The Year We Were Famous (5 page)

Ma glanced down at my feet. "If you're tired."

As we approached the house and picked our way through the muddy chore yard, I was encouraged by a window box of pansies. A person who tended flowers was bound to be nice, wasn't she? I slowed down as we approached the porch. Although I was looking forward to dinner and a dry place to sleep, I'd rather sleep in a haystack than beg for a bed as if we were tramps.

Ma squeezed my shoulder. "They'll take us in, you'll see. It's the law of the frontier to take in a stranger on the road." She tidied her hair and practiced a smile before raising her hand to knock on the front door.

An older woman, as small as Ida, opened the door a crack. "Are you alone?"

"Yes, it's just me and my daughter," said Ma. "Could we get out of the rain while we introduce ourselves?" She edged toward the doorway, but I hovered behind, poised to head back to the road if we weren't welcomed in. "I'm Helga Estby, and this is Clara. We're walking across the country to New York City to save our farm."

"New York! You must be daft," the woman said.

Ma didn't deny that she was daft, but went on with her pitch. "Your house looked like such a friendly little place, I just knew someone nice lived here, someone who wouldn't turn a mother and her daughter out into the rain."

My stomach rumbled as the smell of food wafted through the open door. Looking over Ma's shoulder, I saw a steaming kettle hanging over the fireplace. How I longed for the warmth of that fire.

"If we could just come inside," Ma said, "I'll show you an article about us from the
New York World
and our letter of recommendation from the mayor of Spokane."

The woman sighed and backed away from the doorway. "Even fools deserve a place out of the rain. Come on in, the two of you."

I nearly stumbled into Ma in my eagerness to get inside.

The woman held out a hand. "Mabel Philson," she said. She might not have weighed ninety-five pounds, but her grip was strong.

As I put down my bag and rolled the kinks out of my shoulders, I assessed our surroundings. The house was just one room with a loft, no bigger than our old sod house. Mrs. Philson had no store-bought furniture, no clock, and the curtains were stitched from feed sacks.

Ma took the oilskin packet out of her bag and showed Mrs. Philson the newspaper article with our picture. "See?" she said. "That's us, though I suppose we look more like drowned rats than respectable ladies after this day on the road. And here's our letter from Mayor Belt."

Mrs. Philson ran one finger over the City of Spokane seal embossed on the top of the mayor's stationery. She slowly read the letter aloud.

To Whom It May Concern:

The bearer hereof, Mrs. H. Estby, has been a resident of this city and vicinity for the last nine years, is a lady of good character and reputation, and I take pleasure in commending her and her daughter, with whom she travels, to the kindly consideration of all persons with whom they may come in contact.

H. N. Belt
Mayor of Spokane

Mrs. Philson returned the letter to Ma. "I guess you're official," she said. "Come have some soup."

I put a hand over my stomach to stifle another loud rumble. Fortunately, it didn't take long for her to serve up three bowls of steaming broth along with the last of her bread, which was so hard that I had to dunk it in the soup to chew it. Mrs. Philson watched us eat every bite. I'm not sure if she was anxious to see that we liked it, or wished she could have had more of it herself. It was hard to enjoy the food, knowing she had so little to share.

After dinner, Mrs. Philson loaned us a couple of her dead husband's long shirts so we could get out of our wet things and hang them over chairs by the fire to dry. I put the pan of leftover hot dishwater on the floor and soaked my feet in it while recording our first day's events in my journal.

Ma seemed reinvigorated by the food and change of company and tried to spark a political discussion with Mrs. Philson.

"Are you hoping Major McKinley or Mr. Bryan will be our next president?" she asked.

"Last I heard, neither one of them can control the weather," Mrs. Philson said, without looking up from her hands and knees as she mopped up the puddles of water growing under our petticoats and skirts. Ma picked up another rag and got down on the floor to help. I knew I should have joined them, but if I got up I'd leave a trail of blood-tinged footprints on the floor they were trying to clean.

"I can't vote, so why should I waste time thinking about who sits in the White House?" Mrs. Philson looked sideways at Ma. For a moment both their faces glowed in the firelight.

