The Children's Blizzard

by Melanie Benjamin

  “Readings?” An old farmer—Sam Benson—guffawed. “What the hell does that mean? I can predict the weather just by looking at the sky.”

  “Did you predict this?” Findlay shot back.

  Benson didn’t say another word.

  “Trust the red man when it comes to weather,” Ol’ Lieutenant chimed in as he pulled out a book—Silas Marner. The man was famous for reading whenever he wasn’t pouring liquor; the book looked ridiculous in his giant hands the color of spring mud. He wore glasses, perched way down on the end of his nose; the glasses, with his tight, short coils of grey hair, gave him the look of a quiet schoolteacher. A look completely at odds with the rumors that he’d once shot ten Indians while out on patrol, even with his trigger hand bandaged after a horse bit him. Those Buffalo Soldiers sure were tough sons of bitches, Gavin knew. They had to be, back in the day. And now here was Ol’ Lieutenant trying to better himself by reading books that men like Gavin had read long ago, in the quiet halls of eastern schools. You had to admire a man like that.

  “Did you see any of them in town today?” Ol’ Lieutenant asked, without glancing up from the page of his book.

  There was silence as, one by one, men shook their heads.

  “That means they knew.”

  “Well, how the hell am I supposed to plan my life around whether or not the Injuns come into town?” somebody asked, to the collected chuckles of men who normally spared no thoughts for the Natives now that they were all safely corralled on their reservations, only venturing out, with passes granted to them by their military guards, to sometimes sell their wares in town.

  “It isn’t letting up any,” Forsythe said, pacing back and forth from the windows to the bar.

  Findlay got up and started putting on his coat. “I need to get the latest readings in and telegraph them to Saint Paul.” He left without a word; the other men just shook their heads, still not willing to give this newfangled weather prediction any merit.

  Of course, every man there recognized that it would be beneficial to know what the weather was going to be like from day to day. But out here on the plains, weather didn’t cooperate like it did in the East, where you could look at the western sky, lick a finger and hold it up to the wind, sniff the air, and plan your day. Here, the weather might blow down straight from the Arctic Circle or roar up from the Gulf of Mexico or march in steadily from the Pacific, and sometimes it did all three at once.

  No civilized man could indicate it—not even an army man.

  “I wonder if I should go to the schoolhouse,” one shopkeeper mused, looking worried. “Davey can’t walk home in this alone.”

  “They won’t let school out in this kind of weather,” someone assured him.

  “But maybe they will. That damn schoolteacher’s from the East, he don’t know our weather.”

  “I’m worried about my horse,” Johnny Swanson fretted. “I don’t like leaving her out there in this, if it ain’t blowing over. I’m gone, gentlemen.” And he threw on his hat and coat, opening the door and letting in a cold blast of air and snow that made more than a few swear. Others, thinking about their horses tied up to the hitching posts, too, followed him. So did Davey’s father, the shopkeeper.

  “That sleighing party, that’s what’s on my mind,” Forsythe said quietly, as he drummed his fingers on the bar next to Gavin.

  Gavin jerked his head up from his second shot of whiskey. “Damn. That’s right. They’re out there in this.”

  The two men exchanged looks. Then Gavin downed that shot, threw some money on the bar, and shrugged his arms back into his coat as Forsythe pulled his on.

  “You two are going out in this? What are you, heroes?” Ol’ Lieutenant snorted; the newspapermen were not exactly respected in a town like Omaha, where people were suspicious of those who made their living trading words, not goods. Gavin snorted. These rubes.

  “Hardly.” He could already imagine the headline—Great Loss of Life! A Day of Pleasure Turns Deadly! Sleighing Party Becomes Funeral Party!

  And he didn’t have to worry about Forsythe getting the headline alone this time; a storm like this was big enough for the two of them. Maybe this was it—maybe this was the event that would get Gavin back to New York, finally. A storm of epic, tragic proportions—the stories would write themselves! Pulitzer would have to bring him back to the fold; already he was thinking of how many ways he could describe what the wind was doing—roaring, blowing, pummeling, assaulting, punching, whistling, screaming…

  The two prepared to head out into the storm that was not letting up, thank God; maybe this thing was going to turn out to be a tragedy, after all!

