The Emigrants (5 page)

The poor, “the ordinary poor,” and other old and ill and incompetent people, were divided into three groups and cared for according to special regulations passed by the parish council. The first group included the old and crippled who were entirely incapacitated. They received first-class poor help, or “complete sustenance,” which might amount to as much as three riksdaler in cash per year—about eighty-seven cents—plus four bushels of barley.

In the second group were those only partly disabled, who could to a certain degree earn a living for themselves and their children. They were helped with sums of cash ranging from twelve shillings to one riksdaler a year—from six to twenty-nine cents—and at the most two bushels of barley.

The third group included people who only temporarily needed help. They received alms from a special fund known as the Ljuder Parish Poor Purse, under the supervision of the parish council. This last group included also “profligate and lazy people who had themselves caused their poverty.” They, according to the council’s decision, “should be remembered with the smallest aid from the Poor Purse, thereby getting accustomed to sobriety and industry.”

Destitute orphans were auctioned off by the parish council to “suitable homes at best bid.” For these “parish boys” and “parish girls” the council sought to find foster homes where the children would receive “fatherly care and in good time instruction in honest habits and work.”

Conditions were similar in other parishes in Sweden at that time.

The Spiritual Care of the Inhabitants

The people were fostered in the pure evangelical-Lutheran religion in accordance with the church law of 1686, and were protected from heretical and dangerous new ideas by the royal “Resolution and Order” of January 12, 1726, “this wholesome Resolution aiming at good order in the parish, and Christian unity in teaching.”

In the church law the clergy were admonished to “see to it that the children learn to read so that they may with their own eyes see God’s holy laws and commands.” This instruction in reading, advisable only for salvation of the soul, was administered by schoolmaster or by parents. Each fall the minister held an examination in the tenets of the faith according to the Little Catechism of Luther. All unmarried parishioners at this time were probed concerning their reading ability, and were fined for failure to attend.

The parish in 1836 engaged its own schoolmaster, Rinaldo, an ex-enlisted cavalry soldier who, having lost an eye, had been permitted to leave the military service. The schoolmaster received a yearly fee of twelve bushels of rye, and one shilling (half a cent) per day for each child he taught. The parents gave him room and firewood besides. Rinaldo wandered from one end of the parish to the other, and held his school in the homes of the peasants, who each in turn allowed him the use of some spare room or attic for this purpose. The length of the term in each house was decided by the schoolmaster. He had been engaged to teach the children to read well enough to learn Luther’s Little Catechism by heart. He ventured sometimes to include such worldly and useless subjects as arithmetic, writing, Swedish history, and geography. Most men and women could read fairly well; some could sign their names; few could write more than this, and very few of the women could write at all: no one knew what use a female could make of the art of writing.

Religious Sects

The so-called Åkian heresy had started in the neighboring parish of Elmeboda about 1780, and soon spread also to Ljuder. The adherents to the sect were called Åkians after the founder, Åke Svensson of Östergöhl, Elmeboda. They tried to copy the early Christian church and return to the ways of the apostles. The Åkians separated from the state church and recognized neither temporal nor spiritual powers in their community. All differences between people as to caste or property ownership were to them contrary to God’s word, and so within their own sect they lived a completely communal life. None of them called a single object his own. They conducted their own services and held their own Holy Communion.

Some forty persons in Elmeboda and Ljuder Parishes had joined the new sect. Many of them belonged to Åke Svensson’s family, which was scattered throughout both parishes. The home of the sect in Ljuder was Kärragärde, owned by Åke’s brother-in-law Andreas Månsson.

The Åkians were soon called in for questioning by the bishopric of Växiö and were given strong warnings. But they were inflexible and met the dignitaries of the church with unpropitious words. The church pronounced its ban but the Åkians retained their convictions. They were then sued in civil court and were brought to Konga County Court in Ingelstad,
¹
where the court admonished them to abide by the law and follow the regulations of the established church. Åke Svensson and his followers could not be persuaded to recant their heretical opinions; they refused to return to the fold of the only true church.

