“Those children back there,” he finally said, removing his straw hat to wipe the perspiration along his forehead with his sleeve. “It’s not right. I thought it was when I heard about it. A school where the wildness could be taught out of the child, where they would be taught English, taught to be part of a civilized society—that could only be a good thing. But I don’t know now. It’s hard, you know. Hard to be separated from your family.”
Raina nodded eagerly, but Gerda knew she didn’t understand. Papa was talking about himself, and how he’d left his mother in the old country, his brothers, too. He would never see them again. But he was a big, grown man and Gerda had never realized, until this moment, that a big, grown man could miss anything. Or anyone.
“And they are but little ones,” her father continued, now staring ahead at the prairie, but Gerda knew he wasn’t seeing it—he was seeing his village in Norway, tucked between steep mountains, the likes of which Gerda couldn’t imagine, even though she’d been born there. But she had no memory of the old country other than vague snippets: a snug little bed in a whitewashed attic with a slanting roof; a Christmas dinner with a table full of uncles and aunts and older cousins who teased; her mother crying bitterly when they drove away in a wagon to the sea.
Now Papa was seeing his own mother, so far away—his father had died when he was younger—and the idea of that, of never seeing Papa and Mama again, squeezed her chest until it bruised her heart. “Little ones, taken from their families. Even if they be Indians, it’s not right. And you, miss…” Papa turned to gaze again at Gerda, and she dropped her head, burning with shame, her eyes swimming with tears.
“Look at me, Gerda.”
Slowly, she raised her face, only to weep even more because Papa was looking at her with the usual love light softening his blue eyes. She hiccupped as she sobbed, and he put his arm about her, pulling her close.
“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?