I've had several people ask me what happened to Clara after the walk; here's how I imagine her homecoming:
CHAPTER 1—Coming Home
June 11, 1897 –
approaching Mica Creek, Washington
My journal lay open on my lap, but I had given
up writing and slipped into a mind-dead trance, rocking gently to the movement
of the passenger car and letting myself be hypnotized by the rhythmic clacking
of wheels on rails and the string of telegraph poles flashing by the window. Ma
and I had gambled away a year of our lives and lost.
For the
first two days on the train, Ma had kept me awake with her incessant fretting
about having been marooned in New York when Bertha died and worrying about all
the people in Mica Creek who could hardly wait to tell her what a fool she had
been. Now that we were within minutes of home she slept.
When the
train rounded a corner, my journal started to slip off my lap and I broke my
trance to grab it. The newspaper clipping I’d tucked inside fluttered to the
floor and I bumped my head as I groped to find it under the seat in front of
me. With a wry smile I read what the Minneapolis
Times had written about us last week when we passed through on our way back
home. Considering how our walk had ended it was probably the last hurrah of our
year of fame.
“Coast
to Coast: Wonderful Trip Made by Mrs.
Estby and Daughter Across America on Foot…No women unattended ever attempted
such a feat before…for three days were they were lost in the Snake River lava
fields of Idaho, without a mouthful to eat…President McKinley was visited…A
compass, knives, revolver…was most of the baggage carried by the two
ladies…sixteen pairs of shoes were used by each of the pedestrians during their
trip…”
The
reporter had left out the most important fact: We arrived in New York City thirty-six
hours behind our deadline and lost our chance at $10,000 for the rights to the
story of our two hundred thirty-two day trek.
Miss
Waterson was not the only publisher in New York, however. I sketched a book
cover and meticulously lettered: From Mica Creek to New York City, by
Clara Estby. I’d write the book, sell it in time to pay our debts before our
farm was auctioned off, apply for college scholarships, and start a new life on
my own, far away from the small-mindedness of Mica Creek. I’d be the image of
the New Woman, strolling ivied halls with slews of chums who would want to hear
about camping out with Indians and having tea with President McKinley. And after college, would Charles have had his own
adventures and be ready to stay put—perhaps with me?
But that
was months and years ahead. Perhaps I would have a letter waiting from Charles.
Tonight I could take a bath and wash my clothes, snuggle into bed, and Ida and
I could catch up on everything we’d missed in the year I’d been away. Tomorrow
I would gather an armful of lilacs for Bertha’s grave.
Uff da! The maroon mohair upholstery
prickled my shoulder blades like a dozen horse flies. With a slap I closed my
journal and rose unsteadily to take a wide-legged stance to keep my balance
while I slipped my journal into the overhead luggage rack and slid the linen
antimacassar far enough down the seat to shield my back.
As the
train rounded another curve, I clutched the rack to keep my balance. Ma groaned
and shifted in her seat by the window. Her eyes twitched under closed lids, her
mouth gaped, and her cheeks vibrated slightly to the rhythm of the train. I
would have retreated into sleep, too, if I could, but how could I sleep when I
didn’t know if, in an hour, I would be greeted as the heroine who got Ma safely
home or the villain who enabled Ma to go?
I had just regained my seat when the conductor passed
through the car, acknowledging me with a nod. “Are we close to where you want
to stop?” he said.
“Soon,” I said. After the conductor moved on to the next
car, I took a deep breath and rubbed my damp hands against my skirt.
To someone from outside Spokane County, one wheat field
probably looked like another. But as I looked again out the window, I began to
recognize our neighbors’ lands. There was Mr. Arenson’s patch, plowed up to
within six inches of the back porch of the house. He would commiserate with Ma
over losing the ten thousand dollars.
I could tell from the wobbly rows that Old Mr.
Williamson’s fields were next. He had been scandalized that Ma, a woman with
eight living children, would leave home for a year to walk across the country. “I
could have told you it would come to no good end,” he would say. There had been
days I would have agreed with him.
Next was the Iverson brothers’ field, plowed in curving
lines which outlined each gentle rise of the land. Maybe, if Erick had plowed
in graceful arcs because it was beautiful and not just because it was the
method described in the latest Grain
Grower’s Monthly, I would love him as much as he apparently loved me.
As the conductor re-entered our car I signaled and shook
Ma’s shoulder. “Time to wake up, Ma.”
