The Daughter's Walk (20 page)

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 sorry.”

“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.”