The Daughter's Walk (22 page)

I dressed as carefully as I could, grateful that the corset I wore again still fit. My hair had grown out enough to pull into a chignon that fit under my hat. I'd miss the privacy of the fields, I decided, and the satisfaction of hands in earth, the smells of horses as they nuzzled me with their
velvet noses. But this is what I'd prayed for, a chance to be on my own, more than a servant, on a path to a career. I'd paid my dues for the family these past three years. The new century would be my new beginning too.

I walked from the station toward the address given, past the rushing Spokane River falls that raged through the center of downtown. I hopped across a streetcar track as the vehicle came around the corner.

A pleasant house on Sixth Avenue bore the address I looked for. The well-built home had a wide front porch and was painted white with soft green trim. A cedar tree took up much of the front yard and offered shade. I rang the bell, my heart fluttering.

“Come in, please,” a rather short, plump woman said. “You must have walked so far. We should have given you tokens for the streetcar.”

“I'm used to walking.”

“Well, of course you are.”

I wondered if this woman was the domestic, but she wasn't dressed as one. She wore no apron, and she moved through the house as one who owned it. She showed me into a finely furnished room. Elegant vases holding peacock feathers stood beside divans with smooth lines and fur throws over the back. In fact, almost all of the furniture had some accessory of fur. “I'm Miss Louise Gubner,” she said, then suggested I sit in a high-back chair. I sank onto a throw of silver fur, adjusting it against my back. “I believe you've met my associate and cousin, Miss O. S. Ammundsen.”

“Olea to my friends,” Olea said as she entered the room. Tall and elegant, she put out her hand and I stood. “Welcome, Clara. I hoped we'd meet again. You remember meeting on the train? Yes, I knew you would. Louise and I returned to New York after that trip. But earlier this year we decided to make the move permanent, manage our business
from the West. Rather exciting, we decided. And we have need of a bookkeeper. We hoped you'd wish to assist? Mary Latham is a friend of ours. She suggested you. Please, sit.”

“I'm good with numbers, but I have no training, none at all as a bookkeeper.”

“Something to remedy. You'll be attending Blair Business College when the session begins in the fall. We're sure you'll qualify. You qualified for the university some years back, I understand.”

“Yes. But.” My mind spun with the goodness of what was offered. “I'll pay you back, I will.”

“You'll keep our books, maybe assist in the household duties.”

“I'm a fair cook,” I offered.

“I rather like doing that myself,” Louise said. “I hope you have a good appetite. You look a little puny if you don't mind my saying so.”

“Puny? I like to eat.”

“Well then, we'll work out your wages. We're hoping you can start immediately,” Olea said. “We'll need to go to the college and get you enrolled. Then you can return home at the weekend and pick up your trunks.”

“I only have the one,” I said.

They were a whirlwind, and I was at the center.

It occurred to me that I ought to put on a business head and negotiate for wages. But I was too excited by the possibilities ahead to quibble over details. I wondered if that same anticipation had affected my mother when she first agreed to that wager so long ago, hopefulness blinding her to truth.

I
think it would have been better if I'd gotten the job,” Ida said when I returned on the weekend for my trunk. “It's not a domestic job, right, Clara?” This was Olaf. “It's bookkeeping.”

“A little domestic work,” I said. “But Louise, I mean Miss Gubner, likes to do the cooking and cleaning. She's round as a pumpkin and really sweet. Miss Ammundsen is always looking at birds through these little binoculars she wears like a necklace. But she's the one with a good business sense. She's a good teacher too. I'll learn more at Blair College.”

“You're going on to school?” Ida said. “No, that doesn't seem fair.”

“You're needed here, Ida,” my stepfather said.

Ida nodded agreement, and part of me envied her for being told she was needed, that she had a place to belong. Now I would too.

Mama sighed. “Maybe I can do more of the cooking, resume my duties,” she offered. “Then you could work in the city, Ida.”

“Nonsense,” Ida said. “You need care.”

“Have you met the instructors?” Olaf asked me.

“Yes. There's only one female, for English. The typewriting and shorthand and penmanship classes and commercial law instructors are all men.”

“
Ja
, as it should be,” my stepfather said. “Men know how to lead.”

I caught my mother's gaze; then we looked away. The meal was completed in silent chewing, only Olaf enthusiastic about my good fortune.

Mama and I walked to the pig shed, where I slopped the hogs for the last time, at least for a while. She leaned over the half door, as slender as a child. Her hair had begun to turn white at the temples.

“I'll visit,” I said. She looked so sad. I set the bucket down.

“I can never be near this shed without thinking of …”

“Maybe you should ask Ole to tear it down,” I said.

“Oh, I already asked, but Ida insisted it remain. A memorial, I suppose.”

“Or a way of hanging on to her outrage,” I said.

“She did the best she could,” Mama said. “I forgive her.”

“She hasn't forgiven you, I don't think.”

“In time,” Mama said. It would be good for me to be away, so good.

After breakfast in the morning, I said good-bye to my family, and Olaf carried my trunk to the train and waited with me. “This is right for you, Clara,” he said. “You need this chance.”

