A Tendering in the Storm (Change and Cherish Historical)

  With the payment, the land was free and clearly mine as Christian’s widow, the debt to the colony paid off. I had not even a half dime of my own to do anything without the help of others. I read the letter again in the quiet of the night, the light from Christian’s lantern reflecting on the smudges.

  “Here it is, Herr Keil,” I’d said. “Christian meant to give this to you.”

  “Not ‘Herr Keil’ but ‘Brother Keil’ to you, Widow Giesy.” He patted my hand like a child’s. “Your husband was one of my best friends. You must know that. He was like a brother to me.” I said nothing. “As it should be,” he said then. “This payment will help all of us at Aurora Mills. We’ll remember your husband. He was a true saint in the work of our Lord.”

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t have told him that while he lived,” I said.

  “It was a hard time when we were here. My son … then the Indian wars. No houses ready for us. All the rain. Here today, this, this climate in August is lovely. But the rains will come again and there will still be much work to keep the cows from disappearing into the woods. The rivers will rise and you will struggle to get your crops to market. We have a better site in Aurora Mills.” I straightened my shoulders, prepared to defend. “But I honor the effort of the Giesys and the building of the mill and the work of the scouts who stay here. We’re friends, all of us. You must see that too, Widow Giesy. You are still a part of the colony. For the sake of your son if for no other reason.”

  “For the sake of both my children, then,” I said, “I give you the payment as Christian wanted.” I paused. “Though I am prepared to receive it back, to have you make my life better than yours. The Diamond Rule—”

  “Emma,” Jonathan said.

  “Which way is it then, Brother? If I receive, then I’m a good and noble widow; but if I ask, then I am somehow a sinner?”

  “You ask for something that would take away from many, Widow Giesy,” Keil said. “I cannot grant such a thing that would rob those in Aurora of their needs.”

  “My children have needs too. They are robbed of their father’s love and care because of his generous willingness to save an old man from drowning.”

  “You and Christian chose this place. Remember that.”

  Oh, I’d remember that. But this bitter exchange would mark a new time. I knew this as I watched Keil and Jonathan and others leave to carry the herd boy back to Aurora. I vowed that I would do whatever it took to keep my family together and free of influences I rejected, influences that had taken Christian’s life from me.

  I vowed it again on the day after Keil left, when I faced the first days of morning sickness.

  10

  Emma

  Holdfast

  That day, weeks ago when Christian and I walked along the beach, the day following our nighttime excursion, he pointed to a stringy plant, seaweed that clasped its greenish tendrils tight around a rock. “Holdfast,” he told me.

  “It does appear to be holding fast, ja,” I agreed. “Clinging tight.”

  He corrected me and said that was the very name of that attachment. It was a holdfast, a noun. The seaweed was made in such a way it could not loose its hold on the rock’s surface. They were bound together by their very nature.

  “As we are,” I told him that day.

  “It’s how we are in God’s sight,” Christian corrected. “Man and God, a holdfast.” He clasped his wide palms together. “Woman and God too,” he added and smiled, a deference to his independent-thinking wife.

  “But are we not a holdfast, too?” I asked. “You and I?”

  “Human beings can separate,” he said. “But not each of us from our Creator. We are bound in storms, in trials, even unto death.”

  He was right, of course, at least about the two of us not being so attached the bond could never be broken. On this first day when I was alone with my children, I dismissed Christian’s observation that a holdfast existed between the Creator and all created ones. I didn’t feel anything holding on to me, didn’t want to even talk to that Being I had once believed would keep us safe.

  There were details to tend to. Christian’s clothes, for one. His brothers could wear the pants or the shirts. Those nearly worn out could be cut into pieces and crafted into quilts. The boots might be kept for Andy. They were a good pair, heavy. Those waders, they brought on his death, filling as they did. I would burn them one day when I burned out a stump. But I didn’t want to give any of it away or cut any of it up. To do so meant saying he would no longer need them and that meant, well, it meant that he wasn’t coming back.

  As I went about my day heating water for laundry, fixing a meal for the children, wondering if the lettuce looked ripe, I heard myself saying, “I’ll ask Christian about that.” Other days I knew for certain he was gone, but then I’d set an extra place at the table and not even notice it until Andy started counting.

  I feared I’d forget what he looked like and often took out the sketch I’d drawn, just to stare.

  Then one day when my bonnet hung drying in the sun, I wore Christian’s flat-top hat out into the garden to shade my face. It offered more protection than my bonnet, and I could see if something moved at my side better too. The next day I pulled one of his shirts over my head. I fell to my knees, overtaken by the scent of him. When I stood again, I found comfort, my thin arms lost within the blousy sleeves, the barrel of the shirt covering the new life I carried. I wrapped a cord around me to keep the cloth from billowing out and decided I would wear it daily. Later I pulled on a pair of his pants and rolled the legs up and tacked them with thread. It was easier to milk the cows in the pants, and if people stayed away as I hoped, no one would know that I’d taken to wearing my husband’s clothes. I could keep Christian with me, and when they became too worn by wearing, I’d sew a tiny dress for the infant he’d never know, or make a quilt from the scraps.

