HOW DO YOU GROW OLD on the prairie?
You become bent with work, you watch your crops fail and succeed and fail again. You marry, you have children, they have children. There are celebrations—marriages, births, good crops, new roofs. There is grief. Death, always that shadow stalking the celebrations, making them even more necessary, more desperately gay—the music louder, the dancing faster, the laughter brighter, anything to ignore its presence. You learn to parcel out your heart, cautiously, because of the certainty that one day, a part of it will be wrenched from you forever. You grow older, quieter, and stern because of this caution. But you still survive, you do the work, you see your children go off on their own to repeat the cycle, but maybe this time, the results will be different—abundant years, better crops, maybe one of their children finds a way to own an even bigger piece of land, maybe buy a new threshing machine. Maybe build a house with five rooms, not three. Fulfill the promise that lured you here in the first place.
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.”
Papa was standing at the foot of the bed, but strangely he wouldn’t look at her directly, not even when she croaked his name—the first word out of her mouth, it must have been for days, because her lips were dry, her voice a rasp.
“Papa?”
He turned toward her, she saw a flicker of relief on his face, but then he quickly turned away.
“Mama?”
“Shhh, we’re here, we’re here,” Mama responded—but she, too, looked troubled. Gerda’s left foot began to itch, to burn, but when she struggled to touch it with her other foot, there was nothing there; she looked at her mother in bewilderment.
“They had to amputate it, my dear heart. I’m so sorry, Gerda—my child, my poor child!” Mama stifled a sob, gently smoothed Gerda’s damp hair. Gerda could see that only one foot, her right, stuck up through the covers; there was nothing where her other foot should be.
“That night,” she murmured, trying to process the information—would she be able to walk? To teach again? “I remember…it was so cold…”
“Yes, darling, yes. Don’t talk now.” Mama gave her a glass of water, which Gerda gulped gratefully, then she felt as if it might come right back up; she turned on her side, leaned over the bed, but managed to keep it down. She rolled over again.
“Papa, Papa—” She reached her hand out toward her father, who walked away and stared out a window. Sharply did her mother speak to him in Norwegian. “Stop behaving like this, she is still our daughter.”
“What, Mama?” Gerda struggled to sit up, her foot—the foot that was no longer part of her—still throbbing, but how could that be?
Mama must have read her thoughts, for, as she helped her up into a seated position, shoving a pillow behind her back, she explained. “You will still feel the foot, the doctor says. It’s normal, but eventually it will go away, that feeling.”
“Oh.”
Gerda shut her eyes, too exhausted to ask more. Her mind was turning over this information like a child turns over a handful of pebbles, searching for the one that feels best in her hand; the smoothest, coolest one. She couldn’t find anything that felt right, however. She was maimed for life. Never before had she imagined this for herself—she’d imagined pretty dresses, bright hair ribbons, a house of her own, with Tiny—
“Tiny!” Her eyes flew open and for now, her foot was forgotten. “Where is he? Tiny—did he—was he—?”
“They found his body a couple of days ago,” Papa said coldly, still gazing out the window, his big, work-scarred hands grasped behind his back.
“No, no!” Gerda felt the impact of his words in her solar plexus, knocking the breath out of her—not Tiny! Yes, she’d told herself he was probably lost when he didn’t come back for her and the girls, but that was then, during the pinnacle of the storm when her resolve was focused only on survival. Now she could feel the pain exquisitely, viscerally—she struggled to control herself because she didn’t want to share her grief with her parents. It was hers, hers alone, they would never understand it. They would never understand them, Gerda and Tiny, because Mama and Papa had never been young and in love, had never had hopes and dreams—
But these were her hopes and dreams, not Tiny’s. If only they’d been able to have that one day together, the day she’d planned; the two of them playing house so she could show him what he would miss if he ran away, she could convince him with her domesticity—with her lips, if necessary—what a wife could give him that a life of adventure couldn’t…if only…
Her face was wet with hot tears, her head pounded, and her foot was beginning to tingle again; her stomach was so empty she felt faint but also sick, but she swallowed the bile, the grief. There was something else, some other worry buzzing about her aching head, and then she remembered, and she looked at Papa. She began to shake with dread—she understood why he was acting so strangely toward her. But she had to ask, she had to know.
“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.”
Once again his anger drained from him and his shoulders sagged, his head bent, and Gerda’s misery was complete. She had done this to him. She had tarnished his name in the community, forever.
“A man has only his name, Gerda,” Papa’d once told her when they were in the barn, mucking out the ox stalls. He’d smiled proudly at her when she staggered beneath a shovel full of manure without flinching; that smile she’d learned to hoard, smug that it was hers alone and not Raina’s; that smile that told her, I know you’re not a son, but you are as fine a daughter as a man could have.
“A man has only his name, that’s why he wants sons. But if he can’t have sons, he still has his name until he dies and so he must make sure he does nothing to ruin it—he must make sure those in his care behave in a certain way. You understand, don’t you, daughter?”
She must have been nearing thirteen or fourteen when this conversation occurred, she realized. Nearing womanhood, and all the delicate navigation that entailed, and she’d blushed, understanding what he couldn’t bring himself to say. But she’d also nodded—of course she understood! It was so easy, she’d thought then. She was unable to imagine a scenario when she wouldn’t behave in a way to bring him honor. The world was simple then—right and wrong. You don’t steal, you don’t lie, you don’t hurt anyone, you do your chores, you don’t talk back to your parents. You don’t covet your sister’s fancy handkerchief that an aunt back home sent for Christmas; you don’t feel like your lot in life is worse than anyone else’s. You don’t want more than your fair share—
Ah. But that was what tripped her up in the end. Wasn’t it? She’d wanted more. Asked for more. More time with Tiny. More of him than he wanted to give. That wanting had led her to making the worst possible decision; it had led her to put herself first, her students last.
