Fall brought harvest and news that some of our “boys,” who had been staked by Keil and headed to the gold fields near Canyon City, had made good of it. They came back for the winter to report. Few had found gold, but they’d tried their hand at storekeeping and cobbling shoes. They noted a market for hops and encouraged us to plant more land in that crop, assured that we could sell it to supplement their “meager fare,” as they described it. I remembered that we’d sold oysters to the California gold market years ago and thought those men ate well. None of our colony boys looked as if they’d had to skip a meal. Most just said they were tired and cold and didn’t want to spend another winter in the Blue Mountains, surrounded by miners with nothing better to do than drink and fight and lament their lost loves while they waited for spring. They were happy to be home in Aurora.
The Oregon State Fair had come around in October, as it always did. The band rehearsed its pieces, seranatin’ us (as some called it) well into the night. We had more horses to enter in the races, and our cattle looked sleek and prime. I thought it might be due to our huge barns made to care for the animals and keep them out of the weather.
Most of the colony found a reason to attend the fair that year.
I decided to enter something I’d made after Matilda died. Using scraps of fabric, I pieced the odd shapes and sizes, with stark angles and curved edges, onto a fabric backing. But instead of quilting it as I’d always done, I made tiny replicas of some of the shapes and stuffed them with bits of wool so they rose up off the fabric. I hand-tacked the patches and used a small buttonhole stitch over the raw edges. I’d seen a woman working on a quilt like this when Christian and the scouts and I had ridden across the west those years before. The quiltmaker had hailed from Virginia, and she called what she did appliqué.
Mine, when I finished, I framed. It was more a picture than a quilt that could bring comfort or warmth, though I hoped it brought rest for one’s eyes. I gave it depth with the stuffed pieces. I wanted people to touch it, to feel the give within the appliqué, to know that it was made of sturdy, discarded stuff but could still be purposeful.
I’d made a landscape scene, bucolic some might say, composed of blue sky and clouds hovering over a log home. A river skirted the edge, and trees soared above the white painted fence circling the yard. Four children, a goat, a sheep, and one dog lounged about. The house had two doors, and I made them with cloth flaps so that the doors could actually be opened if one took the time. Behind one door a tiny candle glowed, an effort of creation that had kept me up well into the night. Behind the other, against a dark wall, a bowl of apples, made with French knots of embroidery thread, graced a table. It had taken me many hours, and I’d shared my efforts with my girls. Both had a fine hand with the needle, and I thought back at how I would otherwise have filled my time if my boys had been daily in my life. Maybe I never would have found quiet encouragement within fabric. My entry hung in the Household Arts exhibit tent.
The girls slept by our wagon now. Po snored at my feet, his long, skinny tail flapping the floor any time I said his name. This wasn’t the life Christian and I had planned, but it was a good life. I’d woven meaning into the loose threads that had taken me from Bethel to Willapa and now to Aurora. It dawned on me that I’d found my Heimat at last in Aurora.
I’d urged my parents to attend the fair and bring Louisa too. Johanna didn’t think I understood how much work it would be, but I offered to stay with them, to bring my girls, and even cook up enough for all of us. That way we could enjoy ourselves, or they could, while I fixed meals over the open fire. I rather liked the informality of fair cooking, where no one complained about the extra dirt that might make its way into their potatoes, the way they did at home if they found a dog or goat hair in the mix.
They agreed to go. Jonathan drove a wagon and so did my father, though neither Christian nor Andy was allowed to accompany us—Martin had his classes, and Andrew covered the store. I wasn’t sure why Christian had been kept back. Some things just happened. We had all the rest of our family there—the girls, Kitty, and my younger brothers, who didn’t stay with us but who at least took their meals with us. They bunked at the horse barns, and I suspected they made wagers on the outcomes of the races.
Christine, too, was absent, but it wasn’t upsetting. There was an ebb and flow to this family; sometimes it supported and sometimes it tore at the edges, as our colony could.
We ate and walked and listened and took in the smells of the fair and the fall. A cluster of people slowed our meandering through the Household Arts exhibit, and it took a few minutes before I realized that a crowd was standing in front of my entry. My mother peered around a woman and took a long look. She said she thought the little doors a clever stitching.
“A scene with cloth,” my mother said. “But small enough to hang on a wall, and those pieces that rise up. How interesting.” She leaned in, touched the puffy clouds, and ran her hand over the texture of the fibers. “Appliqué,” she read. Then she saw my name on the ticket. She gasped. “I had no idea you did such work, Emma. That’s my daughter’s work,” she told anyone around her. I beamed. “Will you show me how?”
“We can begin today if you want,” I said.
“Nein. We will have that be a winter project. You bring the girls, and we’ll sit around the fire. Maybe Christine will be back by then, and you can teach us all.”
