A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish)

  “I assumed I’d offer up my work and my labor, not my heart, not my flesh and blood, not the absence of my sons from my life.” My voice broke. I will not let him see my cry!

  He’d come around to my side of his desk. He pressed his hand against my shoulder. “Next time we may both pay a little more attention to the wording of things, ja? So I’m not paying for something frivolous you might want to do, while you call it ‘education.’” He patted my back. “I’ll see you out now,” he said.

  I sat for a time until I felt his hand increase pressure on my shoulders. He led me like a calf to slaughter toward the root room door. Scents of onion and potato rose to me as I walked outside. My lips were dry as dirt. Keil pulled the door shut behind me. The sunshine hit my eyes without warmth. I blinked, focused. How had this happened? What had happened?

  Kitty stood as I walked up the grade toward the steps where she’d waited for me. “Ready to head up the hill and watch them work?” she said. “They’ll make progress, now that our dance hall carpenters are back.”

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “You want me to watch the boys?”

  I didn’t dare look toward the boys. Christian might be waiting for me, but I doubted Andy was. I couldn’t bear to see the looks on either of their faces, or for them to see mine, to see me cut like a too-long hem from their lives.

  “I’m sure that Martin will,” I said. “No…I…”

  “Emma? Are you all right?”

  Keil came through the front door, stood at the top of the steps. “Good morning, ladies.” He spoke in English. He carried his cane, walked between us as he came down the steps, then headed up toward the church. I watched him. In the distance, he stopped where Jacob Stauffer and Matilda had stalled on their way to the stage. Matilda stepped back, and Jacob listened to whatever it was that Keil so diligently expressed to them. Jacob said nothing back, but he tipped his hat to Matilda, then made his way back to the church construction, Keil and that little dog walking behind him.

  Someone else’s life had just changed in an instant.

  Matilda stared after them; she turned away as we approached, biting her lip. Even in the shadow of her bonnet I could see she wept. She would have moved past us, but I stopped her. “I’m going back to my home,” I said. “Something has…come up. I’ll walk with you.”

  “All right, then,” Kitty said. “But what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Come with us if you wish,” I said. “Or maybe Louisa has some tasks for you.” Martin had turned toward me, arms at his side. “Or you can tell Martin that I’ll bring the boys’ things over to him later today. He needn’t plan to stop by to pick them up.”

  “But he’s standing right there, why don’t—”

  “Tell him! Or not,” I said. “I can’t say any more.”

  “Are you ill, Sister?” Kitty asked.

  I shook my head no. Her kindness could unravel me if I let the slightest thread of warmth from her wrap around my broken soul.

  “Go,” I said. “I’ll walk with Matilda.”

  Matilda walked silently beside me. I knew she was troubled, and if I’d had an ounce of compassion left in me I’d have reached out to comfort her. But I felt as though I was stuck inside a bale of thick wool and couldn’t push my way out through the dingbats and twigs to get breath. I kept swallowing. I stopped. I lowered my head. I was going to be sick.

  “Your girls are up and fed and ready to help with chores,” Almira greeted us as we reached the house. Kitty had remained behind. I knew she was confused, but I couldn’t explain. She’d gone off to talk with Martin or maybe the boys. I’d given her nothing to tell them; I didn’t know what to say.

  “Have Kate gather eggs,” I said, pulling myself into the present. “And let Ida go with her. But watch out for Opal. She doesn’t know her own strength. I don’t want her knocking Ida over.”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Giesy?” Almira asked. “I mean, Emma. You don’t look well.” Those gray piercing eyes.

  “I need some time alone,” I said. “The stagecoach should be…”

  “I’m not going to take it today, if that’s all right with you,” Matilda said. “Your offer, for me to stay, is it still good?”

  “Yes. Ja. There’s lots of room now,” I said and walked slowly up the stairs. I felt one hundred years old.

