The Daughter's Walk (36 page)

“I wish you'd stop trapping,” Louise said. I readied my kit for the months I'd be on my timberlands. “I worry about you there alone for so many weeks in the snow and cold.”

“I have the Warrens,” I assured her. “And Lucky.” She handed me a pair of gloves, furry sides in. “It's not only danger that concerns me.” She didn't look at me when she spoke, so I wasn't sure I heard what she said next. “I like your company. I miss you when you're gone.”

“You miss Lucky,” I teased. I couldn't recall anyone suggesting that my absence brought them even the smallest heartache. I assumed my brothers and sisters missed my mother while on our journey, but I'd already worked away from the Mica Creek farm for five years by the time Mama and I left for New York, so I didn't imagine they really missed me. I had already become more a memory than a presence to them. Louise offered a view of belonging that hadn't occurred to me before.

“No, I miss you,” she insisted.

“I miss you too,” I said. And I realized I did. The observation warmed before it alarmed.

I took plenty of food with me: hardtack biscuits, dried venison, and beef that I jerked from my Coulee City neighbor's stock. I added carrots
and potatoes beginning to sprout eyes. I stored all this in the shack, along with fish pemmican the Warrens traded with me. I knew how to locate the best spots and set traps for the winter weasels, those ermine whose pelts were valued regardless of size. I could identify the slides the otters made on the stream banks, and beavers leave tracks even a child can find. I had the right bait (chicken parts Louise sent with me and, when my traps were full, scent glands from the animals). Lucky came too, and I welcomed not only his brawn but his fierce barks warning of wolves or bears. I understood that for my benefit, Louise had given up her own precious time with him, a clear sacrifice.

Lucky's tail wagged when I placed the usual animal innards in his dish one morning. Wood smoke from my stove made my throat sore, or so I'd thought until my cough turned into a seal's bark. Fatigue visited more quickly than I'd remembered, but I had to check the traps. As I trudged through the woods, Lucky trotted behind me on the narrow trail. Snow fell, sugaring the pine and firs and filling in my snowshoe tracks. Fur-lined boots kept my feet warm, but the coughing caused me to stop more than once, gloves on knees. I felt a buzzing in my head after each bout. “I should have fixed a mustard pack,” I croaked to Lucky, who panted beside me.

For the first time, I was too weak to finish the trap lines. Instead, I took what I had and dragged it back to my shack, unloaded Lucky, and stood in the crisp air to flesh and stretch them. Despite my stupor, I ran my hands over the smooth fur, exerting energy to tie the edges to the circular frame and salt them. More hides waited, but I needed to eat. I rested for an hour before I fixed my supper of vegetable stew with pieces of beaver tail and fat floating on the top. I curled up beneath a fur blanket. I'd rest then finish. That was my plan.

When I awoke, it was morning, and my chest felt like an elephant
sat on it. I knew I ought to remain where I was, fight the fever growing within me, but I needed to finish the line. Lucky licked my face, and I rose, stopping to cough, my lungs vibrating against my chest. Breath came with difficulty. I sat down on my cot to pull on my pants. I tried to stoke the fire, but now I shivered and dropped kindling. The ends of my fingers were white as bone, and when I caught my face in the mirror over the washbasin, my lips looked blue.

Even now, all these years later, when Ida gets up to stoke the fire, I remember how my hands trembled that day, lips and fingers numb, as close to giving in to final silence as any time in my life.

“I should eat,” I mumbled to the dog.

I reached for a pan to heat water and watched the wood floor come up to smack my face.

I
wheezed in and out of memories. Once Ida flashed before my eyes, telling me how cold the hog house was and that Johnny was sick. Words wouldn't come for me to tell her I was so sorry that he was ill, that she was cold, that I was cold too, and that I wished it had been me instead of any of them, me instead of my mother having to ache and grieve the rest of her life. In dreams, words fail to express the heart, but the soul knows of the longing. Olaf swirled in my memory, flying up into a cyclone. I thought that dying would be good now, but someone wouldn't let me, lifted my head instead.

