This time it didn’t help to say “As sure as I live!” Soldier-Hulda went to the fireplace to fetch her rod from behind the damper handle—a bunch of birch twigs. She let down Valter’s pants and switched his behind. It was a thorough beating he received that time. Afterward he felt as though he had been sitting with his bare behind in a stand of nettles. Mother seemed regretful and kind after the punishment: Why must he lie and invent stories so that she was forced to beat him? Think if Father had been home and heard this! He was only seven, yet already an inveterate liar. Didn’t he remember the proverb: “Young liar, old thief”? Did he want to become a thief and spend his days in prison when he grew up?
Valter had not thought that the proverb about the thief might apply to him. Another proverb said: “Begin with a pin, end up with a silver bowl.” So that was how one became a thief: first by lying and inventing stories, then stealing pins, at last by taking silver bowls.
But Valter had not lied. And Mother could not beat him enough to make him admit he had lied. He had seen the man with the cart and the sack. He knew how the man was dressed and what his face looked like. This he could not have known if no man had been there. And his brothers had been scared—Anton had crawled under the carpet. Anton and Gunnar could not have been scared if no man had been there.
But he, Valter, had not been scared. Because he knew that the man was not dangerous. When he no longer wanted to see him, then he was there no longer. He had just walked off as Fredrik and Mother came home. Anton and Gunnar could never have seen the man—no one could have seen him except Valter, because it was his man. He had been sitting there at the window in the twilight, and wished the man from the shadows in the yard. And the man had come. He had enjoyed telling his brothers about him, but it was not his fault that they were frightened.
How foolish that he hadn’t kept the man and his cart to himself! And why had Anton and Gunnar feared the man? He had never said that he was dangerous.
And so Valter learned something that evening: He must keep things like this to himself. He must never tell others, it did not concern them. And he could no longer trust anyone, not even Gunnar. He must forever keep to himself what belonged to him only.
The man with the cart and the sack stayed with Valter for a long time. He wondered about the secrets in the sack. Because it contained more things than children’s heads. It might contain almost anything. He wished to share his discoveries in the sack with someone, but there was no one he could trust.
And then Father returned from the maneuver and brought him a notebook with yellow covers and a pencil in a holder at the back. It was exactly the kind of book he had wanted. And it came at the right moment: in the yellow book he wrote down a story about a man who walked through the world, pulling a cart with a big sack. All people wondered what the sack contained, but the man never opened it, and no one knew. No one except Valter knew, and he wrote a story in his book to tell the secret.
Now he had found the solution—he could confide, yet keep it to himself.
He wrote and told those things that were his own. This writing was not a pretense; it was not for fun; to him it was deeply serious, perhaps the most serious thing that was. There were moments when he felt something must happen; he wished it might happen—and his wish was fulfilled in this way. It was not a surprise to him, nor to anyone else—now that he kept it to himself.
Thus Soldier-Valter had found an outlet for the experiences of his imagination.
CHAPTER IV
Valter went with his father to the forest to peel fence posts. Now he was big enough to do useful work. And being seven years of age, he was supposed to earn his food. During the spring his schoolwork prevented him from helping Father, but during the fall he attended school only on Fridays and could help in the forest other weekdays.
It was a nuisance that school took so much of the children’s work time. And Valter preferred the forest. He used a debarking-knife almost as long as himself. Father piled the posts on sawhorses and Valter peeled off the bark until they lay there like skinned calves on a slaughter bench. The posts were used for the railroad fence; between the beautiful posts that his hands had peeled the trains would rush. The travelers on their soft seats would perhaps look out through the windows and see his posts. “They’re peeled well,” they might say. “Wonder who did it.”
When Valter came home evenings he now smelled like Father. He smelled of pitch, pine needles, wood, and sap, a manfolk smell that made him proud. Now all would recognize his smell and know that he performed a man’s work and earned his food. One must earn one’s food before eating it to enjoy its blessing. If he spent the day in school and made no use of himself, he would not relish his food in the evening. Then he would sit and swallow his unearned bites with the knowledge of denied blessing.
He was growing up. He was his father’s working-comrade. On the way to or from the forest he would trudge a little behind Father, but this was not because his legs were so short, but rather because Father’s were so long. But Father never left him behind entirely; he would stop at intervals to let Valter catch up; then he would walk slower. Returning home in the evenings, it might sometimes happen that Soldier-Sträng would pick up his son and carry him on his shoulder. Valter held on to Father’s neck; Father could carry a whole tree on his shoulder as easily as a hazel branch; he could splinter a thick log with a single ax-cut.
They walked together along the timber-drivers’ road in the winter, following the white sled marks in the snow with its glittering frost stars. The timber road was two bright lines through the forest, like the White Star Line that crossed the sea to America. And tall forest crowns soughed softly, protecting the workers below busy peeling posts.
Valter and his father were comrades. “Confidence, friendship, assistance must exist between comrades,” read a paragraph in the Instruction for the Infantry. This was the soldiers’ catechism, and Valter had read it from cover to cover many times. It gave advice as to those things a soldier must guard against: dishonesty, debt, drunkenness, debauchery, swearing. Yet Valter had heard his father as well as his father’s soldier-comrades use swear words, like the devil and hell. If the Crown had heard this, they might have been discharged. And the soldiers drank brännvin—Flink in Sutaremåla used to vomit on the stoop at the Christmas parties. If the Crown had known this, he might have been discharged. What did Father think of this?
“Flink would not have been discharged,” said Father. “It didn’t happen in the service. He vomited in civvies.”
However, Flink had recently been given a year’s probation.
Well, perhaps the soldiers could swear and carry on when not in the service. But there were other things that were forbidden in the Instruction. Valter knew whole paragraphs by heart: “Insubordinate speech and intercourse with base and lewd people disgrace the soldier and might lead to bad reputation, punishment, and finally dishonorable discharge.” Who were those people called base and lewd?
“It means they must stay away from bad women while on the maneuvers,” said Soldier-Sträng.
“Those women at the maneuvers—are they bad?”
“Some of them are. Some are even dangerous. Don’t have anything to do with them when you grow up! They might make you sick.”
“Those women, are they sick?”
“Well, some are sick. They’re not bedridden, exactly, but they are dangerous.”
Now Father had warned Valter against sick women who were not exactly bedridden. They were base and lewd. Hereabouts were no such women, said Father, but they looked so much like decent, fine women that one could easily make a mistake.
The soldier and his youngest son talked like comrades—“in confidence, friendship, assistance”—and Valter was proud of being a comrade to his father. He really wasn’t old enough for that yet. But as soon as his legs grew a little more he would be able