A Clearing in the Wild

  2

  Dancing Over

  “Remember the old German proverb,” my mother said later as I sniffled about my budding romance so early thwarted by Father Keil. “Begin to weave / God provides the thread.”

  I nodded, though unsure of what that meant. Should I spend my time weaving and hope something good would come of my creations when I gave them away? Or did it mean that I should just begin, take my stand, and God would provide whatever was needed to serve His purpose? I let my mother wipe at my tears and cheer me as she said, “There’s always the New Year’s dance.”

  Waltzing is allowed by our leader, as are the colony’s many festive days, though I suspect Father Keil didn’t expect Christian to dance with the likes of me. I know that now. Following the wedge he placed between us on Christmas Day, I neither saw nor heard about Christian’s activities for an entire week. I’d said nothing when my father raised his eyebrows as I caught up with my parents Christmas morning, and my mother merely handed me a handkerchief when I failed to hold back tears. But later, gaining rhythm, I threw off my brother’s teasing that I’d been left behind like an old potato. “Ja, little you know about making stew,” I said. “Potatoes, even old ones, give stew substance.”

  He wrinkled his brows. “What does—”

  “Never mind,” I said and hurried up the stairs to the loft room I shared with my three sisters, where if I was lucky and the girls played downstairs, I could smooth my rebuff in private.

  But midweek, my mother’s word of weaving brought hope. So on New Year’s Day, with the Missouri winter pining for spring, I thought of dancing. We’d have a celebration later that evening with the brass band playing full force in Elim, the largest house in the colony, where our leader lived and where we often gathered for dances next to his octagonal music room. I had hoped, prayed too, that Christian might ask me to dance at least once, assuming he attended and hadn’t been sent off again by our leader to some faraway place to gain additional converts. I revisited each thing he’d said, remembered the tingling of my skin as I recalled the closeness of our hands. Words formed into music as I beat our rugs beneath the opaque sky, then brought the handwoven carpets inside.

  To touch the face / Of one so dear / Is like music / Falling on one’s ear.

  I knew the words were not at all like the elegant music of Papa’s second cousin—mine too—Richard Wagner, who couldn’t even hear his opera Lohengrin performed the year before because he displeased the German government. Franz Liszt conducted instead. Maybe music and dissent mixed in my ancestral blood, though it didn’t help me carry a tune. But so mixed passion, too, as Cousin Wagner was a romantic man and so was my father. Even my uncle was an American ambassador to France, that most romantic of lands. My mother still wore beneath her dark high-collared dress a tiny strand of pearls my father must have given her. I’d glimpsed it once before she discreetly tucked it away, blushing as she did.

  Later, after New Year’s, I’d help my mother store the few Christmas decorations we kept up until Epiphany. I most loved the tiered carving of the Christmas story, each layer a circle, with wooden shepherds on the bottom, then on the shelf above them, wise men, and finally Joseph and Mary with the Christ child on top. The whole structure stood on the floor, and each level spun in circles by the heat of candles moving wooden flaps. My mother had brought it from Germany with her. I’d never seen one in any other colony home, and we were only allowed to display it during this season. Putting it away always marked the end of a celebrating time and then the beginning of the long wait for spring.

  Sheppie barked, and I went to the window expecting to see a squirrel scampering. I instead delighted in watching Christian make his way through the melting snow to my father’s house. I’d begun to think his little invitation to venture into “trouble” with me on Christmas Day was nothing but a Peltz Nickel treat with a twig attached: a promise of a treasure but with a punishment, too. But now, here he appeared, and me with dust fluffs hanging from my dress!

  Seeing him stride up the steps onto the porch, his head almost touching the corner filigree, made me forget the punishment part. I pitched aside disappointment brought on by our leader’s interruption on Christmas Day. The dust fluffs were forgotten too.

