The Last Letter Home Read Online Free PDF

preparing the husband’s clothing, when he was to go to war.
    —4—
    The following evening Kristina was again at her sewing machine after supper. She was expecting Karl Oskar back from Stillwater, but he was late. The children had gotten hungry and so they had eaten their supper without the father at the table. What was left of the corn pancakes she had put into the Prairie Queen to keep warm for him.
    It was already bedtime when Karl Oskar returned. The sewing machine kept buzzing and muffled her ear so she didn’t hear him before he was inside the kitchen. She stopped the machine and went to take the plate with the pancakes from the oven; she poured milk into the pitcher and cut a few slices of bread. He threw his hat onto a peg and sat down silently at the table.
    Karl Oskar seemed depressed and listless after his journey to Stillwater. Nor had he been especially happy when he left in the morning. But he had never been one of those who kept singing “We are coming, Father Abraham” even though he had a good voice, well noticed in church at the psalm singing. And by now that war song was sung mostly by those stay-at-homes who never had any intention of hearkening to Honest Abe’s call.
    Kristina wondered if perhaps he had changed his mind. Had he regretted his decision at the last moment? Maybe he had thought he wouldn’t go out and seek death of his free will. Could it be that he didn’t want to leave them all perhaps never to see them again? Maybe he had changed his mind and would wait until he was drafted for the human slaughter?
    Something was wrong with him, that much she could see. But she would not ask. He must come out with it himself. Perhaps he had enlisted and now regretted it—when it was too late.
    He mumbled something between swallows—the pancakes tasted awfully good; he had only had a sandwich in Stillwater, he was quite hungry.
    He had stilled the worst of his hunger when he said, “Kristina do you want to know—I’m not going to war . . .”
    “You’re riot! Didn’t you enlist . . . ?”
    “No.”
    “You changed your mind in the end? You’ll wait till they take you?”
    “No. I didn’t change my mind.”
    “What happened . . . ?”
    “They rejected me in Stillwater. I’m not up to it . . .”
    “They rejected you!”
    A powerful feeling of joy pierced Kristina’s heart.
    “I’m not good enough to go to war. Because of my leg. My lame shank . . .”
    Karl Oskar pulled out his left leg from under the table, held it up for his wife to see. It seemed she had never seen her husband’s left leg before. Meanwhile he sat and looked gloomily at the floor.
    She had been wrong a moment ago; he had not regretted his decision. Instead he felt disappointed, ashamed. Yes, by jiminy, he was ashamed and gloomy because he had been rejected!
    He bent down and felt the leg across the injured bone which he held pointed toward her.
    “Some doctor had to examine me first, to see if I could do military service. The doctor rejected me, because of my leg . . .”
    She was told how everything had happened. The recruiting office in Stillwater was housed in the old tailor’s shop across from the bank, and Swedes and Norwegians who wanted to join the rifle company had to go there. It was called a rifle company because they were to use the new guns with rifles in them to make them shoot much faster than the old guns. An officer in gold-braided uniform with many stripes and tassels had received him and the other volunteers. His name was Captain Silversvärd; he was a Swedish nobleman who had emigrated and he spoke the mother tongue. So in the beginning it was quite like home there in the office. And that man, the captain, was quite a decent sort of fellow and treated them all as equals, since they were all in America where soldiers are free men who themselves select their company commanders. In Sweden a simple soldier had only one duty—to obey—but here he could help select his own officers. The captain