The Children's Blizzard

by Melanie Benjamin

  Raina smiled and lay her cheek on the old man’s hand, before seeing him to the door. But she didn’t agree with what he said, because she couldn’t imagine having more than her parents did back in Norway—how many stories had she heard about the fun they’d had there surrounded by family, for all the farms were close together in the old country, not separated by one hundred and sixty acres like they were here? Back there, they never wanted for food or clothing; there was always someone to borrow from, hand-me-downs passed from one cousin to another. They were not rich, no—not in the things men value. Still, she knew her mother had been happier there, richer in the things that women know as worthy—sympathy, conversation, community. But a married woman had no choices of her own. A married woman’s future was her husband’s, no matter where she lived.

  What was Raina’s future now?

  Mama’s dream of sending her girls to a teaching college so they could at least find a position somewhere other than a country schoolhouse full of poor children who would need nothing more than a cursory education—

  Well, that dream was vanishing just as the sun was vanishing outside. After this winter, there would be the usual floods that would mean the usual delay in planting, the rush to harvest before the next winter arrived. How could they save enough? There’d never be enough money for college now, especially since Gerda…

  Oh, what was she doing, thinking of college in the face of such loss? But as Raina patted the letter in her apron, the letter that had brought the unfathomable news about her sister, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it. She had initially longed to rush home to her parents, to comfort them and be comforted. But now, she was afraid.

  Afraid that her parents would see into her heart and know she was not the same person she’d been when she left home. Afraid to add to their grief in this way. Afraid to be thrust into the reality that her family was not the same, either—and would never be again.

  Raina couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t hold off her grief any longer; she fell onto a sofa and wept for her sister—and also for herself. Why couldn’t her parents have settled in a city like Omaha or Saint Paul? In a city, she and Gerda could have worked together in a little store, or taken a secretarial course, or taught in a school where the children didn’t fall asleep from exhaustion.

  Or where the wrong decision didn’t lead to unimaginable tragedy.

  Suddenly she could hear her sister’s voice in her ears, scoffing. Poor Raina, the voice said—but there was warmth in it, love. Such a baby, such a princess. And Raina stopped crying, and she laughed instead as she blew her nose and dried her eyes.

  No matter what, Gerda would always be with her; the bond of sisters was eternal. This letter was simply paper and ink, nothing more; her heart knew the real truth of her sister. These words could not change that.

  From the bedroom, Anna was calling her name; Raina rose with a sigh, reaching into her pocket. She took the letter—neatly folded, no need to read it again—and went to the kitchen. Opening the door of the woodstove, she threw the letter inside. She did not remain to watch the flames consume it.

  Instead, she resolutely went back inside the sickroom to care for Anette.

  CHAPTER 26

  •••••

  ANETTE WAS DREAMING NOW, AGAIN, always. For a girl who had not been given to dreaming before—how could anyone sleep so lightly as to dream, when she was so exhausted every night her sleep was as heavy as a ton of bricks, blotting out any fancies?—she was currently entangled in so many she couldn’t make sense of them.

  There was the dream of being yanked out of an ice house and into someone’s arms, a woman’s arms, not Mama’s, but someone else’s. And when she opened her eyes, just once, she saw that she was in Mother Pedersen’s arms, but that couldn’t be possible, because, well—that just couldn’t be possible. And then Mother Pedersen was crying and saying she was sorry, but that, too, could not be. Then the nightmare of fire licking at her hands, devouring them in its fierce, gaping mouth, and she cried and screamed, and maybe someone held her down because she wanted to get up and stab that flaming monster in the eyes, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t move her arms.

  Another bout of dreams and fantasies—past, present, future, she had no idea: Fredrik taunting her, telling her to get up, she was a baby, just a girl, a stupid girl, why didn’t she get up and go with him? A recurring sensation of falling from a ledge up in the sky into the very earth itself, the soil rising up to catch her was soft as a feather bed. She fell deep into it, afraid that it would hurt when she finally landed, but she never did, she just kept tumbling down in its pillowy embrace. Teacher calling her name over and over, sternly, like Anette had done something bad. And her slate! Her pail! Where were they? She patted her chest, felt for the slate—hadn’t she wrapped her shawl over it?

