The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [22]
“A secret, Mama? Another secret?”
“Clara,” her voice changes. “Clara, I don’t think that’s thunder.” Joy in her voice then. “Clara! Oh, Clara, look!”
It’s too dark. I can see nothing but a tiny star moving across the low horizon far in the distance.
“A star.”
“Not a star at all,” Mama says.
“Lightning in the storm. Rain will come.”
“No. No storm, Clara. It’s a train! God has sent us a train!” She stands. She leaves me. “Where is that compass?” She clatters over the rocks, finds her grip. I can hear her, then see her in the lantern light. “Yes! That’s the direction we will follow in the morning. We know where we’re going! Oh, Clara, we’re saved. We’re truly saved.”
Is she going to tell me another secret? How many does she keep?
ELEVEN
Changing Clothes
Weak as a kitten, I followed her in the morning. She put everything into one grip and carried it. I had to carry only myself. I imagined lefse soaked in butter and rolled up around fresh blackberry preserves, or sandbakkels shaking sugar from their crispy shapes, and my licking the crystals from my mouth. I imagined cream porridge served with milk and eating mounds of boiled potatoes, saving the water for the next day to use for making bread, fresh brown buns, straight from the oven, soft and smelling of yeast. I could see the julekaga. I could see tables spread and a chicken steaming, its oyster-flavored stuffing spilling out onto the plate. I saw pools of water Mama said weren’t there.
“Clara. Sheep!” She pointed and held up the empty canteen, shouting to them. “Water! May we have water?”
Sheep will give us water?
Two Basque sheepherders halted, then walked out of the desert heat toward us. They spoke no English, but it wasn’t necessary. We looked so gaunt and ravenous, and we received the gift of water and biscuits like communion as in our Norwegian Lutheran church back home. Two hours later we were at the railroad tracks. I bent down to touch them.
“Praise God,” Mama said.
“Don’t ever leave these again, Mama. This is the path. We follow the rails. Promise me?”
Mama nodded, tears in her eyes. She dropped to her knees too and said, “Thank You, thank You.”
Mama changed after that. She was as determined, but a part of her seemed … humbled, maybe a little more open to my thinking. When I suggested that the eggs we were given might contain more fuel for our bodies than the venison jerky pressed onto us by a rancher’s wife outside of Battle Creek, Utah, for example, my mother agreed. When she mentioned politics and how much she admired William Jennings Bryan, she didn’t try to cut me off when I said I preferred William McKinley. Once, she even agreed with me when I told her that Bryan supported segregation, and that didn’t seem like the actions of a man who worked for the downtrodden, as my mother claimed he always had. She accepted that we had differing views and didn’t push to make me think like her.
But when I tried to have her talk a bit more about what she’d almost told me in the lava beds, she said it was of no consequence. “You were nearly delirious, Clara. It wasn’t anything so important.” She changed the subject then, telling me a story of a pair of red shoes she’d brought with her from Norway, beautifully embroidered. “They’d never have survived this trip,” she said.
My mother, the avoider.
The July day felt balmy with white-capped mountain peaks looking down on us as we approached the Mormon town in Utah. We could walk side by side here instead of having to traverse narrow trails that kept me behind Mama and made conversation difficult.
“We might have people stare and point at us in Salt Lake City,” Mama said, “once we put on the reform clothing.”
“I know. The Rescue League of Washington thinks wearing such clothing is the work of the devil,” I said. “But then I suppose they think the devil rides the bicycle too.”
Mama laughed. “I can’t tell you how many of my women friends said every