I really don’t remember what Herr Keil said at the grave. The wind whipped the dirt, reminding me of ash. All the candles blew out. We didn’t need them for light; it was still afternoon. The lantern light continued to glow. My mind took in only small tidbits of his words. A raccoon scampered through the graveyard behind Keil.
I wanted this to be over. I wanted to plant the cedar sapling Jonathan carried for me, then saddle the mule and return home, curl up with my children and my memories, uninterrupted by what others thought I should or should not do. I wanted to lie there, maybe until we all died.
Jonathan helped me tap the seedling into the ground at Christian’s grave, then we left the cemetery to eat. How can I die if I eat? All had brought food. People did tell stories then of Christian, food being appetite for memory. They spoke of his adventuresome spirit even as a child. His teasing on Ash Wednesday, how as a boy he called the last child out of bed the Aschenpuddel, the ash puddle; how his brothers and he wrestled; how his older sister Helena taught him; how his younger sisters adored him.
Then Herr Keil suggested they replay the funeral dirge he’d composed for Willie. The men agreed and their horns intoned a heaviness. It was too much.
“Here are Christian’s papers,” Sam told me as I rose, gathered up my children, and walked out to our mount. I retied the lantern, making sure we wouldn’t lose it. Sarah and Sam stood on either side of me. He handed me the folded leather satchel. “It was on his person, tucked in a belt.”
“We took everything out,” Sarah said. “Sam dried them. They’re all in German so you mustn’t think we pried.”
Her words made me smile. “You would never pry,” I said. “Thank goodness you were one of the first to be there, Sam.” I clutched the papers to my breast. “Thank you for this.”
Sam said, remembering, “His last words the day you left were of you, Emma.”
“Were they?” I wiped at my eyes with the sleeve of my dress.
“He said if you needed anything, to remind you that the family would always take care of you. Oh, and just before he left, he pocketed his compass and said to let you know he’d found it, hidden under his books. Did he get a chance to tell you himself?” I shook my head, no. “He was quite adamant that I tell you. I suspect you know what it means.”
He’d found his direction; I had now to find mine.
9
Emma
Water-Stained Wisdom
Those first weeks after the service were like the water-stained pages I unfolded from Christian’s leather wallet. I remember moments of clarity but mostly I couldn’t make sense of much at all. Even before I left the service, that arbitrary time I’d given to myself to begin to face the future, even then my thinking had begun to warp.
I felt obsessed about seeing what Christian carried in that wallet. I could have found the certificates to pay off Herr Keil and get that out of the way, finish what Christian had started. But I didn’t want to open it with everyone around. It was something tangible of my husband that I could hold on to, and I didn’t want to share it. Keil could wait. This was his fault anyway. Christian wouldn’t have been on the Bay if Keil hadn’t insisted that the real colony form south of the Columbia. If he had accepted what the scouts claimed, none of this would have happened. If he’d realized how much Christian contributed to the larger community here by his marshalling, being the justice of the peace, a legislator, he’d see why we could not follow him to Aurora. Christian and I had come to this place so certain of God’s guidance, and now this.
I lacked shelter in this storm.
My brother would be returning with Keil in a few days, though he offered to take me back to my home. Our home. My home. Did it matter what I called it?
Once again I would have another adult in the house, but this one was my brother, whom I dearly loved, and I trusted it would be a soothing time.
“We’re going to go back to Aurora Mills, up the Willapa,” Jonathan told me while still at the stockade. “And Wilhelm will come in a day or so with the others, bringing the herd boy’s casket. I can join them then. He’s brought you apple cider too. For the children’s teeth.”
I wanted nothing from Keil but the children did need cider. I had no dried apples to give them. “We can take the cider with us now,” I said. “That way Keil won’t have to stop by. It’ll be easier for him to take the casket across the Bay and up the Columbia rather than carrying it overland. That’s the way he brought Willie’s casket.” It was the route Christian took to his death.
