Christian didn’t go far. I could hear his voice as he spoke to others, commented on the leather hinges he’d made for doors. He waited within earshot. Had I told him that Louisa made me nervous? Knowing he waited just outside the door comforted. I’d tell him that when this was over.
This infant wouldn’t come as swiftly as Andy had. The day waned as the baby pushed its way closer to arriving into the world. Then we heard shouts from the gun turrets announcing an alarm.
I struggled to sit up. Louisa helped steady my shoulders. “I’ll see what it is. You wait here.”
“Did you think I planned to take a walk?” I snapped.
I heard her say in English, “No. She is indisposed,” but then she stumbled aside, and Sarah Woodard bent through the opening of the door. I sighed relief. Even if she brought news of Indian attacks it would be good to have her here.
“What news?” I said between pants.
“No attacks,” she said. “But the first ship of the New Year arrived.”
I leaned back against Louisa. “Good. There’ll be bread, then, grain for us all.”
With full stomachs and a greater variety of food, tempers would cool. Maybe playing music would be considered acceptable. Karl Ruge could return to reading nightly to us from his books while smoking his long clay pipe. Our hungry stomachs had elbowed our souls, and many of us couldn’t listen for long. Music would soothe. Surely any hostile Indians wouldn’t mind the sound of trumpets and horns. Maybe we’d begin thanking God again as a group for all He had done. My husband would be vindicated. Flour, as he’d ordered it, well in advance of the arrival of this many people, would mean nourishment and a sign that my husband was a good leader, someone who could anticipate and provide, with God’s help. Always with God’s help.
Sarah looked down, then wiped my sweaty forehead. Rain dripped from her cape, and steam rose up from the moist wool already warming within the close heat of the house. “Your family arrives,” she said. “They say they are Giesys, and they bring grist stones.”
“Christian’s parents.” We’d have more to feed, but we’d also have more support for Christian. They’d see the possibilities here. They’d want to remain where Christian and the scouts had done so much to prepare for their coming. And there’d be flour. Food. Our hunger filled at last.
“We’ll have a big meal,” I panted. “With bread and cakes maybe. And the band will play.”
Sarah’s eyes went to Louisa’s. She leaned into Louisa and whispered something. Louisa shook her head, no. “What is it?” I asked. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“No,” Louisa said. “You don’t need to know.”
“Here we share good news and bad,” I panted.
Sarah nodded. “The ship brought only one small bag of flour. Sam and I will ration what we can and share what we have with you.”
“One bag of flour? Didn’t they understand the order?”
“Maybe a mix-up, my husband tells me. It happens,” Sarah said.
“Or maybe your husband did not order as much as needed, thinking you would have grain here to grind,” Louisa said.
“He would have done what he thought was right,” I defended. The pain began its rise. I gasped.
“Nothing good comes of this place,” Louisa announced. “But we will help with this baby. Then you’ll travel better to a new place, one my husband picks that will be good for all of us.”
“One small bag,” I cried, then gripped Sarah’s hand as Catherina, my daughter, arrived without further fuss into the promised land of the Willapa Valley.
The first months of 1856 were marked by the cold, icy winds and incessant rains, but with small signs that we were still blessed, still under the shelter of our Father. I found myself clinging more often to the words of faith that Karl Ruge dispensed in nightly prayers for us all. Wilhelm remained distant, aloof; my husband acted faded and fatigued. I hoped that my leaning on faith wasn’t temporary, that perhaps I had learned how to trust even in the midst of disaster. The Israelite tents pitched before they crossed into the Promised Land were reminders of where our shelter truly came from. I waited each day to hear Karl Ruge’s gentle teaching, his encouraging words of “Ja, by golly, that’s right!” that followed a positive comment or small success.
