’s being too often ill during the winter, or of some minor injury of Karl’s that had laid him up too long in the spring. Otto, sorry to hear of such mishaps, and full of youth and strength himself, had regarded these accounts in the light of transient troubles, and not as portents of declining health. Thor and Marta’s old-country letters told of the bad harvests, which Lisbeth only hinted at in her letters to Otto. Surely there would be a better harvest next year. Surely his parents’ health was not so bad, or would improve. Or, wouldn’t they immigrate anyway and find their health improved in a hopeful new land?
“Well,” he thought, as he forked the hay into the wagon and the day grew hot, “that is all done with now,” and felt his face grow hot with shame for having sundered the family, probably broken his mother’s heart—and maybe contributed to his parents’ early decline and death by his absence, to no purpose. Had he been in Sweden, perhaps he could have helped. Perhaps the harvests would have been better, and there would have been more to eat.
It had been a beautiful dream he had cherished all these years, the dream of the fields green with corn and gold with ripening grain, the deep peace of cattle in the pastures, the dooryard lively with geese and other fowl, a dream big with barn and byre and sweet with fields of clover, and a family home, a home that would be presided over by parents whom his imagination would admit to having grown a little older, but which included a flaxen-haired sister who would remain forever a child.
That dream would never be.
Marta came out to the field at mid-day with lunch and ginger-water. Otto watched her draw Thor aside. She was telling him about the letter. Otto ate and drank and wiped the sweat from his brow and felt his hair prickling the back of his neck and sticking to his face, and felt as drenched in guilt and shame as his body was with sweat.
Days passed, and weeks. Marta saw that Otto had sunk into despondent silence. She was fond of him, maybe too fond. His silence disturbed her.
Otto had never been highly sociable; he was too independent for that. His skill as a fiddler had made him sought after far and wide, so that they sometimes had to dispense with his help on the farm so that he could travel to some distant town to play for a wedding or a dance. But his frequent attendance at social gatherings had never made him outgoing, even in their own small community, where he spoke the language. He was often invited to play the fiddle for social events among English-speaking people, where he was an oddity—in the early years in America, a blonde boy who was precocious in music, yet scarcely able to speak English. Gradually he learned English, and grew less awkward when demands for his music sent him out to English-speaking communities. He even enjoyed a musician’s kind of popularity—of being generally admired yet seldom getting a chance to participate in the talk and laughter and dancing. But sometimes there were other musicians to talk to and to learn from.
There were girls in the neighborhood—and, Marta suspected, in several other neighborhoods—who had an eye for Otto. But he never seemed aware of it. It was the resolute single-mindedness he had about the reunion of his family in America. He waited, and with an intensity that was visible in everything he did, even to small gestures such as shoving that mane of golden hair out of his face, or the way his eyes would flash blue when company spoke of places where new land was being opened up for settlement. And you could see it, too, in the way he played his fiddle in the evening. You could see that he was dreaming over the music, dreaming, perhaps, that he played for his distant family, or at the Lindstrom place that was going to be.
You could see it in the way he applied himself to learning English. He was glad to be invited to play at the English-speaking settlements, even though it must have been painful for him, at first, to go among people with whom he could hardly communicate, were it not for that remarkable power he had to make his music speak for him. By now he was fluent in English, and could read and write it too. Otto had been helped to master English, and the reading and writing of it, by a minister in one of the English-speaking towns—for he often stayed with a minister’s family, especially if he was providing music for a wedding. One minister in particular had befriended him, loaned him books, and taught him, whenever he could spare the time. The old man had a fine library, and Otto learned to love novels and poetry written in English.
The Olsens were pleased by this taste for reading and writing English. His fluency had been a help to them on several occasions, and it would be a help to the Lindstrom family, as well, when they came.
“Ja,” Otto had agreed, “what a help it will be to them, to come here and have a son who speaks English. Nobody will be able to fool them or cheat them the way they do some people who come here not knowing English.” He had blushed when he said this, and Marta thought it was all modesty over such an accomplishment.
