The Children's Blizzard(57)

She’d never have another friend, she thought miserably. From now on, she would truly be alone in the world.

There were hot tears streaming down her face and into her ears and so she raised her left hand to wipe them away—but the tears still remained, nothing touched her cheek at all. It was almost as if she’d missed her own face! Puzzled, she tried again, and again she missed. Then she looked at her hand—

    It wasn’t there. Her arm, mostly covered by an unfamiliar nightgown that was soft and scented, ended in a bandaged stump where her hand should have been.

She struggled up, leveraging herself with her right hand, which was also bandaged but still attached, and she held out her left arm, moving it left, then right, up, then down, wriggling her fingers—she felt them! They did wriggle! She felt pain, too, when she moved her wrist.

But there was no hand, there were no fingers.

Where was it? Had someone taken it without her permission—was nothing her very own, not even her flesh? She was jabbering in Norwegian, enraged by everything that had happened, Fredrik gone and now her hand, and this was too much to take. All the months of being treated like an unwanted old dog at best, but overworked and despised at worst—she had had enough. What a stupid turn of events! She must leave this place, go somewhere, to Fredrik’s house; but no, he wasn’t there—her heart seized up in an odd way and then it fluttered. She placed her left hand on her chest. Then she looked down and saw it again—that queer, bandaged end of her arm, as if—as if—someone had sawed off her hand?

She was falling, falling, and with a thud, she hit the floor, heard excited voices, arms lifting her up, cool hands on her hot forehead, and then she was back in the cushioned earth again, dreaming her dreams.



* * *



—

WHEN ANETTE PEDERSEN woke a third time, it was morning, and the oil lamps were extinguished. The usual voices were in the kitchen. They weren’t bothering to whisper. This was a conversation that had been going on a long time, she could tell by the weariness in the voices, the circling back to topics.

    There was a grunt at the foot of the bed, and Anette tried to lift her head, then she pushed herself up on her right hand, and she saw once more the absence of her left.

She also saw a man. Seated on a chair that was much too small for him. He was a large person, with a soft, doughy shape she’d never seen before in a man. All the men she knew—and there weren’t that many—were solidly muscular. But this one looked as if he had never handled a shovel or a hoe in his life. He was grunting again, and his breath was labored, as if he’d tired himself out just by sitting.

But he wasn’t only sitting. He was writing something, furiously scribbling with a pencil across a sheet of paper.

Finally, he raised his head and saw her watching him.

He grinned—it was a funny grin, and it tickled something inside Anette, something she had only ever felt with Fredrik. She found herself grinning back. Then he said something in English, and to her astonishment, she understood it.

“Well, here she is, finally, wide awake! The plucky little girl herself!”

And the voices stopped in the kitchen. Anette heard a general stampede of feet, and she was suddenly surrounded—Mother and Father Pedersen, Teacher, Doc Eriksen. They all gaped at her like she was the answer to a question. She blushed at all those eyes, and she turned again to the man. Who beamed at her like she was a prize, someone worth knowing.

Who looked at her the same way Fredrik did, with pure happiness.





CHAPTER 27


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THE FIRST COUPLE OF DAYS that Gavin Woodson spent on the Godforsaken Prairie had yielded nothing but unbroken horror.

Every small settlement—you couldn’t call them towns, since they were only a handful of buildings, sometimes only repurposed abandoned train cars—gave up, all too readily, its tragedies to his pencil and notepad. It was as if he’d given these people permission to drop that fabled stoicism and pour forth so much pent-up grief and trouble, his pencil could barely keep up. After a while, the stories all began to blur but still he wrote them down. He had to. He had to bear witness.

The men lost, out tending livestock. The livestock gone, too; another disastrous year for cattle and who in his right mind would continue to pursue that folly?

There were people who miraculously survived the night in a cold that froze the cattle where they stood, only to drop dead in the morning when they rose to find their way home—something about the change in pressure on the heart; he’d have to look it up or ask a doctor when he got back to Omaha. It was a mystery to Gavin and it seemed improbable, but too many people had witnessed it, had looked out their windows to see someone rise from the snow like a wraith, take a step or two, then drop deader than a stone.

    Men who survived, who got home—only to find their wives and children frozen beside a cold and empty stove, maybe the windows had blown out, maybe not; the cold was so relentless it had no fear of windows and walls. Or men who found their wives steps from the house, almost covered entirely by the snow. They’d become disoriented, lost their way between house and barn if they hadn’t thought to tie up a line between the two, and many hadn’t because the storm had come upon them so abruptly.

Entire families were caught out on the plains, driving home from getting supplies on that deceptively warm morning. Like the family of his maiden; he could imagine it only too well.