OUR clothes had dried overnight, but with today's rain and wind they wouldn't stay that way for long. Mercifully, Ma was less talkative today. She told our story anew to everyone we passed, but in between she was generally quiet. Since my feet needed no instruction from my brain, I cast about for some project to keep my mind busy. "Ma, can I borrow Pa's watch?"
"Why would you need to know the time here?" She gestured toward the miles of plowed fields on either side of the tracks.
"I'll tell you when I have it figured out," I said.
"Ja, well." She set her satchel down on a rocky patch out of the mud and slipped the cord with Pa's pocket watch over her head. She handed it to me with both hands. "Don't drop it," she said.
I took it just as carefully, slipping the cord over my own head and checking the time. "It's nine thirty-four," I said. "Just walk normally. And don't talk or you'll make me lose count." We resumed our pace as I mumbled the number of my steps, periodically checking the hands of the watch.
At nine forty-four I announced, "Nine hundred and ninety-three steps."
"Well, that fact will make a fascinating entry for our journals," Ma said.
"Don't laugh, Ma. If anyone wants to know how many steps it takes to get from Mica Creek to New York City or how many steps we take in a day, we can tell them. I walk about three miles an hour. If I take nearly a thousand steps in ten minutes, I'll take nearly two thousand steps in the twenty minutes it takes to walk a mile. To cover our quota of twenty-five miles a day, we'll take fifty thousand steps. And, since we can't walk as the crow flies, we'll probably walk at least four thousand miles getting to New York. That's at least eight million steps." I stopped long enough to wipe a few drops of rain off Pa's watch and give it back to Ma.
"Nearly eight million steps." Ma's face drooped for a moment, then brightened. "That's pretty impressive, nei?"
My gap-toothed grin answered Ma's as I held up my canteen in a toast. "Here's to eight million!"
Ma tapped my canteen with her own. "Eight million!"
Uff da! As one foot landed awkwardly in a puddle, muddy water soaked the one dry area left on my skirts and spoiled fantasies of newspaper headlines celebrating our eight million-step walk to New York. Rain sluiced so hard down the brim of my hat, it was like looking through a waterfall. Was it just yesterday morning that I had tucked flowers in my hair and danced down the road like a gypsy?
The rest of the day was more of the same. Another fifty thousand steps. Another twenty-five miles past fields and farmhouses. When my feet hurt so bad that I was ready to plop down in a mud puddle to rest, we came to a handful of houses at Saint John. "Couldn't we stop here for the night?" I asked. Ma kept walking.
By the time we reached the next isolated house, I was limping on both feet. From the outside, it was hard to tell what kind of folks lived in this place. The barn was unpainted and the door to the outhouse was half off its hinges. A shovel had been left out in the rain and was propped up against the ramshackle hen house. But the kitchen garden looked like it had been laid out with a ruler and a pot of blooming geraniums showed through the lamp-lit window.
A woman answered the door, holding a baby. Inside, clotheslines strung just below the ceiling were covered with drying diapers. The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"You two look half drowned!" she said as she opened the door wider.
Her husband quickly joined her at the door. He scowled as he craned his neck to peer behind us into the dusk. Perhaps he thought we were in cahoots with someone bent on stealing their silverware.
We huddled together on their porch, trying to fit under the scant overhang above the door. Ma forced a laugh. "We must look a sight, but we're respectable women walking across the country to save our farm. Wouldn't you feel good knowing you'd helped us out?"
"Where's your husband?" the man asked.
"He's at home with the rest of our children," Ma explained. "My daughter and I intend to show that women are just as capable as any man by making this trip on our own."
He looked as skeptical as the reporter in Spokane about our fitness to walk clear across the country. Furthermore, he didn't look impressed that Ma was out trying to prove she was the equal of any man. Since optimism seemed to have blunted Ma's ability to read the signs, she plowed on. She held out her hand. "I'm Helga Estby, and this is Clara."
The woman shifted the baby in her arms and edged far enough forward to shake Ma's hand. The man still squinted at us like he was trying to figure out what to make of us.
Ma glanced from one face to the other and forced even more hearty goodwill into her voice. "We're going to write a book about our adventures, and if we had your names we could put you in it." She shook my elbow. "Clara, get out your notebook so you can write down the names of these nice folks."
