“Hmm?” He turned to me. The startling, longing look disappeared. “Just saying good-bye,” he said. “Foolish. Not to worry, Liebchen.” He patted my hand.
“We’ll be going back next year, and you’ll see it all again,” I told him cheerfully.
“Indeed,” he said.
His absent-minded agreement made me wonder if he thought we might not return. “We thank God for our safe journey, ask Him to bless the remainder, and then we head west,” he said to the group more than to me, his strong arms spread out wide as though he could take us all in, keep us all safe.
It must have worked—this plan of mine—to think of all that could go wrong to prevent its occurrence because little troubled us those first days. We rode our horses on the south side of the Platte and only had to hear about the rugged crossings of those who took the north side of the river. The men talked horseflesh with other travelers, and Hans even made a trade at a farmer’s plot, turning over a tiring horse for a sturdier mount, a more willful mule who became a mate of Opal. We found good grass for them to graze on, and at least three times each week, we had wood to fire a hot meal in the evening.
Our camps were efficiently made, the beans cooked easily without sticking to the pan. Joseph Knight pulled out our Golden Rule Whiskey just once those first weeks to settle Michael Sr.’s stomach. We stopped on Sundays for a full day of rest, and Christian even helped me with the laundry on Saturday evenings if we were near water then.
Even the weather cooperated, though sometimes rain poured so hard we could barely see one another as we staked the tents. But my mother’s wool cape kept me warm and nearly dry. Thunder boomed and lightning crackled and lifted the hair at the back of my neck, but the stock stayed together, and in the mornings, we repeated our routine of readying with minimal adjustment. Inconveniences, yes. Finding a private shrub when needed, biting my tongue when I’d rather have talked, sleeping without a down pillow at my head. But I held out the image of what we’d have one day when we arrived at wherever we were going: a roof over our heads, a permanent place to stay, sunshine to make the garden grow with just enough rain to keep it watered. Everything we heard of Oregon Territory made it sound like Eden. I could put up with temporary inconveniences knowing they’d be gone at the end of the trail. I vowed to share that with the Bethelites, to prepare them for the joys that would follow the trials of the journey.
As we could, we paralleled larger lines of wagons, camped at night close enough to hear their music and the mooing of their cows. We met a woman named Elliot traveling with her children to join her husband, and a young couple named Bond, all heading to the Willamette Valley in the southern part of the Territory. They eagerly looked forward to their new lives. They spoke slowly when I asked so I could understand them and smiled when my English broke through the German in an understandable way.
Most of the time, though, because we traveled faster than wagons could, we rode alone on the vast prairies, tiny pencil dashes against a slate of prairie green. A band of people so insignificant that even the Sioux took little notice of us, leaving us alone to contemplate the monotony of our days, the certainty of our future.
At one stop, Christian spoke with travelers who said they’d go north of the Columbia River once they arrived in the Oregon Territory, for the land there stood timbered and the Californians bought the logs as quick as they were cut. He shared this news with the scouts. “Timbered ground offers a ready market for logs. It leaves land remaining to farm. This has potential,” John Genger said.
Dogs often barked in the distance when we nooned. No lost pups wandered in seeking scraps, though. Our stock became accustomed to the rhythm of our ways. I kept silent, trying to be that woman who “weren’t no trouble and even helped some.”
Just before Chimney Rock, some days out from Fort Laramie, George Link killed an antelope and brought it in to jerk. The rock pillar could be seen for miles before we reached it, and there we stayed a day beside a trickling spring that offered not enough water to wash clothes in, but ran fresh and not dirtied, unlike the rain-swollen Platte we’d been riding beside. We’d made good time, Joe Knight noted, his finger pointed to the air like the spire of Chimney Rock. “It’s just June,” he said.
“We are being tenderly led,” Christian noted.
At Fort Laramie, we restocked beans and traded some of George Link’s good jerked meat for sugar and tea and then left messages to be taken back by those heading east, most returning from the California gold fields or Oregonians bent on bringing the rest of their families out.
We were a day out of Laramie, whipped by late June winds that flapped at our tent in the night, when Christian let me know that he knew.
The intensity of his gaze must have awakened me as he leaned up on one elbow, gazing down at me when I opened my eyes. Moonbeams split the tent opening, giving a shadowed hue to his handsome face. “Can’t you sleep?” I asked.
He remained silent for a time, then spoke. “I’ve lived around women all my life. Watched the moods of my mother and sisters and my sisters-in-law wax and wane with the moon.” He combed hair from my face with the back of his fingers. He smelled of lye and vinegar from the soap we’d used to pound at the men’s jeans.
I swallowed and beneath the blanket, my thumb and forefinger began their nervous rub.
“So I note,” he said, “that something is amiss with you.”
“I’m fine, husband. This clear air does me well. I may have lost a little weight with our spare servings, but I’m healthy. Soon we’ll be in the mountains and—”
“Your face has gained fullness.” He hesitated, then added, “And you’ve had no flow since we’ve left Bethel. None before that for a month or more, now that I pay attention. I’ve been remiss. But you, you have deceived me.” I heard my heart pound in my ears. “Indeed. It’s not a wife’s place to keep secrets.”
