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148Writing Workshop Analysis of Theme in FictionThe Hollow ChildrenLouise ErdrichAt the Tabor Bar, around beer No. 4, the men sometimes got into history farming, trading stories of their antecedents%u2019 exploits and agonies. In the long ago, wheat prices had plunged and most of the bonanza farms had broken up. That was when their great-greats had bought the land. The men talked about old plagues, old equipment, old swaps of ownership, crops, land, and dire weather. John Pavlecky%u2019s greatgrandmother, at the age of nine, had survived the blizzard of 1923 by burrowing into a nearby haystack when the school bus didn%u2019t show up. Diz remembered his grandfather telling stories about an Uncle Ivek, who had also endured that blizzard, which was particularly lethal because it happened on a misty and mild April day. Around eight that morning, the bus had been almost full of children and headed toward the school, when out of the northwest a wind of sixty miles per hour had dropped the temperature instantly to minus twenty and filled the air with a blisteringcold curtain of powder. Such a snow could blind your eyes and scour the features off your face.Ivek was a farmer, a part-time schoolteacher, and one of the bus drivers. He was taking his turn behind the wheel. In the back of a school notebook, not long after the blizzard, he wrote about what happened.Ivek was bouncing down the muddy road when the mist dissolved and he saw it%u2014a boiling white mass rolling at him like annihilation. He drove straight in at full speed, hoping to make it the rest of the way on sheer momentum. But in the whiteout he slowed to a crawl. Then crept along, feeling through the tires for the road. The children had gone dead silent.The silence lasted until Ivek lost his feel of the road and knew that they had left it. The earth on either side of the Red River had been rollingpinned by a vast and ancient glacier. The flat fields and prairie were of a time eternal, and the human presence in that expanse was slight. The children knew it, and he knew it. They had to keep moving or die. Luckily, he%u2019d filled the gasoline tank.%u201cHow about a song?%u201d Ivek shouted.%u201cWhat shall we sing?%u201d the Viveky boy called out from a few seats back. His voice trembled. Perhaps he thought that a church hymn would insure their admittance to Heaven.%u201cWe shall sing %u2018Wild Clover.%u2019%u201dIvek hadn%u2019t noticed the girl. She touched her hand to his shoulder. It was Agnid Awbrey, daughter of a Welshman and an Irishwoman, a steady girl of eleven years, whose upbringing had been of the finest sort. From her mother, fearless good cheer, and from her father, a soldier who%u2019d fought in Mesopotamia, drinking songs adapted for childish ears. She began. And she taught the other children the words as she went along, just the way Ivek taught his students to learn poems and stirring speeches by heart:I%u2019ve been a wild clover all summer longAnd I%u2019ve spent all my money on sunlight and songBut now I am falling asleep under snowSo I can return as wild clover once more.And it%u2019s yes, yea, everYes, yea, ever and moreShall I be the wild cloverYea, ever and more.The song went on, amended verse after verse, with clapping and stamping on the chorus. It roused Ivek%u2019s heart and he roared the chorus, too. When the children were tired of that song, there was another:Fiery pillar on our journeyLead us through the snowFire, fire, fire, fire.5Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.