Miss Ammundsen turned away, then stopped and looked back. “I think you should call me Olea when we meet again,” she said. “And if I may, I’ll call you Clara. We’re reform women, yes?” I smiled. “It’s been such a pleasure to meet you, Clara.”
“Likewise, Olea.”
I watched her walk away with a twinge of envy and no anticipation that one day she’d be back into my life. But I hoped for the financial security to travel, dress well, and consider real business risks as she did—well-studied risks, nothing foolish, decisions that didn’t put my family in jeopardy or change their lives forever.
TWENTY-ONE
Homecoming
The train arrived earlier than expected, so no one was there to meet us at the stop near Mica Creek.
“Well, I guess we walk up to the house,” Mama said.
“They’ll come greet us, surely,” I said. “This gives us time to find the frog.”
“That’s right! Johnny would never forgive us if we forgot his frog.”
We stepped across the tracks, headed toward the banks of Mica Creek, then set our bags down. The air smelled of new-mown hay, and the sky was as blue as Mama’s eyes. The landscape seemed to open its arms to us, welcoming. I squatted beside the little creek that rushed across leaves and swirled broken willow boughs around. I could see where the water had been higher with spring rains before time tamed it.
“Here’s one,” I shouted. I shivered at the feel of its skin, all rippled and wet, and it leaped from my hand.
“I’ve got one too,” Mama said. “Well, I guess I don’t,” she added when the frog disappeared from her palm. We hollered back and forth, laughing as our prey departed, and then I found another.
“Here, put it in my grip,” Mama said.
“No, it’ll mess up your papers. Take off my hat,” I said. “Plop him in here. Johnny will be so surprised and he’ll never guess we didn’t bring it from New York. I wonder where they are? You don’t suppose they’re still—”
“In quarantine,” Mama gasped. Color drained from her face. “I should have thought.”
We heard Sailor barking as we left the road and walked up the lane to the house. The sign “Quarantined” hung on the gate like a pox. Mama hesitated, inhaled deeply, gearing up for what lay ahead. I patted her back. In a strange way, I felt stronger at that moment, perhaps because I had lost a sister while she had lost a part of her flesh and her heart.
The farmhouse sat in a dimple of green, the pig shed and barn beyond, and I heard my heart pounding against my temple. We stood for a moment, Mama and me as we’d been for over a year, just the two of us. Now all that would change. Sailor nosed up and I bent to hug him. “Where is everyone?” I said scratching at his ears. He leaned into me, sniffing at my closed hat.
“Hello!” Mama shouted. “Ole, children, we’re home.”
The sound of muffled talking reached us as my brothers and sisters came out of the house, their slender forms straight as arrows, eyes hollow. Arthur and Billy stepped out first, followed by Ida holding Lillian’s hand, with my stepfather and Olaf walking—no, standing behind them. I didn’t want to look at the space that Bertha would have filled beside Ida.
For my mother’s sake, I wanted my stepfather to give a nod or smile. He wasn’t the kind of man to take Mama in his arms, at least not in front of us children, but it would be good if they could weep together for their lost child. I wanted them to be glad we were home, and I hoped they’d be happy once Mama told them about the book, that good had still come from the walk.
Arthur stepped forward then, the first. “Mama,” he said before Ida grabbed at his shoulder and pulled him back. He waved a small hand but didn’t approach again.
“Hi, Mama. Hi, Clara.” Billy followed with his own greetings, but he didn’t push ahead either. “We’re quan-tined,” he said, his five-year-old tongue stumbling on the word.
We’d be now too.
Ida had picked Lillian up, held her on her hip. The child lay her head on Ida’s shoulder, looked warily at us. She doesn’t recognize us. She doesn’t know who Mama is.
Olaf was the only one to actually smile. “Welcome home,” he said. “Though this isn’t much of a homecoming.”
“They shouldn’t expect a party,” Ida said.
Mama looked at Ida, and I felt or maybe even saw a wave of revulsion roll between them, daughter riding on hostility so thick and powerful that Mama actually stepped back. Something more was wrong, more than Lillian acting cautious, more than Bertha missing and my stepfather not giving even a nod of greeting to his wife, whom he’d not seen for more than a year.
Mama dropped the grip she’d held in her hand. She let her arms fall to her sides.
The hair at the back of my neck prickled.
“Where’s Johnny?” Mama whispered to the hedge of eyes and anger before us. “We brought along a frog for Johnny. Where is my son?”
“He’s dead,” Ida said. “Just like Bertha. And you weren’t here to save them.”
TWENTY-TWO
The Siblings of Sorrow
Lillian jerked her head up from my sister’s shoulder, Ida’s words like gunshots slamming into my heart.
I looked at Mama, ached for her.
She covered her mouth with her hands. I dropped my hat, stepped back to reach for her, caught in a crossfire. The frog jumped out and the dog gave chase.
“When?” Mama wailed. She dropped to her knees. “How?”
My stepfather came forward but didn’t reach to comfort. He lifted Lillian from Ida, who looked like she’d explode with rage. “What do you think?” she growled. “What do you think killed him?”
