It was almost like dealing with a wounded animal, Ollie sometimes thought. You had to understand the mind of a creature, you had to anticipate its movements, and its fear. You had to know when to back off, when to duck your head, cross to the other side of the street, avert your eyes.
“Miss—” Ollie turned to his son and hissed, “What’s her name?”
“Miss Carson!” Francis said too loudly, and Ollie winced.
“I’m sorry, Miss Carson, is it? I’m Mr. Tennant. Francis and Melissa’s father. How are you all doing? Have the children eaten their lunch? Have you had anything to eat?”
“Stay away from me,” Miss Carson said in a choked voice; she drew her knees up against her chest, pressing herself even farther against the wall, although Ollie hadn’t thought that was possible. “I don’t know—it’s so awful outside—don’t take one more step toward me, you—you—”
Ollie pressed his lips together, turned away so that he didn’t have to see the terror in this young woman’s eyes—and so that she wouldn’t see the disgust in his. This was who was teaching his kids? A girl who hated them, who was terrified of them? Was she able to hide her disgust at the color of their skin because they were small and couldn’t hurt her? He tried to remember what he knew about the school, newly open. His children could legally go to the white schools but they weren’t welcome there, not as their numbers grew. Schools were forming here on the North Side to accommodate the growing population. He’d heard there was only one colored teacher in all of Omaha, and she taught at a small high school. So the younger children were being taught by white teachers, mainly those who volunteered in, or were volunteered by, their churches. He’d never thought of it this way, but it was true; teaching his children was considered an act of charity. And Ollie knew people well enough to understand that those performing a charitable act rarely had much love or consideration for the recipients of it.
“I have to go home!” Miss Carson stood up abruptly; she was trembling from head to toe. “I have to go home, they’ll be worried for me, I can’t stay here, I don’t care about—you can take them home, get them out of here, get them away! All of you, just go away!”
“Now, miss, listen to me.” Ollie’s voice could be as smooth as honey when he wanted it to be, and right now he did. “It’s not possible, not with the way this storm is. Where do you live, anyway?”
“Why do you want to know?” The girl’s eyes narrowed, her lips grew white.
“Just—is it on this side of town? Or somewhere else?”
“Near Fremont, the Episcopal Church—my papa is the rector there. It was his idea that I teach here.”
“Ah.” Ollie nodded, unsurprised. “Well, miss, you won’t get there, is what I’m trying to tell you. The cable cars aren’t running anymore, most of the streetlights are out, it’s not fit for man or beast. You’d get lost, you might hurt yourself—you can’t even see a horse coming around a corner. You need to stay here until it’s over.”
“Stay here—stay the night?” Her voice rose.
“At least until it’s over.”
“Will you take these—the children home?”
“No, miss, I won’t. It’s safest right where we are.”
“Oh!” Miss Carson shut her eyes tight; she turned her head, hiding half her face against the wall.
Ollie took a few steps backward, allowing her time to absorb what he’d said. He turned toward the children, who were all holding hands near the stove, watching with big eyes. He joined them, holding his hands out toward the feeble fire, thinking.
The room was small. It had two rows of benches, no blackboard, no desks—not for the colored children, he thought grimly. Tell them they can learn but don’t give them the tools they need. There were a few readers, and he deduced they had to share. His children had slates, but he knew—he’d overheard his wife—that some of the others didn’t, and that she was thinking of taking up a collection for them. There were some pictures, childish drawings, pinned up on the whitewashed walls, but otherwise, it was a joyless place, dimly lit with a few dusty oil lamps.
He couldn’t see any stacks of logs or buckets of coal for the stove.
“Where do you keep your fuel?” Ollie asked this casually, tossing it over his shoulder, still not turning toward the schoolteacher.
“We ran out about an hour ago. That’s the last of it,” she said, and he could hear her rapid breathing, like something caught in a trap, from across the increasingly cold room.
He rose—pretending to stretch, but really, he was searching for something to burn. There were the few books. He saw a stack of old newspapers in a far corner—probably intended for the outhouse behind the building. There was a massive desk—a heavy rolltop, like you’d find in a bank—for the teacher, and that counter along the back of the room. But that looked solid, not anything that would yield to his bare hands.
He turned his gaze to the two rows of benches. Putting his hands in his pockets, he casually strolled over to the first bench. He kicked at it, and it moved; it wasn’t bolted to the floor. It wasn’t solidly built, either, just planks nailed on either end to legs made of two-by-fours.
The six children shadowed him; he realized they’d been frightened by the teacher’s behavior. Now that he was here, they weren’t scared anymore—but they’d probably stick to him like glue until he could get them all home in the morning or whenever the storm stopped. When he stopped moving, they all did, too.
He turned, fixed them each with a kind gaze, then broke into a smile.
“Who wants to play a game?”
There were some grins, and then his son began to cheer as Ollie showed them how to break apart the benches, kicking at them, chopping them with their small hands. Sanctioned vandalism—every schoolchild’s dream. Soon they were all laughing and shouting. It was good for them to run around, get their blood going, warm themselves up a little. Ollie wasn’t sure how long the fire would last, even with this new source of fuel.