There were tucks in our relationship that might never be smoothed out, but that didn’t have to mean we could not go on sewing up new memories, stitching otherwise-frayed hems. I could imagine myself sitting with them, talking, my showing them a stitch and their telling me of their day. Papa might smoke out on the porch. I’d bring Po along, so he could walk me and the girls home at the end of the evening. Maybe they’d ask us to spend the night, which we’d decline because of the tiny space, but it would feel right to have been invited. The home art, as my piece was called in the fair, would be a good place for our experiences and imagination to intersect. We’d create an artifact that might take on a life of its own.
We walked out into the sunlight, and I squinted, nearly stumbling over a shovel leaned against the side of the exhibit barn.
“Are you all right?” A small, callused hand reached out for mine. “I didn’t mean to leave the shovel aleaning there. I hope you didn’t get hurt?”
I recognized the voice and smiled as I looked into the eyes of Brita. “I daydreamed,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault at all.”
To Provide For
October 6. Received my second ribbon at the fair. I appliquéd but a small portion. Instead, I used red thread to outline every piece of fabric regardless of its color or texture. It reminded me of the veins I see in the back of my mother’s hands, only I have made the color red instead of blue. My mother said it looked confused, but I didn’t mind. It looked organized to me.
Brita’s eyes were pinched, and dirt filled in lines around them that I hadn’t remembered.
“Where are the boys?” I looked around.
“They are finding work, staying with farmers who can feed them and give them a warm bed at night. I never could make it once we left the livery.”
“I’m sorry. Why didn’t you go back to the Durbin brothers or come to Aurora?” I asked. “We’d have made room for you. Did you never get my letters?”
“I wanted to do it myself,” she said.
I remembered my own difficulty in reaching for hands that could keep me from falling. “You can come now,” I told her. “You’d be welcome.”
She shook her head. “I work here, at the fair.”
“But you always said you would never go back to the carnival.”
She bristled, straightened her back. “I’m not in the circus. I pick up things. I guess they thought I was so close to the ground, my back wouldn’t hurt with the reaching and bending. It’s good work. I tidy things up.”
“Well, of course it’s good work. Tidying is what we women do, and usually no one even notices unl
ess we don’t.” She smiled, her shoulders relaxed. “Would you consider coming later? The fair doesn’t last but four or five days. Then what? I have a home. You could bring your boys.”
I saw it all in a flash: There’d be the sounds of boys in my house again. We’d find reason to laugh in the midst of our work. “The girls will love seeing Pearl again too,” I said.
Her eyes filled with tears. “I’d best return to my station. It was good to see you again, Emma. Tell your boys and those girls hello for me.” She looked away.
“Where is Pearl?” The boys were old enough to have been farmed out to hopefully kind couples, but Pearl was a young one. “You never said.”
“She didn’t make it,” she said. A sob broke from her throat. “It was a silly plan, my ahomesteading. Pearl got ill. We were far from the town. She died before I could get her to a doctor.” Her grief caught in her throat. “We can’t always do everything we set our hearts on, can we? I risked it all, and in the end I had to give up.”
Her words bored like an ocean drill into the oyster of my heart. So much of what I’d hoped for hadn’t come about either, no matter how much I longed for it, prayed for it. Yet my life was full. All of my children lived. My sons stayed healthy and would go on to school one day; my girls skipped with activity, were being educated with the warmth of family to surround them, and they, too, would pursue their Sehnsucht, their dreams and desires. I didn’t get to see my boys daily or influence them as I might like, but I still saw them. I wished they’d choose to see me more often, but my own parents felt the same way about me. One could never seem to satisfy that longing for a visit by a child, except to live with them. Or live so close that it felt as though one did. But families then had to suffer the irritations of familiarity rather than the agonies of perceived neglect. There was no perfect solution.
Brita and I moved out of the way so others could walk around us. I touched her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Brita. Losing a child…” I remembered when Christian died, how my time with his mother after that had been when I’d felt the closest to her. She’d lost a child; I’d lost my husband. But they still weighed unequally; losing a child weighed more.
“My heart has a slice right through it,” she said, drawing her wide palm like a sword across her small chest. “I don’t know what’ll ever be a-mending it. She might have lived if I’d been less stubborn. I thought I could keep her fever down. I couldn’t. I don’t think the boys will ever forgive me, either. But then, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Oh, Brita, we all do things we later regret. It’s another thing you and I have in common with everyone else who admits it. But Pearl would want you to forgive yourself. I just know it.”
I’d done so many things that I regretted. But I’d also taken steps to change through the years, to cherish what I had, to nurture hope, and to use new brush strokes to bring vibrancy to the painting of my life. I wanted that for my friend too.
“Brita. Get the boys back and come stay with us. If only for a time. We could feed you…not out of pity, but because we can, and you could give back, get restored until you know what you want to do next, truly.”
She shook her head. “It would only be a temporary fix,” she said. “Like putting a tack where a nail is needed.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s a coward’s way out.”
“Oh, Brita, how can you say that? You once lived in a cave; you didn’t plan to live there forever, did you?”
