Emigrants

THE AMERICA CHEST

-------- IX -------THE AMERICA CHEST -1A WHOLE YEAR PASSED during which Karl Oskar and Kristina made preparations for their emigration, feeling as if they were already on the move. There was so much to do and to think about they could not sink too deeply into sorrow over their dead child. Karl Oskar let it be announced from the church pulpit that his farm was for sale. News soon spread through the parish that the farmer of Korpamoen intended to move away from the country, intended to emigrate to North America, taking with him wife, children, and his only brother. There was much talk in the village about this strange projected undertaking. Whence had he got the amazing notion? Serious-minded older peasants shook their heads and came up to Karl Oskar on the church green on Sundays. To one who was younger they could speak as father to son, and they wished now-with the best of intentions-to dissuade him; how could he relinquish his farm, the parental home whose deed he had, and reach out for land in faraway North America, a country which neither he nor anyone else had seen? Wasn't it like trying to catch the will-o'-the-wisp on a misty morning? The project seemed rash to them; he would enter into a dangerous game in which he might win a little, but lose aU; this they must tell him as older and more experienced farmers. It was not that he was forced to give up his farm. The sheriff had been to many farms this last year but he had not yet come to take anything in pawn from Korpamoen. Many were harder pressed on their farms than he, yet they remained at home. Karl Oskar answered proudly that he acted according to his own good judgment, and after much thought. He understood well enough that a peasant who had tilled his farm some fifty years might think himself ten times wiser and more experienced than he, who had worked Korpamoen only five years. But did anyone gain in wisdom from 127 128 TIiE EMIGRANTS living on the same place and tramping in the same furrows all his life? If a man's wisdom increased because he remained all his life on the patch where he was born, then the oldest farmers in the parish should by now possess more wisdom than King Solomon himself. But the fact was that most of them were squareheads. Karl Oskar was considered arrogant and proud when he rejected his neighbors' kind advice. His emigration was taken as a reproach, an insult even, to the parish as a whole and to each individual: the community and the people here were not good enough for him. The old story of the Nilsa-nose was remembered; Karl Oskar's big nose protruded so far that he was unable to turn about in the parish. The whole of Sweden was not large enough to house his nose-he must travel to a bigger country, far away in the world, in order to be comfortable. And some.wit started a saying which spread through the village: when Karl Oskar came to North America, his face too would be long. Perhaps he thought himself such a bigwig that he could look down on his home community? Others surmised something wrong in his head; he was seized by a delusion of grandeur. Such ideas didn't suit a one-sixteenth homestead peasant. Karl Oskar knew that people poked fun at him and spoke ill behind his back. But he didn't bother to get angry; _ after all, he tried to please himself, not others. If you spent your time worrying about what other people thought and said, you wouldn't get much done in your life. Outside his home everyone was against his proposed undertaking; even within his home, only his wife was for him; but she was the only one he needed on his side. His parents were against him, though they kept silent. Their reserved rights would now have to be met by an outsider, and this was not to their liking. Once only did Nils quietly reproach his son: "You take many along with you." "There will be six of us." "You take many more. Your descendants are more numerous than you know." Karl Oskar did not answer. He felt the grief he caused in taking the family from their own country to a foreign land. "You have...