The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [10]
She looked at me and a shiver went through me. What she was about to tell the little ones would change their lives forever. Mine too.
“You older children know we are facing a difficult time,” Mama began. “Your papa’s injury makes it difficult for him to work, and the world now makes it hard for people to find jobs doing carpenter work even if he could do more. No one builds in either Rockford or Spokane. The farm feeds us, and that is why Olaf comes home so often. Now he works two places, Spokane and for the family.”
“He got sick,” Bertha piped up. “He came home so you could make him well.”
“Yes. He had diphtheria but now he’s better. He is a big help on this farm, and the farm is very important. So important that we must find a way to pay what is due. This year, even the ten percent interest on our loan is playing hide-and-seek with us. So it is very important that we keep the farm from foreclosure. Very important.”
“What’s four closure?” eight-year-old Johnny asked. “Is there a five closure?”
“It means we need to pay back money we don’t have,” I told him. I touched his blond hair with my hand. “They will take the farm instead of money.”
His eyes were big and round, but I only spoke the truth.
“Where would we go if we lost the farm?” Bertha asked.
“It will work out,” Papa said. “It always has. What your mother proposes is not necessary. We could live with my sister if needed.”
The boys looked at each other. Our parents were disagreeing in front of them, an event as rare as snow in July.
“Not this time,” Mama said.
I looked at my father. His eyes drooped. It must be difficult for him to have his wife talking about finances, something a Norwegian man usually took care of, saw it as his duty, not his wife’s.
“Without the farm we cannot sustain our family,” my mother insisted. “I’ve found the help.” She spoke to the children now, turning her back on my father. “Sponsors, wealthy women, will pay us ten thousand dollars if we can walk from Spokane to New York within a certain time.”
“Ti tusen dollar,” Ida whispered. She was shorter than I, slender, with perfect gold hair braided in a crown at the top of her head. She sank back into her chair.
“Why would anyone pay that?” Bertha asked.
“Where is New York?” Arthur asked. “Can I walk there too?”
“No. It’s too far away and you’re too young. And to answer Bertha: for a fashion campaign, to show off the new reform skirts that women can wear when we bicycle or go on a picnic, without having to wear corsets.” Olaf raised his blond eyebrows at our mother. She said, “Nothing risqué. Goodness, no. Legs all covered by stockings or boots or skirt. But it will show that women are strong, that we are more capable than men give us credit for. Imagine, earning our way across the continent.”
“If you finish the walk,” my father said. “Unharmed. The danger does not go away because you tell us so.” The little ones had stopped eating their rommergrot and watched, heads turning back and forth as each parent spoke.
“We’ve been given this great opportunity. God will be with us in the danger, and walking thirty-five hundred miles will prove a woman’s endurance.”
“But not so much her sound judgment,” my father said.
I agreed with him, for all the good it did either of us.
“I’m so sorry, Ida,” I said. My sister sobbed as we slopped the pigs in the pig shed, their grunting and squealing loud enough that we had to raise our voices even to share a confidence. “I wouldn’t go at all except that Mama needs a companion.”
“If you refused, maybe she wouldn’t go,” Ida cried.
“Mama never changes her mind. You know that. She’d go on alone or get someone else to go with her, and none of us would know what was happening.”
“I hated it when she went to Wisconsin to help Bestemor when Bestefar died,” Ida said.
“Her mother needed her.”
“Ja, I remember,” she said, then mocked Mama. “ ‘You had your father here and Clara and each other, much more than Bestemor had in her time of grief.’ ” Anger seasoned Ida’s tone. “What if one of the children gets sick?” Ida