Free Unto a Good Land by Vilhelm Moberg Page B

needed to seem bigger.
    He tried to understand words and sentences he overheard, but everything was unintelligible, senseless jabber; not even one word, not a single syllable, was he able to recognize from his language book. He felt discouraged and disappointed. When he had stepped ashore he had thought he knew enough English to understand what he heard, even if he couldn’t answer properly; he began to think they had cheated him in Karlshamn by selling him an unreliable book.
    The boys arrived at an open square where many booths had been erected, and they thought this must be a market day. Here they stood long and gazed; Robert had said they shouldn’t stand and stare because they might be laughed at, but this market fascinated them.
    Wooden barrels stood in long rows, running over with potatoes, turnips, cabbages, carrots, peas, beets, parsnips, and many other roots which they saw for the first time; barrels in great numbers were filled with fruit—yellow, red, green, striped—apples, cherries, plums, and other fruits and berries which they never before had seen and the names of which they did not know. Between the barrels were long rows of baskets full of eggs and tubs full of butter, so fat that it seemed to perspire; on poles hung yellow, round, fat cheeses, big as grindstones; carcasses of animals, legs of pork, steaks, shortribs, and sides of bacon were stacked like firewood in high piles. Sizable, well-stuffed sausages hung in lines over tables on which stood vessels of ground meat and salted hams. There were booths with fowl: chickens, ducks, game birds; other fowl were stacked in hills of feathers, of all earthly bird colors, with a sprinkle of blood here and there on heads, necks, and wings. Four-footed beasts of the wild hung here in great numbers, hairy bodies of stags and does, hares and rabbits, known and unknown animals. In other stands were large tables with fish, long and short, broad and narrow, fat and spindly, black and white, red and blue; fish with striped bodies, misshapen fish, all head and protruding eyes, fish with ravenous jaws and sharp teeth like dogs’, fish with fins as sharp as spears, and fish with long tail fins by which they hung on hooks, swinging like pendulums as the shoppers brushed against them. On the ground stood wooden boxes in which crawled and crept shellfish, horrible-looking sea monsters, lizardlike creatures, frogs, crayfish, mussels, snails, animals in shells that opened up like caskets, and shellfish that crawled about and resembled who knew what; nothing they had ever heard of, seen, or known, now or ever in all their living days.
    The barrels, baskets, tubs, tables, boxes, and buckets in this market place were filled to overflowing; the whole place seemed flooded with fruit and meat, pork and lamb, fins and feathers, shell and hides, flooded with food of endless variety. People shopping here tramped in food, hit their heads on food, were enveloped in food, tumbled about in food. Who would skin all these animals, pluck all these birds, scale all these fish? For strangers and new arrivals, there was a booth in the market offering samples of all the food products which the new land offered its inhabitants. Here they saw the Creator’s many gifts, fruits and berries, roots, herbs, and plants; they saw crawling, flying, swimming creatures, and meat from the cattle and beasts which God had created on the Sixth Day, before He created Man.
    The two youths beheld the earth’s abundance in a market next to the most beautiful street in the world. This much they understood: there was food in sufficiency in North America; it would be enough for them too, and for the seventy immigrants who had arrived with them today; they knew, from what their own eyes told them, that they had entered a new world.
    —3—
    The day was nearing its warmest hour, the heat lay like a heavy weight over the city, making breathing difficult for the crowds on the street. People sought the shade and sat