“Miss Olsen, please, before we go—let me just run out for a minute to see if I can find Fredrik and Anette.” Tor dared to take her hand—a big breach in manners, but he was so desperate. He clutched her hand until it hurt. “Please, Fredrik is so little, Mama and Papa have always told me I have to look out for him. Please!”
Raina longed to let him go, because she was thinking of Anette right then. Of all her pupils, Anette was the only one she really knew. Anette, unloved, misused; it was so rare to see any light behind her pale blue eyes, except when she was with Fredrik. Anette, terrified to displease Anna Pedersen; that’s why she left, Raina knew that with certainty. How many times had that awful woman told the girl she couldn’t linger after school, that she would be punished severely if she did? Anna was not the kind of person to threaten punishment if she didn’t have one already in mind. Anette knew that better than anyone. No wonder she’d sprinted off for home.
“Tor, I can’t stop you, you know that. I can only trust you to make the right decision.” Raina had never spoken so honestly as she did in that moment—the moment that Tor Halvorsan shook off the last vestiges of childhood, squared his shoulders, met her gaze evenly, and promised to stay by her side.
Raina was moved to witness this transformation. She turned away, quickly, before he could see the tears in her eyes.
“Now,” she said, going to the children, putting her arms, briefly, around each one, to give them some courage—she herself felt as if she had none, but she must pretend for their sakes. “Girls, untie your aprons, please.”
Looking at her in surprise, they obeyed. Little Clara regarded her apron—a pretty, useless one, different from the other girls’ in that it was of a dainty fabric, embroidered in colorful threads along the hem and the waistband—with a sigh. But she untied it.
“Good.” Raina added her own apron to the bundle, then she told the children to stand in line, from tallest to smallest; Arvid to Sofia. They obeyed, shuddering, stamping their feet, the snow still blasting in from the huge open window and the temperature falling by the second. They were clad in the coats and shawls they’d come to school with, but none of them was adequately dressed; neither was Raina. She thought of her heavy woolen coat, which she’d carelessly left hanging outside to air. But at least she had a long skirt, and a petticoat; the little girls’ skirts only hit their knees. Clara and Sofia had wool hats, and Tana had a scarf wound up to her eyes. So did Arvid. But only half the children wore mittens or gloves.
“Now, we’re going to tie ourselves together, you see? Like a chain, a people chain.” Without realizing it, Raina had started talking in Norwegian, and although Albert and Walter were German, they seemed to understand.
She handed the aprons out to most of the children, and they tied the strings first around their waists, then each new apron to the string of the one before it, so that when they were done, the children resembled one long—oddly gay, with Clara’s festive apron right in the middle—insect with ten heads and twenty pairs of arms and legs. Albert started to giggle, and soon the others did, too, charmed with the novelty of it.
“Shhh!” Raina scolded them; they had to conserve their energy. She beckoned Tor over to where she was standing, shivering, searching outside; the landscape wasn’t merely bleak, it was angry, a roiling, churning ocean. The flat Nebraska land that everyone joked about wasn’t, really. There were still plenty of obstacles waiting to trip you up if you weren’t careful; gopher holes and stubborn grass that didn’t die off in the winter completely, little creeks, ravines, not to mention barbed-wire fencing. And there would be no way to see any of these, with the storm cloud touching the very ground, until you were upon them. Tangled up in them.
“Tor, your house is the nearest, I think?” She wasn’t sure about this; she had been so caught up in her own drama that she’d never really gotten a good read on the land. Her father would be disappointed in her; he had always told her that you get the lay of the land first, then worry about the landscape of emotions. The land was the most cruel, he’d always said.