“Diphtheria,” Olaf said. “Four days after Bertha. We did what we could, but …”
“But the children were quarantined, weren’t they? You kept everything clean, sterile?”
Mama, grabbing at straws.
“I did what was needed,” my stepfather defended, his first words to Mama. “As soon as we know Johnny is ill, Olaf carries him from the pig barn, where Ida keeps the children when Bertha becomes ill. We had to do it without the help of a mother here to do her part.”
“I did everything I could,” Ida said. “Everything. But we were in the shed! The pig shed.”
It was a well-built barn with a loft entered from a ladder on the outside and a small stove inside for heating when the pigs birthed. But she wouldn’t appreciate my observations. Ida would have had to clean it, maybe with Olaf and the boys’ help. Cooking would have been complicated, and keeping the children entertained would have demanded much of her.
“It was so cold,” Ida said. “Papa couldn’t even bring blankets to us for fear they carried the disease. He left food on the porch and I picked it up. We ate cold things. Poor Johnny.” Ida started to cry now. “Arthur and William and Lillian, we cried over Johnny, and there was no one to cry over us.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mama said softly through her own tears.
“I know that!” Ida snapped. The braids crowning the top of her sixteen-year-old head weren’t neatly done up the way she was known for. They shook now with the vehemence of her words. “I didn’t kill Bertha and Johnny.”
“But I did,” Mama whispered.
“No, Mama,” I said. Had we been here, the grieving would have been different, but there was no evidence that either Mama or I could have kept the children alive. I looked at the man I’d called Papa my entire life. I pleaded with him to come to Mama and help her up, lift her in her anguish. But he stood rooted to the porch.
Mama sank forward as in a deep prayer, her head nearly on the ground, and she cried out the names of her lost children.
“Olaf,” I said. “Come help her.” My sweet brother came around from the back of the hedge of sisters and brothers and squatted beside Mama. “I’m not sure I should touch you,” he whispered. “I might carry—”
She leaned against him, and he put his arms around her. “I’m so sorry you had to hear it like this, Mother. So sorr
y.”
“Where was she when we needed comforting?” Ida said. My sister had been harboring this anger for months, covering her own pain and grief, and now she had Mama to vent it on. She was a child; I could forgive this. But my stepfather should stop this disrespect of Mama, this pounding of nails into a coffin of grief. Where was his kind nature; what held him back? Couldn’t he see that Mama was sick with sorrow? Someone had to defend and diffuse.
“Ida,” I said quietly. “That’s not fair.”
“You know nothing of fairness,” Ida spit the words at me.
Lillian fussed now to be let down from my stepfather’s arms, and she trotted over to Mama before Ida could haul her back. “Lillian, you come here this instant!”
But Lillian reached Mama and patted her on the shoulder. “You stand up?” she asked. “Are you sick?”
Sick at heart, I thought. She’s sick at heart.
“Mama needs to rest a little longer,” Olaf told his youngest sister. When he looked at me again, his eyes held pity.
Both Arthur and Billy moved in a little closer but looked warily in Ida’s direction. They stood on either side of me and let me put my arms on their shoulders and pull them to me. Lillian with her wide gait found me too, and I bent to pick her up.
“She doesn’t want you to hold her,” Ida snapped.
“Oh, well, it looked like she wouldn’t mind.”
“You don’t know her,” Ida said. “She doesn’t know you in those ridiculous costumes.” She ran her eyes up and down my reform dress and snorted. “You have no idea what she’s been through, and all for what?” She scoffed.
“She’s my sister,” I said and patted the child’s back as the girl leaned into me, seeking comfort. They all needed comforting.
“Mama grieves deeply for your children, Ole,” I said. I heard Ida gasp with my use of his name. “And for what you must have all gone through with our not being here.”
I saw a flicker in my stepfather’s eyes, acknowledgment a change between us. “She will grieve a long time before she catches up with us,” he said.
“But at least we’re all together again,” I said. “We can help each other.”
My words fell like rocks into deep water.
Mama looked beaten, an old rug with no luster. I helped her into the house, helped her undress, removed her shoes, pulled a light sheet up to her neck, browned from our walking in the summer sun. “Rest now, Mama,” I said. “Rest.”
Grief has many siblings. Anger, isolation, sadness, guilt, and, yes, distraction, avoidance, pretense. I met them all in the weeks that followed. So did our family.
“I should have sent you away once we saw the quarantine sign,” Mama told me a few weeks later when she felt a little stronger and we’d disinfected the rooms yet again to be sure no new diphtheria would steal into the house. “You weren’t exposed. You could have gone on to find work until you return to New York.” She poured generous amounts of the Labarraque’s solution the doctor had brought out. We had manganese peroxide to mix with muriatic acid to create chlorine gas.
“Be careful not to breathe the fumes,” the doctor said. “Leave the room and close the door.” Mama had Olaf show us where he and my stepfather had buried the body fluid of Bertha and Johnny so we could put additional lime on top. Then we resteamed all the sheets and clothing, the hot water boiling on a July day, creating a penance I hoped would bring Mama relief. She sank further into despair.