The goat kept my babies alive as Andy drank goat milk and ate the lumps of cheese we made, dripping the rich milk through Mary’s petticoat, the cloth as close to muslin as we could find. The other colonists allowed our baby and other young children to drink the milk first, but when Mary’s baby, Elizabeth, arrived in February, we rationed ourselves even more to ensure that Mary had enough to eat to make milk for her baby. When she offered to nurse Catherina, too, I whispered gratitude and remembered how An-Gie had found help for Andy. My daughter would have the blessing of a friend.
Wilhelm had yet to head south. He stayed and continued his insistence about Indian troubles, so we could not bring in game. I missed the cows and mules. We could have sent men and cattle into the prairies, where they would have had plenty of grass to consume, but Wilhelm didn’t trust that the men watching them would be safe. While I rocked my infant to sleep, I imagined the rich prairies south, where one day Christian and I had hoped to build our home. I remembered walking that prairie, sitting in the quiet of the trees, listening to rain patter onto the needles that carpeted the ground. The silence would be broken only by the cry of a pileated woodpecker or a deer stepping on a fallen branch as it made its way past.
At night, I dreamed of food that I just couldn’t swallow.
Potatoes baked in the coals soon lost their flavor. The same meal we’d had for weeks lacked both savor and salt. We caught very few fish now.
Barbara, my mother-in-law, busied herself with her grandchildren. She rocked them, and though she was skinny as a bedpost, she never mentioned how hungry she must have been. I hoped she noticed that I never complained about food, either, except in my sleep.
At least my mother-in-law had brought a trunk with our name on it, and at last I had a fresh change of clothes, a dress with a plain petticoat. Tenderly lifting items from the trunk served as a distraction from the ache in my stomach. I could grab a handful at the waistband of my petticoat, I’d lost so much weight. My old under slip with the ruffles had been stripped long ago into bandages for wounds and washed over and over to manage my monthly flow. My mother had made a baby’s quilt and a small dress that might have been used for a christening, if we had such things. We would dedicate the baby to the Lord in time, maybe when we had a church or Wilhelm felt the occasion was right. Karl Ruge, who remained a Lutheran, spoke of christenings, and I thought the idea of it a lovely thing and wished we’d do it as a colony. When this time of want had passed, I’d talk to Christian about it, if he’d hear me. More and more he spent time staring, having little to say, carrying the weight of this starvation into a dark solitude.
Starvation. It was the first time I’d thought the word. Even thinking it made me feel disloyal to my husband.
I smelled each item I pulled from the trunk, imagining my mother’s hands on each one, my father’s eyes looking over them as she wrapped the child’s gown in precious paper I’d use to write to them to tell them of Catherina. Inhaling deeply took away the dizziness I assumed came with the hunger. One last quilt made of red and black squares lay folded at the bottom of the chest. I lifted it out and something dropped on the ground beside my foot. My mother’s pearl necklace.
Why had she sent it? Was she telling me that a luxury was acceptable, or that as one matured, one no longer needed such things?
“What’s that?” Louisa asked. The woman was like the mist, appearing quiet and cold.
“Something my mother sent me.” I folded it back into the quilt, liking the feel of the smooth round stones, perfectly strung. I’d look at it later.
“Your mother,” Louisa said.
“Ja?” I prepared to defend.
“She found a way to be … noticed without taking away from anyone else.”
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A compliment? “We all need to be noticed,” I said, stuffing the quilt into the corner of the trunk.
“Ja,” she said, looking at her husband who slept, his head bobbed forward onto his chest, his arm wrapped around Aurora, who slept seated beside him. “There you and me, we agree.”
Through the drizzle of March, a letter arrived in Bruceport on the coast, and Sam Woodard brought it to us. One of Keil’s nieces, Fredricka, had married Benjamin Brown, a man she’d met in The Dalles, in the Skamania country east of where we were. The couple had met again in Portland and married January 3, 1856, beginning their new year in the Washington Territory. They’d decided to live separate from the colony, an act I thought very brave for Fredricka. I’d tell her so whenever I got to see her again. Her father, Keil’s brother, had remained in the area with them, but when someone commented on his following in his daughter’s footsteps, leaving the fold, Wilhelm announced, “He looks for a place for our colony. He’s still engaged in the Lord’s work.”
