Tiny also harbored a desire to fight Indians, always moaning to her that he’d missed his only chance. Custer had been massacred years ago, when she and Tiny were just children. Tiny revered the man he looked at as a martyr to the point of trying to grow a long, droopy mustache like the one in the photographs. But at this, he could not succeed; Gerda had learned not to tease him about the patchy, fuzzy hair he insisted was soon to be a luxurious mustache.
Gerda tried to point out that most of the Indians had already been defeated, at least the ones in Dakota; Yankton was bordered to the west and north by the Great Sioux Reservation. She’d actually been asked to teach at a school for Indian children, like the one back in Genoa, Nebraska, not far from her family’s homestead. Once, when she was younger, Papa had taken her and Raina to visit the new Indian school—it was about half a day’s drive from their farm, and he thought it would be interesting to see. The Olsens had come to Nebraska from eastern Minnesota, where the family had first immigrated in 1876, the year of Custer’s last stand. They hadn’t had much dealing with Indians, beyond seeing them sometimes in town, peddling beautifully made baskets that could hold water—Mama marveled at the skill. And when Papa plowed, she and Raina often found finely carved arrowheads in the fields. But an entire school full of little Indian children in their clothes of buckskin and beads—Gerda remembered being so excited about it, she couldn’t sleep the night before.
But it hadn’t turned out the way she thought it would. The children weren’t wearing their colorful beaded Indian costumes, after all. They were clad in somber uniforms, grey coat and pants for the boys, white homespun dresses for the girls. All the boys had their shining black hair cut short in a bowl shape; the girls wore their hair in severe braids devoid of pretty touches like feathers or beads. And none of them smiled at Gerda or Raina when the sisters stood at the back of the room with some other curious folks, watching the children seated at their desks, tonelessly chanting the alphabet. In fact, some of the littler ones were crying; one in particular, a tiny doll-like girl, looked so sad with her enormous brown eyes welling up with tears as she chewed the end of one of her braids, her birdlike shoulders heaving, that Gerda wanted to take her home with them.
But her father looked at her with such reproach when she asked him if she could keep the little girl, take her home and help her not feel so sad, that Gerda had felt sick with shame. He’d yanked her and Raina by the arms and dragged them out of the school; he pushed them away from the tall building, toward town, where he made them sit on the stoop of a dry goods store when he went to buy some thread for their mother. When he came out, he didn’t have the usual sticks of hard candy; he curtly barked orders for them to get in the wagon so they could begin the journey home.
He sat silently, holding the reins, for the longest time while Gerda and Raina shared puzzled, worried looks. Normally Papa sang songs from the old country—“Bonden og Kr?ka” was a favorite—or talked through his hopes for the farm while he was driving, even though neither Gerda nor Raina was much help. But they didn’t have to be; he simply liked to hear himself speak to someone other than the chickens—that’s what he always said.
This day he was so quiet, for so long, that Gerda started to chew on her fingernails, and Raina couldn’t hold back her tears, although she let them fall silently down her plump cheeks.
The wagon swayed on the rutty path; the sun was behind them now, so everything looked bathed in a warm, red glow—the tops of the grasses were already a russet hue, but they looked almost ruby in the fading sunlight. Only if you lived for a long time on the prairie did you know the landmarks; a newcomer’s eye would only see mile after mile of barely undulating land, undisturbed by trees or buildings. But Gerda knew that particular clump of purple leadplant meant they only had an hour left to go if they didn’t break a wheel or axle; she recognized the branch where another set of ruts went off to the north as the place where they would stop for the girls to use the bushes if they had to. She wondered if the prairie chickens scurrying across the trail in front of the wagon were the same that had scurried across it on the trip this morning.
Finally, Papa sighed so deeply his shoulders rose nearly to his ears. He pulled on the reins and the oxen ambled to a stop; he tugged on the hand brake and let the animals graze a bit. He peered down at Gerda for so long that she began to quake inside, wondering if she could hide in the tallgrass before he punished her.