The Children's Blizzard(24)

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.