The Children's Blizzard

by Melanie Benjamin

  Tiny also harbored a desire to fight Indians, always moaning to her that he’d missed his only chance. Custer had been massacred years ago, when she and Tiny were just children. Tiny revered the man he looked at as a martyr to the point of trying to grow a long, droopy mustache like the one in the photographs. But at this, he could not succeed; Gerda had learned not to tease him about the patchy, fuzzy hair he insisted was soon to be a luxurious mustache.

  Gerda tried to point out that most of the Indians had already been defeated, at least the ones in Dakota; Yankton was bordered to the west and north by the Great Sioux Reservation. She’d actually been asked to teach at a school for Indian children, like the one back in Genoa, Nebraska, not far from her family’s homestead. Once, when she was younger, Papa had taken her and Raina to visit the new Indian school—it was about half a day’s drive from their farm, and he thought it would be interesting to see. The Olsens had come to Nebraska from eastern Minnesota, where the family had first immigrated in 1876, the year of Custer’s last stand. They hadn’t had much dealing with Indians, beyond seeing them sometimes in town, peddling beautifully made baskets that could hold water—Mama marveled at the skill. And when Papa plowed, she and Raina often found finely carved arrowheads in the fields. But an entire school full of little Indian children in their clothes of buckskin and beads—Gerda remembered being so excited about it, she couldn’t sleep the night before.

  But it hadn’t turned out the way she thought it would. The children weren’t wearing their colorful beaded Indian costumes, after all. They were clad in somber uniforms, grey coat and pants for the boys, white homespun dresses for the girls. All the boys had their shining black hair cut short in a bowl shape; the girls wore their hair in severe braids devoid of pretty touches like feathers or beads. And none of them smiled at Gerda or Raina when the sisters stood at the back of the room with some other curious folks, watching the children seated at their desks, tonelessly chanting the alphabet. In fact, some of the littler ones were crying; one in particular, a tiny doll-like girl, looked so sad with her enormous brown eyes welling up with tears as she chewed the end of one of her braids, her birdlike shoulders heaving, that Gerda wanted to take her home with them.

  But her father looked at her with such reproach when she asked him if she could keep the little girl, take her home and help her not feel so sad, that Gerda had felt sick with shame. He’d yanked her and Raina by the arms and dragged them out of the school; he pushed them away from the tall building, toward town, where he made them sit on the stoop of a dry goods store when he went to buy some thread for their mother. When he came out, he didn’t have the usual sticks of hard candy; he curtly barked orders for them to get in the wagon so they could begin the journey home.

  He sat silently, holding the reins, for the longest time while Gerda and Raina shared puzzled, worried looks. Normally Papa sang songs from the old country—“Bonden og Kråka” was a favorite—or talked through his hopes for the farm while he was driving, even though neither Gerda nor Raina was much help. But they didn’t have to be; he simply liked to hear himself speak to someone other than the chickens—that’s what he always said.

  This day he was so quiet, for so long, that Gerda started to chew on her fingernails, and Raina couldn’t hold back her tears, although she let them fall silently down her plump cheeks.

  The wagon swayed on the rutty path; the sun was behind them now, so everything looked bathed in a warm, red glow—the tops of the grasses were already a russet hue, but they looked almost ruby in the fading sunlight. Only if you lived for a long time on the prairie did you know the landmarks; a newcomer’s eye would only see mile after mile of barely undulating land, undisturbed by trees or buildings. But Gerda knew that particular clump of purple leadplant meant they only had an hour left to go if they didn’t break a wheel or axle; she recognized the branch where another set of ruts went off to the north as the place where they would stop for the girls to use the bushes if they had to. She wondered if the prairie chickens scurrying across the trail in front of the wagon were the same that had scurried across it on the trip this morning.

  Finally, Papa sighed so deeply his shoulders rose nearly to his ears. He pulled on the reins and the oxen ambled to a stop; he tugged on the hand brake and let the animals graze a bit. He peered down at Gerda for so long that she began to quake inside, wondering if she could hide in the tallgrass before he punished her.

