I used the word wretch to mean someone exiled, in distress because they are alone and are, as in German, full of Elend, of misery. Some days this is how I feel here, as though I travel in a foreign land, exiled from what once gave pleasure. This is not to blame anyone, not my husband or God or anyone else. But I feel wretched just the same.
I worry about our friends on the Willapa with such wretched happenings. We learn too this month that the Indian uprising of last September, which took the lives of one hundred and twenty sojourners in that Deseret country, may not be blamed entirely on the natives. It is now believed that saints also took part in the killings. I find this nearly impossible to believe, but some children remembered. They saw the white flag of truce flown by their parents and uncles and older brothers. When the Deseret saints came in to say they’d negotiate the peace, they instead attacked, killing everyone save those few children they thought would not be old enough to remember. But they were. They do. Poor wretches.
So I fear for those in that country too. We hear they have rebelled against the governor appointed to the territory, and the military has moved in to make the peace there. Emma Wagner’s aunt lives there. I pray that she is well.
I pray for us here too. Whenever some bad news comes about a group set apart as the Deseret saints are, the Americans around us get nervous, or so my husband tells me. They wonder if we will attack our neighbors or pretend to be neighborly when we really aren’t. They weave us into the same pattern as those they do not understand. Soon, instead of coming to our storehouse to purchase pear butter or to buy up a new bed that one of our men made, they’ll stay away. Maybe start rumors about us because they cannot understand our tongue, and then like others who stand out, we’ll be asked to move. All of us here in Aurora would be wretches. Yet not alone at least. In the colony we always have that hope, that we will never be truly alone.
I hoped that Rudy’s purchasing land near us meant he’d be coming here for good. He’s a laughing soul, and my husband needs that to lighten his efforts to keep this colony prospering. I thought Karl, too, would stay but he returned. He purchased school items from the common fund for those Willapa children. But what of ours here? Our children need learning all year long. They should speak English so they won’t stand out as different in this land.
My husband says we can teach our children as we go, as we did along the trail. We’ll build a school after the church. But first we need more homes, and also more buildings so we can manufacture barrels and chairs and weave our cloth, all things these people of Oregon need. We will win them over by having what they want. “Who needs a church when we have the gross Haus in which to meet?” he asks me.
No one needs the church building to worship God, it’s true. But back in Bethel, what my husband did not know is that many of us found solace in that building, even when he wasn’t there to lead us. We women slipped in, sometimes together, sometimes alone. We sat in a quiet place, the scent of cooled candle wax and brick mortar falling gently on our shoulders. We prayed. We felt less wretched. And when we left, we could resume the work, serve the people, tend our families. It is harder for me to find that place of peace when there are people always around us, living here, needing cooking, mending clothes. A child needs a nose wiped, another a napkin changed. I wonder if I sin by wishing for time alone, by longing to make my letters pretty, to dream of recognition at the harvest fair, or to find a joke to laugh at. Maybe to enjoy a little teasing.
At least I have the choir to sing in. I wonder if Willapa has a choir. Does Emma sing in it? Probably not. She is honoring her husband’s death, preparing for a new arrival, tending her children. She must feel wretched indeed. There must be something I can do for her even from this distance. I don’t know what that is or why she comes to mind so often. I will listen harder to my husband’s next sermon on service. There is always something in what he says for me.
13
Emma
Chipping Flint
That winter wore like a threadbare cloth, covering just enough to keep me breathing but offering little warmth. I struck my flint to start the February fire. I must be like flint. Strong. My young sister’s letters urged me to let God lead the way for me so I could avoid more of His harsh lessons. What more could He do to me than make me a widow? My sister wrote of a spiritual world both confining and remote.
I sparked the riven wood with my chipped flint and hung the pot filled with water on the crane, then pushed it back over the flames. I tried to imagine the convenience of starting a fire without having to make the spark from the stone. Maybe if one waited long enough, all things changed for the better.
Karl’s visits offered sparks of interest. My threadbare cloak of grief warmed a little more when he stopped by, filling me in on various news items of the day. He took a German newspaper, and while it was rarely current, having to come from Bethel or Milwaukee or beyond, he did still seem to know more about the outside world than any of the rest of us. It was easier to think of events back in Missouri than to face the struggles just down my road.
Mary came less often, and when I attended church, something felt different with the other Giesy women. I blanketed their festivities, I feared. They must not tease a widow, just offer help to her.
