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_ On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house
in which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier
to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a
shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood
still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides
overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek
gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all
the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human
landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The
houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away
in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon
them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only
the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint
tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The
record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on
stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may,
after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of
human strivings.
In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression
upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing
that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to
come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly
to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of
the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following
Alexandra's trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same
land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and draw
and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed
fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the
pond,--and then the grass.
Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back.
One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer
one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had
to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and
a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again
his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came
between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and
death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was
going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course,
counted upon more time.
Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into
debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages
and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned
exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his
door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three
hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the
homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone
back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself
in a Swedish athletic club. So far John had not attempted to
cultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land,
and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.
John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is
desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that
no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks
things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to
farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their
neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did.
Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their
homesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS at home; tailors, locksmiths,
joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a
shipyard.
For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things. His
bed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through the
day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the
father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had
hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle
over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight
each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called
his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was
twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew
older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness
and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when
he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra
who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by
the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always
tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could
guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could
never teach them to use their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her
grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.
John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable
force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time,
a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder's
part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of
a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years his
unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated,
lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring
men, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing. But when all
was said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proud
little business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, and
had proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognized
the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things
out, that had characterized his father in his better days. He
would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of
his sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay there
day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be
thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could
entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his
hard-won land.
The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike
a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through
the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away.
He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with
all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt.
He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to
go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find
him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the
tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.
"DOTTER," he called feebly, "DOTTER!" He heard her quick step and
saw her tall figure appear in the doorway, with the light of the
lamp behind her. He felt her youth and strength, how easily she
moved and stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it again
if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin
again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.
His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She called
him by an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she was
little and took his dinner to him in the shipyard.
"Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I want to speak to them."
"They are feeding the horses, father. They have just come back
from the Blue. Shall I call them?"
He sighed. "No, no. Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you will
have to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything will
come on you."
"I will do all I can, father."
"Don't let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto. I want
them to keep the land."
"We will, father. We will never lose the land."
There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen. Alexandra went
to the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of
seventeen and nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of the
bed. Their father looked at them searchingly, though it was too
dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told
himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and
heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was
quicker, but vacillating.
"Boys," said the father wearily, "I want you to keep the land
together and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her
since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no
quarrels among my children, and so long as there is one house there
must be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.
She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not
make so many as I have made. When you marry, and want a house of
your own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts.
But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must all
keep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can."
Oscar, who was usually the last to speak, replied because he
was the older, "Yes, father. It would be so anyway, without your
speaking. We will all work the place together."
"And you will be guided by your sister, boys, and be good brothers
to her, and good sons to your mother? That is good. And Alexandra
must not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now.
Hire a man when you need help. She can make much more with her
eggs and butter than the wages of a man. It was one of my mistakes
that I did not find that out sooner. Try to break a little more
land every year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning the
land, and always put up more hay than you need. Don't grudge your
mother a little time for plowing her garden and setting out fruit
trees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has been a good
mother to you, and she has always missed the old country."
When they went back to the kitchen the boys sat down silently at
the table. Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates
and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although
they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit
stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies.
John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a good
housewife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable
about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household
order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit
was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to
repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done
a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and
getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for
instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.
She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer
she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to
fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to
load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing
herself.
Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert
island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden,
and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with
Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of
Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild
creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid
ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon
peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She
had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could
not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and
murmuring, "What a pity!" When there was nothing more to preserve,
she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes
was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She was
a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough
not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven
John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now
that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her
old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some
comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on
the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all her
neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women
thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to
Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in
the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot." _
Read next: PART I - The Wild Land: Chapter 3
Read previous: PART I - The Wild Land: Chapter 1
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