The Children's Blizzard Read online

  “I’m sorry, I’m here because I heard…” Gavin only had to begin, and then the child—who had, by some grace of some god, stayed home from school that fateful day or had made it home safely—would immediately start jabbering in both English and Norwegian. And then the stories would be shared—the boy sent out to bring the horse in from pasture. The father who had gone out to the barn at the height of the storm to make sure there was hay, to break the ice in the troughs. The mother who just had to check on the chickens—they were so fragile, she wondered if she should bring them in.

  And there were many still missing. Many families resigned to not knowing the truth until the spring thaw.

  Several times, he found himself knocking on a door just in time to witness the simplicity of a Norwegian funeral. A pine box, at best; often just a body wrapped in a blanket. A few hymns sung in a language he didn’t understand, a prayer, then the body removed, taken to a plot of land next to the barn, usually; a place that already had crude gravestones dotting it. This was never the first death a family had experienced. The ground, despite the cold, could usually be coerced into giving up enough topsoil to lower the box or body deep enough to keep predators out.

  So many of the boxes were small. Three feet, four.

  In every house, Gavin hoped, right before he knocked on the door, to see the face he sought. There were glimpses of it, stray pieces of an incomplete puzzle—pretty blue eyes in a young woman’s face, a thick blond braid the right shade, even throats that yearned, dammit. But never the complete picture.

  Gavin would write it all down, and then move on to the nearest train station where he could telegraph the more sensational stories to the Bee—the ones that Rosewater was now, in opposition to his earlier stance, clamoring for, because the public’s hunger for these tragedies was proving to be voracious. He slept many a night on the floor of one of those stations. There were few hotels or boardinghouses in these strange, bleak settlements.

  But God Almighty, what he’d give for a good snort back at the Lily; hot shots of whiskey burning his throat, blotting his senses, making him forget everything he was forced to record. Because the tragedies started to blur together into one infinite shroud of misery that he wondered if he could ever shrug off. Oh, there were stories with happy endings—the dog who spent the night out with his young master, whose barking led searchers to the unconscious boy, saving his life. Those who had miraculously survived that frigid night with nothing more than some numb fingers or a slightly frostbit nose. These survivors would keep the blizzard alive in memory, passed from one generation to the next.

  The other stories haunted his dreams, made him question the folly of man; not just himself, but man in general. This great age in which he lived—the age of Go West, Young Man, the age of industry with enormous factories bellowing up volcanos of black smoke and creating rivers of sludge, of railroads trampling the landscape; new inventions like telegraphs and telephones and typewriters and electric light and steam engines—it had brainwashed them all into thinking there was nothing that man couldn’t conquer or bend to his will.

  Even the weather itself.

  Death toll not exaggerated, he telegraphed to Rosewater. Hard to get exact number. Many still missing.

  Good work so far, Rosewater telegraphed in reply. Then one day, this: Great interest from all but stories starting to blur. Need new angle.

  Gavin’s desire to bear witness did not abate; he still sought the tragedies, he wrote them all down: Olaf Gustoffsen, aged ten, ran back to the schoolhouse after his teacher dismissed school to retrieve a book; found frozen to death the next morning. Maria Jorgensen, aged thirteen, and her sister Helga, expired on the prairie, huddled together, big sister with her arm wrapped about her younger sibling. But he was a newspaperman to his very bones, and he understood Rosewater’s request. There was no way to spin “cute” out of this tragedy, but he did need to find some new angle to keep the story alive—and the papers selling.

  So it was providential when he ran into a man called Doc Eriksen in a settlement a couple of counties south of the Dakota border in northeastern Nebraska. The man was old, bent, exhausted; Gavin met him in the farmhouse of a family that had lost a son and a father. The son had died saving his friend, a little girl. He’d covered her up with his own clothing during the night.

  Eriksen was tending to the mother, who had collapsed with grief after the twin funeral. A polite, tall young man with floppy sandy hair, maybe fifteen, was tending to two younger brothers and a sister until his mother got up again.

