The Children's Blizzard

by Melanie Benjamin

  He tugged her arm painfully; she rubbed her eyes, which had crusted shut again, opening them with a thumb that didn’t feel. She was shivering so thoroughly she couldn’t remember what it was like not to; her inadequate shawl, her regular cotton petticoat, could not keep her warm. She could not imagine being warm again. But she still kept moving; those strong legs and heart that launched her toward school with joy kept her upright now. Linked with Fredrik, she proceeded, inch by inch. Head bent down, face stinging from the strange, gritty balls of snow. The two of them all alone in the echoing center of the storm, at once muffling all sound—she couldn’t hear their footsteps, it was difficult to talk to each other—and assaulting her ears with the shrieking wind.

  Anette took a deep breath, then shouted at Fredrik, “I think we’re going the wrong way!”

  She didn’t know if that was true or not, but they’d been walking for hours without coming to anything that looked familiar.

  “No, we’re not,” Fredrik shouted. He was so maddening sometimes, just because he was a boy and Anette was not. He wasn’t shy about bossing her around, and most of the time Anette let him.

  But now she found herself arguing back—she was not going to let this boy tell her what to do! “Yes, we are—it is my way home, I know it!”

  “You stupid, we’re lost right now!” Fredrik cried hoarsely.

  And suddenly they were screaming at each other, tears freezing on their faces; she’d never known anyone more stupid than this boy! She was sick of people bullying her, bossing her around. Yes, she was terrified and the vicious winds were trying to pull her off her very feet, but this boy was not going to tell her how to get to her own home! For the moment she forgot that this was Fredrik, her only friend; he represented everyone who had told her what to do, how fast or how slow she should do it, where to live, how to think.

  He was everyone. And before she knew what she was doing, she slapped him across the face.

  “You stupid girl!” Fredrik clenched his fists but didn’t strike her back. “You—you slavey! No better than a hired girl—worse than a hired girl! You know what everyone says about you at school—your own mother sold you for a pig. You’re so ugly, that’s all you were worth!”

  “You take that back!” Anette was crying, but madder than she’d been since—since she could ever remember. She hadn’t allowed herself to be angry at her mother, or at Mother Pedersen; all along, deep down, she’d agreed with Fredrik and all the others. She was stupid, she was ugly—but now, lost in a volcano of ash-like snow, stuck with this idiotic boy, she was also angrier than a hive of bees. She flew at him, shaking him by the shoulders, and he fought back, pushing her to the ground. She picked herself up and screamed at him.

  “I am not—I wasn’t sold! I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t!”

  She flung her arm, the arm still grasping the pail, backward, prepared to strike. Fredrik saw, his eyes widened—then he turned around and ran off in the other direction, disappearing into the cloud of misery.

  Leaving her alone once more.

  She stood for a moment with her arm still in the air, poised to hit; she wanted something, someone to pummel. She screamed at the top of her lungs, one long, piercing cry that ended in hoarse whimpering. She panted, it was too hard to breathe in this whirlpool of ice and snow, yet she opened her mouth and let loose her fury again, a fury that rose up to meet the fury raining down, yet it hardly made a dent. She was too small, she was too insignificant. No one heard her.

  No one cared.

  Falling to her knees, she wept great heaving sobs. And she shivered, and she wept, and she burned with anger, and she froze with fear, and she knew she would die right there and no one would care. Would her mama ever know? Would she come claim her body and bury it near the dugout, a cave, really, carved into a riverbank? It must have been carved by the Indians, maybe it was a hiding place during the Indian wars, her stepfather said once. “Jesus, this place stinks of them, don’t it?” And there were arrowheads everywhere, catching the glint of the sun in the summer so they were easy to find.

  Even though she’d never known another dwelling until her mother gave her away, she’d understood how miserable the dugout was, and that most people didn’t live that way, no better than gophers in holes. In the spring it flooded and in the summer snakes crawled through the dirt walls and in the autumn the wild pigs came and terrorized everyone and in the winter they all just sat and stared at one another; it was too cold to do anything else, and that was when her stepfather was the worst, in the winter. That was when he would alternate between making fun of Anette and coming too close. “To warm up,” he would say with a sickening smile while her mother looked on with compressed lips and her little brothers laughed.