“You can’t—why, they can’t do that! That’s not right!” Miss Carson took a few steps out of her hiding place, outraged. “That’s someone else’s property—it belongs to the town!”
“I’ll pay them back,” Ollie said wryly. “Miss, we have to burn something, or freeze. Do you have any other ideas?”
“Yes—go home! All of you—go back to where you came from! I’m going home, I am!” With a wild cry she dashed across the room, headed for the door, and Ollie had a choice to make: Stop her, put his hands on a white woman and risk his very life—
Or let her go, this crazy person, to her doom.
“Miss! Miss Carson!” His voice could also fill a room—fill a church, his wife often hinted—if he wanted it to. It boomed, echoed in the nearly empty space, and he placed himself firmly between the wild-eyed young woman and the door.
She stopped a couple of feet in front of him, and so finally he was able to take a good look at her face. She was white—whiter than he’d ever seen a person—with terror, her lips pale, too. But her cheeks were still round with the last remnants of childhood; her pointed chin was trembling, like his own little girl’s did when she was sad or afraid.
Children had come late in Ollie’s life; he wasn’t looking to have a family—he had few outright plans for living—but it had happened to him anyway, and he couldn’t really remember having much choice in the matter. He’d met a girl: sweet, shrewd Alma, who didn’t mind that he owned a bar and—most important—never went overboard in trying to get him to attend church. She only dropped a couple of subtle hints a month, which, given what Ollie knew about churchgoing women, made her a model of restraint. She tamed him in a different way by giving him two babies who turned his heart to mush the moment he held them as newborns; each one of them had pounded his chest with a tiny fist and made a conquest.
And ever since, Ollie had discovered he was putty in a ch
ild’s hand; everything about children, their overabundance of emotion, their exhausting energy that would give way, without warning, to a sleep that could not be interrupted, delighted him. Especially their possibility. Who could tell what kind of a person a child will grow into? Some thought they could; Alma was particularly judgmental in this way: “That Francis, he will grow up to be a preacher, now mark my words, the way he can talk!” “You know little Peter, the Thompsons’ boy? The way he looks at you—I can tell he’s going to grow up to be no good!”
But Ollie held out hope for each and every one of them.
It was that quivering chin on this girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen—this girl, he had to acknowledge, who was most likely forced into this situation by her misguided parent who was trying to tick off an item on his own checklist to get into heaven—that did it. If she were an adult—for Ollie held out no such hope for change and goodness in adults—he would have let her go outside without a second thought. He wasn’t there to save her. He was there to save the children.
He had not been prepared for the schoolteacher to be a child herself. But she was, and so he had to act.
“You can’t go out there, miss.” He softened his voice again. “You’ll be going to your death. I don’t want that to happen, these children don’t want that to happen. Look at them.”
Miss Carson, clutching her shawl so tightly her knuckles bulged, turned toward her pupils. None of them reacted in any way; they simply stared right back at her, faces neutral. There was no great love between teacher and pupils, that was evident. So Ollie made a gesture to Francis, who immediately understood and stepped forward, his hands clasped upon his chest like the actress who had played Little Eva in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that had passed through last summer, and Ollie had to stifle a grin. This boy of his! Maybe Alma was correct: Maybe a stage of some kind—in a church or in a theater—was part of his future.
But Ollie kept his face serious, for this wasn’t make-believe; it was life and death.
“Please, Miss Carson, please don’t go,” Francis said, his voice full of pathos. “We want you to stay with us! If anything happened to you we would be so sad!”
Miss Carson, evidently no fool, cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him—but she also appeared to be considering the situation from another angle; she glanced out at the dark street. The glow of the oil lamps inside the building cast a weak light outside, so that the full fury of the storm wasn’t visible. Fortunately the mercurial wind chose that moment to turn and pound on the huge glass storefront window; even Ollie let out a yelp of surprise. It seemed a miracle the window didn’t break.
Miss Carson had jumped, too; she was crying again, twisting up the ends of her shawl in her small hands. “I don’t know—I can’t stay here—I want to go home! I miss my parents! Why don’t they come for me?” She finally let her gaze meet Ollie’s, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why doesn’t anyone come?”
“I did. I’m here. Let’s all sit down by the fire—my, it’s cold, isn’t it?” Ollie—he would not touch her, no sir—tried to lure her toward the stove with his voice, his movement. “I think I’ll go put my coat on, yes, that’s what I’m going to do.” He gave her some room to get to the stove while he took his dripping coat off the wooden peg, shoving his arms into the sleeves. It really was cold.
She crept toward the stove, casting wary glances toward the children, who automatically stepped back to allow her the warmest spot. She huddled there, miserable, still sniffling, occasionally wiping her nose with her shawl.
Then his son took a step toward her, reaching out his hand. “Miss Carson, don’t you worry. We’ll be all right, now that my papa is here. This old storm will blow itself out sometime—it can’t last forever!”
