The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

Author:Melanie Benjamin [Benjamin, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

•••••

THE HORSE PLOWED ON, HEAD bobbing with each steady step, sometimes nickering softly, his breath blowing puffs of air that turned into moist clouds that froze into tiny crystals that scattered like diamond dust in the air, and the effect was beautiful. If you overlooked the fact that it was horse snot. The hardware on his bridle jingled, the leather harness and reins creaked and moaned, and the runners on the sleigh swished through the snow like a constant admonition—shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh.

The man plowed on, as well—a large man made larger by the massive buffalo robe that covered him from head to toe, a wild, mahogany-colored curly coat, surely having seen better days, since it was matted in patches, as if the beast had just rolled up from sleep. Perched atop a comically dainty sleigh being pulled by the horse—a sleigh more fitted for an elegant lady on her way to a tea party—the man loomed even more ponderously than usual. Faded, horsehair-covered blankets were piled up on his knees. He resembled nothing less than a humiliated bear in a circus, forced to wear human clothing and ride about in a pony-drawn kiddie sleigh.

He was alone. As far as the eye could see, there was this: an undulating carpet of various shades of white as pure as an angel’s robes; a garish, vicious yellow-white sun that turned the snow into dangerous shards of brilliance, aiming right for the eye; telegraph poles; and the bear in the kiddie sleigh.

The runners swishing, the creaking, the jingling, his own occasional mutterings; those were the only sounds Gavin heard for a very long time as he kept his head bent against the cold. As he trusted to the horse and whatever God had time to spare for a miserable soul like himself, on a miserable mission for a miserable reason he couldn’t begin to parse.

Gavin Woodson, tenderfoot extraordinaire, colossal joke of a man, was headed out onto the Great Plains by himself in a hired sleigh with a hired horse, a few feedbags of oats at his feet, a carpetbag full of paper and pens and ink and a change of woolen underwear by his side.

He, the horse, and the sleigh were the only creatures on this earth, or so he could easily believe; he saw no one else, heard not a sound save those mentioned.

He’d never felt so pathetic.

He was a city man who felt most at home in stifling, sweat-infused enclosures, on busy streets bordered with tall buildings that kept the horizon at bay. On the rare occasion that his lungs desired fresh air, he was content with a park or a street corner. But there was little fresh air in Omaha; the canning facilities, the stockyards filled the air with odors whose sources were best left unquestioned. That he’d been inspired, that morning of the blizzard, to walk away from the city and toward the prairie, had puzzled him. That he’d been so captivated by the sight of the girl had worried him.

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