“She might one day learn about something else,” Christine said. She paused. “I had a child,” she said. “I left it on the doorstep of a church in Shelbina, where I lived. I never returned to my father’s home after that. How could I? Your mother found me, thin as a noodle, behind a boarding house I cooked at. She took me home and in an act of Christian charity so wonderfully bizarre, your parents made me one of theirs. They asked no questions. I told them I had no parents, and they fostered me.”
“And here I am, asking all kinds of questions.”
“But not in judgment, and I’m thankful for that. If Helena or others found out, they might be upset with you for taking me in.”
“Ach, let them be. There’s no need for you to hide yourself. You’ve paid a terrible price for someone’s violating you.”
“But that’s just it. He didn’t really violate me. I was a willing partner. I thought he loved me, and we’d marry one day. But he wasn’t interested in marriage. And when I told him of the baby, I never heard from him again. My father, he’s the one who took the whip to me when he learned of…the baby. I was big boned then too, and could conceal it for a time.”
“Did your mother…?”
“She died when I was born. It was my father and me, and he never did get over her death. He blamed me for it. I made my way alone after that. Until your mother found me and took me in.”
“But you decided to work for Keil and to stay there for a time.”
She nodded. “Your parents’ cabin is small and Johanna takes good care of Lou, and your brothers are a help to your mother. So Kitty and I decided to work elsewhere and live elsewhere, to reduce the burden on them. But there are so many people at Keils’ now, with those arriving from Bethel and still so few houses built.”
“The scars…from your father, then?”
“It was his way of letting me know how deeply I had sinned.” She dropped her eyes, her demeanor that of a scolded dog.
“In my view, he performed the greater transgression. You sought to fill up an empty place with love, Christine. More than one of us has done the same and later wished we hadn’t acted in quite the way we did. I have.” She looked up at me, her eyes pooling with tears. “Yes, I did something that turned out poorly. I’m sure Helena will fill you in if you ask. Maybe my parents told you.” She shook her head no. “I refused the help of other people, and married poorly after my husband died. Grief can be a veil against good reason. All that happened next wasn’t good. In part, my sons no longer live with me because of how I managed my empty place.”
“You didn’t leave them on a doorstep.”
“No, I didn’t.” But I put them in peril. I paused. “Did you see someone pick your baby up and take him inside?” She nodded yes. “Then you know the baby was safe. You tended him…Was it a boy?” She nodded yes. “You tended him to the very edge and then you went no further, giving him what you couldn’t give him yourself just then. But you did not deserve the flogging by your father. No one ever deserves beating. Ever. There is always another way to solve a problem. Always.” I took a deep breath. “And you don’t need to keep covering your wounds behind your girth either. You’re a lovely soul.”
“I don’t believe what you said, yet; but they are nice words to hear.”
“One day you might.” I patted her hand. It was cool to the touch, and she didn’t pull it away from me. “Sometimes if we act as though a thought is true, it becomes true. We can work on it together.”
The Hatching House
Christmas Eve. Belsnickel left treasures for the boys. My girls got another doll each that I made myself with extra clothes. I sewed them after the girls went to sleep at night so I saw the moon rise and sometimes dawn appear before I was finished. Comfort came in the stitching.
January 6. I checked on my smoked hams. Andy tells me that Henry T snuck into Keil’s smokehouse and took a chunk from the biggest ham that had Brother Keil’s name on it. That boy took a risk, indeed. Yet it’s good to see that he’s not intimidated by power. Still, I appeared appropriately appalled when Andy told me. One mustn’t minimize theft, even if it appears as a prank.
The Advent season came and went. Christmas Eve arrived, and we women gave one gift each to one another at our “plotting place.” The boys spent the afternoon with us, and later, after we’d walked through a melting snow to my parents’ to bring them their gifts, Martin came to my home and sat with us in the parlor while we drank hot apple cider. He said the boys could spend the night if they wished to.
I didn’t have the courage to ask if they wanted to, so I told him simply that they would. So they were with me on Christmas morning, and with the sounds of their laughter and even a few arguments between them and their sisters, I could pretend that all was as it should be. I thought of the verse in Hosea about lifting the yoke from our jaws, and God bending down to feed us. I felt fed.
