The Year We Were Famous

by Carole Estby Dagg

  The Year We Were Famous

  Carole Estby Dagg

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHARTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CLARION BOOKS

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York 2011

  CLARION BOOKS

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Text copyright © 2011 by Carole Estby Dagg

  The text of this book is set in Centaur MT.

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin

  Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York,

  New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  IS AVAILABLE.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  4500281247

  ISBN 978-0-618-99983-5

  To Clara and Helga

  Preface

  Fame is a bee.

  It has a song—

  It has a sting—

  Ah, too, it has a wing.

  —Emily Dickinson, "Fame is a bee"

  THE FIRST SEVENTEEN YEARS and three months of my life were so ordinary, they would not be worth the telling. And last May when I came home from high school in Spokane to help Ma, I thought fate had yanked me back to Mica Creek and I would be stuck there on the farm, helping out one more time and one more time until I was buried in the Mica Creek cemetery alongside my brother Henry. I had prayed that I would find a way to get out of Mica Creek. I forgot to stipulate that I would like to get out of Mica Creek without the constant company of my mother and by some means other than my own two feet.

  But then, because of Ma, I was briefly famous. Sketches of us appeared in the New York World twice: our "before" picture in black silk dresses with leg-o'-mutton sleeves; and our "after" picture in ankle-baring skirts and brandishing guns and daggers. Because of the way our adventure ended, we couldn't talk about it afterward. But I kept my journal. Sometimes, late at night, I would rummage through to the bottom of my hope chest and find my journal. I would read it and remind myself of that life-changing year.

  CHAPTER 1

  MICA CREEK

  February 28, 1896

  I ARRANGED a dozen winter-blooming Johnny-jump-ups in a tall pill bottle and set them on a tray along with three biscuits and coffee in Ma's best teacup. As if it might bite, I took a deep breath and lifted the letter by one corner and laid it across the top of the tray.

  I nudged open the door to Ma and Pa's bedroom with my knee. "Cod morgen, Ma! Good morning!" I crossed the room to hold the tray close enough for her to smell hot biscuits and coffee.

  Ma groaned and turned to face the wall. "No breakfast. Sleep."

  I set the tray on the bedside table and tapped one corner of the envelope against Ma's hand, the one clutching the bedclothes as protection against the real world. "It's another letter from the treasurer. Do you want me to read it to you?"

  Ma drew up her knees as if she were making herself a smaller target for bad news.

  With the knife from the tray, I slit open the envelope. The treasurer's seal glared out from the top of the letter. It reminded me of the eye of a dead fish. "You are hereby notified that on January 2, 1897, the property in township..."

  Eyes still closed, Ma flung her arm to brush the unwelcome words away and instead bumped the tray, spilling the coffee and soaking the biscuits. She covered her ears.

  "Ma, you have to listen!"

  As if in league with my intent to rouse Ma from bed today, Marmee jumped on the bed to lick Ma's cheek and purr into her ear. Ma swiped Marmee's paw away from her face.

  I lifted the cat off the bed so I'd have a place to sit. "Refusing to listen to this letter isn't going to make it disappear. Since Pa doesn't read English, he leaves all the business to you, and we are a sheriff's auction away from losing this house and everything in it."

  Ma still played possum, so I crossed the room and jerked the window shade cord, letting the shade snap to the top, and opened the window as far as it would go.

  She turned her back to the light and pulled the quilt over her head. "Cold," she said.

  "Refreshing," I countered.

  She forced a cough. "I can't get up," she said. "I have consumption."

  "Half of Mica Creek has a cough this winter, Ma. I don't think it's consumption. And even if it is, fresh air and exercise are the best things for it."

  "And it's not just consumption. You don't understand what it's like to have a sensitive spirit."

  I pictured Henry in his coffin: eleven years old, hands gnarled like an old man's by the childhood arthritis that had spread through his body and stopped his heart. "We all miss Henry," I said, smoothing the coverlet over Ma's shoulder, "but keeping busy is the best cure for sadness. You have to get out of bed sometime. Are you going to wait until the farm is auctioned off and Pa carries you off on the mattress?"

  Ma burrowed deeper into the covers. So much for rousing her today.

  I carried the puddled tray with soggy biscuits back to the kitchen so I could get on with the rest of my chores—more accurately, Ma's chores, which she had been leaving to me for the last two months. But first I'd drink what was left in her cup. She always said coffee would stunt my growth, but I didn't care. I was already taller than half the boys my age.

  Three loaves of bread dough had risen an inch above the rim of their pans; while they baked, I'd scrub the sink and the table, spot clean the floor, and refill the wood box. By the time everyone else was out of bed and had run through their chores, the bread would be ready.

  Hot air from the oven flushed my cheeks as I slid the first two pans into the wood stove. Making room for the third pan, I burned my knuckles.