  “Will she?” Gavin asked, because grief of that sort might be too heavy ever to stand up under.

  “Oh, yes, she will,” Eriksen replied. “You don’t know these homesteaders the way I do. She has a family to care for, a farm to run—she won’t stay down for long. She just needed some laudanum so she could rest, because she wasn’t sleeping.”

  The young man studied Gavin warily, even though his manners remained excruciatingly proper; he’d obviously been loath to let Gavin in, but the presence of the doctor seemed to assure him that this stranger wasn’t going to steal anything other than his family’s grief. Gavin, pulling out his notebook, turned to him.

  “So I heard your brother, he was a hero? He saved his friend?”

  The boy, named Tor, nodded. “Fredrik, that is—was—his name. They ran out in the storm, Miss Olsen couldn’t stop them. I should have—I should have—” But he turned abruptly to give his little sister, just a toddler, a wooden spoon to play with.

  “Between you and me,” Doc said, in a precise English that was surprising for an immigrant his age, “I don’t know about these stories. Like this boy. He was indeed found with most of his clothes off, piled on top of his friend. But I’ve seen this in others who froze to death out there alone—and their clothes were torn off, too. I don’t think it was animals that did it, either, but I can’t quite understand it. It’s as if, in the moments before they lost consciousness, they were burning with fever instead of freezing to death. Maybe cold that severe does something to the mind. I don’t know, I just think—”

  “Fredrik was a hero,” Tor said, his eyes flashing dangerously. “He saved Anette.”

  “Well, let’s hope so, son—that little girl might not make it. I’m on my way there now. Care to come with me, Mr. Woodson?”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind,” Gavin replied gratefully; he was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the stifling kitchen; the stove was too hot, there were stacks of dirty dishes on the table. The boy was obviously trying his best but was outnumbered by his needy siblings. Gavin looked around the small farmhouse—just two rooms downstairs, a kitchen and a small bedroom; upstairs, there must be another room. The funeral had come and gone and now all that was left to do was to continue living, he supposed. The mother was apparently strong, despite the laudanum; the boy was almost a man in body, although his flash of emotion betrayed that he was yet a boy in spirit. This was a family devastated by grief, but it looked to be a family that would find some way to go on. And that was what Gavin was discovering about these “rubes” he’d so dismissed; they had the strength to go on. Despite the cruelty of the land and weather, the best of them would find a way to keep at it instead of going back to the softer lands from where they’d come. The unyielding soil had seeped into their skins, their backbones.

  “I’ll tell the story of your brother, don’t worry,” he assured the boy, and there was a flush in the lad’s cheeks, sudden, embarrassing tears in his eyes as he nodded. Then Tor held out his hand.

  “Thank you,” he said, shaking Gavin’s paw firmly. “Tusen takk.”

  Then the boy turned to the stove, throwing in some wood; he grabbed a pan of potatoes and began to peel them.

  “Come, let’s go, I need to check on this girl. You might find something there of interest,” the doctor mused, “for that paper of yours.”

  “I�
�m not sure I can keep filling columns with these stories of loss,” Gavin said, rubbing his eyes because they were suddenly misty. It must have been the heat from the stove.

  “Then you definitely need to come with me to the Pedersens’,” Doc Eriksen said as he and Gavin threw on their layers—the wet wool, the perpetually musky buffalo coat, everything was beginning to smell, as was he. He should find a place to bathe soon. Then they ventured out to the tundra, as he had begun to call this battered, frozen land.

  CHAPTER 28

  •••••

  WHEN THE YOUNG WOMAN OPENED the door, Gavin’s heart leapt. It was impossible, but—could it really be her? His maiden in the flesh?

  She had the same dark blond hair that would surely have streaks of gold and russet in it in summer. She was slight but not delicate, and there was an air of patience about her. She had a pretty face—not flashily pretty, not like the woman he glimpsed behind her, a woman whose beauty seemed out of place in this setting—but a restful pretty. He could, he realized, spend a lifetime gazing at that face.