The day went too quickly, and then I knew Martin would be coming for them, so I told the boys to get ready. “Are we going home?” Christian asked.
I thought of Martin’s presence as their home now and realized that home for me is where those we love reside. “Yes,” I said. I brushed his straight hair out of his eyes. “You’re going home.”
I walked over to Karl Ruge’s hut a few days later. Since the weather kept the school closed from December until spring, he’d gone back to his toll bridge booth. Po bounded up to me as I knocked. I squatted down. “Doesn’t your papa let you stay inside in this cold weather?” I asked. An old rug twisted where the dog had been sleeping out of the rain and snow beneath the dripping eaves. Karl opened the door. “Poor little thing. He’ll freeze out here.”
“He’s too warm inside. Down, Po,” Karl said as the dog trotted in behind me, a big black spot wagging back and forth on his otherwise white tail. He lay down by the stove as though it belonged to him. I saw a torn-up basket still able to hold kindling, and a once perfectly good shoe, all chewed up.
“Too warm,” I said as I bent to scratch the dog’s ears. “That’s a story.”
Karl grinned. “He’d have you believe he’s neglected, but he isn’t. You can see that. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“It’s Epiphany. Twelfth Day. And I have one last present to give, to you. I’ve woven a runner for your table,” I said.
“Ach, you’re not supposed to tell me,” he said. He untied the string and rolled it out. “Such bright colors. Purple, red, green. Ja, by goodness, this is really good. Danke. I have for you a little something too.”
He handed me a huge package, so large I had to set it down on the table. I unwrapped the paper, which I’d save for checking my stove heat. Inside the package lay several folds of fabric. Calicos and woolens, cotton blends with wool. All bright colors. Double pinks and cinnamon pinks, chocolate browns, purples known as fugitive dyes that would fade into browns. They were all store-bought material, machine printed, from back East from the looks of them. There must have been fifteen different pieces in all, perhaps five yards of each. One with tiny red stars I recognized as a fabric featured in a dress in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Another was a royal Prussian blue dotted with pink flowers throughout.
“These are…beautiful. I…The girls will love these for dresses.”
“Ja, maybe for you too.” He looked away.
“Oh, look, Karl. This one is one of those ‘changeable fabrics.’ See, where the light reflects differently against the warp and weft?” It was a rust color but had flecks of gold or yellow. I held it up to the window light, so he could see the shifts in it. “It feels like wool and silk.” He nodded. “It must have been terribly expensive, Karl. You shouldn’t have.” I truly meant it.
“I notice on the ledger sheets that mostly cloth and needles and thread are what you buy, Emma.”
“And stoves and chickens and iceboxes.” I laughed. “The whole world knows what we do here with those ledger sheets, ja?” I wondered if everyone knew that he’d ordered these for me.
“I don’t pry,” he said. “I happened to see the ledger one time. I looked for my page for the shoemaker to draw my foot onto. I needed new boots. Joe Knight helped me order your cloth from a Portland store.”
He was such a good friend. So faithful, so thoughtful in what he offered and gave up, asking nothing in return. “I thank you. And thank Joe Knight too.”
Karl busied himself making tea. Always when I spent time with Karl like this, I thought of Christian and our time together. Karl had known me through all my phases. The years with Christian and Karl at Willapa had been good years, and Karl’s presence after Christian’s death still remained the cornerstone of how we Christian colonists should act to make another’s life better than our own. Maybe if I hadn’t rushed into the marriage with Jack…I pitched that thought away. “Speaking of Joe Knight, his sister Matilda is much enamored with Jacob Stauffer. You know this?”
“So I hear. And he likewise,” Karl said.
“Ja? This is gut. But why hasn’t he asked to marry her? They’d be happy together, don’t you think?” I folded the material back up and rewrapped it, keeping my tea set safely to the side. The steam of it smelled of spices.
“He has no way to build a house for her. They’d be far down on the list. And Wilhelm has given his usual remarks that marriage takes one away from the true mission of our work here.”
