The Children's Blizzard(27)

“I’ll pay them back,” Ollie said wryly. “Miss, we have to burn something, or freeze. Do you have any other ideas?”

“Yes—go home! All of you—go back to where you came from! I’m going home, I am!” With a wild cry she dashed across the room, headed for the door, and Ollie had a choice to make: Stop her, put his hands on a white woman and risk his very life—

Or let her go, this crazy person, to her doom.

“Miss! Miss Carson!” His voice could also fill a room—fill a church, his wife often hinted—if he wanted it to. It boomed, echoed in the nearly empty space, and he placed himself firmly between the wild-eyed young woman and the door.

She stopped a couple of feet in front of him, and so finally he was able to take a good look at her face. She was white—whiter than he’d ever seen a person—with terror, her lips pale, too. But her cheeks were still round with the last remnants of childhood; her pointed chin was trembling, like his own little girl’s did when she was sad or afraid.

Children had come late in Ollie’s life; he wasn’t looking to have a family—he had few outright plans for living—but it had happened to him anyway, and he couldn’t really remember having much choice in the matter. He’d met a girl: sweet, shrewd Alma, who didn’t mind that he owned a bar and—most important—never went overboard in trying to get him to attend church. She only dropped a couple of subtle hints a month, which, given what Ollie knew about churchgoing women, made her a model of restraint. She tamed him in a different way by giving him two babies who turned his heart to mush the moment he held them as newborns; each one of them had pounded his chest with a tiny fist and made a conquest.

    And ever since, Ollie had discovered he was putty in a child’s hand; everything about children, their overabundance of emotion, their exhausting energy that would give way, without warning, to a sleep that could not be interrupted, delighted him. Especially their possibility. Who could tell what kind of a person a child will grow into? Some thought they could; Alma was particularly judgmental in this way: “That Francis, he will grow up to be a preacher, now mark my words, the way he can talk!” “You know little Peter, the Thompsons’ boy? The way he looks at you—I can tell he’s going to grow up to be no good!”

But Ollie held out hope for each and every one of them.

It was that quivering chin on this girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen—this girl, he had to acknowledge, who was most likely forced into this situation by her misguided parent who was trying to tick off an item on his own checklist to get into heaven—that did it. If she were an adult—for Ollie held out no such hope for change and goodness in adults—he would have let her go outside without a second thought. He wasn’t there to save her. He was there to save the children.

He had not been prepared for the schoolteacher to be a child herself. But she was, and so he had to act.

“You can’t go out there, miss.” He softened his voice again. “You’ll be going to your death. I don’t want that to happen, these children don’t want that to happen. Look at them.”

    Miss Carson, clutching her shawl so tightly her knuckles bulged, turned toward her pupils. None of them reacted in any way; they simply stared right back at her, faces neutral. There was no great love between teacher and pupils, that was evident. So Ollie made a gesture to Francis, who immediately understood and stepped forward, his hands clasped upon his chest like the actress who had played Little Eva in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that had passed through last summer, and Ollie had to stifle a grin. This boy of his! Maybe Alma was correct: Maybe a stage of some kind—in a church or in a theater—was part of his future.

But Ollie kept his face serious, for this wasn’t make-believe; it was life and death.

“Please, Miss Carson, please don’t go,” Francis said, his voice full of pathos. “We want you to stay with us! If anything happened to you we would be so sad!”

Miss Carson, evidently no fool, cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him—but she also appeared to be considering the situation from another angle; she glanced out at the dark street. The glow of the oil lamps inside the building cast a weak light outside, so that the full fury of the storm wasn’t visible. Fortunately the mercurial wind chose that moment to turn and pound on the huge glass storefront window; even Ollie let out a yelp of surprise. It seemed a miracle the window didn’t break.

Miss Carson had jumped, too; she was crying again, twisting up the ends of her shawl in her small hands. “I don’t know—I can’t stay here—I want to go home! I miss my parents! Why don’t they come for me?” She finally let her gaze meet Ollie’s, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why doesn’t anyone come?”

“I did. I’m here. Let’s all sit down by the fire—my, it’s cold, isn’t it?” Ollie—he would not touch her, no sir—tried to lure her toward the stove with his voice, his movement. “I think I’ll go put my coat on, yes, that’s what I’m going to do.” He gave her some room to get to the stove while he took his dripping coat off the wooden peg, shoving his arms into the sleeves. It really was cold.

    She crept toward the stove, casting wary glances toward the children, who automatically stepped back to allow her the warmest spot. She huddled there, miserable, still sniffling, occasionally wiping her nose with her shawl.