The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [83]
"At least there's an end to this paddling."
"Maybe. Could be wrong kind, though. Melander's had his end, and Braaf his."
"And chewing over their deaths doesn't undo them. Wennberg, each day We pull ourselves nearer to Astoria."
"Or to drowning or to Koloshes or to Christ knows just whatever, I ought've taken my death and been done with it, the day somebody spoke 'Merica to me."
Of that continent which had begun to pull Swedes as the moon draws the tides, the young blacksmith knew only the glittering pun its word made against the Swedish tongue. America, 'Merica: mer rika, more rich. That there somehow was a Russian 'Merica besides the one that the Swedish farm families were flocking to mystified Wennberg only briefly. He imagined the Mericas must be side by side there the other end of the ocean, that the ship made a turn like going down one road fork instead of the other. Then word arrived to the Nordmark region, in the person of a merchant over from Karlstad, that the Russians were recruiting blacksmiths to work iron in their America. Wennberg's father, heartily weary of a son with temper enough in him to burn down Hell, managed to see to it that Wennberg was one of the three smiths chosen, and that Wennberg went off south across the Gulf of Bothnia with the others to meet the Russian ship at Sveaborg. They were joining the voyage of Arvid Adolf Etholen, a naval man of Finnish-Swedish lineage serving as an officer of the tsar and now to become the new governor of Russian America. Wennberg never worked clear how it was that Etholen could be simultaneously Swede and Russian and captain and governor, but then Wennberg had ahead of him years of finding out that double-daddle of such sort was not rare where the Russians were concerned. A Russian system, at least as he found it practiced in Alaska, did not need make any too much sense, it simply needed be followed relentlessly and the effort pounded into it would eventually force result of some sort out the far end.
"You can't close your cars always," Karlssoil said.
"Maybe not," concurred Wennberg. "The trouble is to know when the devil's doing the talking."
Finns predominated in the number that voyaged for Russian America during the term of Etholen; weavers, masons, tanners and tailors, sailmakers, carpenters. But for ironwork a Wennberg was wanted. The forge must have been the cradle of these Värmland Swedes. So Wennberg was shipboard with new governor Etholen's entourage those nine months from the Baltic to New Archangel in 1839—4)0. Etholen with his prim little divided mustache and those hooded eyes which seemed to see all over the ship at once; he was said to know more of Alaska than any of the tsar's men since Baranov. And Etholen's big-nosed young wife, pious as Deuteronomy recited backwards; and Pastor Cygnaeus, and the governor's servants, and the naval officers; oh, it was high carriage and red wheels too, for a blacksmith to be journeying in company with such as these.
"Tell me truth, Karlsson," Wennberg blurted now. "How many more days d'you think it can be? To Astoria?"
Karlsson, carefully; "There's no count to what you can't sec, Wennberg. I'd give much to put a finger a place on Braaf's counting board and say, 'Here. Astoria day, this one.' But we can't know that. We can just know tomorrow will carry us closer to it,"
Wennberg shook his head. "I've played cards against men like you, Karlsson, They count too much on the next flip from the deck."
"While your style won you the world?"
Wennberg's embarkation to Russian America