But of course he knew why, and it was all around him—land. Too much land, it seemed to him, an astonishing amount; how could it ever be tamed and parceled, even by the hordes who had come here to do just that? He didn’t dare gaze too much at it, for fear of becoming snow blind; he’d been instructed to keep his head down and trust his horse, outfitted with side blinkers to cut down the glare. But he did raise his head and let his eyes water in the cold and brilliance, now and then. Simply to gaze on a landscape he’d never fully understood—that he’d never tried to understand.
Everyone said the prairie was flat, but it wasn’t. The snow-carpeted land swelled and dipped even though the horizon presented itself as one straight line. But the utter lack of natural landmarks, the unbrokenness of it all, made it seem so. And the air today, so still after the storm, also lent to the notion that he, the horse, and the sleigh were perched upon an infinite cloth-covered table, above the rest of the world. And yet, there would come a point where, if they weren’t careful, they would fall off the edge and be lost forever.
Every once in a while, he did see tiny dark dots, far off, close to the edge of that table. Houses that, despite a thin trail of smoke from a chimney poking a tentative finger up in the sky, appeared utterly desolate, despairing. Those were homesteaders. Despite the temptation to veer off to talk to them, he stayed along the tracks as Forsythe had recommended.
And really, he asked himself—he was already aware that he would be carrying on entire conversations with himself or the horse before this thing was over—what would he do if he did decide to turn the nag and take off over that landscape full of traps and obstacles buried by the snow? What would he say if he knocked on the door of one of those soddies or cabins?
Excuse me, I’m looking for a girl. Maybe you know her? Maybe she lives here? She’s young and has reddish-blond hair, and her throat was yearning, and I don’t know her name, and she doesn’t know mine, either. But I need to find her, because—
Because why?
Well, that was it, wasn’t it? Why on earth was he on such a fool’s errand? Could it be that he was in love? With a girl at least half his age, whom he had seen for a couple of minutes?
No, he didn’t think so, probing his feelings—a distasteful exercise he’d generally avoided until recently. He didn’t long to enfold her in his arms or whisk her away to a homestead of his own. God, no.
Gavin had had romantic entanglements in the past, an almost-engagement back East, and a regular Sunday dinner invitation from the sister of one of the printers at the Bee that he had let peter out, sending his polite refusal one too many times. But he was no stranger to the softness of a woman’s body—that softness he required, now and then, to reassure himself that he was still solid, a man of sinew and bone, despite all evidence to the contrary. Oh my, no, he was no stranger to the contours of a woman, pillows of flesh, excitable nipples, eager legs wrapping around him until he lost himself entirely, the moment always too brief, and then there was the brisk transaction of money, the quick ushering out the door and he was back in Godforsaken Omaha, his disappointing self once more. And that transaction sufficed—at least he’d thought so. Just the physical contact was enough. Emotions, needs, yearnings, comfort, companionship, a sense of purpose, of being necessary to someone, less alone in the swamp of his miserable thoughts and actions—these he believed he’d outgrown. Or never needed in the first place.
So no, he didn’t want to marry the girl, it wasn’t that. He didn’t want to marry at all. And to marry a Swedish or German homesteading daughter—he shuddered at the very notion of being entangled with a family still halfway stuck in the Old World even while they battled, with spirit-breaking results, the new. He tried to imagine himself living out here on this callous flatland, trying to break it—he could feel its unyielding surface beneath the runners of the sleigh—trying to coax it into giving him something to live on, to keep going, to do the same thing year after soul-sucking year. The numbing repetitiveness of it, like Sisyphus, only instead of a boulder, a plow. He tried to imagine living in one of those squalid little soddies, surrounded by people needing something from you—your thoughts, your food, your sweat, your dreams, your very breath; you’d never have your full share of anything, ever again. And for what? One hundred and sixty acres of land that was worth so little, the government was practically giving it away.