The Children's Blizzard(58)

But it was the children that everyone talked about.

The storm hit at precisely the wrong time here in northeastern Nebraska, southeastern Dakota. Earlier, and there would have been no question of sheltering in place. But it hit right when most schools were about to disgorge their pupils for the day, or just had.

Gavin scurried from town to town, house to house, following breadcrumbs like in the old children’s fairy tale. But this time, the breadcrumbs were the children themselves: their lost bodies, frozen. He’d pull up in one settlement, hear the tales of woe, then someone would say something along the lines of “But I heard that the schoolteacher there up in Holt County let them all go home, alone,” and he’d be back in his ridiculous sleigh—it had definitely elicited a few snorts of amusement—trying to figure out how the hell to get up to Holt County. Most of the time, someone took pity on him—they had relatives up that way, anyway, and wanted to check in on them—and would ride alongside him. These men—so lean they looked starved, and indeed some did have the telltale signs of malnutrition: the distended stomach, the sunken cheeks and haunted eyes—wouldn’t say a word, they’d just ride. Ploddingly, horses breaking through the snow, they’d point off in one direction and then peel away in another, and Gavin would have no choice but to aim his nag and trudge off, steeling himself for the inevitable.

    A stranger knocking on a dugout door elicited less astonishment than he would have thought. Perhaps it was the grief, permeating every frigid dugout, every poorly insulated cabin or shed that opened its door to Gavin and his pad of paper, that dulled any other senses. Grief so palpable it soured the air. The adult homesteaders rarely spoke English but there was usually a child or two who did, who translated.

“I’m sorry, I’m here because I heard…” Gavin only had to begin, and then the child—who had, by some grace of some god, stayed home from school that fateful day or had made it home safely—would immediately start jabbering in both English and Norwegian. And then the stories would be shared—the boy sent out to bring the horse in from pasture. The father who had gone out to the barn at the height of the storm to make sure there was hay, to break the ice in the troughs. The mother who just had to check on the chickens—they were so fragile, she wondered if she should bring them in.

And there were many still missing. Many families resigned to not knowing the truth until the spring thaw.

Several times, he found himself knocking on a door just in time to witness the simplicity of a Norwegian funeral. A pine box, at best; often just a body wrapped in a blanket. A few hymns sung in a language he didn’t understand, a prayer, then the body removed, taken to a plot of land next to the barn, usually; a place that already had crude gravestones dotting it. This was never the first death a family had experienced. The ground, despite the cold, could usually be coerced into giving up enough topsoil to lower the box or body deep enough to keep predators out.

    So many of the boxes were small. Three feet, four.

In every house, Gavin hoped, right before he knocked on the door, to see the face he sought. There were glimpses of it, stray pieces of an incomplete puzzle—pretty blue eyes in a young woman’s face, a thick blond braid the right shade, even throats that yearned, dammit. But never the complete picture.

Gavin would write it all down, and then move on to the nearest train station where he could telegraph the more sensational stories to the Bee—the ones that Rosewater was now, in opposition to his earlier stance, clamoring for, because the public’s hunger for these tragedies was proving to be voracious. He slept many a night on the floor of one of those stations. There were few hotels or boardinghouses in these strange, bleak settlements.

But God Almighty, what he’d give for a good snort back at the Lily; hot shots of whiskey burning his throat, blotting his senses, making him forget everything he was forced to record. Because the tragedies started to blur together into one infinite shroud of misery that he wondered if he could ever shrug off. Oh, there were stories with happy endings—the dog who spent the night out with his young master, whose barking led searchers to the unconscious boy, saving his life. Those who had miraculously survived that frigid night with nothing more than some numb fingers or a slightly frostbit nose. These survivors would keep the blizzard alive in memory, passed from one generation to the next.

    The other stories haunted his dreams, made him question the folly of man; not just himself, but man in general. This great age in which he lived—the age of Go West, Young Man, the age of industry with enormous factories bellowing up volcanos of black smoke and creating rivers of sludge, of railroads trampling the landscape; new inventions like telegraphs and telephones and typewriters and electric light and steam engines—it had brainwashed them all into thinking there was nothing that man couldn’t conquer or bend to his will.

Even the weather itself.

Death toll not exaggerated, he telegraphed to Rosewater. Hard to get exact number. Many still missing.

Good work so far, Rosewater telegraphed in reply. Then one day, this: Great interest from all but stories starting to blur. Need new angle.

Gavin’s desire to bear witness did not abate; he still sought the tragedies, he wrote them all down: Olaf Gustoffsen, aged ten, ran back to the schoolhouse after his teacher dismissed school to retrieve a book; found frozen to death the next morning. Maria Jorgensen, aged thirteen, and her sister Helga, expired on the prairie, huddled together, big sister with her arm wrapped about her younger sibling. But he was a newspaperman to his very bones, and he understood Rosewater’s request. There was no way to spin “cute” out of this tragedy, but he did need to find some new angle to keep the story alive—and the papers selling.