The Year We Were Famous (21 page)

As I dished up soup, its steam made my eyes water. We ate slowly and silently.

Ma put her spoon down gently, aligning it carefully in a ninety-degree angle with the edge of the desk. She looked out the window. "How can I face Pa without the money?"

Even in profile I could tell Ma was showing her age. Although her face was so gaunt that her cheekbones stuck out like crab apples, the line of her throat was beginning to sag. And when had the hair at her temples gone gray?

"Pa will just be happy to see you home safely, Ma." I pulled Pa's letter from the stack and held it toward her.

Her open hand hesitated for a heartbeat above the letter before closing on it. She read aloud:

December 17, 1896

Dear Mrs. Estby,

I hope you are sitting down when you read this because I have taken a drastic step. I took no news as bad news, and assumed you missed your deadline. I sold all our farm equipment and our plow horse to Erick Iverson. He paid me more than I expected, enough to make partial payments on both the mortgage and the taxes. The bank and the county treasurer have said they'll give us another year before auctioning off the farm.

I can hear you saying, "How will we grow wheat without the equipment?" Well, we won't. We've lost money on the wheat the last three years anyway. We'll just plant a little hay the old-fashioned way, by hand, work our kitchen garden and orchard, and keep the milk cow, pigs, and chickens to feed the family.

If we're meant to keep the farm, Providence will provide.
If we're not, we'd have to sell the equipment anyway, and now we have a head start on it.

We all miss you.

Your husband,
Ole Estby

Ma dropped the letter, mouth open, but wordless.

I snatched up the letter and used my skirt to wipe off a splash of soup from one corner. I reread the letter. The farm was still ours, at least for another year. My hand was shaking as I put the letter back down on Ma's side of the desk. Ma and I had walked nearly four thousand miles and were going home broke. Pa walked across the road to sell some farm equipment and had saved the farm. At least for now. I fumbled in my pocket for Pa's wise owl and perched it on the windowsill.

I supposed I should see what Erick had to say. I tapped his letter on the table, nerving myself to open it. I slipped a table knife under the flap, but the knife was dull and my hands were still shaking. The envelope ripped down the front.

November 26, 1896

Dear Clara,

Don't worry. I didn't take you at your word when you wrote to say that you were refusing my proposal. Your walk across the country has clearly drained all your reasoning capacity to fuel
your feet. I don't blame you—you were just going out of loyalty to your folks.

To give you something happy to think on, I write to tell you I have finished our bed and table and laid the foundation for our house. It is a goodly twenty by twenty, and we can add to it as our family grows. I suppose I should have waited until you returned to get your opinion on where the sink should go and all, but now that harvest is over I had to find something to keep busy while I waited for you to come home.

My brothers have warned me that too much time under the influence of your mother would corrupt your modest, obliging nature. I am convinced, however, that once you are safely home you will be restored to your own sweet self.

With love,
Erick Iverson

P.S. Happy birthday! Don't worry about the farm. I've talked to my pa and we have a plan to help.

Now what? I looked to Ma for advice, but she was smiling as she read her letters from Olaf, Ida, Bertha, Arthur, and Johnny. I didn't want to spoil her mood by dithering about whether I owed Erick anything for helping save the farm and wailing about having wasted over half a year on a foolhardy walk.

Was the half-year entirely wasted, though? Since I thought better with a pencil in my hand, I got out my journal.

Across the top of one of the last blank pages I wrote:
Coals for the walk.

Under goals, I wrote:
1. Save the farm.

At least Ma had tried. Her plan hadn't worked, but it might have, if someone other than Miss Waterson had taken her up on her wager. We still had a story to sell to someone else. I tapped my pencil against my two front teeth.

"You know, Ma, maybe we didn't do so bad." I turned my journal around so she could read it. "Money from selling some of the farm equipment gives us another year. That's long enough for you to write your book."

"Who wants to read about losers?"

"We walked nearly coast to coast. That counts for something." Ma did not look convinced, but I went on.

