“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.
But still she loved Tiny, maybe because he was so different from any other boy she’d known—placid cows, all of them, content to stay put and homestead. As if the imagination that had caused their parents to put an ocean between themselves and all that was familiar had skipped a generation. Tiny was the only boy she’d ever met who didn’t want to stay exactly where he was. So she loved him for this—while trying to dissuade him from it, too. It wasn’t as if she loved homesteading. But she knew there was no place for a woman on a cattle drive or riding with the cavalry.
Oh, Gerda didn’t know exactly what she wanted, other than to do exactly as she pleased! And she wanted—she needed—to begin now, because the good Lord knew that life could be short and brutal—hadn’t she stood graveside for a school chum who died from a bee sting, of all things? Hadn’t her mother’s best friend, Lydia Gunderson, died in childbed, delivering her sixth baby? Didn’t children fall into wells, vanish forever in the tall prairie grass; didn’t young men get kicked in the head by horses, people get bit by rattlers, or suffer unexpected bloody flux or step on rusty nails or fall into open fires? Didn’t entire families get sucked up by tornadoes or perish in flash floods?
Life was hard, and short, and Gerda, at eighteen, lay awake at night sometimes, her mind too full of wanting to sleep. Mostly, she wanted Tiny. She wanted to cook for him, to shine his boots, to scold him for taking too much time with the animals, to make him trim his fingernails, to cut his hair for him, to read to him in front of the fire.
To sleep next to his sturdy body radiating warmth and strength in the depths of a feather bed covered with quilts, bridal quilts made just for her. To reach out to him in the night, bring him as close as it was possible between a husband and wife, only breaths and sighs and whispers apart.
Sometimes, Gerda moaned at night in her narrow bed next to Pa and Ma Anderson’s room; she tossed and turned, burning with a fever, for her emotions, her desires, always had a way of stoking up the furnace of her strong heart, lungs, and blood. She was always ashamed at those moments, ashamed of her sinful desires. And she couldn’t take comfort in the thought that soon they would be absolved through marriage. Because no matter how meaningfully he pressed her hand, Tiny kept talking about going west. Just last Sunday, he’d shown her an illustration of the rocky Colorado mountains that he’d cut out of a newspaper.
“That’s a place where a man can breathe,” he’d exulted. “Where a man can touch God!”
It was always “a man” who figured in Tiny’s dreams and wants. Just one. Solo.
So Gerda had her plans for this unexpected gift of an afternoon. She would let Tiny kiss her today. And she would kiss him back.
She’d written Raina about Tiny, pouring out her frustrations. Raina’s letters in reply, however, weren’t at all like the sunny, understanding letters from Raina of old; they were full of dark thoughts and questions that Gerda could never begin to answer. Poor Raina! She was certainly having a tough time at her first school. Gerda, now in her third year as a teacher, wished she could give her some advice. But Gerda’s teaching career had been uncomplicated, her previous boarding situations uneventful. And now, with the Andersons, she certainly couldn’t complain about anything but their dogged protection; they treated her just like a daughter. Gerda had no advice at all to give to the little sister who had always looked up to her. To tell the truth, she’d tried to warn her parents that Raina might be a little young to board out, despite the fact that she was the same age as Gerda had been. But her parents couldn’t see what Gerda saw, that Raina was too quick to feel—happiness, sadness, it didn’t matter, emotions ran roughshod over her, leaving her gasping in their wake. Gerda’s parents couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see that their younger girl with the dark blond hair was too trusting, that she never saw a reason to look beyond the surface of people’s actions. A smile was enough to convince Raina that someone was kind; a funny story meant that the teller was the most humorous person she’d ever met. Raina’s heart was simply too pliable, too eager to both receive and give.
Gerda had guarded her own heart fiercely from the country bumpkins she’d grown up with, the sons of the stoic Norwegians and Swedes of the community. Until she went to Dakota Territory—her father still didn’t understand why she chose a school so far away from home, a long four-day journey—where she met Tiny.
This afternoon, Tiny had come jingling up to the schoolroom in the sleigh at exactly twelve o’clock, as she’d instructed him to; she was just bundling the children up to go home, having declared it a holiday due to the nice weather. It was easy work; they’d all come to school wearing light jackets or shawls, the heavy woolens airing out at home on the line. By this time of the year, wool was starting to smell briny after so many wearings, having gotten wet and then dried inside at close quarters, over and over again. Every homestead mother took the opportunity of a rare warm day to air winter clothing outdoors.
Gerda was just fastening the last button on little Minna’s sweater when Tiny let out a whoop from the sleigh; he was standing, holding tight to the reins of the little bay as the cloud descended and curtained the sun. She gazed in a stupor as sparks sizzled from the runners of the sleigh and the children squealed at the sight—then she sprang into action.
“Children, make a run for it,” she called out as she quickly doused the fire in the round-bellied stove with a pail of water. “You’d better hurry, it looks like a big one!”
It was the right thing to do, she decided; they were already bundled up and ready to go home, and she’d officially declared school out. There would be no teaching her disappointed pupils if she changed her mind and kept them inside.