  But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful—yearning—women were frozen to death out on the prairie?

  Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun.

  But no such break occurred.

  CHAPTER 7

  •••••

  OLLIE TENNANT WATCHED THE MEN file out of his bar, successfully hiding his distaste. Not a one of them had mentioned the school where his children spent their days learning their lessons.

  But Ollie was used to this; from the moment these idiots had mangled his name, assuming that he must be one of those Buffalo Soldiers whose legacies still loomed large in barely settled places like Omaha, he’d understood the way to deal with them. He’d understood that the only way to get a white man to respect you was to try to be as white as he was, at least in book learning. And you had to be braver, twenty times as brave as the average white gentleman, because the colored man was starting from a ways away from zero, in that category. At least in the white imagination.

  So Ollie read his books, but he sometimes thought they were foolish—stories about the problems white people had, which couldn’t hold a candle to the problems darker people had. He mostly read for the show of it, although now and then a book—like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—surprised him. But his reading soothed the customers somehow. It made them feel more inclined to spend.

  And he’d smiled enigmatically when the stories sprang up about him—that he’d been a soldier, part of the famous 9th Cavalry that helped “tame” the Kiowa and Comanche down in Texas. All he’d done was buy a cavalry jacket off a drunk in Missouri, because the coat was warmer than the one he had on his back at the time. He’d never once said a word that wasn’t true; all he had to do was smile or force a far-off look in his eye when white folk jumped to their own conclusions.

  A colored man got a lot further in this world when he didn’t open his mouth.

  He wasn’t no former slave, either; that was the other assumption folks in Omaha made about people with skin darker than an Indian or Mexican. Ollie had grown up in a tiny village in northern Indiana, a settlement of mostly coloreds who farmed small plots and kept to themselves. But just because his skin wasn’t white didn’t mean that he, too, didn’t feel the tug of the West, like so many men. His first memories were of turning to face the setting sun, wanting to go with it, to see what it saw. He’d lit out as soon as he was able, wandering from outpost to outpost, finally ending up in Omaha, putting his money into this little bar that was fine for a while, sure, while the town was just itty-bitty, but now that it was booming, things were different.

  First the railroad, then the stockyards; Omaha became a magnet for people who didn’t want to farm but who would do—and do happily—the jobs that a lot of natural-born white Americans didn’t want to do. The Irish, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Italians, the coloreds—they were willing to spend their days in a slaughterhouse or a canning facility, or bending over crooked rails and hammering them straight, or enduring the crippling fumes of a tanning house. Omaha had jobs like these in spa
des, and so they came, and the people who’d been here first, the white boomers and boosters, got rich off them, building rickety shacks for them to rent on the outskirts of town. There was Little Bohemia just south of here. Up north were the Hebrews, Italians, and people like Ollie himself; that was where the coloreds were starting to congregate.

  Ollie had bought his little tavern right in the heart of the downtown area when there wasn’t a downtown area. Back then, nobody seemed to care that they got their drinks from a colored man—one of the few in town at the time. But now, the city was civilized. Tamed, the newspapers trumpeted. Fine hotels and restaurants surrounded his little storefront. Just last week the Bee had run a story of a visiting colored man who tried to get a drink in a bar of one of those fine hotels, and—politely, the paper said—was asked to leave.

  Ollie had been approached several times in recent months by groups of civic leaders pressuring him to sell. “Go north, Ollie. The land is cheap there; you could buy five lots for what we’re able to pay you for the Lily.”

