“You’ve got to get fluid back into you, Clara. Here, sip a little water now.”
“I … I can’t hold anything down,” I said.
I wanted to die, to be left alone to die.
Mama pointed out that at least we had the graciousness of a widowed grandma here in Percy, Wyoming. Living on the outskirts of town, she’d shown us comfort, offered her outhouse. I groaned again. Mama rose. “I’m going to ask her where the doctor is and see about finding a little work while you’re down.”
“No, don’t leave me,” I said. The thought of sitting alone in the disgust of my own aroma gave me chills. I started to shake.
“I have to go, Clara. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I imagined this was what my sisters felt when we left Mica Creek: wanting to believe she’d be back but feeling like they’d die while she was gone.
I tried sipping water again, watched a spider make its way up the side of the door, then spin a web. Bees hovered on the hollyhock branches; the sun moved across the sky.
“Here we are.” Mama’s cheery voice reached through my agony. “The doctor said water then a little rice, if you can hold it down. The lady of the house has dried apples we can mash later. And tea, he told me tea will help.” She handed me the bowl, but another wave of cramping coursed through me. I was grateful this hadn’t happened in the wide-open spaces. Thunder rumbled in the distance and lightning crackled in the foothills. At least I had a roof over my head. And Mama was taking care of me and didn’t seem upset with me even though this delay was bad. We weren’t even halfway to New York yet.
“I’ll contact the sponsors,” Mama said later that evening. “Get an extension. They said we could do that for illnesses, and the doctor will surely verify that you’ve been sick. I’ve got a laundry job for tomorrow. And here, I replaced your curling iron.”
I lay on a cot in a guest room of the kindly woman. My hair was as dirty and flat as old leaves. I didn’t need a curling iron.
“Don’t fret, Clara. You should have at least one delay on this trip with your name on it,” she teased. “You don’t need to remind me that all the others have been mine.”
Sun pierced the darkness of the mile-high Wyoming mountains, casting heavy shadows against stone. I was recovered from my bout with “not quite botulism,” as the doctor called it, and we’d walked several more days, including up a twisting mountain climb the locals called Rattlesnake Pass Road. I didn’t need my mother squeezing my shoulder and forcing me awake with her cheery, “It’s time, Clara.” I knew what time it was: time for yet another of her challenges, time for me to once again wonder what I was doing here. My fear of heights competed with my dread of uncertainty. This day threatened both, and there was nothing I could do about it but keep walking.
“Susan B. Anthony was stuck here twenty years ago,” my mother said. She stood, her angular face in profile. “Snow kept their train here four days, but they had plenty of coal and the railroad served them crackers and dried fish. They made an adventure of it. We’re lucky we’re here in the summertime.”
I put my jacket on, rubbed my arms, warming myself. “I could use hot tea.”
“On the other side,” my mother said, “we’ll look for a spot out of the wind to build a fire, make tea. No time to lose here.” She handed me a circle of hardtack, our regular morning breakfast.
My back ached and my throat felt scratchy as old socks. I drank from the canteen as I walked to the opening of the snow shelter, gazing up at patches of dirty snow hugging dips in the granite crevices. I stared at the narrow train trestle. I rounded my shoulders in an effort to relax them, pushed them forward and back, took deeper breaths. The thin air made me feel dizzy. This whole adventure, as my mother called it, made me feel dizzy.
“Nothing to be afraid of, Clara,” my mother said. She put her arm around my waist, gentled her head to mine. “We’ve walked farther than that. It’s what, maybe three hundred feet across?”
“More like four hundred fifty,” I said. “And the canyon’s at least a hundred and fifty feet deep.”
“You are the better judge of distances.” My mother patted my waist, turned back to put items into her carpetbag. She grabbed my curling iron and stuffed it inside. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to cross here, and the sooner the better.”
