Then I remembered. My breath came from an empty hollow welled out in my heart. I suppressed a sob, I thought.
“You’re awake,” Mary said. She set her needlework down on our rough table and came closer.
“Where are the children?”
“Andy went back with Martin for now. Just for a little while, to give you time to come to the understanding of this. Kate’s asleep, bless her. She patted your head for the longest time and then finally just dozed off. I carried her to the cradle. I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”
“What time is it?”
“Midnight or so.”
“You should go home, be with Elizabeth and Boshie. It isn’t necessary for you to be here. I’ll be all right. I’ll get Andrew in the morning. I want him with me.”
She patted my shoulder. “You can get him at the service. You need your own rest.”
“Is that possible? Do you know what’s happened? Of course you do. I just mean—”
“I know what you mean. But please. Let me just stay with you. I want to be here.”
I lay back on the pillow but in doing so I smelled my husband, the salt of him, the brush of his mustache on my mouth, the weight of his head on my breast. I jerked up.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s him. Here.” I shook my head. “I need to get up, work, do something. There’s the funeral. His clothes. I need to give them clothes for the burial.”
“Yes. John and Henry are taking care of those things, Emma. They all want—we all want to help. We’re all just so sorry. They’re making the arrangements, digging the … next to Willie’s grave. Martin can dress the body. He knows about those things with herbs and whatnot.”
“I should wash his body. It’s what a wife does.”
“His mother will help with that. It will help her grieve.”
“Yes. Help her grieve a senseless death.”
My mind swirled to capture the image of Christian’s last moments alive on this earth. The flailing, the rush of water, going under the raft, getting tangled in the ropes. Maybe he tried to save the boy, but the young man’s panic pulled him under. Did the old man try to save Christian or just himself? Does Christian know how to swim? Did he? He’d joked about it once. Perhaps it was no joke. What courage it must have taken for him to work the oysters, to be brother to the water if he didn’t know how to swim. Why did I have no foreboding? Were we not as close as I imagined? Surely if we had been as one, I would have heard him crying out to me or been warmed by the presence of a comforting God preparing me for loss. I felt nothing. I, who feared the water, hadn’t been worried when he decided to help the old man; just annoyed that he would take the time from us. “I had every reason to fear water,” I told Mary.
“It was an accident from what Sam says. Just an—”
“It’s Keil,” I said, interrupting. “Christian insisted on taking the certificates to Keil so he could pay our debt. Always it’s been Keil, driving our lives and now Christian’s death.” I stood, paced. “The goat,” I said. “Someone needs to milk the goat.”
“Boshie did that. And fed the mule. There’s nothing you need to do but rest. Build up your strength. It hasn’t even hit you yet, Emma. That much I know. When we lost the baby, well …”
Her voice trailed off. I couldn’t listen. My mind rolled around thinking that when Christian came home I’d tell him all about this, how strange I felt, how empty, how my husband had squandered his life in a meaningless way.
He’s not coming home.
I resented Mary then. I resented her having already grieved and lived through what I had yet to bear. I resented that she still had a husband she’d go home to. I resented her knowing what to do when I didn’t.
I gazed at the door, expectant though I knew that he wouldn’t walk through it. Could the human mind hold two opposing thoughts at once? Mary had grief’s ritual down. Everyone knew what to do except me.
I wanted Andy with me. I wanted to decide about the casket. I wanted my husband buried here, on our property. Why did it have to be in the place Keil picked for his son? Why was it Keil, always Keil? Didn’t I have say in any of this?
I picked up Kate and held her to me, her sweet little face like a full moon, so round, so glowing in the lamplight. I brushed at her nose and the crackled sound she made as she breathed ceased. I watched her chest move in and out. I wanted to hold her tight to me but I didn’t want to wake her. My fingers made round motions on her skin. She and Andy were all I had now. All that mattered.
“Emma? Are you all right?”