“He had a hearse then. Now it is just us and the mules. The boy is light. Keil has decided. I’m coming back with you now, Emma,” Jonathan said. It wasn’t an offer but a directive. He stepped back into the stockade to let Keil know, I supposed. He came out with Jack Giesy.
Jack tipped his hat at me. “I’m sorry for your loss, Frau Giesy.”
I looked for the tease in his face, but his condolences sounded sincere. Right then hollow platitudes would have angered me.
Jack had been the one to lift my son up for a last look at his father. Jack touched Andy’s hat. My son didn’t jerk away. The two had twisted a thread together. “Thank you,” I said. I nodded my head to him and finished saddling the mule.
Boshie and Mary stood near my brother and Jack when I finished and led the mule to a stump, where I stepped up into the stirrup. Sarah lifted Kate up to me, the child all wide eyes and smiles. Mary wiped at her eyes.
I caught a look in Jack’s eyes, a blend of surprise and disapproval, I thought, and so I said, “Sidesaddles aren’t much used in these parts. Certainly not when one is holding a child.”
Before stepping back Mary whispered, “We could see your crinoline ruffles when you lifted your leg over.”
“Ja, well, fortunately for me, I don’t care,” I said.
Jonathan mounted up and we headed south toward my house.
Christian wouldn’t see the garden harvest. He wouldn’t be there to tell me that my wheat had been a waste. He wouldn’t find another perfect small cedar tree to decorate with blown egg shells like the one we had last Christmas. Last Christmas. Christian had seen his last Christday, my last birthday, our last anniversary. How many “lasts” could there be? A last senseless death. I wondered then if I’d ever have another thought that didn’t carry with it a reference to my Christian.
Jonathan stayed busy those days he shared with me. He milked the cows while I handled the goat. He chopped wood in the late summer dusk when the air cooled. He often knelt to weed with me and surprised me with his love of words, something we shared that I hadn’t known of. “The word therapy comes from working with decay and decomposition,” he said. “As in a garden. Yet in that decay, the soil builds up if we add to it, tend it. It’s the way of life.”
“I like the gardening but it’s just that, work. Not much tenderness in ripping out weeds.”
“More though, Emma. Your grief, it must be worked and reworked through your own thinking until you come to a place of resolution. So you can go forward. From dust to dust. We are all built up eventually, again. If we allow it.”
He failed to engage me with such talk that Christian’s death was somehow related to an act of nurture, soil decaying and being restored. I wasn’t ready to be restored. I planned to have a few words with God, once my brother left me alone, about what had happened here, words about the life of a worthy servant being taken in exchange for an old man’s insistence and inferior furniture. “Doing for others. Helping our neighbors.” Keil and this whole act of servitude had taken us from Bethel to here.
For now, I’d change the subject.
“Christian planned to bring back a bred ewe for me, for wool,” I said.
“We will bring several up. Ja. Andreas and John talk of sheep too.” He looked around. “Lots of twigs and such will get in the wool here unless they’re fenced and fed,” he said. “Be difficult to clean but the fodder would be good. Christian must have talked with his father about it.”
“He wa
s going to bring one just for us,” I said.
My brother let that pass without comment.
That evening when I served him bean soup with fresh lettuce from my garden, and biscuits with molasses followed by a cake with berries and freshly whipped cream, he pushed his chair back and stuck his hands in his waistband and said, “That was good, Sister. Good flavors, filling but not heavy. I like that.”
“A compliment’s a rare thing,” I said. “Especially from a brother.”
Andy and Kate both licked spoons full of the cream. Jonathan cleared his throat. “I should do it more, then.” He picked at his nails as I cleared the table of the tin plates that Christian had made. Andy, wearing a mustache of white, came to sit on his uncle’s knee. Jonathan bounced him as though he rode a horse but then said Andy was getting too big for him. “See how I huff and puff?” Jonathan told him.
“Like the wolf and the three pigs,” Andy said.
“Like that.”
