The Children's Blizzard(9)

    Gerda would know what to do, Raina was sure of it.

But Gerda was far, far away.





DAKOTA TERRITORY,

EARLY AFTERNOON,

JANUARY 12, 1888





CHAPTER 4


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“LET’S GO!”

Gerda shouted at Tiny Svenson; she cupped her hands around her mouth so that her voice might carry through the howling wind. She giggled, grabbed both girls by the shoulders, and pulled them toward her, then settled down in the sleigh, ready for the journey.

Tiny waved a gloved hand at her—she could barely see it through the snow—and tightened the horse’s bridle. His prize bay horse, the horse she teased that he loved even more than he loved her. Then he climbed back into the sleigh and wound the reins around his wrists; the wind was pummeling the sleigh so that it swayed back and forth like a small boat on a turbulent ocean. “Hang on,” Tiny shouted at the three figures next to him, already shivering. The two little girls, Minna and Ingrid Nillssen, shuddered with cold; Gerda was vibrating with excitement.

She had planned it all this morning. The house where Gerda boarded as the district’s schoolteacher would be blissfully free from the hovering presence of the Andersons. They were an elderly couple, one of the first homesteaders in this part of southeastern Dakota Territory not too far from Yankton, and they worried and fretted over Gerda more than her parents ever had. They did not like the fact that Tiny—not a thing like his name, a great, milk-fed oaf of a lad—had taken to courting the schoolmarm, despite the fact that both were of marriageable age. The Andersons had vowed to Gerda’s parents that they would safeguard her virtue like two bulldogs, and they had succeeded, limiting Tiny’s visits to a mere fifteen minutes after church, always supervised, Pa Anderson sitting in disapproval in the parlor or on the front porch, puffing on his pipe, short, throat-clearing puffs whenever he felt conversation was lagging or there were too many moony looks flying between the two young people.

    But Pa and Ma Anderson were away today—the weather had been so nice and warm this morning, they declared that they would be in Yankton all day, laying in supplies. Ma Anderson even said she would look for a nice fabric, maybe lawn, so she could make Gerda a spring dress, something to look forward to during the endless prairie winter. And Gerda had turned her head to hide her joy at the opportunity before her. An opportunity that Gerda had revealed to Tiny when he arrived to take Gerda, along with the two little Nillssen girls who lived on the next farm, to school that morning. The Andersons allowed him this because of the presence of Gerda’s pupils. And because their farm was the farthest away from the schoolhouse, about five miles, and Pa Anderson couldn’t spare the time away from the farm. The Andersons had no son to help out; they had no children at all.

    “I’ll dismiss school early,” Gerda whispered that morning into Tiny’s red ear, so that the little girls wouldn’t hear. “Pick me up at lunch; we’ll have the rest of the afternoon to ourselves. We can play house!” For this was Gerda’s latest weapon in the fight to keep Tiny from going west.

He wanted to be a cowboy, did Tiny; he devoured dime novels about them. Wild Bill Hickok was his favorite. Tiny despised homesteading, longing instead for an open range that didn’t really exist any longer, except maybe farther west in Montana or Wyoming. He’d even trained the little bay to cut, like a cow pony; he had sent away last winter for an authentic cowboy hat from a mail order catalog. Gerda had to admit he looked quite dashing in it.

Tiny also harbored a desire to fight Indians, always moaning to her that he’d missed his only chance. Custer had been massacred years ago, when she and Tiny were just children. Tiny revered the man he looked at as a martyr to the point of trying to grow a long, droopy mustache like the one in the photographs. But at this, he could not succeed; Gerda had learned not to tease him about the patchy, fuzzy hair he insisted was soon to be a luxurious mustache.

Gerda tried to point out that most of the Indians had already been defeated, at least the ones in Dakota; Yankton was bordered to the west and north by the Great Sioux Reservation. She’d actually been asked to teach at a school for Indian children, like the one back in Genoa, Nebraska, not far from her family’s homestead. Once, when she was younger, Papa had taken her and Raina to visit the new Indian school—it was about half a day’s drive from their farm, and he thought it would be interesting to see. The Olsens had come to Nebraska from eastern Minnesota, where the family had first immigrated in 1876, the year of Custer’s last stand. They hadn’t had much dealing with Indians, beyond seeing them sometimes in town, peddling beautifully made baskets that could hold water—Mama marveled at the skill. And when Papa plowed, she and Raina often found finely carved arrowheads in the fields. But an entire school full of little Indian children in their clothes of buckskin and beads—Gerda remembered being so excited about it, she couldn’t sleep the night before.

    But it hadn’t turned out the way she thought it would. The children weren’t wearing their colorful beaded Indian costumes, after all. They were clad in somber uniforms, grey coat and pants for the boys, white homespun dresses for the girls. All the boys had their shining black hair cut short in a bowl shape; the girls wore their hair in severe braids devoid of pretty touches like feathers or beads. And none of them smiled at Gerda or Raina when the sisters stood at the back of the room with some other curious folks, watching the children seated at their desks, tonelessly chanting the alphabet. In fact, some of the littler ones were crying; one in particular, a tiny doll-like girl, looked so sad with her enormous brown eyes welling up with tears as she chewed the end of one of her braids, her birdlike shoulders heaving, that Gerda wanted to take her home with them.