  “Those children back there,” he finally said, removing his straw hat to wipe the perspiration along his forehead with his sleeve. “It’s not right. I thought it was when I heard about it. A school where the wildness could be taught out of the child, where they would be taught English, taught to be part of a civilized society—that could only be a good thing. But I don’t know now. It’s hard, you know. Hard to be separated from your family.”

  Raina nodded eagerly, but Gerda knew she didn’t understand. Papa was talking about himself, and how he’d left his mother in the old country, his brothers, too. He would never see them again. But he was a big, grown man and Gerda had never realized, until this moment, that a big, grown man could miss anything. Or anyone.

  “And they are but little ones,” her father continued, now staring ahead at the prairie, but Gerda knew he wasn’t seeing it—he was seeing his village in Norway, tucked between steep mountains, the likes of which Gerda couldn’t imagine, even though she’d been born there. But she had no memory of the old country other than vague snippets: a snug little bed in a whitewashed attic with a slanting roof; a Christmas dinner with a table full of uncles and aunts and older cousins who teased; her mother crying bitterly when they drove away in a wagon to the sea.

  Now Papa was seeing his own mother, so far away—his father had died when he was younger—and the idea of that, of never seeing Papa and Mama again, squeezed her chest until it bruised her heart. “Little ones, taken from their families. Even if they be Indians, it’s not right. And you, miss…” Papa turned to gaze again at Gerda, and she dropped her head, burning with shame, her eyes swimming with tears.

  “Look at me, Gerda.”

  Slowly, she raised her face, only to weep even more because Papa was looking at her with the usual love light softening his blue eyes. She hiccupped as she sobbed, and he put his arm about her, pulling her close.

  “People aren’t to be treated like possessions. They shouldn’t be bought and sold or contained or corralled. I thought you knew that, Gerda.”

  “Oh, Papa, I do! I just—she seemed so sad.”

  “Yes, and you wanted to make her feel better and that is a good notion to have. So maybe think about how you can accomplish that another way. Maybe not for this little girl, but others like her. Think about giving, not taking.”

  She’d nodded, and they continued the journey home, where Mama wanted to know all about the school. But none of them wanted to talk about it, and she stopped asking with one of her understanding looks.

  Gerda had never forgotten what her father had said then, and when she heard of another Indian school, one to be built on a reservation so that the children would live with their parents, she’d applied.

  But when she received an invitation to teach, she’d declined. She couldn’t exactly say why—only that it seemed such an enormous leap from the world she knew into a world she didn’t. A world she was more than a little afraid of. So she’d taken up this school, and boarded with the Andersons, and met Tiny—who wanted to go fight an enemy that was already defeated. All you had to do was see that school to know that.

  But still she loved Tiny, maybe because he was so different from any other boy she’d known—placid cows, all of them, content to stay put and homestead. As if the imagination that had caused their parents to put an ocean between themselves and all that was familiar had skipped a generation. Tiny was the only boy she’d ever met who didn’t want to stay exactly where he was. So she loved him for this—while trying
to dissuade him from it, too. It wasn’t as if she loved homesteading. But she knew there was no place for a woman on a cattle drive or riding with the cavalry.

  Oh, Gerda didn’t know exactly what she wanted, other than to do exactly as she pleased! And she wanted—she needed—to begin now, because the good Lord knew that life could be short and brutal—hadn’t she stood graveside for a school chum who died from a bee sting, of all things? Hadn’t her mother’s best friend, Lydia Gunderson, died in childbed, delivering her sixth baby? Didn’t children fall into wells, vanish forever in the tall prairie grass; didn’t young men get kicked in the head by horses, people get bit by rattlers, or suffer unexpected bloody flux or step on rusty nails or fall into open fires? Didn’t entire families get sucked up by tornadoes or perish in flash floods?

  Life was hard, and short, and Gerda, at eighteen, lay awake at night sometimes, her mind too full of wanting to sleep. Mostly, she wanted Tiny. She wanted to cook for him, to shine his boots, to scold him for taking too much time with the animals, to make him trim his fingernails, to cut his hair for him, to read to him in front of the fire.

