We rented the farmhouse to a young couple, and the husband agreed to work on shares. It was a perfect arrangement.
I didn’t need my brother.
“At least he might have written to me,” I complained. We’d bought peaches from a local farmer and were putting them up in Ball jars. “He said he’d always talk to me, and now he won’t.”
“Go see him again,” Olea said. The heat of the day and our canning had left moisture above her lips. Birdsong merried the air beyond the open window.
“No. He knows where I am. It’s up to him. It’s only right he contact me.” I rubbed my forehead with my forearm. It was so very hot in the kitchen.
“But you’re the one distressed. You can be right, Clara, but not be very happy about it.”
“I wouldn’t be happy begging him either,” I said.
“You think it’s begging to find out what might have gotten in the way of his contacting you again? He’s surely not out to hurt you. It’s in your best interest to believe he is doing the best he can. Maybe he’s sick or had an accident and can’t contact you.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
Still, he could ask someone to write to me. Maybe Erik Elstad. Or one of my brothers and sisters. He would find a way if he was really interested.
Obviously he wasn’t. Like my fantasy involving my father, I’d created a story with Olaf in it. Both stories had the same real-life ending: neither wanted contact with me.
THIRTY-FIVE
Calculated Changes
FEBRUARY 1904
Franklin arrived for a visit, much to the delight of the women, and me too I guess. The snow was deep in the stream ravines, but he and I snowshoed a distance into the timber so he could see the land. Afterward, we sat in my little shack, the wood stove crackling. It was his first look at the land I’d been trapping.
He assessed my pelts, commented on their size, pointed out the cuts I’d made in the fisher hide when fleshing it. “You’ve reduced its value,” he said. “You’ll get the hang of it. Otherwise, they look good. We didn’t see many beaver dams. Not as many tracks as I’d hoped for to indicate there’ll be ample harvest in the future. Makes me wonder if it’s overtrapped, or maybe disease has taken its toll and they haven’t reproduced as we’d expect. Stress in the coats suggests that too.”
“Are they good enough to sell on our own?” I asked.
“Some are. But we’d do better at the auction because you don’t have that many quality pelts.”
“Yet,” I said, but his words stung. I’d messed up with my knife in my learning, reducing the pelt’s value.
Franklin shrugged. He was like my brother Olaf in that way, not openly disagreeing but still expressing caution. “I’ve never been to an auction.” I’d sold my first season’s pelts in Spokane. “I guess now is the time.”
We all decided to go to Seattle and make an adventure of it, as Louise said. She contacted a neighbor boy to look after Lucy, and Lucky went out to the farm for the few days we’d be gone.
At the Seattle auction, we women sat in the back while the male buyers lifted their hats or flicked a finger beside their noses to indicate the lot of furs they wished to buy. Excitement crackled in the air between those representing the trappers and the buyers hoping to get the best profit for their manufacturing firms.
Pampering ourselves, we stayed at a fine hotel in Seattle and ate at the best restaurants. The eyes of my friends, Olea and Louise, sparkled in recognition of a buyer from Quebec they hadn’t seen for a while and the wife of a grader who sat with us after the auction.
“This is what I mean by passion,” Olea told me that evening as we prepared for yet another party. Her eyes sparkled. “Isn’t this grand?”
I did enjoy the hoopla and Franklin’s attention as well. Mostly, I eavesdropped to hear anything I could about what the Finns were doing, how the industry was moving. If I mentioned their ranching program, people scoffed. “Oh, you know those Finns,” they said. “I’ll bet it’s just rich gentlemen playing at a hobby. Why spend money gathering food for animals when the forests can do it for you?” A trapper’s wife interjected that it would be nice to have her man at home in the winter with a ranching operation, and the other women nodded. The conversation moved on, the idea of farming furs something for those dreaming Finns. When the auction events were over, we walked with Franklin to the train station. He’d head next to Montreal; we’d return to Coulee City. Louise and Olea had already boarded our train. I stood with Franklin, realizing I enjoyed his company and would miss it. Our friendship lacked pressure, carried the comfort of when I spent time with my brother, and had the added spark of bantering between two people who respected each other.