  Her own family thought she wasn’t good enough even for that hole in the ground, and they sent her away.

  The Pedersens surely wouldn’t care if she froze to death. They would find her lifeless, but with the slate and the lunch pail, the only two things Mother Pedersen cared about, and she would sigh with relief and let her husband deal with Anette’s body; he’d probably bury it somewhere because he was decent. But then he would forget her as soon as the last spade full of earth covered her up, he wouldn’t put up a marker or anything, and soon the grass would grow over her, and she would lie there in the cold earth alone for all eternity, forgotten.

  Not even Fredrik would mourn her now—she’d made sure of that, she’d chased him away, she’d reminded him, the only person who hadn’t yet discovered it on his own, that she wasn’t worthy of love.

  “Fredrik!” Seized by panic, she scrambled up, her anger forgotten, and she was herself again. No longer a fury raging at her fate, just a stupid girl unable to do anything on her own, lost. “Fredrik!”

  She began to run in the direction she thought he’d gone, she kept screaming his name, and finally she heard something. She stopped, listened with all her might, and it was crying she heard, a boy crying, and her heart beat faster with hope, propelling her legs toward that sound.

  “Fredrik!”

  She found him seated in a little swallow of the earth, drifted over with snow—she didn’t see him, she tripped over him. His legs were drawn up tightly against his chest and he was crying; he looked up at her—the snow had frosted over his eyebrows, was stuck on his eyelashes, his cheeks were unnaturally red from the biting cold, the burn of the snow. But he was Fredrik, all the same.

  “I’m so-so-sorry,” he wheezed, his voice quaking, but he got up and hugged her tightly, and the surprise of this made Anette gasp. He’d never hugged her. No one had—she was so shocked she forgot to hug him back, or maybe she didn’t know how to. But either way, in a moment they were hand in hand again, and he meekly allowed her to pull him back in the direction that, a few moments ago, she had been so certain of that she’d nearly lost the only person in the world who would mourn her if she died.

  But now, she wasn’t so certain; in fact, she had no idea which way to go. But Fredrik didn’t seem able to help; he was muttering something to himself and obediently held on to Anette’s hand as she led him forward.

  So she pretended that she knew the way home but the only thing she really knew was that they had to keep moving or else. So they continued to stumble on.

  Together.

  CHAPTER 14

  •••••

  “WE HAVE TO LEAVE.”

  Raina was surprised to hear her voice—a calm, rational voice—say the words out loud; she’d been sure she was only thinking them. But once she said them, they made sense; her mind, not her heart, was finally in control. Even as the snow kept blowing through the broken window, the temperature dropping with each heartbeat, she was sure of one thing. It was all up to her; no one would come to save her. Not her big sister, not her father. Not Gunner Pedersen.

  “Children,” Raina shouted over the wind and the sniffles and the
wails—she did a quick headcount, just to make sure. Ten children, plus Tor. Sofia Nyquist was the youngest, only six, sobbing for her mother; her older sister, Enid, barely older, seven. Rosa and Eva Larsen, twins, eight years old; Albert Blickenstaff, nine; Clara Hagen and Tana Berg, ten; Albert’s big brother, Walter, and his best friend, Daniel Hagen, eleven. Tall but painfully thin Arvid Dahl, thirteen; he was the biggest boy next to Tor but so frail from a lifetime of illnesses, and his asthma was already making his breathing squeak and rattle.

  Surveying them, Raina found herself unaccountably touched by small things: The crooked part in Daniel’s hair—she imagined him refusing to let his mother part his hair anymore; that was for a baby and he was a big boy, he could do it himself. The way Clara and Tana held hands, as they always did, sitting side by side on the bench or out at recess skipping together. Enid’s lopsided smile; one of her front teeth was missing, and she wasn’t embarrassed about it at all, she smiled boldly, brilliantly, defying anyone to make fun of her. Walter’s way of hitching up his suspenders, just like a man would, an unconscious yet proud little gesture, as if he was constantly surveying a field of bounty, mentally calculating the income from it. Yet he was a small child, finer boned than the other boys, better fitted for a general store than the farm that he’d been destined for since birth out here on the prairie.

