The Meadowlark's Song

On this night in late December, a normal Dakotas blizzard blew its worst, the wind howling an evil shriek across the prairie. It blew before it a horizontal snowfall possessing more of the characteristics of ice than of snow, flakes that stung or pinged when they struck a face or a window. It would freeze by morning into rounded hills as hard as any rock. You could drive teams of horses over those drifts, and their hooves wouldn’t make a dent. You could--if you had owned one— have driven a car across them and left no track.

The wind clutched at the corners of the tall white house as though trying literally to tear it from the ice-bound soil on which it stood. The weather wasn’t in the least unusual for the time of year, but unusual events were taking place inside the dwelling. To the two women who waited there, one of them young, one a generation older, a snowstorm would have been less unwelcome on any other night.

The house belonged to the older woman, Amelia Amoth, and stood on land she and her late husband, Martin, had homesteaded thirty-four years before—in 1896, that was, with a lifetime of raising her family in between.

Now Amelia appeared in the open doorway of her bedroom and cast another anxious glance across the large front room to the outer door on its east wall. But the son she very much wished to see there was still nowhere in sight. She turned with a sigh and re-entered the bedroom, and the soft, soothing murmur of her voice came from inside, and another voice as well.

 Margaret, her daughter-in-law lay on Amelia’s bed in the tiny room, awaiting the birth of her first child. Now the older woman moved around the room, arranging things, smoothing the bedclothes, making everything ready for the doctor’s arrival. Soon, she hoped, it had better be soon.

“Albert ought to be back any time now,” she said reassuringly to the expectant mother whose eyes kept straying toward the doorway. Amelia’s soft voice gave every word she spoke the lilting quality of her Norwegian heritage, sounding more like song than conversation.

Her son Albert had left a half-hour before for the home of the nearest neighbor with a telephone to call Dr. McQueen. She carefully masked, for the sake of her daughter-in-law, the uneasiness she felt over any drive in such weather: were the roads still open? Would they stay open for the doctor to make it through?

The house had an urgent feel about it tonight, as though it too participated in the coming event. The soft yellow glow of kerosene lamps shone out from every downstairs window, had there been anyone outside to see. The big coal heater at one side of the larger room, and the cast-iron cook-stove through a doorway to the kitchen each crackled and snapped with unusual vigor for so late an hour. The house seemed alive, and waiting too.

Now, alerted to the chug, chug, chug of Albert’s Model T Ford coming to a stop outside the front door, the two women exchanged relieved smiles.

“Ah, here he is!” breathed his mother, as the short, sturdy young man blew in through the doorway as though propelled by the wind. “Here’s Albert now!”

Her son stood on the round braided rug just inside the outer door as he peeled off overshoes, mittens, and the sheepskin greatcoat that was almost a winter uniform for prairie farmers. He raised questioning eyebrows, and his mother nodded silent reassurance.

“Well, I got through to him,” he told her, “and he said he’d be out here as soon as he could make it.” Then, gesturing toward the chaos he had just left, he added uneasily, “It’s getting pretty bad out there, Ma. If Dr. McQueen makes it up the lane getting in here, I’ll sure have to hitch up the team to pull his car out to the main road afterward….” This last from the bedroom doorway, and then he turned and went to sit beside his wife’s bed.

“How’s it going, then?” he asked Margaret solicitously.

“Not too bad so far,” she assured him, and then he sat quietly, holding her hand, as they waited together.

Margaret was small, a worry now to both Albert and Amelia, and normally weighed less than a hundred pounds. She had a round, pretty face, and looked far younger than her years. At twenty-five, she was a few years older than were most Mennonite women when giving birth to a first child. Albert, at thirty-three, was older than most first-time fathers among their people too. He and his older brother had taken on the job of helping their mother raise their younger brothers and sisters when their father died, and had only recently felt free to marry.

Margaret’s eyes were blue, and tonight her light brown hair was braided in a long plait down her back. In daytime she would wear it pinned up in a tightly coiled bun, covered with the triangular black head covering of their Mennonite denomination. For church services on Sunday, this ‘covering was tied kerchief-style beneath her chin (and by some women, Amelia included, at all times). On any other day the ‘covering was