It wasn’t that the land near the river wasn’t lush and laid out for easy tilling, but that these meanders of river were separated by ghastly tangles of vines and trees and sometimes close-in hills that seemed to suck the air from my throat. We could cut trails along the river through those sections, but most likely living here, we would use the boats often, ride in small crafts that were not nearly as grand nor as sleek or as stable as those used by the Cowlitz people. We’d be dependent on this river, to go from here to there. I’d be on water nearly every day of my life if I wanted to visit someone, or become a hermit connected only to my husband and my children.
“I’ve purchased these three hundred twenty acres,” Christian told me when we’d beached the boat and climbed up a high bank. “It was a donation land claim of a man who is prepared to leave.”
“But it’s so far from Woodard’s Landing and our place,” I said. “Won’t we all want to be close, the way we were in Bethel?”
“This is maybe seven miles, nothing more.” He bristled.
“I only meant that in Bethel we all lived close together. In a town, with streets that—”
“Some stayed in Nineveh, you forget. We can have settlements separated by a few miles and still remain true to our cause. We all agreed to settle along the Willapa, Emma. We will need to do things differently in the West. Around us is free land if a family lives on it for five years and improves it. It’s theirs. There is no such thing as this in Bethel. We cannot afford to drain the entire treasury there to buy land for us, Liebchen.” He patted my shoulder.
“I’ve seen no buggies, or even people except for the Woodards.”
“I told you. Here we walk or go by water. It is the way. There’s a post office in Bruceport and warehouses, so there are people closer to the bay. We’ll go there one day. You’ll see. This will be the route nearest to the Cowlitz, and those from Bethel will come across our trail, and maybe by then we’ll have time to clear it further so the stock can be driven across too. The returning scouts will advise that we bring only mules or oxen to drive the wagons. Our farm will be along the way for people heading to the coast.”
“Whose name is this property in?” I asked, changing the subject.
“In the Territory’s eyes, it is ours,” he said. “But it belongs to the colony, all held in common as in Bethel.”
“Then who owns the Giesy place with the one nearly finished house?”
He cleared his throat. “I claim that for my parents. This section, distant but not so far away, this one will be ours to farm.”
Andy shouted, then pointed at a squirrel and took my attention.
“You let us men attend to these things,” he said, following me as I changed Andy’s diaper. I grabbed at some cedar duff as an absorbent. “Your job is to make what we will build into a home to raise our sons in. Wait here.”
He walked down the riverbank and leaned into the wobbly craft we’d pulled up onto the shoreline. From it he took a pack with a shovel pitched over his back. “I begin,” he said.
He lifted the sod from a square, pushing and scraping the tall meadow grasses. Sweat dripped from his forehead, but he whistled as he worked. I gingerly walked through the grasses, felt the sun warm my face and knew it must be warm on Andy’s too, though I’d set him in the shade. I took his hand and he waddled upright. He still hadn’t taken his first steps alone, but with help he grinned at his success. “We may as well see if there are late-blooming berries, since your father is so occupied in digging.”
I’d filled my apron with flowers instead, sticking one behind Andy’s ear, tickling him as he sat. I slapped at mosquitoes. They’d be swarming by sunset. Andy pulled against my skirt to raise himself and stay balanced. Finally, Christian whistled his single loud tone and motioned me to return to the square he’d scraped out. Across it, he’d spread the canvas. Come,” he said. “Let’s christen this land we’ve been given to turn into service to our Lord.”
The look in his eye told me he had more than the Lord’s service in mind at that moment. I felt a stirring in my own heart. My face grew warm. I marveled that his hours of intense labor poling upriver, then clearing the sod, hadn’t weakened him in the least. If anything, it seemed to fire his desire.
“When do we begin work on our house?” I said as he reached to untie my bonnet.
“Don’t worry about that now.” He pulled me to him.
I said, “Right here? Won’t it tire you for the return trip? And what about Andy?”