In order to maintain church peace and civil security the case was reviewed by the Göta Crown Court.
²
This court found the members of the sect “completely fallen into insanity, having lost the use of their sound minds,” and held that, to maintain peace, and for the welfare of the dissenters, they should be confined in an asylum. Åke Svensson and seven other leaders of the sect “who had shown their insanity in many instances” were ordered transported to Danvik’s asylum in Stockholm, “there to receive such attention as their condition warranted.”

The eight sectarians who had fallen under the Crown Court’s order were turned over to the sheriff. In 1786 they were taken to Danvik’s asylum in Stockholm. Åke Svensson, Andreas Månsson, and two others died within two years, after having received “the attention their condition warranted.” Åke was at the time of his death thirty-five years of age.

The other dissenters were gradually liberated and returned as cured to their respective homes, where the one-time asylum inmates lived tranquilly and harmoniously, and for many years it seemed as if the firebrand of Åkianism was for ever smothered. But in the eighteen-forties this dangerous heresy reappeared in Ljuder Parish. The circumstances, however, belong to the story.

V. M.

NOTES

1
. Konga County Records for 1785.

2
. Gota Crown Court Proceedings, December 12, 1785.

Part One

Gates on the Road

to America

I

KING IN HIS STONE KINGDOM

—1—

Mjödahult is one of Ljuder’s most ancient homesteads. Its name is mentioned in a court record two hundred years before the discovery of America.

The Nilsa family had tilled and lived on this farm as far back in history as paper is preserved, as far as the memory of generations can reach. The first known owner was Nils in Mjödahult after whom the family got its name. About Nils in Mjödahult it is further known that he had an unusually large and grotesque nose, which was said to have resembled a well-grown rutabaga. This nose was inherited by his descendants, and someone in each generation possessed it. It became a mark of the Nilsa family. Called the Nilsa-nose, it was believed to be endowed with the same magic powers as a birth cowl, and brought luck to its owner. Children born with the Nilsa-nose became the most fortunate and most successful members of the family, and, even though it was hardly a mark of beauty in a woman, it is not known to have been an obstacle in securing advantageous marriages.

The assessment book indicates that Nils’ Mjödahult was still a full homestead in the eighteenth century. The farm was later split up several times, lastly in 1819 when two brothers, Olov Jakob’s Son and Nils Jakob’s Son, received equal shares. The records list four more brothers and three sisters. The new farms were by now only one-sixteenth of the original homestead. Nils, the younger brother, obtained the split-off piece: three arable acres on the outskirts, where he built his house among the straggling pines. The new farm is recorded as “one-sixteenth crown assessment Korpamoen under the mother homestead Mjödahult.”

Nils Jakob’s Son was short of build—only five feet—and he had not been endowed with the Nilsa-nose. He was nevertheless a capable man, strong-armed and persevering; his hands did not willingly rest if there was aught to do. Märta, his wife, was a strong and stately woman, a full head taller than her husband.

Korpamoen was at first hardly more than a cotter’s place, but Nils developed his inheritance into a farm. The soil was sandy, strewn with stones. It looked as if it had rained stones from heaven here during all the six days of the creation. But Nils searched out every patch of soil that could be cultivated and attacked the stones with his iron bar and lever—the latter a long pole with a horseshoe nailed to the heavy end. His best tools, however, were his hands; with these he went after the stones deep in their holes, wrestled with them, turned them, finally rolled them away. And when Nils encountered a stone which he couldn’t manage with his hands or his tools, he called for his wife. Märta was almost as strong as her husband; she hung on to the small end of the lever while Nils used the iron bar.

It was a silent struggle between Nils and the stone, a fight between an inert mass and the living muscles and sinews of a patient, persevering man.