The truth was that he blushed because reading books in English had long since ceased to be a matter of plodding dutifully through dry and difficult prose. A minister of a church in another town had lent him books to stir a young man's imagination, and Scott’s novels of war, adventure, and romance stirred him more than he liked to give out, and Burns’ poems set him dreaming, when they did not shock him with their frankness. He admitted only to himself that reading of books in English, which had started out as a Herculean labor, had become a secret joy. And he never told the Olsens the words to most of the songs he played on the fiddle, because they were so often love songs. But sometimes he thought Marta suspected him
Now, when he played the fiddle in the evening and Marta sat over her sewing admiring the beauty of the music almost as much as she admired the burnished golden good looks of the musician, his face ruddy from the sun, Otto did not tell her the words to “The Last Rose of Summer” or “Silent, O Moyle,” either. Yet the words echoed in his thoughts as he played:
“When shall the swan,
“Her death note singing,
“Sleep with wings in darkness furled?
“When shall heaven,
“Her sweet bell ringing,
“Call my spirit from this stormy world?”
And when he played Moore’s “Last Rose of Summer,” the unsung words tore at his heart:
“’Tis the last rose of summer,
“Left blooming alone;
“All thy lovely companions
“Are faded and gone.”
The tunes were memorized from a book of Thomas Moore’s songs, borrowed from the old minister, and the sadness of the music alone must have been enough to tell Marta that they were songs of loneliness, and that they spoke of death.
When Marta looked at him across the table at mealtimes, she saw that all the purposefulness of the past had gone out of him and had been replaced by dumb pain. And Marta could sense that Otto’s relationship to her and Thor was shifting, a rift was forming between them.
“He will not be staying on here,” she told her husband one night. “You know that, don’t you?”
Thor surprised her by nodding his head reflectively over some piece of nonsense he was whittling away at, but without looking up to see the lines of worry that furrowed her brow as she sat in her split-bottomed chair, bent over her sewing. It was hard to make the tiny stitches when there were tears in her eyes. The Lindstroms had been her friends, back in the old country—so long ago, it now seemed—especially Anna. Marta was genuinely grieved to think that they were gone, but she grieved still more over their son’s misery, and even more over the way his grief had made him silent and remote.
“Ja,” Thor said with resignation, “he’ll be going soon, I think.”
“Where will he go?” Marta asked. She knew that young men set off on their own, but it was beyond her powers imagination to suppose where they went or what they did.
Thor remained silent, apparently without information as to that question.
“Did he tell you he will be leaving?” Marta asked.
“Ja,” Thor replied again, briefly. “He didn’t say much. But you know how the boy is. When he says something, it is because his mind is made up to it.”
Thor and Otto had been mending harness in the barn when Otto had spoken about it. Before the letter, it had been a companionable job, and there would have been conversation about how things went on with the animals and the crops. Or maybe Otto would have commented on Marta’s cleverness in planting sweet peas by the garden gate, and how fine they were to look at now that they were in bloom.
Since the letter, Otto had spoken of these things as if he only forced himself to pretend to take an interest in them, and mostly he had not spoken at all. But that evening in the barn, he had finally spoken about what was really on his mind.
“I think I will be going soon,” he had told Thor, without preamble. He had gotten in the habit of saying things out of the blue like that. It was a sign of the way his life was becoming disconnected from theirs—disconnected from everything.
Thor heaved a sigh. He had seen it coming. He was not as thick-headed as Marta thought.
“Where will you go?” Thor asked resignedly. They had no hold on the youngster, he thought. No rights, as if he were a son of theirs. He was a hired hand—that was the way it was supposed to be, the way Otto wanted it. But Thor did have a responsibility for the boy.
Otto was silent for a long time, until Thor began to doubt that he would answer, or that Otto even knew, himself, where he was going.
