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 came time for Sture to go off for school. They were concerned about his ‘unnaturalness’. At the same time, they were sorry to lose him, not to have his cheerful smile, his singing, talking to the animals, and especially his continual helping hand. The day he dressed for school the first time, wearing his only pair of shoes, his father spoke to him.
‘Sture, I know you’ll be a good boy at school.’
Sture nodded his head and smiled. It never occurred to him to be anything else; he could probably not even conceive of an alternative, but he listened.
Among other things, Sture was a good listener. He listened to everything and everybody. He listened to the grasses blowing, the insects buzzing. He could lie in a field and listen to the different sounds and tell without looking whether there were gnats, fleas, beetles, crickets, ants or grasshoppers chewing the grass beside him, flies, wasps or bees buzzing around his head.
He listened to anyone as if he really wanted to hear what was said. When he listened, one knew he not only heard the words said but understood their meaning and the feelings behind them. One felt Sture also heard a person’s voice as a thing separate, a personal music, not even heard by the speaker, but heard by Sture when he listened.
Sture’s dad continued: ‘I know you can already read better than your mother or I, but don’t ‘stick out’ in the class. Everything is so easy for you the other children might be jealous and treat you mean. You understand?’
Of course Sture understood; he also understood all the things his father was not saying, all his father’s fears and his pride.
‘Father, I shall be good. I want to know everything. I know I will be happy in school and I want everybody else happy, too.’
So Sture went off. As soon as he was over the first hill, out of sight from the house, he took off his shoes and shirt. He wrapped them carefully and started to run. It was five miles to the school and Sture ran the entire way. Sture liked to run; it made him feel close to the other animals. Because there was so much to be done on the farm, he never had enough time to run, but now was his chance for running: to and from school every day. He’d taken off his shirt and shoes so he wouldn’t scuff his shoes or soil his shirt.
Before he reached school, Sture put on his shirt and shoes. He went inside and sat in a chair with the other young children and listened. It was a one-room schoolhouse and some of the students in front were as old as seventeen or eighteen.
The teacher was a local girl who had gone to the high school in Manawa. She was nineteen and not especially intelligent or well trained, but she was kind. She was teaching until the man she wanted to marry could find his own piece of land to farm.
At first, she did not notice the new little tow-headed boy in back. She was busy trying to manage some of the older children. She gave Sture a primer to look at because there were pictures. She also gave Sture and the two other children about his age each a piece of paper and a pencil.
‘See if you can draw a picture from this book. Can you make your drawings pretty as these?’
She smiled. Sture smiled his disarming smile back at her. At first he did not know what she meant ‘to draw a picture’. He knew what it was to ‘draw water’, or for a horse to ‘draw’ a cart or to ‘draw’ a breath, or how to ‘draw’ the small bow he’d made. He knew his father talked about the chimney ‘drawing’ but he didn’t know about ‘drawing a picture’.
He read through the simple primer several times and looked around to see the other young pupils working with their pencils and looking back and forth at the pictures in the book. Then he knew. Drawing was like making the sound of a cow by listening to the cow, only on paper, with a pencil.
Sture proceeded to make almost perfect drawings, one after another, of the pictures. Sture thought this was a wonderful idea. School was going to be even more fun than he thought. His drawings were actually superior to those in the book because most of the stories in the primer were about animals and so were the illustrations. Sture ‘drew’ upon his constant observations of the animals to ‘draw’ his pictures. The other little children soon saw what he was doing and stopped to watch. It was like magic the way Sture drew. He drew without hesitation as if there were some kind of invisible image already on the paper that he was tracing, copying.
When the teacher saw that the younger pupils weren’t working but only staring open-mouthed at Sture, she came back to see what he was doing.
So began the schooling of Sture Modig.
The teacher quickly discovered he could do, easily, almost any task in reading or reckoning she could set. He asked to borrow several books reserved for pupils in the twelve- to fifteen-year-old range, and she willingly, but with some trepidation, agreed. Sture ran home that afternoon, barefooted, barebacked, with the books wrapped, along with his shoes, inside the rough shirt his mother had made for him. The shirt didn’t get dirty because his shoes had scarcely touched the ground.
Sture immediately went out to help his father with the milking. He showed his parents the books he had been given, and since neither of them could read English well, they thought it was only natural and were glad that at last Sture was doing something normal just like any other child.
That evening after dinner, after helping his mother with the dishes, then helping his father sharpen posts for a new fence they were putting across one of the fields, Sture read his new books. He read each of them twice. One was about Ancient Greece and the conflict between Sparta and Athens. Sture was not sure with which side he felt the more sympathy. He liked the Athenians for their love of learning, but the austerity and efficiency of the Spartans appealed to him more.
The other book was an algebra book. The intricate beauty of the equations delighted him. It made him think of his feelings about how everything in nature seemed to fit.
At school, Sture quickly became assistant to the teacher. In reality, he became the teacher. He had natural patience and could help the students understand. He possessed a sixth sense for their individual minds, much like that he had for the cows and other animals.
Although he was always smiling and pleasant, even to the slowest of the students, some of the older boys became resentful. This was what Sture’s father had tried to warn him about. The warning was not very necessary.
When the older boys tried to gang up on Sture in the schoolyard, they learned something new about Sture Modig. First, he was truly modig, brave. None of them spoke Swedish and could therefore not know this. They found out how Sture, without seeming to try, smiling all the time, could dodge like a rabbit, butt like a goat, run like a deer.