Who knows how long I’d stood there. My heart felt snowed on, wet, thick, suffocating snow. Mary lifted Kate from my arms, my daughter’s little legs hanging over Mary’s forearm, relaxed, her head lolling in safe sleep. Mary pressed her onto the bed, pulled a light cover over her legs.
“My mind feels foggy.” I inhaled, couldn’t get a deep breath. “I’ll fix tea. I need tea.”
“Let me do it for you,” Mary said.
“He’s my husband, the father of my children. Five years, Mary. That’s all I’m to get? Five years? What kind of God would be so unloving that—”
“Oh, Emma, don’t. Don’t blame, not now.”
I looked at her. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but here was something forbidden, something I wasn’t supposed to do. My contrary ways, what Emma Wagner Giesy was known for.
My husband understood me. Maybe he was the only one who had ever understood me. And now he was gone.
That thought finally brought the tears I hoped would cleanse my angry soul.
They stayed with me three days, the Giesy women. They helped me select clothes for Christian to be buried in and carried them off. I compelled them to bring Andy back despite my mother-in-law’s suggestion that Andy stay longer with them, “where he would have male influences to guide him during this trying time.”
“He has the memory of his father to guide him,” I said. “And me.”
Having Andy home gave me strength. I needed that success. Power, after all, is setting a goal and gathering resources to make it happen.
When my mother-in-law brought him back to me, she spent the day. It was her first visit to our home since the house was built. We looked at my garden with a good stand of peas and onions and potatoes. The wheat field looked paltry. “Planting that was a waste when you can get wheat ground at the mill,” she said, pointing with her chin toward the field. She looked to the flowers. “And posies.” She clucked her tongue. Waste. A life given for nothing, that was a waste.
I didn’t defend. I had no energy. Christian understood my efforts.
“He loved fishing,” she said then. “He’d plop his line into the water, even little puddles of water in the spring. Then he’d come running to tell me he’d seen a fish there. He was always so hopeful.” She sighed. “He loved the mountains. I always thought we’d go back one day to Switzerland, just to see them and what we left behind. Did you know that he broke his arm once, running and falling? He didn’t even cry but it was so crooked I knew it was broken. His father set it. I nursed him and now …” My arm brushed hers and she reached to grab my hand. She squeezed it firm, and the warmth of it and its strength brought tears. She was perhaps the closest anyone could come to knowing of the emptiness I felt. “A parent isn’t supposed to outlive a child,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Especially not a child who has lived to forty-five.” She released my hand, fumbled at her sleeve, then blew her nose in the handkerchief she’d kept there.
Andy ran past us, chasing the goat, grabbing for the animal’s twitching tail. It bleated in unison with my son’s laughter. I could not imagine my life without that child. How would I survive the loss of his laughter or of Kate’s? What must it be like for my mother-in-law to have given birth and witnessed a son grow to manhood, and then to watch him be buried? Death was difficult enough, but to lose a part of my own flesh? Such courage it takes to be a mother.
My mother-in-law said, “Such strange events we see in living
. I must cherish the years I had with him. You too, Emma. Others, Mary, had only minutes with the child she lost. And you, just five years as a wife.” She took my hand again. “But you’re young,” she added.
I braced myself for the words, “You’ll marry again,” but they didn’t come. I would never do that, not ever marry again, and so I’d never have another child that I would worry would one day be lost to me. These two were enough to worry over.
Christian wasn’t supposed to leave a wife and two small children, but I didn’t say this to her.
“The service,” I said. “I—”
“It is being handled, Emma.” She patted my hand. “You have too much to think about now. His brothers and father will take care of those details.”
These were details I wanted to take care of, but my tongue fell silent under the weight of her grief.
I fought sleep, fearing I’d have to face the loss again each time I woke. The children both slept with me, something my mother-in-law suggested. “It will ease the pain of not sharing a bed,” she said. She forgot that my bed stayed empty for weeks at a time when Christian traveled, when he farmed the oysters. In the night, a child’s elbow now pressed against my back; a tiny arm draped across my face. I dozed and woke from dreams where Christian fell over a cliff all tangled up with a mule; or where he sank into deep mud and I couldn’t pull him out; or, the worst, that dream where we together dived underwater in a craft and I’d asked if he knew how to get where we intended to go and he said, “No, I’ve forgotten my compass.”
