Andy nodded, and Kate began telling him in her boisterous voice about the monkey who sat upon a wooden music box, then started dancing.
“We need to finish unloading,” I told her. “Settle down now.” I scanned the area, looking for Jack. All I wanted was to know what Martin had to tell me.
“I’ll get Clara,” Kate whispered. She ran back out to see if she could lift the basket with the chicken in it by herself.
I had to help her. We set the basket next to her, as she cuddled beside Pearl and Ida on the mats that Brita had laid out for us all. I’d have to build a movable pecking cage for Clara in the morning.
When I came back out to the wagon to get the last blanket twisted around the food basket, Martin stopped me. “Jack’s gone back to Willapa. He says ‘for good.’”
I caught my breath, put my fingers to my throat to keep me from crying out with joy. “Could my life be so blessed?”
“Karl talked with him on the bridge. He said he’d had enough time in Aurora. Said he’s going back where having an ale or two isn’t considered demonic.”
“Truly,” I said. I sat on the lowest step, removed my bonnet. It was like him to do the unexpected. I was so pleased I hadn’t wasted hours in anticipating how he could mess up our return. “That’s it then? I’m…free,” I said. Can it be?
I knew I wasn’t totally free. I was still married to Jack Giesy. But as the days went by without Jack around, I realized that ambiguous position provided a certain safety too. I was not a woman who’d be sought after by a man. Even if I were, I could easily put off such an adventurer by saying that I was a married widow. That alone ought to confuse a suitor and send him looking elsewhere. I’d already attempted to blend one family into another without success. I had no wish to try again. I could devote my life to caring for my children. If I wanted to hear a man’s voice or smell a pipe, I could visit Karl Ruge or walk up Keil’s steps to the main floor, where bachelors congregated in the evening, making music, talking.
Jack had taken up so much space in my life that I could hardly imagine a day without worrying about his next move, without defending my children from him. But maybe life did offer strange twists that turned us around like a top. Ja, they did.
Late that fall, Henry C. Finck arrived from Bethel, bringing his five children including ten-year-old Henry T (as he was known). The child squinted at the vials in the blue cabinet, reading each label aloud and telling any who would listen what the name would be in Latin. He was precocious, but his love of learning could make him a good pal for Andy.
“We will have the best, most wonderful Christmas this year,” Louisa crooned. “Herr Finck is a genius with the music. We’ll have choirs and a Pie and Beer Band too, not only the Aurora Band. There’ll be music for those left behind when the band travels off to dances and such. And he’s a widower too, Emma. You think of that.”
“Nothing to think of,” I said as I stitched. “I’m still a married woman, remember?”
“Ach,” she said, waving her hands at me. “I so easily forget.”
“If only I could.”
A rooster crowed while we served the men their suppers, reminding me that no one had said anything about how I’d paid for my chicken. One of the bachelors said, “He’s looking for that Clara of yours, Sister Emma, the one that looks like she was tossed out of the creation oven before there was time to put tail feathers on her.”
“She’s the way she was intended to be,” I defended to the men’s laughter.
“She does stand out.”
“As Emma likes to,” Helena said. She set a plate of ginger cookies on the table and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Everyone liked the blue eggs. They liked the idea of the colony having such a unique chicken. But Helena saw it as yet another way I was being a separate dish in a community that honored blended stews. The colony owned the chicken, this I knew, but I did name her and did build the cage for her. Perhaps Helena was threatened by my having something attached to my name instead of the chicken’s belonging to us all.
I thought about that the rest of the evening. The next morning I took Clara out and put her with the other chickens, scratching for worms behind the Keils’, and prayed that the hawks would resist the delicacy.
As the rains began again that year, Brother Keil arranged for Karl to read Scripture to us twice monthly, but he himself stopped leading worship. Louisa hinted it was his gout that pained him. During worship, we women sat on one side of the big upstairs room, and the men sat on the other. Karl sat at the head, his back to the fireplace. I liked hearing the words but wished we could have sung more hymns as we had back in Bethel. Still, the band sometimes played. Brother Keil liked band music.