  But then she wrinkled her nose, crossed her arms, and planted her feet widely, not at all inclined to let a strange man into the home. No, she wasn’t his maiden, after all; this competent young woman needed no saving.

  “Miss Olsen, Mrs. Pedersen,” Doc Eriksen introduced the two women, “this is Mr. Woodson. He’s a newspaperman, come all the way from Omaha to report on the storm.”

  The girl raised an eyebrow, looked him up and down skeptically.

  “Miss Olsen is the schoolteacher hereabouts,” Doc Eriksen explained, gesturing to the younger woman.

  Gavin was startled; this was a schoolteacher? He’d taken her to be a pupil, she was so young. She couldn’t be much older than the Halvorsan boy he’d just seen.

  “Miss,” Gavin said, removing his hat, and for some reason this struck the young woman as funny; she smiled, relaxed, and let him in.

  “How is the little girl today?” Doc asked anxiously as he removed his coat and scarf and gloves with lightning speed, not pausing to hear the answer as he rushed toward a back bedroom on the other side of the house.

  Miss Olsen’s face darkened; worry creased her smooth forehead. “The same.”

  Mrs. Pedersen took Gavin’s coat and woolens, sniffed them without embarrassment, then shook her head. She turned and darted away with them in her arms, putting them in a little closet of a room outside the kitchen. Then she came back with a proper smile and welcome.

  “Welcome to my home. My husband is out with the horses. Please come in, won’t you? I’m afraid I don’t have anything proper to offer you but if you don’t mind plain coffee cake, I can give you that.” She said it so precisely and prettily, Gavin was startled. Her English was halting but understandable. This was a city girl, and Gavin knew city girls. This was a woman used to entertaining in her own parlor, holding musicales or teas. A woman accustomed to the company of females, because a speech like this was the kind of thing a woman said to impress other women, not men.

  Gavin nodded, and she dashed off to slice him a piece of the cake; he sat down with it at the kitchen table—he glimpsed a tiny parlor of sorts, but it seemed to be occupied by three small children all staring at him as if he had descended from the heavens on a ladder made of candy—then Mrs. Pedersen started chattering in Norwegian, a rush of words that Miss Olsen patiently translated.

  “I’m sorry, you’ll excuse me. Everything is a mess but it doesn’t matter because of Anette. I need to go to her now, Raina will keep you company. My husband is perfectly useless except with horses.” Mrs. Pedersen said these last words with such forthrightness, and Miss Olsen translated them with equal directness, that Gavin almost swallowed a bite of cake whole. While his sample size was small, he had yet to hear a Norwegian speak this way about a spouse.

  Raina, too, seemed suddenly uncomfortable by the statement she’d just translated; she sat with downcast eyes while Gavin pulled out his pencil and paper. Then she looked at him with interest. “You’re from Omaha? Oh, such a big city! And you write for the paper? You get to see your words in print?”

  “Yes, I do,” he answered, amused. Women weren’t generally impressed by what he did for a living, especially not the women of Omaha.

  “It must be such an honor, to do that job. You must be a very respected man.”

  Gavin stifled a sudden cough.

  “Well, yes, perhaps—so tell me, Miss Olsen, you are a schoolteacher? How old are you, if you don’t mind? You look so young. And what did you do during the blizzard, then? When it struck? Tell me everything.”

  “I’m sixteen,” Raina said, blushing again. “I just did my job.”

  “That’s not true. She’s a heroine,” another voice interrupted, and Gavin looked up. A tall man, handsome, not as weathered and bent as the other Norskis he’d encountered, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He had a bridle in his hand. So this must be the useless husband.

  Raina stared at her hands folded in her lap; she did not look pleased or flattered. The man continued, in a truly awkward fashion; even Gavin sensed that he was putting his foot in it somehow, but neither Raina nor the wife—who kept darting in and out of the kitchen fetching things for Doc Eriksen—appeared to afford him any stature.

