The Children's Blizzard Read online

  “It’s too late, they’ll be here today. I promised the mother. She was desperate—and so, my Anna, may I say, are you. You have too much to do with the children and this place, you know that’s true.”

  “And why is that? Who dragged me out here to the ends of the earth?”

  Gunner didn’t respond, he never did when she reminded him of his folly. He only pressed his lips together, passed his hand over his eyes, so that when they were visible again a little light had gone out of them. They weren’t such a polished, gleaming brown. Then he rose to go to the stable and tend to his horses, the only things he truly loved.

  “Don’t think that I will be good to this—creature,” she called after him. “Don’t think that I’ll treat her as my own!”

  And she hadn’t; she never would. The girl was stupid, there was no other word for it; she had a habit of staring into space, her eyes dull. Her skin was pockmarked, her hair a mustardy brown and thin, stringy. Anna feared that her own children, a girl and two boys, would catch whatever had made Anette this way, but she had no choice but to rely on the girl for help. The child was a hard worker, there was no denying that, but she worked in as dull a way as she lived, her movements ploddingly methodical, her face expressionless. Anna would never be able to stop adding up the cost of an extra mouth to feed, an extra body to clothe, and then there was school to think of. But she had learned to live with the girl, absorb her status in the household—servant only. Not family.

  But then, the Schoolteacher arrived. And that was Gunner’s doing, too.

  “Darling Anna, good news! I’ve been appointed to the school board—a sign of my importance in the community. Just you wait and see, I’ll run for office one day, my dearest!” And he’d puffed his chest out, patted his mustache, and looked ridiculous. The vanity of man!

  “And we’ve just decided on the new teacher for this term,” he continued smugly. “This will be her first school, but her older sister has excellent references and she’s from a good home. The Olsens over in the next county, they farm, immigrants, Norwegians like us. The father is a deacon in the church, an impeccable character. When we visited to tell the girl she was chosen, I was very impressed by the family.”

  “That’s nice.” She had been knitting a new muffler for him. Putting her pretty hands to labor for him. Completely unaware of the treachery he was about to deploy.

  “And I volunteered our home, for her to board in. I felt it was the thing to do, being new to the school board. It’s a good way to show my value to them. She’ll start with the winter term, we can put her up in the attic with Anette. I thought I might insulate it, paint it up a bit—”

  “You will not.” Anna’s voice was low and reasonable—but she felt the darkness blanket her face, the thick clouds impairing her vision. “You will not. How dare you, Gunner? How dare you do this without consulting me?” The man was too friendly, too stupid, too—everything. He wanted to make friends with these people, this community; he was putting down roots even when she was desperately trying to pull them up. She wanted to go home. She had not been reticent about telling him this, every single day. He knew her wishes, he knew he was lucky to have her—but he kept smiling and being neighborly and ingratiating himself with the community anyway. And now he wanted to introduce a young schoolteacher into this house? Because, of course, the schoolteacher would be pretty; she knew it. Not as pretty as herself. But still. Weren’t schoolteachers in the stories she read always pretty?

  And that turned out to be the case. Raina was petite, a doll-like young woman. Her hair had glints of red in it, and her nose was pert, charmingly turned up. Her prettiness was much quieter than Anna’s; it wasn’t flashy. Instead, it coaxed, it made you want to come closer to take another look, rather than blinding you at first glance.

  From the very first moment she set eyes on the Schoolteacher—and saw her husband looking at the girl with something she hadn’t seen in his eyes since they had courted back in Kristiania—Anna despised her. Despised him. She saw it all happen, right under her nose—the moony looks, the careful attention, the little presents, like flowers, fresh pencils. Gunner made a show every time he pulled the Schoolteacher’s seat out for her at dinner. He insisted that she eat with them, too, and he even grew a bit of a spine and started insisting Anette do the same, even though, before, he didn’t seem to care that Anette took her meals up in her attic. But once the Schoolteacher arrived, Gunner started to care about Anette, or at least to pretend to care about Anette. When before, he let Anna do as she liked regarding the girl.