“He didn’t think his son Frederick’s work would be diminished by his marriage,” I said. I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“It is Wilhelm’s way, Emma,” he said. “You know this.”
Karl’s loyalty to Keil was much like my brother Jonathan’s. It was a puzzle to me, one I might never solve but, like the labyrinth, might have to walk around.
“What if he and Matilda lived with me until they could get a home built by the colony? Might he ask to marry her, then?”
Karl shrugged. “He might, if he would accept your kindness. Some people are reluctant to accept the goodwill of others, ja?”
I felt my face grow warm. “But then we’d have the problem of the ceremony itself. Keil wouldn’t officiate.”
The dog now sprawled at my feet, and Karl nearly tripped over him. “Ach, this dog. You need to take him, Emma. The girls would love him, and he could stay inside all the time, then.”
“What if I did take him?” I said. “And in exchange, you officiate at their marriage. Don’t you have such credentials?”
“Ja. But I would not defy Wilhelm in his own place,” he said.
“No. You wouldn’t want to do that.” I drank my tea. “But what if you officiated at their marriage away from here? In Oregon City, let’s say. Or even in Portland. Would you consider doing that?”
“In exchange for your taking the dog? Ja. This could be arranged.”
“Well then. All that’s left is for Jacob to ask for Matilda’s hand in marriage. Do you want me to push that along? Or will you?”
“I’ll talk to him today,” he said. “If it means this Po will be one more Epiphany gift I give to you.”
February 20, 1865, was festive. It felt like spring with warm, balmy air swirling dried grasses as fresh green pushed them away. Green spears of daffodil shot up through the pungent earth. Within a month, they’d give us blooms.
I brought the girls with me, Kate insisting that I let her ride the Kartoffel horse that Andy had told her about. “He won’t bite anymore, Andy says, and if he does try, I should carry a hot potato with me.”
“Andy told you this?” She nodded. “He’s a big horse.”
“I can do it, Mama.” The horses were kept in a long Pennsylvania-style barn, one of the few in the region. Most of the Oregon farmers allowed their stock to graze in the wetness, as it was seldom very cold. But we Germans liked to bring them inside, give them a dry, warm place to know they were appreciated. We saddled the Kartoffel horse, and Kate rode beside us in my father’s wagon, twisting up the road north from Aurora. We’d placed twists of white bunting on the harness and another on the wagon side to announce that we rode to something joyous.
It had been a while since I’d been to Oregon City. We didn’t go as far as those thundering falls but turned off instead onto a wagon road that led through a stand of oak. I’d decided against asking for Andy and Christian to attend, fearing Keil might object. I was pretty certain Martin wouldn’t be there, because Keil had not sanctioned the marriage.
But when I saw John and BW’s wagon parked by the Knights’ home, north of Aurora on Baker Prairie, I wished I had asked for the boys. I said it out loud to my sister.
“BW came because she was a part of the plan,” Kitty said. “She wouldn’t have missed the results of your house hatching.”
“Hatching at my house? That sounds ominous,” I said.
Kitty laughed. “Well, isn’t that what you do there? I mean, we all do it.”
“I guess I hadn’t thought of it as hatching, which sounds sinister to me, as though it wasn’t natural.”
“But hatching is natural, Emma. Look at your chickens. If they didn’t hatch, we wouldn’t have chicken soup eventually. Or a wedding cake.”
“Still, I like to think I was a part of something Providential.”
“Wouldn’t we all?” Kitty said. “Sorting what’s ours and what isn’t, there’s the challenge. If you remember, you were always kindling your own—”
“I remember,” I said.
I was as proud as if Matilda were my own daughter. Fortunately my chickens were laying, since the cake I agreed to provide required fifteen big eggs. Most of them were blue. I used saleratus to add the rise, but with butter and flour and seeded raisins and ground mace and nearly a pint of molasses, and of course, ground cinnamon and cloves to improve everyone’s digestion, I ended up with four rounds. Layered between each, I spread a buttery frosting. I cut a small piece of the cloth Karl gave me to make a tiny quilt that I constructed a little frame for. It might have fit in a doll’s house, and I told Matilda she could give it to her first girl to play with one day, but it gave a splash of color to the cake top, and it matched Matilda’s finely tailored dress.