Christian smiled as he lifted his son still clinging to my skirt, laced him into the board leaned against the tree. His wide fingers wove the rawhide strings through the buckskin covering, then tied them neatly in a bow. Something about the movement softened me.
“Andrew has perfect timing,” he said. “See? He sleeps.”
Swaddling did usually put Andy to sleep. His father laid the board propped up against the shovel base, but in a shaded area beneath some arching vines. On his cheeks I wiped the mud paste to counter mosquito attacks. Christian replaced the flower behind Andy’s ear, and our son took two quick breaths but didn’t awaken.
“As for me being too tired to love my wife and then take her safely back to the landing, you forget.” He grinned now and began untying my wrapper at the bodice. “Do you still wear the petticoat with the ruffles?” I nodded. “Then here is another occasion to mark your uniqueness on our Giesy place.” With Christian, life felt right, even in this place so far upriver from the others. Geese called above us on their way south for the winter.
“Trust me, Liebchen,” he whispered as he led me onto the canvas he’d unfurled on the ground. “It’s an easy ride downriver to wherever you wish to go from here.”
He kissed my neck, and I felt like a tall cedar going slowly down.
20
Duty-Bound Steps
Fog, like a faithful scout sent ahead to survey the land, eased into the Willapa Valley. Behind it came the storms.
At first we crunched our necks into our shoulders, doing our best to ignore the rains, my mother’s wool cape no longer spotted with water but soaked instead. Our lack of attention to the rain must have angered it, for soon it came down harder, and the lean- to Andy and I huddled in beneath a cedar while the men worked in the trees on another Giesy house, not ours, could not keep out the damp. The fire I kept going at the entrance of the lean- to billowed smoke back into our faces. We coughed but chose that discomfort over being drenched.
One or two seagulls continued to seek us out, which surprised me, as we had little to offer them. I now used the deer bladders—the rounded organ that I learned to pick out quickly from the entrails—to hold dried berries. Sarah said she’d seen Chehalis people dry deer ears and later boil them with roots and little plops of flour. That sounded like a dumpling stew, so I did that too. She told me to save the brains for tanning hides (we’d done that back in Bethel) and that the broth from boiled tongue helped people with a cough. I even kept the sinew away from the seagulls, that stringy part along the deer’s back strap that proved as tough as any thread I’d ever used before. One day I boiled the shinbones and found the tallow a palatable fat. Even the antlers became digging tools, not that the seagulls hungered after them. The birds had all looked alike to me, but when Andy and I sat in the lean- to and watched them screech at one another, lifting up and settling back, I did notice one with a chip out of his flattened bill. He returned often enough we named him Charlie. He became a friend for Andy.
Opal, the goat, bleated protests, lifting her right leg up onto my squatting knees as I cooked. I protested too when I had to clean out the area of the shelter where I milked her and where she stood during the night. How she must have resented my cold hands on her bag in the morning, but she never kicked. A docile female indeed—as I was becoming.
I considered building a corral for Opal using abandoned branches from the trees but wasn’t sure she’d stay in it. And besides, I’d be leaving that corral for Christian’s sisters or brothers. It
wasn’t as though we were establishing the home we’d be staying on. That was selfish of me, I knew, but I’d endure the weather better, I thought, if I knew that one day soon I’d have a place to call our own.
By December, with every day crying rain and a coldness I didn’t remember while I lived at the fort, I risked again urging Christian to reconsider staying with the Woodards at least until March, when the rains tended to come more intermittently—or so I remembered Sarah saying.
“You’re soaked all the time. I’ve given up washing, or have you noticed? The mud clutches at clothes, and they’re dirty before I even finish, and they never dry. You’ve started to cough. We’ll all be sick, and when spring comes you won’t be able to make up for the time you’re losing now.”
“We have to keep going, Liebchen. They count on us. So many count on us.” He coughed a racking cough, bent over, barking like a sea lion. When it stopped he said, “In November next year, if all goes well, they’ll arrive. How will they live through the winter if we have no houses for them?”