A long whistle and squealing brakes broke through Ma’s
deep sleep, and I helped her stand as the brakes squealed again and the train
slowed, then stopped in a series of jerks. As the other passengers mumbled
about this unscheduled stop in the middle of the wheat fields, the conductor
slid open the door of our car, leaped to the ground, and held up a hand to help
Ma down. Even with my weak ankle I didn’t need his help, but I played helpless
damsel and took his hand as I stepped down to the crushed gravel and cinders
along the tracks.
While Ma gathered her wits and her strength, I was
content to stand in the shin-high wheat sprouts and watch the cinder plume from
the receding train trail out, then slowly settle to the ground. I took a deep
breath of Eastern Washington air. Under the lingering trace of cinders was the
smell of plowed earth and new wheat. It was my favorite time of evening, when
the sky faded from deep transparent blue in the east to milky blue edged with
pink and gold in the west. I’d hold that serene view in mind as I faced what
lay ahead.
I took Ma’s elbow. “Do you need help?” I asked.
“I can walk
on my own.” She pulled back her
shoulders and turned from the tracks toward home.
As we
passed the marker to the edge of our fields, Ma increased her pace and I nearly
forgot my limp as I hurried to keep up. Arthur or Johnny—at that distance in
the twilight, I couldn’t have told which—was the first to see us. He dropped
the slop buckets with a clang I heard from fifty yards away. He darted first to
the barn, then streaked across the yard to the house and flung open the screen
door with a bang. A larger figure—Pa for sure—emerged from the barn, and Ida,
carrying Lillian, and Arthur or Johnny leading William by the hand came out the
kitchen door. They drew together in a ragged line: Pa, one of the middle boys
with William, and Ida with Lillian.
No one ran to greet us. As we drew closer, no one smiled.
Pa worried the frayed edges on the straw field hat he held in front of his
chest. I had alternately expected recriminations or a joyful greeting, but not
this eerie silence. My heartbeat slowed, waiting for whatever happened next.
I waved. “Hei!” I called. Drawing nearer I could tell it was Arthur
between Pa and William. He raised a thin arm in answer, but no one waved back.
“Ole?” Ma said as I closed the gate behind us. She
reached tentatively toward Pa, but he just crushed the edges of his hat with
both hands. He opened his mouth to speak, gulped back his words and looked to
Ida.
Ida tucked a strand of silvery-blond hair behind her ear,
tightened her lips and resettled Lillian on her narrow hip. Ma reached out to
take Lillian from Ida’s arms, but Lillian turned her face from the stranger-ma
she had not seen for a year, and hid her face in Ida’s neck.
Ma winced at Lillian’s rejection and turned back toward
Pa. “Hva er galt?” What’s wrong? “Og hvor er Olaf? Where is Olaf? Is he working in town?”
“Ja.” Pa nodded
and unraveled another strand from the brim of his hat.
Ma looked up and down the line again. “And Johnny?”
Ida fixed Ma with a hostile glare. “Johnny’s dead, too,
Ma.”
Stunned, I looked up and down the line of sisters and
brothers again, not believing that Johnny, as well as Bertha, was gone. Ma
dropped her satchel and stepped toward Pa, who opened his arms to her. Ma
wailed, Pa murmured comfort.
Ida pried Lillian’s arms from around her neck and set her
roughly down. Lillian took her emotional cue from Ma and Pa, and started to
howl, and then reached up to Ida to be picked up again. Ignoring Lillian, Ida
jammed her fists on her hips and shifted her glare to me. “While you were off
having tea with President McKinley and getting your picture in the paper, I was
shivering in the woodshed, waiting to hear each day which of my brothers and
sisters was still alive.”
“We tried to get home sooner,” I started.
“You didn’t try hard enough, though, did you?” Ida said.
My hand went limp, dropping my bag to the ground. “But
how did—“
“Diphtheria,”
Ida said. “Both of them.”
CHAPTER 2—Up in Smoke
After an hour’s bickering
over whose fault it was that both Bertha and Johnny had died while Ma and I
were gone —a distressing amount of the blame was pointed at me—Pa interceded
and sent us all to bed. I had not seen a bed in three days, so despite
hostility radiating from Ida, I escaped into sleep from the reality I had come
home to.
I woke to the smell of smoke. I bolted upright, ready to
sound the alarm and looked for Ida, but moonlight filtering through the muslin
curtains revealed only Lillian, who was drooling onto Ida’s pillow as she
sucked her thumb in her sleep. Where was Ida? My ears pricked to a furtive
scraping, like someone trying to drag something quietly across the floor
downstairs in the kitchen.
I slid out of bed and crept barefoot down the
stairs, shifting part of my weight to the hand rail as I stepped cautiously from
tread to tread, ready to lift my foot at the first threat of a squeak.