“You ought to stay on here,” Thor advised, “at least until you can find a girl and settle down. You can still—“ Thor broke his sentence in half, aware that he was getting into dangerous territory, “you can still have your own place, you know.”
What Thor said was true, Otto thought, as he oiled the leather straps. But he had no inclination to court any of the local girls. It was a bad time, all right. Maybe, in time, he would feel like getting married, starting his own family, but not now. And in the meantime, it was too painful to stay on here.
Sure, he could take up land on his own and look for a wife later. But he had seen men who did that. It was not a good kind of life. It was all wrong—a farm without a circle of domesticity to bless it. He had seen how men who did that lived slovenly and indifferent—harness lying on the kitchen table next to a plate of dried-up beans. The chimney of the lamp that sat on the same table would be so blackened with soot as to give scarcely any light. These bachelor farmers went unshaven most of the time, buttons missing from their coats and shirts. Mostly, Otto guessed, there was too much work in such a life for a man alone, so that the most ordinary refinements and even decencies were neglected, and men had no talent or training for delicate touches that made a home.
Without fully understanding the reason for it, Otto felt that such a life was not for him—too often, such men doomed themselves to perpetual bachelorhood by their habits, and by the isolation of their lives.
“Why don’t you set up a little shop in town, then?” Thor went on. “You’ve saved quite a bit, haven’t you? One of the Olafson boys is looking to do that, only he needs someone to throw in with him. It’s a profitable line.” The lines around Thor’s eyes crinkled humorously. “Some think it’s better than farming—more profit for less work. Meet a lot of folks that way, too.”
Otto’s lips curved as if the thought struck him as humorous.
“I don’t think I’m fit to meet folks,” he observed.
Thor eyed him narrowly.
“You would be, once you got started. Time changes things. Look here, now,” Thor advised cautiously, “life goes on. Do you think my folks back home are still alive? I can tell you they’re not.” Thor looked like he was remembering the old country, with fondness, and not with grief. When his own father had died, it had not even seemed that sad. It had been at the end of a long, good life, and Thor had always felt that his father had gone to his reward, and in contentment. “Life goes on,” Thor repeated.
Otto was still silent.
“You have to do something,” Thor commented.
“Well,” Otto began, almost tentatively, even though Thor knew form experience that there was rarely anything tentative about Otto’s remarks, “I have been thinking about that Jacobson fellow.”
“I don’t know why anyone would be thinking about him,” Thor told Otto with a frown that reminded him that the Olsen’s were not exactly proud of this particular relation—on Thor’s side of the family, and he was sensitive about it. “Darned fool!”
“He gave you some pretty good advice,” Otto responded, feeling, for the first time in weeks, almost ready to laugh at Thor’s discomfort.
“Ja,” he did that,” Thor agreed, “and we come over here and found everything just like he said. But we never did see Jacobson himself. I sent off letters to some of those places way off in the wilderness where he said he might get to, to fetch a letter. But I never heard a word.”
“Maybe he thought you’d send the law after him. Or maybe he thought you’d come calling and catch him with a pretty French girl.”
“Not likely, either way,” Thor grumbled. “Maybe the second….. I dunno…. And why have you been thinking about such a rascal as that?”
Otto had always been curious about the exact nature of Jacobson’s sins—the ones that had driven him so far from civilization—but he’d never gotten an answer in seven years, and didn’t think it very likely that Thor would confide in him now. Otto let it lay.
“I’m going west,” he said, with a quiet finality, “be a trapper.”
Thor looked at him as if he’d gone mad.
“Maybe I’ll do some trading.” Otto was beginning to warm to his topic, in spite of Thor’s horrified look. “I could outfit myself. Maybe even trade with the Indians out west. The fur trade is booming. We get good prices for what we can trap around here.”
“Good enough,” Thor agreed. Talk of prices and practical matters was soothing to him. “But you’d be a darn fool to go into that country where there’s nothing but savages. The way I hear it, the trappers out west are worse than the savages, themselves. You’d turn into a darn—” Thor was beginning to sputter from the strain of avoiding stronger language than his sense of decorum would allow, “—darned savages!”