  My initial reaction to the baby I carried was one of disbelief, then anger at the injustice of it all, then resolution. I’d been left to raise not two small children but three. This infant would be a constant reminder of what he could never hold fast to. A father.

  I carried that fatherless child through the September harvests and into the mild October breezes. I began to talk to the baby, a sure sign that I accepted it was there. Maybe I could talk to Christian that way too, accept that he was gone but still with me.

  Some days, though, talking to my husband felt like praying, and I didn’t want to give God that satisfaction.

  I wrote letters to my family. I made candles and soap. I dried herbs from my garden. I dug potatoes. I used the handsaw to cut some of the twigs to size for cooking and while I did, found myself annoyed again at Keil. Why hadn’t Keil sent handsaws with us when we’d come here? So many things I did each day made me remember my outrage at Keil.

  Despite the morning sickness, I dragged myself out of bed to milk the goat. Andy learned to stoke the fire, carefully, but it proved a huge help. I tried peppermint-leaf tea to settle the sickness. I hadn’t remembered having morning bouts with either of the other two children, but this one, this one protested its place within me. I thought often of Keil’s words spoken long years before about the fate of a woman, how she would suffer for her Eden brashness of seeking knowledge, daring to want more. In return, her punishment was pain in childbirth.

  Yet he’d been encouraging young men and women to wait to marry and even seemed to bring to sainthood women like Helena Giesy who chose to never marry at all. How would Helena come to know her place if painful childbirth was the chosen path for women? He never had answered that question for me, saw it as one more challenge to his authority.

  I moved through the days as though in a fog, still. Andy could take me from it with his questions, and Kate could sometimes make me smile as I watched her get her legs beneath her now and run without as much falling. She’d plow toward my lap and throw herself at me, sure that I would catch her. I’d swoop her up into my arms and blow air bubbles on her belly. She
’d arch her back in laughter and almost flip herself from my arms. Standing, she’d toss me a kiss from her tiny palm just before she lowered her head to run toward me and start the whole routine again. She always began again, even when she stumbled. She was strong, my daughter. And yet fine grained. Like flint.

  I saw in Andy more of his father as the days went by. He seemed to know what time I needed to go out to milk the cows. Young as he was, he tended Kate carefully while I milked them, then skimmed the cream. His eyes were Christian’s, especially when he couldn’t untie a knotted rope or when the goat bunted him when he least expected. Once he said, “Ach, jammer!” and I smiled rather than chastised him for his close-to-cursing words.

  In the house one day Andy asked me when his father was coming back from the Bay. I finished scrubbing the potatoes, gaining time. I sat him down and pulled up a stool beside him. “Remember when your uncle Jonathan was here? He stayed for a time after the funeral. That was when we said good-bye to your papa because he can’t come home anymore. Jonathan can come to visit us again, but not your papa. He’s not a living being anymore. He doesn’t hurt, but he doesn’t breathe or eat. He’s gone to heaven.” Did I believe this? Was I telling my son a lie? Yes, I believed there was such a place, and surely Christian would be there. It was here, the hellishness of this earth, where I thought God had forsaken us. “To heaven, Andy, where good men go.”

  “Why didn’t he take me with him?”

  I pulled him to me. “He didn’t mean to leave you behind, or me or Kate or his friends. It just happened, and when it happens like that, he doesn’t even get to say the words good-bye or reassure us, though I know he would have wanted to.” I made it sound like it was perfectly understandable that death followed life. But I still woke every morning hoping I’d hear his footsteps at the door or smell the salt of him when he turned toward me and kissed my nose. How could I expect a four-year-old boy to understand? “That’s hard, isn’t it?” He nodded. “We must be like flint,” I said. “Hard but firm, and when we think of Papa, it will be as though we struck a spark like we do when we light the cooking fire. We’ll remember lovely things about him then. We’ll keep him with us that way,” I said and patted his chest with my hand. “We’ll hold him fast in our hearts.”

  “Like when we slept at the beach,” he said.

  “Ja, that’s a good memory. We had to fight off the mosquitoes, didn’t we?”

  “Papa put up netting. They went away then. We could only hear buzz-buzz.”

  “He took good care of us, didn’t he?”

  Andy stayed quiet a long time and then he said, “He didn’t want to go, did he, Mama? He just wanted to help that man, didn’t he?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t wish to leave you, not ever. But one day we will all go, and—”

  “Not you!” He startled. He pushed away, then hugged me tight, burying his face in my lap. “Not you!” I could feel his shoulders shake and then the sob.

  I patted his back. “Not me, not anytime soon.” No one can ever know such things, but it was a lie I thought I’d be forgiven for, as it seemed to comfort my son. He reached up around my neck as though to have me lift him. “I can’t right now,” I told him. “I’ll hold you here, beside me. You’ll have another brother or sister before too long, and you’re so big that lifting you isn’t good for the baby.”

  He patted my stomach then. I told him to put his ear to my belly, to listen to the heartbeat. I knew he’d hear my heart beating, but in time, if this pregnancy progressed well, he’d be hearing the sounds of his sibling. Kate waddled over then, and she too put her head to my stomach. “We three,” I said, caressing their heads. “We three will be all right. We must just hold fast.”

