The Children's Blizzard(92)

I don’t know, but I feel it in my bones—which are so sharp now, I don’t seem to need as much food as I used to—that Mama and Papa are gone by now. It seems likely. I hope they were at peace, and happy, in the twilight of their lives. I know they were together, and that is a blessing. I can’t imagine the two of them ever parting. I know Mama wasn’t always happy, I know she didn’t want to leave Norway. Have you ever thought about that—how it was always the men who left, taking the women with them? I never once heard of a woman leaving the old country on her own accord. It was the men who had to have more. I saw that in Montana, when I was there. No woman wanted to mine for silver. There were smart women who took advantage of the men who did, however. Many were wanton women, but I did not see them that way (although there were many temperance groups and society women who did, mercy!). I saw them as women smarter than anyone else, who knew what men wanted and found a way to make a living providing it. I have shocked you, haven’t I, dearest baby sister! Do not worry, I myself am not a wanton woman.

     Sometimes I wonder if I am a woman at all. Sometimes I think I am just a wraith. Roaming this earth until one day, I will stop.

Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia. I haven’t forgotten them, I still say their names every night before I lay down wherever I happen to be.

I left Montana. For no real reason other than I felt like wandering again. I knew too many people in Montana and it has started to trouble me, to be in the company of others. So I am starting over again, in Idaho. They have mountains in Idaho, too. I don’t think I shall ever come down from the mountains.

Do you ever think how odd it is that we both left home? Just when I said it’s what men do, it struck me that we did, too. Two women, two sisters. Because when I think about us, and the others our age, born homesteaders, born of parents who chose to leave somewhere, I think that most of us really didn’t have a choice. That by leaving all they’d known on their own accord, our parents ended up enslaving their children to the land, just so they could have a piece of paper saying that they possessed it. Most of our generation are still there, I am certain. I used to think of the boys we knew, how they had no imagination, they were too content to stay. But now I think it was so unfair to them. They had no choice; their parents lived and died to prove the land, and they left it to their children to continue the cycle. What could those boys do, other than stay there and try?

     But you and I got out. It still mystifies me. It was the storm, of course—it blew us out of there, in a way. You because you did the right thing; me, because I didn’t.

I don’t know what you are doing now, Raina. I move around too much to ever get a letter back, and I have little hope that my previous letter got to you. I have even less hope that this one will. I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to you finally. Oh, don’t worry, I am not dying!

I just feel less and less of this world somehow.

Maybe we will meet again, dear sister. But I don’t think we will. You wouldn’t recognize me anyway. You would pass me on the street. No, you would look at me and ask yourself, “Who is that poor excuse of a woman? That ghost in tattered clothing, stringy grey hair, a pain in her heart that makes her press her hand to her chest now and then to ease it?”

Up here in the mountains, higher and higher—maybe I will touch God one of these days, after all!—nobody cares. There are so few people, anyway. And they all have their own versions of hell to contend with.

I do hope you are happy, Raina. You deserve it.

Goodbye from your loving sister,

Gerda





Occasionally, in the years to come, Raina would receive odd gifts in the mail. A packet of eagle’s feathers. A few stones of turquoise. A cowboy hat with silver disks stitched along its brim. Pebbles washed smooth by spring water.

    A yellowed news clipping about a madwoman in the mountains whom no one has ever seen, but who sends presents to the schoolchildren in the nearest town.

The last thing she ever received, no return address like the others, was just a list, scrawled in a weak hand on brown paper, in pencil: Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.

To that list, Raina added in her own precise, schoolteacher’s hand:

Gerda.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD OF 1888—sometimes known as the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard or the Schoolhouse Blizzard—has long been known to me by its name, although I didn’t truly grasp its scope and terror. But when my editor at the time and I were looking for a new idea for a novel, and she mused that it might be interesting to write about children, I replied, “The Children’s Blizzard!” And when she asked what that was, I admitted I didn’t exactly know.

I set off to do the research, and almost immediately, I started to construct a story around it.

For the first time in my career as a historical novelist, I wanted to write about an actual historical event, but invent the people caught up in it. My other books have all been created around real people—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the real Alice in Wonderland, Truman Capote, Mary Pickford, etc. I was looking for a new challenge as a writer, and this subject, so vast with possibility, ignited my imagination. So I stuck to the actual timeline of the blizzard but invented most of the characters, basing many of them on the oral histories of those who remembered the storm and the newspaper articles about it.