The Children's Blizzard

by Melanie Benjamin

  “Why did you do it? Why were you a party to this—” Gavin couldn’t even find the right word, he was so disgusted by the entire transaction.

  Gunner’s face reddened; he turned away to pour himself some coffee. “For my wife—Anna—it’s not quite so simple. You’re from the city. You don’t know how it is out here.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I do.” And Gavin didn’t hide his sneer. He also didn’t reveal that Raina had told him some of the story already, how Anette had been overworked by the Pedersens to the point of abuse.

  And now this—what to do with this woman who obviously thought to get her hands on the money being deposited in her daughter’s name in a bank account in Omaha? Or maybe even wanted to take her back to the terrible place from where she’d come, and there was no way that Gavin Woodson was going to let that happen.

  Over his dead body would anything bad happen to Anette.

  Anette, who kept him coming back to the Pedersens time and time again. Anette who, in his mind, had assumed the characteristics of an orphan in a Dickens story. This little girl, so dear and amusing—she did not realize she had a sense of humor, which was one of her most endearing qualities. But she said the funniest things, like when he had given her a single glove, right hand, of course; the left glove thoughtfully missing. Anette mused that perhaps there was someone out there with two left hands who needed an extra glove. Or when he told her that someone had wanted to give her a piano, and she laughed and said she’d never been able to play before and she certainly couldn’t now, could she?

  The funny little waif had stolen his curmudgeonly old heart. His maiden of the prairie—the original one—was only a distant memory. But the idea she had inspired was still with him and was now embodied in this little girl who had suffered mightily, and not only in the blizzard. When Gavin was back in Omaha writing these stories, the stories that were driving subscriptions through the roof, the stories that might, if he were lucky, get him back in the good graces of Pulitzer back East, he fretted about Anette. He wondered if she was going to bed early enough. He worried if she was eating healthy, hearty food—the Pedersens didn’t seem pinched for money, but, still, he could never know for certain. Anna Pedersen acted like a woman who had repented for a great sin—almost too eager to please, to nurture, to nurse. She seemed genuinely sorrowful, desperate to atone for her past behavior toward the little girl, but a woman like that, well—Gavin knew women like that, or so he believed he did. Women who had relied on their looks for so long that they’d gotten spoiled and selfish. And then, too, she was obviously a hothouse flower plunked down in the middle of the cold, withering prairie soil. What resentment she might have about that he couldn’t begin to know—but he could guess.

  But as long as Raina remained there to watch over her, he was reasonably assured of Anette’s well-being. However, Raina couldn’t stay forever. School would be out in the early spring, in time for planting, and Raina now had options before her: proposals and money and an education, the world was truly hers for the taking. She would leave the Pedersens. And where would that leave Anette?

  That Gavin could take her in, make her his ward—again, something out of Dickens—did cross his mind. But his situation in Omaha—a stifling room in a boardinghouse—didn’t seem proper for a little girl. What he wanted for her was a life she’d never known nor could ever have expected before the storm and its aftermath—a life of ease, of love, of stability. Gavin couldn’t provide that. He was a man without close relations. He had no idea how to do family things like carving a turkey at Christmas or saying prayers at night or making sure children bathed often enough—Christ, he could barely remember to do that himself.

  But who could be Anette’s family? It couldn’t be the Pedersens, no matter how penitent Mrs. Pedersen acted; not people who had bought this child for labor.

  Spying Gavin, Anette beckoned for him to come into the kitchen, where she introduced him to her mother in her funny way. “The Newspaper Man,” she declared, as if he were the only one in the world, the original. Suddenly the mother was gazing at him as if he was about to give her not just a chicken and a hog but an entire barnyard full of animals, and he recoiled. He didn’t care how happy Anette was to see her, he was not going to let this woman get her hands on Anette or her money.

  But how could he prevent it?

  “I am Mrs. Thorkelsen,” the mother said with ridiculous dignity. Then she dabbed at her eyes with a grubby handkerchief. “Ah, so good, this man!” Raina, who was home from school by now, translated. “You see my poor, poor child, my daughter? What she has been through? The loss of her hand? And she almost died? These people!” Mrs. Thorkelsen gestured angrily at the Pedersens. “I gave Anette to them thinking they would give her a better life than I could—see my sacrifice? How I suffered, the mama? But not as much as my poor daughter.”

  “You—you—” Anna Pedersen could barely contain her fury; her hands were fisted, her face nearly purple. She kept glancing at the stove in the kitchen for some reason. But she managed to swallow her angry words, because of Anette.

  “And now, thanks to you and all those kind people from the newspaper,” Mrs. Thorkelsen continued smugly, “we won’t have to suffer again, will we, min datter?”

  Gavin took a step backward; his nostrils flared as she smiled a mostly toothless, cunning smile. “We? What do you mean, we?”

  Anette’s mother stopped smiling. She pushed her child off her lap so she could stand up, her hands on her hips—

  And Gavin shuddered at the undistilled hatred in her small, shrewd eyes.

