The Year We Were Famous (8 page)

As I put down my pencil, the grim smile on my face collapsed. My arm still jangled from the recoil on the pistol, and I shuddered and gagged at the smells of gunpowder and blood, which still clung to the inside of my nose. I darted out from our host cabin long enough to retch and wash my mouth out at the pump. I could have killed that man. Or he might have killed Ma and me just to see what was in our satchels.

After a few minutes of breathing fresh air, I was ready to revise the draft of my letter to Arthur and Johnny. By this second retelling—three, if you counted the time I explained what happened to the sheriff—my heart still quickened, my ears still rang with the sound of gunshot, the bile still rose. I had an adventure to write about, but I hoped this would be the last one that nearly landed us in jail.

W
E
arrived at the
Idaho Daily Statesman
office still dripping trails of water from the stream we forded a few miles back where the bridge had washed out. Ma briskly shook off her poncho and fished in her satchel for one of her cards. As soon as the reporter found his notebook, she launched into her "why we're walking" spiel.

Since she was determined to be an example of indomitable womanhood, she did not complain about our walking conditions this month. I didn't complain out loud, but shivered theatrically and wrung my skirt out on the floor. Littered as the floor was with dead cigars and slimy tobacco cuds that had missed the spittoons, my wrung-out rainwater undoubtedly improved the hygiene of the office. When Ma scowled my direction, I lifted one foot to show her the sole of my shoe, which was almost thin enough to see my sock through. After crossing the Blue and Boise Mountains and walking wet for twenty-eight days, my boots were ready to be given to a teething puppy to finish off. Ma rolled her eyes and sighed, but ended her talk by saying that we planned to stay long enough to earn money for new shoes and would be grateful for a place to stay.

The next morning we found Governor McConnell's office, but he was out visiting the site of a new irrigation program. It escaped me how there could be a square inch of Idaho that needed more water.

The governor's secretary tried to shoo us out, but Ma would not be shooed. She unfolded her letter of recommendation from Spokane's Mayor Belt and held it close to his spectacles.

Ma had his attention, but I'm not sure it was favorable. I drew back, trying to make myself invisible.

Ma said she needed to see the governor. Just for a minute. Just to get his signature on the bottom of her letter from Mayor Belt.

Mr. Frisk sighed and said that if we could come back the day after tomorrow at 4:45 p.m., we could see him for five minutes and get his signature.

As we walked up Main Street and passed the Assay Office, Ma daydreamed aloud about all the gold and silver that had passed through that office over the last thirty years. I remembered two years ago, when Ma read Pa every article in the newspaper about gold strikes in Colorado and hectored him about finding us a mine. We were in mining country now, but I was more intrigued by water from the hot springs that was pumped into town to heat the houses. No chopping wood for heat!

At the post office, Ma mailed her first journal home so she wouldn't have to carry it and we picked up mail. No exciting news. Ida was taking my place as maid of honor in my friend Tilda's wedding and Bertha would be playing the piano. Arthur was still helping out while Pa's back continued to mend. He asked me to say hello to any Indian chiefs I met and to make sure Butch Cassidy didn't rob us. Erick also wrote.

Dear Clara,

More than one night I've thought of you and your mother so far from home without a man at your side to keep you safe. If your mother's agreement didn't go against it, you know I would gladly have walked from Mica Creek to New York with you. Folks in Mica Creek say your mother is irresponsible to leave her children on such a foolhardy venture, but you may be sure I defend you for your decision to go with her. I admire your loyalty, although I regret that it delays the day we can be married.

Sincerely,
Erick

Blisters and mud had taken my mind off the wedding everyone seemed to expect as soon as Ma and I returned to Mica Creek. Pa favored the match. Erick could work sixteen hours straight in the field. My brothers liked Erick; he laughed at their silliest jokes and taught them rope tricks. He was already close to fulfilling all the requirements for his own 160-acre homestead, with good bottom land near his own Pa's farm and ours. It was a sensible match: hard-working Erick and hard-working Clara. They would have healthy, hard-working children, attend services every Sunday at the Mica Creek Lutheran Church, and be buried side by side in the Mica Creek cemetery.

