The Daughter's Walk (33 page)

“I've wandered around for almost a year,” I said. “I need to be responsible for my fate.”

She looked like she wanted to speak, shook her head, then added, “Our lives will change dramatically if we do this. You know that. A move is the least of it.”

“I do.”

“Elizabeth Cady Stanton used to say that ‘Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.' I can hear the quickening in your voice.”

I nodded.

She brushed at my collar. “Coulee City. Goodness. I'd say you're avoiding Spokane.”

“I'm not ready yet to bump into members of my family,” I said. “That's true.”

“Do you know when you might be?”

I thought for a moment, my fingers pressing down on the pewter sunflower of the hatpin. “When what they need is what I have to give and I have more hope that they'll accept it.”

It had been a full afternoon and evening, much of it spent at Thompson and Dundy's amusement park. Franklin gave us little dolls he won
throwing balls at bottles. I laughed more than I had in weeks. The lights flickered over the water, and the joy lingered on the Thompson-Culver ferry line that took us back to the hotel. Both Louise and Olea chastised us for coming back with them.

“You were having such a good time. We old folks surely didn't need to stand in your way,” Louise said.

“You're not that old,” I said. “And besides, we haven't come to a conclusion yet about my suggestions. Business is more important to me than pleasure.”

“Pity,” Franklin said. He didn't elaborate.

At our suite, Louise hustled about getting us hot water for tea while Franklin sipped at a glass of red wine. When they were all settled and before I could speak, Olea said, “I'm wondering why you bring this up now, Clara, this big plan to trap and travel and relegate us all to Coulee City.”

“I … You and Louise, you have your business, and I can tell that you're slowing down while I'm just beginning. You've been a success. I haven't. I want this to be an operation that eventually I'll be able to manage on my own,” I said, “after I've had good training.”

“She's leaving us,” Louise told Olea. “I mean you have every right to, but I thought.” Louise looked genuinely distressed.

“I'm not,” I insisted. I wished my mother or even Ida had looked that unhappy at the idea of my going away.

“You and Olea can stay in Spokane if you want. I thought, well, if you lived with me in Coulee City, I'd have a place to come back to that wouldn't …”

“Put you where you'll see your family,” Olea said. “You wouldn't see them in Seattle either, and that would be a much better place to settle in.”

“It rains too much there,” I said. “It's too far from property with streams. And we can't raise wheat there. We visited Seattle in the spring, and it's beautiful with rhododendron blooms the size of Lucy, but I know I'd suffer in the constant dreariness of winter mists and downpours.”

I wondered whether to mention now the Finland fox-farming experiments but decided not to.

“I'd like to know that you were at home looking after things. I'd like to have a place to come home to that was well, my own.”

“You want us to work for you?” Louise said.

“No. I'd own the house and you'd look after it and maybe even operate it as a boardinghouse.” That thought had just occurred. “You love to cook and take care of people, Louise. When I'm not there, you'd have others to spoil besides Olea.”

“I'd always have Olea,” Louise said. “I guess it would make us money, having boarders.”

“Assuming people want to come to Coulee City,” Olea said.

“The dam,” I said. “It'll bring in people. The
New York Times
says so. And there's good ranch land available now.”

“You haven't even gotten to the expense of wheat seed and paying a manager to farm it.”

“I'm going to contact my brother Olaf. He's a good farmer, and I hope he'll be open to working for us, farming the wheat on shares.” He may not want land of his own, but he might be willing to work for me.

They sat silently while my own heart pounded. Summarizing it as I had did make it sound a lot more involved than what I had imagined. Maybe at first it would be, until I had things pieced together. Buying a house. Acquiring property to trap. Then the wheat land. Right now my vision wasn't something we could all see and understand.

But I could imagine it, I could. And for the first time, I felt excitement about moving forward in my exile.

We sat silent for a time, late-night-reveler sounds rising up from the streets to interrupt the teapot scream.

“I see what you're after,” Franklin said. “But get someone locally to trap for you.”

“I want to learn that part myself. If you won't teach me—”

“It doesn't make sense for me to do it,” he said. “Find the men who have been trapping that land. Engage them.”

Olea nodded in agreement.

I deferred to their wisdom. I'd find local help. Between Franklin's and the women's advice, I'd learn about pelts and their quality. We'd move, make a change. It would be one we chose, not one thrust upon us.

“Change is kind of like a prayer, isn't it?” Louise mused as she refilled our cups with hot water. “We present it and have faith it'll be received as intended, perhaps even better, trusting that one day it'll be answered in a way we hope is fruitful.”