  Ollie was willing to admit he had a stubborn streak; he didn’t like being told what to do. He’d once massacred a passel of fireflies, running after them, catching them in his big mitt of a hand, despite his mother warning him he would squeeze them to death. He’d clutched them even tighter in response, and when he finally released them into the glass jar she’d given him for just this purpose, he’d discovered she was right. They were lifeless, his hand faintly smeared with their yellow dust, still glowing in the dark. He’d squeezed the life out of them by wanting them too much.

  He’d spent the rest of his life trying not to want too much.

  But he had a wife now, and two kids, and his wife hated living over the bar in this part of town where she wasn’t wanted; she felt it much more keenly than Ollie. She kept pestering him to move to the North Side, where her friends were. (Ollie didn’t have any friends and that was fine by him; he had no need for conversation. Nor did he have any love for some of the younger men coming to town, agitating for things like equal rights for the Negro. Ollie’d done just fine, hadn’t he? Why upset the apple cart and make the whites nervous and angsty?) Still, he was considering the latest offer. Because he had a customer who had kindly told him that if he didn’t, he could expect some kind of bill to pass in the town council that would annex his lot in the name of progress, and he wouldn’t get even a single dime.

  Besides, his kids went to school on the North Side, too. And it was a long walk back home. They weren’t welcome on the new cable cars that ran up and down the main thoroughfares.

  Ollie looked outside his now-empty bar. The storm wasn’t getting any better; in fact, the wind seemed more intent on punishing everything standing upright. His windows creaked ominously, and despite the fact that the round-bellied stove was blazing away, full of coal, the air was getting colder by the minute. His kids couldn’t come home in this. And Ollie didn’t trust their teacher—a maniacally cheerful white lady, daughter of an Episcopalian minister with a charitable bent—to keep them safe.

  Ollie bundled up into his buffalo coat, pulled on some leather gloves, and prepared to go out in the storm to get his kids.

  Because he couldn’t trust the white men to spare a thought for them, that was for damn sure.

  CHAPTER 8

  •••••

  “ANETTE! FREDRIK! ANETTE!” RAINA SCREAMED until her throat was raw; she stood on the doorstep to the schoolhouse for as long as she could stand it, shouting after the two who had been sucked into the storm. All she could see was grey and white. The snow whipped up from the ground meeting the snow falling from the sky in a hellish, twisting dance. The wind kept pushing her off balance; she clung to the doorframe but finally had to shut the door. Her eyes watered and stung from the icy projectiles that assaulted them; she felt tears rushing down her cheeks.

  “No—Tor! No!” She grabbed his arm and yanked him back from the door. Tor had buttoned up his jacket and was headed out to retrieve his brother.

  “Let go of me,” he yelled, fighting Raina. He was the larger, he could easily overpower her and leave. But desperation tightened her grip on his strong arm; she couldn’t let him go, she couldn’t do this alone.

  “I say let go of me—Fredrik! Fredrik!” Tor wrested the door open again and shouted into the tempest, his voice ragged with tears that he tried to hide from Raina. Tor was fifteen, almost a man. No, a man already, by prairie standards; this was his last year in the schoolhouse. When he wasn’t at school, Raina knew, a boy like Tor was laboring beside his father, sharing the hardest tasks. His body was already muscled and work-weathered, his hands callused, his nose sunburnt in the summer from spending days in the fields, his biceps like rocks. Only his mind still needed coaxing out of childhood.

  Raina had noted in Tor a hunger, almost, but not quite, disguised by his manners, the same respect and obedience all the immigrant children had been brought up with. Tor was too polite to ask for more than his share in life, but Raina could tell by the way he gobbled up his assignments and spat them back out again that he had a desire to learn—and an ability for it—that she could never begin to satiate. In a different place, Tor would go to college. But not here, not in Nebraska. Not a poor farmer’s oldest son. So she tried to slip him extra books when she could—her own books that she’d brought with her from home. Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist. Even Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, which he seemed to enjoy despite that the fact that they were “girls’ books.”

  But sometimes, Raina felt guilty about giving him more. What right did she have to enflame this boy’s hunger when there was no way for him ever to satisfy it? He was born on a farm and he would die on a farm; he would stop reading words and searching for ideas and instead learn to read the weather in the sky, when a mare would foal by the way she walked, how often to switch crops from the color of the soil.

