And one morning when Valter woke up, his oldest brother was gone. He asked for him and was told that he had left by horse from the village; Aldo Samuel had driven him on his wagon; they had left before daylight in order to catch the train.
Valter was chagrined and disappointed. He was long to remember the morning when Albin left for America while he lay in bed and slept; he never said good-by to his oldest brother.
Albin had grown up and was gone. Here, in Sweden, one was born and grew up. One went to America after one was grown.
CHAPTER II
Valter’s world widened. He opened more gates and walked farther out into the world. He walked all the way to the village. Father no longer led him by the hand—he could walk about by himself and observe.
The farmers in Strängshult Village had bigger houses than the soldier-cottage. They had more than one cow in their barns, more than one pig in the pen, and they had a horse or two in the stables. The Alderman, Aldo Samuel, had two horses, one black and one red. The Alderman’s house was finer than the soldier’s.
Round about in the forest lay the cotters’ places. They were smaller than the soldier-cottage, and the smallest of them all was Trångadal, where Grandmother lived, and where Mother had grown up, and her brothers and sisters before they went to America. To that place led a narrow, little-used path that wound its way like a snake across the woodlands. Grandmother’s room was barely half as large as the room in the soldier-cottage. Round and about, in glades and openings in the forest, lived people who owned neither barn nor cow, neither pig nor sheep. There lived widowers and widows, crippled people and hunchbacks. There lived Välling-Lena, who was harelipped, and Tailor-Jan, who was deaf. People whose sight was poor or who didn’t hear well, people who walked with canes, who were a little off, and people who lay in bed ready to die. These were the cotter people, and they were poorer than the soldier’s.
The Christmas pig was slaughtered, and Valter was sent with lard and bacon to Balk-Emma, who had aided Mother at seven births and had helped him also into life. He knocked lightly on her door, and behind the smudgy window he could see a brown, wrinkled face peer out cautiously. Emma was afraid of stray men folk. At her door now stood a man, but he was so little that he barely reached the keyhole.
“Is it the little one from the soldier’s?”
Balk-Emma dared open. But it took a few minutes to remove all the boards and bolts securing the door. She took Valter’s basket and began to lift out all the food—a piece of pork, a chunk of lard, some bacon.
“She’s too generous, your mother. I can’t accept all this.”
She looked once more in the basket to make sure she had found everything, then said:
“It’s too much—I refuse it.”
Then she put the food in a cupboard near the hearth and pushed the basket toward Valter. He picked up the empty basket and made ready to leave, but the old woman motioned to him to stay; she began to poke among the quilts and sheepskin covers of her bed. She was looking for something. She dug herself deeper and deeper into the pile of bedclothes. Valter knew what she was looking for. And he trembled at the thought of what he must go through.
He must have coffee. And nothing else he had ever taken into his mouth tasted as evil as Balk-Emma’s coffee. She had her coffee container bedded down among the quilts, and her coffee tasted bitter and noxious; it was neither warm nor cold, but somewhat tepid. It was “bed-warm.” And thick as dungwater. When one swallowed the coffee, it wanted to come up again; it did not wish to be closed in the stomach. He had drunk it last year and the year before when he brought Christmas food, so he knew.
At last Balk-Emma found her coffeepot deep down in the bed. It kept warm between the pelts so she need not put it on the fire each time a visitor came. Thus, she had always coffee ready for a caller. The pot was well tied up in a black-and-white checkered woolen shawl.
Valter made an attempt to escape: he must get home before dark. But Emma grabbed him by the shoulder as if he were still the newborn brat of eleven pounds whom she once had hung on the steelyard. She pulled him up to the table: no caller had yet left her house without coffee; as long as she lived, no caller would leave her cottage without coffee. It was a matter of honor.
He could not escape. The cup, the sugar bowl, the cream pitcher were already on the table. And on the table sat also the coffeepot in its shawl with the corners tied like the ears of a crouching, vicious owl. There was no getting away this year either.
The coffee clucked in the throat of the shawl-owl as Emma poured it into the cup. Its color was the same as Emma’s face, dark brown like dried spruce bark. She must have drunk so much coffee that it had oozed through her leathery skin. With trembling hands Valter lifted the cup toward his lips. Last year he had managed not to vomit until he was outside; he hoped to do as well this year.
The old woman stood beside him and watched while he drank: her generosity and honor would be kept as long as she lived, she assured him. No one should be able to say over her dead bones that he had left her house without a treat.
Valter emptied the cup in deep swallows. He tortured himself valiantly for Emma’s honor and generosity. And in front of him sat the black-white shawl-owl, threatening a refill from its throat. But because he was so very little he escaped with one cup. Then the owl with its thick black coffee flew back to its warm nest in the bed, there to rest until the next guest arrived at Balk-Emma’s cottage.
Valter got out with the coffee still inside him. He stopped outside to vomit. But this year he was unable to. The coffee did not want to remain inside him, nor would it come up. During the whole way home he carried both his coffee and his feeling of nausea.
Dusk was already falling over the wide forest. Only in some openings between the fir-tops did light from the sky break through. He stumbled on a slippery root, tumbled over, and lost his wooden shoes. His father would say that it mattered little if such a short being fell—he was so close to the ground. He looked for his shoes and found them, but could feel from the pressure over the instep that the left one had broken in the fall.
Now he had reached Janne-Shoemaker’s cottage. Janne came once a year to their home. He would stand at the barn gable and dig into a pile of alder logs until he had made two pairs of shoes for each one of them. When he left, sixteen pairs of wooden shoes would stand in a row in the attic at Soldier-Sträng’s to dry. Valter had an extra pair up in the attic and he had been promised the use of them after Christmas. He might therefore just as well break both his old shoes; they would be thrown away anyway; there was no sense in having one broken shoe and one unbroken.
He stopped and took off the unbroken right shoe and hit it against a stone. It didn’t break. He banged it against the stone once more, this time much harder. Now it broke completely, in two pieces.
Darn it! He almost swore. Darn it was as near as one could come to swearing without actually doing so. He hadn’t intended his shoe to break so badly that it was unusable; he had only meant to crack it, like the left one. Now he had no shoe to put on his foot for his walk home, and he still had a great distance left. He put the two halves in the empty basket and walked on wearing only a stocking on his right foot.
There was no snow, but the ground was cold and muddy. The stocking had a hole in it, which left his heel exposed. Wooden shoes were always hungry at the heel and gnawed through the stockings. Now the stocking got wet and his whole foot felt cold. He had a wooden shoe on one foot but only the stocking on the other, and he limped along like a cripple. Darn! Damn! Now he swore outright. He would have to begin using the extra pair even before Christmas. But Janne made poor shoes that cracked easily; this he must tell Father.
He hopped along on the shod left foot to avoid putting the shoeless right one down on the ground.
In America wooden shoes were not used. All his thirty cousins might not have a single pair among them. Only here,