After our meetings, I found I wanted to talk, to make the readings relevant for how we lived in Aurora, and not just focusing on way back when the words were first written. When we were in Willapa, Karl and I could have talked like the old friends we are. But here, people clustered around us in the Haus and there was no time to speak freely as friends. Karl spent days at the toll hut, but I didn’t feel right about visiting him. It wouldn’t be “seemly,” as Helena was fond of saying. That’s what she told me about discussing the readings too.
“It isn’t seemly,” Helena said, “for us to discuss Scripture, without structure provided by a religious leader.”
“My husband will feel better soon,” Louisa said. “Then he’ll lead us as he has before. Instead, let’s use this time together to stitch or card.”
In the back of my mind I remembered a scripture about people “hearkening together,” but I couldn’t name it. I’d look for it in Christian’s Bible and then make my case again. If I ever got my own home I’d have a talking time there, or at least invite others to come. I might ask my mother for that verse when I wrote her next. She might respond to a question of faith, if not to my plaintive calls for them to come west. I sat down to do it right then.
In November, Brita left us. “It’s atime,” she said as she folded her children’s meager things into the middle of their quilts and blankets. I fidgeted, agitated, maybe envious at her ability to set a goal and meet it. She’d decided some weeks earlier to help a neighbor outside of the colony, in addition to assisting at the hotel. That’s where she’d been working the night we’d returned from the fair. The people Brita had gone to assist weren’t part of the colony, and so they paid her with currency even a greenback, said to be in great circulation back in the States. Her new employers worked her hard, and she returned to the gross Haus exhausted each night. But she could keep her earnings. She’d make better wages at the Durbin Livery Stable in Salem, once she moved there.
“Aren’t you worried about working with such big animals?” I asked.
“I’m just cleaning stalls,” she said. “It’s warm and inside work, and there’s a room my children and I can stay in. I’m close to the ground, so my back doesn’t ache as another’s might. Besides, there’s asoothing to be found around a breathing animal like that. If a dog or chicken or goat is company, why not a horse?”
“But Pearl…” I said.
“The Durbins like to have babies about. The boys can help with feeding and such, and I hope to make enough to send them to school. I’m not a saying it’s forever, but for now, we’ll be together, and I’ll be putting money aside for when the new Homestead Act’s set up.”
I hadn’t heard of this and said so. She told me of the act, which would give one hundred sixty acres to anyone over twenty-one who was willing to farm, build a cabin, and stay for five years.
“I’m saving money so we can buy seed and other things we need,” said Brita.
While I had been imagining a house with two sides to share with her (though I’d never expressed it), she had proceeded with dreams of her own.
Andy regretted Charles’s leaving. He’d found a real friend in the blond-headed boy. “He was my lookout, Mama,” Andy told me. “So we never were surprised by Big Jack.”
“His leaving i
s good timing, then,” I said. “Jack is gone. See how God provided for us, all we needed?” Andy nodded, though I could still see the loss in his eyes.
“I’ll look out for you,” Christian offered. Andy shrugged, but Christian didn’t seem to notice. Christian had his big brother back. “Andy’s more in-trusting than Stanley or Pearl,” my younger son told me.
“The word is ‘interesting,’” I said.
“That’s what I said,” he defended. “In-trusting.”
“Well, maybe that’s a good word too,” I said.
Ida, too, noted the change in our hallway constellation of stars.
“Pearl gone?” she’d ask, her personal doll somehow come up missing. When I explained that yes, Pearl was indeed gone, my youngest child brushed aside the mending I worked on, pulled herself up onto my now-empty lap and demanded in her small but charged voice, “Mama, hold!”
And I’d held her, my chin on her head as she leaned against my breast. “Mama holds,” I said. I’d hold my impatience in getting a home, hold my sadness at Brita’s departure. Most of all, I’d hold out hope that my parents would join me one day. Until then, holding my children safely was a prayer I lifted up for myself. All families need the glue of someone to hold.
Seeking Meaning
December 12. Kona coffee sells in Portland along with crushed sugar. I’ve no need now for the sugar breaker Christian had the blacksmith make for me. I have happy plans for holiday cooking. Food to heal the sorrowful souls. Clara has stopped laying eggs.
