All except for Anette. Anette stood still, even when Fredrik shouted at her to run. She chewed her lip and she shook her head. She would not move. Her wary pale blue eyes that saw everything that went on in the house with an intelligence that shocked Raina, yet always looked so confused and slow here in the schoolhouse, were turbulent. The little girl kept looking out the window, then over at the cloakroom, then back to the window, which continued to shake and rattle, as did the entire schoolhouse. At one point a gust hit it so assuredly that it seemed as if the two-by-fours—such a proud sight on the treeless prairie, signaling an investment by the homesteaders for they had to be brought in by train—might lift off the foundation.
Raina wished for a soddie all of a sudden, that symbol of poverty that yet was so much more sturdy, insulated, than these store-bought and tar-papered wooden planks. A soddie wouldn’t blow over in a blizzard. A soddie, snug to the earth—made out of the earth itself, walls that were stacked mud and roofs that were strips of sod—was warmer.
But a soddie was a signal that a community was still transient, not permanent. And the homesteaders near Newman Grove were too proud for that. So this schoolhouse, while it looked fancier than the surrounding farmhouses, was not as warm nor as sturdy, because it was merely a place for children to spend whatever meager time they were not forced to spend working at home.
Raina clapped her hands, both to keep warm and to inspire the children to continue at their game, as they’d fallen silent once more, as if mesmerized by the howling wind. She consulted her watch, pinned neatly to the breast of her calico dress; it was one forty-five. Almost forty-five minutes since the blizzard had started. And still not a sign of rescue.
But he would come. She knew it.
“You are the most important thing to me in the world,” he’d said last week, in those stolen moments they clung to whenever his wife—in all her golden-haired glory, so bright, so fierce, it was like looking at the sun itself, only no warmth emanated from her—had her back turned. Flying about the small two-story house like a fury, her hair in those elaborate coils, it must have taken her an extra hour each morning to arrange it so. Her vanity on display.
“You are the light, she is the dark,” he’d whispered. He wrote it on a scrap of paper and handed it to Raina once. When they believed she wasn’t looking.
He would rescue her.
But she needed an affirmation all the same. She whirled around and asked, “Anette…”
The girl was gone. She wasn’t at the desk, nor was she running around with the others.
Then a blast of cold air froze everyone in their tracks; Raina dashed to the cloakroom. Anette’s pail was gone, and there was fresh snow inside the door, which wasn’t quite closed; the wind was too fierce.
“Anette!” Raina opened the door, gasped, shrank back from the howling wind, the snow as hard as pebbles against her bare skin and inadequate dress. She grit her teeth, tried to open her eyes, which had shut against the assaulting snow; she peered out, caught a glimpse of a red shawl, Anette’s shawl, before it was swallowed up in the whirling, blinding void.
“Anette!”
What should she do? Run after the girl? But what about the others, standing still, no longer at play, confusion and fear on every face?
Oh, Gerda! Gerda would know. Gerda would do the right thing, the smart thing. But Gerda wasn’t here. Raina felt the weight of her responsibilities fall across her shoulders like an oxbow, and she stifled a cry. It wasn’t fair, she was so small, she shouldn’t have left home in the first place, she was too young—both for the dangerous games at the Pedersen home and for this. Children—some too young to do anything but cry for their mothers—in her care. When most of the time she felt unable to care for even the hardiest baby chick. It was only last year she was in braids! And now here she was, in a quaking, barely insulated schoolhouse with no fuel. And one of those children—the one most dear—running out into this storm that was unlike any other.
Gerda would know what to do, Raina was sure of it.
But Gerda was far, far away.
DAKOTA TERRITORY,
EARLY AFTERNOON,
JANUARY 12, 1888
CHAPTER 4
•••••
“LET’S GO!”
Gerda shouted at Tiny Svenson; she cupped her hands around her mouth so that her voice might carry through the howling wind. She giggled, grabbed both girls by the shoulders, and pulled them toward her, then settled down in the sleigh, ready for the journey.
Tiny waved a gloved hand at her—she could barely see it through the snow—and tightened the horse’s bridle. His prize bay horse, the horse she teased that he loved even more than he loved her. Then he climbed back into the sleigh and wound the reins around his wrists; the wind was pummeling the sleigh so that it swayed back and forth like a small boat on a turbulent ocean. “Hang on,” Tiny shouted at the three figures next to him, already shivering. The two little girls, Minna and Ingrid Nillssen, shuddered with cold; Gerda was vibrating with excitement.
She had planned it all this morning. The house where Gerda boarded as the district’s schoolteacher would be blissfully free from the hovering presence of the Andersons. They were an elderly couple, one of the first homesteaders in this part of southeastern Dakota Territory not too far from Yankton, and they worried and fretted over Gerda more than her parents ever had. They did not like the fact that Tiny—not a thing like his name, a great, milk-fed oaf of a lad—had taken to courting the schoolmarm, despite the fact that both were of marriageable age. The Andersons had vowed to Gerda’s parents that they would safeguard her virtue like two bulldogs, and they had succeeded, limiting Tiny’s visits to a mere fifteen minutes after church, always supervised, Pa Anderson sitting in disapproval in the parlor or on the front porch, puffing on his pipe, short, throat-clearing puffs whenever he felt conversation was lagging or there were too many moony looks flying between the two young people.
But Pa and Ma Anderson were away today—the weather had been so nice and warm this morning, they declared that they would be in Yankton all day, laying in supplies. Ma Anderson even said she would look for a nice fabric, maybe lawn, so she could make Gerda a spring dress, something to look forward to during the endless prairie winter. And Gerda had turned her head to hide her joy at the opportunity before her. An opportunity that Gerda had revealed to Tiny when he arrived to take Gerda, along with the two little Nillssen girls who lived on the next farm, to school that morning. The Andersons allowed him this because of the presence of Gerda’s pupils. And because their farm was the farthest away from the schoolhouse, about five miles, and Pa Anderson couldn’t spare the time away from the farm. The Andersons had no son to help out; they had no children at all.