He put his knuckle in his mouth and thought: Luck would have been easier to understand if it had been their little field near the road.
He began to ask his mother again, but she would no longer answer his questions. She had other things to think of, she said.
“Don’t bite your knuckles!” she scolded him.
As he stood there, pondering deeply, the thought came to him: Perhaps Mother herself wasn’t quite sure what luck was; she had so many other things to think about.
Valter Sträng began to wander about in the world and look for himself. He had already picked flowers in the yard; now he walked to the woodlands and picked lingon twigs and tore moss from under the junipers. Wherever he turned, luck was in his hands.
His soul groped for the light of knowledge as the shoots from seed force their way through the crust of earth toward daylight. He recognized himself as a being, apart from the others. He called himself “I.” The others, they were Father and Mother. The others, they were all his brothers and his sister: Albin, Ivar, Dagmar, Fredrik, Anton, and Gunnar. And the others were also the people who lived in neighboring places: Grandmother Mathilda, Balk-Emma, Carpenter-Elof, Shoemaker-Janne, and his godfather Banda, and Banda’s Valfrid who was almost as tall as Albin, and Banda’s Edvin who was as little as he himself. The others, they were also the soldiers from neighboring villages: Hellström and Flink and Nero and Bäck and Tilly. Those were the others. He was Karl Artur Valter. He had been given three names; there were names enough in the Almanac, said Father. He could not be confused with anyone else, because no one else was called Karl Artur Valter Sträng. Yet he called himself “I.” He said: I am hungry. It was inside, in his stomach, that the hunger was. No one else could feel it. Valter was I. And he was the smallest and weakest of the human race in this place.
Father was the strongest and biggest person in the world. He had to stoop when he stepped through the door of their cottage. He was so big he could travel as far out into the world as he wished. When he left he would be dressed in his uniform with its shining brass buttons, and the cap with the plate; and sometimes he had the plume in the plate—it was like the tail of some animal, a tail of horsehair. Father was a soldier. This made them different from the people in the other cottages—they were called the soldier’s. Mother was called Soldier’s Hulda. And his brothers and sisters were Soldier’s Albin, and Soldier’s Ivar, and so on to the youngest one: he was Soldier’s Valter.
Albin and Ivar were so tall that they almost reached their father’s shoulder. They were away in service with farmers, and when they came home on Sundays they would measure their length and pull out their pocket knives and mark the doorpost. They carved the marks higher and higher toward the ceiling. Valter stood and looked on while his brothers grew. He himself did not yet reach to the door handle; he must ask Gunnar to help him open the door. Gunnar was next to the smallest, yet half a head taller than he. Gunnar had already cut a mark in the doorpost.
In the road Valter would stand and look through the slats in the gate, out into the world. He had heard his father speak of the Big Field, which lay beyond the bend of the road, in the woodlands. And on the first spring day, when the earth was warm and he could walk barefoot, he was allowed to go there with his father.
Father carried a sack of oats on his back and held his son by the hand. Valter reached only to the knees of his father, but he walked proudly and with straight back at Father’s side, out into the world. They walked all the way to the Big Field, where Father would sow the oats. The world had many fields, big ones and little ones. But the field that meant luck he knew little about as yet. Valter asked his father, Soldier 128 Sträng, what luck was.
Luck, that meant good health, said the father. It meant being able to walk, move about, see, hear, and work. It meant being strong and not having to ask others for help in lifting a log or rolling away a stone. To manage one’s own, that was luck. To have food and clothes and not have to go begging. To eat one’s sufficiency when hungry. To lie down and rest when tired. To arise in the morning rested. That was luck, the field in God’s hand, said Father.
And Valter understood as he walked at the side of his tall, strong father and held on to his hand: If he didn’t get food, it hurt in his stomach so much that he had to cry. Then he would go to Mother and ask for a slice of bread, which she would cut for him. As he ate, the hurt in his stomach disappeared. If he got food, he need not suffer hurt in his stomach, and that was luck. And luck for Soldier-Sträng’s family was that they had enough herring and potatoes and rye porridge and lingon sauce so that they could sit down and eat their sufficiency. It was bad luck and a misfortune to be hungry.
Father was so strong that he could lift the heaviest log in the forest. He knew what luck meant. And it was safe to walk with Father out into the world, all the way to the Big Field. Father held him by the hand and took short steps to allow his son to keep up with him. Valter hurried along and moved his short leg-sticks as quickly as he could, but Father had to shorten his own steps for his son’s sake. They walked through the woodland among bursting birches and heard the play of birds in the thickets. The oats in Father’s sack smelled pungently, like the earth.
He felt secure, walking like this. Valter knew that Father never would leave him.
Then there were also many people whom Valter had not seen in real life but only heard of. But he saw pictures of them. They were the relatives in America. They stood on the bureau, in frames of shells—red, white, and blue. They were called the America-pictures. They were the finest objects in the room, and it was with them as it was with the Crown gun and other Crown property: they must not be touched. No hands except Father’s and Mother’s must hold the America-portraits. Those who lived in America were better dressed than others, and there must be no thumb marks on them. Valter could stand below the bureau and look up at his relatives in America: Uncle Jacob, Uncle Algot, Uncle Frank, Aunt Lotten, Aunt Anna, and many more.
Valter liked best Uncle Frank, whose name had been Frans while in Sweden. He wore suspenders and a broad-brimmed hat and had a pipe in his mouth. Uncle Frank dug gold in a mine and he would come home when he had dug up enough. Uncle Jacob was in his Sunday best, with slicked-down hair, a white collar, and a large tie. He would come home next summer. Aunt Lotten and Aunt Anna had lace collars and long watch chains of gold hanging down on their breasts. In one large shell frame were four children holding one another’s hands. They were Aldos, Mildred, Kennet, and Mary. They had finer clothes than children hereabouts, the boys with ties and the girls with brooches. Those were his cousins. Cousins were better-dressed children who lived in America only.
Valter was proud to have cousins. Not all had them. How many cousins in America were his? Mother counted on her fingers and added: Uncle Jacob had six children and Aunt Anna three, Uncle Frank none, Aunt Lotten four and Uncle Axel two. She was not sure about Uncle Henrik and Uncle Aron, but she thought they must have four or five each. She supposed there were about thirty cousins that were his.
Why were there cousins in America only? Mother replied: Because all the brothers and sisters of Father and Mother were in America. She and Father alone of that generation in their families had stayed at home.
Why weren’t Father and Mother also in America? To that question Valter did not receive a clear answer. Perhaps they were destined to remain at home, she said. But Valter thought that Father and Mother would not fit in with their brothers and sisters in America: they did not have such fine clothes. Nor did he fit in with his cousins; he did not have clothes like them.
America had existed in the soldier-cottage long before Valter was born. It occupied the foremost place in the room: on top of the bureau. Here stood all the shell frames in their bright colors. America, too, was a land in this world, said Mother, but it was so far away that it was almost as if it had been in another world. It was a long way to church,