Miss Carson didn’t take Francis’s hand, but she did smile—a timid little smile; she kind of reminded Ollie of a rabbit, now that he thought about it, with her little red nose, quivering chin—and she nodded.
Ollie exhaled. He felt as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time, ever since he left the Lily, to tell the truth. First the physical exertion of tunneling his way through the storm, then the emotional tightrope he’d had to cross once he got here. But now he could breathe.
They’d be safe, they could survive the night. All of them, including that insensitive but frightened woman-child of Christian charity.
But for damn sure, he was going to have a talk with Alma tomorrow, when the storm cleared and they were all back safe and snug above the saloon. He wasn’t going to allow his children to be taught out of pity. No, he wasn’t. They deserved to be taught by someone who looked like them, thought like them. They deserved to be treated like people, not rungs on the ladder to heaven. There must be something the community could do—help more of their young women get teaching certificates or do a better job advertising for colored teachers. Something.
Maybe the storm had blown some good sense into him—he admitted that. No more could he hide behind his bar, stubbornly refusing to see that the landscape of polite society was being reconfigured as thoroughly as the wind was surely rearranging the physical landscape right now. Trees would be uprooted, fences blown down, roofs collapsed.
And cities like Omaha would continue to be divided up, like with like, languages not mixing. Certain streets not crossed by one kind or another.
Children learning different lessons, depending on the color of their skin.
CHAPTER 13
•••••
“ANETTE!”
Anette started, panicked. She’d almost fallen asleep, even as she was still walking, miraculously; still stumbling in a whirlwind of snow that stung her cheeks. Snow that wasn’t snow, but pebbles. A wind that wasn’t a wind, but a cyclone.
Fredrik held her hand—she saw it but couldn’t feel it. In her other hand was the lunch pail, and she thought the slate was still snug against her chest—frozen to it, she imagined. Somehow, she was being tugged alongside him as he was crying, and calling her name, trying to wake her up out of her stupor.
She was shivering. But she was hot. She was falling. But she was on her feet. She had to go to the bathroom—urgently, she felt her bladder swell, knew it released, knew there must be warmth drizzling down her legs, soaking her underclothes, her petticoat, her stockings, dripping down into her shoes. She longed for that warmth, actually—but it never came, she didn’t feel anything.
Fredrik was suddenly stopping, a strange look on his face, embarrassment; he looked down at his pants. Anette looked, too, and there was a dark stain. The two gazed at each other for a moment; they shared the embarrassment—they’d never done this before, not in front of the other. And they were both crying now, but still bound together, hands entwined. And then they started moving again.
They had to be close to the Pedersen homestead. Didn’t they? They’d been trudging through the snow for hours, it seemed to Anette. And it occurred to her she’d never spent this much time with Fredrik. Their time together, always, was so fleeting: a few minutes before school started, recess, their races home. They were always moving, never sitting still, even when talking—although it was Fredrik who mostly talked. Anette was simply content to listen to someone talking to her, not at her. Anyway, she didn’t have much to share; she couldn’t tell him how it was at the Pedersens’. She was ashamed to reveal that she was just a hired girl, really, but without pay. Unwanted.
Whereas Fredrik had a large, happy family he was always complaining about. Tor teased him mercilessly, put frogs in his boots, dropped snakes down his shirt. Fredrik, in turn, taunted his little brothers and sister, but Fredrik swore he got punished for it in a way Tor never did; his papa would look at him gravely and say he was disappointed in him before giving him a good whipping. And his mother would kiss away all his tears, but still she would deny him dessert that night.
“You have to be an example, Fredrik,” she wo
uld say. But she never, ever punished Tor. Both his papa and his mama thought the sun rose and set on him. And what about the time Fredrik brought home the prize for spelling? Did his mama cry with pride over that, the way she did when Tor revealed that Miss Olsen said she couldn’t teach him much more, that he learned too quickly?
No. Mama did make him his favorite dessert that night, Fredrik admitted—stollen with raisins—and excused him from bringing in the water for the dishes. But she didn’t shed shining tears of joy.
Oh, the trials of poor Fredrik! Anette never betrayed to Fredrik how much she envied him, how silly, really, she thought his trials were. How, in sharing these stories, he was reminding Anette of all that was missing in her own life. A happy family, a mother and father who cared for you enough to punish you and then cry over it, a big brother who thought of you enough to play pranks on you. People who saw you as a person, not as a problem or an unasked-for solution, no better than a workhorse in a plow.
People who loved you.
If only Anette had an older sibling who teased her! A papa who punished her in order to make her a better person, because he loved her that much! But she would never, ever let it slip to Fredrik that she felt this way. Because Fredrik Halvorsan, freckled and naughty yet completely innocent of the bad things that could happen to people, had chosen Anette. He was the only person in the world who looked for her, and her alone, in a crowded room. The only person who fought to sit next to her, not to get away from her. The only person who considered her an ally, not an enemy or a stupid little donkey, plodding along doing all the work nobody else wanted to do.
The only person who said her name with happiness, not reluctance or anger.
“Anette!”
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