  At first, the Schoolteacher had been shy, and somewhat startled by the attention. But sure as the sun rises, the young woman began to blossom, color prettily, do her hair in elaborate twists instead of the simple braided coil she’d arrived with. She started to glare at Anna, defy her by speaking English to Anette, daring to help the girl with her lessons even after Anna told her not to. But she’d never spoken an impudent word to Anna, until last week.

  And then came that dreadful night when she actually caught Gunner up in the attic in his coat and boots, kneeling beside her bed, preparing to take the Schoolteacher—where, exactly? He couldn’t say.

  He was a stupid, stupid man.

  She’d stopped him, stopped them both that night—the knife she’d started keeping beneath her mattress had done the job, for the most part; she had only to show it. He coaxed her down the stairs, wrested the knife out of her hand; it fell with a clang. She slapped him and threatened to do the same or worse to the Schoolteacher, but he said the right things: He didn’t know what had happened, he’d lost his head, it had to be the cabin fever, being cooped up so long in the bitter cold. He needed her, Anna; he needed his children, his family. His good name.

  For a week he didn’t say one word to the Schoolteacher. But that didn’t prevent Anna from taking out her fury on them both—and Anette—at every chance.

  Why didn’t the strangers leave? When would the punishing temperatures rise so that they could leave her in peace and give her a chance to breathe, to sit, to think—to plan?

  Thank God the weather had cleared this morning, the temperatures warming the little house so that the stove actually seemed to radiate heat. As the Schoolteacher and Anette fled the house, Gunner hadn’t given either of them a glance; he’d only sat at the breakfast table, talking earnestly to Anna, something about the horses, she never truly listened to the words he said. She only needed to know that he was paying attention to her, and her alone.

  But now—

  “I’m going to get them.”

  Gunner stood before her, wearing his heavy coat, carrying a buffalo robe, muffled up to his eyes, but still his words destroyed her complacency, her growing contentment with the storm raging outside while, inside, it was only her family again. Blessedly. No interlopers. No vipers in the nest.

  “No, you’re not.” She said it calmly; no blackness overcame her this time. She saw everything clearly, almost too clearly; Gunner’s eyes were too meltingly brown, the china too sparkling, the light from the kerosene lanterns too bright.

  The gun in her hand too silver. Too cool, too heavy. She stared at it in surprise; she’d forgotten, until that moment, that she’d retrieved it earlier from the loose brick behind the stove. She’d forgotten that she’d been carrying it all morning as she stirred up the stove fire, set the table for the children, mixed the batter for the flapjacks. It had become part of her, soothing her. Keeping her intact, her mind rational. Her heart beating steadily.

  She raised her arm, she aimed the gun right at him—right at his heart.

  The heart that could only belong to her.

  CHAPTER 11

  •••••

  “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, THIS storm.” Gavin peered out the window, like everyone else was doing. As they’d been doing for hours. Watching the weather. Waiting for some kind of movement. Waiting for news to r
eport. Waiting it out, like sensible people.

  There was no sign of the sleighing party; they must have holed up over in Council Bluffs. The street was empty save for flying pieces of trash, coming together in the air in a crazy ballet.

  “Why is everyone standing around like a damn herd of cattle?” Suddenly Rosewater himself, Mr. Edward Rosewater, publisher and editor in chief of the Omaha Daily Bee, was upon them. Immediately, everyone but Gavin and Dan Forsythe scurried back to their desks, pretending to work.

  Gavin wasn’t technically employed by the man, but he respected him. Edward Rosewater was average in build, with receding dark brown hair, the requisite luxuriant mustache, and penetrating eyes that missed nothing. He’d built the Bee from scratch, put his stamp on it and the town, was not afraid to report on the most scandalous behavior of the town fathers, and also not afraid to use his cane when the inevitable physical attacks came his way. He was a target of vitriol and not only because of his headlines; he was also a target because he was a Jew in a town that didn’t have many of them and whose mostly Protestant citizens mistrusted those they knew.

