The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [45]
Mama stood and rolled lengths of my fine hair around the narrow rod, holding it until the hair nearly steamed, then untwisting it and gathering up two more strands before placing it back on the stovetop to reheat. She got better results with that iron than I did.
The articles raved about our feat and wrote that we would receive the ten thousand dollars after we published the book. The reporters praised the future story of a woman’s unusual perspective in this time of the “woman question.” “ ‘A settlement has been reached between the two pedestrians and private parties in New York,’ ” I read. “I wish I shared their certainty. Your certainty.”
“Set your sights, Clara. No one thought we could make the walk except the sponsors and me. And eventually you. But if we hadn’t determined to go, we surely wouldn’t have been successful. We went for a good cause, and God blessed our walk. It will all work out.”
I stared at her. How could it all work out? Bertha was dead.
“Mama. It says here that one reason we made the walk was because of your consumption, and your wanting to prove that with good exercise like walking, you could get your health back. When you said that last night, it surprised me. I didn’t know you were ‘threatened’ with consumption.”
“I suppose that was too strong of a word, threatened, but I did want the trip to prove to myself that I could get my strength back, especially after my female surgery, and I didn’t really want to talk about that in the paper.”
“We might not want Papa to see this comment.” I pointed. “ ‘Both are enthusiastic over their work and adventures and are satisfied in their own minds, at least, that man is not much the superior of woman after all.’ ”
“Ja, well, that one we might not.” She winked at me.
The old Mama was back.
TWENTY
Another Trestle
I spread out drawing paper on the table in the train’s dining room car. Mama slept at her seat, and so I’d slipped away. Since we’d boarded, she’d slept, and when she woke, her face at first wore a haunted look. I stared out the window thinking I could sketch the skyline along this prairie land, but this route took us much farther north and didn’t look like the landscapes where we’d walked the previous year. Remembering the lonely train station of Nebraska, I started to draw, capturing as I could the rails coming together where land met sky. I drew a few more lines, thinking of how to create the sense of an endless horizon. I thought of the Dale Creek trestle instead.
Taking out another sheet of paper, I set to work sketching from memory the sheer rock walls, the canyon’s depth, the intricate buttresses of tall, straight, and crossed sticks that held up the railroad tracks.
“Dale Creek, is it?” A woman slightly older than Mama spoke to me as she leaned over my sketch. She dressed as someone comfortable in New York’s society gatherings, with an ermine collar on a stylish jacket and a long linen skirt that accented her slender frame. Porters had lit the gaslights and prepared the meal for dinner, which sent wafts of good smells into the car. The table light warmed even further the silver fur piece that gave dignity and beauty to her wide-brimmed hat. “The Dale Creek trestle, yes?” The woman had a Norwegian accent.
“Yes,” I said. “We walked across it.”
“You mean you took the train. There’s no walking across that place.”
I smiled. The woman had the blunt way of stating things common to Norwegians. My aunt Hannah spoke like that.
“No,” I corrected her. “We walked. My mother and I, on our way from Spokane to New York to publicize the reform dress. And to prove that women could endure such a journey.” I didn’t mention our financial reasons.
The woman gasped, put her gloved hand to her mouth. She stepped back and I wondered if her actions were in response to the reform dress or the very idea of women walking across the country.
“You’re them,” she said. “The globe trekkers. I … read about you in the Minneapolis Tribune.”
“Yes. We’re them.