The Last Letter Home (12 page)

It seemed as if Karl Oskar and the boys cut wood and carried it inside all day long. And outside the walls of the house the bitter cold lurked. As soon as anyone stuck his nose outside the door he was assailed by stinging bites. The cold was a persistent pursuer who bit into any unprotected part of the body. The skin on one’s cheeks felt as if covered by a crust. They protected their hands with great woolen mittens, the thickest Kristina could knit, but even with these the fingers grew numb, clumsy, and stiff as wooden sticks.

They must constantly be on guard against frostbite; in this winter weather a limb could be frozen in a few moments, especially those of sensitive children. Dan and Ulrika attended school in the newly built meetinghouse in Center City, but during the coldest days they were kept at home. However much Kristina bundled them up it was never sufficient to keep them warm. If they should get behind in their lessons they might catch up later, but frozen ears, hands, and feet could never be replaced.

They spent most of the winter inside; only chores in the stable, tending the animals, and other necessary errands, brought them outside.

Tree-felling in the forest usually warmed the man who handled the ax, but this winter Karl Oskar had to interrupt his timber cutting for buildings because one of his legs turned numb during the work; the injury to his left leg became worse in this merciless cold. After a day of much walking his swollen shank ached and felt sore during the night, and his limp was more pronounced than before. Apparently he was stuck with this limp for the rest of his life, so he might as well learn to get along with it. The price he had paid for his life that time when he escaped the robbers who had coaxed him onto their wagon must be paid in installments during many years of pain and lameness.

Before he went to bed in the evenings, Kristina would rub his sore leg with camphor-brännvin which somewhat eased the gnawing ache. And each time she poured the fluid on his limb she comforted him about the injury: If he hadn’t had this old injury he might already have lost his life in the war between the states. She herself was grateful:

“I can thank your bad shank I’m not a widow.”

“Are you so pleased to be married to a lame man?”

“Better a lame man than a dead one!”

The sharp smell tickled Kristina’s nostrils as she poured the camphor-brännvin into her hand and rubbed the swollen lower calf of his leg. She recognized God’s meaning and purpose in everything that happened to them; God had lamed Karl Oskar’s leg to save him from the human slaughter on the battlefield.

“I am still sound in life itself, of course,” he said. “But I feel older every day.”

He stopped, embarrassed that he had spoken in a mixture of English and Swedish; Kristina poked fun at his attempts at English and had asked him to use his mother tongue when he spoke with her.

This settler couple at Chisago Lake were still far from old age, if they counted the years. Karl Oskar was thirty-nine, Kristina thirty-seven. They were between youth and old age, they had used only half of life’s measure granted a human being according to David’s words in Holy Writ. But it was not the measure of a person’s years that told if he was old or young, it was what he had gone through in his life. Karl Oskar and Kristina were old before their time, badly bruised by years of hard labor, marked by heavy chores. Minnesota’s violent changes in weather—the summers’ intense heat, the winters’ severe cold—showed its effect in their bodies. Their limbs and joints had stiffened, their backs and shoulders bent. They were a toiling couple, moving heavily and sluggishly when they still ought to have used the uncumbered, light steps of youth.

If one counted the number of heavy work days that had filled their lives Karl Oskar and Kristina were already old people.

—2—

Lucky he who was warm inside four walls this winter. But there were people in their part of the world who had no timbered walls to protect them against the merciless cold. Kristina could not get her thoughts off the Indians who always—summer and winter alike—lived in wretched huts. A few animal skins and blankets spread over twisted, bent saplings—this was their house. Pelts and woven materials were their only protection; the wind must blow at full hurricane strength through the walls and roofs of the Indians’ huts. Karl Oskar surmised the redskins must have been created different from the whites; perhaps their blood contained some warming fluid that protected them against freezing to death. But Kristina felt it was a miracle that they could survive Minnesota’s winters year after year.

Besides, the Indians were always exposed to hunger in wintertime; the hunting season was over and the ground was covered with snow so deep it was almost impossible to snare game. The ice on the lakes lay so thick they could not catch fish. Perhaps they had saved a little from last summer’s corn—“lazy man’s corn”—which their women grew in small plots. In the fall they gathered wild rice along the lakeshores, but they were so lackadaisical that the rice often was frozen before they got to it. They would also eat roots and ferns and evil lizards and critters white people wouldn’t taste. The savages were not squeamish. But it certainly couldn’t be true that they fried rattlesnakes and considered them delicacies.

