The Children's Blizzard(33)

    Slowing down enough so that someone could have caught him. And the horse wondered why his owner had not; why the exhausted cries of his name had stopped at some point, so many painful steps back.



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LIKE THE HORSE SHE CURSED, Gerda kept moving against the force of the wind, just barely; staggering with each small step, eyes tightly shut against the javelins of ice hurtling down from the sky, tugging little Ingrid along, struggling to keep the child upright. Minna had stopped crying, a silent stone upon Gerda’s back. Every now and then Gerda felt a warm breath in her ear, so that she could tell Minna was still alive, and she thanked God. Because now she knew, she fully understood, that the three of them might not make it out of this; she’d already given up on Tiny, or so she told herself. She wasn’t prone to foolish hope, no, not she. Not practical Gerda—isn’t that what Papa always called her? His little soldier, his rock. Papa had wanted a son so much, at least that’s what Mama said once, in a rare, disjointed act of desperation that Gerda still wondered about, years later.

One morning when Gerda was only about ten, Mama had been airing out the bedstead that she and Papa slept on. But all at once, Mama plopped down on it as if her legs had given out on her, and suddenly a torrent of words—Norwegian words—poured out of her. Mama was talking to her, Gerda, who had been carefully washing the breakfast dishes in a bucket of water, keeping an eye on Raina, who was outside, singing a little song while she made her doll a blanket out of tallgrass, weaving the long purplish stems in and out. It was a spring day, a soft one, as Mama sometimes called these rare, blessed days when everything—the sun, the breeze, the temperature—was moderate. Coaxing.

    “Yes, I know, your papa, my Steffen, he wanted a son so badly to share the work, to keep his name alive, but he loves you girls, Gerda; he loves you with all his heart.”

Gerda looked at her mother in confusion; she had never questioned her father’s love, it was as constant as the rustling of the prairie grass. As perennial as the cry of a screech owl at night. As comforting as the patter of a gentle rain in spring.

“Oh, yes, he loves you,” Mama repeated in a rush, mistaking Gerda’s expression. “You especially, Gerda. He does look at you like his right arm sometimes, and I don’t know that that is fair, but it is the way it is. Still you have the best papa around, but a son, a boy, it would have helped. He is a strong man but this place is too much even for him, he will work himself to death, that is the fate of a man here, but it is a fate your papa wanted, even so. At home, there wasn’t enough for him, the farms were divided up among all the sons so that none of them had much. They weren’t big farms like this, no, so your father had to up and leave, he took us away; my mother, my poor mother, I do miss her so. My sisters, my Breena and my Maja, the letters come too slowly, all the way across the ocean, they might be gone now, do you know? Gone—accidents happen, sickness, and Mama, she is old!” Gerda’s mother looked stunned by this, she raised her hands up in a jerky movement and let them fall in her lap while her eyes were big and wondering, her mouth open in surprise. “Yes, they might be gone and, Gerda, I wouldn’t know, would I? Maybe not for months.”

    “Mama!” Gerda dropped a tin cup in the dishwater and ran to her mother, putting an arm about her, but Mama didn’t cry; she looked at Gerda, smiled, shook herself a little, and continued on with this strange conversation that seemed to spring from a hidden well, a conversation Gerda had never been part of before, the kind of talk you imagine goes on between a papa and a mama at night, after you’re tucked into your bed with your sister and they’re still up, sitting in front of the fire, their heads bent together, their voices low and murmuring and assuring you that someone is still awake and alert and will care for you even if there are wolves outside the door; you know you heard them, even though Papa scoffed and said it was a coyote. But as long as Papa and Mama were up and talking, you could go to sleep because you knew they wouldn’t let a wolf inside.

But now, for the first time, Gerda suspected that perhaps those conversations weren’t so comforting, after all; perhaps they were about urgent things, sad things. Heartbreaking things.

“But I have you and Raina, don’t I? I have you and so I’m not as alone as Papa is; it’s almost like my sisters but not quite. But Papa, he doesn’t have men around him and that’s a kind of loneliness, it is, Gerda, even though he loves us so. Do you think he is disappointed in me, because I didn’t give him sons? Oh, there was one, yes, before you, but he died so little, so quickly, sometimes I almost forget. Of course, I won’t ever forget but sometimes I get so busy and I have you two and so I do go a few hours without thinking of him; little Peter, we baptized him, or at least Papa did with our Bible, but he barely got it done before the baby died. He shuddered and whimpered and lay very still in my arms and then Papa took him from me. He wrapped him in something, and later we had a ceremony outside, but that was long ago, back home in Norway. I’ll never see him again and I cried about that, yes I did, when we left; and perhaps I was even angry at your papa for taking us away from him, but of course I couldn’t say that. And now we are here, so far away from him and Mama and my sisters, who might be dead, but that is the way of the Lord and all we can do is accept it.”

    Gerda was too stunned to say anything; she’d never heard of a brother. She’d never seen any sign of longing or sadness for him in either of her parents. She had no idea why her mother was so worried about the lack of him, or another son, all of a sudden. Did Mama have these thoughts all the time? And did she have to hide them, storing them up somewhere inside until they gushed out like now? Gerda understood that this was not part of the conversation that went on at night between her parents. Gerda knew that this was the kind of conversation that women had, and she remembered how sad Mama had been when her friend Lydia Gunderson, on the homestead next to theirs, had died giving birth. To a son, Gerda remembered. But both mother and child had died, and Mama, Gerda realized, must have been so lonely ever since. Even though they didn’t see their neighbors all that often, especially during winter, still, Mama and Mrs. Gunderson must have been the kind of friends who talked about these things. And now, Mama only had her and Raina.