December 13. I let the flour dry on the back of the range all night. My cake rose higher than expected. Perhaps it is a sign of good things to come.
Only Kate appeared oblivious to the departure of Brita’s family. The Keil girls pampered Kate the most of all my brood, and they continued after Brita left, playing hiding games with her, letting her go with them to gather eggs or feed the goats. Aurora, who was nearly thirteen and looked more mature than that, showed Kate how to stitch the paper model “In God We Trust,” and my daughter insisted they were “wise words” when she showed it to me. A twinge of guilt tweaked me that I’d taught Kate neither how to do the stitches nor nurtured her spiritual life to help her find those wisest of words. The Keil girls were doing it for me.
“It’s lovely, Kate,” I said. “But why did you sign it ‘Catie’?”
“Ja. Father Keil says that’s my name.”
“It’s not the one your father and I gave you.”
“I like it,” she said and pooched her lower lip out in protest.
I loved her independence but resented Keil’s latest intrusion into my life. It was probably nothing worth arguing over, I decided. “Well, I’ll still call you Kate,” I said with more assurance than I felt. “And that’ll be that.”
When the annual sickness came, I took a deep breath. This was how our winters wore on. But now I was among people who could help me care for my children if they became ill, as they had that first hard winter. I could be hopeful. Everyone had sniffles. It was part of living.
“The people your little Zwerg helped out are ill now,” Lucinda Wolfer told me.
“She isn’t my little person,” I said, “any more than anyone else’s.”
“Ja, ja. I meant no offense.”
“Besides, they were healthy when Brita left.”
I knew that Brita had worked hard steaming the bedclothes because she told me of the demanding work, the tubs so tall she stood on stools to stir the clothes with an oak paddle.
John Wolfer, Lucinda’s husband, that kindhearted man, asked Brother Keil if he shouldn’t go and help another family across the Pudding who suffered from the illness, even though it might be smallpox. “It’s the Christian thing to do,” John said.
“Ja, it is that.” Keil was on his way out the door to help another household, and he had already been by to treat John’s friends. Martin, too, had begun visiting the sick, and more than once Andy asked if he could go along to help. I’d refused him that, fearful of what he might contract. Andy’d scowled as he used to, arms crossed over his small chest and his leather shoes kicking at the sideboard. “You’re prone to sickness,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be good.”
“They’ve had what medicine I can give them,” Keil told Martin and John as they stood before the blue cabinet. Both healing men were filling their leather medicine bags. Andy glared at me with darkened eyes. “It’s mostly tending now. You’ll need to wash the linens, John. Use soap but don’t breathe in the steam. Keep the windows open to air things out, and don’t get too close to them. You understand? And always wash your hands afterward. We know now that helps. That doctor who came from the States in ’52 with wagons to Portland made everyone wash their hands and boil the water, and they lost not a soul, though cholera raged around them. You wash your hands.” John nodded and left by the root room door.
“I hope this isn’t smallpox,” Brother Keil said to Martin. “It could race through Oregon as it did of old.” Brother Keil had taken to wearing a frock coat he had tailored himself. It was the fashion now, but it still surprised me that he’d take the time to be in style. He checked the stitching on the cuffs.
“We’ll do what we can,” Martin said. He touched Andy’s hair. “Your mother’s right. You stay here and keep those sniffles from getting worse. When you’re better, you can help.”
Andy looked up at me. “When the sniffles are gone.” His face relaxed, and the kindness of his heart, wanting to help others, showed through his eyes.
John Wolfer traveled back and forth to assist the ill family but finally returned to stay when the man and two of their children died. The man’s wife and another child appeared unaffected.
“You did your best,” Brother Keil told him in the workroom. I could hear them as I tended the children in the wide hall. “And you’ve not become ill, so this is good. If the cold weather comes, it’ll freeze out the disease.”
“We can hope,” John told him.
I wanted us to do something that wasn’t weighted with illness and loss. I’d begun to realize that I grieved Brita’s leaving. In the past when my heart felt broken, I’d slammed the door on it, then opened it later to a slug in the garden named Jack. This time I wanted to recognize my sadness and do something thoughtful rather than impulsive. I looked for a happy task. I decided to begin furnishing the house I didn’t have yet. I found four, empty wide-necked bottles and solicited Louisa and Lucinda Wolfer’s help.