“I'm glad for it. I plan to earn enough to send home but also put a little aside for your schooling. You need a chance too.”

He shrugged. “I may be one of the Norwegian bachelor farmers like Papa says were in the old country. Like he almost was before he fell in love with Mama.”

I wondered if I should tell Olaf. I'd told no one of what Mama shared at Dale Creek about my place in the family.

“Olaf, if I tell you a secret, will you promise not to tell anyone?”

“I can keep a secret.”

“Papa didn't exactly fall in love with Mama.
Bestefar
introduced them, and they married quickly because … because … Mama was with child. With me. It was for the good of her family that she married him.”

“Ah, no,” Olaf said. He frowned. “That can't be.”

“It is. And they had a child right after me, before you, one who didn't live long, Mama told me. I'm actually a year older than everyone thinks.”

“But then … who is your father?”

“I don't know his name. Mama wouldn't tell me. Someone in Michigan. Mama worked for his family. But it explains why I'm. different.”

“You're not.”

“I am. All the Estbys have white-blond hair, and here I am, a dirty blond. You all have such thick, strong hair, and mine is as limp and stringy as Sailor's tail without my curling iron.”

Olaf shook his head. “So that's why you called Papa ‘Ole' that time.” He brushed aside a curl that had escaped from beneath my hat. “You're different because you're smarter than the rest of us,” Olaf said, “if you're different at all.”

“I'm not.” I bumped his shoulder, pleased by the compliment.

“You'll always be my big sister,” he said. “The rest doesn't matter. I'm glad for you. When one of us makes his way, it gives the rest of us hope that we'll make our way too.”

“What do you think Mama will do if the farm is foreclosed on?” I said. I fanned my face with my straw hat.

“What will they do? I think it will be the best days of their lives once they get over the shock of it.”

“Olaf!”

“It's true. The farm has consumed all of us. I know they love the land and it's fed us, but it devours too, taking every dime we'll give it but not in proportion to what it demands. There is more cost than just dollars, Clara. Once they got behind and borrowed with no way to repay it, then with Papa's injuries, trying to hang on to it has been like holding on to a cow's tail in a cyclone. You know you're going to get hurt and separated. It's just a matter of how much pain you'll endure before you let go. They'll hate it, the humiliation. But it will free them. All of us.”

“Mama walked east for the farm,” I said.

“And see what it cost her?” He pulled on a grass stem and chewed on it. In the distance we heard the train chugging. “I'll keep your secret,” he said. “And you need to keep mine. They'd think me a traitor if I said good riddance, let the farm go. But that's how I feel. At least today.” He smiled.

“We'll keep our secrets,” I said. I hugged him and whispered, “I'll miss you most of all.” I thought it was the truth.

The routine of Blair College and the presence of the two women filled my life in ways I'd never known. Days I spent in classes; evenings I assisted with laundry, the heavier work, as both Olea and Louise were in their fifties (or so I guessed) and were pleased by my strong arms and back. Then I studied while Louise plied me with cookies and cakes. On Saturdays, Olea introduced me to their ledgers. I took her training seriously
and saw it as the path that would help me move on to full independence, having a business of my own.

The women were frugal and careful managers. I found the bookkeeping well in hand and thought they used it more as an excuse for my learning than because they truly needed an employee. The only real office work I thought they lacked was a secretary to write the letters Olea dictated. I liked the secretarial part, learning how to phrase words. Their correspondence went to places like Romania and France, Italy and Greece, to London and Oslo. Over supper they often told stories of their trips there and of their lives in Norway before New York.

“We were schoolgirl friends in Christiania as well as cousins,” Louise told me one day. “Olea was always smarter and faster than I.”

“And Louise attracted every lost soul in the city,” Olea said, “from children to cats.”

“We complement each other,” Louise said as I served chicken and dumplings for supper. Louise cooked, but I insisted on serving. At first, I also declined to sit with them at their table.

“I'm a servant,” I insisted. “It wouldn't be right to assume I was your equal, eating with you side by side as though we were family.”

I stood while Louise spoke grace before the meals. She offered not the childhood prayers I'd learned in Norwegian, but original words each day, asking for guidance, talking about the day's events. After grace, I sat in the kitchen alone to pick at my food. When they were finished and the table cleared, they'd drink their coffees and I'd join them then.

“You treat food like life,” Louise commented once. “Like you don't deserve a full plate shared with friends.”

I didn't think that was so, but I had no response to her either.

Olea often explored theological questions during the coffee time,
posing thoughts like whether one ought to worship Jesus as a signpost or by following His direction. “If you see the sign saying ‘Seventy Miles to Coulee City,' you don't stay there saying, ‘Yes, this is what matters. I will worship the sign.' No, you follow the directions; you follow Him. That's true worship, by doing what He asks of us.”

“Would Jesus want to go to Coulee City?” Louise said.

“He might,” said Olea. They laughed and I joined them. Coulee City was a little town an hour's train ride west that had as many rabbits as people.