“That’s a blessing, anyway.”
“Like I said, this land chews people up and spits them out in pieces. Even children.”
“Why—why did you come here, then?” Raina asked the question she’d never dared ask her own parents but had always longed to. Why leave what you knew, a land that was familiar, your family, your friends, problems you could predict because you’d encountered them before? Why start over in a barren desert of cruelty? And subject your children to it, or bring new children into its prickly bosom?
Why did men believe that land was worth the human toll it extracted?
“You were born here?” Doc asked as he wound a muffler about his neck, groaning and flexing his stiff hands.
“No, but I was so little, I don’t remember the old country.”
“Then you don’t know what it was like. It wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong. But there wasn’t much opportunity for a man to change the path he was set on from birth. Here, there is. And for many men, that’s enough.”
“What about you? You were a doctor there, you’re a doctor here.”
“And a homesteader. A piss-poor one—I’m sorry, excuse me, Raina. But I own land, and I never would have in Norway. It’s not good land, though. That’s the fact of it. I think of those articles that started showing up in the papers back home, promising us the moon and the stars. None of them were the truth, but why were we so eager to believe them? We have to answer for that ourselves. But we’re here now. Some will go back, after this. Every year, many go back, I think. But the ones that stick it out—stubborn old fools like me—”
“Like Papa,” Raina broke in, frowning.
“I’ve never met your papa but I imagine he is stubborn, because his daughter seems to have a streak of it.” Doc Eriksen laughed, but his rueful amusement only highlighted how weary he was, how old; his teeth were yellow, his cheeks hollow, the bags under his eyes as droopy as a hound’s. “Us stubborn men, if we stick it out, if somehow we make this earth do what it should, and not what it wants…Think of the reward. Not in riches, but in satisfaction, in dying knowing you have tamed nature itself. Of knowing your children”—and here Doc Eriksen lay a gnarled but kind hand on Raina’s shoulder—“will have more than you ever dreamed of, because of you.”
Raina smiled and lay her cheek on the old man’s hand, before seeing him to the door. But she didn’t agree with what he said, because she couldn’t imagine having more than her parents did back in Norway—how many stories had she heard about the fun they’d had there surrounded by family, for all the farms were close together in the old country, not separated by one hundred and sixty acres like they were here? Back there, they never wanted for food or clothing; there was always someone to borrow from, hand-me-downs passed from one cousin to another. They were not rich, no—not in the things men value. Still, she knew her mother had been happier there, richer in the things that women know as worthy—sympathy, conversation, community. But a married woman had no choices of her own. A married woman’s future was her husband’s, no matter where she lived.
What was Raina’s future now?
Mama’s dream of sending her girls to a teaching college so they could at least find a position somewhere other than a country schoolhouse full of poor children who would need nothing more than a cursory education—
Well, that dream was vanishing just as the sun was vanishing outside. After this winter, there would be the usual floods that would mean the usual delay in planting, the rush to harvest before the next winter arrived. How could they save enough? There’d never be enough money for college now, especially since Gerda…
Oh, what was she doing, thinking of college in the face of such loss? But as Raina patted the letter in her apron, the letter that had brought the unfathomable news about her sister, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it. She had initially longed to rush home to her parents, to comfort them and be comforted. But now, she was afraid.