  Christian struck the porch post, knocking mud from his half-boot ankle jacks, then he bent to unlace them. Sheppie barked a happy bark, his gray tail wagging like a metronome, his nails scraping across the pine floor, meeting my father approaching the door. The shepherd dog acted as though he knew the man when he surely didn’t. But the dog’s delight pleased me, and I felt myself emboldened enough to pull back the simple curtain covering our windows and stare out at Christian, willing him to look at me.

  He didn’t.

  “Your beau’s here,” Jonathan said from behind me.

  I turned and shushed him with my chin stuck out and a grit of my teeth. “He’s here to see Papa, no doubt,” I said, though I hoped I told a lie.

  My father answered the door when Christian knocked, and for a moment I wondered if Christian would take offense at the lavish garlands of greens I’d woven dried berries into and hung around the room. I’d set candles in such a way that they, too, looked inviting and shimmered against the wooden cabinet in which my mother kept her good dishes that even today she had not pulled out. It was far from a simple great room, with the festive boughs acting like necklaces, candles flickering, and the fire crackling at the end of the house. Both Catherine and Johanna worked with thread and needles in their laps while Louisa napped. Books spread across the table and on the divan, and I wondered if that would upset him, since our leader didn’t care much for books unless they offered practical advice for making better whiskey or gaining higher yields from fields. A colorful purple and green Wandering Foot quilt almost shouted its lavish comfort. Would Christian think us too worldly?

  I stepped in front of the wooden Christmas tier to keep him from seeing its fine carving, just in case. My little ruffle, still stitched to my crinoline, seemed heavier. I had yet to remove it.

  The smell of my mother’s baked cinnamon buns permeated the air. At least good scents were not forbidden in a German colony.

  Christian seemed not to notice any of his surroundings. He entered in stocking feet against my father’s protest that the floor easily cleaned and he could keep his boots on. Instead, he set the boots with heels precise against the wall, then accepted my father’s offer of ale. He didn’t even acknowledge me as he bent to pet Sheppie.

  My father ushered him into the dining room. “Come along, Jonathan,” he told my brother, acting as though I were nothing but a candle stand.

  Apparently, if I was to hear the conversation or even share Christian’s presence, it would be as a serving woman unless I did something about it.

  “I’d be interested in hearing what Mr. Giesy has to say about his travels,” I said.

  My father turned, frowned. “In the kitchen, your mother needs you.”

  “Ja, I’m sure,” I said, “but—”

  “Emma …”

  Jonathan grinned as he marched by me and motioned to David and even little William to join him with the men.

  I couldn’t overhear them in the kitchen. When I brought in trays of tea to offer, they looked serious as I slowly served them, my brothers included, sitting stiff as bedposts. None of them even acknowledged my presence with a simple nod of thanks. All this men’s talk apparently meant Christian truly had come only to see my father.

  “They’ll pass laws against communal living,” Christian said. “And this will not be good for us.”

  “We’re not like those … others,” my father said. “We don’t share our wives or husbands. We don’t all live in one huge house. We’re happy, giving to each other in a Christian way. Why should the government care?”

  “Sometimes we do, though, live in one house. The bachelors who come with no family to stay with. And until we build them homes, new recruits and whole families do live with others.”

/>   “Ach, that is just family,” my father said. “You have generations living in the Giesy house. It is nothing wrong.”

  “All we earn we put into one place, communally. All of Bethel’s land is in Wilhelm’s name, no one else’s. This bothers some officials who see such commonness as … against the nation. They wonder if our loyalty is to our leader rather than to the country, and with the rumblings of war … ja, well, they might think we long to become our own country inside this new American state of Missouri.”

  “Wilhelm would change that in a moment if asked,” my father said. “He does not keep the land for himself, only for the good of us all.” My father’s voice rose.

  “I know this, David,” Christian countered. He reached for my father’s hand and patted it with assurance. Christian had fine, high cuticles, and his nails were white as piano ivory. “But outsiders, they don’t understand. It seems strange to them, how we do things here. We are foreign to them, more German than American.”