“It looks sturdy enough,” I ventured. “It’s … the height. I’ll have to look down to step on the ties, but then I’ll see … how deep it is.” I swallowed. “It’ll make me dizzy and then—”
“I suppose we could backtrack to that old wagon road through the canyon. But there are snakes down there, no doubt. We’d have to climb like mountaineers to get up the other side. We don’t have that kind of time.”
“That’s not my fault, Mama,” I said.
“I know. I know. Something you ate, though I still don’t know why I didn’t get sick.”
It hadn’t been only my recent illness that delayed us, but I kept my tongue. No sense having an argument when we might die within the next moments. “The trestle’s the only way. But should a train come …”
“We’ve not met any trains this early in the morning,” my mother said. “I checked at the Laramie station. One arrives at 7:00 a.m. and stops for passengers to eat. Then it makes the long climb up Sherman Hill. We’ll be long across Dale Creek trestle by then. No trains are expected this early from Cheyenne either. We’ll scamper across like rabbits and be done with it before the sun can peek over that ridge.” She pointed to the rocky promontory in the distance. I shivered. “This is how Estbys deal with fear, Clara. Fears or disappointments or betrayals: we face them early on with a strong jaw forward, a refreshing drink of water, and a prayer.”
I walked to the opening of the snow shelter, lifted my skirts to relieve myself, then rubbed my hands clean in the pebbled dirt beside the tracks. We were saving precious water. Returning, I took the items my mother handed me and stuffed them into the light grip, making sure everything balanced well. I pushed my worn straw hat onto my head, held the grip at my side.
I’d heard stories that the winds could be so fierce that railroad cars had toppled off the Dale Creek trestle, plunging into the hundred-fifty-foot depths below. Both my mother and I together weighed less than one good stout man, so who knew what the wind could do to us if it took a mind to.
“What is it, five o’clock?” I yawned, couldn’t get a good, deep breath.
“We do not walk in darkness,” my mother chirped, and I knew it was as much a statement of reality as a reference to Scripture.
The wind came at us in blustery gusts. In between them, the world fell silent as snow.
The thin soles of my leather shoes—my fourth pair since the journey began—gave rise to little pebbles pressed against my feet. Maybe that was good, to feel the ground so closely. It would keep me bound to earth and forbid my missteps. I could see myself dropping a leg between the railroad ties or, worse, losing my balance and tumbling to certain death. My feet attuned to earthly things might notice the vibration of a distant train, feel it strong enough and early so I’d know before we stepped onto the first railroad tie that we should wait, that there wasn’t enough time before a train came smoking around that distant bend and the engineer faced the horrified looks of two women about to meet their deaths. Could my feet save us both?
A hawk screamed overhead. Or was that a distant train whistle?
No, the wind. It seared through the iron monolith, pushing against the guy wires that reminded me of tiny threads futilely hoisting a ship’s sail. Still, I had to believe it was secure.
At the trestle’s edge, my mother halted, looked ahead, then turned. “Keep your eyes on the ties, not between them. We’ll make this. We have to.”
I set my carpetbag down, bent to flatten my hands onto the iron track, willing myself to feel even the tiniest vibration. My breaths came short, rapid. The steel felt cold and silent as a dagger. My fingers scraped the iron spikes holding the rail to the ties.
 
; “Come along,” my mother shouted, swinging her arm forward. She didn’t look back.
My head buzzed as I stood. The world spun.
I took the first tentative step onto the railroad tie, thin soles making me aware of the ax marks struck by a Chinese worker who labored in building this trestle. The essence of another human having touched that tie gave me courage. Others had made their way on foot across here; so could I. I set the grip in front of me, took another step. Through the ties, I saw a tiny dark snake of a creek wind its way beneath me. I felt lightheaded again. Am I going to be ill? I shook my head, took the third step, then another. I got my rhythm: a step, then move the grip forward, eyes on my mother’s slender back, eyes down to the next tie, then step, grip forward. I refused to see what lay beneath us, what the sun wouldn’t hit for hours. I focused on the solid ties and my mother’s frame as we two met yet one more challenge.