I planned to grieve after the service. I’d simmer until then, temper the slow boil I felt brewing that without watching would spill over and sear a hole clear through my heart. When everyone left us alone, my children and I would decide what we would do, not Christian’s family, not everyone else who thought they knew best. When we were our own island, then we’d decide when to cross the water to the mainland or whether to stay all alone.
Karl and Boshie came to escort us to the stockade for the service. It was one of those glorious summer days with every sweet scent of wildflower imaginable floating in the air and yet one could not hold on to any particular scent. Birdsong became so loud at times I didn’t even hear the clop-clop of the mule crossing the river. A bridge might be there one day, but my husband wouldn’t build it. Tiny flashes of memory of trips taken with Christian formed, then darted like dragonflies, away. I’d never hear him call me Liebchen again. Never feel his mustache prick my lips. No physical sensations; no recognizing his gait from a distance. Just memories and perhaps not even them if they sifted through my mind forever as they had this week, like seeds scattered in wind.
I didn’t want to arrive. I didn’t want to see his family’s faces, be “Emma” for them, behave as they expected. I wanted this over so I could be alone with my children. Alone with my grief.
Outside, people spoke in low voices and stopped talking when we walked past them. Even my black dress hushed against my legs. I’d put lumps of sugar in the hem pockets, something to soothe the children with later, and the tiny weights tapped my ankles. I stepped inside the stockade where I expected to see the casket and my husband, one last time.
Sarah and Sam stood there, a few others from the area. All the Giesys. The Stauffers. George Link, John Genger, the other scouts. And then as they parted for me, I saw him.
He opened wide his arms to me and I rushed into them trying desperately not to sob, not to bring attention to my wails, but I could not contain the mix of joy and agony his presence represented.
“Ah, Emma,” my brother Jonathan said. “It’s with great sadness I come now to see you. Great sadness.”
“Ja, I know, I know. But you are here. I so need you to be here. Thank you. Danke.” Shared blood comforted as none other.
“Thank Wilhelm, too, Emma. He brought several of us.” He said these words as whispers in my ear. Frozen water replaced my blood.
I stepped away from Jonathan, scanned the crowd until I saw him standing with that beard, those eyes that never seemed to blink, eyes that took people in and kept them, that drew people across water they couldn’t swim in, just to please him. I felt a buzzing in my head, but my breath came short and I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just prayed, yes prayed, that Keil would not approach me, would not attempt to offer sympathy.
“We come today to help our sister, the Widow Giesy, put her husband to rest,” Keil said then to the group. “She is among family and friends who know how to serve widows and orphans as our colony has done for years. She is like a daughter to me. We come to say good-bye on this earth to our friend, Chris Giesy, her husband, the father of this fine boy.” Andy stood against my hip looking down. Keil touched the top of his head. “We come to light these candles and climb the hill where we will place this man who was like a son to me into the ground next to”—his voice croaked—“my son, my Willie.” He cried now and tears rolled down his face. Others comforted him, patted his back.
Singing began, men’s voices rising in a German dirge. I saw the Schellenbaum. I heard the tiny tinkle of the bells. Keil had brought the staff of honor to be carried before my husband’s casket.
When the dirge ended, Keil regained his composure and he continued. “We prepare to lay Chris Giesy’s body in the ground, but we know his spirit has already gone before us. It waits for us in heaven where we will all be united one day. All of us, sinners all and yet forgiven by an act of grace.”
At least he does not blame me for Christian’s death. At least not yet.
He motioned then for the men inside to lift the casket they’d been shielding from my view. It was made of redwood, leftover from the mill, I imagined. A second, smaller casket sat off to the side; the herd boy’s casket. “We go now to the burial site,” Keil commanded.