  CHAPTER 33

  •••••

  ANNA’S NERVES WERE STRUNG SO tightly, she thought she might fly apart if anyone brushed against her. Her household had been disrupted enough by the events of the past weeks, what with Anette taking over the bedroom—she didn’t begrudge her that, no, it was the least she could do for the child she had maimed. But there was also the fact that she and Gunner had to sleep somewhere, and she’d banished him to the parlor while she slept with her children; Raina was still upstairs in the attic. And then the Newspaper Man, always underfoot now, bringing more and more things into the house, things that needed to be stored somewhere—the letters and toys and clothes and odd trinkets like the beads the Catholics used for prayer, someone’s mother’s old Bible, framed needlework samplers spouting prayers. Even a milk cow—well, that was actually useful, and the cow was a welcome addition to the barn. But the house simply couldn’t hold any more of these things, yet they still came, along with him.

  The Newspaper Man. He had turned their lives upside down more thoroughly than the blizzard. What would happen to Anette—to them all—after the blizzard, Anna hadn’t had time to imagine, not in all the turbulence of the sickroom. But even if she had, she’d never have been able to imagine this—the sudden, unwanted glare of notoriety.

  People—strangers as well as neighbors—came knocking on her very door asking to see Raina or Anette, “the heroines”! As if they could just stare at the two, like animals in the zoo back in Kristiania. As if she, Anna Pedersen, would be happy to let them trample all kinds of slush and snow into her house, would be thrilled to be ignored, treated as a hired girl, in order to satisfy the incomprehensible hunger to behold two ordinary humans who had survived an extraordinary situation.

  Yet even as her skin pricked with resentment—no one ever asked about Anna, no one ever complimented her or praised her devotion—she was also consumed by guilt. Every time she remembered the sight of that pail, gleaming in the snow, she had to sit down, press her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her cry. She had banished the pail to the barn, where Gunner could use it for slop. She would buy Anette a new one—a shinier, bigger one—when she went back to school. And a new slate, too, and new dresses, hair ribbons, stockings—anything, to atone for her sins.

  But it wouldn’t suffice; she would still have this ga
ping, pulsating hole within, a hole where her goodness, her Christian charity—her untouched soul—used to reside. She could never make it up to Anette. She was going to hell, and Anna did believe in hell, the old-fashioned kind she was taught in the Lutheran church. Demons and flames and eternal suffering.

  Unless…

  She could have another chance.

  She’d not told anyone—least of all her husband—but she was determined that Anette remain with them despite the opportunities the Newspaper Man brought with every visit: offers from well-off people to adopt Anette, give her an education, not to mention all the money being set aside for her future. It wasn’t the money that Anna desired, it was the chance for redemption. Fierce was that determination—it propelled her about the sickroom just as her fury at Gunner and the Schoolteacher used to fuel her housekeeping before—to give Anette a good life, the best life possible. She would do what she could to try to make up for the loss of the limb; she would help her with her lessons, provide her with the best food, pretty clothes; she would curl the girl’s hair, massage creams into her rough skin, turn her into a living doll, anything to make up for the fact that she was forever less than whole.

  Because what good was a woman if she wasn’t complete? What man would have her? Anna had been brought up to believe that a woman was only as prized as the man who made her his wife. Of course, that belief made her tie herself to a man who was enviable on the surface, but underneath, weak as pudding. Still, she couldn’t shake her upbringing.

  In maiming Anette, she had spoiled any chance the girl might have for a good marriage. So it was up to Anna to fix her as best she could—to save her. And in doing so, she would save herself.

  The moment she opened the door and beheld Anette’s mother—that horrifying hag, that heartless shrew—Anna’s mind started whirling, trying to stay one step ahead of her. This was danger. This was evil; evil as black as Anna’s own.

  Maybe that’s why she recognized it instantly.

  “You see my poor, poor child, my daughter? What she has been through?” Mrs. Thorkelsen was saying now as she cuddled Anette—actually putting the girl in a kind of stranglehold. The Newspaper Man looked at her skeptically. “And now, thanks to you and all those kind people, we won’t have to suffer again, will we, min datter?”

  “What do you mean, we?” the Newspaper Man replied.

  Anna watched as the hag shoved Anette off her lap and rose to glare at the Newspaper Man, who took a step back, unprepared for the look of repulsion in the woman’s eyes.

  Fool, Anna thought. What a fool that man was. He was not a worthy opponent for this woman, despite his big city airs and his words in the newspapers that had lured her here in the first place—couldn’t he see how he himself was to blame? No, of course he couldn’t; he was just a man. It would take a woman to save Anette.

  “I assume you’re after the money?” Anna asked the woman, ignoring the sputtering Newspaper Man. Raina and Gunner were also in the kitchen now but silent. Witnessing.

  “I am only concerned about min datter, who has suffered so in your care, losing her hand! Almost dying! I will take her with me and give her all that she desires, thanks to the kind people. The things only a mama can provide.”

  “Oh, Mama!” Anette’s little face radiated joy—Anna had never seen her look this way. The girl had never smiled, she had never laughed before the blizzard. But first the Newspaper Man, and now the arrival of her mother, had done this. Transformed a sullen—no, desperately unhappy—creature into a real child. One who could laugh and smile.

  One who knew that she belonged to someone—Anna’s heart pinched with guilt again, remembering how she’d treated the girl from the start.