"If any man can vote, don't you deserve the vote, too?"

Ma was launching into one of her standard suffragist speeches. I suspected Mrs. Philson wasn't interested, but there was no stopping Ma once she'd started. I turned back to my journal.

Soaked skirts, sore feet, and begging for a dry spot to spend the night. Is that all I'd have to write about every day? How could I do this for another seven months?

Day One on the way to New York City
Mica Creek to Freeman—2 miles
Freeman to Hope—5 miles
Hope to Waverley (crossed Latah Creek)—7 miles
Waverly to Spring Valley—7 miles
Spring Valley to Rosalia—5 miles
Only 3,974 miles to go.

O
UR
clothes had dried overnight, but with today's rain and wind they wouldn't stay that way for long. Mercifully, Ma was less talkative today. She told our story anew to everyone we passed, but in between she was generally quiet. Since my feet needed no instruction from my brain, I cast about for some project to keep my mind busy. "Ma, can I borrow Pa's watch?"

"Why would you need to know the time here?" She gestured toward the miles of plowed fields on either side of the tracks.

"I'll tell you when I have it figured out," I said.

"
Ja,
well." She set her satchel down on a rocky patch out of the mud and slipped the cord with Pa's pocket watch over her head. She handed it to me with both hands. "Don't drop it," she said.

I took it just as carefully, slipping the cord over my own head and checking the time. "It's nine thirty-four," I said. "Just walk normally. And don't talk or you'll make me lose count." We resumed our pace as I mumbled the number of my steps, periodically checking the hands of the watch.

At nine forty-four I announced, "Nine hundred and ninety-three steps."

"Well, that fact will make a fascinating entry for our journals," Ma said.

"Don't laugh, Ma. If anyone wants to know how many steps it takes to get from Mica Creek to New York City or how many steps we take in a day, we can tell them. I walk about three miles an hour. If I take nearly a thousand steps in ten minutes, I'll take nearly two thousand steps in the twenty minutes it takes to walk a mile. To cover our quota of twenty-five miles a day, we'll take fifty thousand steps. And, since we can't walk as the crow flies, we'll probably walk at least four thousand miles getting to New York. That's at least eight million steps." I stopped long enough to wipe a few drops of rain off Pa's watch and give it back to Ma.

"Nearly eight million steps." Ma's face drooped for a moment, then brightened. "That's pretty impressive,
nei
?"

My gap-toothed grin answered Ma's as I held up my canteen in a toast. "Here's to eight million!"

Ma tapped my canteen with her own. "Eight million!"

Uff da!
As one foot landed awkwardly in a puddle, muddy water soaked the one dry area left on my skirts and spoiled fantasies of newspaper headlines celebrating our eight million-step walk to New York. Rain sluiced so hard down the brim of my hat, it was like looking through a waterfall. Was it just yesterday morning that I had tucked flowers in my hair and danced down the road like a gypsy?

The rest of the day was more of the same. Another fifty thousand steps. Another twenty-five miles past fields and farmhouses. When my feet hurt so bad that I was ready to plop down in a mud puddle to rest, we came to a handful of houses at Saint John. "Couldn't we stop here for the night?" I asked. Ma kept walking.

By the time we reached the next isolated house, I was limping on both feet. From the outside, it was hard to tell what kind of folks lived in this place. The barn was unpainted and the door to the outhouse was half off its hinges. A shovel had been left out in the rain and was propped up against the ramshackle hen house. But the kitchen garden looked like it had been laid out with a ruler and a pot of blooming geraniums showed through the lamp-lit window.

A woman answered the door, holding a baby. Inside, clotheslines strung just below the ceiling were covered with drying diapers. The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"You two look half drowned!" she said as she opened the door wider.

Her husband quickly joined her at the door. He scowled as he craned his neck to peer behind us into the dusk. Perhaps he thought we were in cahoots with someone bent on stealing their silverware.

We huddled together on their porch, trying to fit under the scant overhang above the door. Ma forced a laugh. "We must look a sight, but we're respectable women walking across the country to save our farm. Wouldn't you feel good knowing you'd helped us out?"