I washed Andy’s and Kate’s faces, then picked up my stitching and wasn’t looking at Jonathan when he said, “Emma, now that you are widowed, it will be foolish for you to hold on to this idea that you can have your own sheep and whatnot, without the others to help you.” I looked at him. “Christian understood that communal care is the best care. Each has a gift that can be shared, and together no one has to bear the great weight of doing all, alone. It is the Christian way, Emma.”
“Obligations come with gifts,” I said. “Accept the cows and then one must meet the obligation of the contract for butter someone else signed. Take on the sheep and then one must shear when others shear, not when I might want to.”
“Ah, Emma. When we give something away, our hands are empty then, right in front of the person receiving our gift. We stand exposed, admitting that we’re needy too. Then they give back. It puts us all in the same place. We are part of the colony. The community.”
“I’m not alone. I have the children. We’ll do gut here. Gut.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, a habit he had. “It’s for the sake of the children … that you should think about coming back with me. There is room in the gross Haus. Louisa would welcome you, I know.”
I laughed. “Louisa would take me in, but welcome me? That I doubt.” I took a needle out of my chatelaine, changed thread, and continued mending. “Louisa didn’t come to Christian’s burial.”
“Their children, she has them to care for.”
“But in a communal place, wouldn’t someone else care for them while a woman took time to grieve with her sister?”
He sighed. “You always could find fault.”
“Not faulting. I don’t complain, just explain. I see things how they are.”
“You see things how you want to, unique but not always right,” my brother said.
As if being right mattered to me. Only where my children were concerned or my husband, well, then it mattered that the right choice was made, the right decision carried out. “I’m not a welcome member at Aurora. It is foolish not to admit that. Even your offer to bring me there would not remove the stain.”
“You’re not thinking clearly, Emma. There is no stain. All is forgiven: your rush to join the scouts, your push to keep Christian here, the oystering, all of that is overlooked in the wake of this great loss. We only want to help.”
My face felt hot. I had no need of forgiveness. Keil, now he ought to be seeking forgiveness for what he’d caused here, for the suffering and hardships and even Christian’s death. But it would do no good to attempt to convince my brother. I stepped over his words and merely told him once again that we’d remain here, in the house Christian had built for us. “We’ll be gut here,” I said. “Just gut.”
“We’ve planted hops at Aurora. Our brew masters will have good work to do,” he continued as though I hadn’t made my stand. “Oregon has scheduled a constitutional meeting and will become a state before long, long before this Washington Territory with all its arguments over Indians and martial law. Your children would have more chance to find meaningful work one day if you came with me to Aurora.”
“There is progress here,” I said. “That man Swan who first invited Christian to this region, he supports the building of a canal from Puget Sound to the Columbia River coming right through Willapa Bay. It would mean great economic growth. We have a future. Right here.”
My stomach burned at any words of the future. I couldn’t imagine my life without Christian. Each morning since his death had been trial enough, to wake up, face the empty pillow beside me, rise and tend to the children as though nothing had changed. At times, I pretended that their father would be coming home any day now in the summer lull of the oyster harvest. I supposed that was a gift of sorts, that the children were accustomed to being without their father for long periods of time. Now, even though Andy had seen him “sleeping” on the beach and in the coffin, Andy might simply be waiting for him to come back. And Kate? Kate would not remember his face at all. She would know him only as a memory. She’d know her mother only as a woman, bitter, widowed.
One evening while Jonathan chopped at logs so I’d have firewood for winter, I finally opened Christian’s wallet. I’d been longing to do it, yet dreading it, as once it was done I’d have no more tangible thing of his to anticipate discovering. It would all be memory from then on, nothing unveiled as something new. It was the last of my connection with him as an undiscovered man.
