The Daughter's Walk (46 page)

Franklin sent us postcards with special stamps he'd looked for, which I put into my book. Olea, Louise, and I enjoyed morning walks in Coulee City before the high heat of the day. We took the car out for spins. The new pharmacist in town worked on a poured cement wall around his yard meant to keep the rattlesnakes out, as his young wife deathly feared them. He drew lines in the wet cement to make them look like blocks or bricks.

“Are there snakes here?” Louise asked. “I've never seen any.”

“I wonder what he'll do about the gate,” I mused. “They'll crawl right under that.”

“Maybe I'll offer him a finished board for the gate that can be raised or lowered depending on the season,” Olea said.

“What we do for love,” I said, thinking that cement wall the sweetest gesture.

When Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, I read the news report but felt confident it wouldn't affect our transport scheduled for January. I listened to that voice telling me to walk this way and felt sure I was. But one morning I awoke, sweat drenching my cotton gown. I rose and wrote out my telegram, taking it to the operator as soon as daylight showed itself. Franklin was in Paris, and I wanted to remind him to purchase insurance before he shipped.

Then I thought,
How silly. Of course he's already done that
. I walked back home and took a nap.

At harvest that fall, we three women brought dinners of fried chicken, pickled beets, string beans, fresh baked bread, potato salad, and blackberry pies out to the harvesters. Louise commented on my
appetite improving, and it had. I enjoyed the taste of the pies and vowed to fix
julekaga
for us for Christmas. My fingernails had even grown out.

Lucky ambled behind us to the fields. I offered to sit in the “dog house”—what the men called the chair on the combine shaded by an awning. A man sat there and sewed tight the ears of the sacks of grain, something every woman could surely do. But the very idea was met with solemn stares. Women couldn't be part of the harvest crew; it was probably considered too much work. We were allowed only to steam over a hot kitchen stove in hundred-degree heat, preparing four meals a day to serve to the men. When he finished with his needle and thread, he stuck the needle into his wooden leg while he prepared the next sack. He pulled the needle out, held it in his hand.

“I bet you can't do that,” he said, handing me the needle.

“Sure I can,” I said. I took the needle from him and stuck it in his wooden leg myself. He yowled.

“Oh, I'm sorry!” My hands flew to my face. I truly was.

“You were s'posed to stick it in your own leg,” he said. “Not my good one.”

“Well, you know how silly women are,” I told him. “We never get instructions right.”

The three of us laughed together when I told Olea and Louise, but I was glad it was only a poke in his leg.

“We feed the world,” I told Louise one day as we gathered eggs from the clutch Olea had built in our backyard. Louise wanted to keep the chickens in the basement of the house, but Olea and I demurred.

“I count only six eggs,” Louise said. “I don't think that'll be enough to feed the world. Do you think? It's unclear.” She sounded so serious, and I laughed and hugged her. What would my life be without her in
it? I wondered. I enjoyed the rhythm of this place and was reminded of the peace I'd found growing up on Mica Creek. I missed anew my brothers, sisters, and yes, most of all my mother, but this was the family given to me when I was desolate. I gratefully accepted.

“Fifteenth of January, 1915. Insurance exorbitant. Cargo insured. Not all ready. Getting out. Reach New York, January late. Stop. Franklin Doré.” Mr. Raymond read the telegram to me over the phone. “Sounds like everything is all right, Miss Doré.”

“Yes, Mr. Raymond.” The phrase “exorbitant insurance” bothered me. It would cut into our profits.

“How long has your mister been gone this time?” he asked.

“He's not my mister,” I said. “You know that.”

“Oh, brother then.”

I let that stand. “Where was it sent from?” I asked.

“Oh, let's see. London. The Brits are in the worst of it, I hear. Guess he wants you to meet him in New York.”

I didn't hear the telegram that way at all. But when Mr. Raymond delivered the paper copy to me, I did wonder if Franklin could possibly mean for me to come to New York. Maybe “reach” should have been “meet.” Commerce was terribly interrupted with the Russians, British, Hungarians, Germans, French, and so many other countries shooting at each other, and I couldn't figure out what it was all about. We read of refugees. It occurred to me that few Europeans would be interested in upgrading their wardrobe of furs until after the conflict was over. Perhaps we'd picked a poor time for this venture.

At least America hadn't entered the war, though the papers suggested
that war machinery geared up even here. Billy was of age for enlisting if it came to that. Arthur might be considered too old at twenty-nine. I wouldn't let myself think of that. My mother had lost enough sons and me enough brothers. I'd be glad when Franklin reached our shores and telegraphed or called saying all was well.

“Norway declared her neutrality,” Olea said, putting the newspaper down. “But the allies will cut off her trade to be sure we don't support Germany.” She tapped her fingers on the paper.

“I'm glad Franklin's getting out and the shipment is on its way.”

“With the war,” Olea said, “the demand might drop for luxury garments like the ones you've designed, but it could well increase for military use. Fur hats and trim, uniforms.”

“Nothing I've designed comes close to being suitable for military function,” I said.

“We'll hope for the best,” she said.

We women busied ourselves. Louise knitted in between her snoring naps. Olea had made a cradle she carved for the pharmacist's wife expecting in the spring. I sketched more designs and put them away, got out my album of stamps. I organized them by color shadings, almost the way a quilter might piece what was left of her little one's dress or her husband's trousers. Nothing interrupted the growing restlessness.

