“Well, here she is, finally, wide awake! The plucky little girl herself!”
And the voices stopped in the kitchen. Anette heard a general stampede of feet, and she was suddenly surrounded—Mother and Father Pedersen, Teacher, Doc Eriksen. They all gaped at her like she was the answer to a question. She blushed at all those eyes, and she turned again to the man. Who beamed at her like she was a prize, someone worth knowing.
Who looked at her the same way Fredrik did, with pure happiness.
CHAPTER 27
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THE FIRST COUPLE OF DAYS that Gavin Woodson spent on the Godforsaken Prairie had yielded nothing but unbroken horror.
Every small settlement—you couldn’t call them towns, since they were only a handful of buildings, sometimes only repurposed abandoned train cars—gave up, all too readily, its tragedies to his pencil and notepad. It was as if he’d given these people permission to drop that fabled stoicism and pour forth so much pent-up grief and trouble, his pencil could barely keep up. After a while, the stories all began to blur but still he wrote them down. He had to. He had to bear witness.
The men lost, out tending livestock. The livestock gone, too; another disastrous year for cattle and who in his right mind would continue to pursue that folly?
There were people who miraculously survived the night in a cold that froze the cattle where they stood, only to drop dead in the morning when they rose to find their way home—something about the change in pressure on the heart; he’d have to look it up or ask a doctor when he got back to Omaha. It was a mystery to Gavin and it seemed improbable, but too many people had witnessed it, had looked out their windows to see someone rise from the snow like a wraith, take a step or two, then drop deader than a stone.
Men who survived, who got home—only to find their wives and children frozen beside a cold and empty stove, maybe the windows had blown out, maybe not; the cold was so relentless it had no fear of windows and walls. Or men who found their wives steps from the house, almost covered entirely by the snow. They’d become disoriented, lost their way between house and barn if they hadn’t thought to tie up a line between the two, and many hadn’t because the storm had come upon them so abruptly.
Entire families were caught out on the plains, driving home from getting supplies on that deceptively warm morning. Like the family of his maiden; he could imagine it only too well.
But it was the children that everyone talked about.
The storm hit at precisely the wrong time here in northeastern Nebraska, southeastern Dakota. Earlier, and there would have been no question of sheltering in place. But it hit right when most schools were about to disgorge their pupils for the day, or just had.
Gavin scurried from town to town, house to house, following breadcrumbs like in the old children’s fairy tale. But this time, the breadcrumbs were the children themselves: their lost bodies, frozen. He’d pull up in one settlement, hear the tales of woe, then someone would say something along the lines of “But I heard that the schoolteacher there up in Holt County let them all go home, alone,” and he’d be back in his ridiculous sleigh—it had definitely elicited a few snorts of amusement—trying to figure out how the hell to get up to Holt County. Most of the time, someone took pity on him—they had relatives up that way, anyway, and wanted to check in on them—and would ride alongside him. These men—so lean they looked starved, and indeed some did have the telltale signs of malnutrition: the distended stomach, the sunken cheeks and haunted eyes—wouldn’t say a word, they’d just ride. Ploddingly, horses breaking through the snow, they’d point off in one direction and then peel away in another, and Gavin would have no choice but to aim his nag and trudge off, steeling himself for the inevitable.
A stranger knocking on a dugout door elicited less astonishment than he would have thought. Perhaps it was the grief, permeating every frigid dugout, every poorly insulated cabin or shed that opened its door to Gavin and his pad of paper, that dulled any other senses. Grief so palpable it soured the air. The adult homesteaders rarely spoke English but there was usually a child or two who did, who translated.