The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [24]
“But won’t the sponsors think that’s cheating?” I said.
She actually looked thoughtful. “I believe you’re right, but using a traditional outfit suggests we can make decisions depending on the occasion. We aren’t likely to pick up phthisis on the hemlines in the performance halls. I can mention how much healthier the reform dress is. And we’ll prove it when we arrive healthy in New York.”
If we ever get to New York for all the side trips Mama chooses.
Our escorts returned to point out silver veins. Mama asked questions. I hated the closed-in feeling and earth’s hot breath on our faces.
After what seemed like hours but was likely only one, we stepped back into the cage, listened as the cables groaned us upward and then stopped with a jerk at a wood landing. Had this sinking into earth’s depths really been necessary to save the family farm?
A few days later, at Silver Creek Canyon, we attempted to climb down the sides of a nearly perpendicular rock as a way to avoid walking around the land formation the way the railroad did. We had to climb back up, and a rock gouged out from beneath my foot, leaving me perilous. I was no mountain goat like one we’d spied a few days before.
“Hold tight, Clara!” Mama yelled. “Don’t let go!”
It was my anger at her for taking this trail that pushed me upward and over the ledge we never should have gone down in the first place.
“Stay with the tracks,” I said, panting, my hands on my knees as I leaned over. “Do it systematically. One foot after the other. Stop these ‘adventures,’ Mama. Stop them. We lose time.” A good businessman would never think like she did. No wonder my parents couldn’t pay the mortgage.
The thought was sacrilege, blaming them when it was the poor economy, Papa’s accident, so many other things that made our situation precarious. But I wouldn’t have been scared to death if Mama hadn’t taken me on this trek.
“The rest of the country is flat. We can make forty miles a day, easy. Besides, I’ll have things to write about,” Mama said. “And you’ll have interesting illustrations to make instead of simply railroad tracks to draw.”
“I’ll make an illustration of me tying my mother to my grip so she doesn’t take a spur track into a dreaded canyon again,” I said.
Mama laughed, but I hadn’t meant it to be funny.
In the Red Desert, food was scarce but mountain lions weren’t. One night we sat up with guns in hand on the far side of large fire we built to keep the big cats at bay. I could feel eyes watching, and this time Mama didn’t dismiss my worries. “I feel him too,” she said. “They don’t attack from behind, so we’ll keep our fire bright and make sure we’re ahead of him when we walk out tomorrow.”
We walked through coal-mining country and, in small towns, felt if not saw the tensions between Chinese workers and local miners. Federal troops walked about, armed. “We may be safer out on the desert than in these towns,” I said.
“Remember that wheelbarrow,” Mama cautioned, but she picked up the pace.
One day we found a jar of water like a lily pad blooming in the desert beside the railroad tracks. We stood and looked at each other.
“Do you think it’s safe to drink?” I asked.
“It looks perfectly good.” But we didn’t pick that jar up. Several miles down the tracks we encountered another jar of water with dried cherries in a paper cone beside it. “They’re looking out for us, those railroad men. They know we’re walking their rails.” Mama lifted the jar and drank, then ate a cherry. She offered me a few and I took them.
“Maybe it’s not the railroad men, Mama. Maybe it’s these Wyoming people, the ranchers and such who have read the articles. Maybe they’re looking after us.”
“I believe you could be right, Clara. After all, those men gave women of Wyoming the vote. They know a thing or two about how to treat a gentlewoman.”
“Don’t turn everything into politics,” I said. I took a swig of the water now too.
“But this is about politics,” she said. “We’ve come through four