“They’ll do what we’ve done. Live in lean-tos and under canvas.”
“They count on us for better, Liebchen.”
“Andy and I count on you too,” I said. I saw the pain in his eyes and I softened. “Please. Let’s stay with the Woodards. They’ve offered this to us, and you always say the receiving of gifts is as important in the Christian way as giving is. Why shouldn’t we learn to receive? Accepting their generosity would be a good witness, wouldn’t it?”
“If we stay at Woodard’s Landing when the weather is good, we’ll lose precious daylight making our way to the woods. Here, we can get up in the morning, and our work is before us, as the Lord provides.”
“He provides more work than necessary,” I said under my breath.
“Your being here helps,” Christian said. He patted my shoulder, then coughed again.
He’d never said such a thing to me before. “You’re pleased I stayed despite my … ways?” I said.
He nodded. Dirt caked the lines in his eyes, and for the first time he looked old, my husband did. Old and tired. And sick. I thought back. He’d stopped doing his pushing-ups.
“Why don’t you build more homes on the original Giesy place, then?” I said. “We could stay at the Landing and you’d still be close to your work.”
“Each claim needs a house or we will lose the deed.”
“There’s time,” I said. “Isn’t it five years to develop the land before the risk of loss?” He took a drink of the hot tea I’d made and pulled a piece of tea leaf from his lower lip. Is he considering my idea? “At the least, why not roof one house to make it livable? One house we could all stay in and be dry. The one you’re working on now, maybe. It’s as though you’re putting together puzzles, but you don’t stay long enough to finish even one.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. When we are all here, we can more easily do the roofs, Emma. We need to keep building walls as we can.” His voice had that final note he gave when he’d bear no more protest. “You talked your way into being here. You must now make being here your way.”
“Can you talk to him, Frau Giesy?” Hans said. I patched the scab on his head with a paste of herbs. A light snow fell outside the lean- to while I tended him. My hands were cold even wearing gloves. I’d wrapped Andy in his board to keep him from wandering off while I helped Hans. I didn’t want my child getting wet or colder than he already was—than we all were. Even Hans’s teeth chattered as I ministered.
“Emma, Hans. It’s all right to call me by my Christian name.”
“Ja, Emma.” Hans had scratched until the place on his head bled nearly every day, but this day he’d scraped that spot as well when he crawled under a tree-fall looking for a deer he thought he’d downed. “It rains so hard a man can hardly see to shoot straight,” he said. “We really need two men hunting together, one to help the other.”
“That’ll mean even fewer to haul the logs,” I said, dabbing again at his wound.
“I saw some Indians out there too,” he said, his voice a whisper then.
“My husband says we’re perfectly safe here. I’ve seen only friendly Indians willing to show me how to make a spoon from a burl. They’re very kind.”
“But I hear—”
“They’re as cold and hungry as we are, I suspect.” I’d been startled myself coming upon what Christian said were Chehalis men at the river when I went to rinse out clothes before I stopped bothering. A man batted with a club at large fish coming up the river while the women with him cut them lengthwise into long filets. They’d arranged a kind of dam that appeared to divert fish into a holding pond where they were easily taken. They’d built a fire beneath a lofty cedar and skewered the filets with long sticks they poked into the ground, holding the fish’s pink flesh toward the fire. The men wore reddish-colored capes that looked like woven reeds or even bark and basket hats that shed the rain. They didn’t seem the least interested in me. When I approached, the women noticed me and offered that cedar burl spoon.
“Still, Frau Giesy—Emma—he would listen to you. We’ll all be getting sicker if we don’t bring in more meat and get out of this wet. Look at us!” He held up his arm and reached his hands around his wrist. “Thin as a cane and barely as useful.” He lowered his voice even more. “We should not have sent so many back to bring the rest out. Two would have been enough.”
