Eventually, your incomplete heart—because of those fragments that have been torn off like the last leaves of autumn through the years—weakens. The work is too much for frail bones and papery skin. All you can do is live quietly with your memories in the back room of one of your children’s houses, and you help while you can, doing things like cooking and mending, until eventually those tasks are taken from you. You sit in a chair by the fire and doze, remembering it all over and over again, if you’re lucky. Or forgetting everything—and maybe that is the luckier thing, after all—puzzled by the strangers hovering over you, spooning broth into your mouth, bathing you once a week. But you are not alone. Even if you no longer recognize the people you had birthed, the husband who still grips your hand at night, tenderly, you are not alone.
That was how you grew old on the prairie, if you were a woman.
The one spinster Gerda had known, the spinster homesteader she had boarded with a year ago, had never envisioned staying out here on the land. She was going to prove up her place, and hire hands to do all the work, then sell it for a good profit and return to Chicago, where she was from. She never spoke of marrying, but maybe in Chicago she had had a beau, or at least family to go back to. Her plans certainly were not to grow old out here alone.
Gerda hadn’t planned to do that, either. Even if Tiny had gone west without her, there would have been others. Less appealing, but she would never have reached the age of twenty-one still unattached. The math didn’t add up. There were too many men who needed wives.
But who would have her now?
In the shock of all the news that fell on her head like hammers raining from the sky, forcing its way through the agonizing pain she suffered physically from her foot being severed from her leg; throughout the torment of guilt and woe, the averted gazes, the tightly pressed lips of those who were forced only through Christian charity to tend to her—this was the one taunting, destroying thought that stood out from all the others.
Who would have her now?
It wasn’t her lost foot that had branded her undesirable. A one-legged wife was still useful to someone; a one-legged wife could still cook and clean and bear children, tend to chickens, garden.
Gerda had never known a criminal. Had there ever even been one in her district? She couldn’t remember anything close to it, no chicken or horse thieves. One far neighbor had shot another neighbor’s dog, causing some hard feelings, but the dog was known for eating eggs, and so most had thought it was a justifiable act.
Tiny’s books had been full of tales of daring bandits like Jesse James and Belle Starr, but they had been depicted in such a thrilling, one-sided way that you had no choice but to sympathize with the bandit. The stories were outlandish, fictional, even if they were based on real people. But they were too far removed from the prairie—these stories happened in other places like Texas or Arizona Territory, in fantastic landscapes featuring canyons and arroyos and sagebrush and cacti, places so unimaginable to Gerda it was as if they existed on other planets. None of it—the bandits or the landscape—was real.
But now, intimately, Gerda knew a criminal. A murderess.
She knew herself.
The first day after she’d crawled up to the house, she was still the schoolteacher, a victim of the storm like so many. Yes, Minna and Ingrid had died in her care, but she had carried the girls on her very back, she had carved out a shelter in a haystack, nearly destroying her hands in the process. She had tried. She was valiant. The storm was too big; no one could have done more, or better. She was too gripped by the fiery pain of a dying foot to know anything but that; the pain was all-encompassing, it drove every other sensation away—she didn’t even know how to breathe, how to keep her eyes open, roasting in the flames of it. She succumbed to it, almost gratefully.
When she opened her eyes, finally freed from its torment, she was no longer in the Nillssens’ kitchen. She was back at the Andersons’， in her own bed. And Mama and Papa were with her, Mama seated next to her, clutching her hand, humming a hymn: “How Blest Are They Who Hear God’s Word.”