Free Until We Reach Home by Lynn Austin Page B

to in America?”
    “We have an uncle who lives in a place called Chicago. He’s letting us live with him.”
    “I’ve heard that Chicago is a huge city—even bigger and more modern than Gothenburg, with lots of factories and things. I wouldn’t like to live there myself. I prefer the countryside. That’s why we’re heading to Minnesota.”
    “Is that a big city, too?”
    “No,” he said, laughing, “Minnesota is a state, not a city. We’re going to get jobs cutting timber this winter so we can earn some money, then we’ll settle down and buy farms of our own. They say you can get a piece of farmland for next to nothing—forty or sixty or even a hundred acres if you want it. And it’s good farmland, too.”
    “Why would they give away so much free land? What’s the catch?”
    “There’s no catch. America is a huge place and they need lots of people to fill it up.”
    Once again, Kirsten thought of Tor. Maybe she should write to him and explain about all the free land. If he didn’t want to be a farmer, maybe he could open his own store in America and . . . But no. She wouldn’t write to him. She wouldn’t humiliate herself any more than she already had.
    “If you don’t like Chicago,” Eric said, “you can always move to Minnesota with me.”
    Kirsten rested her head against the seat, tilting her chin so her tears wouldn’t fall. “I don’t know if I want to live on a farm again,” she said. “There’s too much work to do on a farm. My sisters and I are going to be rich in Chicago and have servants to wait on us.”
    “Servants, eh? What will you do with yourself all day?”
    “Anything I want—or nothing at all.” But Kirsten couldn’t imagine doing nothing. She had nothing to do on the train except look at the scenery or work on her stupid embroidery, and the inactivity bored her. She had loved to explore the woods back home with Nils—and Tor. Once again, she battled her tears.
    “Are you scared?” she asked Eric. “I mean, moving so far from home to a land you’ve never seen?”
    “ Nej , I think it’s exciting. The place where we’re going has already been settled by several families from our village back home in Sweden, so it’s not like we’ll be with strangers. We’ll have friends and relatives there. They all say that it’s just like home, only better because we’ll each get our own piece of land—whether we’re the oldest son or not.”
    “That sounds nice.”
    “Listen, I meant it when I said you should come up to Minnesota with us. Once I finish building my own house, I’ll be looking for a pretty wife like you to marry.”
    Kirsten didn’t know what to say. She wished Tor could hear Eric proposing marriage to her. Thinking about Tor, remembering how happy she once had been, made her stomach hurt.
    Eric leaned a little closer to her. “I’ll bet you had dozens of suitors knocking on your father’s door back home. He must have been chasing them off with a broom.”
    The pain in Kirsten’s stomach burned like hot coals as she shook her head. “ Nej , I didn’t have any suitors.”
    “That’s hard to believe. A pretty girl like you?”
    She waved away Eric’s words with a shrug, pretending she didn’t care. Tor had told her over and over how pretty she was as they’d kissed in the woods.
    “Tell me everything you know about America,” she said, desperate to change the subject. They talked about America all afternoon—what it would be like, how big the country was, how different it would be from home.
    “There are places you can live in America where the weather is always warm,” Eric told her, “and where it never snows, even in January.”
    Kirsten couldn’t comprehend it. The more Eric talked about their new home, the more excited she became, catching his dream like a fever, as if his hope for the future was contagious. Kirsten knew she had fled from home unprepared, running away from her old life instead of journeying toward a new one the