When I glanced up from my letter, I caught Ma looking at me. She seemed to be waiting for my comments on his letter, but what was to tell? He was waiting, I was stalling, same as usual.

I didn't know what Pa said in his letter, but as Ma reread it, she blinked her eyes and pinched her mouth like she half wanted to cry but wouldn't. She wrote her first progress report to Miss Waterson. In the one hundred and fifty pages Ma had sent home, she had undoubtedly described every sunrise and sunset and every conversation she had had along the way. In all those pages of sunsets and conversations, she had no record of how many miles we'd walked. She had to ask me. I flipped through the pages in my own journal and added the figures in my head.

To: Miss A. J. Waterson, 95 William Street, New York City, New York

From: Helga Estby

Monthly report #1: Boise, Idaho

Miles covered, May 5—June 4: 432

Rain, mud, and blizzard in the Blue Mountains have slowed us down, but we should make up lost time here in Idaho. Shot a man in the leg but were not jailed for it.

The letter seemed powerfully short, considering all we'd been through this month, but Ma said Miss Waterson wouldn't get all the details until she paid us our ten thousand dollars. The "shot a man" line was just to whet her appetite for the rest of the story.

We spent the time waiting for the governor's signature doing laundry and gardening. With what we had left of our start-up money, we had enough to buy Ma new boots and a new journal, and socks for both of us. My shoes would have to hold together a little longer.

Four hundred and thirty-two miles this first month. At two thousand steps a mile, we had taken eight hundred and sixty-four thousand steps, but by now we should have covered nearly six hundred miles and taken over a million steps. We were already a week behind schedule.

I
NSTEAD OF
sagebrush, we had sand dunes and rocks. Instead of rain, we had hot sun. Instead of following the main line out of Shoshone, we walked eighteen miles on a spur line that came to an abrupt dead end in the foothills of the Pioneer Mountains.

"
Ish da!
" I said, looking at the map in the Richfield station. "We have to backtrack. We'll lose at least another day."

"Nonsense," Ma said, tracing a finger along a line between where we were and where we wanted to be. "I'm not wasting a day going back the way we came. Let's just take this shortcut directly south to get to the other track that leads to Minidoka."

"The young lady's right." The voice came from the stationmaster, who'd been hovering behind us as we looked at the map.

I smiled a thank-you to him for his support of the safe route along the tracks, but retracted my smile when he kept on talking.

"I don't think two ladies would be up to that rough country between here and the main line." He shook his head, as if already mourning our fate if we should try that shortcut.

As soon as he said it, I knew he'd goaded Ma into a foolhardy choice.

She puffed up in indignation. "We are not namby-pamby drawing room ladies," she said. "We crossed the Blue Mountains in a blizzard, and we can certainly walk ten miles over a few rocks to get to the other track." From the glint in her eye, I guessed it was now a matter of principle to show how strong we women could be.

So we wouldn't have to argue in front of an audience, I pulled Ma outside the station. "Ma, that shortcut could be treacherous."

"Here I come up with an idea to save half a day and you're afraid to risk it. You're as cautious as your pa." She started to fill her canteen at the station's water pump.

Filled with misgivings, I followed Ma toward Minidoka, past boulders and dry sage and gradually downward through loose rock. After an hour or so, we dead-ended at a sheer drop-off. We followed the cleft eastward, and just as we thought we had reached the end, the cleft took a sharp bend to the north, opposite of the direction we wanted to go. I dropped my bag and took out the compass Erick had given me, but poked it away again in disgust.

"Compass doesn't do much good unless you have wings to fly." I ran a finger around my collar where sweat had glued it to my neck.

Ma looked furtively at me as if she expected me to add a rebuke for not following my advice. With angelic self-restraint, I said nothing.

We'd been walking another hour when Ma blurted, "Talk! Even if it's to tell me we shouldn't have taken the shortcut."

"I guess we shouldn't have taken the shortcut! Satisfied?"

"I don't know how you came to be so much like Pa," she said. "He can get by a whole day on ten words." As she wiped her forehead with the back of a sleeve, she looked at me—really looked—as if I were a stranger she'd just met and was taking the measure of.