  The work I had to do now lost a certain luster. I no longer milked the cows so we’d one day be independent. I milked them for the milk I would make into butter. It wouldn’t be long and I’d have no more milk; the cows would be bred back and they’d need what they made to prepare for their own calves when they came in the spring. I suppose I was grateful in one way that no one had brought a bred ewe up from Aurora and that Rudy had taken the pigs to raise. A ewe would have been one more thing to manage. When the cows dried up, we’d rely on the goat then for our daily milk. I wondered if this next infant would have trouble eating, if I’d have trouble feeding it as I had my others. Time would tell.

  For the first time in my whole life, I felt like I had too much time and nothing I cared to do with it.

  I had hurts and no one to salve them, and few reasons to treat the wounds myself. I had ideas but nowhere to go with them, no one to listen to them, not even to tell me that what I thought about wasn’t worth the trouble. Malaise. That was the emotion that haunted me those first months after Christian died.

  “You’re a wealthy widow,” Mary said one day. She’d brought Elizabeth over to play with Andy and Kate while we churned butter. She’d take the round molds with her when she left, and they’d be transported to the Woodard’s, where they’d be shipped north or south. Contracts had to be met, and those of us in Willapa were meeting the needs for butter in faraway places. Soon we’d add pork to our obligations. John and Andreas had found markets for our products just as Christian said they would. But what was earned went to the common fund. Or so I supposed. I didn’t see any payment for my labors.

  I also hadn’t seen much of Mary since Christian’s death, and now that she was here there was a strain between us.

  “Wealthy?” I asked.

  “You own your property. Isn’t it what you always wanted, to have your own place?”

  “It isn’t how I imagined it,” I said.

  “I know, but still, you have property and value in your own name. Christian left you taken care of.”

  “All I can do with this land is sell it,” I said. “If I stay here, then I have no choice but to depend on all of you to take care of me. To be … communal, again.”

  “Is it really so bad to share?” she asked.

  “I’m adjusting,” I said. “I can’t contribute much myself except the butter, and before long that’ll stop too. So that adds to my … beholding, something I’ve never liked.”

  She churned for a time then said, “Maybe you could hire Jack. To do your work.”

  I laughed. “I don’t have any way to pay anyone, let alone a wanderer like Jack.”

  “You could pay him in shares to the property, for each year worked or something like that. You could keep accounts. You can’t chop wood or do the hard labor, not with your baby on the way. And the others can’t always get here after their day of work. I mean to be helpful, as we should be to widows and orphans.”

  I raised an eyebrow, more interested in how she knew I carried a child than in the thought that others might resent having to help me after completing their own day’s work.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’re starting to show,” she said. “Only a little, but your face, it’s rounder already. I noticed at the last gathering at the stockade.”

  “Do Christian’s parents know?”

  She shrugged. The children’s laughter rose, and Mary motioned for Elizabeth to come to her so she could say a few settling words. She sent her back with a finger of warning. “He’s … good, Emma,” she said, turning to me.

  “Who?”

  “Jack. He doesn’t complain about my cooking and—”

  “Jack’s living with you now? You and Sebastian and Karl?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t mind and Boshie likes the conversations with the others. Oh, Jack keeps odd hours sometimes, but usually he helps with chores so Boshie has less to do when he gets home. I think he wants to help, if you let him.”

  “You mean work without being paid?”

  “You have such a difficult time letting anyone help you.”

  Her avoidance confirmed my hesitance. “There’s something about him, Mary. When he first came here, with the cows, there was something … I don’t know, he’s … cocky.”


  “Confident,” Mary defended. She was a good judge of character, at least I’d always thought that about her. She shared my dislike for Keil. Or had.

  “Arrogantly pert,” I said. “He … swaggers.”

  “He’s young.”

  “He’s older than me, if I remember correctly.”

  “Is he? He likes his brew, but it seems to make him happy rather than demanding as with some men. And Boshie doesn’t like him to drink and Karl doesn’t either, and Jack honors that. He even goes outside to smoke. He’s … funny. He does unexpected things, sort of like you do. That’s why I thought he might be someone you’d enjoy talking with. It was just a thought, a way to make your days easier,” she said.

  “My days aren’t hard, Mary. They’re … lonely.”

  “Well then, maybe Jack could bring you laughter. Laughter wipes out loneliness like ash to a stain.”

  While my husband was alive but working at the Bay, a man could not visit me alone without some consternation. Karl was sometimes deemed safe enough; he was twenty years my senior and he offered lessons to Andy. But otherwise, the men honored civility and didn’t come alone.

  But now that I was a widow, men could come by without hesitation, in the name of service, in the name of helping me out. They could sit at my table and be served noodles and Strudels and never once feel out of place. I was set apart, as different as I could be from every other woman along the Willapa as I wore the widow’s robe. I am set apart. That thought brought a wry smile. Oh, one must be careful what one wishes for. There is a chance it will arrive in peculiar ways.