  Mrs. Halvorsan, Tor Halvorsan, they knocked at the door of her turbulent mind, they cried Fredrik’s name, they gazed at her and put something in her arms, they cried again, they left, they came back. They were only notions, not real people, of course. Real people did not come to see her, did not treat her kindly. Except for Fredrik, who kept running in and out of her dreams like he did when they played tag together; he’d dart around the corner of the schoolhouse, then reappear behind her like a demon. She’d laugh and dash away from his outstretched hand, and he’d call her name. He called her name now. His was the voice she heard the most, rising above all the others she might have recognized and might not have, but it seemed there was a babbling stew of praying, crying, talking all around her, never letting her sleep as she longed to.

  Then they stopped. The dreams. The voices were silenced, too, and that’s when she knew that the voices hadn’t really been in her dreams, they had been real people, talking. But it was quiet now. And she thought that she had died. For wasn’t that what death was, the silencing of all things?

  “I don’t know how we’ll tell her,” a voice said. So she wasn’t dead, after all. She tried to open one eye, to see who was talking, but it took too much effort, so she lay quietly, her old trick of not being noticeable so she couldn’t offend.

  “Maybe she knows already, somehow,” another voice whispered, and Anette couldn’t help it, her eyes wrenched open—painfully—because the voices belonged to Mother Pedersen and Teacher, and they sounded like they were…well, not exactly friends, but united in something.

  The light—feeble as it was in whatever unfamiliar room she was in—stung her eyes. Then she realized she was lying in a brass bed and so, astonishingly, must be in the Pedersens’ bedroom. Her lashes felt heavy, then instant tears obscured her vision. She wondered how long she’d been lying in the Pedersens’ bed, and what had happened to her own. Shouldn’t she be upstairs? She started to shiver, her teeth rattled and she moaned, and that silenced the voices.

  “She’s awake!” Mother Pedersen looked at Teacher with what might have been joy, except that Anette had never before seen joy in Mother Pedersen’s eyes. Blinking, trying to clear her vision, she struggled to recall the last thing she had seen before falling asleep.

  Fredrik! Where was he? Where—they’d been outside, in the storm, the storm—oh, the storm! The howling and the swirling, gritty ice-snow, the cold—she was shivering more violently, again as if she was outside and not inside. They’d fallen, she remembered that—they’d fallen into the ravine.

  But that was all she remembered.

  Anette pressed her hands against the mattress to raise herself up to a sitting position, but there was a bolt of pain in her left hand when she did and she fell over on her left side as if her hand had simply given out; she couldn’t get the leverage she needed. So she rolled over on her back, blinked some more, and stared at the ceiling.

  “Don’t move, Anette, you’re not strong enough. Stay quiet, kjaereste,” Teacher whispered, and Anette’s head spun again. No one had ever called her that before. She rea
lized she was being talked to in her native tongue, and she relaxed a little.

  “But Fredrik…” Anette mumbled. She turned her head to gaze at Teacher, who was right next to the bed. Mother Pedersen was hovering over Teacher, clasping and unclasping her hands. Both of them looked tired—even Mother Pedersen’s lively hair looked limp. Teacher was thinner than before, and paler, and the tip of her nose was blistered, like she’d had a sunburn.

  At the mention of Fredrik, both of them looked away.

  “I don’t think…” Teacher whispered to Mother Pedersen. But Mother Pedersen shook her head.

  “We have to tell the truth, she deserves that.” Then Mother Pedersen came to the other side of the bed, and she knelt down; she took Anette’s right hand in hers, and Anette marveled at how callused Mother Pedersen’s hands were, just like Mama’s hands had been. But Mother Pedersen’s nails were so pretty and pink and buffed; Anette had never suspected the palms were rough from work.

