Free The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg Page B

Somewhere in the Snake River lava fields
    We woke in absolute quiet as the sun edged red-hot above the horizon. I took my mind off my empty stomach by writing in my journal for a few minutes. After we each took another sip of water, we started again toward Minidoka. Tall rock formations, cliffs, and crevasses detoured us from our southward course so many times that I began to feel like a croquet ball, zigzagging from wicket to wicket to reach our goals: civilization and water.
    By noon, when I thought we should have reached Minidoka, I was hungry, hot, and thirsty. I sat on my satchel and fanned myself with my journal. Ma leaned over and inspected her boots, lamenting each cut and slash on her brand-new purchase.
    "Three dollars wasted," she said.
    I picked up my canteen and shook it at Ma's ear. "You should be worried about water, not the state of your shoes," I said. "We only have a swallow or two left."
    She didn't answer. Her eyes were sunken. Her upper chest rose and fell with laboring shudders, like that of someone with pneumonia. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were a fish out of water, but no sound came out.
    Ma did not protest as I started unbuttoning her shirtwaist, "Maybe it's your cussable corset," I said. As I pulled the strings out of more and more eyelets, Ma took in enough air to talk.
    "A lady always wears her corset," she wheezed.
    "Ladies don't take shortcuts through the lava fields," I said, as I took off my corset, too, and dropped it into my satchel. I hadn't the energy to rebutton or retuck my shirtwaist.
    As we climbed up a wrinkled river of lava stone, I kept an eye on Ma and a hand on Pa's owl. Death and I were not strangers. My brother Ole had died just days old when I was yet a toddler. We'd buried Henry this January. One of my brother Arthur's classmates was caught in a thresher, and a friend of Pa's slipped into a silo and was buried in a ton of wheat. Mrs. Rassmusson—she was only nineteen—died having her first baby, and old Mr. Ulafsson's heart stopped when he was right in the middle of his pole beans three years ago.
    Ma would die someday. So would I, but I didn't expect it to be so soon, from one stupid, prideful mistake. Ma was barely lifting her feet as she walked, scraping the soles of her shoes on sharp lava rock. My head ached; the landscape tilted and blurred. But I had promised Pa I would get Ma home safely, and I wasn't one to break a promise.
    We stumbled along for three more hours until we took off our skirts to pad the rocks and slept.
June 12, 1896 – Day 38 Still in the lava fields
    The sun was not up yet when we woke. I tried not to think about breakfast or water as I stuffed my skirt into my satchel. The skirt was too big; ragged hems drooped over the sides, but I didn't care. I just wanted to live through that day until night, when it would cool off again. Ma's face was red and raw, and fried skin on my lips peeled off in jagged layers. We walked only a mile or two before we napped again in the shade of a rock.
    After a brief rest, we staggered up. Heat bore down on us as solidly as a suit of mail. I walked with my eyes almost closed, looking through my eyelashes for a path for my feet. Walk or die, walk or die, I chanted in my head. We were probably going in circles, but as least we were proving to the turkey vultures overhead that we weren't dead yet.
    I slept fitfully, with my arms around Ma, my body sheltering hers. If we died, they would find our skeletons entwined, like Quasimodo and Esmeralda. When I had read
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
I thought it was romantic. What a fool.
June 13, 1896 – Day 39 Still in the lava fields
    Into my waking dreams later that night came a ghostly wailing. Ma must have heard something, too, because her head jerked upright as she looked for the source of the sound.
    Whoo-whoooo.
A faint glow moved against the darkening sky. I staggered to a stand and draped Ma's left arm across my shoulders and put my right arm around