“Yes,” I said. “Change is a bit like that.” Risk too.

Once I learned the trade, had my own property, my own way of doing things, no one would be in a position to take advantage of me. I'd be financially secure. I'd have an independent business that could sustain me well into the future. If it served as a way to reconnect to my brother, then that was a bonus. Yes, moving intertwined Olea and Louise with me in new ways, but they were people I imagined would remain in my life. I wanted them to stay. Wasn't that the purpose in taking risks? Wasn't that why my mother had wagered everything to walk across the country, doing what she thought best for family and financial security too?

But I was making better choices than she had. I'd thought my plan through. I didn't hear any voice telling me not to pursue it.

F
ALL 1902

A
fter we returned to Washington, I purchased land from the government, short of three hundred twenty acres, a half section. An additional sixteen acres became available from the Department of the Interior, and not long after that another quarter section, all in the same region in the wide bend of the Spokane River west of Spokane. The sixteen acres had a little more open farmland that didn't need to be cleared at all and could support orchards. It was close to the LaPray Toll Bridge, so I had road access and could easily arrange for a wagon to pick me up and help get my pelts to storage. A couple named Welch had opened a small store/hotel and post office near the bridge, so I could keep Louise and Olea aware of my comings and goings. My property west of Spokane was so intertwined with timber and streams that when I bent beneath the branches and untangled my bifurcated skirts from the blackberry bushes, it was as though the land reached out with fingers, clutching me to it, and I knew this would be
prime country for weasel and martin, otter and skunk, bobcat, beaver, and wolf.

That fall, after much ado, we found what we agreed was a suitable house in Coulee City. It had big bedrooms for the three of us and three more on the third floor to rent out to boarders, who could enter through an outside stairwell. Meeting each of our needs in selecting a home proved daunting, and I wondered how Olea had ever gotten Louise to move all the way from New York those years before.

Louise's concern had to do with the privy. She counted the steps between the back porch and the hollyhock-decorated house, wanting no more than one hundred between them even though the main home had a water closet with a flush pulled by a handle near the ceiling. The house even had indoor water, so we wouldn't have to go out to the pump in the winter. Louise didn't care all that much about the water in the house; it was the outhouse that concerned her, “Because all these newfangled things break down, and eventually we'll be glad we have the privy. I don't want to be walking that far in the dark,” she insisted. “You never know what will slither across your path in the night.”

She also wanted a bedroom close to the kitchen, “For late-nighters.” She took a room on the second floor with a back stairway into the kitchen.

Olea had other needs. She desired a room where the sun wouldn't come up in her eyes but that wouldn't get too hot in the afternoons when she liked to take her nap. I suggested that she use the shades to keep the sunrise from bothering her, but she wanted her window open “a crack” at night in all weather and didn't want the breezes to rattle the shade. These preferences were unknown to me when we lived together in Spokane. Olea wanted a room on the first floor, so we turned what must have been a sewing room into a bedroom for her.

The house's features were not an issue for me. I'd slept in haymows
and train stations, in lovely hotels in Minneapolis, and with my mother in a small bed in Brooklyn, and with Ida and Bertha until I went to work. What mattered to me was that my home be a place that no one could take from me, that it remained in my name so I would always have a roof without the fear of losing it, that it be free of a bank that had more leverage than I did.

Because the women had given me money and allowed me to invest it, I bought the house and the river properties outright. I could afford to be generous in meeting the needs of my good friends by selecting a house we could all appreciate.

A stray dog, a bushy-tailed mongrel with Newfoundland-like proportions and bearing one chewed-up ear, arrived at our porch, his fur matted with seeds and weeds. Louise took him under her wing. “He's lucky you found him,” Olea teased.

“That'll be his name,” Louise said. “Lucky.” We all became attached to the dog, and even Lucy didn't object to his presence. He lay at Louise's feet while she knitted and Olea and I read by the evening light, awaiting the cold weather and my foray into trapping.

Coulee City held promise in its isolation, the very qualities I wanted. I was on my way to complete financial independence in the fur trade. My goal was to be successful by the time I turned forty, which would be in 1916. Years away. I set forth. This was my destiny now.

When I celebrated my birthday, the best present of all was that I had a path and still had money in the bank.

No letters had been forwarded to me from Olaf, and I received none in those first months back. After we moved, I took a chance and wrote to him care of the Elstad family, asking if he might want to work my farm.
If he was interested, he could even come and help me find the right property. The return address I marked simply as “Clara” and our box number in Coulee City. No need to rub salt in the wound by using the Doré name; no need to remind myself that I wasn't an Estby by using that name either.