“I haven’t kept it from you,” I said. “I wasn’t sure until recently. I didn’t want to worry you. My mother lost two children. I might not have the stamina to carry this infant, and I didn’t want you to—”
“All the more reason to tell me, Emma,” he said. He’d stopped stroking my face. He sat up, lit the lamp, and then returned, his legs folded over, his hands clasped in his lap. He squeezed his hands together, open and closed, steady as a beating heart. “You should not be doing heavy work. The laundry.” He shook his head. “Perhaps not even riding as you do, though how else we can do this now I don’t know. Maybe you will need to walk more, but this will slow us. I will have to confer with the others.”
“Why?” I whispered to him. “It’s our baby, our family. It’s none of their business. I can do the washing. You help me.”
“What happens to them happens to us, and the same is true for them. We are on this journey together. It is not possible to survive it alone. This is our colony here, small as it is, and we must work as one.”
“We don’t share children,” I hissed.
“Your needs and that of this baby now could compromise our task. Father Keil did not know of this or he would never have sent you with us.”
I kept my expression unchanged. Our leader didn’t know, but he sent me knowing that having a family was my intent. He knew there might be a child born in the Oregon Territory before the main colony came out. He knew I might have a difficult childbirth. He knew and sent me anyway, sent me because of the likelihood that I would at last know the results of Eve’s sin in Eden and perhaps accept my place.
“Haven’t I been helpful?” I put my cold hands over his clasped ones. “You didn’t even know because I’ve been no trouble.”
“It brings an issue we have not prepared for. I should have noticed before we left.”
“You were busy, preparing. Even I wasn’t sure.”
“You should have told me.” Christian looked lost in thought. He nodded his head as though in agreement, just once. “Ja, I’ll send you back with Hans.”
“No!” I withdrew my hands from his. “That w
ould be wrong.”
He was quiet, then, “Ja, you’re right.” I exhaled. “I should take you back. The hardest part of the trip is yet to come. It is my error. I should make the correction.”
“No, no. This is your mission.” My heart pounded, my mouth felt like fur. “Didn’t you say we were tenderly led? This must be a part of it, a sign to show that even with an infant we can prepare for a new colony.”
“The devil makes life easy, woos us to his ways so we forget that we are birthed in turmoil. We should not have welcomed such smoothness. I should have seen it as a distraction. So now I pay the price. You and our baby, too, unless we do the right thing now.”
He attributes this easy journey to the devil’s work; this infant, too?
“What is good comes from God. You told me this, Christian.”
“Only when we are obedient, Liebchen. Only then.”
If he took me back to Bethel, he’d blame me forever for depriving him of this response to his call. “Please listen, Christian.” I knelt in front of him, pleading. “I’m healthy and strong. I’m young. There were other women with children traveling west. I saw them at the camps. The Elliots. That young couple, she could be carrying a child even now. Some even held newborns.”
“Delivered with the help of midwives or other women, which we have none of.”
“We’ll be in Oregon Territory before the baby comes. There’ll be people, neighbors.”
“We seek isolation, Emma. We must prepare houses for ourselves and the others for when they come out. We have much to do before winter comes. A baby … in such wilderness …”
“It will break up the scouts and the success of the journey to go back now. We don’t even need to share this with the others. We’ll be in the Territory before it matters. Please, Christian. Don’t send me back, and don’t think of taking me back. I’ll help make this work, I will. You’ll be proud of me, as proud as any husband of a wife.”
“You put yourself before the others in keeping this a secret. It is not a quality I noticed in you before we married. This is a difficult thing, Emma. Something I must pray about further.” He unfolded his hands, pressed against his thighs as though to stand. “This is not your fault, Emma. It is mine. I must pay the price.”
I’d expected his anger, prepared for it, delayed telling him in fear of it. I imagined it so it might not happen. I didn’t expect self-reproach. He couldn’t have found words to trouble me more than that he would bear the blame. Now I blamed myself, not for keeping the secret, but for not imagining the worst, and so it came to be.
He stood up then, pulled on his jeans and boots.
“Where are you going?”
“To decide, Emma.”
“Can’t we decide together?”
“Apparently not.”
He stepped out through the tent flap. The whip of the wind blew out the light. When the flap closed behind him, the moonbeam no longer pierced the crack. Darkness hovered in the tent.
11
Open Places
In the morning, we gathered. A hawk of some kind soared above us, yet low enough I could see his yellow eye just before he dipped, then rose to catch a breeze. Even the bird accused. I’d spent the night in remorse, wishing I’d told Christian earlier, wanting to have shared this good godly gift with him, to let there be joy in the child’s coming rather than discord. Some events never offer a second chance.
I vowed I wouldn’t do this ever again. I’d be a wife who shared everything, a true helpmate instead of one looking out for her own … pleasure. My ears burned, thinking of what my father would say if he knew I’d kept such a secret only because I didn’t want to be left behind. My mother’s German proverb came to mind: I’d begun to weave, all right, with God’s thread; but my tapestry had tears in it already.