I unfolded the wallet. Inside was the certificate that would pay off our debt. It was smudged, water-soaked but decipherable, its intent clear. Maybe I could invest the money back into oystering with Joe so he could hire the labor that Christian would otherwise have provided. Or I could use the money to purchase the ewe or pay outright for the cows or buy a hog myself. Maybe I’d use it to make my way in this world by traveling to Olympia or Oregon City to paint miniature portraits of prominent people there, people who would pay to have a good likeness made of them. Of course doing so with two young children posed a problem, but I pitched that thought away. The certificates offered a future, though the one I envisioned opposed Christian’s hopes.
To pay Keil … I could barely stand the idea of it.
A smaller piece of paper was folded into the leather. I could be grateful that they’d quickly recovered Christian’s body, or the sea and salt would have ruined everything inside. I held a piece of paper that looked like a letter. I unfolded the layers.
It was one of my own, sent to him when he traveled in the South that first year we were married. He’d saved it. I read it again, filling in the words smudged by the creases and the water. I’d told him I’d support his work, do what must be done to make him grateful he had come to marriage late in life. One day we would have a family. He wanted that. I’d forced myself along on this journey west because of that. Well, that and other reasons. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have known his son and daughter who were his legacy, nor this place, this valley he’d felt called to and trusted. I’d helped him find a way to be here. Staying here would honor all he’d sacrificed; leaving would mean the work he’d done here had been for nothing. I folded the letter back into the wallet. Those were the only two things he’d carried with him.
At some point, Keil and the herd boy’s casket and those who’d come to the funeral would head back by way of our land. I could simply hand Keil the certificates that would pay off our land debt. We had no donation land claim; Christian had purchased our three hundred and twenty acres from a former settler. If I kept this certificate and converted it into cash, I’d have enough to purchase all we’d need to get us through the winter—the grain, cloth, whatever else. I’d be independent of the Giesy clan and Keil too.
Or I could give the certificate to Keil and end the debt, knowing to do so meant I’d be in debt to Christian’s family. There was no way out of the obligation, not the way Keil set up the colony, not the way he controlled and mastered everyone to do his bidding, not the way Christian had followed Keil through the years. Such a
senseless death.
I would ask Keil to forgive the debt. That would be the Christian thing to do for a widow and her children. Indeed, to not do that, I decided, was an unforgivable act.
I prepared meals and offered additional food for their sacks. The latter they rejected, saying they’d been given enough by the Giesys and Schaefers and others to make it back to Oregon well fed.
“You’d reject the Diamond Rule?” I asked. “How can I make your life better than my own if you won’t take my offerings?”
“Ach, Emma,” Keil said. His dark eyes bored into me. “While it is true that it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is also true that all of us must receive. When you accept a gift, you practice accepting forgiveness.”
I’d done nothing requiring forgiveness, and I felt the hair at my scalp tighten. Maybe I needed forgiveness for my un-Christian thoughts about Keil. Perhaps for coming back and bringing Christian out to the water where he saw the old man in need. Perhaps I needed forgiveness for that. No. I was doing what a wife did, making time to be with her husband. My thoughts were pure and simple theological explanations of his actions. Considering holding on to the certificates, to not carry out my husband’s wishes, that was an act of caring for my children. If I handed over the certificates, we’d be at the mercy of this colony. I’d be dependent. I and my children would be required to accept help from others. Our life would not be better than Keil’s; we would never be on the better end of the Diamond Rule, a rule that had taken my husband’s life.
But to withhold the payment denied the vow I’d made to further Christian’s work, his ministry, his wish to serve the colony and Christ.
Ach, jammer! These men put me in such a whirlwind of confusion.
In the end, I behaved without courage. I gave Keil the certificates. I suppose it was my own letter Christian had carried with him all those years that was the deciding factor. I’d made a vow to support his work. Even being in this valley was a sign of my willingness to support his work. He’d made a vow to Keil and the nurture of the colony. And while I resented that he’d done it, that he’d kept his lifeline to communal living, I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to keep the certificates and turn them into independence. I wasn’t sure I could live with the consequences of reaching for something that Christian might not have supported had he lived. And if I failed, then I’d have lost Christian’s last hope along with my own.