There was a low hooting sound, an owl, off somewhere. Dropping her gaze from the illuminated sky, Anna searched for it but saw nothing but the tundra encircling her. She was the very middle, the eye. The frigid, frosty land stretched in all directions, and it was beautiful—graceful, even. Fingers of dried tallgrass broke through the snow and waved gently; there were little dips and swales, like on a cake gaily frosted. The excited whisper of loose snow dancing in the distance. The feeling of being the only person in the world—Anna loved that feeling, and she wondered why she’d never thought of looking for it out here.
My God, but the prairie is beautiful, she thought. One day I, too, might disappear in it.
Placing her man-sized boots into the tracks she’d made on the way out, she continued to walk toward home.
CHAPTER 35
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BY THE TIME SPRING ARRIVED on the prairie, with the Chinook winds sweeping over snow-smothered plains, snaking along the frozen creeks and up the sandhills, rattling houses anew, it was the melting that people worried about. And indeed, that year there was massive flooding, entire towns afloat, creeks rushing over their banks and turning soddies into muddy memories. But that was part of a prairie spring, everyone was prepared for it. After the snow came the floods, then the jolting dry, the spring fires, the summer and the grasshoppers and then the fall fires…it went on and on. It was simply what happened.
By the end of spring, life had, for the most part, returned to normal. The dead were buried. There were always dead after a prairie winter; babies who couldn’t survive, the elderly. The weak were ripe for the picking in the depths of the prairie winter.
This year, there were just more healthy people lost. And too many children.
More empty places at tables, fewer hands to try to work the fields after the floods finally abated. Schools emptied out anyway in the spring, so the surviving children could help with the planting. By then, they’d all gotten used to the empty desks.
To be sure, when the snows melted, bodies were found, and there was a fresh round of grief, but it was muted. These bodies had already been mourned by the practical souls of the plains. No one still held out hope that a lost loved one was simply waiting for a bout of good weather to return home after sheltering in some stranger’s house. So more funerals, more burnt cork to blacken the coffin, but at least now the ground was softer, the digging easier, everything sped up so they could get back to what was important, what was life—the spring planting.
At the few celebrations that spring—a wedding here, a christening there, church when people could be spared from the fields—it was noted, ruefully, how many incomplete people were there. Friends and relations missing ears, wearing hats pulled down low to cover up the raw wound. Grotesque holes where once there was a nose. Missing digits abounded; it was almost, but not quite, rare to see someone with ten fingers or ten toes, they joked. They grew used to wooden hands, like the one Anette Pedersen sported proudly.
To wooden boots, like the one that Gerda Olsen stomped about on, miserably.
But those who experienced the storm would never forget it; they would pass the stories down from one generation to the next, and they wouldn’t embellish them because they didn’t need to. And embellishing was not their way regardless.
Life must go on.
But many lives had irrevocably changed. Some for the better.
Most not.
* * *
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THE HALVORSAN FARM continued to eke out an existence. Tor did not go back to school, although he was missed. Raina went out to the house one day before the spring term was over. She needed to talk to him, to see for herself how the family was doing—she couldn’t quite explain why. It was part of her general leavetaking, she supposed; she felt a compulsion to wrap things up before journeying back to her family and all that awaited her there—most important, Gerda.