“I’ll write more often if you’d like me to,” Franklin said as we stood in the station.
“Do you think we need more information from you?” I said. He kept the women updated quite well, I thought.
“No,” he smiled. “I’d like more response.”
“Oh. Well, I can write reports more frequently,” I said.
“Clara. It’s you I’d like to hear from, not only the official correspondence of my women.”
“About my trapping?”
“I’m interested in you more than in trapping. Will you allow me to write of other things? More importantly, will you write back?”
I was glad he couldn’t hear my heartbeat. I liked the current arrangement. We were separated by miles, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that distance shortened by his knowing me better or differently. The train whistle blew over any answer he might have heard if I’d had the voice to give one.
“I’ll write back,” I told him, but I didn’t say about what.
By the next winter, I no longer felt baffled by the traps, though I still had much to learn about knowing where to set them. I still had two lines going now, both productive.
The Warrens were neighborly enough. At Christmas, they left me a wild turkey they’d shot. Once a salmon hung on a hook by my door. I set a packet of tobacco out for them, and it was gone by morning.
Louise worried out loud when I came home. She said that I seemed to grow taller but thinner and expressed concern about how hard I worked. Olea said more than once that she didn’t think this whole “trapping thing” was the best use of my time. It was difficult, cold work, though Lucky made it less so. There were occasional disputes about my not appreciating the work the two women performed at home or my “apparent preference for furs over friends.” The latter charge wasn’t so, but I could see how they might think so. Franklin’s letters spoke of designers he’d met with in Montreal and of bringing finished products back from Hong Kong to sell in the furrier shops of New York. He reminded me that design work was “much warmer than what you’re about with those traps.” He signed his letters, Affectionately yours.
The challenges made me more stubborn. No one was going to tell me what I couldn’t do. I didn’t take the time to listen for Isaiah’s words about what way to walk. That season I didn’t collect enough prime pelts, so I offered the Warrens good prices for theirs. I took all of the furs to the Spokane auction myself instead of having Franklin come west. No sense cracking muddy waters best left frozen. The pelts brought an average price, but I made little over what I’d paid the Warrens. My paltry contribution of my own pelts added a small profit, but I wasn’t going to become financially independent this way. I’d have to consider livetrapping to begin fur ranching, and I needed to let Olea and Louise know what I had in mind for the farm.
The boardinghouse earned us additional funds, and we split it three ways. Olea furnished the rooms and Louise cooked and I provided the house, so it worked. I added my profits to a fund I had for buying land. In 1905 I found sixteen more acres along the Spokane River bordering my three hundred twenty. It had timber in addition to river frontage, and I thought it a good investment. It came with an apple orchard. My cash reserve grew smaller. With trepidation, I took out a small loan at the bank for wheat seed, a few apple starts
, and twenty chickens.
“Don’t overextend yourself,” Olea warned.
“But you said one has to invest in order to get a return, right?”
“Yes, but caution is essential.”
“I’ve studied yields and expenses. I’m diversifying,” I said, remembering Olea’s brother-in-law’s advice. I didn’t add that I thought her latest enterprise promised less return than my wheat fields. She and her sister, Priscilla, had begun importing European furniture into America. Olea used a few pieces to furnish the boarders’ rooms and our living quarters; some she placed in the Spokane house she still owned, where she met monthly with society women looking for the perfect settee or that English burl elm Chippendale flattop desk (which she told everyone came from a royal estate). I was surprised by the prices people were willing to pay for secondhand items and wondered if they were moved to spend by the romance of the stories Olea spun.
