The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [87]
She also wanted a bedroom close to the kitchen, “For late-nighters.” She took a room on the second floor with a back stairway into the kitchen.
Olea had other needs. She desired a room where the sun wouldn’t come up in her eyes but that wouldn’t get too hot in the afternoons when she liked to take her nap. I suggested that she use the shades to keep the sunrise from bothering her, but she wanted her window open “a crack” at night in all weather and didn’t want the breezes to rattle the shade. These preferences were unknown to me when we lived together in Spokane. Olea wanted a room on the first floor, so we turned what must have been a sewing room into a bedroom for her.
The house’s features were not an issue for me. I’d slept in haymows and train stations, in lovely hotels in Minneapolis, and with my mother in a small bed in Brooklyn, and with Ida and Bertha until I went to work. What mattered to me was that my home be a place that no one could take from me, that it remained in my name so I would always have a roof without the fear of losing it, that it be free of a bank that had more leverage than I did.
Because the women had given me money and allowed me to invest it, I bought the house and the river properties outright. I could afford to be generous in meeting the needs of my good friends by selecting a house we could all appreciate.
A stray dog, a bushy-tailed mongrel with Newfoundland-like proportions and bearing one chewed-up ear, arrived at our porch, his fur matted with seeds and weeds. Louise took him under her wing. “He’s lucky you found him,” Olea teased.
“That’ll be his name,” Louise said. “Lucky.” We all became attached to the dog, and even Lucy didn’t object to his presence. He lay at Louise’s feet while she knitted and Olea and I read by the evening light, awaiting the cold weather and my foray into trapping.
Coulee City held promise in its isolation, the very qualities I wanted. I was on my way to complete financial independence in the fur trade. My goal was to be successful by the time I turned forty, which would be in 1916. Years away. I set forth. This was my destiny now.
When I celebrated my birthday, the best present of all was that I had a path and still had money in the bank.
No letters had been forwarded to me from Olaf, and I received none in those first months back. After we moved, I took a chance and wrote to him care of the Elstad family, asking if he might want to work my farm. If he was interested, he could even come and help me find the right property. The return address I marked simply as “Clara” and our box number in Coulee City. No need to rub salt in the wound by using the Doré name; no need to remind myself that I wasn’t an Estby by using that name either.
Olaf wrote in October and said he was inclined to accept my offer. He’d winter in Spokane and contact me in the spring. “Don’t write to Aunt Hannah’s,” he said. “Papa won’t like it. I’ll come help you look for land next year.”
Arthur’s birthday was in November, Johnny’s too if he had lived. I thought about sending Arthur a card but didn’t want to do anything that might upset the family. Still, if I sent a card and gave them my address, maybe they’d contact me one day, open a door of return. I had to give them a way.
With property purchased, papers signed, and winter approaching, the next steps meant trapping my own land—or at least learning how. A bit of the bravado I’d had in New York waned when the skies spit snow