The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [20]
When she pulled out a frying pan, my jaw dropped. She scorned my curling iron for being too heavy, but she carried an iron pan? Worse, I soon learned it wasn’t for cooking.
The miner showed Mama how it was done—the swirl of stone and water around the edge, over and over, panning for gold. She was like a schoolgirl, giggling, her skirts hiked up into her belt, her shoes on the side of the stream. She looked … young to me. Happy.
“You can use any old pan,” he told her. “None with grease. Got to be clean to capture gold.”
She called out for me to join her, but I refused. Such a waste. I wrote to Forest instead, describing the beauty of the landscape and that we’d stopped to pan for gold. I made it sound like we were having fun. Maybe I was like her, pretending.
“How could you spend money on a pan?” I hissed when we bedded down.
“I got you a gift too,” she said.
“I don’t want a pan or that speck of glitter no larger than a pimple he said is gold.”
“Nothing like that,” Mama said. “I was keeping it a surprise, but you’ve been so disheartened of late.” She rose and reached into her grip. “A sketchbook and pencils. You can record those things that interest you, to keep them in your memory. Here. Take them.”
“I … We won’t have time,” I said. Her frivolity worried me even though the pad and pencils were a rare present from my mother, impractical. There had been moments when I wished I could draw, though. That sea of sunflowers dipping their heads to the west, a cattleman moving his herd through the sage. Accepting the book would make it seem like I accepted her impulsive buying and this shortcut too.
“I still don’t know why you wasted money on that pan,” I said, deciding to keep the pad.
“We can cook in it if nothing else. I’ll carry it, for heaven’s sake. In the morning, you look for sunflowers to sketch. They always seek the light instead of dwelling on the dark.”
The miner said south of Shoshone, go left, take the settlers’ trail. We did that.
“Mama, we passed by this rock outcropping before,” I said many hours later. “See, those are our tracks.”
“I’m using the compass,” Mama snapped. “We can’t go through these … monoliths. We have to go around.”
We’d entered a dark maze of lava rocks that bit into the sky yet rolled like the folds of a giant caterpillar, slick and baked in sun. We’d been wandering most of the day, our second in this desolate place. In going around the sharp lava rocks, passing by black and red formations that shot up like chimneys after a house fire, we’d gotten turned around. These chimneys were all that remained from volcanoes exploding years and years before, and now they threatened to be the grave markers for Mama and me.
Mama repeated. “The old miner said, ‘Beyond them hills there, you can see the flat plain where you’ll meet up with the railroad. Shouldn’t be no trouble at all to make up time.’ ”
Make up time.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come this way,” I croaked with a parched mouth. Both of our canteens were down by half. No shade. Nothing green to even consider eating, and no living thing roamed except snakes. The lava cut our shoes, and I’d stumbled and jammed the palms of my hands against long strips of rock that looked like turkey talons. They stretched for miles, making walking uneven and our energy spent. I’d thought we were exhausted through the rains, but this ache sucked at my bones; the heat of the day weighted our chests, stole our breaths. My face burned from the sun despite wearing a hat, and Mama … Mama’s eyes had a frantic look that unsettled me more than the snakes we watched out for.
We rested on a rock so barren it didn’t even host a lichen. “We’ll try traveling at night,” she said, wiping her brow. “It won’t be so hot, and we’ll use the lantern to watch the compass.”
“I can barely walk in the daylight without falling,” I said. But I complied. What else could I do?
Coyotes yipped in the distance. We didn’t make it far before Mama fell too