The Lord’s work. The words sounded empty. It seemed all of us were engaged in Wilhelm Keil’s work, trying to find a place to serve him. If it were otherwise, we’d be discussing how to move forward here, how to make what the scouts had chosen here into the service we’d set out to perform. We’d be hunting and feeding our people. There were a few other English-speaking people besides the Woodards who might come to join us if we demonstrated strength, showed ourselves to be loving and generous rather than stingy with our hope.
“Do you think this time here might change Wilhelm’s mind?” I asked Christian. “Maybe seeing that we survive even with little grain and without using ammunition to hunt will help him think differently. Maybe he would bring everyone from Portland after all in the spring.”
Christian said nothing.
“We still have the promise of a spring to win him,” I said. “Even I long for the prairie and when we can begin building on our place.” I patted Catherina’s bottom as I rocked her to sleep.
He turned to me then, my husband, his handsome face marked now by puffy skin beneath his eyes, the bones of his cheeks sharp as elbows, the hollows near his mouth as cavernous as caves. He’d lost teeth. So had I. Many of us had. We’d had a last apple peel sometime in January. I couldn’t remember. But what he said then was more frightening than any of the physical fears we’d faced and overcome. “There is no future here, Emma. Father Keil is right.”
By mid-March, Wilhelm decided the weather was agreeable enough that he would now act according to the letters he’d had Karl Ruge write. There’d been no more messages of Indian attacks and, in fact, we’d not heard of one person dying in the region due to hostile natives. Wilhelm’s coat hung on him like a jacket slipped over a chair, waiting for someone to put it on and give it substance. But his voice still boomed.
“I will leave for Portland and from there onto a new life. A place has been found, according to the Bruceport letter. You are all good people,” he said then, giving up a small crumb of praise. “Some of you may wish to stay until you can sell your claims, but the rest should be prepared to go with me before the week is out.” He’d gathered everyone into the largest of the houses inside the stockade.
Coughs and muffled cries of children answered him first. Then Hans Stauffer said, “I’m staying here. I never once thought the Lord wasn’t in this place, and I think we can still make a go of it. With ammunition—no offense, Wilhelm—we can eat well and have skins to put into service.”
Adam Schuele nodded agreement. Michael Sr. and the Stauffers did too. “We all believed it was a good place when we found it. Even a woman could plow the soil here, and that means with more hands, we can have more ground planted. We can sell the grain and—”
“To whom?” Wilhelm asked. “And the grain, it’s puny. Besides, you’ll eat up your own profits.”
“Near the bay, a man named White, who is a former Indian agent, he buys property, and those from San Francisco will come north to live here, for the climate. We’ll sell to them,” Hans said.
“The climate!” Wilhelm laughed at that, a big deep laugh without joy in it. His bushy eyebrows raised, then lowered into a scowl.
I hoped Christian would stand and speak. Here were two men agreeing that remaining was worthy work.
“It is a fine climate in the spring and summer and fall,” I said, finally.
Wilhelm turned to me. “It is a place that encourages women to go beyond their position.”
“Our Lord never asked women to take a place behind,” I said quietly. Louisa gasped. “I know the apostle Paul had many thoughts of how women should be in the worship, but work is worship, too, and we women always served where we were called to work back in Bethel. We worked side by side with men. We do that here, too. But in deciding things, we were silenced, though not by our Lord.”
“There are flowers blooming in the woods already,” Mary said. I turned to her and smiled at her gift of support. “I would like to see how this landscape changes when the rain is replaced by more of the sun.” Her eyes met mine.
“You, Christian,” Wilhelm said. “You have your hands full enough with this woman of yours. I will understand your wish to remain here with her.”
