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

  “Those ugly boils,” Louisa said. I’d just come downstairs from the bedroom where Lucinda convalesced.

  “Don’t they mean that the pox is taking its course?” I asked. “Isn’t that a good sign?”

  “Oh, I pray they’ll get well now,” she said. “I do.” She said it with a wail. “What could I have done to bring this on? What?”

  I reached to touch her hand. We Germans weren’t known for demonstrations of affection, and the wartime Sanitary Commission urged people not to touch another’s clothing during times of illness, but comfort sometimes required an abandoning of the rules.

  “You didn’t do anything,” I told her, relying on my understanding of the gift of grace. “Illness…happens. It isn’t brought on by a parent’s behavior or as punishment. How could it be as punishment? We’ve already been forgiven for our many sins, remember?”

  Louisa shook her head. “Nein, nein. There is reason for everything. Look at Job.”

  “But not everything is reasonable,” I said. “Christian’s death wasn’t reasonable, drowning to save another who saved himself. Your Willie was too young to die, too good, and yet he did. That’s not reasonable, it just is.”

  “Ja, that’s why I fear this. My husband believes the sins of the father are given to the children.”

  In this case I thought Brother Keil couldn’t place blame on the sins of the mother. Surely he wouldn’t. But I knew Louisa heard it that way. She’d carry the blame. We all did when someone we loved was in distress, wondering what we might have done differently to prevent it.

  I stood beside her, my arm around her waist now. She was taller than I was, but she leaned for comfort into my smaller frame. Her ribs felt as thin as knitting needles. I wanted to say something to encourage her. I tried to remember what Karl Ruge had said after Christian died. I’d trusted that someone who cared for me on this earth could be the hand that reached out to keep me from falling. Then a psalm came to mind. “Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy.…Our soul waiteth for the LORD: he is our help and our shield.” I recited it softly to Louisa.

  “Ja,” she whispered. “I’ll hope that God is merciful to end our suffering.” She cried then, against my shoulder.

  To end suffering. Theirs and my own. I prayed for an end to the suffering of my friends. Our own healing often came when we prayed for others. Karl had told me that too. After a time, Louisa dabbed at her eyes and put the cloth in the basket where we kept all used linens.

  “We can transform things,” I told Louisa. “We stitch tiny scraps into comforting quilts, spare and splendid in their beauty. We make glasses out of old bottles. We take sad times and find the threads of wisdom there and weave it into the next generation. We’re alchemists, we women,” I said. “We change things.”

  “Ja, but Eve turned a lovely garden into a place of separation,” Louisa said.

  “We need to think of hopeful things, Louisa.” I took a deep breath. “For now,” I said, “let’s trust that God will change us through our prayers, ja? We’ll pray the sicknesses of hearts and bodies will pass over and only small scars will be left behind.”

  On November 27, we learned that Solomon and Isaac Durbin’s livery in Salem, where Brita had gone to work, had burned to the ground.

  On the same day, my parents arrived.

  They stepped out of the ox wagon on a cool day with misty rain beading onto our wool cloaks and dresses. I’d come out of the house through the root room door to bring in a bucket of rainwater, breaking loose the lace of ice around the edge. I looked up, saw the wagon, and recognized my mother. I was speechless. Raindrops tap-tapping on leaves filled the otherwise still air.

  My mother walked to me, wrapped her arms around me, and patted my back, not long enough for me to be the first to let go, but firmly enough.

  “You look well, Emma,” she said, surprise in her voice. Then, “Gut. That’s gut. Where are your children?” She looked around. “Ah. So, this is your Andy.” She pointed with her chin, past me to where the children had once again followed me out. They must have seen the wagon through the main floor windows.

  I gathered up words. “Say hello to your Oma,” I told Andy, pushing him forward to his grandmother. Andy shook her hand. Kate curtsied, without my even telling her. “This is Christian,” I told her, introducing my younger son, who had turned four in April. “And Ida, the baby, is inside. We should go in, to get out of this weather.”