The hunger among the Indians this winter was gruesomely described to Kristina one evening when Samuel Nöjd, the old hunter, came around looking for pelts.

Nöjd had lived among the Indians and knew them better than any of the settlers in the valley. At one time he had had a Sioux girl living with him—he maintained he had saved her from starving to death—but she had gone back to her own people. At present he lived alone in his log cabin in Taylors Falls with twelve dogs and twelve cats. The dogs he used for hunting but the cats he kept to lick his plates and pots; the cats in the house, he insisted, did the same service as a woman—they washed the dishes.

Kristina felt sorry for Samuel Nöjd because he was an unbeliever and blasphemer. He was also dirty, with an evil smell, and full of vermin, but she could not feel aversion to him because of this—she had no right to detest any human being, however strangely he was created. But as he now came into their kitchen and sat down on the sofa bench she was afraid a few lice might stray from the old trapper. American lice were much more ravenous and vicious in their bites than their Swedish counterparts, and unbelievably tenacious of life, almost impossible to exterminate. Neither the brass comb nor boiling soap lye helped against American vermin.

Dan and Ulrika came in and stood beside the old man who sat on the bench; he always told them strange stories. Kristina thought, now the children would surely pick up some lice, and a louse became a grandmother in one night; tomorrow they would have grandchildren in the house from Nöjd’s vermin.

The trapper had recently returned from a trip out West where the Sioux were in winter quarters. This year, he said, the hunger among them was worse than ever: The Sioux were eating their own children.

Kristina winced: “What in all the world are you saying, Nöjd?”

“I’m just telling you that there are Indians who eat their own offspring because they don’t have anything else to sustain life.”

As the old man didn’t think she believed him he hastened to assure her. He had with his own eyes, which now rested on them, seen in Meeker County, near Acton, a pile of children’s bones gnawed clean. He had inspected the heap very closely; there were skulls and thighbones and shanks, of people, fresh bones of devoured Indian children. There wasn’t the smallest scrap of flesh left. And he had met soldiers who were stationed at the Indian post at Red Wood who had confirmed that this winter the Indians were eating their own.

They had told him about an Indian woman who had gone so crazy from hunger she had cut up her fourteen-year-old son when her husband was away. She had made the boy go to sleep with his head on her knees and then she had cut his throat and drunk his blood. Later she had sliced her son’s body and cooked the pieces. The neighbors could smell the wonderful meat in her pot and wondered what it was. To keep them from telling her husband she shared the meal with them. The woman and her guests had eaten the boy in one meal; he was so little and skinny that was all there was of him. When her husband came back he missed his son and asked for him. The wife was evasive and wouldn’t tell him but he found the bare bones and then she was forced to confess her deed. The husband instantly killed his wife with his tomahawk.

“You’re scaring us to death, Nöjd!” exclaimed Kristina in horror.

Karl Oskar told the children to leave the kitchen and they obeyed reluctantly.

“It must be stories you carry around,” he said. He looked at Kristina, as much as to say: Don’t believe all you hear from Nöjd.

But the old hunter assured them that he had told only the truth about the devastating starvation among the Indians. Ever since so many of the buffalo had been shot the Sioux had suffered from hunger, but never had their misery been so horrible as this winter. He himself could take almost anything, but this was too much for him. The soldiers at Red Wood hated to be on guard duty at the supply house which was filled with food, while Indians, fainting from hunger, swarmed about outside. No food was permitted to be distributed without cash, and the redskins had no cash because they hadn’t been paid what the government owed them. The food in the supply house was rightly theirs, but they were not allowed to eat it!

Kristina said that the whites, who were Christian people and knew what was right, must accumulate a heavy burden before God when they treated the Indians so meanly. Petrus Olausson used to say that the redskins were under God’s curse and would be exterminated because they wouldn’t turn to Christianity of their own will. But she couldn’t believe that savages who didn’t know the gospel could be under the Lord’s curse. “If any are to be punished it should be the Christians!”