  I looked about for the basket of wool I’d carded. Jonathan had built me a spinning wheel, set up on the wide hall, and I’d returned my mother’s to her. This one still smelled of fresh lumber. The oils of my hands had yet to darken it. I sat now to spin that wool, grasping it too tightly at first, then loosening my grip to let it pull through my fingers. It was solid yet soft. My foot moved to the rhythm. I held the yarn in my fingertips. It was wool I’d dyed myself, red as blood from the madder root. The color didn’t soothe, but the threads did. I needed something firm and familiar in my fingers, something I could hang on to that wouldn’t drift away, that wouldn’t be taken from me. I’d thought I couldn’t be stumbled by any more surprises. I had a house, my health, good work, my girls. But none of that was enough. I’d lost my sons.

  I must talk to Jonathan and see if he could intervene. My father—perhaps he’d be willing to raise my sons, or at least talk to Keil about letting me do what a mother was called to do. But these were tasks I’d do later. I was too tired now. My head began to throb.

  When I came downstairs, the sun dappled through the trees, making its way toward setting. I could smell the soup that the girls must have eaten, and hopefully Almira and Matilda had as well. I didn’t remember the scent rising up the stairs to me, but I hadn’t been hungry. I wasn’t now. I stepped out onto the porch to sit on my blue bench. Matilda was already there, her hands clasped in her lap.

  “Do you know where the girls are?”

  “Almira took them for a walk. I thought she came upstairs to tell you. It was quite a while ago.” She had a slight lisp, so when she said “thought” it came out as “taught.”

  “She might have. I didn’t hear it above the spinning wheel.” I didn’t tell her that I’d been in a trancelike place, devoid of anything but the feel of the yarn in my fingers. I sat down beside her. “You decided not to go back to your brother’s right now?”

  “You invited me to stay, you remember?” I didn’t remember that we’d talked of it. “I can leave…” She stood up, but I reached for her hand and pulled her back down. “Danke. Thank you,” she said. “Dr. Keil. He…he said Jacob needed to spend less time courting and more time counting his hours of work. We’d only taken a moment, and it was hardly courting. Jacob hasn’t even spoken a word of interest to me except to notice I was here.”

  I smiled, for the first time in hours. “Oh, he’s interested,” I said. “Even in my stupor I could see how his eyes lit up when he saw you and how closely he stood to you, to hear your every word.”

  “Until Dr. Keil approached.” She clucked her tongue. “I felt like a small child who’d been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. And Jacob…how humiliating to be accused of courting when he wasn’t. Ach,” she said. “My brother was right. I shouldn’t be here in Aurora. I should stay with them. But I thought the Stauffers might come here, since so many others from Willapa had. And I didn’t want to miss him. Them, I mean.”

  “And so he has come,” I said. “With intention to stay, since he’s working on the church. I imagine he’ll live with the bachelors, in that rectangular building they’ve put up on the Point.”

  “And there’ll be other houses going up too,” she added. “Or so he told me.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall of my house. My house. That’s all it was then. A house. Not a home that would hear the sounds of laughter and love and disappointment and challenge and hope poured out through the lives of my children, all together as one. It was a structure. Wood and glass and brick and an iron stove. And for it I’d given up my sons.

  Perhaps Keil was right about me. My girls were off
with a woman who might be a dangerous person, for all I knew. By her own admission, Almira had a “past.” My judgment about people was obviously suspect, since so many of those I’d come to trust through the years weren’t worthy of it. Perhaps I wasn’t fit to raise my sons—or my daughters. I was a self-centered woman, a wayward daughter, a pushing wife, and not much of a friend, least of all a good mother. I wiped the tears that formed a stream from my eyes into my ears. My legs weighed heavy as anchors.

  “Martin Giesy came by,” Matilda said. “He wanted to talk with you.”

  “Ja. I bet he did.” I opened my eyes.

  She turned to look at me. “He said he’d come back later this evening, for you not to trouble yourself about bringing the boys’ things. He said you’d know what he meant.”

