“The other children?” she whispered pleadingly. “The others—what about them?”
“Finally you ask what you should have asked the moment you awoke?” Papa’s voice bounced off the glass windowpanes and thundered about the room, tormenting her ears, her heart. “Finally you want to know about your students and not your beau?”
She nodded.
“They are gone, Gerda. All of them, lost in the storm. Three boys found together frozen, their arms about each other—the Gerber boys. A brother and sister—the Borstads—found only a few feet from the schoolhouse. And two little boys, Hardus Hummel and Johnny Rolstad, found together, too, not far from the Rolstad farm.”
The names were too much; she felt herself receding from the room, from her father’s accusing voice, and she began to chant as she had during the storm—“Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia…Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.”
“Stop it!” Papa was beside her in one great inhuman stride; as she continued to mumble the names, their little faces spinning through her mind, she was trapped on a carousel of the dead—
A sting, a gasp. Papa had slapped her across the face.
“Steffen!” Mama rose, her voice terrible; she pushed her husband away from her daughter. Gerda was stunned, although she didn’t feel pain from the slap itself; her torture was that, for the first time in her life, her father had struck her.
And she deserved it, more than he would ever know—more than he ever could know.
“Why, Gerda—why?” Papa’s voice was hoarse; he sank down into a chair and let his shoulders slump so that he seemed like an old man, but he raised his head and finally looked her in the eye. “What were you thinking when you let them all go, when you left with Tiny and the two little girls?”
Now she couldn’t meet his gaze. She also couldn’t answer his question—never could he know what she was thinking that day. So she only shook her head.
“We must get you back to our farm soon,” Papa said, rising once more, roaming the little room—where were the Andersons? She didn’t even hear Ma Anderson bustling about in the kitchen. “You’re not safe here.”
“What do you mean?” Gerda’s head ached as if someone had put it in a vise; she rubbed her temples but brushed her mother’s hands away when that good woman tried to do it for her. She didn’t deserve to be touched or soothed—not by decent people, people like her parents. People who would die from grief and disappointment if they could see inside her blackened, sinful heart.
“They want to kill you,” Papa muttered. “I can’t blame them.”
Once more Mama’s great and terrible voice boomed out her father’s name. “Steffen!”
“It’s true, she ought to know. The father of the three boys came here, wild with grief. He had a shotgun. He would have killed you if I hadn’t been here.”
“You exaggerate—Papa exaggerates,” Mama clucked in her gentle way. “The man came here, yes, but he would not have shot you! To think of that, to shoot a schoolteacher because of—because of this storm. Everyone with any sense knows it wasn’t your fault, that the storm was worse than anyone could predict. Do not think of it.”
But Gerda was irritated by her mother’s love and protection and she continued to swat at her ministering hands as if they were flies. She preferred the way Papa was speaking to her, not bothering to conceal his disgust. He spoke to her as if she were a criminal. And she knew that she was, forevermore.
“You will have to come home with us soon, and you will never teach again. Not near here, at any rate. I don’t know what we’ll do with you. Or how we’ll show our faces again to anyone.”