The Daughter''s Walk

“You would?” the editor said.

  “We’ll need them to help with the writing, and since the original contract was voided—by my sprained ankle—those signatures really do belong to us.”

  “Clara—”

  “No, no,” the editor said. “She has a point.” He pulled at is earlobe. “I see no harm in that. I’ll get them for you now.”

  We left the offices, signatures in hand. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask,” Mama said.

  “We’ll ask each one of them to promote the book. We could plan a trip when it comes out, stopping back at all those places. I’m sure the papers in Boise City and Lincoln and Canton would cover it. President McKinley—”

  “That’s brilliant, Clara.”

  The admiration on her face was almost as satisfying as eating a piece of julekaga.

  Mama looked almost peaceful when we boarded the train. We’d decided not to look for a frog for Johnny but to pick one up in Washington State, as the creature would never survive the train trip home. Mama had written to Papa to tell him that when we left Minneapolis, we’d send a telegram so he would know when to expect us.

  “I told him to bring everyone to meet us,” Mama said. “I’m certain they’ll be waiting for good news given the year we’ve all had.”

  “At last we have some,” I said, thinking of the tickets home. Of all the skills I lacked, however, predicting the future was chief among them.

  NINETEEN

  The Empty Hole of Why

  The trouble with a train ride is all the time one has to think. We rumbled through New York City and the Amish farms where we’d been treated with such care, through coal country, and out through Pittsburgh across its triple rivers, wide and swift. Everything looked different rushing by. Everything had changed since we’d dusted the earth with our footsteps.

  Bertha’s death wasn’t real to me yet. I held her in my heart as I’d done during the entire trip east, as I had held all my brothers and sisters. Bertha was still there, right where she belonged. It didn’t seem possible that she wouldn’t be waiting for us when we arrived.

  “Is Bertha with Henry now?” I asked as black smoke drifted back from the engine.

  “It’s what we Lutherans believe,” Mama said. “We will see them again, these baptized babies. Bertha knew her catechism, and she had the heart of Christ, loving and giving. It seems not right, I know, that young people like Bertha and Henry and young Ole should pass away from this land while Ole and I still trek along as though we contribute to God’s plan at our age.”

  “Why is that?” I asked. “Why did I live but not little Ole or Henry and now Bertha too?” Mama winced, and I wondered if she said things to herself about how Bertha might have lived if she’d been there to keep the house clean of the disease, if she’d been there to comfort Bertha and nurse her through. What if I’d insisted that Olaf make the trip with her or if I’d refused to go at all? Maybe Mama would have stayed too; she might have kept Bertha alive.

  “Ours isn’t to question the why of things, Clara. It takes up too much time and energy without any promise of answers. ‘Why Bertha? Why Henry? Why not me?’ No answers in those questions. None.”

  Mama stared out the window as farmland blended with industry. “A better question,” Mama continued, “must be, ‘What next? What now does God have in store for me?’ These will take you to a new place, moving forward on one’s way rather than hovering over the empty hole of why, where you can only tumble down.”

  In Chicago, we left the train and walked past buildings that had been part of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, where reform-length skirts had first been introduced. At the Tribune, Mama asked for a clipping of the article written when we’d passed through before. It included a picture of the two of us, and Mama left our Spokane address so they could send a copy of any articles they wrote as a result of this visit.

  “The walk will be good for us,” Mama said as we began the next four hundred miles. “Sitting on a train weakens the body. We need the benefit of physical exertion to calm thoughts that ride on sorrow.”

  The walk north through the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin was nothing like the route we’d taken across the country the year before. Yes, cornfields lined our dusty trails, and little clusters of trees marked farmhouses, but we also walked past long miles of oak and maple forests. The hill climbs were steeper than in Iowa, and the humidity limped my hair straight as a horse’s tail even when I used the curling iron Mama bought for me with a portion of the editor’s five dollars.

  “When will you write the book, Mama?” I asked. Southern Wisconsin was awash with fresh green and birdsong and little pools of rainwater where yellow butterflies danced about.