  "Uff da!" I let the oven door slam and blew on my hand as I crossed the room to put the backs of my burned fingers against the ice in the corner of the window. The heat of my fingers melted through the frost. Past the orchard, dormant wheat fields were tucked under six inches of powdery snow. I felt like the winter wheat, holed up and hibernating, waiting for my time to sprout. If you planted wheat, you got wheat, but what was I meant to grow into?

  I splayed the palm of my good hand against the frost on the window. I was seventeen years old, but lye soap and kitchen, laundry, and garden chores had given me the hands of a forty-year-old. Piece by piece my parents' farm in Mica Creek was turning me into someone I did not want to be.

  I scratched my initial in the thinning ice
toward the middle of the pane. C for Clara. C for clever? Clever enough to stay at the top of my high school classes, even while working at least twenty hours a week for my room and board in Spokane, but not clever enough to think of a way to save the farm. Ice collected under my fingernail as I sketched a kindergarten-style oblong house on the window, then huffed on the frost and wiped it out.

  I looked back at the kitchen: the water pump handle where our hands had worn off the red paint; the marks on the door frame where Marmee scratched to be let out; our heights recorded each year on our birthdays on the wall next to Ma and Pa's bedroom ... If we didn't get money soon, we'd have to leave it all behind. Even though I wanted to leave Mica Creek and go away to college, I had always assumed this house would be here forever, to come back to.

  It was quiet ... all I could hear was the ticking of the regulator clock. Time was running out.

  CHAPTER 2

  SPRING CLEANING

  March 15, 1896 4:30 a.m.

  WHEN I heard the thunks of something heavy hitting each plank of the back porch steps, I wiped my floury hands on my apron and dashed toward the door just in time to open it for Ma. She was lugging in the stepladder from the barn. Since she had not stirred from bed for nearly three months, I was amazed to see her not only up, but dressed and apparently ready to start some project that involved a ladder. But that was Ma—weighted down in misery for weeks and then, with no preamble, up and bustling again.

  "What are you doing up so early, Ma?"

  Ma grinned. "Spring cleaning! Just look at that soot on the ceiling above the wood stove."

  "I know it's dirty, but why don't we wait until everyone's had breakfast and the kids are off to school?"

  "If you wait for the perfect time to clean, it doesn't get done; you just have to jump in and do it."

  "You're a fine one to lecture after spending months in bed," I said. As Ma raised her eyebrows, I reached out for a hug. "Never mind," I said. "I'm glad to see you up. Truly."

  "Well then. Let's fill the kettle and get going."

  Pa shuffled out of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes. "I thought I heard you up, Mrs. Estby!" His eyes glowed with a tenderness that made me blush. I hoped someone besides Erick Iverson looked at me that way someday.

  After Pa went to the barn for milking, I pumped water into the copper wash kettle and lugged it to the wood stove. Between batches of biscuits, I refilled Ma's buckets and wiped up her spills. She had moved the ladder several times and scrubbed half the ceiling before the kids started trailing downstairs for breakfast.

  As usual, the boys were first. Olaf, Johnny, Arthur, and William clomped slowly down the stairs until they saw Ma; then they rushed to be first for a hug. Johnny slipped on water that had dripped down from the ceiling, and stumbled into the ladder. In a flying leap, I caught the ladder in time to save Ma from a fall, but the pail balanced on the top of the ladder slid off, dumping dirty scrub water on the floor—and me. William and Arthur started to laugh, but smothered their chuckles when I gave them my sternest big-sister glare.

  I was still wringing out my apron at the sink when Ida entered the kitchen carrying baby Lillian. Bertha lagged several steps behind her. "Ma's up?" she said, as if she could scarcely credit the evidence of her own eyes.

  "Ma's up!" the boys chorused. Once they had certified that fact, they surrounded me to ask what we were having for breakfast.

  "No sit-down breakfast this morning," I snapped. "There are biscuits and I'll boil eggs." Marmee attempted figure eights around my shins as I took the pot to the pump for water, then went back to the stove, found eggs in the larder, and slid each into the water to boil.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ida set to buttering biscuits and peeling eggs. Everyone stood around eating and dropping crumbs and morsels of egg yolk on the floor.

  I sliced bread and cheese for lunches and lined up lunch pails. Ma gave each child another hug as he or she went out the door to cross the orchard toward the school. I sent William and Marmee back to the barn with Pa and set Lillian up with canning jar lids and a basket of spools in Ma's room, leaving the door open so I could keep an eye on her.

  I offered to take over on the ceiling, but Ma said she liked seeing how much difference she was making. She sang and hummed as she cleaned. There wasn't a tidy way to wash a ceiling, but Ma's exuberant flourishes with the cleaning rags sent even more water dripping down the walls and onto the floor than usual. I followed behind, mopping up.

  "I wish you'd worry more about saving the farm than cleaning soot off the ceiling. We won't have a ceiling to wash if we don't pay off our back taxes and mortgage."