Such Indians as were still seen in these parts made Thor nervous. He regarded them as sneaky folk—so soft-footed that you might turn around at the general store and find one standing behind you in some outlandish garb. Years ago, before Otto came to the Olsen farm, they used to come into the farmhouse uninvited and stand around Marta’s kitchen. One of the local farm women had nearly caused an Indian war by driving them out with a broom. For several weeks afterward, local settlers were troubled by Indians skulking around the bushes outside their cabins—presumably waiting for someone to stumble over them and be killed. But nothing ever came of it.
Otto laughed—the first time he had really laughed since the letter.
“Y'er set on it?”
“I am.”
“Darn fool.”
Predictably, Marta liked the idea even less than her husband. Thor told her about their conversation as she sat over her stitching. Her response was a deep, disapproving frown.
“We’ll manage okay,” Thor told her gently.
“It’s a shame,” Marta said feelingly. “He didn’t come from that kind of folks. It seems like if we let him go, it’ll be as good as letting him go bad. You could talk him out of it, if you tried,” she accused.
“You know how he is.”
Marta did know.
“I’m not worried about us being all right,” Marta added. “Will he write?”
“I guess so. You better ask him.”
“Ja, and we’ll send off letters to some god-forsaken fort out west and never hear a word back—” Marta found herself studiously avoiding the Jacobsen’s name.
Thor scratched his head. “When a man’s got himself set on something….”
“He’s just a boy!”
“Nope. Not any more. He’s taller than you are,” Thor pointed out. “Gonna be taller than me.”
“And twice as stupid!”
“That’s a fair amount of stupid,” Thor agreed, turning away so that Marta would not see his smile.
For the next few weeks, they watched helplessly as Otto outfitted himself. There were trips into town to buy traps, a rifle, some blankets—even a new pair of boots and a hat—and not the kind farmers wore, either. He bought winter clothes—black woolens. The prices for such necessities would be outrageous out west, if they could be had at all.
Marta surreptitiously put cedar chips among the woolens, but she did not tell him. Let him discover them in his packs when it turned cold, she thought. Maybe then he would write.
The day Otto had designated for his departure finally came, and they said their goodbyes in Marta’s kitchen, over coffee.
“You better write!” Marta insisted, her eyes clouding. “You better not go without writing and let us think you are dead, like that Jacobson.”
“Ja,” Otto agreed, leaning forward in his chair, “I’ll be sure to write.”
“You wrote your sister, I guess.”
“Ja, You can write to me at Fort Pierre. That’s where I’m going.”
“You’re going all the way to the Missouri!”
“I’m going across the Missouri.” He looked determined.
If he were a son of hers, Marta thought, she would lay into him! But she didn’t have the right.
But Otto did a surprising thing—something he had never done before. He stood up and walked over to stand beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder—one of those fine; fiddler’s hands, with their long golden-tanned fingers. It seemed to Marta that he had gotten taller—or maybe just thinner. He hadn’t been eating much lately.
The hand on her shoulder was a gesture of affection—a rare thing coming from Otto, who had always seemed to feel that if he allowed himself to become too close to the Olsens it would somehow be a betrayal of his own family. But now that orphaned resentment, that refusal to let himself be adopted, was gone. He really was a man, Marta realized. He did not need to insist on his independence any more: He really was independent; he was going. He was finally free to make those gestures of affection that had been withheld till now.
Otto bent to place a kiss on the top of Marta’s head. Otto had always been a gentleman. He had always been gentle, too—with animals. And he had always been considerate. It was just that he had drawn a line in the dirt, when it came to being family. Until now, it had made him seem to Marta as if he had a streak of coldness. Marta knew for the first time how much this tragedy had changed him—or maybe it had only freed him.
It was a farewell kiss.