The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [29]
“You were ashamed for having me,” I said as we walked the rails again. I padded beside her, trying to keep up.
“No. You made it all worthwhile. My shame was in believing in the words of a man, a boy, who had no good intentions. This is why your Forest—”
“I don’t know if he’s my Forest.”
“You wish he would be,” she said. “It’s one reason why I wanted you to go with me on this journey. I didn’t want the same to happen to you.”
“You don’t know that Forest might not be a good man,” I said. “I’m not fifteen, a girl. I’m eighteen years … Nineteen, I guess.”
“Nineteen.”
“Didn’t Papa know?”
“Of course he knew.” Mama stopped and took the grip from me. She held my hand, brown and scratched. She stared at my stubby fingers. I still gnawed at the nails. Her fingers were slender as asparagus. She looked up, chewing the side of her cheek.
“At the lava craters, I wanted to tell you, in case … Ole would never tell you. It was mine to tell, he always said, but he didn’t see the point of it. It didn’t seem right that I might die still holding the truth. It was time you knew, but that’s that now. Nothing more needs to be said. That boy who fathered you … he isn’t family. Ole is.”
We walked in silence for a long time, and I finally dropped behind, hung my head like the soggy sunflower, trying to piece together who I was.
What was he like? What was his name? It became my new internal conversation. After acquiring a signature I’d wonder, Could my father have been like this mayor or that governor? Once we scared off a herd of curious pronghorns, and I wondered if my true father ever hunted or if he had crossed the Mississippi River. A world of otherness opened to me, a way to make sense of why I was the only one in the family not a towhead, why I was nearly as tall as Papa. Who would my father vote for in the upcoming election? My mother gave out no new information. I feared I had all I was meant to get, at least for now.
Cooler weather gave us renewed spirit. In Greeley, Colorado, we bought yet another pair of shoes and welcomed September. A news reporter wrote about us, “They wear the beat look of a pedestrian stomp.” It was the first time we experienced disdain in the newspaper before leaving town. The article ended with, “The fakes left this city for Denver.”
A part of me did feel like a fake: I’d been masquerading as an Estby.
“What was his name?” I asked. We rested for the night in a shared bed in the house of a suffragette.
“There’s no reason for you to know that, Clara. He was young. I was young. I did what was best for him and for my parents, who had dreamed I’d go on to school. They’d sent me to private school in Norway. All that investment, lost.”
“But—”
“Not all questions need answering.”
“Will you write to Papa and tell him you’ve told me?”
She sighed. “Better left until we get back,” Mama said. “Besides, I fill the letters with so many details of what we’ve seen, the people who have befriended us, our adventures, that such intimate things can wait, ja? Wait until we have a sandbakkel to dip in our coffee and I am baking the Christmas bread for us all. We can sigh together about how God has been so good to us. We are your family, Clara. This”—she tapped her heart—“this is who you belong to and always will.”
Not far from Denver, a man approached as though he had news, hailing us. “Women walkers,” he said. We stopped to greet him, and before Mama could show him a photograph to sell, he grabbed the grip that held our money and possessions, save the pepper-box pistol I kept in my pocket.
“Give that back!” she shouted.
“Stupid women,” he snarled. “Tramps. You’re asking for this.”
His need to condemn us before running gave me time to get my pistol out. I stepped forward and pulled the trigger, purposefully shooting past his head.
He screamed and Mama grabbed for the grip, swung it from him.
My heart