The Year We Were Famous (6 page)

"Eight children," Mrs. Ramsey said. "And how long will you be gone?" I couldn't tell if she sympathized with Ma for having to leave her children or was aghast that she'd left behind so many.

"Seven months," Ma said. "But they're all good children; they'll be fine." Her forehead knitted in a flash of worry. Then she nodded as if to convince herself, as well as Mrs. Ramsey, that they would be fine. "My oldest boy is already working in Spokane and my second-oldest daughter, Ida, is at home to help with the younger ones." Ma was silent for a moment, then stood. "Would you like to see how we mean to go?"

Mrs. Ramsey's eyes lit up at that. "I sure would!" she said.

Ma got out her maps and showed her our route and the sights we hoped to see. They traded the trials of teething babies and rain that came at the wrong time just before harvest. Ma told her the remedy she'd used for Henry's colic when he was a baby, and Mrs. Ramsey gave Ma the name of someone she knew who'd moved fifteen miles south of Rosalia who could give us lunch tomorrow.

They were still chatting away when I got ready for bed and lay down on the blankets Mrs. Ramsey had laid out for us. Just as I was about to drift off, I caught one last comment from Mrs. Ramsey.

"I've never been more than eleven miles from this place, myself," she said.

F
OR
the third day in a row, it rained. The only things not dampened were Ma's spirits. She babbled on about how surprised Mr. Ramsey would be by the neat stack of wood we'd left for him and how he'd think differently about the New Woman from now on. My own spirits, however, were soggy. I was too tired from chopping wood and walking twenty-odd miles yesterday to face Ma's chatter, so I walked by myself on the other side of the tracks, far enough away to discourage conversation. At least today's mud gradually softened my boots, which had dried overnight as hard as copper-plated baby shoes.

***

We had lunch with Mrs. Ramsey's friend, and walked another ten miles before looking for a family to take us in. We were greeted at the first place by a stubble-faced man holding a rifle like a walking stick. After a glance at the rifle, Ma bravely launched into her speech. "We're walking to New York to save our family's farm," she began. Her voice was strong, but I detected a slight quaver as her eyes darted down again to the rifle.

"No decent woman would be tromping across the country without her husband. Go home where you belong!" he said. The door slammed in our faces.

"
Uff da,
" I muttered. I grabbed a handful of waterlogged skirt, picked up my satchel, and stepped down from the porch. Mud oozed over the tops of my boots and seeped down to my toes. Like anybody who worked on a farm, I'd been wet and dirty before, but I'd always had food and a bed to look forward to at the end of the day. Under Ma's "the Lord will provide" approach, we carried no food, and in this part of the state it might be ten miles to shelter.

As we continued walking, my stomach growled. "Do you think we'll get food at the next station?"

Ma sighed. "We'll just have to keep walking and find out," she said.

Maybe the next station was just around the next curve in the tracks. I rubbed the head of the owl in my pocket for good luck.

Two hours later, maybe three, the clouds parted enough to reveal a half moon. I goaded myself on, chanting just one more step, one more. What foolish pride had made me think I was destined for a better life than Mica Creek? I'd starve as a writer, and the chances of my becoming a governess for Mr. Rochester, like Jane Eyre, or winning the heart of a Mr. Darcy, like Elizabeth Bennet, were exceedingly slim. Erick wasn't my soul mate, but he was cheerful and hard-working. He would never treat a stranger like Mr. Ramsey or the man with the rifle had treated us.

I perked up when the faint light picked out the outline of a water tower less than a mile ahead, but when we reached the water tower we wilted. There was no station house. Yet another two hours on, we passed another water tower without a station house.

About two miles past Winona, we stumbled up the steps to the veranda of the La Crosse railroad station. Under cover at last, we wrung our skirts, scraped our boots, and shook out our ponchos.

Ma opened the door. "Anybody here?"

I crept into the waiting room behind her, expecting someone with a railroad badge to pop out from behind a bench and tell us we were trespassing on Union Pacific property. I held my breath, listening.