From their expressions, I could almost see him shaking his head no and his wife timidly nodding yes. I looked up the section road toward the tracks. There wasn't another lamp-lit window or trail of chimney smoke in sight. Desperation put my tongue in gear.
"We don't mean to be a burden on you," I said. "We can work for our keep. Just name what you need done and we'll do it."
At hearing my voice, Ma looked at me as if she had found a mouse spouting Latin. My heart stopped beating while I waited to see if my offer would be accepted.
The man finally smiled, but it wasn't the kind of smile that made me want to smile back. "I'm Mr. Ramsey," he said. "And Mrs. Ramsey, and little Rebecca. Maybe we can think of something. Something especially fitting for two women out to prove they're equal to any man."
Thankfully it was the wrong time of year for butchering hogs, but what else did he have in mind?
He led us off the porch and back into the mud to a heap of logs that had been roughly chopped into wood-stove lengths. "Know how to swing an ax?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he trotted straight back toward his warm kitchen.
"Do you have any gloves?" I called. He was halfway back to the house already, so he must not have heard me.
Ma drew in her shoulders against the wind and rain as she eyed the jumbled woodpile. "If you'd just given me another minute I could have talked him around without having to chop wood."
"I don't think so, Ma," I said.
"I wonder how much he means for us to chop?"
"Maybe we could satisfy him just by showing we can swing an ax without losing a foot," I said. I tilted my head toward the window facing the chore yard. Mr. Ramsey's weasel-like face poked between the curtains, watching us. I felt like sticking my tongue out at him. "If he thinks he's going to get a laugh watching us bumble around figuring out which end of an ax goes where," I said, "I'll show him what the New Woman is made of."
While I swung the ax, Ma stacked. I whacked and chopped like the fate of the world hung on my getting through the whole pile by nightfall. By the end of a quarter hour, I was as damp from my own sweat as from the rain, and I handed over the ax to Ma. For Mr. Ramsey's benefit I tried not to look like my arms were as wobbly as jelly. The stack of chopped wood grew more slowly during my second shift with the ax, and slower still on my third. Sometime along the way, Mr. Ramsey's face disappeared from the window.
By the end of an hour, there was just enough daylight left to compare the blisters on our hands. Ma plopped down on the low end of our solidly stacked pile. "Don't you think we've done enough?"
Just then, Mrs. Ramsey dashed out in the rain. "Come get warm before you catch your death," she said. "Mr. Ramsey has already had his supper and has gone to bed. He himself would never chop more than a day's worth of wood in this rain."
Once inside, she clucked over our hands. "I have just the thing." She took down a large can from an open shelf in the kitchen. "Mutton tallow with chickweed, calendula flowers, and beeswax."
We held out our hands as she gingerly dabbed the concoction on our blisters. I begged for more of her home remedy for my feet.
After Mrs. Ramsey's doctoring and two bowls of rabbit stew each, I felt like I might live to see another morning.
"Wash-up can wait," Mrs. Ramsey said. "Let's just visit." We sat on the floor next to her and admired her sleeping baby.
"I've had ten," Ma said. "Eight still living." She brought one finger within a hair's breadth of the baby's cheek and then pulled it back. "Don't want to wake her," she whispered with a smile.
"Eight children," Mrs. Ramsey said. "And how long will you be gone?" I couldn't tell if she sympathized with Ma for having to leave her children or was aghast that she'd left behind so many.
"Seven months," Ma said. "But they're all good children; they'll be fine." Her forehead knitted in a flash of worry. Then she nodded as if to convince herself, as well as Mrs. Ramsey, that they would be fine. "My oldest boy is already working in Spokane and my second-oldest daughter, Ida, is at home to help with the younger ones." Ma was silent for a moment, then stood. "Would you like to see how we mean to go?"
Mrs. Ramsey's eyes lit up at that. "I sure would!" she said.
Ma got out her maps and showed her our route and the sights we hoped to see. They traded the trials of teething babies and rain that came at the wrong time just before harvest. Ma told her the remedy she'd used for Henry's colic when he was a baby, and Mrs. Ramsey gave Ma the name of someone she knew who'd moved fifteen miles south of Rosalia who could give us lunch tomorrow.
They were still chatting away when I got ready for bed and lay down on the blankets Mrs. Ramsey had laid out for us. Just as I was about to drift off, I caught one last comment from Mrs. Ramsey.
"I've never been more than eleven miles from this place, myself," she said.