Free Pride by William Wharton Page B

container in the kitchen.
    At first, his mother allowed Sture to help only to keep the child busy, but soon realized his value. He was a consistent, quiet worker and his “play” seemed to be what everyone else would consider drudgery.
    Already, at that young age, Sture wanted to be of some good. It might be claimed this was because his parents were older and they doted on him, spoiled him in some way, expected too much of him; but it became more apparent with time this was not the case.
    Sture was somehow unique in our world. His failing might have been that he didn’t know how to express love. He admired, respected his parents, but he was never overtly affectionate. This could come from the traditional Scandinavian impassiveness: neither of his parents easily expressed their feelings, either.
    It could also come from their years of servitude. They transferred their servile allegiance to their animals and even more so to Sture. He grew up feeling a guilt for the service, the love, the admiration he received, the joy they took in him. He reciprocated, in a sense, defended himself, by serving them , devotedly, to the best of his ability. It was a battle of goodness, of kindness, but there wasn’t really much of natural spontaneous love.
    Sture learned to milk a cow before he was seven. His small hands could just get around an extended teat but his strength, his will, and his communion with animals more than made up for this minor deficiency. The cows seemed to give him the milk. Sture could get more milk from a cow than his father or mother. At first, Sture’s father let him work around the barn with the animals only to give him something to do, but he, too, became increasingly dependent upon him.
    Nothing was too hard, too dirty, too monotonous for Sture. He mucked out the pigpens with a miniature shovel, singing. He broke up bales of hay and carried fodder down from the granary in the largest armfuls he could manage. And, all the time, he talked to the animals, seemed to keep up a running conversation with them.
    By the time he was seven, both his parents were worried about Sture. He was too good; in some strange way he made them feel guilty. He was so happy all the time, so helpful, so willing. It wasn’t natural. He wasn’t in any way like a normal seven-year-old. But there was no one else to talk with about this problem; their farm was isolated and the nearest communities were French-speaking.
    Mr. and Mrs. Modig spoke only English with Sture. They wanted him to be a real American, to have the advantages of a native born. However, they spoke Swedish between themselves. They thought of it as their private language.
    Meanwhile, Sture learned to speak both Swedish and English; he spoke Swedish to his parents the way he spoke cow to the cows or dog to the dogs.
    Even more amazing, his English was less accented than that of his parents. As a very young boy, he was already learning to read English on his own from the pictures in the catalogues his father tore up to be used in the outhouse. He learned how to read by himself because reading was not high on the scale of sensible skills in the eyes of his parents.
    Sture didn’t go to school until he was eight years old. By that time, he was doing about half the chores around the house: wood hauling, chopping, water carrying, sweeping, scrubbing floors. He was the first out of bed every day, starting a fire in the kitchen range or the pot-bellied stove in the sitting room. After this, he’d go out to the barn and join his father in the milking and other animal chores.
    At calving time he’d often sneak away in the night to check that everything was all right. Twice he saved the lives of valuable milking cows in birthing by “knowing” something was wrong even before his father was aware of it. The animals confided in him and he could “read” their every movement as well as interpret their sounds.
    His parents were glad when it