In the distance I could hear the band playing. At the end of the piece came applause. If we’d been sitting there watching and listening, we’d have heard the musicians talk briefly to one another, the movement of music papers, and then they’d clear the spit valves on their horns, that little whistle of sound that Henry C, the conductor, said wasn’t really spit but pure water formed from their breath as it condensed on the metal. The band began again. My sisters and parents had moved on to stand outside the dance hall door, leaving us alone.
“I never planned a long time in the cave or to stay at Aurora, but I did think the homestead would be forever,” she said. She poked at the ground with her picking-up stick. “I thought my purpose was to save those boys, build a home for them and Pearl, and have a place no one could ever take away from us.”
“Maybe it never was to be the house,” I said. She frowned, looking up at me. “Your purpose. Maybe it was to be with them, wherever that was, however that might be. Maybe that was the goal, and where you did that, or the adjustments you had to make, the kind of shelter you provided, standing tall for them…as tall as you could, maybe that’s all that really matters in the end. For any of us.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I failed there, too, then.” “It’s only one step. You can take the next one. I’ll walk with you.” I couldn’t convince her, any more than my relatives and friends could have convinced me those dark days in Willapa. But what I’d said to her, what I’d thought out loud before I even knew it, that was what I planned to piece and stitch and frame one day to remind myself: “It’s not the house but the shelter.” That’s what truly mattered.
Christine returned in November. I hardly recognized her. She was thinner than when she’d first come to Aurora, long before she’d danced at the fair with an interested man. But it was more than her physical change that I noticed: she had an air about her, a spirit of anticipation that drew others to her. She said she’d waited to return until after the fair, not wanting to see any old friends just yet. “I’m learning to live inside this new person,” she said. “Sometimes I can bend over to stoke the fire and stand back up without even leaning on a staff. I can move without making waves.”
“You were always light on your feet,” Kitty said.
“I eat and work the same,” she said. “But I feel filled up now. The time with Almira was good. We walked new paths, ones she made at her son’s house. Maybe it was the walking,” she said. “But I did plenty of that here too.” She shrugged her shoulders, seemed to accept the change in her life without absolute explanation.
“You look…different,” Kitty said. “Happier.”
“I am that. I remembered things you said, Emma, about being worthy, from the inside out. That’s the door I’ve opened.”
When we were alone, she told me about the delivery of her twins and her sadness when she said good-bye to them and returned here. “But Almira is good to them. And her children are good to her, the older boy and his wife. I didn’t meet Almira’s husband, but I don’t think she’s even thinking of returning to him. She said she’d find happiness every morning when she looked in the eyes of those children. I named one Emma,” Christine said, “and the other one Karl.”
“Not…”
“Not for his father, no, no. Nein. For Karl Ruge. The teacher. He was always so kind to me. When my son grows up, I want him to be like Karl. And my daughter, well, Almira’s daughter, I’m hoping she’ll be generous, like you.”
“Ach, no,” I said and waved my hand in dismissal.
“You ought to let a compliment come your way now and then,” Christine said.
Twice now I’d been described as generous, and that thought surprised. My sister Johanna, through her love for my parents and brothers and sisters, stood much higher on the ladder of compassion than I did.
“When you take a compliment in, you do your children a favor,” Christine continued. “Almira said letting her children watch their father demean her was one of the worst things she did to them. She didn’t realize that until she’d had time here to heal. She’s going to let me be a part of the children’s lives. I’ll be like an aunt to them. It will be best for us all.”
“You’ve exchanged wisdom for your weight,” I said. She grinned.
At the harvest dances, Christine had her share of beaus inviting her to Schottische or to do the webfoot quickstep. She appeared to enjoy herself, but she told me one day, as we kneaded dough together preparing for the Christmas celebrations of December, that she didn’t th
ink she’d ever marry. I cajoled her, telling her she was yet young and any number of things could happen to her that she didn’t now think possible. But she said she couldn’t tell any potential husband about her three babies, and she couldn’t imagine beginning a marriage without telling someone she loved the whole truth. It was a sacrifice she thought made sense.
“I’m sure there are useful things for me to do. And I can be happy knowing I’ve done good work, apart from caring for a husband or children.”
“Jacob Stauffer said something like that a few weeks back,” I said. I sprinkled flour onto the table and folded the dough over yet again. “He said he’d done good work in providing for Matilda, giving her a good home and happiness for however short a time. I was so glad to see him thinking that way.”
“He’ll marry again sometime,” Christine said. She patted her dough into shape, then placed it in the tin and sprinkled salt across the top. “Maybe Martha Miller.”
“Are you matchmaking?” I said. “I thought that was my job.” She laughed. “You may be a little late anyway,” I said. “Jacob told me that Christina Wolfer had brought him a chocolate cake with that coconut on it. His eyes lit up as he described it. She served it on that blue plate her mother rescued on the trail.”