  “Mama, Mama!” Ida’s voice. I saw them approach and watched as Ida tried to skip, but double-stepped instead. “We made this place, in the trees, Mama. It was fun. We walked in a lab-rinse. Wasn’t it called that, Mira?”

  “Labyrinth,” Almira said. “It’s called a labyrinth.”

  “Lab-rinth,” Ida tried again. “It looks like Path to the…to the…”

  “Path Through the Wilderness? The quilt pattern?” I asked her.

  “It might be best to call it a puzzle path,” Almira said.

  I’d heard of labyrinths, a very famous one in Chartres, France, that my uncle, the ambassador to France, had written to us about. He’d drawn a picture shaped like a mushroom cap. It looked like a maze, made out of stones laid out on the floor of a cathedral, he’d told us. One could never get lost inside it; the only choice a person had to make was whether to enter at all. There was only one way in and one way out, and Christians came to walk there to find answers, and had been doing so for centuries. There certainly wasn’t a labyrinth in Aurora.

  I looked up at Almira. “It’s a path I made for us in the clearing,” she said. “I scraped it out with a stick, and the girls and I laid pinecones to mark the paths. Then we walked it. Or I should say they ran and jumped it! It was a joy to hear them laughing. I’d made one on the Clatsop Plains too. It was the only place I found peace, though it later got me into trouble.” She looked away. “My husband discovered it and claimed it was some sort of witchcraft. He scattered all the stones that I had used to mark the trails.”

  Witchcraft!

  “I’d forgotten the comfort that could come from walking one,” she continued. She had a shine to her face that hadn’t been there in the morning, or at any time since we’d met. “It reminds me that I must let go of everything and follow the path to the center of my soul and then carry what I’ve learned there back out to the world. Walking helps my soul wake up.”

  Kate plopped down on the porch and leaned against my legs. “Is Andy here?” she said. “Where are those boys?”

  I took a deep breath. “They’re going to be staying at the gross Haus,” I said. “For now. Martin Giesy will look after them, and Andy’s going to help him at the pharmacy, and one day he’ll go to school to become a doctor.”

  “Can I be a doctor?” Kate asked.

  “No, Kate,” I said. Too quickly.

  “Father Keil will let me,” she pouted. “He calls me Catie. He likes me.”

  “You can never be sure,” I said.

  “There are women who become doctors,” Matilda ventured.

  I couldn’t imagine my Kate having to make her way through medical school, with men all around making decisions that excluded her. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Kate said, “I’m going to school this autumn, aren’t I, Mama? Karl Ruge said I could.”

  “Yes. You will go to school, and so will Andy and Christian. You’ll see them there every day.” I hesitated, then said, “But I won’t.”

  “Why not?” Ida said.

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  Walk In, Walk Out

  Could I fight this? I could ask my parents to take the boys, but Keil was right: they couldn’t afford to send Andy to medical school. They had children of their own, and there was Lou with her needs. Jonathan didn’t have his own home either, and at least Martin would eventually have a place to stay with my sons, assuming Keil wouldn’t change his mind about finishing the pharmacy. Jack was no option. None of the Giesys were. It occurred to me that Martin’s reticence when he told me Jack was gone was a part of this, that Jack had exacted the promise that Martin would raise the boys and not me. Anything to harm me. Karl Ruge? He’d never consider raising my sons, and what was the point of looking for anyone else besides Martin? Martin was the best of the lot. What I needed was the way to raise them myself.

  I could hire a lawyer to demand my sons remain with me but at what cost, even if I could find a lawyer to take my case? I still had the pearls. I could sell them. Surely my mother wouldn’t mind if I did that for such a cause. But then where would we go? We’d be out on the street in no time, and where would that leave Andy’s future or the future of any of my children? No. There was nothing I could do. If I found somewhere else to live, to take all my children with me, I’d still need a way to support them, to care for them, to educate them, to give them shelter.