Fortunately, we had bountiful rain that year. The grain harvest not only allowed me to repay my bank loan and interest, but it made all my expenses, the labor I hired, and feed and seed for the next season. We butchered several chickens and sold them in Spokane, but I knew that when I was ready for raising my fur-bearing animals, chickens or their eggs would meet the protein needs. I used a little of my small profit to buy Louise a new Monarch stove and Olea a signed first edition of Audubon’s 1827 The Birds of America, published in France. If I could repeat my success each year, I’d have a nice little nest egg soon. I was doing what I’d set out to do, making my way with sound decisions that hurt no one else. I still wished I could tell Olaf of my success, but he’d made his choice. I’d made mine. Louise and Olea and even Franklin—at arm’s length—were my family now.
“I wish you’d stop trapping,” Louise said. I readied my kit for the months I’d be on my timberlands. “I worry about you there alone for so many weeks in the snow and cold.”
“I have the Warrens,” I assured her. “And Lucky.” She handed me a pair of gloves, furry sides in. “It’s not only danger that concerns me.” She didn’t look at me when she spoke, so I wasn’t sure I heard what she said next. “I like your company. I miss you when you’re gone.”
“You miss Lucky,” I teased. I couldn’t recall anyone suggesting that my absence brought them even the smallest heartache. I assumed my brothers and sisters missed my mother while on our journey, but I’d already worked away from the Mica Creek farm for five years by the time Mama and I left for New York, so I didn’t imagine they really missed me. I had already become more a memory than a presence to them. Louise offered a view of belonging that hadn’t occurred to me before.
“No, I miss you,” she insisted.
“I miss you too,” I said. And I realized I did. The observation warmed before it alarmed.
I took plenty of food with me: hardtack biscuits, dried venison, and beef that I jerked from my Coulee City neighbor’s stock. I added carrots and potatoes beginning to sprout eyes. I stored all this in the shack, along with fish pemmican the Warrens traded with me. I knew how to locate the best spots and set traps for the winter weasels, those ermine whose pelts were valued regardless of size. I could identify the slides the otters made on the stream banks, and beavers leave tracks even a child can find. I had the right bait (chicken parts Louise sent with me and, when my traps were full, scent glands from the animals). Lucky came too, and I welcomed not only his brawn but his fierce barks warning of wolves or bears. I understood that for my benefit, Louise had given up her own precious time with him, a clear sacrifice.
Lucky’s tail wagged when I placed the usual animal innards in his dish one morning. Wood smoke from my stove made my throat sore, or so I’d thought until my cough turned into a seal’s bark. Fatigue visited more quickly than I’d remembered, but I had to check the traps. As I trudged through the woods, Lucky trotted behind me on the narrow trail. Snow fell, sugaring the pine and firs and filling in my snowshoe tracks. Fur-lined boots kept my feet warm, but the coughing caused me to stop more than once, gloves on knees. I felt a buzzing in my head after each bout. “I should have fixed a mustard pack,” I croaked to Lucky, who panted beside me.
For the first time, I was too weak to finish the trap lines. Instead, I took what I had and dragged it back to my shack, unloaded Lucky, and stood in the crisp air to flesh and stretch them. Despite my stupor, I ran my hands over the smooth fur, exerting energy to tie the edges to the circular frame and salt them. More hides waited, but I needed to eat. I rested for an hour before I fixed my supper of vegetable stew with pieces of beaver tail and fat floating on the top. I curled up beneath a fur blanket. I’d rest then finish. That was my plan.
When I awoke, it was morning, and my chest felt like an elephant sat on it. I knew I ought to remain where I was, fight the fever growing within me, but I needed to finish the line. Lucky licked my face, and I rose, stopping to cough, my lungs vibrating against my chest. Breath came with difficulty. I sat down on my cot to pull on my pants. I tried to stoke the fire, but now I shivered and dropped kindling. The ends of my fingers were white as bone, and when I caught my face in the mirror over the washbasin, my lips looked blue.
Even now, all these years later, when Ida gets up to stoke the fire, I remember how my hands trembled that day, lips and fingers numb, as close to giving in to final silence as any time in my life.
“I should eat,” I mumbled to the dog.
I reached for a pan to heat water and watched the wood floor come up to smack my face.