  Raina realized she’d not really taken the time to get to know her pupils; her mind had been so distracted, first by the excitement of leaving home, then by the oppressive atmosphere at the Pedersens’, her fear of Anna, and then the cyclone of confusion, hope, desire, that Gunner stirred in her. Taunted her with, to be honest. Her pupils had been the least of everything; they had occupied the smallest space in her brain and heart, and she chided herself. Teaching was her job, and these children were her charges. It was only now that she was about to lead them out into the chaos of the storm that she fully realized it. Fully saw them as individuals.

  “Miss Olsen, please, before we go—let me just run out for a minute to see if I can find Fredrik and Anette.” Tor dared to take her hand—a big breach in manners, but he was so desperate. He clutched her hand until it hurt. “Please, Fredrik is so little, Mama and Papa have always told me I have to look out for him. Please!”

  Raina longed to let him go, because she was thinking of Anette right then. Of all her pupils, Anette was the only one she really knew. Anette, unloved, misused; it was so rare to see any light behind her pale blue eyes, except when she was with Fredrik. Anette, terrified to displease Anna Pedersen; that’s why she left, Raina knew that with certainty. How many times had that awful woman told the girl she couldn’t linger after school, that she would be punished severely if she did? Anna was not the kind of person to threaten punishment if she didn’t have one already in mind. Anette knew that better than anyone. No wonder she’d sprinted off for home.

  “Tor, I can’t stop you, you know that. I can only trust you to make the right decision.” Raina had never spoken so honestly as she did in that moment—the moment that Tor Halvorsan shook off the last vestiges of childhood, squared his shoulders, met her gaze evenly, and promised to stay by her side.

  Raina was moved to witness this transformation. She turned away, quickly, before he could see the tears in her eyes.

  “Now,” she said, going to the children, putting her arms, briefly, around each one, to give them some courage—she herself felt as if she had none, but she must pretend for their sakes. “Girls, untie your aprons, please.”

  Looking at her in surprise, they obeyed. Little Clara regarded her apron—a pretty, useless one, different from the other girls’ in that it was of a dainty fabric, embroidered in colorful threads along the hem and the waistband—with a sigh. But she untied it.

  “Good.” Raina added her own apron to the bundle, then she told the children to stand in line, from tallest to smallest; Arvid to Sofia. They obeyed, shuddering, stamping their feet, the snow still blasting in from the huge open window and the temperature falling by the second. They were clad in the coats and shawls they’d come to school with, but none of them was adequately dressed; neither was Raina. She thought of her heavy woolen coat, which she’d carelessly left hanging outside to air. But at least she had a long skirt, and a petticoat; the little girls’ skirts only hit their knees. Clara and Sofia had wool hats, and Tana had a scarf wound up to her eyes. So did Arvid. But only half the children wore mittens or gloves.

  “Now, we’re going to tie ourselves together, you see? Like a chain, a people chain.” Without realizing it, Raina had started talking in Norwegian, and although Albert and Walter were German, they seemed to understand.

  She handed the aprons out to most of the children, and they tied the strings first around their waists, then each new apron to the string of the one before it, so that when they were done, the children resembled one long—oddly gay, with Clara’s festive apron right in the middle—insect with ten heads and twenty pairs of arms and legs. Albert started to giggle, and soon the others did, too, charmed with the novelty of it.

  “Shhh!” Raina scolded them; they had to conserve their energy. She beckoned Tor over to where she was standing, shivering, searching outside; the landscape wasn’t merely bleak, it was angry, a roiling, churning ocean. The flat Nebraska land that everyone joked about wasn’t, really. There were still plenty of obstacles waiting to trip you up if you weren’t careful; gopher holes and stubborn grass that didn’t die off in the winter completely, little creeks, ravines, not to mention barbed-wire fencing. And there would be no way to see any of these, with the storm cloud touching the very ground, until you were upon them. Tangled up in them.