  To sleep next to his sturdy body radiating warmth and strength in the depths of a feather bed covered with quilts, bridal quilts made just for her. To reach out to him in the night, bring him as close as it was possible between a husband and wife, only breaths and sighs and whispers apart.

  Sometimes, Gerda moaned at night in her narrow bed next to Pa and Ma Anderson’s room; she tossed and turned, burning with a fever, for her emotions, her desires, always had a way of stoking up the furnace of her strong heart, lungs, and blood. She was always ashamed at those moments, ashamed of her sinful desires. And she couldn’t take comfort in the thought that soon they would be absolved through marriage. Because no matter how meaningfully he pressed her hand, Tiny kept talking about going west. Just last Sunday, he’d shown her an illustration of the rocky Colorado mountains that he’d cut out of a newspaper.

  “That’s a place where a man can breathe,” he’d exulted. “Where a man can touch God!”

  It was always “a man” who figured in Tiny’s dreams and wants. Just one. Solo.

  So Gerda had her plans for this unexpected gift of an afternoon. She would let Tiny kiss her today. And she would kiss him back.

  She’d written Raina about Tiny, pouring out her frustrations. Raina’s letters in reply, however, weren’t at all like the sunny, understanding letters from Raina of old; they were full of dark thoughts and questions that Gerda could never begin to answer. Poor Raina! She was certainly having a tough time at her first school. Gerda, now in her third year as a teacher, wished she could give her some advice. But Gerda’s teaching career had been uncomplicated, her previous boarding situations uneventful. And now, with the Andersons, she certainly couldn’t complain about anything but their dogged protection; they treated her just like a daughter. Gerda had no advice at all to give to the little sister who had always looked up to her. To tell the truth, she’d tried to warn her parents that Raina might be a little young to board out, despite the fact that she was the same age as Gerda had been. But her parents couldn’t see what Gerda saw, that Raina was too quick to feel—happiness, sadness, it didn’t matter, emotions ran roughshod over her, leaving her gasping in their wake. Gerda’s parents couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see that their younger girl with the dark blond hair was too trusting, that she never saw a reason to look beyond the surface of people’s actions. A smile was enough to convince Raina that someone was kind; a funny story meant that the teller was the most humorous person she’d ever met. Raina’s heart was simply too pliable, too eager to both receive and give.

  Gerda had guarded her own heart fiercely from the country bumpkins she’d grown up with, the sons of the stoic Norwegians and Swedes of the community. Until she went to Dakota Territory—her father still didn’t understand why she chose a school so far away from home, a long four-day journey—where she met Tiny.

  This afternoon, Tiny had come jingling up to the schoolroom in the sleigh at exactly twelve o’clock, as she’d instructed him to; she was just bundling the children up to go home, having declared it a holiday due to the nice weather. It was easy work; they’d all come to school wearing light jackets or shawls, the heavy woolens airing out at home on the line. By this time of the year, wool was starting to smell briny after so many wearings, having gotten wet and then dried inside at close quarters, over and over again. Every homestead mother took the opportunity of a rare warm day to air winter clothing outdoors.

  Gerda was just fastening the last button on little Minna’s sweater when Tiny let out a whoop from the sleigh; he was standing, holding tight to the reins of the little bay as the cloud descended and curtained the sun. She gazed in a stupor as sparks sizzled from the runners of the sleigh and the children squealed at the sight—then she sprang into action.

  “Children, make a run for it,” she called out as she quickly doused the fire in the round-bellied stove with a pail of water. “You’d better hurry, it looks like a big one!”

  It was the right thing to do, she decided; they were already bundled up and ready to go home, and she’d officially declared school out. There would be no teaching her disappointed pupils if she changed her mind and kept them inside.

  And there would be no pretending with Tiny in the snug little farmhouse, cooking him the meal she’d planned—Ma Anderson had left a plucked and dressed chicken, saying they wouldn’t be home until after dinner. There would be no snuggling together in the big rush rocker. No kisses designed to lasso her cowpoke.

