The Settlers (17 page)

—2—

The shakes were ready to be put on the new threshing barn and Karl Oskar had asked Jonas Petter and Anders Månsson to help him. He himself placed the shakes in straight rows, Jonas Petter nailed them down, and Månsson acted as handyman, fetching and carrying up and down the ladder. On the roof, the sun burned like a branding iron; up there it was too hot even to fry bacon, said Jonas Petter; the sun would burn it to cinders.

The men had to quench their thirst every quarter of an hour; they drank gallons of cold buttermilk to which had been added fresh, cool spring water. Once every hour they rested in the shade of the maples, stretched out dazed and indifferent. Even Jonas Petter held his tongue for long periods, obviously not himself.

The Ölander, Månsson, was stingy with words in any company. His eyelids were swollen and there was also a swelling over his cheekbones; he did not look well. Time and again he went on a binge and ended “flat on his back,” his mother said. He neglected his claim because he was busy emptying whiskey kegs, and this spring he had had to sell a cow to pay his debts.

Jonas Petter had said to him, “Take a wife! Then you’ll have so much to do at night that you’ll have neither time nor strength to drink in the daytime! But if you must drink—do it in the morning when you’re sober!”

Anders Månsson had proposed to Ulrika but she had married another man. And how many women remained to propose to?

The Ölander said, “In this country a man is forced to live single.”

“A hell of a shame that a young buck like you must remain a bachelor!”

But Jonas Petter knew how things were—what could a man do here in the Territory, with one woman to twenty men? Nineteen of the twenty had to lie alone, sighing, lusting, suffering. Here men slept in their lonely beds night after night, year in, year out, until white moss grew on their tool.

Those who couldn’t stand it forever, continued Jonas Petter, must do as Samuel Nöjd did, he had taken an Indian girl to live with him. She was skinny as a bird and had a dirty face but had a pretty good shape. Jonas Petter himself had seen several Indian wenches a white man could get hopped up about. Their black eyes burned with something that roused a fire in one’s loins. But it was forbidden on the Tablets of Stone for a Christian Lutheran to spill his seed in the chambers of heathendom’s daughters. But perhaps the Tablets of Stone were not in force in a wild land with a scarcity of women. When God made Eve he told Adam he was giving him the help a man needed. According to the Bible, then, every man had a right to have a woman in his bed. And the Bible said nothing about a man and a woman having the same color skin in order to lie in bed together.

Karl Oskar said that as far as he was concerned he couldn’t have bed play with an Indian woman however long he might have to go without.

“If you had to, you would do it!” insisted Jonas Petter.

Anders Månsson said, “I know white men who have made children in brown women.”

“They’re all right in the hole, although too tight,” said Jonas Petter; “Yet, they drop their brats like rabbits; perhaps their children come on the thin, narrow side.”

Jonas Petter had figured out a remedy for the lack of women in the Territory: they ought to write to the authorities in Sweden and ask for a shipload of women. All men who lived alone must sign a petition, and then they would send it to Dean Brusander of Ljuder Parish. He could announce from the pulpit that unmarried girls were in demand as wives for the settlers of this women-empty country. He would have no trouble getting a shipful of fine women. Only honest, upright, chaste, capable women must volunteer, of course; no slut in the load.

And the women must have definite promises of marriage; each man who signed the petition would guarantee to marry a girl the moment she arrived in Minnesota Territory. No need to wait. The men must promise in writing to relieve the girls of their maidenheads on the day of arrival, or at least not later than the following night; they must promise this honestly and conscientiously as decent men and citizens. If any one of the women had her maidenhead intact the following morning at sunup, she would have a right to claim a thousand-dollar indemnity.

Anders Månsson laughed. Karl Oskar only smiled a little; ever since leaving their home village he had heard Jonas Petter’s continuous stories of women and bed play and it was beginning to bore him. Such talk might be excused in younger men who were familiar with the words but not the act; between grown men there were more important things to talk about. He had his own strong desires and he suffered greatly when pregnancies and childbeds prevented him from knowing his wife, but at other times they enjoyed each other and were well pleased. To him, this act belonged to secrecy and night and became unclean and profaned when men spoke of it in daylight openly and directly.

But Anders Månsson loved Jonas Petter’s tales. When the roofers took their next rest in the shade of the maples, Anders turned to him and said, “Tell us a good story!”

Jonas Petter dried his forehead slowly with a handkerchief stiff as bark from many days’ sweat. Today the weather was not suitable for storytelling; in this heat Jonas Petter’s head stood still. But he remembered a true happening that had taken place recently concerning a man and a woman here in North America. It was a serious story which anyone might learn from and find useful, for it was a story of loneliness.

This is what had happened:

A middle-aged man and a woman of the same age emigrated from the same land in the Old World and settled down in the same neighborhood in the New World. They met, and the woman was employed to run the man’s house.

In the old country the man still had a wife, whom he had left because they couldn’t get along; he was so tired of his life with her that, to be on the safe side, he had managed to put the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his marital bed. In the New World he sought peace. The woman who ran his house said that she had emigrated for the same reason. She had a good mind, a fine body, healthy and unused. Among her countrymen she was held in great esteem for her honesty, chastity, and religious devotion.

The man treated her well and they got along fine. She looked after his house, cooked his food, mended his clothes, prepared his breakfast in the morning and his bed in the evening. They never used evil or angry words between them. During the day they shared the work hours and the moments of rest and enjoyed each other’s company. Not until bedtime did they part; then they slept in different beds, in different rooms. Then the man became the master of the house, the woman, the housekeeper in his employ.