  “Tor, your house is the nearest, I think?” She wasn’t sure about this; she had been so caught up in her own drama that she’d never really gotten a good read on the land. Her father would be disappointed in her; he had always told her that you get the lay of the land first, then worry about the landscape of emotions. The land was the most cruel, he’d always said.

  But he was wrong, although Raina couldn’t tell him just how.

  “Yes, Miss Olsen. About half a mile southwest of here.”

  Southwest—that was good, they wouldn’t be walking directly into the teeth of the snarling demon outside. “So if we walk outside the door, we head at a diagonal, to our right?”

  He nodded.

  “Are there any landmarks—barns or fences or trees, maybe even a haystack, that might help us stay in the right direction?”

  The boy pondered, his heavy eyebrows drawing together in a sharp “V” on his forehead. “There’s a small creek right outside our barn, with some planks we use as a footbridge.”

  “But nothing before then?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “All right.”

  The wind screamed louder, and the top piece of the stove blew off its mooring to the ceiling; the children cried, tried to run from it but got tangled up, each going in a different direction. Raina rushed to sort it out, and knew she couldn’t put off their departure another minute. They would freeze to death here.

  They would freeze to death outside, too, but please, God in heaven, she would get them to the Halvorsans’ before they did. They would have to move quickly; she shook her head at the little girls.

  “Tor, you might have to carry Sofia. I’ll take Enid up front with me.” She untied Enid, smiled into her wide grey eyes, lips that trembled from cold, excitement, or fear, who could tell? She smoothed the little girl’s copper braids. “Those are very pretty ribbons, Enid.”

  “Th-Thank you, Miss Olsen,” she said, and braved a tiny smile, which pierced Raina’s heart. The trust, the innocence, placed right into her very hands. The bravery of these sons and daughters of immigrants.

  “All right, children! We’re going now, but we’re together. Nothing bad can happen to us if we’re together. We’re going to Tor’s house, and when we get there I
bet there will be some cookies and warm milk, and we’ll play games until your parents come to get you. That will be fun, won’t it?”

  There were a few excited yelps but, for the most part, the children were silent. Trusting. Lifting Enid up, she nodded at Tor, who held on to Rosa Larsen, Sofia already on his back.

  “Let’s go,” she cried, bending her head against the wind as she led them all through the doorway of the schoolhouse. She paused for a moment to get her bearing, then she faced the southwest, feeling the pull of the ten children and Tor behind her, all of them in her wake, but attached to her. The children were too stunned by the storm to do more than gasp.

  Then she stepped into the howling void.

  CHAPTER 15

  •••••

  THE BIRDS AND BEASTS OF the prairie took shelter where they could.

  They had sensed it first, long before the humans; they felt the change in the atmosphere, the wind moving like the hands of a clock from the south to the northwest. They smelled it, the subtle yet acrid whiff of electricity. Snow smelled different from rain; drier, less mossy. They felt the coming cold even before the temperature started to plummet.

  The rattlesnakes and the toads and the salamanders didn’t sense any of this; they were sleeping their winter sleep, burrowed deep beneath the ground, their hearts barely beating, only just enough to keep them alive until spring. They were unaware of the storm raging on top of them.

  Prairie dogs, too, with their extra layer of winter fat, were lazing about in the subterranean burrows of their prairie towns; they may have noticed some changes in the air above them, but they didn’t care. They would wait the storm out, families cuddling together in little nests made of grass. Once the storm was over, these curious critters would venture out to see what was what, but for now, dozing was the plan.

  Even foxes, sporting an additional layer of fur for the winter, decided to cower in dens built against abandoned houses or in soddies, forgoing the delight of sleeping out on the plain at night under the stars. There was no hunting to be done in a storm like this; there was little enough hunting to be done in the winter anyway, which meant an extra reliance on the chicken eggs so prized by the homesteaders. But on a day like this, even a henhouse wasn’t tempting; the mature foxes huddled with their young, for winter was high breeding time.