The Year We Were Famous (9 page)

Ma would die someday. So would I, but I didn't expect it to be so soon, from one stupid, prideful mistake. Ma was barely lifting her feet as she walked, scraping the soles of her shoes on sharp lava rock. My head ached; the landscape tilted and blurred. But I had promised Pa I would get Ma home safely, and I wasn't one to break a promise.

We stumbled along for three more hours until we took off our skirts to pad the rocks and slept.

The sun was not up yet when we woke. I tried not to think about breakfast or water as I stuffed my skirt into my satchel. The skirt was too big; ragged hems drooped over the sides, but I didn't care. I just wanted to live through that day until night, when it would cool off again. Ma's face was red and raw, and fried skin on my lips peeled off in jagged layers. We walked only a mile or two before we napped again in the shade of a rock.

After a brief rest, we staggered up. Heat bore down on us as solidly as a suit of mail. I walked with my eyes almost closed, looking through my eyelashes for a path for my feet. Walk or die, walk or die, I chanted in my head. We were probably going in circles, but as least we were proving to the turkey vultures overhead that we weren't dead yet.

I slept fitfully, with my arms around Ma, my body sheltering hers. If we died, they would find our skeletons entwined, like Quasimodo and Esmeralda. When I had read
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
I thought it was romantic. What a fool.

Into my waking dreams later that night came a ghostly wailing. Ma must have heard something, too, because her head jerked upright as she looked for the source of the sound.

Whoo-whoooo.
A faint glow moved against the darkening sky. I staggered to a stand and draped Ma's left arm across my shoulders and put my right arm around her waist to support her as we picked our steps among sliding jumbles of rock. At the crest of a small rise I felt like Columbus discovering land. Far below us, the light of an engine picked out the ribbons of railroad track. We had found the route back to people and water.

We were too weak to cheer.

T
HE
folks back in Minidoka had kindly rounded up secondhand boots to replace the ones we had ruined in the lava fields, but the shoes they found for me were bigger than Pa's and I had to stuff the toes and wear two pairs of socks to keep them from flopping on my feet. I felt like a clumsy puppy tripping over my outsize paws.

We followed the Bear River across the border into Utah as far as Trenton, then headed south to Cache and back up more hills to Collinston. South of Brigham, we walked along the western slopes of the Wasatch Range through scattered farms and orchards. The air hummed with bees during the day. The evenings were abuzz with mosquitoes as determined to suck my body dry as Varney the Vampire in that penny dreadful
The Feast
of Blood.
Not that I usually read that sort of thing. Three years ago, a classmate had left behind a copy under her desk and I slipped it between my own textbooks and stayed up all night reading before returning it the next day.

Ma said she had a surprise waiting for us in Salt Lake City and showed me the letter she had just written to the woman who owned a progressive women's clothing store there:

July 3, 1896

Dear Miss Jones,

Please reserve time to take in the seams on the bicycling outfits you ordered in for us based on our measurements of two months ago. We expect to arrive in Salt Lake City on July 8, so our talk and exhibition can be scheduled accordingly.

Sincerely,
Helga Estby

"What talk? What exhibition?" My stomach churned with questions, but Ma said only that Miss Jones was a friend of one of her suffrage society friends in Spokane.

"Just another example of what a little hoopla can accomplish," she said.

Ma also wrote out her next monthly report. I had to give her the miles again.

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

From: Helga Estby

Monthly Report #2: Ogden

Miles covered, June 5—July 3: 317

We were lost in the Snake River lava fields for three days and were in a sorry state when we found our way out; it took us two days to recover. We hereby request a five-day extension of time.

I hovered over Ma as she used a borrowed paintbrush and black paint to letter a sign. "We can't waste time marching in a parade today!" I said. "Nearly a third of our time is up and we've only walked seven hundred and forty-nine miles."

Ma tidied up the
Y
in
USE YOUR VOTE!
and stood back, paintbrush dripping black paint on the grass, to get the full effect.