THIRTY-SIX
Servicing
I wheezed in and out of memories. Once Ida flashed before my eyes, telling me how cold the hog house was and that Johnny was sick. Words wouldn’t come for me to tell her I was so sorry that he was ill, that she was cold, that I was cold too, and that I wished it had been me instead of any of them, me instead of my mother having to ache and grieve the rest of her life. In dreams, words fail to express the heart, but the soul knows of the longing. Olaf swirled in my memory, flying up into a cyclone. I thought that dying would be good now, but someone wouldn’t let me, lifted my head instead.
I opened my eyes to the brown face of Young Warren.
I smelled juniper, tasted bitter broth that Older Warren now spooned into my mouth. I lay back shivering. “Very sick, Miss,” he said. “We stay.”
And they did.
Lucky had been lucky for me. I’d let him outside, though I didn’t remember doing it. He’d found the Warrens, urged them back to the shack. They’d put me to bed and stayed for four days watching over me.
When I felt well enough to sit up and take nourishment on my own, I remembered Louise’s lament and agreed with her.
“I’ve asked the Warrens to do the trapping for me from now on,” I told Olea and Louise when the Warrens returned me to Coulee City. I was weak and had lost weight. I pulled the fur hat with its ear flaps off, not caring how matted my hair must look. Getting a hot bath and my hair washed would feel like heaven.
“It’s good to see you learn from experience,” Olea chided, “even if it does take years.”
“I’ll buy pelts from them exclusively, for a fair price. Maybe my profit will be a little less but still enough. And I’ll have them start livetrapping,” I told my friends.
“Whatever for?” Olea said.
“To do what the Finns are doing, only with foxes here. I’ll build pens out at the farm. We’ll have chickens for protein. We have enough cold weather to bring us excellent pelts. I’ve investigated it,” I said. “There’s hardly any risk.”
“Investigated? Have you been to Finland to see what’s happening there? Have you talked with those who think ranching fur-bearing animals has merit? No, Clara. You haven’t thought this through,” Olea said.
It struck me that her words were the very ones I’d spoken to my mother all those years ago before we took our walk.
When we carried our fur garments to Spokane for summer cleaning and storage in April of 1906, I looked in the city directory. I hadn’t done i
t before then, not wanting to see my family’s names without mine included. Ida worked as a domestic. My mother, Ole, Arthur, William, and Lillian lived at 1528 Mallon Avenue. Aunt Hannah wasn’t listed there, or anywhere. I wondered if she’d passed on. I’d last seen my brother Olaf in 1901. He wasn’t mentioned, so I assumed he worked outside of Spokane, maybe still at the Elstads’ farm. That he still hadn’t written to me stung.
I also looked up the Doré name, and there were Dorés listed. An Elsie, John, and Mitchell appeared, the latter a conductor on the Northern Pacific Railway. Seeing their names affirmed for me what my father had once said, that there were many Dorés. It was a name like Olson or Johnson, with a hundred branches on every family tree.
On my own, I took the streetcar to the Mallon address. I’m not sure what I thought I’d do there, but I wanted to see where they lived so I could picture where they carried on lives without me. I stood across the street from a fine-looking two-story home with dormers on the top floor and a lovely porch to grace the front. Lilac scent wafted from the yard. My stepfather had detailed the area above the porch with an intricate framed design that added interest, made it unique. A bay window brought in extra light. If he’d built the house as Olaf said he planned to, he’d done a fine job of it. Without the dirty money, they apparently lived comfortably.
My heart leaped as two girls came out of the house, onto the porch. They were about twelve. Lillian? They sat on the stone steps holding little books in their laps. Diaries. They giggled together. The one I thought was Lillian suddenly looked my way, as though she was aware that I stared.
When I waved, she waved back. My heart pounded. I looked for traffic, thinking to cross the street, when I heard Ida’s voice. “It’s time Marcia went home,” Ida said. “Lillian, come help Mama get the duster down.”