Ericson

“ Ericson observed.
“So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe.”
“Your father,” Mrs. Ericson said grimly, “liked everybody.”
As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs. Ericson observed, “There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way from town.” Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother, who was waiting on the porch. ”

“ Ericson. “I've got cob corn for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of that in the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your room. You'll want to get the dust off you before you eat.”
Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that his room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a startled glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled out to the porch. ”

“ THE TRIP in to Dridihad was a seduction, an enchantment, a bliss. Ericson's strength came flooding back to him. His sick pallor was turning to rich gold. On the second day he whittled, under Mnathl's guidance, a spear and a throwing-stick for it, and on the third and fourth she taught him to set snares and kindle fires with a sliver of onchian. The country grew wilder and more beautiful, the trees taller, the sky a deeper blue, the waterfalls more loud. ”

“ Ericson said.
"An alien virus. Martian. Nobody's been able to isolate it. If a case isn't too bad we cure it in the antiseptic wards, but otherwise—well, you just wither away and die in a few hours. You're all shriveled up and look like a mummy."
"That's horrible!" whispered Mrs. Ericson.
"They're diseased fakirs who say they can read the sands, predict your future, bring you paradise, for five credits. But stay away from them!"
And just at that moment, as though on cue, Madeleine thought, the old man stepped out about fifty feet in front of Don's camel, and blocked the narrow trail. ”

“ Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars. ”

“ Can't I make the fire for you?”
“No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like to manage the kitchen stove myself” Mrs. Ericson paused with a shovel full of ashes in her hand. “I expect you will be wanting to see your brothers as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders' place this morning. He's threshing, and most of our boys are over there.”
“Will Olaf be there?”
Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between shovels. “No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He got six thousand bushel this year. ”

“ They swiftly master politics, voting for honesty rather than for hand-shakes; they make keen, scrupulously honest business deals; send their children to school; accumulate land—one section, two sections—or move to town to keep shop and ply skilled tools; become Methodists and Congregationalists; are neighborly with Yankee manufacturers and doctors and teachers; and in one generation, or less, are completely American.
So was it with Carl Ericson. His carpenter father had come from Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name from Ericsen. ”

“ CHAPTER III
arl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school; then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool, smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and "chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.
A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy ”

“ Ericson in particular.
Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl himself was part of a hash-group—an older woman who seemed to know Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven, with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. ”

“ Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.
“I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work,” she went on presently. “Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm, it's too bad you put off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do something by you.”
Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. ”

“ Ericson, at the thought, felt sweat break out on his upper lip. What he had endured had been just at the edge of what a man could stand and still live. (His ordeal, had he known it, had been very much less than it would have been had he taken the drug cure in the hospital in Penhairn. Mnathl, though she had not disdained the help of terrestrial science, knew things about the Fyhonese flora and its properties that no terrestrial even suspected. Still, the ordeal had been bad enough.) Ericson shifted his position and sighed. ”

“ The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach you to booze? I understand you're good at it."
"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to Frazer [94] to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. ”

“ Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. “Olaf don't seem to have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb you can always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere.”
Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. “She brought him a good deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?” ”

“ I'm Carl Ericson."
"Oh, are you? I'm——"
"I'm gonna have a shotgun when I'm fifteen." He shyly hurled a stone at a telegraph-pole to prove that he was not shy.
"My name is Gertie Cowles. I came from Minneapolis. My mamma owns part of the Joralemon Flour Mill.... Are you a nice boy? We just moved here and I don't know anybody. Maybe my mamma will let me play with you if you are a nice boy."
"I jus' soon come play with you. If you play soldiers.... My pa 's the smartest man in Joralemon. He builded Alex Johnson's house. He's got a ten-gauge gun." ”

“ But nobody else gets around like the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her sons' places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?” He craned his neck and looked at Nils' flute case with eager curiosity. “The old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand. His wife's musical: took lessons in Chicago.”
“I'm going up there tomorrow,” said Nils imperturbably. He saw that the driver took him for a piano tuner. ”

“ Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three days after his return home. ”

“ O Lord!' said Ericson.
'Why not?' asked Robert, in some wonderment; for he could not imagine Ericson acting from mere popular prejudice or fancy.
'Just think of spending one's life in an atmosphere of squabbles. It's all very well when one gets to be a judge and dispense justice; but—well, it's not for me. I could not do the best for my clients. And a lawyer has nothing to do with the kingdom of heaven—only with his clients. He must be a party-man. He must secure for one so often at the loss of the rest. My duty and my conscience would always be at strife.'
'Then what will you be, Mr. ”

“ His face seemed childlike, too, Nils thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy. All the others had been men at his age.
After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him and began to knit busily. It was one of the few old-world customs she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.
“Where’s little Eric, Mother?”
“He’s helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I don’t like a boy to be too handy about the house.”
“He seems like a nice kid.” ”

“ For the Carl Ericson who sailed his ice-boat over inch-thick ice was timid now. He poked into the library, and in a nausea of discomfort he conversed with Mrs. Cowles, Mrs. Cowles doing the conversing.
"Are you going to be a Republican or a Democrat, Carl?" asked the forbidding lady.
"Yessum," mumbled Carl, peering over at Gertie's throne, where Ben Rusk was being cultured.
"I hope you are having a good time. We always wish our young friends to have an especially good time at Gertrude's parties," Mrs. ”

“ But what can one be with ships?" Ritz asked plaintively, for if Edi expressed a thought, then it usually remained firmly in Ritz's head.
"One can be also something very good without ships, my dear Ritz," the mother said comfortingly, "and that is much safer; then one stays on firm land, and I should advise you to stay. And what does our Erick want to be? Has he too thought of that?"
"I must become an honorable man," answered Erick at once. ”

“ The people passed by him, and here and there one woman said to another: "The poor little fellow, he has no one on this earth," and then they went out.
The pastor in the pulpit had seen Erick rush into church. He now looked again in that direction, and noticed the little chap, how he sat there on the empty bench, so forsaken, his head resting on his arm. The pastor now walked behind the last of the congregation toward the bench. He stepped into the pew and put his hand on Erick's shoulder and asked kindly: "Why are you weeping so hard, my boy?" ”

“ The pastor was so surprised that for a moment he could not collect his wits. Erick's grandfather! There stood the man bodily before him, whose existence had been to him a mere fairy tale, and the man looked so stately and so commanding, that everyone who beheld him must be inspired with respect. But at the same time there was something winning in his expression, which was familiar to the reverend gentleman from Erick's dear face. And this gentleman had traveled so far to fetch his grandson, and Erick had disappeared. ”

“ But the father put down his book and said, nodding at the boy: "That is right, Erick, go toward that goal: first, and above all, an honorable man; after that, every calling is all right."
Now the mother rose, for it was time to go to bed. Edi and Ritz took Erick between them and thus marched ahead of the mother to conduct him to his little room which was beside their bedroom, so that the door between could be left open, with the advantage that Erick also could be drawn into the nightly conversation. Both Edi and Ritz were delighted with that. ”

“ LEIF ERICSSON [Leifr Eiriksson] (fl. 999–1000) , Scandinavian explorer, of Icelandic family, the first known European discoverer of “Vinland,” “Vineland” or “Wineland, the Good,” in North America. He was a son of Eric the Red (Eirikr hinn raudi Thorvaldsson) , the founder of the earliest Scandinavian settlements—from Iceland—in Greenland (985) . In 999 he went from Greenland to the court of King Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, stopping in the Hebrides on the way. On his departure from Norway in 1000, the king commissioned him to proclaim Christianity in Greenland. ”

“ Erick had to lower his open eyes and answered very low: "No."
"But worse things turn up if one goes with bad boys," the pastor continued. "Through them, one often comes where one never wanted to come. See, if you had not been saved from it through your mother's song which you heard, you would have been caught with the others in the vineyard as a thief, and punished as such. Well, Erick, if your mother should have had to hear that!" ”