I heard the shout, stunned by my mother’s body jerking forward and her, “Whoa!”
“Mama?”
My mother dropped to the rails. Before I knew what was happening, the blast of wind that lowered her struck me. I felt myself shifting, threw my arms out like a tightrope walker I’d once seen in a circus. I’d be cast aside without a net. My heart pounded in my temples. “Ooh!” I shouted. The wind pushed me down, and I squatted and gripped the sides of the tracks with my face buried in the carpetbag on the tie in front of me, sucking up air. At least it hadn’t been blown away. Tears of fear and outrage pressed against my nose. What am I doing here? Cool sweat threatened my rib cage beneath thin wool. I was frozen in place.
If I got across this trestle alive, I vowed I’d never put a member of my family in such a position; I’d never do such a foolish thing. Anger spurrred me to crawl. Being on my knees made praying easier.
“ ‘This is the way, walk ye in it.’ ” I repeated the verse from Isaiah.
“You can do it!” Mama called out. I looked up. She was already across. “Swallow your fears. Keep coming.”
I crept and finally looked up to my mother’s hand reaching out to me.
“We did it, Clara.” She hugged me. “Come, we’ll fix that tea I promised.”
“No one should be in that kind of danger,” I said. “No one.” I wanted to cry in relief. “This is all because you didn’t think this through.” I shivered both from outrage and fear.
“Clara. We’re here. You have to let go of what got us here and take one step at a time. It’s the Estby way.”
“Maybe I’m not an Estby then,” I said.
She softened. “You’re truly frightened.”
I started to cry. “I thought I’d die,” I said. “And you too. Why did you bring me? What did I do to make you want me along?”
“Oh, Clara, I would never knowingly do anything to hurt you. Never.” She pulled me to her. “I … I hoped you’d like the time with me on this journey. You’re a wise young woman. You add respectability to the wager. I enjoy your companionship. This could be such an education for you. I. You can’t let things frighten you. We must be bold. We must be.”
“But I was scared.”
“Come, let’s have that tea,” she said then. “And a little conversation.”
I drank the tea, inhaled the mint of it. My mother stared at me in a thoughtful mood.
“What makes you think you’re not an Estby?”
“You tell me often enough that Estbys aren’t fearful; they keep going.”
“Oh, we’re fearful all right. But it doesn’t put us in shackles. It shouldn’t you either.”
I sipped my tea. My hands still shook.
“I’m different, I guess,” I said. “I mean, I can see that I’m different. I have a different shape, hair color, eyes. I don’t see things like Ida or Papa do. Or you. I think things are either right or wrong, and the rest of you think, well, things are either good or bad.”
She stayed quiet, replenished my tea. “Clara. There’s something you should know. If something were to happen to me on this trip—not that I think it will, but, well, the lava craters and this dangerous trestle. It’s possible.”
Her words sent fear through me. “Don’t, Mama. Don’t you dare die and leave me alone in the middle of nowhere.”
“Not my plan. However”—she cleared her throat—“perhaps it’s time you knew.”
THIRTEEN
The Spoils of Achievement
A moment of tingling, a premonition of something bad.
“When I was fifteen,” she began, “I … became with child.”
“Oh. But you were sixteen when you married, you always said.”
“I … wasn’t truthful about that.” She didn’t look at me. “It was by the son of a wealthy family I worked for. It … I thought … He wasn’t much older than I. I wasn’t sure how things even happened, but I knew I loved him. Or thought I did.” She cleared her throat. “When my mother learned of it … they were … shamed. She had my stepfather speak to Ole, a friend of his from the old country. Ole was willing to cover the shame I brought to my parents.” The wind whistled behind us, and I felt cold despite the warming tea. “We married and I gave birth to you.”
I stared at her.
“You were born in Michigan. We moved right after to Yellow Medicine, Minnesota. What I wrote in the Bible about your birthday was written to conceal my shame. Your grandparents moved with us, and we told everyone that you were big for your age. So there’d be no question about your legitimacy.”