  “Jack’s girl,” my mother said. Water misted off of her felt bonnet.

  “My girl,” I corrected.

  “Your Christian has his papa’s eyes. Kind eyes. Well, all the brothers and sisters have his eyes, don’t you think so, Mr. Wagner?” It’s what she called my father. “Ida has brown eyes too?”

  I shook my head no. My father nodded agreement to my mother’s words. He hadn’t reached out to hold me, and so I held back too, my fingers making circles against my thumb pads. I couldn’t have borne it if I’d reached my arms to him and he’d stood rigid as a backsaw, cutting through my hoped-for warmth. I was glad I held a pail in my hand. Then my brother Jonathan greeted me with a bear hug, around bucket and all. “Sister,” he said. “You finally made your way to Aurora.”

  “You too,” I told him. I smiled. “Has it changed much?”

  “Nein,” he said. He gazed around. “Jack told us where you’d be staying.”

  “You fooled me with your grand words about Aurora,” I told him, ignoring the reference to Jack. “You described an Eden here, but it isn’t.”

  “Ja, ja,” Jonathan said. “But Eden is in the mind too, Sister. So it becomes what you make it, ja? What your mind’s eye brings to it.”

  “‘I think myself happy.’”

  My mother nodded. “From the book of The Acts,” she said.

  “It can be done, Sister,” Jonathan said, “with faith.” He held his index finger up to the air like a teacher giving me a good grade. “It can be done.”

  I was reintroduced to my younger brothers and sisters then. William had been four when I left Bethel; he was nearly fourteen now and towered over me as he asked if they could carry things inside.

  “Ja,” I said. “Go right in through there. Ask for biscuits in the kitchen. I’m sure you’re hungry, ja?”

  He nodded and moved past me. Louisa, sixteen, stood slender and pale. She held her head at an angle, and one eye drifted off to the side as she smiled at me. Johanna, eighteen, nodded and said with no nonsense, “Sister,” then took Lou’s arm, following William inside. Kitty, as she called herself, was twenty and had always complained in her letters about the size of her hips, but I envied her robust roundness. Beside her, I felt insignificant as a string beside a rope. She was lovely. Her eyes held adoration, and I felt my face grow warm.

  Another woman I didn’t recognize stood beside Kitty. She stood back from the crowd. Her dark hair parted in the center, and her skirts billowed out from a waist as thick as a walnut trunk. How can Kitty think herself big compared to this woman?

  “This is our foster daughter,” my mother said. “Christine’s her name.” She curtsied toward me, her back as straight as a ladle. Her skirts made a hush as she bowed.

  “Your…foster daughter?”

  “I wondered how you’d look after all this time,” Kitty interrupted. She’d closed the gap between us, grabbed my narrow shoulders, and held me at arm’s length, then pulled me into a closer hug. “And now I have two older sisters. Isn’t that grand? You look young as a twig,” she said. “You’ve been married twice and me not even once.” She rolled her lower lip out, the way Ida did when she didn’t get her way.

  “Ach, Kitty,” my mother chided her. “How you worry over nothing.”

  David Jr. was twenty-two and, like my oldest brother, Jonathan, a grown man with a full, dark beard. He stood beside the team, absently rubbing the harness. Both of them began gathering things up out of the wagon, David Jr. saying he’d take the ox team to the barn if I?
??d direct him.

  I pointed toward the ox barn down in the village, then said to my mother, “I didn’t know you’d fostered a child. A person. Taken in a child when you haven’t even written…

  “Christine.” I nodded to her, my stomach flummoxed indeed.

  “She had a need; we could meet it,” my father said at last.

  “Yes. Of course,” I said. “That’s what we Wagners do.”

  In the midst of my confusion, I still managed to warn them then about the illness. It was everywhere in the country, but at least here we kept precautions in the Haus. I thanked Kitty for writing to me and hoped I didn’t sound wounded that my parents hadn’t. I invited them to sleep inside.