I opened my eyes to the brown face of Young Warren.

I smelled juniper, tasted bitter broth that Older Warren now spooned into my mouth. I lay back shivering. “Very sick, Miss,” he said. “We stay.”

And they did.

Lucky had been lucky for me. I'd let him outside, though I didn't remember doing it. He'd found the Warrens, urged them back to the shack. They'd put me to bed and stayed for four days watching over me.

When I felt well enough to sit up and take nourishment on my own, I remembered Louise's lament and agreed with her.

“I've asked the Warrens to do the trapping for me from now on,” I told Olea and Louise when the Warrens returned me to Coulee City. I was weak and had lost weight. I pulled the fur hat with its ear flaps off, not caring how matted my hair must look. Getting a hot bath and my hair washed would feel like heaven.

“It's good to see you learn from experience,” Olea chided, “even if it does take years.”

“I'll buy pelts from them exclusively, for a fair price. Maybe my profit will be a little less but still enough. And I'll have them start livetrapping,” I told my friends.

“Whatever for?” Olea said.

“To do what the Finns are doing, only with foxes here. I'll build pens out at the farm. We'll have chickens for protein. We have enough cold weather to bring us excellent pelts. I've investigated it,” I said. “There's hardly any risk.”

“Investigated? Have you been to Finland to see what's happening there? Have you talked with those who think ranching fur-bearing animals has merit? No, Clara. You haven't thought this through,” Olea said.

It struck me that her words were the very ones I'd spoken to my mother all those years ago before we took our walk.

When we carried our fur garments to Spokane for summer cleaning and storage in April of 1906, I looked in the city directory. I hadn't done it before then, not wanting to see my family's names without mine included. Ida worked as a domestic. My mother, Ole, Arthur, William,
and Lillian lived at 1528 Mallon Avenue. Aunt Hannah wasn't listed there, or anywhere. I wondered if she'd passed on. I'd last seen my brother Olaf in 1901. He wasn't mentioned, so I assumed he worked outside of Spokane, maybe still at the Elstads' farm. That he still hadn't written to me stung.

I also looked up the Doré name, and there were Dorés listed. An Elsie, John, and Mitchell appeared, the latter a conductor on the Northern Pacific Railway. Seeing their names affirmed for me what my father had once said, that there were many Dorés. It was a name like Olson or Johnson, with a hundred branches on every family tree.

On my own, I took the streetcar to the Mallon address. I'm not sure what I thought I'd do there, but I wanted to see where they lived so I could picture where they carried on lives without me. I stood across the street from a fine-looking two-story home with dormers on the top floor and a lovely porch to grace the front. Lilac scent wafted from the yard. My stepfather had detailed the area above the porch with an intricate framed design that added interest, made it unique. A bay window brought in extra light. If he'd built the house as Olaf said he planned to, he'd done a fine job of it. Without the dirty money, they apparently lived comfortably.

My heart leaped as two girls came out of the house, onto the porch. They were about twelve.
Lillian?
They sat on the stone steps holding little books in their laps.
Diaries
. They giggled together. The one I thought was Lillian suddenly looked my way, as though she was aware that I stared.

When I waved, she waved back. My heart pounded. I looked for traffic, thinking to cross the street, when I heard Ida's voice. “It's time Marcia went home,” Ida said. “Lillian, come help Mama get the duster down.”

The girls whispered to each other, then separated. Lillian, lithe and
blond, ran inside. The other girl walked off down the street. The emptiness I felt surprised me.

I took the streetcar back toward the Fairview house Olea owned and where we stayed when we came to Spokane. Instead of going all the way to the house, I got off and walked into a beauty shop and asked for a pompadour frame and spent the afternoon having my hair built up around it. “You'll have to save the hair from your brushing,” the woman told me, “to fill in these thin places. Your hair is so soft!”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“A little color can give it body. Would you like to try blond?”

I nodded.

“I love adventurous women!” she said and poured warm water from a pitcher over my head.