The Children's Blizzard(10)

But her father looked at her with such reproach when she asked him if she could keep the little girl, take her home and help her not feel so sad, that Gerda had felt sick with shame. He’d yanked her and Raina by the arms and dragged them out of the school; he pushed them away from the tall building, toward town, where he made them sit on the stoop of a dry goods store when he went to buy some thread for their mother. When he came out, he didn’t have the usual sticks of hard candy; he curtly barked orders for them to get in the wagon so they could begin the journey home.

    He sat silently, holding the reins, for the longest time while Gerda and Raina shared puzzled, worried looks. Normally Papa sang songs from the old country—“Bonden og Kr?ka” was a favorite—or talked through his hopes for the farm while he was driving, even though neither Gerda nor Raina was much help. But they didn’t have to be; he simply liked to hear himself speak to someone other than the chickens—that’s what he always said.

This day he was so quiet, for so long, that Gerda started to chew on her fingernails, and Raina couldn’t hold back her tears, although she let them fall silently down her plump cheeks.

The wagon swayed on the rutty path; the sun was behind them now, so everything looked bathed in a warm, red glow—the tops of the grasses were already a russet hue, but they looked almost ruby in the fading sunlight. Only if you lived for a long time on the prairie did you know the landmarks; a newcomer’s eye would only see mile after mile of barely undulating land, undisturbed by trees or buildings. But Gerda knew that particular clump of purple leadplant meant they only had an hour left to go if they didn’t break a wheel or axle; she recognized the branch where another set of ruts went off to the north as the place where they would stop for the girls to use the bushes if they had to. She wondered if the prairie chickens scurrying across the trail in front of the wagon were the same that had scurried across it on the trip this morning.

Finally, Papa sighed so deeply his shoulders rose nearly to his ears. He pulled on the reins and the oxen ambled to a stop; he tugged on the hand brake and let the animals graze a bit. He peered down at Gerda for so long that she began to quake inside, wondering if she could hide in the tallgrass before he punished her.

    “Those children back there,” he finally said, removing his straw hat to wipe the perspiration along his forehead with his sleeve. “It’s not right. I thought it was when I heard about it. A school where the wildness could be taught out of the child, where they would be taught English, taught to be part of a civilized society—that could only be a good thing. But I don’t know now. It’s hard, you know. Hard to be separated from your family.”

Raina nodded eagerly, but Gerda knew she didn’t understand. Papa was talking about himself, and how he’d left his mother in the old country, his brothers, too. He would never see them again. But he was a big, grown man and Gerda had never realized, until this moment, that a big, grown man could miss anything. Or anyone.

“And they are but little ones,” her father continued, now staring ahead at the prairie, but Gerda knew he wasn’t seeing it—he was seeing his village in Norway, tucked between steep mountains, the likes of which Gerda couldn’t imagine, even though she’d been born there. But she had no memory of the old country other than vague snippets: a snug little bed in a whitewashed attic with a slanting roof; a Christmas dinner with a table full of uncles and aunts and older cousins who teased; her mother crying bitterly when they drove away in a wagon to the sea.

Now Papa was seeing his own mother, so far away—his father had died when he was younger—and the idea of that, of never seeing Papa and Mama again, squeezed her chest until it bruised her heart. “Little ones, taken from their families. Even if they be Indians, it’s not right. And you, miss…” Papa turned to gaze again at Gerda, and she dropped her head, burning with shame, her eyes swimming with tears.

    “Look at me, Gerda.”

Slowly, she raised her face, only to weep even more because Papa was looking at her with the usual love light softening his blue eyes. She hiccupped as she sobbed, and he put his arm about her, pulling her close.

“People aren’t to be treated like possessions. They shouldn’t be bought and sold or contained or corralled. I thought you knew that, Gerda.”

“Oh, Papa, I do! I just—she seemed so sad.”

“Yes, and you wanted to make her feel better and that is a good notion to have. So maybe think about how you can accomplish that another way. Maybe not for this little girl, but others like her. Think about giving, not taking.”

She’d nodded, and they continued the journey home, where Mama wanted to know all about the school. But none of them wanted to talk about it, and she stopped asking with one of her understanding looks.

Gerda had never forgotten what her father had said then, and when she heard of another Indian school, one to be built on a reservation so that the children would live with their parents, she’d applied.

But when she received an invitation to teach, she’d declined. She couldn’t exactly say why—only that it seemed such an enormous leap from the world she knew into a world she didn’t. A world she was more than a little afraid of. So she’d taken up this school, and boarded with the Andersons, and met Tiny—who wanted to go fight an enemy that was already defeated. All you had to do was see that school to know that.