  “You really have come for me then, Mama? You really do want me? And we can go back home?”

  “Yes, or maybe even—how would you like to go somewhere else, just you and me? Maybe not back to the old place, not back to that bast—your stepfather? Maybe we start over somewhere nice, just the two of us?”

  Anette nodded and buried her face in her mother’s bosom. She began to cry, softly, but they were tears of happiness. Anna couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t look at this heartrending tableau—the mother was now patting Anette on the back, murmuring “Min datter, min datter,” over and over; she even managed to produce touching tears. Crocodile tears, more like it.

  Oh, Anna knew this woman. And she could imagine, too well, what would happen if she took Anette away. She’d burn through all the money, she’d drag the girl from flophouse to flophouse, she’d never see that Anette got an education. She would most likely sell her again, but by that time, Anette would be a young woman. And the kind of selling that entailed made Anna shake with fury. It took all her self-control not to tear that hag’s eyes out right now.

  Anna glanced at the others—Raina, Gunner, the Newspaper Man. Their faces, too, revealed their fear—but also their helplessness.

  “She is her mother.” Raina was the first to break the spell; she spoke in English, so Mrs. Thorkelsen couldn’t understand. But the woman was so busy clucking over her daughter, she didn’t take notice—she was putting on a show, staking her claim—and Anette was loving it, believing every false declaration of endearment and devotion. Ach, that poor child! Another thing she must do—teach Anette not to be so gullible.

  “A mother can take her own child,” Raina continued. “What can we do?”

  “We signed no papers,” Gunner admitted. “Legally, Anette is not ours. I doubt there are any birth certificates or marriage certificates in that woman’s possession—papers don’t seem to mean much out here, other than land claims—but if this went to any kind of court, no judge would deny that it’s the mother’s right to take Anette back.”

  “I’ll be damned if she takes her,” grumbled the Newspaper Man. “She sold her own daughter. She’ll take the money and the girl and run, and we’ll never find Anette again. That is not going to happen, I promise. I can…I can write something up about her in the newspaper, expose her for who she is.” But he, too, looked helpless in spite of his anger, and Anna snorted. A pen, mighty as his appeared to be, was nothing on the prairie. It was no weapon against the basest elements of humankind, and those were what the prairie brought out in people. There was no refinement here. Only the elemental instincts and emotions: greed, evil, might, right. A pen was no weapon against a determined woman.

  Pffft!

  Anna had no time for these blathering idiots who couldn’t see the danger in front of them, who held on to useless niceties and legalities and idealistic notions of mother love. Turning her back on them—her gaze lingering, just for a moment, on the stove in the kitchen—Anna sighed. She really had enough to do with all these people in the house—cook, clean, sew, nurse—and now this cunning wench disguised as a pitiful mother. Anna thought that Raina, at least, would have had more sense. But no, it would be up to her alone.

  “It is time for dinner,” she announced, putting an end to all the babbling. It hurt her ears, it made her skin itch, all these stupid people in her house. “Anette needs to eat so she can go to bed and get her rest.” Anna shooed them all out of her kitchen, grabbed the skillet of cornbread and shoved it into the oven.

  The sooner these idiots were fed, the sooner they would go to sleep.

  And then she could do what must be done.

  CHAPTER 34

  •••••

  PEOPLE DISAPPEAR IN THE PRAIRIE. That is one thing everyone understands from the moment they get off the train. Just one look at the endless, unmarked land stretching out on either side of the tracks—no buildings in sight, no fences, just space—and a person can’t help but think that it is a good place to vanish, willingly or unwillingly.

  Indeed, it was not unusual to hear of people who had walked away from home, never to be seen again. Every community had its tale—the man near Gibbon who had been surveyin
g his withering crops, last spotted with a scythe in his hand walking through the rows of dust-choked stalks. Never to be seen again, despite notices put up by his frantic family. The mother up around Beatrice who put her baby down for a nap, went out the door with a bucket for water, and never returned. The baby was found by its father, red in the face from crying all day but otherwise unharmed.

  Bodies, frozen to death in a blizzard, swallowed up by it—some would be found come spring. But others wouldn’t; those who had been caught in remote areas, trapped in gullies or ravines or ground caves where the snow took longer to thaw, where people wouldn’t necessarily be searching. Perhaps bones would be found, a year or so later, stripped of identifying flesh, clothing long torn away, only a few remnants of fabric left and that weathered beyond recognition. There were wolves, of course. Cougars.

  The Great Plains were immense enough to inspire the grandest, most foolish of dreams—but they were also vast enough that no one could ever explore every corner. Some people disappeared because they wanted to, because they recognized an opportunity to start over somewhere else with no risk of being traced. Some vanished because they simply gave up.

  And some people disappeared because someone else wanted them to.

  Anna Pedersen had one chance for redemption, that night. One chance to make up for everything she’d ever done to Anette. One chance to ensure the girl the future she deserved because no one else seemed able to.

  By acting, she wouldn’t redeem her own soul—she would further destroy it. But she was already damned for eternity. What was one more sin upon her shoulders, to bear for the rest of her life here in this cursed place?