"Where's your husband?" the man asked.

"He's at home with the rest of our children," Ma explained. "My daughter and I intend to show that women are just as capable as any man by making this trip on our own."

He looked as skeptical as the reporter in Spokane about our fitness to walk clear across the country. Furthermore, he didn't look impressed that Ma was out trying to prove she was the equal of any man. Since optimism seemed to have blunted Ma's ability to read the signs, she plowed on. She held out her hand. "I'm Helga Estby, and this is Clara."

The woman shifted the baby in her arms and edged far enough forward to shake Ma's hand. The man still squinted at us like he was trying to figure out what to make of us.

Ma glanced from one face to the other and forced even more hearty goodwill into her voice. "We're going to write a book about our adventures, and if we had your names we could put you in it." She shook my elbow. "Clara, get out your notebook so you can write down the names of these nice folks."

From their expressions, I could almost see him shaking his head no and his wife timidly nodding yes. I looked up the section road toward the tracks. There wasn't another lamp-lit window or trail of chimney smoke in sight. Desperation put my tongue in gear.

"We don't mean to be a burden on you," I said. "We can work for our keep. Just name what you need done and we'll do it."

At hearing my voice, Ma looked at me as if she had found a mouse spouting Latin. My heart stopped beating while I waited to see if my offer would be accepted.

The man finally smiled, but it wasn't the kind of smile that made me want to smile back. "I'm Mr. Ramsey," he said. "And Mrs. Ramsey, and little Rebecca. Maybe we can think of something. Something especially fitting for two women out to prove they're equal to any man."

Thankfully it was the wrong time of year for butchering hogs, but what else did he have in mind?

He led us off the porch and back into the mud to a heap of logs that had been roughly chopped into wood-stove lengths. "Know how to swing an ax?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he trotted straight back toward his warm kitchen.

"Do you have any gloves?" I called. He was halfway back to the house already, so he must not have heard me.

Ma drew in her shoulders against the wind and rain as she eyed the jumbled woodpile. "If you'd just given me another minute I could have talked him around without having to chop wood."

"I don't think so, Ma," I said.

"I wonder how much he means for us to chop?"

"Maybe we could satisfy him just by showing we can swing an ax without losing a foot," I said. I tilted my head toward the window facing the chore yard. Mr. Ramsey's weasel-like face poked between the curtains, watching us. I felt like sticking my tongue out at him. "If he thinks he's going to get a laugh watching us bumble around figuring out which end of an ax goes where," I said, "I'll show him what the New Woman is made of."

While I swung the ax, Ma stacked. I whacked and chopped like the fate of the world hung on my getting through the whole pile by nightfall. By the end of a quarter hour, I was as damp from my own sweat as from the rain, and I handed over the ax to Ma. For Mr. Ramsey's benefit I tried not to look like my arms were as wobbly as jelly. The stack of chopped wood grew more slowly during my second shift with the ax, and slower still on my third. Sometime along the way, Mr. Ramsey's face disappeared from the window.

By the end of an hour, there was just enough daylight left to compare the blisters on our hands. Ma plopped down on the low end of our solidly stacked pile. "Don't you think we've done enough?"

Just then, Mrs. Ramsey dashed out in the rain. "Come get warm before you catch your death," she said. "Mr. Ramsey has already had his supper and has gone to bed. He himself would never chop more than a day's worth of wood in this rain."

Once inside, she clucked over our hands. "I have just the thing." She took down a large can from an open shelf in the kitchen. "Mutton tallow with chickweed, calendula flowers, and beeswax."

We held out our hands as she gingerly dabbed the concoction on our blisters. I begged for more of her home remedy for my feet.

After Mrs. Ramsey's doctoring and two bowls of rabbit stew each, I felt like I might live to see another morning.

"Wash-up can wait," Mrs. Ramsey said. "Let's just visit." We sat on the floor next to her and admired her sleeping baby.

"I've had ten," Ma said. "Eight still living." She brought one finger within a hair's breadth of the baby's cheek and then pulled it back. "Don't want to wake her," she whispered with a smile.