I wonder if there is any place where I will feel as if I belong.
Do you ever think of the storm now, Raina? Or are you too far removed from it, snug in a city surrounded by tall buildings that block out the weather?
I do. I sometimes stay in my tent too long into the snow season, just so I will never forget how it was that awful night. Just so I can shiver and shake with cold once more, and remember every step I took with Minna on my back, Ingrid clutching my hand. I remember how the storm made me forget everything else, except for taking just one more step. Just one more. Then the one after that. And that was all that mattered. To take one more step.
At night, in my tent that quivers in the wind, I bundle up in blankets and robes. I have a pistol by my side. A woman can’t be in the camps without one. I haven’t had to use it but I can go to sleep knowing it’s there. But before I go to sleep, I make myself say their names: Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.
Do you think I will go to hell, Raina? Do you even believe in hell anymore? We did as children, didn’t we? Papa would read from the Bible when we couldn’t make it to church on Sunday, and I believed in hell then, oh, I did! I believed in heaven and hell, that they were two separate places, one above and one below, and that I would either be eternally lost or eternally saved in the end.
But hell is this life we lead now, not later. So I suppose that means there really is no heaven either, is there? There never was, we were told a lie.
But maybe you are living your heaven now. I hope you are.
Your loving sister,
Gerda
Dear Raina,
I suppose you are surprised to hear from me after so many years! I don’t know if you are still in Chicago. I can’t imagine that you are not, because where does a person go after Chicago? It is beyond my imagination. I can’t picture you going home to Nebraska, that is for certain. If home is still there, even.
I don’t know, but I feel it in my bones—which are so sharp now, I don’t seem to need as much food as I used to—that Mama and Papa are gone by now. It seems likely. I hope they were at peace, and happy, in the twilight of their lives. I know they were together, and that is a blessing. I can’t imagine the two of them ever parting. I know Mama wasn’t always happy, I know she didn’t want to leave Norway. Have you ever thought about that—how it was always the men who left, taking the women with them? I never once heard of a woman leaving the old country on her own accord. It was the men who had to have more. I saw that in Montana, when I was there. No woman wanted to mine for silver. There were smart women who took advantage of the men who did, however. Many were wanton women, but I did not see them that way （although there were many temperance groups and society women who did, mercy!）。 I saw them as women smarter than anyone else, who knew what men wanted and found a way to make a living providing it. I have shocked you, haven’t I, dearest baby sister! Do not worry, I myself am not a wanton woman.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a woman at all. Sometimes I think I am just a wraith. Roaming this earth until one day, I will stop.
Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia. I haven’t forgotten them, I still say their names every night before I lay down wherever I happen to be.
I left Montana. For no real reason other than I felt like wandering again. I knew too many people in Montana and it has started to trouble me, to be in the company of others. So I am starting over again, in Idaho. They have mountains in Idaho, too. I don’t think I shall ever come down from the mountains.
Do you ever think how odd it is that we both left home? Just when I said it’s what men do, it struck me that we did, too. Two women, two sisters. Because when I think about us, and the others our age, born homesteaders, born of parents who chose to leave somewhere, I think that most of us really didn’t have a choice. That by leaving all they’d known on their own accord, our parents ended up enslaving their children to the land, just so they could have a piece of paper saying that they possessed it. Most of our generation are still there, I am certain. I used to think of the boys we knew, how they had no imagination, they were too content to stay. But now I think it was so unfair to them. They had no choice; their parents lived and died to prove the land, and they left it to their children to continue the cycle. What could those boys do, other than stay there and try?