  "I can do more than one thing at once," Ma said, wringing out another cleaning rag and splashing more water on the floor.

  "So what ideas are you coming up with?" I said.

  "Well..."

  From the length of time she stalled, I wasn't sure she'd been thinking about our debts at all until I prodded her.

  She looked down from the ladder. "They're still finding gold in Colorado. I couldn't get Pa to go two years ago, but maybe he would go now that we have to come up with money quickly."

  "I think most of the good mining sites are already taken, Ma."

  "Or how about drilling for oil again? I'm sure it's there somewhere; those wildcatters just didn't know where to drill."

  "The rest of Mica Creek is still laughing about that one, Ma." The skeleton of a rig still stood on the northeast corner of our wheat fields and a pair of hawks surveyed their territory from its height.

  "If you don't like my ideas, come up with your own, then." Ma got down long enough to move the ladder and get a fresh pail of hot water.

  I had been thinking for months, but all my ideas were as fanciful or worthless as Ma's. Pa's back still pained him from when he fell off a roof carpentering in Spokane, so he wouldn't be earning much between now and next January. Most women didn't get paid more than a dollar a day with factory work, washing clothes, or even teaching. We needed more than a thousand dollars.

  As Ma climbed the ladder with her bucket, she said, "Jenny Lind sang her way across two continents and probably earned five dollars every time she opened her mouth."

  "Do you think anyone would pay to hear us sing? They wouldn't even let us in the choir." Mica Creek Lutheran had put out a call for new members after their first soprano, Maija Bagnold, died, but they hadn't been desperate enough to take us. My voice wasn't any better than Ma's, but at least my ear was keen enough to know we were always at least a quarter tone off true.

  Ma started scrubbing at a stubborn sooty spot above the stove. She looked down as she wrung out her rag again. "How about shooting, like Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show? I could make the costumes and you could do the shooting." I looked up from mopping the drips on the floor in time to catch Ma's grin. This time she flicked a few drops of water down at me on purpose.

  I wiped my face with one sleeve. "I'm sure your costumes would be spectacular, but you know I can't hit the broad side of a hay wagon at five paces. Be serious—we have to come up with something."

  "We have months to think of something. It'll come to us. How about writing? It can't be that hard to write a book. Whenever you can't think of the right word you can look in Roget's Thesaurus, and you have an editor to correct your commas and spelling."

  Just one book like Little Women or Black Beauty would pay our bills, but writing was just as ridiculous a suggestion as finding gold in Colorado or learning to shoot as well as Annie Oakley. I still winced to remember what my freshman English teacher had written across the top of my first story: "Good spelling. Lacks poetic imagination." When the books I wrote someday sold thousands of copies, I'd prove that teacher wrong, but I couldn't learn enough about writing in time to do any good.

  Ma filled the silence with more singing as she scrubbed. Periodically, Lilly would come into the kitchen to check on us, and I'd find something else to amuse her, like Ma's button jar or the box of alphabet blocks Pa had made that had p
assed to each child in turn.

  We took a break at noon when Pa came in with Billy, but the two of them went back out to the barn as soon as they had eaten. If he kept on polishing the tines on the cultivator they'd be worn down to stubs before spring. After Ma put Lilly down for a nap on the big bed in her room, we were ready to scrub again.

  When she had finished the ceiling, she pulled every pot, pan, and bowl out of the Hoosier cabinet and stacked them on the table so she could empty the flour and sugar bins into them. In the process, fine flour dust settled onto the damp floor, turning to paste. I continued following along behind her, sweeping and wiping down. We sometimes called these Ma's whirlwind moods, and for good reason.

  When the kitchen door opened again, I didn't look up until I heard Erick's voice. "Hei, Mrs. Estby ... Clara," he said.

  I bolted up from my hands and knees where I'd been scrubbing soot and floury goo from around the legs of the wood stove. "Hei, Erick." I flushed—from embarrassment as well as exertion. My apron was damp and smudged in a band at knee-level from kneeling on a wet floor, the cuffs of my chore dress were sopping with scrub water, and the constant steam from the copper kettle had put a sheen of perspiration on my face and plastered loose strands of hair to my forehead and cheeks. Even my best was not very good, and I was not at my best.

  Erick swiped off his cap. "I did knock," he said.

  Ma wiped her hands on her apron. "I guess we were making too much racket with our pots and pails to hear it. Come on in."

  Erick closed the door behind him. "I came over to see if I could help with anything and found Mr. Estby in the barn. He said you were up today, Mrs. Estby, and I thought I'd drop in and tell you how happy we all are to hear it. You've all been through some rough times..." Here he paused, fixing me with a lambent gaze.

  "Clara, excuse my rudeness," he said, "but did you know your whole face is covered with flour?" He reached one finger toward my cheek, as if to write his name there, and I drew back.