Eriksen was tending to the mother, who had collapsed with grief after the twin funeral. A polite, tall young man with floppy sandy hair, maybe fifteen, was tending to two younger brothers and a sister until his mother got up again.
“Will she?” Gavin asked, because grief of that sort might be too heavy ever to stand up under.
“Oh, yes, she will,” Eriksen replied. “You don’t know these homesteaders the way I do. She has a family to care for, a farm to run—she won’t stay down for long. She just needed some laudanum so she could rest, because she wasn’t sleeping.”
The young man studied Gavin warily, even though his manners remained excruciatingly proper; he’d obviously been loath to let Gavin in, but the presence of the doctor seemed to assure him that this stranger wasn’t going to steal anything other than his family’s grief. Gavin, pulling out his notebook, turned to him.
“So I heard your brother, he was a hero? He saved his friend?”
The boy, named Tor, nodded. “Fredrik, that is—was—his name. They ran out in the storm, Miss Olsen couldn’t stop them. I should have—I should have—” But he turned abruptly to give his little sister, just a toddler, a wooden spoon to play with.
“Between you and me,” Doc said, in a precise English that was surprising for an immigrant his age, “I don’t know about these stories. Like this boy. He was indeed found with most of his clothes off, piled on top of his friend. But I’ve seen this in others who froze to death out there alone—and their clothes were torn off, too. I don’t think it was animals that did it, either, but I can’t quite understand it. It’s as if, in the moments before they lost consciousness, they were burning with fever instead of freezing to death. Maybe cold that severe does something to the mind. I don’t know, I just think—”
“Fredrik was a hero,” Tor said, his eyes flashing dangerously. “He saved Anette.”
“Well, let’s hope so, son—that little girl might not make it. I’m on my way there now. Care to come with me, Mr. Woodson?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Gavin replied gratefully; he was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the stifling kitchen; the stove was too hot, there were stacks of dirty dishes on the table. The boy was obviously trying his best but was outnumbered by his needy siblings. Gavin looked around the small farmhouse—just two rooms downstairs, a kitchen and a small bedroom; upstairs, there must be another room. The funeral had come and gone and now all that was left to do was to continue living, he supposed. The mother was apparently strong, despite the laudanum; the boy was almost a man in body, although his flash of emotion betrayed that he was yet a boy in spirit. This was a family devastated by grief, but it looked to be a family that would find some way to go on. And that was what Gavin was discovering about these “rubes” he’d so dismissed; they had the strength to go on. Despite the cruelty of the land and weather, the best of them would find a way to keep at it instead of going back to the softer lands from where they’d come. The unyielding soil had seeped into their skins, their backbones.
“I’ll tell the story of your brother, don’t worry,” he assured the boy, and there was a flush in the lad’s cheeks, sudden, embarrassing tears in his eyes as he nodded. Then Tor held out his hand.
“Thank you,” he said, shaking Gavin’s paw firmly. “Tusen takk.”
Then the boy turned to the stove, throwing in some wood; he grabbed a pan of potatoes and began to peel them.
“Come, let’s go, I need to check on this girl. You might find something there of interest,” the doctor mused, “for that paper of yours.”
“I’m not sure I can keep filling columns with these stories of loss,” Gavin said, rubbing his eyes because they were suddenly misty. It must have been the heat from the stove.
“Then you definitely need to come with me to the Pedersens’，” Doc Eriksen said as he and Gavin threw on their layers—the wet wool, the perpetually musky buffalo coat, everything was beginning to smell, as was he. He should find a place to bathe soon. Then they ventured out to the tundra, as he had begun to call this battered, frozen land.