It had led her to murder.
Would she actually face trial for the deaths of her students? Her heart began to palpitate, her throat constrict. She asked her mother for another glass of water but she couldn’t begin to ask her that question. Papa would know—
But Papa wouldn’t look at her.
She would have to wait to know the full impact of her actions, then—but she couldn’t imagine that anything could be worse than this guilt she would have to bear in secret. Papa and Mama could never know how thoroughly bad she was. It was hard enough on them as it was. She would have to carry the boulder of her evil—for that’s what it was, selfishness that had led to unimaginable ruin, the deaths of innocents, of innocence itself—on her back, alone, for the rest of her life. No one would see it but her, she would never be able to let someone else hold it, not even for the briefest of moments.
As she lay for three more long days in the darkened room—the curtains drawn tight against anguished eyes—tended by her mother while her father prowled the Andersons’ house like a caged tiger, she tried to sleep, to rest her body, but she couldn’t. In the middle of the night she would sit bolt upright, prodded with electric shocks of fear and guilt, imagining herself in a jail cell, the gallows awaiting her the next morning. She couldn’t stop this nightmare, this torment.
She began to hate her mother for loving her, for staying by her side even through the nightmares. This good woman—she had lost a son in the old country. And now, she had lost a daughter. A woman, a mother—she looks forward to the day a daughter marries. Hadn’t Mama been stockpiling a hope chest for years, for both Gerda and Raina? Whenever she had a spare second, she had knitted shawls and blankets, pressed flowers and put them under glass, made sachets of dried prairie grass, saved precious ribbons from stray packages or gifts. All for her daughters, to set them up in their own homes when their time came. And then, of course, there would come the longed-for grandchildren, the next generation, the hope for the future.
But Gerda had deprived her of this. At least there still was Raina.
Finally, the Andersons asked Mama and Papa to take Gerda home. She overheard them one evening, as the four of them miserably shared a meal. “We can’t keep her here any longer, we have our own place in the community to think of,” Pa Anderson said, not bothering to lower his voice. “She was a good girl, though, at least what we saw. But after this…”
So the next day, despite the fact that Gerda was still weak with fever from the surgery, still unable to eat more than broth, she was packed up—unceremoniously, like the rest of her clothing and things that were hastily thrown in a carpetbag—and bundled into blankets. It was so strange, she could feel the weight of the blankets on her missing foot, she was certain of it. But she was just as certain that she had only buttoned one shoe, not two. The four-day-long journey back to their homestead was so torturous to her weak, mutilated body she almost bit through her lower lip to hide her screams, tasting blood along with the tears the entire journey. That was when she began to hate Papa, too. For he seemed to go out of the way to hit the bumpiest parts of the trail.
But she never hated anyone more than she despised herself.
Over and over, she forced herself to remember her students’ joy when she released them early. Johannes Gerber had thrown his cap in the air with a shout, and actually picked his little brother up in his arms and swung him around until Gerda had to tell him, laughingly, to stop. The way Minna and Ingrid had smiled their secret smile, because they alone would be riding with Teacher and her beau, and Gerda had long known how much that honor meant to them, how they whispered about it in the middle of a circle of gaping admirers at almost every recess.
And then she would force herself to imagine how lost they must have felt, alone, forsaken by the person in charge of them when they were not at home. Forsaken by Teacher, who was too absorbed in her own plans to understand the growing, growling threat of the storm as it swirled about them all. She had only that last glimpse of them all being swallowed by the greedy cloud. After that, she could only speculate—had they cried? Argued, the three brothers who almost always argued? Had the big children put their arms about the small ones? Had they all called out for their mothers and fathers?
Had they called out for her? Miss Olsen, what do we do? Where are you? Why did you send us away?
Finally she was home, back in her own room, still recuperating—it would be a long while, the home doctor told her with a shake of his head. But she would recover, she was strong, she would learn to get by with the crutch or the wooden boot.
Back home, and from her small room that would only grow more constrictive with each passing year, she heard her parents going about the business of farming in the winter. There were more storms—and the first time she heard the howling wind outside her walls, she sat up and began to shiver, her body automatically reacting just to the thought of being out there again, in that pummeling, knifelike wind. Despite the pile of quilts on top of her, she wondered if she would ever feel warm again.
The livestock was always a worry in the winter—would the hay last until they could graze again? Mama had to bring new chicks into the kitchen, to keep them warm close to the stove. Food would run low—extra low this winter, because she was no longer able to help out with her teacher’s salary, and she was an unexpected mouth to feed. But she had little appetite, anyway.
No longer did Papa sing his booming songs while he worked. Now, when she heard her parents huddled together by the hearth at night when they thought she was asleep, Gerda knew that they were talking about her. There were sounds of muffled sobs. Of broken prayers. Of wondering, “Why did she do it? What will become of her now?”
How do you grow old on the prairie?
Watching your parents fall apart a little every day, and then witnessing them valiantly try to mend themselves again on the morrow, each time losing a stitch or two until they didn’t resemble people so much as rag dolls, the stuffing falling out. Hiding alone in your room with the curtains drawn, ashamed to show your face to the sun. Terrified to behold another human being, unable to bear the look in their eyes—This is her, she’s the one I was telling you about. Remember her? Gerda Olsen? She used to be so proud, that one. And we were proud of her, too, I’ll admit. A shining example, a good teacher.
Did you hear that she murdered nine children?
Then one day, the papers from Omaha began to arrive. And just when Gerda thought she could suffer no more—
She had to read about her sister.