  “Where is Fredrik?” Anette whispered; her throat was parched, she longed for water.

  “Fredrik died, Anette,” Mother Pedersen said, her voice matter-of-fact but not cruel. “He died, in the storm. I found you both, together, the morning after—over a week ago, now. You were in the ravine. He had—” Mother Pedersen had to look away for a moment, and Anette—despite the deepening misery reaching out to draw her back into the nightmare she’d only just left—was astonished to see that she had tears running down her cheeks.

  Mother Pedersen took a breath and forced herself to look at Anette. “He had taken his clothes off, Anette. He covered you with them. He saved your life.”

  And Anette, in that moment before she lost consciousness again, was filled with bitter anger; she wanted to slap Fredrik in the face and call him a stupid, careless boy.

  Because didn’t he know that hers wasn’t a life worth saving?

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT TIME Anette opened her eyes, the light was different; it was late afternoon, and there were so many oil lamps lit all around her that she wondered if someone had died, then she remembered someone had, and it was Fredrik, and she turned her face to muffle a moan as the grief hit her anew. Her anger at his self-sacrifice had vanished, replaced by loss. Loss more pure and uncomplicated than any she’d known before. Her loss of her real family, her former life—that had been too diluted, murky as it was with questions that seemingly had no answers, stunned surprise at the rapid change in her environment, the immediate, exhausting work that Mother Pedersen shoveled her way. Her mama was still alive in the world—that, too, made the loss difficult to process. Losing Fredrik was different; she would never see his freckled face again, never make fun of his donkey ears sticking out from his head, never see his eyes light up with happiness.

  She’d never have another friend, she thought miserably. From now on, she would truly be alone in the world.

  There were hot tears streaming down her face and into her ears and so she raised her left hand to wipe them away—but the tears still remained, nothing touched her cheek at all. It was almost as if she’d missed her own face! Puzzled, she tried again, and again she missed. Then she looked at her hand—

  It wasn’t there. Her arm, mostly covered by an unfamiliar nightgown that was soft and scented, ended in a bandaged stump where her hand should have been.

  She struggled up, leveraging herself with her right hand, which was also bandaged but still attached, and she held out her left arm, moving it left, then right, up, then down, wriggling her fingers—she felt them! They did wriggle! She felt pain, too, when she moved her wrist.

  But there was no hand, there were no fingers.

  Where was it? Had someone taken it without her permission—was nothing her very own, not even her flesh? She was jabbering in Norwegian, enraged by everything that had happened, Fredrik gone and now her hand, and this was too much to take. All the months of being treated like an unwanted old dog at best, but overworked and despised at worst—she had had enough. What a stupid turn of events! She must leave this place, go somewhere, to Fredrik’s house; but no, he wasn’t there—her heart seized up in an odd way and then it fluttered. She placed her left hand on her chest. Then she looked down and saw it again—that queer, bandaged end of her arm, as if—as if—someone had sawed off her hand?

  She was falling, falling, and with a thud, she hit the floor, heard excited voices, arms lifting her up, cool hands on her hot forehead, and then she was back in the cushioned earth again, dreaming her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ANETTE PEDERSEN woke a third time, it was morning, and the oil lamps were extinguished. The usual voices were in the kitchen. They weren’t bothering to whisper. This was a conversation that had been going on a long time, she could tell by the weariness in the voices, the circling back to topics.

  There was a grunt at the foot of the bed, and Anette tried to lift her head, then she pushed herself up on her right hand, and she saw once more the absence of her left.

  She also saw a man. Seated on a chair that was much too small for him. He was a large person, with a soft, doughy shape she’d never seen before in a man. All the men she knew—and there weren’t that many—were solidly muscular. But this one looked as if he had never handled a shovel or a hoe in his life. He was grunting again, and his breath was labored, as if he’d tired himself out just by sitting.