“So I’m—”
“You’re actually nineteen, Clara. You’ll be twenty in November.”
I was shocked into silence. Then, “But if Papa isn’t my …” Is that why he hugs Ida, teases Bertha by tugging on her braids, holds Lillian laughing on his lap, but rarely if ever touches me?
“He’s your father in every way, Clara, save one.”
“But if you didn’t really love him …”
“It was best for the family. All of us.”
“And the man, the one who is my real—?”
“There’s no need to know more. He was in my life and then gone. I moved ahead. That’s what Estbys do.”
“Which I’m not,” I said. My voice cracked. I’m truly not. “What am I?”
“You’re an Estby. That’s that.”
“And baby Ole?”
“He came after you, not before. And yes, he died.”
“What was his name, my father?”
She shook her head, packed up, quick to move on now, leaving me to wonder about my mother’s secrets and the man she’d fallen in love with, a man with no name whom I might be more like than anyone in my so-called family.
“You were ashamed for having me,” I said as we walked the rails again. I padded beside her, trying to keep up.
“No. You made it all worthwhile. My shame was in believing in the words of a man, a boy, who had no good intentions. This is why your Forest—”
“I don’t know if he’s my Forest.”
“You wish he would be,” she said. “It’s one reason why I wanted you to go with me on this journey. I didn’t want the same to happen to you.”
“You don’t know that Forest might not be a good man,” I said. “I’m not fifteen, a girl. I’m eighteen years … Nineteen, I guess.”
“Nineteen.”
“Didn’t Papa know?”
“Of course he knew.” Mama stopped and took the grip from me. She held my hand, brown and scratched. She stared at my stubby fingers. I still gnawed at the nails. Her fingers were slender as asparagus. She looked up, chewing the side of her cheek.
“At the lava craters, I wanted to tell you, in case … Ole would never tell you. It was mine to tell, he always said, but he didn’t see the point of it. It didn’t seem right that I might die still holding the truth. It was time you knew, but that’s that now. Nothing more needs to be said. That boy who fathered you … he isn’t family. Ole is.”
We walked in silence for a long time, and I finally dropped behind, hung my head like the
soggy sunflower, trying to piece together who I was.
What was he like? What was his name? It became my new internal conversation. After acquiring a signature I’d wonder, Could my father have been like this mayor or that governor? Once we scared off a herd of curious pronghorns, and I wondered if my true father ever hunted or if he had crossed the Mississippi River. A world of otherness opened to me, a way to make sense of why I was the only one in the family not a towhead, why I was nearly as tall as Papa. Who would my father vote for in the upcoming election? My mother gave out no new information. I feared I had all I was meant to get, at least for now.
Cooler weather gave us renewed spirit. In Greeley, Colorado, we bought yet another pair of shoes and welcomed September. A news reporter wrote about us, “They wear the beat look of a pedestrian stomp.” It was the first time we experienced disdain in the newspaper before leaving town. The article ended with, “The fakes left this city for Denver.”
A part of me did feel like a fake: I’d been masquerading as an Estby.
“What was his name?” I asked. We rested for the night in a shared bed in the house of a suffragette.
“There’s no reason for you to know that, Clara. He was young. I was young. I did what was best for him and for my parents, who had dreamed I’d go on to school. They’d sent me to private school in Norway. All that investment, lost.”
“But—”
“Not all questions need answering.”
“Will you write to Papa and tell him you’ve told me?”
She sighed. “Better left until we get back,” Mama said. “Besides, I fill the letters with so many details of what we’ve seen, the people who have befriended us, our adventures, that such intimate things can wait, ja? Wait until we have a sandbakkel to dip in our coffee and I am baking the Christmas bread for us all. We can sigh together about how God has been so good to us. We are your family, Clara. This”—she tapped her heart—“this is who you belong to and always will.”