The Children's Blizzard(28)

Then his son took a step toward her, reaching out his hand. “Miss Carson, don’t you worry. We’ll be all right, now that my papa is here. This old storm will blow itself out sometime—it can’t last forever!”

Miss Carson didn’t take Francis’s hand, but she did smile—a timid little smile; she kind of reminded Ollie of a rabbit, now that he thought about it, with her little red nose, quivering chin—and she nodded.

Ollie exhaled. He felt as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time, ever since he left the Lily, to tell the truth. First the physical exertion of tunneling his way through the storm, then the emotional tightrope he’d had to cross once he got here. But now he could breathe.

They’d be safe, they could survive the night. All of them, including that insensitive but frightened woman-child of Christian charity.

But for damn sure, he was going to have a talk with Alma tomorrow, when the storm cleared and they were all back safe and snug above the saloon. He wasn’t going to allow his children to be taught out of pity. No, he wasn’t. They deserved to be taught by someone who looked like them, thought like them. They deserved to be treated like people, not rungs on the ladder to heaven. There must be something the community could do—help more of their young women get teaching certificates or do a better job advertising for colored teachers. Something.

    Maybe the storm had blown some good sense into him—he admitted that. No more could he hide behind his bar, stubbornly refusing to see that the landscape of polite society was being reconfigured as thoroughly as the wind was surely rearranging the physical landscape right now. Trees would be uprooted, fences blown down, roofs collapsed.

And cities like Omaha would continue to be divided up, like with like, languages not mixing. Certain streets not crossed by one kind or another.

Children learning different lessons, depending on the color of their skin.





CHAPTER 13


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“ANETTE!”

Anette started, panicked. She’d almost fallen asleep, even as she was still walking, miraculously; still stumbling in a whirlwind of snow that stung her cheeks. Snow that wasn’t snow, but pebbles. A wind that wasn’t a wind, but a cyclone.

Fredrik held her hand—she saw it but couldn’t feel it. In her other hand was the lunch pail, and she thought the slate was still snug against her chest—frozen to it, she imagined. Somehow, she was being tugged alongside him as he was crying, and calling her name, trying to wake her up out of her stupor.

She was shivering. But she was hot. She was falling. But she was on her feet. She had to go to the bathroom—urgently, she felt her bladder swell, knew it released, knew there must be warmth drizzling down her legs, soaking her underclothes, her petticoat, her stockings, dripping down into her shoes. She longed for that warmth, actually—but it never came, she didn’t feel anything.

Fredrik was suddenly stopping, a strange look on his face, embarrassment; he looked down at his pants. Anette looked, too, and there was a dark stain. The two gazed at each other for a moment; they shared the embarrassment—they’d never done this before, not in front of the other. And they were both crying now, but still bound together, hands entwined. And then they started moving again.

    They had to be close to the Pedersen homestead. Didn’t they? They’d been trudging through the snow for hours, it seemed to Anette. And it occurred to her she’d never spent this much time with Fredrik. Their time together, always, was so fleeting: a few minutes before school started, recess, their races home. They were always moving, never sitting still, even when talking—although it was Fredrik who mostly talked. Anette was simply content to listen to someone talking to her, not at her. Anyway, she didn’t have much to share; she couldn’t tell him how it was at the Pedersens’. She was ashamed to reveal that she was just a hired girl, really, but without pay. Unwanted.

Whereas Fredrik had a large, happy family he was always complaining about. Tor teased him mercilessly, put frogs in his boots, dropped snakes down his shirt. Fredrik, in turn, taunted his little brothers and sister, but Fredrik swore he got punished for it in a way Tor never did; his papa would look at him gravely and say he was disappointed in him before giving him a good whipping. And his mother would kiss away all his tears, but still she would deny him dessert that night.

“You have to be an example, Fredrik,” she would say. But she never, ever punished Tor. Both his papa and his mama thought the sun rose and set on him. And what about the time Fredrik brought home the prize for spelling? Did his mama cry with pride over that, the way she did when Tor revealed that Miss Olsen said she couldn’t teach him much more, that he learned too quickly?

    No. Mama did make him his favorite dessert that night, Fredrik admitted—stollen with raisins—and excused him from bringing in the water for the dishes. But she didn’t shed shining tears of joy.

Oh, the trials of poor Fredrik! Anette never betrayed to Fredrik how much she envied him, how silly, really, she thought his trials were. How, in sharing these stories, he was reminding Anette of all that was missing in her own life. A happy family, a mother and father who cared for you enough to punish you and then cry over it, a big brother who thought of you enough to play pranks on you. People who saw you as a person, not as a problem or an unasked-for solution, no better than a workhorse in a plow.