Read Online The Daughter's Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick - Free Book Online

and even pan for a little gold.”
    â€œMother.”
    â€œNothing wrong with trying that,” she said. “He’s safe enough and we lost time, Clara, through all the mud and having to work. This will help us.”
    â€œHe might lead us out to a forsaken place and—”
    â€œDon’t fill that wheelbarrow,” she said. “Miss Simmons knows him. He’s a common man, a working soul. They can be trusted.”
    Like the tramp you shot because you didn’t consider other possibilities
.
    We walked southeast, and the sun beat down hotter than anything we’d experienced in the summers in Washington State. I wanted to unbutton my jacket but couldn’t because the man and his pack mule traveled with us. The desert trail revealed pools of water surrounded by chalky dust. We made camp earlier than usual, beside a little stream, the miner sharing our fire. We couldn’t walk the streets of Spokane for fear of strangers; yet now we planned to bed down beside one. I wondered at my mother’s choices.
    When she pulled out a frying pan, my jaw dropped. She scorned my curling iron for being too heavy, but she carried an iron pan? Worse, I soon learned it wasn’t for cooking.
    The miner showed Mama how it was done—the swirl of stone and water around the edge, over and over, panning for gold. She was like a schoolgirl, giggling, her skirts hiked up into her belt, her shoes on the side of the stream. She looked … young to me. Happy.
    â€œYou can use any old pan,” he told her. “None with grease. Got to be clean to capture gold.”
    She called out for me to join her, but I refused. Such a waste. I wrote to Forest instead, describing the beauty of the landscape and that we’d stopped to pan for gold. I made it sound like we were having fun. Maybe I was like her, pretending.
    â€œHow could you spend money on a pan?” I hissed when we bedded down.
    â€œI got you a gift too,” she said.
    â€œI don’t want a pan or that speck of glitter no larger than a pimple he said is gold.”
    â€œNothing like that,” Mama said. “I was keeping it a surprise, but you’ve been so disheartened of late.” She rose and reached into her grip. “A sketchbook and pencils. You can record those things that interest you, to keep them in your memory. Here. Take them.”
    â€œI … We won’t have time,” I said. Her frivolity worried me even though the pad and pencils were a rare present from my mother, impractical. There had been moments when I wished I could draw, though. That sea of sunflowers dipping their heads to the west, a cattleman moving his herd through the sage. Accepting the book would make it seem like I accepted her impulsive buying and this shortcut too.
    â€œI still don’t know why you wasted money on that pan,” I said, deciding to keep the pad.
    â€œWe can cook in it if nothing else. I’ll carry it, for heaven’s sake. In the morning, you look for sunflowers to sketch. They always seek the light instead of dwelling on the dark.”

    The miner said south of Shoshone, go left, take the settlers’ trail. We did that.
    â€œMama, we passed by this rock outcropping before,” I said many hours later. “See, those are our tracks.”
    â€œI’m using the compass,” Mama snapped. “We can’t go through these … monoliths. We have to go around.”
    We’d entered a dark maze of lava rocks that bit into the sky yet rolled like the folds of a giant caterpillar, slick and baked in sun. We’d been wandering most of the day, our second in this desolate place. Ingoing around the sharp lava rocks, passing by black and red formations that shot up like chimneys after a house fire, we’d gotten turned around. These chimneys were all that remained from volcanoes exploding years and years before, and now they threatened to be the grave markers