If Wilhelm couldn’t see the good in this place, then we’d just let him leave. Without him here, Christian’s waned confidence could return. We’d have a life again, not one focused on what was good for the colony but for our own families.
“And you make my point, Mary Giesy,” Wilhelm said. “This place encourages defiance. The landscape itself commands too much. Ve learn to protest against it and mistakenly believe ve must protest against our leaders.”
Louisa’s eyes watched the floor, but I noticed that her hands folded in prayer had turned her knuckles white. Does she wish to speak? She won’t, not here, not now.
“Who leaves with me?” Wilhelm asked. “And who wants to remain?”
Peter Klein and several others said then that they would leave. They looked apologetically at Christian as they spoke. One by one the group expressed their wishes until we got to the part of the circle where Christian and I stood. I waited to hear my husband say that we would stay; we’d build our Giesy place upriver. Wilhelm had even approved of it.
“We do,” Christian said. “My family and I go with you.”
I turned to him. “We can’t abandon all you’ve done here.”
He shook his head at me, signaled silence.
“No,” I said. “It’ll destroy you.”
“We do not need to heed the voices of women,” Wilhelm said gently. A man who had won could afford to be gracious. “I believe you have made a good choice, Chris. In some things, at least.” He turned away from me. “Who else?”
“You can’t, Christian,” I pleaded. “You can’t turn your back on all this. You did well. It is an Eden, it is. How can you say God acted wrongly?”
Wilhelm turned back to me to answer. “In Eden, God asked, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘What have you done?’ He punished Eve for being independent, for pushing beyond. God gave the Garden, ja, but then He removed people from it. He changed His mind.”
“God is unchanging,” I hissed at him.
“So then, you have come to accept your role, that God made woman of man and that you bear the sins of what happened. Your punishment will be always as a mother in peril at childbirth, at the mercy of her husband, never to make her own choices. Never,” he said. “A good woman knows her place and stays there. She goes where her husband tells her.” He turned to Louisa. She smiled at him, but I thought I saw something besides docility in her eyes, something I couldn’t name.
I felt my hands grow wet with sweat. Catherina squirmed. Not now, not now. This was not about me being submissive; it was about supporting my husband. “Even when God removed them from Eden,” I said, “He provided for them. He made clothes for them from animal skins, from the very bounty of the Garden. He was tender and loving and forgiving.”
Mary had her arm crooked,
holding her infant. She bore a healthy baby here, even with the trials of coming across the plains. “Don’t you want your baby to grow up where she was born?” I asked Sebastian. Mary had expressed her wishes openly, but so far Christian’s brothers had not.
I turned to Frau Giesy, Christian’s mother. Surely she’d know that leaving now would be a final defeat for her son. It would deplete him. I pleaded with my eyes. She said nothing.
“Don’t you want to finish what you started?” I asked my husband. “You’re the one who convinced me of the merits of this clearing. You told me to put aside our own wishes for what God wants of us. Wasn’t this colony to be in service to others? Who’s to say that there aren’t many in need of His love here? The settlers, though not many, might be soil we can plant seed in. Each other.” I whispered that last. “We can be salt and light to the world around us if we open our arms wide. Even to each other.”
“We have no need of a world so large around us,” Wilhelm said. “Such intrusions only bring trials. Wars.”
“You sent us out to find an isolated place, to find one where our faith could take root. But there is no isolated place, not really. And now you abandon your own mission? For … comfort?” I said.
“Emma—,” Christian said.
“But you said this place was chosen for us, that we were chosen. When I struggled with the rain and mud, you’re the one who reminded me.”
“There are no people here, Emma,” Christian said. He had tears in his eyes. “Father Keil is right. There are none to buy our products, none to bring into the fold. Only us, and we cannot feed ourselves, let alone those around us. Maybe some oystermen on the coast who are lost, maybe to those few we can bring the message of love and compassion, but not if we cannot survive.”