  “I’ve been writing it. The letters I sent to Ole are like chapters in my mind. I’ll be busy at home, yes, but there is always early morning before the sun comes. Writing our story brings me comfort. I find new ways of thinking about things. It’s as though I went on to school myself with the experience of the walk, and now writing about it is another education: what to put in, what to leave out, how I felt at various times. It’s easier to … write than speak about how I feel.”

  “People won’t want to know how you felt, Mama. They’ll want to know what we did and how we did it, what we saw, who we met.”

  “When I read, I want my feelings touched,” she said. “I want the writer’s imagination and his facts. But they’re different things, the walk and writing about it. Each gives me … peace. Its publication will bring honor to Bertha. We’ll save the farm with it.” She switched the grip to her other hand. “I’ll dedicate it to her. You won’t mind, will you?”

  Dedicating the book to Bertha meant everyone would know that my sister had died while we lived in Brooklyn, separated from our family, victims of the sponsors’ withdrawal.

  “Must there be a dedication?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Dedicate it to the entire family. We couldn’t have made it without them staying faithful at home.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” She turned around and walked backward as she said, “They supported us. They’ll support us too with the writing and your sketching. You’ll see. It’ll work, Clara. It has to. I’ll save the farm yet.”

  My mother made her own facts. I remembered the looks on the faces of my brothers and sisters when we’d left them. If I’d learned anything from this journey, it was that to take care of one’s family, everyone needed to tell the truth and not make up facts when evidence was lacking.

  In Winona, Minnesota, we visited the Daily Republican newspaper but got no coverage. Two women walking home had less appeal than brazen western adventurers walking east. At a park bench where we sat to eat an egg and biscuit, I picked up a copy of an old newspaper lying near the trash basket. I read the headline aloud. “ ‘Two St. Paul Women Fined.’ They lifted their dresses too high as they crossed a muddy road, or so says a peculiar policeman.”

  “The paper called the policeman peculiar?” Mama asked.

  “No. They said he was ‘keen-eyed’ and that if ‘the simple-minded females had but joined a vaudeville troupe doing barnstorming work around the country or become members of the grand opera company exhibiting in Paris or Chicago, they might have lifted their skirts a good deal higher without incurring official censure.’ Mother, are we going to be arrested in St. Paul? Maybe we shouldn’t wear our reform skirts there.”

  “Nonsense. Our ankles are covered with the shoes, and besides, hemlines will be coming up before long; I’m sure of it. Didn’t you get the feel of that back in New York with all the talk of women’s suffrage?”

  “I was too busy working, Mother,” I said.

  “How does the article end?”

  “ ‘St. Paul must be set down as one of the rural villages in the country in questions of female dress—or undress.’ ”

  “There, you see?” Mama said. “The newspapers know that change is coming, and they’d like to push St. Paul along toward a more open vi
ew of female outfitting. We’ll be inspiration in St. Paul.”

  In Minneapolis, we posed at the Anderson Studio on Washington Avenue, wearing our reform skirts so we’d have new photographs to sell. A row of buttons at the top of the side seam added interest to the waistline of the linen skirts. Blousy shoulders with narrow sleeves to the wrist gave a respectable appearance from the waist up. While on the train, Mama had embroidered delicate stitching down the shirtwaist fronts. In the photographic pose, Mama sat revealing the tops of the leather shoes while I leaned on a prop, a tree stump, with my skirt a good eight inches from the floor and my shoe, topped with a canvas overshoe, showing. We gave one print to the reporter at the Times and another to the reporter at the Tribune. Reporters from both newspapers showed up at the Scandia-Excelsior Hotel, where we sat in the kitchen telling stories to the staff.

  Complimentary and thorough articles appeared in both papers the next day. “They liked us, didn’t they?” Mama asked.

  “I believe so,” I said. I spit on my finger, then tapped the curling iron heating on the coal stove in our room. “It’s hot,” I said.