  “Let go, I have to go after him! Mama and Papa— I have to, they’d never forgive me if I didn’t; you don’t understand, Fredrik’s little, he’s just a kid—”

  “Tor.” Raina’s voice startled the boy, as it startled her; it came from a place she’d never had access to before. A deep well of authority and certainty. She started talking to him in Norwegian, forgetting the edict about English; it stopped Tor in his tracks to hear Miss Olsen speak his native language—she saw the confusion and curiosity in his eyes, giving Raina the advantage she needed. She quickly shut the door again. “Tor, you could get lost out there yourself. You might not be able to find them in all this—you know how fast those two are, they could be almost home by now, anyway—” She broke off, rubbing her stinging eyes; she didn’t believe that, not with the fact of this monstrous wind rearranging the very landscape, and she knew Tor didn’t believe it, either. But they both needed to pretend they did. “You have to stay here, do you understand?” Now her voice was urgent, conspiratorial. “The other children—I have to keep them safe now. We need to think of the greater good. We’re going to run out of fuel soon, we’ll have to think about what else we can use—break up the benches and tables, maybe. I can’t do that without you. Do you understand?”

  Tor’s eyes, reddened from frustration and fear, looked anguished; Raina could see his thoughts fighting for prominence—the desire to protect his brother, the fear of disappointing his parents, the realization that what Raina was saying was true. All his responsibilities—and a homestead boy had so many, too many—claiming his heart, dividing it into little parcels. As she gazed into his face, about level with her own, she recognized how steady, how good a character he was. Clear blue eyes, unclouded by deception or prevarication. Strong eyebrows, darker than the reddish brown of his thick hair. No freckles, unlike his impish brother; Tor’s skin was fair, yet his cheeks were ruddy and the peach fuzz on his upper lip starting to coarsen.

  This was a boy, a man—a good man, he would be, just like his father—who would never speak a seduction wrapped up in a compli
ment. Who would never say pretty things he shouldn’t to a naïve young girl. Who would never dangle hope where none existed.

  Nothing in his honest young face made her fearful. Or confused. She only knew an overwhelming sense of relief that he was here. Tor, she realized with an overdue slap of rational thinking, even at his young age, was everything that Gunner Pedersen was not. Gunner—suddenly she wanted to howl his name just as desperately as Tor had howled Fredrik’s.

  She and Tor were both missing people. People who had claim to their hearts. Despite what she thought about Gunner—his flaws as a husband, as a moral person—Raina still longed for him to come driving up with his fine horses and save her. Save them all.

  She longed for him to act like the man she wanted him to be.

  As she gently pulled Tor away from the door and back into the schoolroom toward the stove where the other children sat huddling, the youngest ones starting to sniff back tears, Raina still listened for the sound of horses whinnying, reins jingling, his teasing, musical voice calling out for her in that seductive way. Her heart actually seemed to reach toward the schoolyard, her hope, her need, was that strong. And she thought back to the other night—that night, when he did croon her name. “You’re the most important thing to me in the world. Get dressed, my Raina,” he’d whispered, pressing her hand when she sat up, wondering if she was dreaming, then hearing Anette turning over in her bed behind the curtain so that she knew she was not. “Get dressed, come to the barn. We’re leaving this place, you and me. Together.”

  What gave him the right to say this? What had she ever done to indicate this was what she wanted? She’d tried so hard to be good, to be modest; she prayed every night to be released from this hell of temptation and despair. He gave her flowers, he manufactured ways for them to be alone, he stole her thoughts, her dreams, even her privacy, accompanying her whenever she tried to escape, whenever she found a dark corner to hide in. He did it all so smoothly, even delicately; no one would know there had been any words spoken between them that weren’t harmless, any thoughts or hopes revealed that weren’t innocent, what would normally occur between two chaste people living under the same roof.