The Children's Blizzard(60)

“Miss Olsen, Mrs. Pedersen,” Doc Eriksen introduced the two women, “this is Mr. Woodson. He’s a newspaperman, come all the way from Omaha to report on the storm.”

The girl raised an eyebrow, looked him up and down skeptically.

“Miss Olsen is the schoolteacher hereabouts,” Doc Eriksen explained, gesturing to the younger woman.

    Gavin was startled; this was a schoolteacher? He’d taken her to be a pupil, she was so young. She couldn’t be much older than the Halvorsan boy he’d just seen.

“Miss,” Gavin said, removing his hat, and for some reason this struck the young woman as funny; she smiled, relaxed, and let him in.

“How is the little girl today?” Doc asked anxiously as he removed his coat and scarf and gloves with lightning speed, not pausing to hear the answer as he rushed toward a back bedroom on the other side of the house.

Miss Olsen’s face darkened; worry creased her smooth forehead. “The same.”

Mrs. Pedersen took Gavin’s coat and woolens, sniffed them without embarrassment, then shook her head. She turned and darted away with them in her arms, putting them in a little closet of a room outside the kitchen. Then she came back with a proper smile and welcome.

“Welcome to my home. My husband is out with the horses. Please come in, won’t you? I’m afraid I don’t have anything proper to offer you but if you don’t mind plain coffee cake, I can give you that.” She said it so precisely and prettily, Gavin was startled. Her English was halting but understandable. This was a city girl, and Gavin knew city girls. This was a woman used to entertaining in her own parlor, holding musicales or teas. A woman accustomed to the company of females, because a speech like this was the kind of thing a woman said to impress other women, not men.

Gavin nodded, and she dashed off to slice him a piece of the cake; he sat down with it at the kitchen table—he glimpsed a tiny parlor of sorts, but it seemed to be occupied by three small children all staring at him as if he had descended from the heavens on a ladder made of candy—then Mrs. Pedersen started chattering in Norwegian, a rush of words that Miss Olsen patiently translated.

    “I’m sorry, you’ll excuse me. Everything is a mess but it doesn’t matter because of Anette. I need to go to her now, Raina will keep you company. My husband is perfectly useless except with horses.” Mrs. Pedersen said these last words with such forthrightness, and Miss Olsen translated them with equal directness, that Gavin almost swallowed a bite of cake whole. While his sample size was small, he had yet to hear a Norwegian speak this way about a spouse.

Raina, too, seemed suddenly uncomfortable by the statement she’d just translated; she sat with downcast eyes while Gavin pulled out his pencil and paper. Then she looked at him with interest. “You’re from Omaha? Oh, such a big city! And you write for the paper? You get to see your words in print?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered, amused. Women weren’t generally impressed by what he did for a living, especially not the women of Omaha.

“It must be such an honor, to do that job. You must be a very respected man.”

Gavin stifled a sudden cough.

“Well, yes, perhaps—so tell me, Miss Olsen, you are a schoolteacher? How old are you, if you don’t mind? You look so young. And what did you do during the blizzard, then? When it struck? Tell me everything.”

“I’m sixteen,” Raina said, blushing again. “I just did my job.”

“That’s not true. She’s a heroine,” another voice interrupted, and Gavin looked up. A tall man, handsome, not as weathered and bent as the other Norskis he’d encountered, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He had a bridle in his hand. So this must be the useless husband.

    Raina stared at her hands folded in her lap; she did not look pleased or flattered. The man continued, in a truly awkward fashion; even Gavin sensed that he was putting his foot in it somehow, but neither Raina nor the wife—who kept darting in and out of the kitchen fetching things for Doc Eriksen—appeared to afford him any stature.

“This pretty young woman here, she got her pupils to safety. She tied them all together with their aprons, can you imagine? And she got them all to the Halvorsans’ in the storm.”

“Not all,” Raina said softly. “And Tor helped.”

“Ja, ja, the boy helped. And poor Anette”—Mr. Pedersen nodded toward the bedroom—“she and Fredrik ran off toward home instead.”

“I couldn’t stop them,” Raina said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “I tried. I couldn’t stop them. Anette felt—”

“Anette came home because of me,” Mrs. Pedersen, her arms full of linen, chimed in. “She knew I would be angry if she didn’t come home to do her chores. It is my fault that she is maimed for life.”

“Anette is your child?” Gavin was puzzled; none of these people really seemed related to one another. He couldn’t explain it other than they seemed to treat each other warily, as if they were all on edge. None of the loving affection or long-suffering hatred that springs up between people who share a name or blood.

“No, no, she’s just a girl, you know—” Mrs. Pedersen replied, but was evidently frustrated by her lack of English.

“Her mother abandoned her,” Gunner said.