  Mama stood and rolled lengths of my fine hair around the narrow rod, holding it until the hair nearly steamed, then untwisting it and gathering up two more strands before placing it back on the stovetop to reheat. She got better results with that iron than I did.

  The articles raved about our feat and wrote that we would receive the ten thousand dollars after we published the book. The reporters praised the future story of a woman’s unusual perspective in this time of the “woman question.” “ ‘A settlement has been reached between the two pedestrians and private parties in New York,’ ” I read. “I wish I shared their certainty. Your certainty.”

  “Set your sights, Clara. No one thought we could make the walk except the sponsors and me. And eventually you. But if we hadn’t determined to go, we surely wouldn’t have been successful. We went for a good cause, and God blessed our walk. It will all work out.”

  I stared at her. How could it all work out? Bertha was dead.

  “Mama. It says here that one reason we made the walk was because of your consumption, and your wanting to prove that with good exercise like walking, you could get your health back. When you said that last night, it surprised me. I didn’t know you were ‘threatened’ with consumption.”

  “I suppose that was too strong of a word, threatened, but I did want the trip to prove to myself that I could get my strength back, especially after my female surgery, and I didn’t really want to talk about that in the paper.”

  “We might not want Papa to see this comment.” I pointed. “ ‘Both are enthusiastic over their work and adventures and are satisfied in their own minds, at least, that man is not much the superior of woman after all.’ ”

  “Ja, well, that one we might not.” She winked at me.

  The old Mama was back.

  TWENTY

  Another Trestle

  I spread out drawing paper on the table in the train’s dining room car. Mama slept at her seat, and so I’d slipped away. Since we’d boarded, she’d slept, and when she woke, her face at first wore a haunted look. I stared out the window thinking I could sketch the skyline along this prairie land, but this route took us much farther north and didn’t look like the landscapes where we’d walked the previous year. Remembering the lonely train station of Nebraska, I started to draw, capturing as I could the rails coming together where land met sky. I drew a few more lines, thinking of how to create the sense of an endless horizon. I thought of the Dale Creek trestle instead.

  Taking out another sheet of paper, I set to work sketching from memory the sheer rock walls, the canyon’s depth, the intricate buttresses of tall, straight, and crossed sticks that held up the railroad tracks.

  “Dale Creek, is it?” A woman slightly older than Mama spoke to me as she leaned over my sketch. She dressed as someone comfortable in New York’s society gatherings, with an ermine collar on a stylish jacket and a long linen skirt that accented her slender frame. Porters had lit the gaslights and prepared the meal for dinner, which sent wafts of good smells into the car. The table light warmed even further the silver fur piece that gave dignity and beauty to her wide-brimmed hat. “The Dale Creek trestle, yes?” The woman had a Norwegian accent.

  “Yes,” I said. “We walked across it.”

  “You mean you took the train. There’s no walking across that place.”

  I smiled. The woman had the blunt way of stating things common to Norwegians. My aunt Hannah spoke like that.

  “No,” I corrected her. “We walked. My mother and I, on our way from Spokane to New York to publicize the reform dress. And to prove that women could endure such a journey.” I didn’t mention our financial reasons.

  The woman gasped, put her gloved hand to her mouth. She stepped back and I wondered if her actions were in response to the reform dress or the very idea of women walking across the country.

  “You’re them,” she said. “The globe trekkers. I … read about you in the Minneapolis Tribune.”

  “Yes. We’re them.” I studied my pencil, tapped it on the table, then set it down, not sure what else to say.

  The woman fingered the small set of binoculars that hung around her neck. “I’d love to hear about your journey. May I?” She motioned that she’d like to sit down and I nodded. I wasn’t sure what Mama would say, but I suspected it would be fine. A stranger interested in our walk would soon be a friend of my mother’s. This stranger would hear the story first from me. Few did.

  “I’m O. S. Ammundsen.” She reached out to shake my hand the way a man might. Many women who attended Mama’s lectures did the same. I put my hand out. The woman’s gloved hand gave two strong shakes, the small set of binoculars bouncing on her bodice.

  “And you are?”