  “Oh, we’ll stay in the wagon,” my father said. “So don’t drive it away, David. It surely can’t rain like this all the time.” To me he said, “We’re used to the wagon. Slept in it while visiting your aunt in the Deseret country.”

  “But there’s room here,” I insisted. Then thinking that maybe they didn’t want to stay where I was, I added, “Or you could stay with the Snyders. Or at Adam’s, though he lives a good seven miles out. You boys could bed down with the bachelors on the top floor.” I couldn’t imagine them spending one more night in that wagon. “I wish I had a home for you to stay in,” I said. “But there were more important things happening here than building a house for me.” I said it cheerfully. I didn’t want them to think I complained. “Then the illnesses…,” I said. “No one has had much interest in doing anything except nursing the sick.”

  “Another reason for us to go elsewhere,” my father said.

  William had come back out, holding a biscuit. “Oh, let the children spend the night inside,” my mother told him. “And I’m going in out of this rain to see Louisa and Helena at the very least.”

  “And to meet Ida,” I told her.

  “Ja. To meet Jack’s Ida.” She sighed but patted my arm as she walked by. Christine, my new sister, followed close behind.

  Inside there were greetings all around. Even Keil came out of the sickroom where he’d been attending his ailing children. He held my father in a bear hug. Neither man spoke a word, and they cleared their throats and looked at the floor when they released each other. They hold affection for each other, so it’s something I’ve done that kept my parents from coming here. Amelia, looking somewhat improved, descended the steps and hesitated. Frederick’s face lit up. He’d not taken ill, and neither had Emanuel, but it is a weight, I think, to be healthy while watching those you love suffer.

  “She recovers,” Keil said, nodding his head toward Amelia.

  “You can stay here,” I assured my family.

  “Ja, you must, David. We have much to catch up on,” Keil said.

  “Well…you boys bunk for the night in with the bachelors, as your sister suggests,” my father told them. “Your mother and I will remain in the wagon.”

  “Just until we build you a house,” Brother Keil said. “It is so good to have you here, David. Ja, this will be good.”

  My father grunted in that way he did before he said something he thought might be disagreeable. “We’ll stay until we find our own property, Wilhelm.”

  “You’re not going to live in Aurora?” I blurted.

  “We’ll do better on our own.”

  Keil took that poorly. Perhaps he was already worn down by the smallpox; or perhaps it had something to do with old memories, like the time when Adam Schuele had returned. He wore a puzzled look when he turned away. He said nothing more, walked back toward his workroom.

  “Jonathan will stay. He’s prepared to help manage the store,” my father called after Wilhelm. “But we are too many to add to your burdens here, with the children ill and all. We’ll make our own way. Perhaps find land to homestead.”

  I didn’t think Keil was listening. But I was. “Would you…that is, would you allow me and my children to come with you, then?” I asked. I’d spoken a thought out loud and heard it myself for the first time. It wasn’t good timing.

  Keil reentered the room, his eyes boring into mine. “We have not made life here good for you, then, Sister Emma?”

  “Ja. I mean, no, you have been very good to me and my family. But as my father notes, many mouths to feed are burdensome.”

  “What should we do with these, Frau Giesy?” One of the newer girls came down the steps carrying dirty linens, unaware that she was interrupting.

  “Steam the linens well. Maybe put some lavender in the water to make it smell pretty for the Keil girls. Don’t inhale the steam.”

  “Ja, Frau Giesy,” she said as she hurried out to the washroom. Her red and green coverlet offered bright color in an otherwise drizzling day.

  “You should think twice about leaving,” Keil said to me. “This communal place has served your family well. Or do you so easily forget? Did you not request a home?” He stared at me.

  “You promised me a home, but—”

  “I’ve had things on my mind, ja? Are you so impatient and self-centered as to begrudge a man that? What more can we do for you!” He turned and closed the door to his workroom.