“We really have so many other things to do,” Louisa said.
“But music makes you happy, and making these glasses will make me happy.”
“Drinking glasses?”
I nodded. “Put the leather thong around here,” I directed. “That’s where we’ll want the top of the glass to be, right at the base of the neck. Now I wrap a good cord twice around the bottle.”
“Have you done this before?” Lucinda asked. She looked doubtful.
“I watched the men do it in Bruceport,” I said. “And because it takes three, I got to help. I remember the details.”
“Let’s pray you do,” Louisa said. She straightened her apron and set her feet, as though she was readying to catch a pig before it ran between her knees.
“You hold this end of the cord, and, Lucinda, grab the other. When I say so, take turns pulling back and forth on your cords as fast as you can, but keep the bottle straight.”
“I don’t understand how this will get you a glass,” Lucinda said.
“The bottle will heat up where the cords are pulled,” I said. “Then when the glass is hot…I’ll grab hold of it to know…I’ll drop a stream of cold water where the cord is, and when you remove the cord, the bottle will break just above the leather, and I’ll hold a glass in one hand and a candlestick holder in the other. It’s gut!” I sang out.
We set about our tasks, the leather thong marking the top, me with the cold water ready. Louisa pulled first; Lucinda pulled back. They seesawed and we laughed until the cord smelled hot. “Reminds m
e of a taffy pull,” Louisa said.
“Now?” Lucinda said.
“Let’s get it good and hot,” I said.
A tiny trail of smoke rose up, and I lifted my apron bottom to hold the bottle. With my free hand I dribbled the cold water, set the ladle down, then took hold of the top.
“Ach, Jammer!” I said, shaking my hand of the stinging heat.
“Emma,” Lucinda chastened. “Are you burned?”
I shook my head no, reached for a quilted pie pad, and held the top as the glass separated like a yolk from a perfectly tapped shell. “My first furnishings for my new home,” I cheered.
“Well, I’ll be,” Lucinda said. “Who would have thought? I’ve turned a tin can into an apple corer by sticking it into hot coals to cut off the top, but I’ve never turned a molasses bottle into a drinking glass.”
“You are such a clever woman, Emma,” Louisa said, smiling.
“Someone told me once you had to spin into gold the straw you were given,” I said. “Let’s see how many more we can make. Some for the colony, of course.”
Two days later, Lucinda became ill. She was followed by Brother Keil’s son Elias, a big, strapping boy who helped with the animals. And then Gloriunda Keil’s giggling lessened. Aurora lay panting beneath her mother’s cooling forehead rag. Louisa, Keil’s oldest daughter, complained of headaches, and then the cough came. Amelia took on suffering next, her frame as slender as a spring sapling overwhelmed by quilts. We were tending them all at the gross Haus, steaming linens, making sure none of the healthy children were nearby to breathe in the harmful mists. Spoonfuls of laudanum got handed out like candy to help ease their discomfort. I feared that the blue cabinet would soon be empty. I wished again my children were in their own home, away from the spots and the coughs of so many.
Even more, though, I was afraid that the Keil children would die. The Keils had already lost a son, Willie, who they’d carried across the plains in his own casket and buried next to my husband in Willapa. Brother Keil had preached on more than one occasion that a child’s death spoke more to the sins of the parents than about the child. I’d never understood such thinking, and to speak it at a child’s funeral seemed as cruel as the death itself. I ached for Louisa, who went from bed to bed to comfort them. Five children ill. She took few moments even to eat, spending all her time and energy attempting to get her children to sip beef broth and hold it down. Reddish spots formed on their chests. Their youngest, Emanuel, Louisa relegated to our hallway area, since he showed no signs of illness. Frederick Keil, already a young man in his twenties and not coughing, stayed with the bachelors on the top floor. I thought his mother might have appreciated his assisting her, but it wasn’t likely he’d offer and Louisa wouldn’t ask. She’d already lost one son to illness.