Glimmers of light reached me unsuspecting. If Ida was outside or the boys weren’t around, Lillian might let Mama hold her, and more than once I watched as Mama wept into the sweet clover smell in the girl’s hair or the taste of earthy salt at the back of her neck. The younger boys acted sullen around us, but Arthur was eleven, and that was a hard age for a boy anyway. They didn’t openly sass Mama or me. Olaf worked long hours in the fields, and while he didn’t say much over the meals, neither did his eyes send barbs sharp enough to cut.
But any mention of the trip brought stark silence, and then, more boldly, my stepfather announced over a quiet meal: “There will be no talk of the trip, no words about that time when you deserted us, when you did not listen to your husband and bad things resulted.”
“But if we write the book,” I said while everyone sat silent at the table after his announcement, “we can at least receive the money we earned.”
“There will be no book.”
“But we—”
“Enough of this reform,” my stepfather shouted. “That money is dirty money now. I am the head of this family, and I say no more talk of this terrible thing.”
“But—”
“Clara, please,” my mother whispered. She shook her head. She had nothing left to fight him.
If I thoughtlessly spoke of a Basque sheepherder in Idaho or a window in New York City, I was silenced by any or all of them, though not nearly as harshly as if Mama forgot and spoke. Everything that went wrong was Mama’s fault.
Ida was the keeper of the guilt. Too much salt in the stew? Mama had been away from cooking for too long. The garden wasn’t producing right? “We should have gotten the garden in by April, but of course, we had other things to do, not that you’d understand.” Ida insisted that Mama and I go with her to the pig shed, where they’d had to stay during the weeks of Bertha’s and Johnny’s illness. Ida wanted to point out where they’d been isolated from the sick children. “Papa built a fine barn for pigs; it was never meant for his children,” Ida said. “If you had been here …”
“I will never forgive myself for my absence,” Mama told her. “Never.”
“Guilt cuddles up next to me and steals my sleep,” she told me when we walked in the field together, both of us safe with each other. “I wish I had died in their stead.” I worried that she might die of a broken heart, of the despair that was deeper than the Dale Creek Canyon with no bridge for crossing. She waned like the moon, her light going out.
There was nothing I could do. Neither of us belonged anymore; we were both outcasts from our family.
“I need to find work, Mama,” I said when the quarantine was finally lifted in August. I hoped it would mean that the neighbors would come by now, that seeing friends might brighten Mama’s eyes. We pulled weeds in the garden, something she seemed willing to do. Ida did most of the cooking these days, and Mama let her. “I … There’s no reason to tell a future employer that I might be heading east on the train, making illustrations, is there?”
She shook her head.
The loss of the book’s possibility hurt more than I’d expected. Worse, I had hoped her writing of the journey would give her relief. In New York she’d told me writing eased her pain. “What if I tried to write it? I could make the trip. I could do it on my own.”
“Ole sees the trip as the cause of all this trouble and our silence as small price to pay for my having done it.”
“But you were behind on the payments before we left,” I insisted.
“It goes further back for him. My surgery. His accidents. All of that cost money, all contributed to my desire to earn the ten thousand dollars. I believe he feels he’s failed, and our journey without the money rubs salt into that wound.”
“But it’s still about money.” I remembered Mr. Depew’s office, the opulence. “Being safe and secure from the hands of the banks, that’s what all of this is about, why we went at all, isn’t it?”
“No, Clara. It’s about family. Doing all one can for our family and respecting what they need now to heal.”
“Your family turned on you and made another foolish choice, to let the book contract disappear.”
“Another foolish choice? So you still think our going was foolish too.”
I hesitated. What good would it do to tell her of my concerns now proven to be true? “I think … not having a better way to adjust the contract for the unexpected was imprudent, not properly thought out.” I pointed to my ankle. “I don’t want you to compound it now by letting the book contract go.”
We sat in silence, and I wondered at my arguing for the very thing I’d once called another foolish act. “What if we told the sponsors that the book was ready and we needed the train ticket east? That way we’d know if they intend to keep their word, and I could use your notes and my own to write it like a long travel article, without mention of how it affected us, nothing personal.”
Mama reached across and brushed my soft curls. “Clara, if they did send the ticket and you wrote it, then your father would never speak to either of us again. The money would mean less to him than that I disobeyed his wishes. I can’t have that. I can’t live without my children, and I want no animosity between you and your father. And if they didn’t send the ticket, then we’d be where we are now, but we’d know for certain of their intentions.”
“So we’re victims. They exploited us; they got their promotion for reform dresses, and we got nothing.”
“Nothing can take away the journey, Clara.” She sighed. She was always so tired now. “Or what we gained as two women. We are simply asked never to speak of it again.” Her voice caught. “It is important for our family to remain together.”
“You may think it’s about family, Mama. But from where I sit, it’s still all about money and maybe power too.”
“Oh, Clara.” She patted my back. Then, “Where’s Lillian?” Mama stood, looking to the barn, the house, back toward the fields. “Where is she?” A frantic look filled her face.
“She was right here, Mama. I’m sure she’s all right.” Mama started toward the barn, turned back toward the house. “There, Mama. In the barn shadow. Looking for eggs maybe. She’s fine.”