And Samuel Nöjd laughed derisively. The whites had brought the Indians cholera, smallpox, and venereal diseases; if they also came with Christianity the Indians must think it was some new deviltry. No wonder they were suspicious and resisted! At least the Church might have saved them from the missionaries who plagued them with the catechism; Christians ought to show their neighbors some mercy. Worst of all, of course, were those damned French trappers—they even used captured Indians as food for their dogs! Those confounded hunters thought this the easiest way to carry dog food with them!

“I shudder in my heart!” said Kristina, as she poured the evening porridge. “Those poor hungry wild ones! How can they stand it?”

“What can they do?” asked the trapper. “They must choose: Starve, or kill others!”

“What others? Who?”

“Try to guess!” And Samuel Nöjd winked secretively. He looked toward Karl Oskar, who had gone to a corner as far away as possible so as not to have to listen to their guest’s stories.

Who were the others the Indians might kill? After that question there was a moments depressing silence. Kristina put an extra plate on the table; she intended to ask Nöjd to eat supper with them.

When the trapper told the story of the dog food, Karl Oskar had remembered some unfinished business he had with him; it had happened a few times that dogs had killed sheep that belonged to him. Last fall he had found two of his yearling ewes killed back at the Indian cliff, their throats slit open. And just about that time Johan had seen some of Nöjd’s dogs near the path along the lake. There was no doubt they were Nöjd’s, as no one else in the vicinity had dogs of that kind.

Nöjd mostly bought raccoon, mink, and muskrat pelts, but a few times they had also sold him calf and sheepskins.

“If you’re out to buy pelts today I can sell you a couple of sheepskins,” said Karl Oskar slowly.

“All right.”

“But I want thirty dollars apiece!”

Nöjd laughed his derisive laugh again; he thought Karl Oskar was joking. “Thirty dollars apiece! Kiss my ass!”

“But those skins are from the two ewes your dogs killed last fall!”

The old hunter jumped up as if something had stuck him in his behind. “That’s a lie! A hell of a lie!” he shouted.

“They were your dogs, Nöjd!”

“My dogs don’t kill tame animals! That’s a lie! A goddamn lie!”

“Our boy saw the bitches—why do you deny it?”

“No son of a bitch saw my dogs! Never!”

Nöjd’s face took on a savage look; he roared and stomped about. Kristina grew frightened and tried to restrain Karl Oskar. But he took the trapper’s American swearing calmly. “I have proof; you let your dogs run on my property!”

“Your property!” Nöjd spit sneeringly on the floor. “Your property as much as mine, Nilsson!”

“What was that you said?” Karl Oskar’s voice had suddenly changed. “Isn’t this my land? What are you talking about, old-timer?”

“All this land was stolen from the Indians!”

“I haven’t stolen my land; I’ve paid the government a dollar twenty-five an acre for it.”

“Yes, but you have bought stolen property, and cheap at that! You know it as well as I do! Better talk soft about
your
land, Nilsson! And I’ll let my dogs run where they please!”

Karl Oskar rose. He took a few long, decided steps toward his guest as if he were going to throw himself on him:

“You say I’ve bought stolen property . . . you old . . .”

He fisted his hands and opened them again, the muscles around his mouth grew taut, his face tense, his eyes contracted and seemed to withdraw into his head. Kristina knew the sign; she rushed between the two inflamed men.

“You have accused me of dishonest dealings!” stuttered the settler.

At the sight of Karl Oskar’s changed face the trapper drew back a step and lowered his voice:

“No! No! Your dealings are honorable, all right—according to the laws of the whites—their own laws—after the theft. There isn’t an acre of land in America that hasn’t been stolen or cheated from the Indians.”

Kristina whispered to her husband: He mustn’t pay any heed to Samuel Nöjd’s talk. But their guest went on: What was the price promised to the Indians when they were forced to give up their land to Swedes and other whites? How much had the government paid for the whole Mississippi Valley? Ten dollars for twenty thousand acres! One two-hundredth of a cent per acre! Could one two-hundredth of a cent be called payment? For the most fertile land in the whole world? It was a thief’s price, that’s what it was! And that’s why they could sell cheap to him, Nilsson! And even this trifle hadn’t yet been paid to the Indians! The only thing left for them was starvation!