  I wanted to remind him that I’d worked very hard to pay my way here, only to have my husband assume my earnings. I’d waited a long time for a home that didn’t appear any closer to being constructed. Now here was my family. How could he object to a family gathering itself together after so long a separation? But of course he was right: I was thinking of myself and my family, and not the suffering of his.

  I looked at my father. I felt a hopefulness that even without knowing the why of our separation, my family would stand with me. I was not alone.

  “I’d say you were settled in well here,” my father said. “You seem to be able to direct people.” He nodded toward where the girl had passed by with the linens. “And Keil obviously thinks your being here is of use. I wouldn’t want to interfere with your successful arrangements. We’d best find a place apart. Come, Mrs. Wagner,” he told my mother. “We’ll get us biscuits and warm up by the fire and then settle in for the night. Christine, Daughter, you’re welcome too. You’re family.”

  My sister nodded at me, then followed them into the kitchen. I tagged along behind, like a beaten-down puppy.

  An Elevating Purpose

  My friend Lucinda Wolfer died just a few days after my parents arrived. The smallpox from the family John cared for had made its way to his very own bed. Grieving with John and Lucinda’s family kept me from pursuing Brita’s fate at the burned-out livery in Salem, but it also took my mind from the unease between me and my parents.

  I wished we’d had a church where we could hold ourselves together in our grief. I missed the bells and almost told Helena so. She had so much wanted the colony to build a church before we built a single other dwelling. I hated to think it, but she was right. In Bethel, the bells had rung out for glorious occasions, but also for funerals. It was a fitting requiem for lives lost, the bells tolling like the years, a reverberating silence when the last clang had rung. Lucinda had been a good friend, and I felt that somehow the tiny Schellenbaum bells tinkling in its standard in the drafty room were not enough to tell the world of our great loss.

  “I’ve found ways to not worry so much over the unexpected,” I told Karl one day when I brought hot soup to him at his toll hut. During the winter months, after school, I risked wagging tongues by taking sustenance to him before dusk. Boiling the onions to arouse more flavor from the potatoes, I remembered my mother saying that as people grew older, they longed for intensive tastes. I had to skip over puddles and walk on the spongy grass and balance my hand just so, since my fingers hadn’t healed well after one of my bouts with Jack. Still, I kept the soup kettle level.

  “All my worrying over what I’d do when Jack came here, or what he’d do while he stayed, came to nothing,” I told Karl. “He up and left—after reminding me that by law, he deserved all my earnings.” I took a deep breath to wash the disgust from my voice. “I’m sure John Wolfer f
ollowed Martin’s and Brother Keil’s advice for caring for the ill, but Lucinda died anyway. My parents finally arrive, but there is still this strain between us. It doesn’t seem fair, any of it. I told Louisa that not everything had a reason, but I’m having trouble believing that myself today.”

  Karl nodded. “Ja, it is good to come to that place. Death and uncertainty are a part of our lives. We wrap our grief with good memories of what encouraged us; they remind us that we live through such things. In the unpredictability, that’s where the Spirit comes to bring us comfort.”

  “I wish the Spirit wouldn’t wait until I’m miserable,” I said.

  “Ja, you hear His voice in the calm too, not just the storms, but we have to learn to listen.” I looked at the tin ladle I’d brought with me from the hotel. It had an emblem, a leaf, at the back. I recognized it as one that Christian had made. I’d found it, now among the common drawer utensils. I’d considered keeping it out for myself but didn’t.

  “What is left to do then is to find meaning, Emma, not a reason. To live a life despite worry or planning against disasters. Things will happen. Worse would be to let fears of death or disappointment frame our days. We are placed here with desires. Ja, desires,” he affirmed when I lifted my eyebrows. “It is part of our journey to discover what those desires are and then to find a way to live them fully as intended. That’s why we listen.”