  But he wasn’t only sitting. He was writing something, furiously scribbling with a pencil across a sheet of paper.

  Finally, he raised his head and saw her watching him.

  He grinned—it was a funny grin, and it tickled something inside Anette, something she had only ever felt with Fredrik. She found herself grinning back. Then he said something in English, and to her astonishment, she understood it.

  “Well, here she is, finally, wide awake! The plucky little girl herself!”

  And the voices stopped in the kitchen. Anette heard a general stampede of feet, and she was suddenly surrounded—Mother and Father Pedersen, Teacher, Doc Eriksen. They all gaped at her like she was the answer to a question. She blushed at all those eyes, and she turned again to the man. Who beamed at her like she was a prize, someone worth knowing.

  Who looked at her the same way Fredrik did, with pure happiness.

  CHAPTER 27

  •••••

  THE FIRST COUPLE OF DAYS that Gavin Woodson spent on the Godforsaken Prairie had yielded nothing but unbroken horror.

  Every small settlement—you couldn’t call them towns, since they were only a handful of buildings, sometimes only repurposed abandoned train cars—gave up, all too readily, its tragedies to his pencil and notepad. It was as if he’d given these people permission to drop that fabled stoicism and pour forth so much pent-up grief and trouble, his pencil could barely keep up. After a while, the stories all began to blur but still he wrote them down. He had to. He had to bear witness.

  The men lost, out tending livestock. The livestock gone, too; another disastrous year for cattle and who in his right mind would continue to pursue that folly?

  There were people who miraculously survived the night in a cold that froze the cattle where they stood, only to drop dead in the morning when they rose to find their way home—something about the change in pressure on the heart; he’d have to look it up or ask a doctor when he got back to Omaha. It was a mystery to Gavin and it seemed improbable, but too many people had witnessed it, had looked out their windows to see someone rise from the snow like a wraith, take a step or two, then drop deader than a stone.

  Men who survived, who got home—only to find their wives and children frozen beside a cold and empty stove, maybe the windows had blown out, maybe not; the cold was so relentless it had no fear of windows and walls. Or men who found their wives steps from the house, almost covered entirely by the snow. They’d become disoriented, lost their way be
tween house and barn if they hadn’t thought to tie up a line between the two, and many hadn’t because the storm had come upon them so abruptly.

  Entire families were caught out on the plains, driving home from getting supplies on that deceptively warm morning. Like the family of his maiden; he could imagine it only too well.

  But it was the children that everyone talked about.

  The storm hit at precisely the wrong time here in northeastern Nebraska, southeastern Dakota. Earlier, and there would have been no question of sheltering in place. But it hit right when most schools were about to disgorge their pupils for the day, or just had.

  Gavin scurried from town to town, house to house, following breadcrumbs like in the old children’s fairy tale. But this time, the breadcrumbs were the children themselves: their lost bodies, frozen. He’d pull up in one settlement, hear the tales of woe, then someone would say something along the lines of “But I heard that the schoolteacher there up in Holt County let them all go home, alone,” and he’d be back in his ridiculous sleigh—it had definitely elicited a few snorts of amusement—trying to figure out how the hell to get up to Holt County. Most of the time, someone took pity on him—they had relatives up that way, anyway, and wanted to check in on them—and would ride alongside him. These men—so lean they looked starved, and indeed some did have the telltale signs of malnutrition: the distended stomach, the sunken cheeks and haunted eyes—wouldn’t say a word, they’d just ride. Ploddingly, horses breaking through the snow, they’d point off in one direction and then peel away in another, and Gavin would have no choice but to aim his nag and trudge off, steeling himself for the inevitable.

  A stranger knocking on a dugout door elicited less astonishment than he would have thought. Perhaps it was the grief, permeating every frigid dugout, every poorly insulated cabin or shed that opened its door to Gavin and his pad of paper, that dulled any other senses. Grief so palpable it soured the air. The adult homesteaders rarely spoke English but there was usually a child or two who did, who translated.