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.
Anette nodded. She went to bed that night in the stifling attic. She cried—silently—and couldn’t sleep. When the sun rose, she was summoned by a big cowbell from downstairs and put to work. Washing, fetching water, throwing slop out into the ravine behind the house, tending to the children, sewing—Mother Pedersen looked over her shoulder as she tried to darn a sock, and said something under her breath that Anette couldn’t quite make out—cooking, clearing away.
That night, exhausted, Anette slept.
When school started up for the summer session, before the crops had to be harvested, she was told that she could attend when she wasn’t needed at home. Mother Pedersen gave her a slate and a shiny new lunch bucket but warned her, “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.” Anette ran the mile north carrying the slate and bucket along with a flicker of hope, cradling them carefully, terrified that all three would be snatched from her, or fall to the earth and shatter.
But school hadn’t turned out to be much better than her new home; she couldn’t understand English, her overworked muscles cramped up from sitting at the bench for so long, and sometimes she fell asleep without warning. The other children—twelve assorted Norwegians, Swedes, and Germans—were polite, but they all knew that she was only a hired girl with no family. So they kept their distance.
Except for Fredrik Halvorsan. Who, one day, instead of running around with his brother and the other boys, suddenly peeled off, pulled on Anette’s apron string, and said in Norwegian, “Tag, you’re it!” And Anette ran toward him, she tagged him easily, and he was so astonished—because he prided himself on being the fastest boy in school—that he blurted out, “You’re my friend now,” and he kept that promise. He sat next to her at lunch, they chased each other at recess, sometimes he even raced her home, even though he then had to turn around and run another mile and a half back north to his farm. He was the only good thing in her life, but Anette couldn’t tell him that for fear of inviting too many questions for which she had no answers.
Teacher was also nice to her, when she was allowed to be. Ever since she started boarding at the Pedersens’ this last school term, she had tried to help Anette with English. But Mother Pedersen wouldn’t allow it. “This is not school,” she told the younger woman, as she gave her one of her needling looks so at odds with the china-doll delicacy of her face. “Boundaries must be respected. Anette is mine here.”
Mother Pedersen was always claiming ownership of things, people—even ideas.
Father Pedersen was different. He had tried to be kind to Anette, and to Teacher. But he was outside most of the time with the horses he loved. Anette had learned not to smile too much at him or laugh at his jokes or his stories. Mother Pedersen had a way of looking at her when she did that caused Anette to lose sleep at night, puzzling over it.