Britta nodded like that made perfect sense.
On the second day, blisters rose on Marta’s palms. By the third, they had broken and become raw again. Britta’s cheeks were chapped and red. She kept shifting her shoulders under the strap of the trunk, trying to make herself useful.
“Let me carry more,” Britta said at one point, stubbornness sharpening her small voice.
Marta stopped walking. She crouched in the grass until she was level with her daughter.
“You carry the important part,” she said.
Britta frowned. “What part?”
Marta touched her daughter’s chest with two fingers. “This part. You keep breathing. You keep going. That is your job.”
Britta stared at her mother for a long moment, then gave a solemn nod as if accepting a contract.
“All right,” she said. “I can do that.”
They followed the river south, then west toward limestone hills that rose like pale backs from the prairie. Marta had heard of abandoned homestead plots in that direction, claims that had failed when drought and loneliness proved stronger than hope. If a family had tried and left, sometimes something remained: a well, a collapsed sod hut, a root cellar carved into a slope.
