The Children's Blizzard(3)

Raina longed to join her pupils; it was only last year she was a pupil herself in her home district, sitting with her friends on a tree stump during recess and chatting about dress patterns and boys, occasionally allowing her dignity to fall off her like a discarded shawl to play tag with the younger students. She still felt stiff and awkward sitting alone at her desk inside while her pupils played. She should go outside and take in the fresh air herself; after the stifling nightmare of this last week, she needed it. But she felt like an intruder as the children played their games; they would grow shy whenever she ventured outside, afraid to be themselves in front of the schoolteacher.

Raina also had a headache, a throbbing at the base of her neck, radiating up to the top of her head, already aching from the heavy pile of her braids. She began to restlessly walk about the room, wishing it were spring already, planting time, and school was out, and she was back home. Away from Anette’s hungry, sad eyes.

    Away from him.



* * *



—

SUMMER WAS WHEN THEY MET. Summer, with the haze of the fires still hanging in the air so that nerves were tense, tingling—anticipating. She was wearing her first dress with a skirt that brushed the ground; her mother had made it for her the week before. She felt like she was playing dress-up, with her hair piled heavily on top of her head in an elaborate twist instead of the usual braided bunch at the base of her neck or streaming down her back. She pinched her wrist, trying to stop the giggles that bubbled up on their own; she felt like an imposter. Absurd.

It was summer, and Nebraska homesteaders were hopeful that this year, unlike the year before, and the year before, and the year before that, the crops would come to fruition before twisters, grasshoppers, fire, or hailstorms decimated them. Or lack of rain withered them.

Summer, and the prairie flowers that Raina loved were in bloom—not even the fires could kill them, they defiantly sprang back up from the scorched earth—and when he came in the house clutching a bouquet of them, prairie wild roses, black-eyed Susans, purple larkspur, she’d gasped and almost clapped her hands.

“Teacher!”

Raina jumped behind her desk, her heart racing; Fredrik Halvorsan was standing before her, panting.

“Come look! Look in the sky, Teacher!”

Raina shivered—the wind must have picked up, for it was noticeably colder than it had been earlier in the day—and followed him outside.



* * *



—

    ANETTE PEDERSEN HAD RACED OFF with Fredrik the moment Teacher released them. It was only when she was sitting still that her legs cramped up and the weariness overcame her, that bone-drenched weariness that was a constant companion ever since she came to the Pedersens.

And it was only when she ran that she felt joy. Well—then, and whenever Fredrik Halvorsan sidled up to her, told her a funny joke, helped her with that foreign language that was so clumsy on her tongue.

Teacher tried to help her learn; it was fortunate, she said, that they lived in the same house! But even when she said that, Anette saw in Teacher’s eyes a guarded confusion. And she wondered how anyone could use the word fortunate to describe the Pedersen household.

“We go to a visit,” Anette’s mother had said that summer day a year and a half ago, when she told Anette to pack her scant belongings—some petticoats, two faded dresses that were almost too small, two pairs of mended stockings, a coat, mittens, and her rag doll—and climb up on the wagon. Ten years old at the time, Anette couldn’t help but notice that her four half-brothers did not pack their belongings; couldn’t help but notice that her stepfather laughed tauntingly at her and her mother as they rode out of the yard, away from the tiny dugout.

Anette’s mother didn’t say a word the entire journey, not even when they stopped to give the horses a rest and eat their lunch, and neither did Anette. She felt she’d done something wrong. Had she looked at her stepfather that certain way he accused her of—“like a damn idiot,” he would say whenever he caught her staring off into space, her mouth half-open? Had she jumped away from him too abruptly when he crept near? Had she angered her mother somehow, either by not taking good enough care of her younger brothers, or simply by being herself, ugly Anette, pockmarked Anette, the rough craters from the smallpox still too visible across her high cheekbones?

    She didn’t know, she didn’t dare ask, and before it was dark she found herself in a strange house, bigger than the dugout—a real house made of wood, with two stories—with her carpetbag on the floor next to her.

“I go now. Be good, don’t make trouble. That’s all I can give you,” her mother said, before she left the house without even touching her daughter in farewell and climbed back up on the wagon, turning the horses around and leaving Anette with her new family—Mother Pedersen, small and beautiful, too beautiful for Anette to even understand; she’d only seen such pink and gold and dimpled beauty once, on a postcard. On a person, it was a beauty almost too vivid to bear; Anette wanted to shade her eyes or look away. But she didn’t dare; she knew instinctively that this would be considered an affront. Mother Pedersen also had the most bountiful hair Anette had ever seen, thick and golden, so many braids in an intricate twist that flattered her pretty, but unsmiling, face.

Father Pedersen was big and handsome with little streaks of grey in his hair and crinkly lines at the corners of his eyes that made him look slightly puzzled, yet kind. And three little Pedersens crawled about, already tugging on Anette’s skirt. “You’re Anette Pedersen now,” Mother Pedersen informed her as she marched her up to her “room”—a faded curtain divided the unfinished upstairs into two sections with a bed, a washstand, and a rush rug on each side. No window, no tar paper for insulation in winter, and not even the warmth from a stove pipe, which vented straight out from the kitchen, not the roof.