"What else did you say you wanted this walk to do? Prove..." I paused to let Ma finish the statement.

Ma sighed. "Prove the endurance of women."

I wrote it down:
2. Prove the endurance of women.

"Remember that
New York World
article that ended 'if they survive the experiment'? Well, we did survive. And I'll bet more than one woman reading about us was inspired to try something she wasn't bold enough to try before."

I didn't wait for Ma to give me the next reason, but wrote down:
3. VOTES for women.

"Idaho passed its referendum giving women the vote just a few months after we passed through."

"I don't think we can take credit for that, Clara."

"No. But maybe we changed a few votes. If every woman who is passionate about equal suffrage wins just a few votes, and a few votes more, eventually we will win."

Next I wrote down:
4. Money for college.

"Tea with McKinley, camping out with Indians, seeing the whole country nearly coast to coast on foot ... think of the scholarship application letter I can write now! I'll probably have colleges fighting over me. That is, if you can spare me," I said.

Ma pulled her chair forward with a scrape. "You've done your duty to your family. Go to college. I'll feel guilty if you don't."

Only one unresolved issue. "Ma, Erick didn't believe me when I said I refused his proposal, and that's why he helped save the farm. Don't I owe him something?"

Ma looked at me like I was too stupid to be any child of hers. "You don't owe him your life, Clara. You told him no and he chose not to believe you. Besides, Erick got a good deal on that farm equipment. Your Pa always kept his tools in like-new condition, and Erick probably gave him less than fifty cents on the dollar for them."

"I've been thinking," she said. "Since you're the published writer in the family, why don't you write the book about the walk? You can have the notes I sent home. It's the least I can do after dragging you across the country."

"I'll put your name on it, too."

"I'd be proud. But your name should come first."

Again, Ma looked out at the snow drifting across the window. This time it wasn't an empty stare. As she narrowed her eyes, I could tell she was thinking hard on something. She turned back with a grin. "I've got it—the title should be
Spokane to New York City, One Step at a Time
"

"Our home is Mica Creek. It should be
Mica Creek to New York City!'

"No one's heard of Mica Creek, and you could say our trip started when we left the office of the
Spokane Chronicle.
" Ma's pallor was slowly being replaced by spots of color.

We had plenty of time to argue about a title. I'd let Ma think she'd won—for now. I changed the subject. "Where should we start the book? Should I leave out the boring beginning with all the rain?" I asked.

"You have to put in the part about the man with the rifle, though," Ma said.

"And the lonesome stationmaster who needed his socks darned."

"Chopping wood."

"Eating grasshoppers."

"The Indians and the curling iron."

"The water bottles on the tracks."

Our momentum halted when Ma looked away, fiddling with the top button on her shirtwaist. I suspected she was remembering Pittsburgh. Passing time could not turn the evening she'd told me about my real father into a funny story or thrilling adventure. I suspected we would never talk about that night again. Ma turned back toward me with a question in her eyes. She would never ask for forgiveness, and I didn't feel she had to ask for it. I reached across the table and laid my hand on top of hers. "Love you, Ma," I said.

Her eyes welled up. She blinked. "Love you, Clara," she whispered.

I had this story to tell, but one book would not support me for the rest of my life. I thought about the wizened widow in Oregon, the stationmaster with holes in his socks, the dressmaker in Salt Lake City with her clothing store, Dr. Holmes in Wyoming, Mrs. Bryan, the McKinleys. I had passed through their lives for an hour, a day, and then moved on, but they all left parts of themselves in my mind. I couldn't help wonder what happened to them after we left. Maybe the father I'd never met would inspire a story, too. Nellie Bly didn't need a poetic imagination; she wrote about real people and places. I had a hundred people and places to write about, too.

And how about Mr. Doré's story? I pressed his letter against my chest and closed my eyes. I remembered his thick stubby eyelashes, the smell of his soap, the texture of his cheek against mine.