  But Rosewater didn’t give a good goddamn about anyone but himself and his paper; despite his frequent altercations, gleefully reported by his competition, he strutted about town as though he owned it. He was currently building the tallest building, too, around the corner, to house the ever-expanding Bee.

  “Forsythe,” Rosewater bellowed, and Dan raised an eyebrow at him. As the ace reporter on staff, he could afford to pretend not to be afraid of his boss.

  “Rosewater?”

  Gavin grinned; nobody else got away without using the “Mr.”

  “Get your big ass outside and do what you’re paid to do. Report. Go find that damn sleighing party—that’s the story here. The town’s finest, caught up in the biggest blizzard we’ve seen in ages—that’s what will sell newspapers.”

  “What about those out on the prairie?” Gavin asked mildly.

  Rosewater turned those penetrating eyes his way. “Good God, that won’t sell papers, boy! So a few farmers lose their cattle or freeze to death in a haystack? So what? It’s the peril of pretty ladies, damsels in distress in their finery, gentlemen with handlebar mustaches, dandies turned into heroes—that’s what people want to read.”

  “I’m not sure I agree.”

  “I don’t care if you do or don’t. You don’t work for me. It’s a courtesy that you even have a desk here.” And with that, Rosewater was done with him.

  “Forsythe, are you gone yet?” Rosewater turned to Dan, who smiled, deliberately put on his coat, and saluted.

  “At your service.” And then he pushed his way out into the storm; Gavin glanced out the window and saw him disappear into the growing blackness.

  “You!” Rosewater turned back to Gavin.

  “Yes?”

  “If you want to write something that the damn boosters will pay me for, write something funny. You know, something about how the outhouse will be mighty cold, or the ice supply will surely be guaranteed after this. Something cute. Although I hate cute. But people love that kind of thing, so do that. You’re good at that, anyway.”

  Gavin winced as he watched Rosewater ascend the staircase, two steps at a time, to his office on the top floor. Yes, he was good at that. Anyway.

  He went to his desk, put on his paper cuffs, pulled out a new bottle of ink from his bottom drawer. Bitterly, he uncorked it and unleashed a great blob of thick black India ink, splattering it all over his desk. He rubbed it into the wood, like a souvenir from a war.

  Another piece of pabulum. That’s what he was good at.

  Overheard on the street after the massive storm…two fellows hitching up their horses stopped to observe that this year’s supply of ice must be guaranteed after the events of yesterday…

  Gavin dropped his pen, tore off his cuffs, crumpled up the paper, and gazed at it in his hand. He had the absurd notion that he should eat it, this feeble effort, this emblem of what he’d become. There were people out there dying. Losing their livelihood. Struggling to survive the night. And he was sitting in the overheated, stuffy offices of a newspaper writing jokes.

  Because that’s what these people had become to Rosewater, to the boosters who had counted them, head by head, when they got off the trains. No longer human beings, they were reduced first to numbers, and now to amusing anecdotes.

  That’s what they’d become to Gavin, too—until this afternoon.

  That young woman. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Was it because she’d finally put a face, a real face, to the anonymous rubes and the jokes at their expense?

  All he knew was that after seeing her, his previous empty promises filled him with shame. Because to this living, breathing—yearning—young woman, and the others like her, this land that Gavin had falsely described was a land that stole not just their hearts but their very lives. It taunted and teased, sure, with its golden sunsets in the summer, the new wheat looking abundant, life-giving. Until the next day when either hail or grasshoppers or both tumbled from the sky, trampling that wheat to the earth, breaking the hearts of those who gazed at it, desperately, from the door of a miserable soddie.

  Today, Gavin had finally seen their faces. The mother’s face—a promise, or more precisely, a threat, of what the girl would look like in a few years: weathered lines, rough skin, a mouth turned down at the corners. Her shoulders stooped from carrying and fetching. And worrying. And they were out there on the prairie, still, in this storm.

