The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [50]
But any mention of the trip brought stark silence, and then, more boldly, my stepfather announced over a quiet meal: “There will be no talk of the trip, no words about that time when you deserted us, when you did not listen to your husband and bad things resulted.”
“But if we write the book,” I said while everyone sat silent at the table after his announcement, “we can at least receive the money we earned.”
“There will be no book.”
“But we—”
“Enough of this reform,” my stepfather shouted. “That money is dirty money now. I am the head of this family, and I say no more talk of this terrible thing.”
“But—”
“Clara, please,” my mother whispered. She shook her head. She had nothing left to fight him.
If I thoughtlessly spoke of a Basque sheepherder in Idaho or a window in New York City, I was silenced by any or all of them, though not nearly as harshly as if Mama forgot and spoke. Everything that went wrong was Mama’s fault.
Ida was the keeper of the guilt. Too much salt in the stew? Mama had been away from cooking for too long. The garden wasn’t producing right? “We should have gotten the garden in by April, but of course, we had other things to do, not that you’d understand.” Ida insisted that Mama and I go with her to the pig shed, where they’d had to stay during the weeks of Bertha’s and Johnny’s illness. Ida wanted to point out where they’d been isolated from the sick children. “Papa built a fine barn for pigs; it was never meant for his children,” Ida said. “If you had been here …”
“I will never forgive myself for my absence,” Mama told her. “Never.”
“Guilt cuddles up next to me and steals my sleep,” she told me when we walked in the field together, both of us safe with each other. “I wish I had died in their stead.” I worried that she might die of a broken heart, of the despair that was deeper than the Dale Creek Canyon with no bridge for crossing. She waned like the moon, her light going out.
There was nothing I could do. Neither of us belonged anymore; we were both outcasts from our family.
“I need to find work, Mama,” I said when the quarantine was finally lifted in August. I hoped it would mean that the neighbors would come by now, that seeing friends might brighten Mama’s eyes. We pulled weeds in the garden, something she seemed willing to do. Ida did most of the cooking these days, and Mama let her. “I … There’s no reason to tell a future employer that I might be heading east on the train, making illustrations, is there?”
She shook her head.
The loss of the book’s possibility hurt more than I’d expected. Worse, I had hoped her writing of the journey would give her relief. In New York she’d told me writing eased her pain. “What if I tried to write it? I could make the trip. I could do it on my own.”
“Ole sees the trip as the cause of all this trouble and our silence as small price to pay for my having done it.”
“But you were behind on the payments before we left,” I insisted.
“It goes further back for him. My surgery. His accidents. All of that cost money, all contributed to my desire to earn the ten thousand dollars. I believe he feels he’s failed, and our journey without the money rubs salt into that wound.”
“But it’s still about money.” I remembered Mr. Depew’s office, the opulence. “Being safe and secure from the hands of the banks, that’s what all of this is about, why we went at all, isn’t it?”
“No, Clara. It’s about family. Doing all one can for our family and respecting what they need now to heal.”
“Your family turned on you and made another foolish choice, to let the book contract disappear.”
“Another