"We can't spare a day just so you can march. We're a week and a half behind schedule now. At least."

"Helping the cause of women's suffrage is one of the reasons for this walk, too," she said as she turned to me. "It's our duty to march and remind the women of Utah that the right to vote they won last year isn't any good unless they use it."

Two weeks after the lava fields, Ma was still gaunt and I didn't know how she could stir the energy to do any walking she didn't have to do. I couldn't talk her out of marching, but I did talk her into letting me carry the sign for her. We fell into line behind the fife and drum marching unit, and I obediently emulated her smart marching style and waved the sign.

O
N
the porch of the offices of
Deseret Evening News,
Ma tried the handle of the door and pushed. A bell tinkled faintly but the door didn't give.

I pointed to the sign in the window of the door. "They're closed, Ma," I said, and turned to go away. "You always give up too easily," Ma said in a that lecturing tone that made me clench my teeth. "They might be closed to ordinary people, but they'll want our story."

I had been walking since dawn with nothing but a crust of bread for breakfast. Sweat pooled down my rib cage under my armpits, and yet I was willing to walk another twenty-five miles for all the tomorrows until we reached New York. I dropped my satchel. "I do not always give up too easily! If I did, I'd already be back in Mica Creek instead of being nibbled to pieces by mosquitoes and wearing my feet off to the kneecaps."

Ma smiled at my outburst and conceded. "Well, maybe not always. But I still bet there are people in there; they just don't want anyone interrupting their lunch." She cupped her hands around her eyes to peer into the window. She straightened, full of herself because she was right. "There is somebody back there," she said. "See for yourself."

I obediently put my face close enough to the glass to leave a nose print on it.
Uff da!
A shadowy figure strode toward the door. I back-stepped twice and—catching my heel on the edge of the sidewalk—toppled backwards, seat-first, into the street, my feet propped up on the sidewalk and skirts halfway up to my knees.

The door opened and a young man—unsuccessfully suppressing laughter—crossed the sidewalk to give me a hand up. "It's not funny," I said.

"Sorry," he said. "But if you'd seen the outraged look on your face when you lost your balance, you'd have laughed, too." His grin faded as he held my hand a little longer than he had to while he examined my face. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"I'm fine," I said, brushing off my skirt to avoid meeting his eyes again.

"Here," he said heartily as he retrieved my hat from the gutter. "Looks like your hat was the only casualty." He held it out toward me. His thumb and forefinger were stained with ink just where a pen would rest.

That poor hat. It was the cheapest one I could find. Within days it had started to unravel, and with loose ends of straw poking out helter-skelter, it had made me look like I had just crawled out from under a haystack. "Believe it or not, it looked that bad before I fell," I said.

Ma wasn't used to my having the reporter's attention. "Young man," she said, putting herself in his range of vision, "I'd like to talk to the features editor."

"Do you have a story?" He opened the door wider and escorted us in with a bow.

He introduced himself as he closed the door. "I'm Charles Doré." He said his name the French way: "Shahrl Doray."

Ma handed him one of her
cartes de visite.
"We've walked clear from Spokane and we're headed to New York City. I'm Helga Estby."

Before I could introduce myself, Mr. Doré looked up from Ma's card. "And you must be 'and daughter'?"

"Yes," I said. My cheeks burned. I hated always being "and daughter." I hated my luck—meeting the first reporter near my age while nearly upside down, my posterior in the street, and soot-stained petticoats in full view.

As he led us back toward a cluster of desks, I fanned myself with a blank piece of paper I had picked up from one of the desks. In spite of the heat, Mr. Doré pulled on a seersucker jacket that had been draped across the back of his chair. As he leaned over to pull chairs from the adjacent desks closer to his desk, I caught a whiff of Pears soap. I had not washed my hair in a month and had had only two tub baths since Mica Creek.