This was the service? No talk of what Christian had meant to so many people here? No scriptures I could cling to for their comfort? What about the way he led us here and protected us, couldn’t we talk about that? Jonathan had my arm but I pulled back. “I … I want to see him. My husband’s body. I need to see him.”
“The casket has already been sealed shut, Widow Giesy,” Keil said.
Already I’ve become the Widow Giesy. No longer Frau Giesy. No longer Emma.
“But you … you saw your son every day coming across the prairie. You said good-bye to him over time.” I heard a gasp from some of the women, but it didn’t stop me. “Now you deprive me of one last time to touch his face, to hold him just once more?”
“Emma,” Jonathan said. “The lid’s already pegged tight.”
I wiggled free of his arm. “They wouldn’t let me wash his body and dress him. They deliberately didn’t want to wait before they pegged it shut.”
Keil asked, “What does the Widow Giesy say?”
Jonathan said, “She is distraught. That’s all. To be expected.”
“I’m not! I only want to see my husband one last time before I never see him ever again.” The group, silent, parted when I pushed through them and stopped at the head of the casket.
“Open it,” I ordered.
A part of me prayed they’d refuse, begged in my heart they’d deny me so I could place my anger onto all of them instead of where it was.
Joe Knight held one end of the casket and he motioned for the men to put it back down onto the saw horses. His eyes looked swollen from crying.
I stared, as desperate as a prisoner waiting for a pardon. I wanted to see an empty casket. Maybe it was all an elaborate joke. Maybe Christian was alive. Maybe I was mistaken in having witnessed his drowning. Maybe I’d turn and see my husband standing there, strong, tall, healthy, waiting to take me home, the joke elaborate and cruel but one I’d forgive. Oh, God, I prayed. I will forgive them, forgive You; I’ll not carry a grudge, I’ll not.
Jonathan said, “She won’t believe until she sees.”
“Ja,” Herr Keil said. “It is like Elijah and his servant, Elisha. The servant had to see his master’s death in order to
believe he must put on the mantle of his master and carry on.”
But it was my brother whose grief became the face of truth, my brother’s orders that lifted the casket lid so at last I could believe.
The women had lined the wooden box with quilt pieces and given him a pillow filled with herbs. My nose filled up with scents of lavender mixed with the unmistakable smell of death. I touched his face then, felt the rubbery wrinkle of his skin, ran my fingers across his cold lips. Was that a bruise on his cheek? I patted the artillery medal he wore on his chest and removed it. No one stopped me.
Andy pulled at my skirt and asked to be lifted up. I held Kate now, not sure when I’d lifted her. “Andy, I can’t …,” I said. Then Big Jack Giesy stepped in and with ease hoisted my son.
“Daddy’s sleeping?” I nodded. “He slept from the water too.” How else to explain to one so young? Andy asked to be set down, and then he leaned his head against me, pushing the ruffles of my crinoline and the hard hem sweets against my legs.
I had two children to remember him by, that’s all I had. These two children would keep his memory alive while his friends placed his body in the ground.
I turned, my breath a weight stuck in my chest. They pegged the cover shut. Jonathan directed me outside, up the steep hill. Those gathered carried candles and began following us, the bells of the Schellenbaum tinkling in the wind.
“Papa’s lantern,” Andy said pulling back. “We carry his lantern, Mama?”
“It’s with the mule,” I told him. “We don’t have time to—”
“But Papa’s lantern has Papa’s light. It—”
“Never mind,” Jack Giesy told Andy. “There’s enough light with the candles.”
“But—”
“Go get it,” I told him.
“You maybe could indulge your son a little less,” Jack said.
I saw Jack raise an eyebrow of warning. His intervention annoyed. “Go,” I said.
Andy raced to the mule. He returned with the lantern, and we trudged up the hill behind the casket, my son’s small hands gripping the lantern handle as though he gripped his father’s hand.