The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [26]
I lay on a cot in a guest room of the kindly woman. My hair was as dirty and flat as old leaves. I didn’t need a curling iron.
“Don’t fret, Clara. You should have at least one delay on this trip with your name on it,” she teased. “You don’t need to remind me that all the others have been mine.”
Sun pierced the darkness of the mile-high Wyoming mountains, casting heavy shadows against stone. I was recovered from my bout with “not quite botulism,” as the doctor called it, and we’d walked several more days, including up a twisting mountain climb the locals called Rattlesnake Pass Road. I didn’t need my mother squeezing my shoulder and forcing me awake with her cheery, “It’s time, Clara.” I knew what time it was: time for yet another of her challenges, time for me to once again wonder what I was doing here. My fear of heights competed with my dread of uncertainty. This day threatened both, and there was nothing I could do about it but keep walking.
“Susan B. Anthony was stuck here twenty years ago,” my mother said. She stood, her angular face in profile. “Snow kept their train here four days, but they had plenty of coal and the railroad served them crackers and dried fish. They made an adventure of it. We’re lucky we’re here in the summertime.”
I put my jacket on, rubbed my arms, warming myself. “I could use hot tea.”
“On the other side,” my mother said, “we’ll look for a spot out of the wind to build a fire, make tea. No time to lose here.” She handed me a circle of hardtack, our regular morning breakfast.
My back ached and my throat felt scratchy as old socks. I drank from the canteen as I walked to the opening of the snow shelter, gazing up at patches of dirty snow hugging dips in the granite crevices. I stared at the narrow train trestle. I rounded my shoulders in an effort to relax them, pushed them forward and back, took deeper breaths. The thin air made me feel dizzy. This whole adventure, as my mother called it, made me feel dizzy.
“Nothing to be afraid of, Clara,” my mother said. She put her arm around my waist, gentled her head to mine. “We’ve walked farther than that. It’s what, maybe three hundred feet across?”
“More like four hundred fifty,” I said. “And the canyon’s at least a hundred and fifty feet deep.”
“You are the better judge of distances.” My mother patted my waist, turned back to put items into her carpetbag. She grabbed my curling iron and stuffed it inside. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to cross here, and the sooner the better.”
“It looks sturdy enough,” I ventured. “It’s … the height. I’ll have to look down to step on the ties, but then I’ll see … how deep it is.” I swallowed. “It’ll make me dizzy and then—”
“I suppose we could backtrack to that old wagon road through the canyon. But there are snakes down there, no doubt. We’d have to climb like mountaineers to get up the other side. We don’t have that kind of time.”
“That’s not my fault, Mama,” I said.
“I know. I know. Something you ate, though I still don’t know why I didn’t get sick.”
It hadn’t been only my recent illness that delayed us, but I kept my tongue. No sense having an argument when we might die within the next moments. “The trestle’s the only way. But should a train come …”
“We’ve not met any trains this early in the morning,” my mother said. “I checked at the Laramie station. One arrives at 7:00 a.m. and stops for passengers to eat. Then it makes the long climb up Sherman Hill. We’ll be long across Dale Creek trestle by then. No trains are expected this early from Cheyenne either. We’ll scamper across like rabbits and be done with it before the sun can peek over that ridge.” She pointed to the rocky promontory in the distance. I shivered. “This is how Estbys deal with fear, Clara. Fears or disappointments or betrayals: we face them early on with a strong jaw forward, a refreshing drink of water, and a prayer.”
I walked to the opening of the snow shelter, lifted my skirts to relieve myself, then rubbed my hands clean in the pebbled dirt beside the tracks. We were saving precious water. Returning,