  Dropping back into his seat, Gavin rubbed his face with his hands, over and over—the actions of a man just one act shy of the asylum, he realized. Then he began to jiggle his left knee. He was ignited with the need to do something, anything—anything but write a joke. Or tell another lie. He needed to do something true, something heroic. Gavin rose, dropping his pen, scattering the blank pages; he hitched up his pants, filled with purpose.

  But then he saw his reflection in the window—the soft jowls of his face, the expansive gut straining his suspenders to capacity. He plopped back down in his chair, stumped. What on earth could he do?

  His only worth lay in his pen and his imagination. And for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how to use them for anything heroic, not while the storm was still raging.

  Christ, he sure could use a snort. Maybe the Lily was still open, for what did a man like Ol’ Lieutenant have to do but keep his doors open for poor sons of bitches with no real use in the world—

  Like himself.

  CHAPTER 12

  •••••

  OLLIE TENNANT, COATED IN SNOW, his long lashes beaded with ice, pushed the door open to the little storefront where his children attended school. He nearly fell inside, given a mighty shove by the bullying wind.

  He had to take a few minutes to catch his breath, let his lungs expand in the dry, marginally warmer air, blink his glazed eyes until he could see again. The journey to the north side of town from the Lily, even for a giant of a man like him, had taken its toll. He’d never lost his way, but for damn sure, the storm had played every trick it could on him, obscuring street crossings, muffling the sound of horses and wagons, tickling up the back of his coat with its icy fingers, kicking at him from all sides so that he had to inch his way, holding on to every available hitching post, streetlamp, street sign, and doorway.

  But he’d made it, and now he was aware that he was being gaped at by a handful of children, including the two who resembled him and bore his last name. And by a young white woman who was cowering in a far corner, away from the colored children; she seemed to press herself into the very wall, her eyes wide with horror, as she registered his presence.

  Finally his two children broke into a grin and shouted joyfully, “Papa!” as they ran to pull him farther into the room, closer to the small potbellied stove that radiated some heat.

>   “Papa! You’ve come!”

  “Hasn’t anybody else?” Ollie’s coat and gloves began to thaw, dripping water on the floor; he went over to the row of empty pegs—the children all had on their coats and scarves or jackets and shawls—and hung up his ponderous coat. Returning to the stove, rubbing his hands together, he counted the children—there were six, including his own. Plus the teacher.

  “Grayson’s papa came and got him and his sister and then Jenny and Charles went home because they live down the street but the rest of us stayed put even though Teacher told us we could leave if we wanted to but we didn’t and now you’re here!” Little Francis, Ollie’s boy of nine, finally paused to take a breath. Ollie rubbed his son’s head and tugged gently on his ear, his sign to tell him to be quiet for now. Francis was well known for his ability to produce great quantities of speech on very little air.

  “Teacher said that you could leave? In this weather?” Ollie looked at his daughter, Melissa, aged eleven. She nodded, her braids—curling up at the ends like little smiles—providing an emphasis.

  “Miss?” Ollie, remembering his manners, took off his hat, shook out the melting snow. He took a step toward the schoolteacher—he had no idea what her name was, that was his wife’s department—but stopped when she cowered farther into the corner of the room where she seemed to have set up camp.

  She was a very young woman. A girl, barely more. Slight, no figure yet, but attired in women’s clothing—a long green skirt, black belt, white shirtwaist with a cameo at the throat, and a big paisley shawl clutched tightly about her shoulders. Her eyes were wide with fear, and they only grew bigger with each step he took toward her. So Ollie—recognizing her behavior, for he encountered it too often, the behavior of a white woman terrified to be in such proximity to a colored man—instinctively gentled his voice and his movement. He must not give her any reason to fear him, because who knew what she would do or say? He had seen other men’s lives ruined—or ended, swinging from a tree—because they had not read the signs, not until too late.