The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [54]
But Melander was stretched under that heap of stones, and Karlsson it would be to point the prow of the canoe into maplessness.
The sensation going through Karlsson now was of being emptied, as if his body from the stomach down had vanished, the way the bottom of the fourth map dissolved their route of escape.
This Karlsson now. Circumstance's man.
... Do It? Do I say, Braaf, Wennberg, surprise in the pot this morning, we haven't the maps we need? Going to voyage blind soon now, we are....
More than any of the other three runners of the sea, a man too of the countryside of Sweden which had birthed him. Karlsson was of the Swedish dispersion that began with the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the bitter years of bad weather and worsening harvests. Rye thin and feeble in the fields, cows like walking boneyards for lack of hay, potatoes rotten lumps in the earth—as though the elaborate clock of the seasons was awry, whatever could happen wrong did so sometime in those years, and all too much of it repeatedly. Karlsson's father Was confounded by the coil of the times, generations of landholding now crimping to futility before his eyes. But bafflement was no helpful crop either. Like many another, young Karlsson in that harsh time became extra to his home soil of Småland, early was uncoupled, simply cast to drift, from his family's farmstead. The two brothers older than lie caught America fever, put themselves into the emigrant stream coursing to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes. At their urging that he come along this brother of theirs shook his head in his parson-serious way and said only : "I am no farm maker."
... Melander had reason, whatever to Christ it was, for saying nothing of the maps. Melander had reason for what direction he stirred his tea. So he said nothing. And now I, I'm the Melander of us, is that the matter of it? Or...
But just what he was, seemed to take the young Karlsson some finding out. While he turned the question he set to work as a timberman on the largest estate in the parish, and there the forester's first words to him, after a look up and down this silent youngster, were: "Hear what I tell you, lad. I don't boil my cabbage twice." His next: "Wedo the day here. Up like lamplighters we are, and late as a miser's tithe." Stropped by that forester's relentless tongue—until he encountered Melander, Karlsson thought it the most relentless possible—Karlsson began to come keen, learn all of axwork, of woodcraft, of a pace to life.
... First hour on the gallows is the worst, Melander'd have said. We are still three, we're strong enough yet. We've the chance....
The merchant arrived to the estate in the winter of 184–9, another crows' winter in that corner of Småland, bleak cold week on bleak cold week, with the announcement that he was looking for supple wood for sled shafts. His true eye, though, was for the grain on men. What he saw in Karlsson suited very well. Karlsson's lovely thrift at work, that knack of finishing an ax stroke and drawing back for the next before it seemed the first could be quite done. The self-sufficiency of him,