This fight continued during all of Nils’ farming years; each year he broke a new quarter of an acre, until at last there were more stone piles in Korpamoen than on any other farm in the parish. When Nils turned his field the plow circled stone piles; he used to say he became giddy from the ring-around-the-rosy dance in his fields.

Nils Jakob’s Son was also handy with wood, and worked sometimes as a timberman in the neighborhood. He had built his own house. Even as a boy he had started to follow the woodmen and before he was grown he could join the corner timbers of a house, that most difficult task in carpentry. He was also a cabinetmaker and a smith. Throughout the winters he stood at his workbench and made all kinds of farming tools.

When he had moved to Korpamoen he had been forced to mortgage the farm, so that his brothers and sisters might receive their inheritance share in cash; the yearly interest on this loan required that he work as timberman and carpenter.

Of the marriage between Nils and Märta three children were born: two sons, Karl Oskar and Robert, and a daughter, Lydia. Twice Märta’s pregnancy had ended in miscarriage; once on the same day she had been in the field helping her husband dig up a boulder.

Karl Johan, the new King of Sweden and Norway, had ascended the throne the year before Nils and Märta were married; their first-born son was named after him; the child’s second name was for the new Crown Prince, Oskar. It was thought to be good luck to name one’s children after people of high station—kings, princes, queens, princesses; even the poorest squatter could afford royal names for his offspring.

The first-born son, Karl Oskar, was also born with the lucky big nose of the Nilsa family.

Karl Oskar grew up strong of limb and body. Soon he helped his father at building and stone breaking. But early the boy showed a mind of his own; in work he would not do as his father told him, but rather followed his own way, though eating his parents’ bread. No chastisement improved the stubborn child; Nils was many times angered over his son’s independent ways.

One day when Karl Oskar was fourteen years old he was asked by his father to make slats for a new hayrick; they should be five feet long. Karl Oskar thought the hayrick would be too low with such short slats; he made them six feet, instead.

Nils measured the slats and said: “Do as I tell you, or go!”

Karl Oskar kept silent for a while, then haughtily answered: “I shall go.”

The same day he hired himself as farmhand to a man in Idemo, where he was to remain seven years.

Taken at his word, Nils regretted it; his son had been a help to him. But he could not retract: a boy who had not yet received Holy Communion could not rule his father in his work. On the whole, however, all went well for Nils and Märta in Korpamoen for some twenty-five years.

Then, one day in the early spring of 1844, Nils Jakob’s Son was alone in an outlying glade, breaking new land. Here he encountered a stone which caused him much trouble. It was smaller than many a one he had removed alone, but it lay deep in earth and was round as a globe so that neither bar nor lever got hold of it. Nils used all his tricks and soon the stone was halfway up. He now wedged it with the iron bar, intending to roll it away with his hands; but as he bent down to get a good hold for the final battle the earth slid away from under his foot and he fell on his face. In the fall he moved the iron bar that held the stone, which rolled back into its hole—over one of his thighs.

Nils lay where he fell. When he didn’t come home for his afternoon meal, Märta went out to look for him. She found her husband in the hole next to the stone, and lifted him onto her back and carried him home. Berta in Idemo, whose aid was solicited for hurts and ailments, was sent for, and she told him that the hipbone was broken and the joint injured.

Nils remained in bed for several months while Berta attended him with her herb concoctions and salves. The bone healed and he could again stand on his feet, but some injury was left in the joint and it remained incurable; he could not move without crutches; from now on he could do chores with his hands only, while seated.

Nils Jakob’s Son was a cripple. His farmer’s life was over. For twenty-five years he had fought the stones, and in the last battle the stones had won.

Korpamoen was no longer a cotter’s place. The size of the manure pile tells the size of the farm: it was not a mean dunghill outside the stable barns at Korpamoen. The farm now had seven arable acres; it could feed seven head of cattle through summer and winter. Nils and Märta had more than doubled the plot they first occupied twenty-five years before. Now they must cede it.