At the landing, I crouched below the half wall along the lower
stairs and raised my head just high enough to peer into the kitchen.
Ida stood with her back to me. The single candle on the
table cast a ceiling-high, wavering shadow against the side wall above the
stove. Ida and her shadow image reached down to an apple crate on the kitchen
chair she’d dragged next to her and withdrew a sheaf of pages. She opened the
top of the stove with a hollow clink, thrust the papers into the fire, and watched
them burn.
I leaned forward over the half-wall and squinted toward
the glow of the open stovetop to see what was on the pages Ida lifted next. Handwriting,
margin to margin! I stood abruptly and nearly tripped on my long nightgown. “Uff da!”
I stumbled down the last steps into the kitchen. “Ida, no!”
I whispered hoarsely. “Those are Ma’s notes I need for my book!”
Ida stuffed the last batch of Ma’s journals into the
stove and firmly replaced the cover plate before she turned to me. Her pointy-chinned
face was fiery red from the heat. She looked up at me from her height of five
feet, nearly a head shorter than I, but feisty as a banty hen protecting her
eggs. “Double ‘uff da,’
yourself.” She crossed her arms defiantly.
“Bertha and Johnny might still be alive if you had talked Ma out of leaving us
for so long instead of goading her on.”
“You can’t blame me for that—even Pa couldn’t talk her
out of going.”
She parted her feet in a sturdy stance and glared,
ignoring the thin rivulet of sweat that ran from her scalp toward one eye. Clearly
she would not move, so I lunged forward, grabbed her under the arms and dragged
her, flailing, away from the stove. I raced back across the kitchen and snatched
the stoveplate lifter. Ida raced toward the stove, too, and grabbed the poker. As
I started to lift the cover plate, she cracked the poker down on the stove top,
inches from my hand, with a clang to rival a blacksmith’s at the anvil. My hand
jerked back and I froze, seeing an Ida who was a stranger to me.
Her bangs were wet with perspiration and spiked like a
crown of thorns. “I never want to hear about your crazy trip again! We’re
already mortified by the local gossip about Ma’s leaving her family to tromp
across the country to ‘save the farm.’ Why would you want to spread the gossip
with a book?”
“At least Ma tried to save the farm instead of sitting in
her rocker and whining!” I moaned as I thought of Ma’s notes in the fire and extended
the stoveplate lifter cautiously toward the cover plate again, staring into
Ida’s pale blue eyes to see what she had in mind to do next.
She met my stare as she lifted the poker threateningly.
“Sounds like a cat and dog fight in here!”
Poised
with stoveplate lifter and poker in mid-air, we turned our faces to Pa, sleep-rumpled
and slump-shouldered.
He put one hand to the small of his back as he twisted
slightly to the right and left to stretch out the night kinks. “Your Ma and I already
lost two children in April. How is losing two more in a duel going to help?”
I reluctantly put the lifter down on the stove and watched
Ida lean the poker against the wall.
“Upstairs, both of you.”
“But Ma’s notes!” I wailed. Pa clearly did not understand
what was at stake. The arteries in my neck throbbed in despair. .
As Ma emerged from the bedroom I repeated my cry, “Ma,
your notes!” All last year’s misery was for nothing without the book. She strode
past Pa to the stove and opened it. In orange light cast from the last of six
hundred pages of her burning journals, she picked up the poker. Instead of
trying to save her work however, broke the pages into chunks that would burn
faster.
“But Ma!” I wiped one arm across my face to wipe the
dampness from my forehead and destroy the evidence of gathering tears.
“There was nothing worth saving, Clara. Pencil scratchings
on paper. I can’t undo last year and bring back Johnny and Bertha. But I’m
going to do my best to forget last year, and I want you to forget it too. I
want you to promise that you’ll never talk or write about our walk again.”
“But…” How could I
never talk about the most heroic thing I’d probably ever do in my whole life?
Ida shot me a smug look as she put on her clogs and a
shawl to visit the outhouse before she went back to bed. I restrained the urge
to throw something at her as she flounced out the kitchen door.
I looked to Pa. “Ja,”
Pa said. “That’s the end of it.”
Ma and
Pa apparently assumed I’d obey and did not wait to hear my promise. As Pa took Ma’s
elbow and led her back into the bedroom I thought about sneaking back to the
stove and fishing out any unburned scraps of Ma’s work. But it was her work, to
save or let burn as she wished.