I didn't look much like Pa except for height. I didn't look that much like Ma, either, except for the gap between my two front teeth. Arthur had also inherited the gap, which he claimed helped him win spitting contests. I found the gap to be of no value whatsoever, except to reassure myself that I was not a foundling.

Although I didn't look like Pa, everyone said Pa was the one I took after. Like him, I would listen and gauge the other person's slant on things so I wouldn't say anything to rile them up. Since I could usually see both sides of an argument, I spent most of my time listening on the fence, a regular mugwump with my "mug" on one side of the fence and my "wump" on the other.

"If you wanted talk you should have taken Ida," I said, reaching over my shoulder to peel my sweaty shirtwaist from my back.

"Ida wouldn't have lasted an hour in this heat," Ma said. "At least you're still here."

"
Ja,
well," I answered, surprised by the compliment. "I suppose my doggedness is just another way I'm like Pa."

"
Ja,
well. You might recall that your Pa didn't want us to take this trip. Yet here you are, with me." Ma unbuttoned the first three buttons on her shirtwaist and picked up her bag, ready to walk again. "You might just be more like me than you think."

Heaven forbid,
I thought.

Taking advantage of the cooler air at night, we kept walking as the stars and a sliver of moon came out. We were tired, and sharp rocks made for unsteady walking. When Ma slipped on loose rock, she threw out a hand to break her fall. She held up her left arm, watching blood drip down and soak into her sleeve. "That blood will stain if we don't wash it out right away," she said.

"I'm not wasting water on your sleeve," I said as I rinsed the sharp slash on her hand with a stingy trickle of water from the canteen. I painted on iodine, wrapped my bandanna around her palm, and helped her to a sip from the canteen. I held my own thimbleful of water in my mouth so long, there was nothing left to swallow.

Even though we had not yet made it to shelter, Ma's hand was an excuse to stop for the night. The volcanic rocks around us were as sharp as broken glass, so I mounded brush into a mattress and we lay down under the stars for the first time on our trip. With no airborne dust or moisture to dilute the starlight, the sky blossomed with more stars, brighter stars, than I had ever seen before. I tried to think of them as our guardian angels so I could relax, but sleep was a long time coming.

We woke in absolute quiet as the sun edged red-hot above the horizon. I took my mind off my empty stomach by writing in my journal for a few minutes. After we each took another sip of water, we started again toward Minidoka. Tall rock formations, cliffs, and crevasses detoured us from our southward course so many times that I began to feel like a croquet ball, zigzagging from wicket to wicket to reach our goals: civilization and water.

By noon, when I thought we should have reached Minidoka, I was hungry, hot, and thirsty. I sat on my satchel and fanned myself with my journal. Ma leaned over and inspected her boots, lamenting each cut and slash on her brand-new purchase.

"Three dollars wasted," she said.

I picked up my canteen and shook it at Ma's ear. "You should be worried about water, not the state of your shoes," I said. "We only have a swallow or two left."

She didn't answer. Her eyes were sunken. Her upper chest rose and fell with laboring shudders, like that of someone with pneumonia. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were a fish out of water, but no sound came out.

Ma did not protest as I started unbuttoning her shirtwaist, "Maybe it's your cussable corset," I said. As I pulled the strings out of more and more eyelets, Ma took in enough air to talk.

"A lady always wears her corset," she wheezed.

"Ladies don't take shortcuts through the lava fields," I said, as I took off my corset, too, and dropped it into my satchel. I hadn't the energy to rebutton or retuck my shirtwaist.

As we climbed up a wrinkled river of lava stone, I kept an eye on Ma and a hand on Pa's owl. Death and I were not strangers. My brother Ole had died just days old when I was yet a toddler. We'd buried Henry this January. One of my brother Arthur's classmates was caught in a thresher, and a friend of Pa's slipped into a silo and was buried in a ton of wheat. Mrs. Rassmusson—she was only nineteen—died having her first baby, and old Mr. Ulafsson's heart stopped when he was right in the middle of his pole beans three years ago.