The Children's Blizzard(61)

    “She lives here, as do I,” Raina patiently explained to the bewildered Gavin. “We board. I’m the teacher, so I have to board out. I don’t live in this district. Anette was—is—somewhat of a hired girl.”

“I go to her,” Mrs. Pedersen said abruptly, and left the room. Raina, watching her, shook her head; her expression was bemused.

“She is trying,” Raina murmured, and Gavin didn’t know what or who she meant.

“I don’t quite—I would like to write about this, with your permission. You see”—and an idea took shape in his mind. That word that Mr. Pedersen had used—heroine—struck him as useful. Extremely useful—of course! There had to be heroes and heroines among all the tragedy; stories of triumph, stories to keep readers interested instead of tuning out the endless misery. Stories to sell papers. Gavin knew the public; while they liked to read about heroes, the appeal of a heroine—a young, pretty woman like Raina who had, against all odds, saved the lives of her pupils—was far greater. And then there was the child fighting for her life—that was a story people could get behind, too. A story of hope; someone they would invest in and keep buying papers to read about. It really was astonishing, this girl’s story—a child who had been abandoned by her own mother only to be saved by the selfless act of her only friend in the world, a young, innocent boy—

It wasn’t a story, it was a goddamn gold mine. Pulitzer would surely take notice of this back East.

“Are all schoolteachers out here like you?” he asked Raina.

“Like me? We all have to have a certificate, yes, after an examination.”

“No, no.” Gavin was too excited now to remember to be a gentleman and that he was a guest in this house. He heaved himself out of the small wooden chair he was in—it creaked dangerously—and began to pace the room. “I mean, are they all girls like you? Pretty? I always thought teachers were men, for some reason. That’s how it was back East.”

    “We can’t convince many eastern teachers to come out here, you know,” Gunner explained. “We take care of our own, we school our own.”

“But you’re so young!” He couldn’t help himself, even though the girl looked very uncomfortable. “Barely a child yourself and look at you, you saved—how many?—other children!”

“Ten. Eleven, if you count Tor but he helped me, you see—”

Gavin didn’t care about Tor.

“Ten children! Ten saved! This is wonderful! I want to know everything. The boss’ll eat it up!” Gavin couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this before. “There must be others like you—do you know any other teachers?”

Raina rose, trembling; her face was scarlet, her eyes downcast and ashamed. Then she sank back down to the chair and hid her face in her hands.

“Yes,” she said, raising her head, and worry lines crisscrossed her forehead. “Yes, I know another schoolteacher.”

But that’s all she would say about it; he couldn’t get the story out of her. It didn’t matter, there would surely be others and he would find them. Meanwhile, there was the little girl in the room, suffering from something, no one had told him what.

“Can I see her?” He pointed toward the bedroom. Raina nodded wearily, then she led him to the threshold. She acted reluctant to cross it.

    The room was too crowded with a suite of fancy furniture—brass bedstead, carved mahogany dresser, horsehair-covered chair. Furniture like this was completely out of place on the plains; it belonged in a city. On either side of the bed were the doctor and Mrs. Pedersen. The room was hot, it smelled of sickness—vomit, excrement, the sour smell of fever. In the middle of the bed lay a tiny form, covered by blankets. She was propped up on two pillows, both arms over the coverlet. Her left arm ended in a stump that looked freshly rendered; the bandage had brownish stains on it.

The tiny form was moaning, and Gavin didn’t dare go too close; he feared catching whatever fever gripped her in its vise. Doc saw his fear and shook his head.

“No, it’s the infection, from the amputation. It’s not catching.”

“This is the little girl? The one who was covered by the boy’s clothes?”

Doc nodded.

Gavin crept closer.

The little face was red, although the lips were white. Sweat glistened on her brow, her eyes were shut but swollen. Her cheeks were pockmarked, her jaw was heavy, her eyebrows thick. Beneath the sheen of sweat, he perceived that her hair was a mousy brown color.

But Gavin knew, the moment he saw her, that here she was. In the midst of misery, in a tiny house full of wary people, he had found her; the girl he would save—and who would save him, too, from his previous self.

Gavin Woodson had found his maiden of the prairie.





CHAPTER 29


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HOW DO YOU GROW OLD on the prairie?

You become bent with work, you watch your crops fail and succeed and fail again. You marry, you have children, they have children. There are celebrations—marriages, births, good crops, new roofs. There is grief. Death, always that shadow stalking the celebrations, making them even more necessary, more desperately gay—the music louder, the dancing faster, the laughter brighter, anything to ignore its presence. You learn to parcel out your heart, cautiously, because of the certainty that one day, a part of it will be wrenched from you forever. You grow older, quieter, and stern because of this caution. But you still survive, you do the work, you see your children go off on their own to repeat the cycle, but maybe this time, the results will be different—abundant years, better crops, maybe one of their children finds a way to own an even bigger piece of land, maybe buy a new threshing machine. Maybe build a house with five rooms, not three. Fulfill the promise that lured you here in the first place.