Bedsprings squeaked in the room behind the door on one end of the waiting room. The door opened and a sleep-wrinkled man in trousers and unbuttoned railroad uniform shirt peered out. "Where on earth did you come from? It's miles to the closest house. And..." he said as he pulled out his railroad watch, "it's one-oh-seven in the morning! The next train in either direction isn't due through here for five hours."

"We're not taking the train," Ma said. "We're walking."

"This waiting room is for the use of Union Pacific passengers." He looked down to see that we were standing in puddles of our own making. I was shivering hard enough to break a molar.

"We've walked fifty miles today," Ma said.

I did some quick figuring. If this was La Crosse, we'd only walked forty-three miles. But if she was stretching the truth to save our lives, I wouldn't quibble.

The stationmaster scratched his head. "It's against the rules," he said. "But I can't turn you out on a night like this. You can have the waiting room to yourselves until six a.m., but then I'll have to come back out to get ready for the first train."

We spread our petticoats and ponchos over the backs of the waiting room benches to dry, then loosened our corsets. A hard wooden bench had never felt so good.

While Ma and I took turns dodging raindrops to the outhouse, the stationmaster, Mr. Willis, stoked the trash-burner stove and prepared breakfast.

When Mr. Willis started to get out three cups, Ma held out a forestalling hand. "Clara's too young for coffee," she said. She didn't know I'd treated myself to a cup almost every morning when she was in bed this winter. The aroma of real coffee—not chicory—and the thought of cold fingers around a warm cup were more than I could bear. "Mr. Willis, I'd like some, too."

"Stimulants aren't good for you," Ma said. She sighed a put-upon sigh and looked to Mr. Willis for sympathy for having to deal with such a wayward, contrary daughter.

I sighed a put-upon sigh, too. How could I keep up with Ma today without some stimulation?

Mr. Willis glanced back and forth between Ma's disapproving look and my longing one. He decided in my favor. "Sure enough," he said. "A cold, wet day needs coffee."

All through breakfast, Mr. Willis had that poised-to-say-something look a shy person has when he's itching to ask you something but is waiting for the right way to put it. I knew that feeling, because it was one I often had myself. As we put down our forks, he finally came out with it.

"Are either of you good with a darning needle?" he asked. "Every sock I own has heels worn thin and a hole in the toe, and I got wash piled up, too. I never quite got the hang of laundry."

I looked at Ma to see what she thought. I wasn't going to have her blaming me for roping us into more work again. I took her wry smile to mean that as tired as we were, we owed him something for breakfast.

While Ma caught up in her journal and curled her hair, I washed and hung clothes by the Franklin stove to dry over backs of chairs. Although the socks were still damp, Ma darned them while I explored the station.

Mr. Willis had a mahogany roll-top desk stacked with canvas-bound ledgers against one wall, and a flat-topped desk for his telegraph key. When a train stopped, he exchanged pouches of ingoing and outgoing mail and helped unload a coffin and boxes from Montgomery Ward. He was matter-of-fact about the coffin, as if handling dead bodies was no different than piling boxes of blue willow dinner plates or cultivators. I stared at the coffin, wondering who was in it. If Ma and I died on this trip, would Miss Waterson pay to have us shipped back home to Mica Creek, or would we have to be buried where we dropped?

I sat on a bench outside the station and watched the sun climb halfway to noon. Using a yard or so of rope I'd begged from Mr. Willis, I tied a long handle onto my satchel so it could ride on either shoulder. Even if I still had foot blisters, maybe my hands would heal. I offered to make a strap for Ma, but she said the shoulder strap would wrinkle the shoulder on her jacket, and that carrying the satchel by hand was more genteel.

Since we weren't starting until noon, we only planned to walk fifteen miles to the next station today. I didn't know if Mr. Willis was grateful for clean, darned clothes or he just felt sorry for us, but he telegraphed the stationmaster in Hay to ask him to find us a real bed to sleep in tonight. If word got out we were willing to do laundry in exchange for bed and bread, we might be doing a lot of laundry.

As we approached Walla Walla, the sun's rays found gaps between the clouds to shine on miles of rolling hills, covered thickly with well-sprouted wheat instead of sage and rock. Pa would have given his eyeteeth for crops that came in that lush.