  “When you recruit, are you able to win hearts for our Lord?” my father asked.

  Christian nodded yes. “But it is harder to describe the necessity for all of us to live in one colony with one storehouse to fill and only one to take from. People wonder why our Lord asks us to live so … communally—”

  “When all around us yearn for things, for new dresses, big horses, more fields to call their own,” I said and continued before they could stop me. “We prosper by meeting those very needs we say we don’t believe in. We sell whiskey and gloves and lumber to those who do not live as we do. I don’t understand that either.”

  Even Jonathan’s eyes grew wide. My father frowned. “Emma …”

  “What she says I have thought too,” Christian said. He sat straighter in the high chair and stared at me, elbows out as his palms rested on his thighs. “It seems a contradiction to separate ourselves and then to take gain from the sales to the fallen world.”

  He considered something I said important?

  “But we do not get rich from it,” my father protested. “Only enough to serve one another comes into the storehouse. We tend widows, orphans, no matter if they are colonists or not. That is our mission.”

  “But perhaps it’s tainted,” I said, pushing my good fortune. “How do we look to those we seek to convert? Maybe it appears as though we recruit to our way rather than to God’s.”

  “Wilhelm’s way has led us to our Lord well these years,” my father said. He snapped the words out. He pointed toward the kitchen door. “Emma. Your mother has need of you.”

  “But, Papa—”

  “Go.”

  I threw a glance at Christian, but he looked lost in thought, and once again he seemed unwilling or unable to challenge orders given me by other men. Never mind that one was my father, a respected elder, and the other our spiritual leader. Christian needed to stand firm, I thought, as the door to the kitchen swung shut behind me, bumping the ruffle beneath my skirt.

  “I’ll bake bread,” I told my mother, slamming down the tea tray.

  “Now?”

  “It will give me something to push around and pound,” I said, gathering flour into the doughboy and reaching for salt from the box.

  “Well, a house can always use bread.”

  The fluff of the flour and the saleratus with melted lard seeped into the flour hole I’d made and kept me occupied, if not pleased. I tried not to think of Christian Giesy as being someone weak, easily overpowered by my father. He stood so tall, had brought in too many new recruits to be a weak man. It was even rumored that every day he lifted himself seventy-five times from the floor by his hands without letting his knees even touch. It took strength for such pushing up, strength that must reflect a man of character, too. Even Karl Ruge, the teacher, a highly educated man and a Lutheran still, chose to live in the colony because of Christian’s enthusiasm and ability to express our views of love and service to one another. And everyone adored Karl—many admired his fine mind and his long clay pipe.

  And yet, and yet, what is a man if he cannot put other men’s wishes aside to tend to those of his beloved?

  I imagined myself as Christian’s beloved. Ach, I thought. You are a Dummkopf. That’s what my father would say. I shook my head and knuckled the dough, imagining the conversation going on without me, imagining life going on without me, farther away, in Shelbina or maybe even Independence.

  We Bethel colonists were asked to be in service, to treat others as we wished to be treated, and to go beyond, to help others live even better than we did. The Diamond Rule our leader called it, better even than the Golden Rule. And yet while women served, our voices were rarely heard except in music. Did not our Lord wash the feet of His disciples? Did not our Lord comfort those who grieved? Is that not what women do? And yet we are not invited into the halls of discussion, we are not asked to sit around the tables and talk with men making sense of a family’s future. No, we are asked to influence through our fathers and our brothers and our sons but never with them.

  “I hope that’s not my head you’re thinking of. You knead that dough with such vigor.” Christian had stepped into the kitchen, his body dwarfing the doughboy table.

  I wiped my forehead with the back of my palm. His height seemed out of place, but his voice fit here, low and calm and smooth as melted butter. “Or if it is, perhaps you’ll exchange it for a chance at my feet this evening. Your father consents to my squiring you to the dance, should you be willing.”

  “And will something more come between us?” I asked, my hands on my hips now.

