And there would be no pretending with Tiny in the snug little farmhouse, cooking him the meal she’d planned—Ma Anderson had left a plucked and dressed chicken, saying they wouldn’t be home until after dinner. There would be no snuggling together in the big rush rocker. No kisses designed to lasso her cowpoke.
“Go home,” Gerda called gaily over the whine of the wind that was causing some of the students to halt in confusion. They looked at her, questions in their eyes. Homestead children understood weather. Shelter in place—wasn’t that what they were taught to do in a blizzard?
But they were also taught to always obey Teacher.
It wasn’t a blizzard yet, Gerda determined; it was only a startlingly dark cloud with no borders and a fierce wind whipping up the snow already on the ground; not much was falling from the sky. If everyone left now, they’d be home, snug and dry, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. “If you live too far away, stay with a friend who’s nearer. But if you run now, you’ll be fine!” She clapped her hands to make her point, hastily threw on her own shawl and the knitted blue hat with the jaunty pom-pom that Tiny loved, grabbed Minna and Ingrid by the hands, and ran out of the schoolhouse, the door shutting on its own as the wind kicked up something fierce.
Then she leapt into the sleigh with the two girls. Tiny jumped in beside her, and with a shout, he slapped the reins down on the haunches of the bay, and they took off, trying to outrace the storm.
There was a moment, when she turned around to look at the receding backs of her students only to find, to her astonishment, that the snow—suddenly tumbling down from the sky to mix with the snow kicked up from the ground—had already swallowed them up. She almost told Tiny to turn around; maybe she should run after them and bring them back to the schoolhouse, after all.
But then Tiny smiled down at her, and even though the temperature seemed to be plummeting by the heartbeat, and her eyelashes had little drops of ice on the ends weighing them down, she smiled back.
And she laughed as Tiny urged the bay to go faster.
CHAPTER 5
•••••
DON’T EVER LOSE THAT SLATE or that bucket! They cost a dime. A whole dime, do you understand? If you lose them, you can’t go to school anymore. And come right home after. No dawdling.
The words were pounded into Anette’s brain as thoroughly as if Mother Pedersen had taken a hammer to her skull. She never had lost the slate or bucket, and she never had dawdled, and she wouldn’t begin now. She clutched the slate tightly to her chest, beneath her shawl, the bucket in her other hand, and bent into the wind. She couldn’t open her eyes at all against the force of it, the hard pebbles of ice pounding her face. But her feet knew the way—hadn’t she made this trip hundreds of times? All she had to worry about was the ravine at the edge of the farm. But that was a mile away. She just had to run, that was all—run faster than normal to chisel through the wall of wind blowing her backward with every other step.
But Teacher was yelling at her to come back inside—Teacher, who knew how Mother Pedersen was! Who knew that she meant what she said and that if you crossed her, even with a look, she would make your life miserable. Mother Pedersen would act on her threat, that was one thing Anette knew—she didn’t like sending Anette to school at all. She only did it because it was the law or something—maybe because Teacher boarded with them, and so she couldn’t very well keep Anette from attending. But Mother Pedersen never stopped talking about the expense of the slate and the pail and the clothes, and the work she had to do in Anette’s absence.
Anette did wonder why Mother Pedersen was so unhappy. She had everything, to Anette’s hungry eyes. A nice house, handsome children (although the oldest, a little girl very much like her mother, was already showing signs of coveting everything that didn’t come to her). Mother Pedersen was so beautiful, sometimes it devastated Anette to look at her because she then had to go look at herself in the mirror and see her own pockmarked face, heavy eyebrows, square jaw. And Mother Pedersen had Father Pedersen, the nicest man Anette had ever known, so quick to help Anette lift a heavy pot or to open a door for her when she had her arms full of dirty laundry; so eager to make sure Teacher had enough light at night to mark the lessons, determined that she have a small vase of fresh flowers whenever they were blooming. His eyes—soft, brown—seemed to understand everything you could ever want to tell him, before you even opened your mouth. And he was just as sweet to Mother Pedersen, too—he always made sure she had pretty fabric to make clothes for herself. Why, once, he even rode all the way to Omaha to find fabric in the exact same shade of blue—almost as blue as a cornflower—of her eyes! If Anette ever had anyone like that all to her own—because she knew that Father Pedersen’s kindness to her was only borrowed, as everything in her life was borrowed, her clothes, the roof over her head, any attention that was paid to her, good and bad—she would never be sad or angry.
But Mother Pedersen was both; she sometimes would stop what she was doing and sit down and cry, so fiercely it looked like her face might split in two while her narrow shoulders sliced through the air in sharp upward thrusts. And her anger! As much a part of her as her bright flaxen hair that she took such care of, her fury was like a harsh, metallic thread woven into her perfectly fitted dresses. You followed the glint of it throughout the house as she darted from bedroom to kitchen to parlor, only staying in one place when she concentrated on baking intricate, dainty pastries that were so light and airy they didn’t seem to belong on the prairie. Their very beauty made Anette shy about eating them—not that she was often offered any. But when she did eat them, she was always disappointed; as sweet as they were, they never did fill her up.
Mother and Father Pedersen rarely visited the second floor. Mother Pedersen left clean linens at the bottom step of the crude stairs every week, but it was the job of Teacher and Anette to make the beds, empty the slop jugs, sweep and dust what little there was to dust. The rest of the house was nicely furnished, at least in Anette’s opinion, since her old home—and funny how she now thought of it that way—had been sparse, with little furniture, no rugs, a dirt floor. But the upstairs, where the two boarders slept, was just the two bedsteads separated by a curtain. No pictures. The only decoration was the flowers that Father Pedersen brought Teacher.
But one night last week, Anette had awoken to sounds that were unfamiliar enough to pull her from her exhausted sleep; it had been laundry day but so cold that the water pump froze outside, so Anette had been forced to carry shovels full of snow inside instead, where they melted in a big tub by the stove. When she awoke, her arms and shoulders still ached so much that she couldn’t move them right away, so she merely lay still, listening.
First she heard Teacher murmuring something—was she talking in her sleep? But then Anette heard more murmurs. Different murmurs. A voice that didn’t belong—