I’d asked Matilda to go through the material that Karl had given me to choose a fabric for her wedding dress. She picked a printed plaid in greens and reds, the perfect festive colors. The entire Sunday afternoon crowd stitched on that dress. Maybe I should say we hatched it.
It wouldn’t have taken much to bring a larger smile to Matilda’s face, but on her wedding day, Kitty wove fresh holly in Matilda’s hair, and she looked as young as Christine.
“I know I owe this to you,” she said as we stood in her parents’ bedroom. “Jacob never would have asked me to marry him if you hadn’t arranged for Karl to officiate.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “Oh, I might have pushed it along, but happiness is from God, and this is too, I’m sure of it.”
“A place to live too, though. You’ve given us that.”
“Passing along a gift I was given and hoping to make your lives better than my own. It’s the Diamond Rule, remember? Besides, with three other women, two young girls, and one dog he’ll share space with, I suspect Jacob will make some noise about moving up on that list for a house. Or maybe even start one of his own before long. But I am pleased to be able to make my home yours. And I thank you for accepting the offer. As Karl once told me, ‘You give to others when you let them give to you.’”
Several of the Schuele family attended. Both Almira and Christine said they’d stay home and look after the dog. Of course, all the Knights were there, and the Stauffers arrived from Willapa. They talked of moving to Aurora later since Jacob was planning to remain.
The surprise was that Chris Wolff officiated instead of Karl.
“He was a Lutheran minister in Marietta, Ohio, before he joined with Keil,” Karl told me. “And he kept many of the Lutheran tenets while he led the faithful back in Bethel. It’s a good thing to do for Jacob and Matilda.”
“Doctor Wolff had no problem doing this?” I as
ked.
“He has never found celibacy to be a critical feature of the Christian faith,” Karl said. “He may have had words with Wilhelm over it, but I doubt it. He believes securely in communal ways, in sharing our wealth with one another so no one is in need. He was in charge of marriages and funerals back in Bethel. Besides, the marriage is here on Baker Prairie. What business is it of Keil’s, then?”
I raised an eyebrow at Karl’s last comment, for it was the testiest thing I’d ever heard him say of Keil.
We had a grand day, and while I was a little weepy remembering the joy of my own wedding day long ago, I didn’t stay back there in my mind. Instead, I brought Christian into my present thoughts, reminding him that it wouldn’t be long before our sons and daughter would be speaking such marriage vows. On the way home, we tied Kate’s horse to the back of the wagon, and Kate rode with us, falling asleep in my lap. I brushed at her hair. I’ll have you in my home for a few more years, I thought. My mother and sisters rode with us, and I decided we all needed festive days like this, to mix memory with promise. How sad it was that we didn’t have more weddings to attend.
It wasn’t hatching, I decided, as I carried Kate and then my Ida into the house and handed them into Almira’s arms. What we’d done in getting Matilda and Jacob married was to be servants. Chris Wolff saw this marriage as a good thing or he wouldn’t have officiated, and Karl had made it happen (so I now had the dog). These were good people, and surely a marriage between them could bring nothing but praise and joy to the faithful. Yes, things could go wrong and often did, but having a partner to walk with through them was a gift indeed.
We gave the newly married the south room, the one over the parlor, and Kitty, Christine, and Almira assumed one end of the other upstairs bedroom, with the girls sharing a bed at the other end with me. It took some adjusting. There was now a dog to accommodate as well, and we had our moments. One day, Opal followed Kate, Ida, and Po into the house and jumped up onto the kitchen table, dropping what looked like raisins but weren’t. That day we made new rules of who managed the door when animals were about. I asked Jacob if he might convert our back kitchen door into one that could be open at the top and remain closed at the bottom, so we could get fresh air in while keeping animals out. Opal could plop her hooves and head up to look in, but I doubted she’d make the leap over the door to the inside. He said he could, and did.