  “Go home,” Gerda called gaily over the whine of the wind that was causing some of the students to halt in confusion. They looked at her, questions in their eyes. Homestead children understood weather. Shelter in place—wasn’t that what they were taught to do in a blizzard?

  But they were also taught to always obey Teacher.

  It wasn’t a blizzard yet, Gerda determined; it was only a startlingly dark cloud with no borders and a fierce wind whipping up the snow already on the ground; not much was falling from the sky. If everyone left now, they’d be home, snug and dry, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. “If you live too far away, stay with a friend who’s nearer. But if you run now, you’ll be fine!” She clapped her hands to make her point, hastily threw on her own shawl and the knitted blue hat with the jaunty pom-pom that Tiny loved, grabbed Minna and Ingrid by the hands, and ran out of the schoolhouse, the door shutting on its own as the wind kicked up something fierce.

  Then she leapt into the sleigh with the two girls. Tiny jumped in beside her, and with a shout, he slapped the reins down on the haunches of the bay, and they took off, trying to outrace the storm.

  There was a moment, when she turned around to look at the receding backs of her students only to find, to her astonishment, that the snow—suddenly tumbling down from the sky to mix with the snow kicked up from the ground—had already swallowed them up. She almost told Tiny to turn around; maybe she should run after them and bring them back to the schoolhouse, after all.

  But then Tiny smiled down at her, and even though the temperature seemed to be plummeting by the heartbeat, and her eyelashes had little drops of ice on the ends weighing them down, she smiled back.

  And she laughed as Tiny urged the bay to go faster.

  CHAPTER 5

  •••••

  DON’T EVER LOSE THAT SLATE or that bucket! They cost a dime. A whole dime, do you understand? If you lose them, you can’t go to school anymore. And come right home after. No dawdling.

  The words were pounded into Anette’s brain as thoroughly as if Mother Pedersen had taken a hammer to her skull. She never had lost the slate or bucket, and she never had dawdled, and she wouldn’t begin now. She clutched the slate tightly to her chest, beneath her shawl, the bucket in her other hand, and bent into the wind. She couldn’t open her eyes at all against the force of it, the hard pebbl
es of ice pounding her face. But her feet knew the way—hadn’t she made this trip hundreds of times? All she had to worry about was the ravine at the edge of the farm. But that was a mile away. She just had to run, that was all—run faster than normal to chisel through the wall of wind blowing her backward with every other step.

  But Teacher was yelling at her to come back inside—Teacher, who knew how Mother Pedersen was! Who knew that she meant what she said and that if you crossed her, even with a look, she would make your life miserable. Mother Pedersen would act on her threat, that was one thing Anette knew—she didn’t like sending Anette to school at all. She only did it because it was the law or something—maybe because Teacher boarded with them, and so she couldn’t very well keep Anette from attending. But Mother Pedersen never stopped talking about the expense of the slate and the pail and the clothes, and the work she had to do in Anette’s absence.

  Anette did wonder why Mother Pedersen was so unhappy. She had everything, to Anette’s hungry eyes. A nice house, handsome children (although the oldest, a little girl very much like her mother, was already showing signs of coveting everything that didn’t come to her). Mother Pedersen was so beautiful, sometimes it devastated Anette to look at her because she then had to go look at herself in the mirror and see her own pockmarked face, heavy eyebrows, square jaw. And Mother Pedersen had Father Pedersen, the nicest man Anette had ever known, so quick to help Anette lift a heavy pot or to open a door for her when she had her arms full of dirty laundry; so eager to make sure Teacher had enough light at night to mark the lessons, determined that she have a small vase of fresh flowers whenever they were blooming. His eyes—soft, brown—seemed to understand everything you could ever want to tell him, before you even opened your mouth. And he was just as sweet to Mother Pedersen, too—he always made sure she had pretty fabric to make clothes for herself. Why, once, he even rode all the way to Omaha to find fabric in the exact same shade of blue—almost as blue as a cornflower—of her eyes! If Anette ever had anyone like that all to her own—because she knew that Father Pedersen’s kindness to her was only borrowed, as everything in her life was borrowed, her clothes, the roof over her head, any attention that was paid to her, good and bad—she would never be sad or angry.