The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [43]
“I told him to bring everyone to meet us,” Mama said. “I’m certain they’ll be waiting for good news given the year we’ve all had.”
“At last we have some,” I said, thinking of the tickets home. Of all the skills I lacked, however, predicting the future was chief among them.
NINETEEN
The Empty Hole of Why
The trouble with a train ride is all the time one has to think. We rumbled through New York City and the Amish farms where we’d been treated with such care, through coal country, and out through Pittsburgh across its triple rivers, wide and swift. Everything looked different rushing by. Everything had changed since we’d dusted the earth with our footsteps.
Bertha’s death wasn’t real to me yet. I held her in my heart as I’d done during the entire trip east, as I had held all my brothers and sisters. Bertha was still there, right where she belonged. It didn’t seem possible that she wouldn’t be waiting for us when we arrived.
“Is Bertha with Henry now?” I asked as black smoke drifted back from the engine.
“It’s what we Lutherans believe,” Mama said. “We will see them again, these baptized babies. Bertha knew her catechism, and she had the heart of Christ, loving and giving. It seems not right, I know, that young people like Bertha and Henry and young Ole should pass away from this land while Ole and I still trek along as though we contribute to God’s plan at our age.”
“Why is that?” I asked. “Why did I live but not little Ole or Henry and now Bertha too?” Mama winced, and I wondered if she said things to herself about how Bertha might have lived if she’d been there to keep the house clean of the disease, if she’d been there to comfort Bertha and nurse her through. What if I’d insisted that Olaf make the trip with her or if I’d refused to go at all? Maybe Mama would have stayed too; she might have kept Bertha alive.
“Ours isn’t to question the why of things, Clara. It takes up too much time and energy without any promise of answers. ‘Why Bertha? Why Henry? Why not me?’ No answers in those questions. None.”
Mama stared out the window as farmland blended with industry. “A better question,” Mama continued, “must be, ‘What next? What now does God have in store for me?’ These will take you to a new place, moving forward on one’s way rather than hovering over the empty hole of why, where you can only tumble down.”
In Chicago, we left the train and walked past buildings that had been part of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, where reform-length skirts had first been introduced. At the Tribune, Mama asked for a clipping of the article written when we’d passed through before. It included a picture of the two of us, and Mama left our Spokane address so they could send a copy of any articles they wrote as a result of this visit.
“The walk will be good for us,” Mama said as we began the next four hundred miles. “Sitting on a train weakens the body. We need the benefit of physical exertion to calm thoughts that ride on sorrow.”
The walk north through the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin was nothing like the route we’d taken across the country the year before. Yes, cornfields lined our dusty trails, and little clusters of trees marked farmhouses, but we also walked past long miles of oak and maple forests. The hill climbs were steeper than in Iowa, and the humidity limped my hair straight as a horse’s tail even when I used the curling iron Mama bought for me with a portion of the editor’s five dollars.
“When will you write the book, Mama?” I asked. Southern Wisconsin was awash with fresh green and birdsong and little pools of rainwater where yellow butterflies danced about.
“I’ve been writing it. The letters I sent to Ole are like chapters in my mind. I’ll be busy at home, yes, but there is always early morning before the sun comes. Writing our story brings me comfort. I find new ways of thinking about