  That night I slept frantically, dreams of fog and mist and mazes, of being lost, seeking rescue. “It is a woman’s lot,” some hag inside my dreams would cackle, as I wandered through the thickening forests. “Raise them to resist, and they’ll be squelched. Raise them to consent, and they’ll be trampled flat like wet leaves of winter. Raise them to believe they can do…,” she cackled toward my face. I woke up sweating and pulled the quilt from the bed to go sit on the blue bench outside to watch the sun come up. Teach them to believe they can do what?

  “It’s a terrible trial to be separated from one’s children,” Almira said. We sat at my table. She used a glass Andy had claimed as his favorite. “I gave birth to nine in thirteen years. My husband traveled. He was a minister who brought the gospel to the Indians and other settlers on the Plains. Then he took a job as a sub-Indian agent, and I thought he’d be home more. We lived far from the nearest settlement. But he brought…a woman with him.” I looked at Almira. “He said she’d be there to help me with the children and the laundry and cooking, but instead, she helped move me out of my bed. And when he traveled, he took her with him.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I bet you didn’t have any more children after that,” Kitty said. She’d joined us before heading to the hotel.

  “Strangely, I did,” Almira said. “I kept thinking I could keep him as long as I didn’t turn him out. But after a time I couldn’t stand the jealous feelings. I divorced him. Or tried to…You should know these details, Emma. You may not want to have me stay here, knowing this. My husband got his friends to testify and say terrible things against me. Only my oldest son and his wife came to my defense, but it was not enough. The newspaper quoted his powerful friends. It’s hard to fight power.”

  “You got your children, though, right?” Kitty asked. “They wouldn’t take children from their mother, would they?” Kitty still didn’t know the details of her nephews’ plight or she wouldn’t have thought that.

  “Legal care always goes to the father.” Almira looked down at her knuckles that held the glass like claws. “Especially well-spoken men. I know it was a sin to seek divorce. He was right about that. My children are being raised by another woman, and I’m not even allowed to see them. A divorced woman and those rumors of witchcraft and all.” She gave me a sad smile. “My being here might have made your plight more precarious.”

  “No,” I said. “What happened to me, Keil had planned long before this. You needed something we had to give, and I am grateful you accepted.”

  I’d started sorting through the boys’ things and putting them into bundles. Maybe Martin would let them come for supper sometimes. Or breakfast. Maybe I could make them special meals on their birthdays. Surely Martin would allow that. At least I wasn’t banned from seeing them, the way Almira was. At least to
tal strangers weren’t going to read about my personal affairs in the Monday Oregonian.

  As I finished sorting, Kate sang out, “Uncle Martin is here.”

  “Have him come into the parlor,” I said. I straightened my dress and tugged loose strands of hair into the swirl of braids on either side of my head. I looked in the mirror. Awful. A mess. I came downstairs and entered the parlor.

  I nodded toward the chair. He sat. “This isn’t how I would have planned it, don’t you know,” Martin said. I’d offered him coffee or tea, but he’d declined. “I know how much you love those boys.”

  “I’ve bundled up their things. If I’ve forgotten something, you can send someone for them.”

  “The boys can come themselves,” he said. “They’re not going to keep you from seeing them, Emma.”

  “They? You’re a part of this too, Martin.”

  “I tried my best, Emma. My arguments fell flat. Jack…It was the best solution, don’t you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “He would have hovered over your life here forever. We thought it the best and—”

  “We. The ‘we’ that excludes me.”

  “But the boys will see you. It won’t be like before, when you lived so far away.”

  “Ja. See, but not raise them; watch, but not influence them. Who’d want such exposure to an outrageous mother not capable of raising her own sons?”

  “Emma,” he said.

  “Does that seem fair to you, Martin?” I still stood. “Doesn’t it…frighten you that Keil can decide such things for other people? that your brother John could?”

  “They mean well, Emma. They truly do. This way you’re…free. To do those things that interest you. You have your house.”