“Ish da!” I
stiffened, then dashed toward the stairs. At least I still had my own journals,
and I had to keep them away from Ida. If I left them anywhere in the bedroom or
the kitchen, she would be sure to find them. I lifted the front of my nightgown
and took the stairs two at a time to the landing. Breathing heavily, I snatched
my satchel from the girls’ bedroom where I’d dropped it and tiptoed, clutching it
to my chest, toward the boys’ bed. Arthur and William were motionless. How they
had slept through the ruckus downstairs defied understanding. The satchel handle
caught on the bedsprings when I tried to shove it under the bed upright, but on
its side, the satchel just slid under their bed, where it should be safe until
I found a better place to hide it.
Back in the girls’ room, I moved Lillian back gently to
the inside edge of my pillow and turned Ida’s pillow to the undrooled-on side. I
looked down on Lillian, face flushed with sleep and still sucking her thumb.
Long after Ida returned to bed, I lay on my side, as
close to the edge of the bed as I could without falling out, and waited for
morning. The bed creaked and rocked each time Ida shifted with exaggerated
flops from side to back to side again. It amazed me that anyone who weighed
barely ninety pounds could make the bed rock so. At last she snored and the bed
was still.
As the first light
prodded its way through the gap in the muslin curtains, I slithered from under
the quilts and stole downstairs with my satchel to the kitchen to find a safer
hiding place for my journals. Clutching the satchel in one hand, I poked about
the kitchen and parlor for a likely spot. Ida dipped into the flour and sugar
bins every day. The utensil drawer in the work table was already jammed with
scrapers, spoons, whips and corers, and Ida used that drawer often, too. The
desk in the parlor was already overflowing with copies of Ma’s old letters to
the editor and to members of her suffrage group. There might be room on the
bottom shelf of the low bookcase if I were bold enough to hide the journals in
plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, but I could not bear to leave the
journals so exposed.
The wood bin. No one would be building a parlor fire in
May, so I could safely tuck my journals under the kindling until I could find a
better hiding place in the barn. Three journals, five letters, a year of my
life. Avoiding noise, I laid each piece of wood gently on the hearth to make a
space for my papers, then replaced the wood to conceal my record of the
journey.
Back in the
kitchen, I primed the pump by the sink with water from the pitcher and pumped
water into a pan for the coffee pot. My hands automatically found their places
on the handle where the red paint had worn away, where Ma’s hands, Ida’s hands,
my hands, Bertha’s hands had been a thousand, thousand times.
Bertha had looked out this kitchen window, sat in these
chairs, laughed in the rope swing in the orchard. How could she be gone when
everything she had touched was still here?
I sighed as I opened the
stove to the ashes of Ma’s hundreds of pages of notes. It seemed disrespectful to
make coffee over the ashes of her work, so I scooped them out into the ash bin to
dig in around her Austrian Copper rose.
After starting the fire and putting on the pot to heat, I
unpacked the rest of my satchel except for several pages of names and addresses
of all the O’Keeffes I had found in the city directories at the New York Public
Library this winter. In a panic when I realized Ma and I might never find a way
home from New York, I’d spent every spare two cents I’d earned on another
stamp, trying to locate someone who might know my real father. It wasn’t an
attempt at blackmail. Not really. I just thought that someone who had once
loved Ma might want to help Ma and me get home. Thirty or so of the names had
been checked off as contacts which had led to no information on whereabouts of
the Patrick O’Keeffe who was my father. Either no one knew Patrick O’Keeffe, or
no one was brave enough to risk upsetting his life with admitting he had an
illegitimate daughter. Just as well. We’d made it home without him. I fed those
pages to the fire with no regrets.
I
emptied to rest of the contents of my satchel: my cracked oilskin poncho, Indian
beads, pistol and nearly full box of
bullets, the owl Pa had carved for me before I left, a half-bottle of mercurochrome,
a sliver of soap, and the pen knife
Arthur and Johnny had loaned me for the trip.
J. E… I ran my fingers over the initials Johnny had clumsily
carved on his side of the knife. Maybe you had to see a person dead and touch his
stiff hands before you could convince yourself he was really dead. Since I had missed
Bertha and Johnny’s funerals, it might take a long time before I stopped
expecting to see them around the next doorway.
When the coffee started to boil, I pulled myself out of
morbid thoughts and moved the pot to a cooler spot on the stove so it wouldn’t
bubble over while it brewed. For a year I’d missed this kitchen: the red and
blue rag rug Aunt Hannah had woven when she was still in Norway, Ma’s counted
stitch table runner, the table, chairs, Pa’s finely finished storage cupboards,
Ma’s framed angel picture by the kitchen door.
As I took my first sip of coffee, I winced and almost
spit it out. If I’d been paying attention I would have noticed that those brown
grounds didn’t smell like coffee. The bitter taste of chicory root without the
ameliorating effects of cream and sugar would take some getting used to. The
family must be down to the last pennies if Pa was willing to give up his
coffee.