Between the joy of walking in dry clothes and anticipating the first town big enough for its own newspaper, Ma was building herself up to a tizzy. "Do you think they'll want to take our picture? Will the mayor of Walla Walla want to meet us?"

I just wondered if we'd find food and a bed tonight.

At the newspaper office, Ma handed the reporter one of her
cartes de visite.

"Mrs. H. Estby and daughter, Pedestrians. Spokane to New York," he read. His eyes flicked back and forth between the postcard-size picture of us in the black silk dresses we'd donned at the photographer's studio and the muddy vision we presented to him now.

"You must be 'and daughter,'" he said, nodding in my direction as I pretended to peruse a back issue of the
Union
from the stack on the counter. I supposed he was inviting me to say something, but if I opened my mouth, I'd probably put my elbow in it. Besides, Ma had seen fit to put only her name on the cards; she could provide the fodder for his article.

He shrugged and turned back to Ma. "You're really walking all the way to New York?" He cocked his head, probably trying to decide whether Ma was crazy or heroic.

Ma gave the same speech she'd given in Spokane, and seemed gratified that the reporter was impressed that we would win ten thousand dollars if we reached New York by November 30. She watched as he wrote down the part about the money. "Mention also that we have to earn our own way as we go, so we are open for any odd job," she said.

Ma caught my eyes peeping above the newspaper and gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Except chopping wood," she added.

I lowered the newspaper far enough for her to see my answering grin.

W
E STOPPED
for the day at the Pendleton station, near the edge of the Umatilla Reservation. While I waited for Ma to finish washing up, I poked through the wire rack of postcards picturing local Indians. The train tracks we followed would lead us right into the reservation tomorrow, which meant that for a day—the whole day and maybe into the night—we would be on foot, without cavalry escort, surrounded by Indians. Was I scared? A little. But maybe I had just read too many Deadwood Dick stories. Anyway, by now I was looking forward to an adventure, as long as it was one I would live to tell.

"Everybody goes for that card, the Cayuse papooses."

As I whirled to see who had crept up on me, the card slid from my fingers. I was too embarrassed to look at the man's face, but glimpsed his crisply pressed blue railway uniform as I bent to retrieve the card. His black shoes had been polished to such a shine I could almost see my face redden in them. Just as I reached toward the card, he swooped down and plucked it from the floor, nearly bumping heads with me. We both quickly straightened.

He held out the card and pointed to the picture of howling twins laced onto their cradleboards. "Tox-e-lox and A-lom-pum," he said. He pronounced the names with deep-throat clicks that would need a whole new alphabet to get recorded in my journal. "Cayuse names."

"Ma and I have to walk across the reservation tomorrow," I said.

I looked at him for reassurance that we would be safe. His bristly black hair broke out on both sides of his railway cap in cowlicks in spite of an effort to pomade it smooth. His eyes were a gentle brown, the color of walnuts. His cheekbones were high and sharp, like Laplanders from the north of Norway...

Or Indians! I stumbled back a step.

Confirming that my suspicion was correct, he spun the rack and pulled off another postcard. "This is my grandmother," he said.

I bent forward to look at the card, then jerked upright when I realized how close it brought my face to his hand. His grandmother had posed in a cape, large round earrings, and headband, each intricately beaded. Her eyes were nearly lost in a web of wrinkles as she smiled.

"But you don't live on the reservation?"

"I've done lots of things you might not expect," he said. "I played trumpet in Father Grassi's brass band at Saint Anne's Mission School, and now," he said, pointing to his cap, "I work for the Union Pacific Railway. My name is Um-ka He-yute-wa-ta-low-it."

I sprained my tongue trying to say the first part of his name, then covered my mouth and shook my head with a nervous giggle.

"At least you tried to say it." He grinned. "The fathers at Saint Anne's gave up. They chose the name Luke Fletcher for me. Fletcher means 'one who makes arrows.' Father John had a sense of humor, I think."

I avoided his gaze as I slowly turned the rack, looking at pictures of an Indian school, a pile of baskets on a porch, and a young woman in fringed buckskin, her hair loosed from its braids and tumbling to her waist.