  “This pretty young woman here, she got her pupils to safety. She tied them all together with their aprons, can you imagine? And she got them all to the Halvorsans’ in the storm.”

  “Not all,” Raina said softly. “And Tor helped.”

  “Ja, ja, the boy helped. And poor Anette”—Mr. Pedersen nodded toward the bedroom—“she and Fredrik ran off toward home instead.”

  “I couldn’t stop them,” Raina said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “I tried. I couldn’t stop them. Anette felt—”

  “Anette came home because of me,” Mrs. Pedersen, her arms full of linen, chimed in. “She knew I would be angry if she didn’t come home to do her chores. It is my fault that she is maimed for life.”

  “Anette is your child?” Gavin was puzzled; none of these people really seemed related to one another. He couldn’t explain it other than they seemed to treat each other warily, as if they were all on edge. None of the loving affection or long-suffering hatred that springs up between people who share a name or blood.

  “No, no, she’s just a girl, you know—” Mrs. Pedersen replied, but was evidently frustrated by her lack of English.

  “Her mother abandoned her,” Gunner said.

  “She lives here, as do I,” Raina patiently explained to the bewildered Gavin. “We board. I’m the teacher, so I have to board out. I don’t live in this district. Anette was—is—somewhat of a hired girl.”

  “I go to her,” Mrs. Pedersen said abruptly, and left the room. Raina, watching her, shook her head; her expression was bemused.

  “She is trying,” Raina murmured, and Gavin didn’t know what or who she meant.

  “I don’t quite—I would like to write about this, with your permission. You see”—and an idea took shape in his mind. That word that Mr. Pedersen had used—heroine—struck him as useful. Extremely useful—of course! There had to be heroes and heroines among all the tragedy; stories of triumph, stories to keep readers interested instead of tuning out the endless misery. Stories to sell papers. Gavin knew the public; while they liked to read about heroes, the appeal of a heroine—a young, pretty woman like Raina who had, against all odds, saved the lives of her pupils—was far greater. And then there was the child fighting for her life—that was a story people could get behind, too. A story of hope; someone they would invest in and keep buying papers to read about. It really was astonishing, this girl’s story—a child who had been abandoned by her own mother only to be saved by the selfless act of her only friend in the world, a young, innocent boy—

  It wasn’t a story, it was a goddamn gold mine. Pulitzer would sur
ely take notice of this back East.

  “Are all schoolteachers out here like you?” he asked Raina.

  “Like me? We all have to have a certificate, yes, after an examination.”

  “No, no.” Gavin was too excited now to remember to be a gentleman and that he was a guest in this house. He heaved himself out of the small wooden chair he was in—it creaked dangerously—and began to pace the room. “I mean, are they all girls like you? Pretty? I always thought teachers were men, for some reason. That’s how it was back East.”

  “We can’t convince many eastern teachers to come out here, you know,” Gunner explained. “We take care of our own, we school our own.”

  “But you’re so young!” He couldn’t help himself, even though the girl looked very uncomfortable. “Barely a child yourself and look at you, you saved—how many?—other children!”

  “Ten. Eleven, if you count Tor but he helped me, you see—”

  Gavin didn’t care about Tor.

  “Ten children! Ten saved! This is wonderful! I want to know everything. The boss’ll eat it up!” Gavin couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this before. “There must be others like you—do you know any other teachers?”

  Raina rose, trembling; her face was scarlet, her eyes downcast and ashamed. Then she sank back down to the chair and hid her face in her hands.

  “Yes,” she said, raising her head, and worry lines crisscrossed her forehead. “Yes, I know another schoolteacher.”

  But that’s all she would say about it; he couldn’t get the story out of her. It didn’t matter, there would surely be others and he would find them. Meanwhile, there was the little girl in the room, suffering from something, no one had told him what.