The men gathered at the fire. I kept my red and puffy eyes lowered beneath my bonnet, raising them only to locate Christian finishing the tent packing. He would not look at me.
“What is it?” Adam Knight asked Christian. “We should be off now. We can talk at the evening camp, ja?”
“Something has … come up, something we need to discuss,” Christian said. He motioned me forward then, and when I stopped behind him, he stepped back so I stood beside him, and I thus was ushered into the circle. At the oddest of times, I’d become one of them.
“My wife is with child,” he said.
“Ach!” Adam Schuele said. He frowned.
“Oh, ho!” Joe Knight said, but he at least grinned.
I felt my face grow hot. I wanted to go back inside the tent, but Christian had already taken it down and rolled the pack onto Opal.
“It’s nothing to cheer over,” Christian said. “Not here. Not now. We have time to return, Emma and I. So she will be safe with family.”
“You’re my family,” I said, biting my tongue as soon as I said it.
“Ja. We’re all family,” George said.
“Someone else can take her back,” John Genger said. “This would be more practical. Not you. We need you. You’ve been anointed as leader.”
“Anyone going back will compromise the mission,” John Stauffer said. He pulled at a tobacco strip, then chewed. “We need all of us to build, all of us to decide the site. If one returns now, we’ll have fewer to work and even less when we send men back to bring the rest out.”
“Pa’s right, Christian,” Hans said.
“You knew?” Adam Knight asked me. “You didn’t tell your husband?”
“I—”
“She told me when she was certain, but I should have known this,” Christian said.
“She will slow us down,” John Genger said.
“It hasn’t—”
“If we are not here, there will be fewer to prepare for each day,” Christian said. “You can make better time without us.”
“You were chosen by Father Keil.” This from Joe Knight’s brother.
“We can make adjustments, brother,” Joe Knight said. “All will work out well. Change doesn’t mean we’ve erred.”
“When? When can we expect this infant to join the scouts?” Hans asked as he scratched at his callus.
Christian turned to me, a puzzled look on his face.
“Am I allowed to speak at last?” Christian narrowed his eyes at me. “October,” I told him, then said to the group, “Late in October.”
We heard the oxen from a nearby camp being yoked. A child’s cry rose and then silenced.
“Nine were chosen for a reason,” Adam Schuele said at last. “Nine were commissioned by our leader. Nine plus this woman. She is one of us. She is here to discover her own part in God’s plan for us. Her presence offers an opportunity to show the spirit of our colony, that we look after one another, that all needs are provided for with enough left to give away. We will look after you, too, Christian. It is how we do this. As community.”
Adam Schuele had scouted for Bethel with my father, and his words now brought my father to mind. My father committed me to Adam’s care in addition to my husband’s; it had been my father’s last request before we left.
The men remained silent after Adam spoke. I didn’t know now if they’d take a vote or what would happen. Did Christian’s word as leader carry more weight in this instance? Did his status as my husband matter? Was it a greater sin that I kept a secret from the scouts and the will of the colony, or from my husband?
The silence lasted a long time. I thought of words to fill the empty space, but something kept my mouth closed. Instead, I listened to the distant sounds of wagons coming forward, the stomps of impatience and snorts from our stock all packed up and ready to start out. The breeze dried the perspiration above my lip. I kicked at the edge of the fire and watched the sparks light up. The worst that could happen had been said out loud: sending me back.
No, the worst would be if Christian left to take me back. It would be years, if ever, before he’d forgive me for that. I poked in the dust with my boot, sending up dust puffs between Chri
stian and me.
“By October we’ll be well into Oregon Territory.” Michael Sr. spoke at last. “You can winter in Portland or Dalles City if need be while the rest of us find the site and begin the work. This would be better than losing anyone to a return trip.”
“Keeping her through the winter apart from us will cost,” John Genger said. Then he shrugged. “But maybe some settler will take pity on us and sell out cheaper if they see we have a woman and babe to tend to.”
“Oh, ho,” Joe cleared his throat. “I say she stays. Who else says this?”
All the men concurred. Only Christian withheld his agreement nod.
“Can you live with this, Christian?” Adam Schuele asked. “Can you accept the consensus of the scouts and trust that what you have is what God wants for you?”
“Ja, I can,” he said at last. “Though I will wonder always why He chose to let me lead this scouting party but not my own household.”
The next days were silent ones between my husband and me. We did the work together that we needed, carried messages back and forth between the others and one another about how far we’d travel before nooning. We even washed clothes together in a dirty stream, and he answered me when I asked for the name of the land formation in the distance. We were civil to each other but spoke less than if we’d just recently met. At night, we slept side by side with his arm often draped over me as he snored. He would quickly remove it in the morning.
I wanted to talk with him about this infant. I wanted to ask how he might have rejoiced if we had been back in Bethel or already in Oregon sharing this news. It was this in-between state that bothered him, I told myself. He worried over our safety, about the journey between where we’d been and where we headed.
The snake rose up twisting and turning into itself, slithering like a thick rope through the landscape canvas of mountains and trees and rushing rivers until it hissed, “Traitor,” its mouth wide and fangs wet.
“Traitor!” I shouted the word loud enough inside my dream that I woke Christian up.