  “I’m Miss Estby, Clara Estby.”

  “You’re headed for Spokane?” Miss Ammundsen said.

  “Yes. Home at last.”

  “That’s my home too, or it may be soon. I’m from Norway. Well, New York most recently. I’ve been visiting my sister in St. Paul.”

  “My mother too, a long time ago. Near Oslo. Christiania it’s called now. I forgot.”

  “One day they’ll change the name back to Oslo, I suspect,” she said. “Much easier to spell and takes up less space, so more efficient. We Norwegians are obsessed with efficiency.” She laughed.

  “My … stepfather, my mother’s husband. He grew up there.”

  It was the first time I’d described him as anything other than Papa. Our relationship too would change, I realized. Unveiling secrets opens doors whether we’re ready for what’s on the other side or not.

  “So,” Miss Ammundsen said, “tell me about crossing the trestle at Dale.”

  I found I could make the woman’s eyes grow large with anxiety then crinkle with laughter at my descriptions of our crossing and how I made light of my fears. I didn’t tell her that I’d learned on that same day about my Michigan birth or my mother’s trials and decisions as a young woman. Instead, I could sense a bit of what Mama enjoyed being up on stage, holding an audience’s interest, though mine was an audience of one. I embellished the feel of the wind, the cry of a hawk flying beneath us as we crossed.

  “When I was there,” the woman said, “it was winter and dreadful. We were in a train car, of course. I thought the wind would push us over like a wheat shock, but we survived. I have to say, I haven’t been back since and didn’t leave anything there I have to go back for.”

  I laughed. “What takes you to Spokane?” I asked, a question I often overheard at the Stapletons’ while serving at parties.

  “Business,” she said. “I prefer to travel for pleasure, but this time it’s business bringing us here.” She didn’t elaborate on the “us.”

  “When we left, there wasn’t much building going on in Spokane,” I said. “The city is still coming out of the depression.”

  “Often that’s the best time to
invest,” she said.

  “Maybe the situation has improved while we were gone.” I hoped my stepfather was stronger and could take on construction work again. That would help us stave off the mortgage man.

  “What kind of business?” I said.

  “Furs,” she said, the word spoken as though filled with magic. She rubbed the binoculars absently. “Wasn’t there a wager attached to your journey?”

  I nodded. “But because of my ankle sprain, the sponsors wouldn’t extend our deadline. We arrived ten days past, on December 23, I’m sad to say.”

  “Have you considered a legal suit?”

  Her words surprised. I couldn’t go into detail with this stranger about the great humiliation, as I’d begun to think of it. We didn’t even know whom to sue. How foolish would that sound? “It was a business risk,” I heard myself say, a phrase spoken by Forest’s father when men discussed their stocks and bonds. “I gained the equivalent of a college degree from the experience, and my mother improved her health. So we achieved something without earning the wager.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but it sounded wise and Miss Ammundsen nodded her head sagely. Then before I could stop myself I added, “Now the sponsors have offered a new incentive for us: we’ll still receive the award money, but first my mother has to write a book. I’m to illustrate it.” I made my voice sound light, the way Mama had bantered with the reporters from the Minneapolis papers. I could perform too.

  “Yes. The article mentioned that. Well, I’ll look forward to reading your book,” she said.

  A porter leaned at the waist and offered service. “Would you join us?” she said. “I’ll go get my cousin, and you could invite your mother.”

  “Oh, we have our basket for supper,” I said.

  “Another time then. My cousin, Ms. Gubner, will be wondering where I’ve gone off to anyway.” She looked thoughtful, lifted her binoculars, then let them rest. “New adventures await you, Miss Estby, you and your mother. What a pleasant time you must have had on this journey together.” Then the woman removed a calling card from the reticule hanging at her wrist. “Here,” she said. “Perhaps we’ll have a little more time to talk on the train, but if we don’t and you’d like to meet in Spokane, you can reach me at this postal address of the friend we’re staying with. I’m always interested in the future of young Norwegian women who show such promise.” I felt my face grow warm.