The Children's Blizzard(18)

    Besides, his kids went to school on the North Side, too. And it was a long walk back home. They weren’t welcome on the new cable cars that ran up and down the main thoroughfares.

Ollie looked outside his now-empty bar. The storm wasn’t getting any better; in fact, the wind seemed more intent on punishing everything standing upright. His windows creaked ominously, and despite the fact that the round-bellied stove was blazing away, full of coal, the air was getting colder by the minute. His kids couldn’t come home in this. And Ollie didn’t trust their teacher—a maniacally cheerful white lady, daughter of an Episcopalian minister with a charitable bent—to keep them safe.

Ollie bundled up into his buffalo coat, pulled on some leather gloves, and prepared to go out in the storm to get his kids.

Because he couldn’t trust the white men to spare a thought for them, that was for damn sure.





CHAPTER 8


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“ANETTE! FREDRIK! ANETTE!” RAINA SCREAMED until her throat was raw; she stood on the doorstep to the schoolhouse for as long as she could stand it, shouting after the two who had been sucked into the storm. All she could see was grey and white. The snow whipped up from the ground meeting the snow falling from the sky in a hellish, twisting dance. The wind kept pushing her off balance; she clung to the doorframe but finally had to shut the door. Her eyes watered and stung from the icy projectiles that assaulted them; she felt tears rushing down her cheeks.

“No—Tor! No!” She grabbed his arm and yanked him back from the door. Tor had buttoned up his jacket and was headed out to retrieve his brother.

“Let go of me,” he yelled, fighting Raina. He was the larger, he could easily overpower her and leave. But desperation tightened her grip on his strong arm; she couldn’t let him go, she couldn’t do this alone.

“I say let go of me—Fredrik! Fredrik!” Tor wrested the door open again and shouted into the tempest, his voice ragged with tears that he tried to hide from Raina. Tor was fifteen, almost a man. No, a man already, by prairie standards; this was his last year in the schoolhouse. When he wasn’t at school, Raina knew, a boy like Tor was laboring beside his father, sharing the hardest tasks. His body was already muscled and work-weathered, his hands callused, his nose sunburnt in the summer from spending days in the fields, his biceps like rocks. Only his mind still needed coaxing out of childhood.

    Raina had noted in Tor a hunger, almost, but not quite, disguised by his manners, the same respect and obedience all the immigrant children had been brought up with. Tor was too polite to ask for more than his share in life, but Raina could tell by the way he gobbled up his assignments and spat them back out again that he had a desire to learn—and an ability for it—that she could never begin to satiate. In a different place, Tor would go to college. But not here, not in Nebraska. Not a poor farmer’s oldest son. So she tried to slip him extra books when she could—her own books that she’d brought with her from home. Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist. Even Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, which he seemed to enjoy despite that the fact that they were “girls’ books.”

But sometimes, Raina felt guilty about giving him more. What right did she have to enflame this boy’s hunger when there was no way for him ever to satisfy it? He was born on a farm and he would die on a farm; he would stop reading words and searching for ideas and instead learn to read the weather in the sky, when a mare would foal by the way she walked, how often to switch crops from the color of the soil.

“Let go, I have to go after him! Mama and Papa— I have to, they’d never forgive me if I didn’t; you don’t understand, Fredrik’s little, he’s just a kid—”

“Tor.” Raina’s voice startled the boy, as it startled her; it came from a place she’d never had access to before. A deep well of authority and certainty. She started talking to him in Norwegian, forgetting the edict about English; it stopped Tor in his tracks to hear Miss Olsen speak his native language—she saw the confusion and curiosity in his eyes, giving Raina the advantage she needed. She quickly shut the door again. “Tor, you could get lost out there yourself. You might not be able to find them in all this—you know how fast those two are, they could be almost home by now, anyway—” She broke off, rubbing her stinging eyes; she didn’t believe that, not with the fact of this monstrous wind rearranging the very landscape, and she knew Tor didn’t believe it, either. But they both needed to pretend they did. “You have to stay here, do you understand?” Now her voice was urgent, conspiratorial. “The other children—I have to keep them safe now. We need to think of the greater good. We’re going to run out of fuel soon, we’ll have to think about what else we can use—break up the benches and tables, maybe. I can’t do that without you. Do you understand?”

    Tor’s eyes, reddened from frustration and fear, looked anguished; Raina could see his thoughts fighting for prominence—the desire to protect his brother, the fear of disappointing his parents, the realization that what Raina was saying was true. All his responsibilities—and a homestead boy had so many, too many—claiming his heart, dividing it into little parcels. As she gazed into his face, about level with her own, she recognized how steady, how good a character he was. Clear blue eyes, unclouded by deception or prevarication. Strong eyebrows, darker than the reddish brown of his thick hair. No freckles, unlike his impish brother; Tor’s skin was fair, yet his cheeks were ruddy and the peach fuzz on his upper lip starting to coarsen.