The man had already lived a whole year without a woman. But that which his body had been accustomed to for twenty-five years could not be denied without loss and suffering. He was not meant for a hermit’s bed. He was a sociable man and he valued highly the company of women, even outside the bed. In their presence he felt an increased well-being. And here he had a woman under his roof, within reach all day long. And so when evening came, bedtime, it seemed only natural to him to extend their companionship to include the night and the bed.

A person will suffer a loss more keenly if what he has lost is within view yet beyond reach. Thus it happened with this man; in the lonely night he lay awake, he pined and yearned. Only a wall separated the man and the woman. She was so close here in his house—so close and so unreachable. A few steps would take him to the woman’s bed, but those steps were longer than the distance between Sweden and North America. The man had emigrated to the New World to find peace. But when the woman came to his house, restlessness and distraction had moved in with her.

He was tempted to go in to her and confess his great suffering and plead with her to have compassion on him and satisfy his will. But each evening through the wall, he could hear her read her evening prayer and the confession in such a forceful and compelling voice that his courage failed him. How could a man go in to a woman who had just confessed her sins and try to tempt her to a new sin?

At length, however, the thought struck him that he could at least confess to the woman the sinful lust he felt for her. This confidence she could hardly take ill; it was only right for a Christian to lay bare his honest heart and his lustful thoughts and desires. At the same time he could use the opportunity to ask her forgiveness.

Thus one evening, shortly after she had retired, he went in and sat down on a chair beside her bed, timid and embarrassed; he had something important to tell her. And he confessed honestly that he looked upon her with desire.

She was not insulted, not even surprised. She replied that she had already guessed he was exposed to this great suffering. And she had read God’s Word as loud as she had just so he might hear it and gain strength from it against his temptation.

He said he would have liked to ask her to become his wife, but he already had a wife in the old country, and bigamy was a great sin with which he did not wish to burden his conscience. And anyway, here in the wilderness, he was unable to obtain the papers necessary to commit this sin.

The woman then told him something which stunned him: she too was married. She too had a mate alive in Sweden. They were equally bad off. She had married a miserable man who drank and caroused and lay about instead of earning a living for his wife and children. She had supported that good-for-nothing louse for many years, but when he rewarded her by whoring with other women, she had tired of stuffing his gullet; she had taken their two children and had emigrated. During the crossing both children had died of the ship sickness. She had arrived in the New World alone and without relatives, and she had decided to live alone ever after without menfolk.

He was a good employer, she told him, and she liked living in his house. But if she moved into his bed, or he to hers, then they would commit double bigamy, since both of them were married. And if an accident, or some other sudden death, should overtake her, and she had to depart unforgiven, she would be condemned to eternal fire in Hell for this grave sin against the sixth commandment. Therefore, everything must remain between them as it was.

To this the man replied that the sixth commandment was written many thousands of years ago on the Stone Tablets for a Jewish country with as many women as men, or perhaps more women than men. God could not have intended this law for settlers in Minnesota Territory, where women and men were so unequally proportioned as one to twenty. God could not have written laws for America many thousand years before that country had been discovered. He didn’t do things that far in advance. Therefore, the sixth commandment could not have been meant for Minnesota, at least not in all its severity. Here life began anew, as in Genesis, where God made a woman for the man. And the Creator’s intent was that even out here every man should be allowed to live with a woman for comfort and enjoyment. Why, then, must they be condemned by a many-thousand-years-old law on a stone tablet? Furthermore, Moses might have misunderstood the sixth commandment; he had grown rather old and his eyes and hearing were poor by that time.

And they got along well during the day, persisted the man. It could not be held against them as a great sin if they also had their bed in common.

The woman replied that in her marriage she had greatly enjoyed the bed play with her husband and that during her years of loneliness she had often missed it. But it was not indispensable to her and the pleasure was not of so great a duration that its price was worth eternal torture. Whoever was willing to pay such an outrageous price must be a big fool.

But she appreciated deeply his confession and she wanted to help him further to fight his desire—if it would aid him any she would read the confession still more loudly each evening.

The man had to leave the woman’s bedside, his purpose thwarted, and everything between them remained as before.

As time passed they grew more and more intimate. And at bedtime it seemed more and more difficult for him to part from her and repair to his own lonely bed. His conviction grew stronger for each day that the Stone Tablets from Mount Sinai were not meant for Minnesota.

A year passed, then one evening the woman came in to him after he had gone to bed. She in turn had a confession to make: they had lived so long under the same roof that she had become a victim of the same temptations as he.

A woman’s body too was made of flesh and blood, and it was not easy for her to live so close to a man for years, with only a wall between them. Many times a day she prayed to God for help against her temptation, unable to overcome it by herself, fragile human being that she was. But to her great consternation God had not answered her prayers. What could he mean by this? She had been at a loss for an answer. And the Lord’s ways were said to be inscrutable. Here she had been left to fight her temptation all alone. And she had long withstood it—it had begun to assail her many months ago—she had repelled it; again and again, she had been the victor. Scores of evenings she had been visited so grievously by her desire that she had been on the verge of leaving her bed to seek him out. But she had summoned all her strength to conquer her desire. At last her strength had given out, she was no longer able to conquer her desire. What should she do now, when her prayers hadn’t been heard? At last she could do nothing else but commit this weakness—sin—here she stood in all her weakness, beside his bed in nothing but her shift; she wished to comply with his desire. Why hadn’t God given her strength to fight off her temptation?

This the man could explain: a person’s prayers were heard only when asking for something good and useful. And it was good for neither her nor him that they slept in different beds. Why should they lie apart and suffer in two separate beds when they could enjoy themselves together in one bed? So now they could both see what God’s finger was pointing at: two miserable creatures in an empty wilderness; she missed a man, he a woman, and their Creator had taken pity on them and had brought them together for comfort and joy.