Dear Miss Estby,

Congratulations on reaching New York! Please write the very day you get there to let me know that you are well. I know you will have given interviews to the reporters at the
World
and
Times
already, but I'd like to do an article about you and your
mother, too, for the
Deseret Evening News,
Would you write me a page or two with what you most remember and places you'd like to go back to?

I hope Salt Lake City is on your list of places to revisit, I'll meet your train if you let me know when you expect to arrive, Miss Ernestine would still like you to visit her class, but don't do it on my account, I told her I planned to go to Seattle and the Klondike next year to cover the gold strike, She told me that if I went, I should not be surprised to find that she had become engaged to someone else while I was gone,

While I was staying put in Salt Lake City learning the newspaper business, you were off on your adventure, and now perhaps you will put down roots long enough to go to college while I go off adventuring, Do you suppose someday we'll be of a mind to go adventuring or put down roots at the same time?

I will send you my address in Seattle as soon as I know it.

Travel home safely,

Most sincerely yours,

Charles Doré

I slipped the letter between pages of my journal. A year from now, after the excitement of the Klondike, would he remember the gap-toothed girl who tromped into his office in Salt Lake City?

How would my own story turn out? Related by blood or not, I was Ole Estby's daughter: strong, stoic, reliable. Everyone in Mica Creek said so. Perhaps I was also a little like the father I had never met. I hoped I would also be like Ma, the bravest woman I knew, a woman who could envision a world better than the one she found herself in, where farm families kept their homes in bad times, where women could vote, and every child with the will could go to college.

In a lull between snow squalls, a shaft of late-afternoon light glinted silver off the lever on the typing machine. I stood in front of the desk. My right index finger hovered over the keys as I searched for the round black button with C for Clara. Most typists were men, but I could learn to type, too. I could support myself while I got started writing. I would write my own story day by day, one step at a time. If I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, I could go anywhere my dreams led me.

CLARA AND HELGA ESTBY
were real people, my great-aunt and great-grandmother. Newspaper articles documented their meetings with notables and described how they demonstrated their curling iron for a group of Indians and survived three days in the lava fields, a flash flood in the Rockies, mountain blizzards, rattlers, a cougar, and assailants. I hope Helga and Clara would not wince at the words I have put in their mouths or the thoughts I have put in their heads.

I made up Erick Iverson and Mr. Doré, and concocted a name for Clara's birth father, since Helga never revealed his name. Miss Waterson is also fiction, since no one knows who—if anyone—made the wager with Helga Estby. Helga said at first that it was with someone in the fashion industry, but later implied that it was someone in publishing. Although newspaper articles disagreed on many details, they all quote Helga's claim that she had a ten-thousand-dollar bet with a mysterious party in the East. In 1896, ten thousand dollars would have been thirty-five times what a typical unskilled woman worker would earn in a year. The payoff Helga claimed for the walk was so extravagant that I began to wonder if the ten-thousand-dollar figure was part of Helga's hoopla.

Helga was so inconsistent about other provisions of the contract and her deadlines that I even doubted if there was a contract, except in her lively imagination. Despite my doubts on the truth of the wager, I chose to stick to Helga's version of the story and cast Miss Waterson in the role of the "mysterious party."

This book ends with Helga and Clara expecting to sell their story for at least enough to save the farm. In real life, their story did not have a happy ending. They were left stranded in New York with no money, without a change of clothes.

With Clara's bad ankle, they could not have walked clear back across the country, especially not in winter. I imagine them walking across the new bridge to Brooklyn where there was a large Norwegian community and finding jobs scrubbing and cleaning—earning enough to keep them off the streets, but not enough to save for train fare home.

Spring came with bad news from Mica Creek. Clara's sister Bertha was dying of diphtheria. Helga and Clara were desperate to get back home. Someone hearing about their plight gave them railway tickets as far as Chicago. From Chicago they walked to Minneapolis, where newspapers printed long articles about them. With this publicity, they likely raised enough money to get the rest of the way home.