As I settled into the chair, I casually shifted one hand to cover the place I'd ripped my skirt on barbed wire. If my guardian angel wasn't busy saving someone's life, I hoped she could keep Mr. Doré from noticing the bug bites on my cheeks, the black crescents of grime rimming my cuticles, and my frayed hems blackened with dirt.

While Mr. Doré was taking notes, I gradually worked my hands out of sight in the folds of my skirt and tucked my feet back under the chair to hide my men's secondhand work boots.

After sixty performances of her standard talk, Ma could still get her voice to tremble movingly when she got to the part in her talk about the imminent loss of our farm. My ears pricked when she started a melodramatic account of the time I shot a man in Oregon.

I nudged Ma's shin, but she kept talking.

I interrupted. "Don't put that part in, Mr. Doré. I—I'm not really ... it was the first time I ever shot anyone, and then it was only in the leg—not that I intend to shoot anyone else ... oh,
uff da.
" Anyone who had grown up with Norwegians would know that there are two ways
uff da
can be said. One is at full volume, with gusto, usually uttered to take the place of an expression unacceptable to one's catechism teacher or maiden aunt. The other is softly, resignedly, with a sigh.

I held my breath while I watched Mr. Doré to see if he was impressed, amused, or shocked. "Since you're carrying a gun," he said, "I guess I better be on good behavior." His tone was solemn, but his mouth twitched toward another grin. When he looked down at his notebook again, I guided a strand of haystack-brown hair back into my bun and tried to scrape off some of the loose, peeling flakes on my chapped lips with my teeth, but even these slight movements drew his eyes back to my face and I could feel my rough cheeks grow hotter yet.

Ma gave Mr. Doré the details of our appearance tomorrow, when we would be modeling the new bicycle costumes and presenting a lecture on our travels.

Since I was curious about what he was writing about us, I stood and tiptoed around to the back of his desk and looked over his shoulder. Mr. Doré stopped writing and turned over his notepad. "You'll blush if you see what I've written," he said. "Or are you admiring my typewriter? I had to save for six months to buy it—it's a Model Two Underwood."

As he stood, he pulled down his sleeves to cover his wrists. If I were Sherlock Holmes I'd have said that jacket used to belong to someone else, or Mr. Reporter had grown since he bought it and couldn't afford to replace it. And yet he had found money to buy a new typewriter. I had to admire his determination to keep up with the times.

"Pretty soon publishers won't be accepting manuscripts in longhand. I ought to know—I've already published three short stories. One in
Scribner's
—'Latecomer's Lament'—did you see it?" He paused expectantly.

I shrugged apologetically and shook my head.

"Well," he said. He reached down to use the back of one sleeve to wipe a fleck of dust off the front, where
Underwood
shone in gold letters.

When he straightened, it struck me that I was exactly his height, so his eyes looked directly into mine. His green eyes, flecked with gold, looked owlish behind gold round-rimmed glasses. "I sure wish I was seeing the country like you and your mother," he said. "All the interesting people you'd meet—I'd have material for a million stories with a trip like that."

I laughed. "You'd also have to like walking for days without ever getting dry, being eaten by mosquitoes, and wondering when you'd eat next."

"But that's part of the adventure, isn't it?"

"Easy to say when you work at a desk and go home to dinner and a warm bed every night," I said. "I'm going to write, too," I said, daring him to say I was only a farm girl off on a lark with my mother and had no chance in the world of writing anything someone would want to read.

"Going to write isn't the same as writing," he said. He used the same lecturing tone Ma used, but from him it didn't rankle. It was good advice, even if it was coming from someone who didn't look more than a few years older than I was.

Ma looked at the clock on the wall. "Enough dawdling," she said as she picked up her satchel and tugged me toward the door. "Time we made it to the dressmaker's."

"Hey," he said as we headed out. "Would you like a couple souvenir pencils?"

They were Eberhard Fabers, embossed with "Deseret Evening News" in blue letters on one side.

"Thanks," I said.

We were halfway down the block when he called after us. "See you tomorrow!"