A
glassful of water washed out the last traces of chicory but reminded me of the
way Bertha and Johnny had died, with their throats filling with leathery layers
of multiplying diphtheria germs until they could not swallow or breathe. Did they
know they were going to die? My own throat felt tight.
I set my
glass on the floor. Bertha and Johnny were dead, Ida hated me, I was unwelcome at
home, and if I didn’t keep up my resolve to confront Erick Iverson—how could I
have forgotten even for an instant that I had to deal with him as well as my
family—I would be carried away on the momentum of the expectations of all of
Mica Creek and be Mrs. Iverson before the ides of July.
The sound of Pa’s boots on the kitchen porch steps
startled me out of self-pity.
“God Morgen,
Clara,” he said as he flung open the kitchen door, set down a pail of milk, and
leveraged his feet out of his barn boots. Marmee padded in behind him, rubbed my ankles, sniffed my heels, tickled each
toe of my bare feet, as if she could tell by smell where I had been this last
year. At least she was still my friend.
Pa poured ersatz coffee into his favorite mug and bent
his rear toward the chair across the table from me, then straightened when he
saw the gun. “My word, Clara, you don’t expect more trouble from Ida this
morning, do you?” He leaned over and shoved
the pistol aside with the back of the hand that held his mug.
“I was just unpacking,”
I said.
Pa set down his coffee and moved the pistol and bullets
to the top of the kitchen cupboard and sat across from me at the table. He
didn’t say anything, just sipped his coffee and looked at me, letting me know
he would be a congenial listener for anything I wanted to say.
His brushy mustache was tinged with red, at odds with the
thinning hair on top of his head, which had faded to gray and brown. His eyes
were a lighter blue than mine, his face longer, ears larger. His fingers were
skewed with arthritis now, so he held his cup awkwardly. But his fingers were
long and slender, with tapered tips. I looked at my own cracked and raw hands, with
shorter, blunt-tipped fingers. I had always wished I had inherited his hands,
but after Ma’s revelation in Pennsylvania last year I knew why I looked not a
bit like Pa. I looked shyly back down at my own hands, clasped neatly around my
mug. Had Ma told him yet that I knew he was not my real father?
He put down his cup and neatened his mustache. Finally he
spoke. “I see you lived through the night at least. How about Ida?”
“She lives, but since she spent most of the night bouncing
the bed to make sure I didn’t sleep, she may not get up until noon.”
“Ja, well,”
“Do you
think Ma will change her mind about writing the book?”
Pa shook his head. “Nei,
and I agree. How do you think she feels, coming home broke and having Bertha
and Johnny die while she was gone? Writing a book would be like rubbing her
nose in her failures. It’s going to be hard enough for Ma to fit back in among
the neighbors without reminding them about your escapades.” Pa got up and
poured himself another cup of coffee.
I followed Pa to the stove. “But Pa, if I went ahead with
the book there would be enough money to save the farm, at least for a little
while.”
“It
would be better for the whole family to put this behind us. People—even
Erick—will forgive us if we just behave ourselves now…”
“By ‘we’
and ‘us’ you mean Ma and me, don’t you?”
He
looked away. “Ja,” he sighed.
“I only
went with Ma because you asked me to.”
Pa
handed me the owl he’d carved me just before I left. “I also depended on you to
show some sense and bring her home if the going got too hard.”
“But you
also asked me to take care of Ma, and if she wasn’t quitting I had to keep
going with her, didn’t I? I thought
you’d be thankful that I got her home safely.”
“Too late,
though, wasn’t it?”
“Too
late?” I paced the room, gesturing wildly in frustration. “I risked my life walking
four thousand miles and scrubbed my hands raw on other people’s laundry to keep
Ma off the streets when we were stranded and instead of gratitude, you say ‘too
late?’ How was I supposed to cross four thousand miles with her when she was so
in the throes of her dismals I couldn’t even get her out of bed for months? I
wish I’d never gone with Ma in the first place. She wears me out Pa, and I have
to get out and start my own life. I can’t—I won’t—stay here if no one even
appreciates what I went through.” I
halted and glared at Pa, waiting for his response. I knew I wouldn’t get an
apology, but hoped I’d get some sign that he didn’t blame me for what happened
anymore.
He
looked down at the floor for a moment, then strode to the parlor. “Who’s this
Mr. Doré you have a letter from?” He opened
the writing desk and dropped an envelope on the table in front of me. “You had
a letter from Salt Lake City about two weeks ago. With the hullabaloo last
night I forgot to give it to you.”
