God, no.
But the prairie—this desert masquerading as a grassland—had its own beauty, he could admit. A cruel beauty, like that of a breathtaking woman who will never remember your name. The cloak of pure snow, like a cloud on the ground—no footprints, not even a leaf print on it—made him feel as if he were the first person to step onto an unexplored planet. A horizon so far off it seemed like a mural. A sky so blue it seemed like a dream of blue; color shouldn’t be this vivid in real life.
A cold so unnerving, he realized he was shivering and that he had been for longer than he had any idea of—damn, this place! What good was beauty when a man’s balls were frozen? This godforsaken place!
The horse was slowing down, so Gavin tugged on the reins, pulled on the brake, and slid out, taking a feedbag with him; he unbridled the nag, strapped the bag over his big ugly face, but held on to the harness just in case the beast got a notion to run off toward one of those homesteads himself. Gavin needed to stay near the railroad, and he thought he was only about five miles to the next station. You’d think, though, that you’d be able to see five miles down the tracks in weather like this, but nothing was in sight, so maybe not.
The horse ate steadily, so Gavin dropped the harness to go off and answer the call of nature, but the thought of unbuttoning his pants to allow egress made him pause. Jesus Christ, in this ball-shriveling cold—should he just let loose and keep it inside? But no, he couldn’t do that, it would freeze. So he tentatively poked himself out through the smallest opening he could allow, uttered epithets so vociferously the horse stopped eating and looked his way, then hastily buttoned himself back up again and raced back through snow above his knees to the sleigh. He slipped the bit back in the horse’s mouth, dropped the half-empty feedbag onto the seat beside him, and slapped the reins, this time less tentatively.
And back to his contemplation of the girl. What was her allure? Not corporeal; he put that notion firmly to rest. She represented something ethereal. An idea. A notion. A prayer. A song. Something spiritual, something spectral. Something.
He simply had to find her, he supposed. To relieve his conscience, to absolve him of his sins. She was his church, this maiden of the prairie. And Gavin needed absolution. He hadn’t known he’d needed it until he saw her the day of the blizzard.
He needed something good to come from this place, this place that, in his worst moments, he could almost believe he’d created all by himself—the Great God Gavin Woodson. Yes, that was it—maybe he’d started to feel that he’d populated these Great Plains all on his own, with no help from the government and the boosters and the railroads and the hustlers. Somehow he could make himself forget their part, especially after too much whiskey, too much sitting at an ink-stained desk with nothing to do but brood. He could convince himself that he’d done it, he’d created these homesteaders, they wouldn’t exist without his pen.
Even God needed his Garden of Eden, his Adam, his Eve.
So Gavin Woodson needed his maiden, but unlike God, he had no wish to punish her. No—the realization became more potent with each step of the puffing nag—he needed to save her. Like a pudgy, dissolute Lochinvar, riding in on his noble steed to rescue her from the fate of the prairie.
And if not her, well, then someone else. Because something good had to come out of the despair and tragedy in the wake of this blizzard that appeared to have struck with more ferocity, leaving more casualties, than any blizzard in the short history of these homesteaded plains. Not even the winter of 1880 to 1881, still talked about in hushed tones, surprised an entire region like this one had.
Now the old-timers had something new to talk about. There would be a rush on wood for coffins as soon as the tracks cleared, he’d heard when he’d picked up the horse and sleigh. There just weren’t enough trees for the poor souls to provide their own.
Frankly, Gavin wondered how they’d even go about digging graves in ground this solidly frozen. What would they do with the dead, then? Keep them in barns or lean-tos? The wolves would surely be after them.