  “Emma,” my mother gasped. “Rude you must not be.”

  “She gives it fairly,” Christian said. “I’ll do my best to see I give her little more reason to express it.”

  How could I refuse?

  This dance held a special tone as it announced the New Year, new beginnings. The year 1852 held prosperity, as Father Keil had already received orders for special wagons made for traveling overland to the Oregon Territory. Whole towns in the Ohio Valley and farther east had signed up to go west, and, hearing of our furniture factory and wagon-building and our colony being so close to Independence and even closer to St. Joseph, many commissioned us to build them sturdy wagons. Even colony women would assist with the construction in order to meet the demand.

  It was our practice that as colony work required more effort, each set aside plowing or candle-making and put all hands toward the greatest need, men and women working side by side. “Ve build many vagons this year,” our leader told us, and so we would.

  Future prosperity lent a festive air to this occasion, and our leader charmed the crowd chattering and eating, paying scant attention to Christian and me. The band played and I watched Willie, our leader’s oldest son, step forward and execute a solo on his horn. He twirled himself around so dancers stopped to watch him, including his father, including us. People applauded, clapped Willie on his back as he finished, and shouted out hurrahs from across the large room. A few men drank small glasses of our colony’s Golden Rule Whiskey, and women not dancing or serving or watching after children sat in groups, their dark flannels reminding me of clusters of grapes waiting to be plucked.

  Christian and I completed a Schottische, a pleasant dance with hops and easy twirls, but one that required a man place his hands across a woman’s shoulders as they skipped side by side. Christian’s hands felt smooth as river stones. The warmth that spread all through me as his palm squeezed mine surprised. He pulled me to him and smiled. I could have spent the entire night this way.

  But after the fourth dance, we moved toward the door, where people coming in and out admitted a coolness. I couldn’t help but notice the envy in the eyes of girls my age, as I’d spent my whole time with an important man just a year younger than my father. Even when men came by to talk to him, he allowed me to remain, didn’t shoo me off, though most of the talk was of Christian’s journeys and when he might leave again or about his tin shop and what work he could complete before he l
eft. I never offered a single word, careful not to embarrass him. In our colony, listening was a valued skill, at least for women.

  Willie played another solo, this one with even more gusto.

  “People say one day Willie will be our leader,” Christian said, leaning in to me as we stood still later with our backs against the wall.

  “I doubt that,” I told him. “He’s too fun-loving, wants attention for himself.”

  “Possibly,” Christian said. “But a leader needs to demonstrate enthusiasm in order to have followers. No one wants to be a disciple of a somber soul.”

  “Father Keil is far from … merry,” I said. “Yet here we all are.” I spread my arms wide.

  “Wilhelm is joyous and kind, Emma. That’s how we see him. He has the music, the band. He reminds us that we find abundance in living simply.”

  “Living simply,” I said, disgust in my voice. I still had the ruffle attached, and I decided at that moment I would simply leave it there. I’d wash it at home, not at the communal washhouse. No one would ever discover my interest in uniqueness.

  “What else about Bethel distresses you?” Christian asked. He’d cocked his head to the side and had a wry smile on his face.

  “You want my opinion?”

  His eyes held mine and he sobered. I noticed that the color of his mustache bore tints of red. “I should know the things that cause unrest in you,” he said, his voice as smooth as hot cider, “if you’re to be my wife.”

  I felt my stomach fall into my knees.

  Catching my breath I said, “The word if looms large.”

  “Indeed, if is larger. As with my dancing, I can step over that word rather than on it,” Christian said, “and make the request without venturing further into what brings you happiness or strife. It surprises—”

  “No, no,” I said. “I want to be asked my thoughts. Ja, I do. Will my answers make a difference to the offer? It was an offer, ja? Or do I misunderstand?” My words twirled around, caught up now with my feelings like a kite string swirling upward in the wind. “Have you asked our leader? my father?” I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I already knew Christian could be easily dissuaded by either of these two men.