The Children's Blizzard(76)

Placing her man-sized boots into the tracks she’d made on the way out, she continued to walk toward home.





CHAPTER 35


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BY THE TIME SPRING ARRIVED on the prairie, with the Chinook winds sweeping over snow-smothered plains, snaking along the frozen creeks and up the sandhills, rattling houses anew, it was the melting that people worried about. And indeed, that year there was massive flooding, entire towns afloat, creeks rushing over their banks and turning soddies into muddy memories. But that was part of a prairie spring, everyone was prepared for it. After the snow came the floods, then the jolting dry, the spring fires, the summer and the grasshoppers and then the fall fires…it went on and on. It was simply what happened.

By the end of spring, life had, for the most part, returned to normal. The dead were buried. There were always dead after a prairie winter; babies who couldn’t survive, the elderly. The weak were ripe for the picking in the depths of the prairie winter.

This year, there were just more healthy people lost. And too many children.

More empty places at tables, fewer hands to try to work the fields after the floods finally abated. Schools emptied out anyway in the spring, so the surviving children could help with the planting. By then, they’d all gotten used to the empty desks.

    To be sure, when the snows melted, bodies were found, and there was a fresh round of grief, but it was muted. These bodies had already been mourned by the practical souls of the plains. No one still held out hope that a lost loved one was simply waiting for a bout of good weather to return home after sheltering in some stranger’s house. So more funerals, more burnt cork to blacken the coffin, but at least now the ground was softer, the digging easier, everything sped up so they could get back to what was important, what was life—the spring planting.

At the few celebrations that spring—a wedding here, a christening there, church when people could be spared from the fields—it was noted, ruefully, how many incomplete people were there. Friends and relations missing ears, wearing hats pulled down low to cover up the raw wound. Grotesque holes where once there was a nose. Missing digits abounded; it was almost, but not quite, rare to see someone with ten fingers or ten toes, they joked. They grew used to wooden hands, like the one Anette Pedersen sported proudly.

To wooden boots, like the one that Gerda Olsen stomped about on, miserably.

But those who experienced the storm would never forget it; they would pass the stories down from one generation to the next, and they wouldn’t embellish them because they didn’t need to. And embellishing was not their way regardless.

Life must go on.

    But many lives had irrevocably changed. Some for the better.

Most not.



* * *



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THE HALVORSAN FARM continued to eke out an existence. Tor did not go back to school, although he was missed. Raina went out to the house one day before the spring term was over. She needed to talk to him, to see for herself how the family was doing—she couldn’t quite explain why. It was part of her general leavetaking, she supposed; she felt a compulsion to wrap things up before journeying back to her family and all that awaited her there—most important, Gerda.

But she wanted to see Tor and Mrs. Halvorsan, she wanted one last chance to say how sorry she was for their losses. She no longer felt responsible for Fredrik’s fate, but she did feel, keenly, the family’s grief because she had been witness to its inception, the first oozing cut of it.

When she walked to their house one warm spring day, after letting the children out—and smiling to see little Rosa being fought over as to which big boy would carry her home because she was still using a crutch—once again Raina marveled at how short a distance their house was from the schoolhouse. You could make out the buildings, the well, even the clothesline from the steps of the schoolhouse. It was a walk of about fifteen minutes.

Yet it had been a lifetime that day in January.

Mrs. Halvorsan was out hanging clothes when she saw Raina coming; the good lady immediately ran into the house but Raina smiled; she knew women, she knew there would be a plate of cookies or a slice of coffee cake, warmed up, waiting for her, with a cup of tea. It was inconceivable to allow a visitor inside your house without food to welcome her.

    By the time Raina knocked on the door, carefully scraping the spring mud from her boots, Mrs. Halvorsan had smoothed her hair and put on a clean apron. She let Raina inside with a shy smile—that shy smile most prairie women had upon greeting guests, especially after a long winter, because they were so unused to company. By the end of summer, people would be freer with their smiles, their laughter. But the isolating, demoralizing winter was still too recent.

“Good, good, Miss Olsen, it is good of you to come! You have been on our minds!”

“I have?” Raina laughed, shook off her cloak, took the proffered seat at the kitchen table, sipped some tea. Two little Halvorsans—one looking so like Fredrik that her heart seized, just for a moment—were chasing each other about the kitchen but all it took was for Mrs. Halvorsan to glance at them once and say, “It is the Teacher!” and they quieted down.

“They will be at school next term,” Mrs. Halvorsan said proudly. “So you can teach them!”

“That was one reason I wanted to visit,” Raina said, shifting uncomfortably in the narrow ladder-backed chair. “I won’t be back next term. I’ve given my notice.”