On a late January morning, Lucky couldn't get up. Olea helped him stand as I entered the living room, the smell of bread baking in the oven. We watched him waddle to the porch. He turned back to look at me peering at him through the diamond-shaped glass in the door, then at the steps, then back at me. I opened the door, pulled my coat around me. “You need help?” I said. I lifted him and carried him down the steps. He wobbled a bit as all fours touched the snow, and I was surprised at how little he weighed. He shuffled to a leafless shrub, watered
it without raising his leg, turning the snow yellow. He looked back at me as though apologizing for his lapse in manners, then made his way to lie beneath a tree.

“It's too cold for you out here,” I said approaching. He was at least fifteen years old and had marked my life with Olea and Louise. I helped him stand again, and he let me. When he stumbled, I half carried him onto the screened back porch, where he plopped down on his rug. His doleful eyes stared up at me, and he panted as I squatted and stroked him. “We finally get everyone home and on a good, straight path, and you're acting like you might leave us. You stay here and rest,” I said. He looked up at me and sighed, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

It's where Olea found us at lunchtime, me lying beside him, stroking the now still fur.

Louise was nearly inconsolable when we told her of Lucky's death. Olea rubbed her back and fixed her tea. “He lived a good long life, Louise. And you fed him like a child. When his time came, he just wanted to lie down and sleep. What better way to end life, right there next to Clara?”

“He wasn't that old,” Louise said.

“Old enough,” Olea told her. “Come along now, let's have an egg sandwich. Clara made bread this morning. Isn't that nice?”

“I made the bread, you say? It isn't clear.”

“You might have,” Olea said. “I think you took it from the oven. You did your part.”

When Franklin called from New York, I was out building a fire on a spot in the backyard, thawing the ground so I could dig a hole deep enough to bury Lucky. Olea called from the porch. “I'll watch the fire,” she said. “Franklin wants to talk with you.”

I grieved Lucky's death, maybe even the loss of the routine we'd
developed with our four-footed pal. Grief can affect our hearing and our hearts.

“But your telegram didn't say anything about meeting you in New York,” I said. “It read ‘reach New York.' ”

“That was a mistake then,” he said. “It was to have read ‘meet,' not ‘reach.' I wanted you here. That's why we sailed ahead of the cargo.”

“But why?”

I didn't really want him chattering about personal affairs on the party line. Olga, the phone company operator, would be listening even now.

“Well, at least you know about the insurance situation.”

“Yes, the telegram said the price was exorbitant. The cost of doing business, right?”

“What? No, I said the cargo was
secured
, not insured. It was aboard ship and ready to transport.”

“But it is insured,” I said. My heart started pounding in alarm. “You did arrange it with Lloyd's, didn't you? You had the money.” I could feel my palms grow moist.

“I couldn't,” he said. “They make … exceptions during wartime, and the cost. It was too much, Clara. They said themselves that they wouldn't underwrite the policy because everything was too risky.”

“You let the cargo ship without insurance?” My throat felt dry. “But we planned for it.”

“It would have cost nearly as much as the initial investment,” he said. “I didn't have that kind of cash, and I suspect neither did you.”

“How much would the insurance have cost us?” I said. “We should have sold—”

He told me and I shivered at the amount. “You're right.” I swallowed. “I would have taken the risk too. There wouldn't have been time
to sell the diamond ring. But we should have been consulted.”
Could I have come up with more money quickly enough?

“The phone lines are spotty for getting through, Clara.” He had a reassuring voice now. “Most of the ships have made it fine. America isn't in the war. And I agree. I ought to have wired you, but I thought that if you'd been with me, you would have done the same. That's how I evaluated it, by asking what Sharon would do.”

“Who is Sharon?” I said.

“What? I meant I asked myself what would Clara do.”

“And you thought I'd risk the shipment?”

“I did,” he said.

“Is the cargo on an American ship?” I held my breath. It would be the safest.

“No. British.” he said. “The Brits have lost only a few ships, and those farther south. I just hoped you'd be here so we could talk in person. And so that, well, so that you could meet my wife. I hoped you could get to know each other on a train ride out west.”

Franklin's married
. I wanted to learn of the trip, everything that he hadn't been able to put into letters or that phone call.
Franklin is married
. I wanted to know about the production of the designs.
Franklin. Married
.

I wanted him to be happy. I tried not to think that he might have been distracted, and that was why he chose to let the cargo be transported uninsured. We had several thousand dollars invested, and not to cover it seemed foolish. And yet, the price … Insurance wasn't always considered necessary by our neighbors. I wondered what Sharon
had
thought.

I heated my curling iron. Things would change yet again. I'd enjoyed knowing that someone special thought about me when I wasn't there. I had looked forward to Franklin's letters, his calls. Because I so seldom saw him, he proved more angelic in my eyes than he probably was. “He was your held-out hope,” I said to the image in the mirror. I felt the tears come—hard, wrenching sobs that I hoped Louise and Olea couldn't hear. I set the curling iron down and stood at the window, my chest aching with an uncertain future. I was not alone, not with Louise and Olea outside my bedroom door playing Chinese checkers. Louise had to be told the rules over and over, but Olea didn't seem to mind. They were special in each other's hearts, shared a common history as cousins. I had no one with whom I shared an uncommon past—no one except my mother and our walk, but I was no longer special in her eyes. My shared “common” past with Louise and Olea would have to be memory enough.