Should I defend my husband’s leadership? I wanted to, but Hans did look thinner. We needed fat; we had all lost weight. My wrapper ties circled twice around me now, but I assumed my weight loss came from doing my best to make sure Andy and the men had sufficient food as they were working the hardest. Opal’s milk kept me fit. Or so I thought. But I was hungry more often than not. These men must be too.
“We all think we should finish one house, cover it, and wait out this rain. Then we can start in earnest in the spring.”
“You’ve spoken to Christian about this?”
Hans shook his head. “Bring it up even sideways, and he turns us around with those staring eyes. He is a taskmaster, that one.”
“He stares at me, too,” I said, the most critical of my husband I preferred to get in the presence of Hans.
“Ja, but he pays attention.”
“Does he?”
Adam Schuele sought me out for his cough next. He needed something more than the boiled deer tongue syrup. I made a pepper and sugar tea, having him sip it slowly as the pepper clustered at the bottom of the mug. “It burns,” he said. But the cough lessoned for the moment.
“We don’t have much sugar left,” I said. “I hope the Knight boys don’t get that cough.”
Hans caught it, too, and Christian’s never did go away, though it wasn’t as wracking as it had been. But my husband wouldn’t hear of leaving or even roofing the hut they worked on. He’d already planned to move on to another Giesy claim, this one for Sebastian and Mary, and haul logs for that house. “Discomfort is part of our mission,” he said. “No disciples ever found following the Lord easy. It is how He works out our character, through these trials.”
“But the men—look at them.” The men stood inside a rotted tree trunk out of the rain, so Christian and I talked in private. “They’re ill. They’re tired. They’re weary of all this. You’re thin as a reed. Surely God did not intend for us to kill ourselves in pursuit of this new colony.”
“We all chose this place.”
“Ach, ja, I know. But things change. We have new information now. The trees aren’t easily harnessed. There are too few of us working on the huts, so you push too hard.”
“Are you saying I shouldn’t have sent so many back?”
“No, I … It’s just that there aren’t people here for us to recruit or to serve, and we’re devoting so much time to housing there’s no energy left for … listening to God’s Word or bringing it to others. Even those who’ve lived here three or four years before us in the Territory are leaving. Isn’t it true you bough
t out their claims? Perhaps this isn’t the way we were supposed to prepare for the others, perhaps we’ve lost the heart of this mission, the soul of—”
“I’ll not hear any more dissension,” he shouted. Andy stopped his playing at my feet and looked up at his father. His eyes filled with tears. The goat scratched with her back leg at her bag. “No more,” he said, quieting. “We will do it this way and the Lord will keep us. You must not be like Job’s wife who did not support her husband in his hour of trial. You must have faith.”
That night I dreamed that my soul woke up. The stretching of my stomach seeking food elbowed it awake. My heart pounded fast, then slow, pushing blood into my head to get my brain to work, feeding it thoughts. My bones ached but exerted strength as they poked at my organs, swimming around inside me until my soul awoke. It had been asleep too long while the other parts of me took over. It was the oddest dream, but when I awoke I knew what I needed to do.
The tarp must have weighed fifty pounds or more, and as I dragged it, it began to collect mud, adding to my effort. “We’ll find fir boughs to lay it on, and I’ll haul that,” I told my wide-eyed son, who sat staring back at me from a distant tree. I’d wrapped him in a larger board I’d made, liking the security it afforded me at times, tying him in. With my small axe, I chopped a bough from a fallen tree. I did imagine Christian’s look when he returned to our lean-to and found us gone. But he’d roll in with Adam Schuele and the others so he’d not sleep in the wet, though they could all cough together once they consumed the pepper-and-sugar tea I’d left for them. And maybe, just maybe, then he’d follow me, and if nothing else, the men would have a few days’ rest while he searched.
My routine involved walking ahead through the mud with Andy on my back while I tugged at the goat. Christian once said the goat would follow me anywhere, but I couldn’t take that chance. I would set down the small pack I carried around my neck, lean Andy’s board against it, tie the goat, then head back to the tarp that lay like a giant gray slug in the rain some distance behind me.