The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [104]
“I suppose in Norway we could locate the fox operation Olea spoke of and take back information for her,” I said.
“We have time. Let’s see if we can find where your mother was born. You have a region?”
“On the Hauge farm,” I said. “Near Kirkenaer, in Central Grue. Her father died when she was young. Barely two. She doesn’t remember him, only her stepfather. How odd,” I said, forgetting that Franklin stood beside me to overhear this thought of family. “My mother was raised by a stepfather too. I wonder when she knew?”
We crossed Sweden by train to Oslo. The silver fox operations weren’t far from there, and we spent the day discovering only small differences between the management of their farm and the Finns’. Again, though, the need for high-protein food and the oils from fish were identified as important for animal health and quality of pelts. Coulee City was far from a fish source, but maybe there were canneries in Spokane. It would be something I’d have to explore if my plan took wings and flew to the other side of the ocean. The word if loomed larger than it had before, as the Norwegian fur ranchers also scoffed at my plans to livetrap and breed weasels.
My mother’s birthplace lay north and we took another train to the city of Kirkenaer, arriving at the administrative town along the Glomma River. We headed east to Grue, past the new church built after the terrible fire that had killed over one hundred people years before. The property wasn’t known as the Hauge farm anymore, but when I asked locally, people knew where I wanted to go. My nearly pure Norwegian told people I had connection to the area, and they assisted us.
We knocked on the door of the tenant’s house. A small building housed pigs we could hear snorting. I thought of Ida stranded in that hog house on Mica Creek, trying to keep the children safe while Bertha lay dying. Ole had built a better building for his hogs than this one appeared to be. I could be grateful for that.
The young farmer and his wife listened to my story. They showed us the house, then urged us to walk the place. “You can’t discover where you came from until you’ve walked about.” The tenants’ children gathered up eggs, and we heard the clucking of laying hens pecking worms for their young ones. Goat bells tinkled in the distance. As on the Mica Creek farm, the buildings were down in a hollow of sorts, saving open land for crops. Only the denser timber made the land noticeably different. My mother couldn’t have remembered this place; she’d been too young, and yet she’d been the one to pick out the farm in Mica Creek. Maybe saving the farm had been, without her even knowing, about preserving something from her past. I wondered how she fared away from it.
Franklin was right. I enjoyed the landscape more than the old house and its sloped lean-to roof, where washtubs leaned against the clapboard. “It reminds me of our Mica Creek farm,” I said. “But the surrounding timber, the woods, that makes me think of my property along the Spokane River too. That surprises me,” I said.
At the local newspaper office, the editor showed us a copy of the Morgenbladet newspaper reporting my grandfather’s death in July of 1862.
“Would you like to visit your grandfather’s grave site?” Franklin asked.
“There’s no need.”
“We’ve come this far. Don’t you know, Clara, that moments at a grave site can link you to a place, a people, and a past more than almost anything else?” He patted my shoulder and asked the editor for directions to the cemetery.
I’d never had a man anticipate my needs as Franklin did. It was very disconcerting.
I’d found something on this journey that I truly loved. It was not Franklin nor the furrier trade so much as travel and the nurture that walking in new landscapes gave. Franklin was the perfect companion, giving me room to consider whether I wanted this venture in fur ranching or not, pushing me with his questions while expressing confidence in whatever I decided.
Franklin and I had barely spoken of Louise and Olea as the trip had gone on. I’d sent them a postcard from