Karl was easier to be with. He gave his time without reminding me that I had so little to give in return, save a good meal for him, a little conversation about words. We talked of tending Christian’s grave and how even that word tend has many meanings: looking after, caring for. Yet it brought images of fragility too. I felt tender, not strong like flint. Karl sat and talked while I rolled out egg noodles. Sometimes he gave Andy guidance on a lesson. I welcomed the sound of his voice, his thoughts about life, and the smell of his tobacco reminded me of my father. We spoke of him.
“Have you written and asked your father to come here?” Karl asked. “To help you now that you are widowed?”
I shook my head. I stuck my arm inside the fireplace, testing the temperature. The hair on my arm singed slightly as I pulled it away. “I doubt they’ll ever come west, even when more of the Bethelites do, sometime in 1862 or 1863 my sister tells me. That’ll give the colony leaders there more time to sell things, but also time for Aurora to be ready for them, I suppose. Keil doesn’t want a repeat of what he found here.” I heard the disgust in my voice.
“Ja, some of us take to change, and some of us find it troubling because we don’t know how things will turn out.” He drew on his pipe. This one had a foot-long stem. “We want to live in certainty and there is none save faith.”
“It could have been better if Keil had waited before bringing the first group out. We scouts wanted a better welcome instead of what Keil turned it into, a huge mistake and disappointment.”
Karl took a long time to respond, the draw of his pipe filling the silence. “It might still have been too much to hope for, Emma Giesy, that this would be a timber place where we could cut and sell the harvest. Sam Woodard tells us that he and his partners logged and hand-hewed timbers square so they would not roll when shipped on the boats. A lot of work that took. Their first shipment went through fine to California and they got paid.”
“See,” I said. “We just needed time to hand hew.” I picked up a pan for the noodles.
He raised a hand to silence me. “The second load was lost at sea. The third load became frozen at the water’s edge and was carried away in the spring. The fourth load rotted because they could never find anyone to buy it. Imagine such frustration! The first turned out well so they kept going. But eventually, they had to face what was. That’s when Sam built his warehouses and moved inland to farm.”
“So you’re saying that even if we’d had more time to prepare, the people would still have been better off in Aurora?”
“By golly, I think so.”
“Why don’t you go there then?” I asked. I slammed the spider down, the three-legged frying pan clanging at the hearth. My children stopped their activities and stared.
Karl looked away. “Willapa helps Aurora now, as does Bethel,” Karl said. “It all works out.”
“My husband is dead. I don’t see how that’s ‘working out.’ ”
“Ja, I misspoke. I meant that Willapa contributes to Aurora now just as Bethel does. All things do work out as Romans says, ‘to them that love God and who are called according to his purpose.’ ” He set his pipe down to cool the bits of tobacco left. “Though what Bethel contributes could be impaired if war comes. I’m glad to be here, apart from all that. You can be glad too, Emma Giesy. Your children will grow up away from the battles. Maybe your father will want to avoid war too. Then he’ll welcome an invitation from his daughter to come west to meet his grandchildren. You could give him a reason to bring his sons west.”
“I can’t ask him to come just to help me. And he has daughters too.”
Karl nodded. “Ask, Emma. A parent does what is necessary for his children.”
“Not for grown children,” I said. “They should manage on their own once they leave the nest.”
“Ach, one never stops being a parent. Or so I’m told.”
“Unless one loses a child,” I said. “Maybe by coming here I am lost to them.”
“You think of Christian, ja? It was a hard loss for Andreas and Barbara. Even so, Christian’s parents, they are still his parents, still with memories of him and with his children alive waddling around before them. If you asked your parents, I think they’d come to help, by golly.”
I imagined them all here in this house with me. My mother would midwife my infant, my father and brothers would joke and laugh, and I would hear the sound of a man’s voice and perhaps not ache with longing so for Christian’s. My young sisters, Lou and Johanna, they could play with their niece, and William would take Andy by the hand and give my son a chance to be a little boy instead of a little man who looks after his mother and sister. And Catherine, well, she’d talk of love, tell me to put my husband’s clothes away and read me hopeful scriptures that promised goodness if I just obeyed. Such words made me feel empty, sometimes angry.
It would be good, though, to hold my mother in my arms again. Maybe in giving her comfort I could receive a bit of my own.
My mother-in-law and Christian’s aunts, the other scouts’ wives, brought me food that spring and helped me dye the yarn I’d spun. They brought me eggs to boil at Easter. Their husbands came by to chop more wood, see to the fields, make sure this widow had what she needed. How I wished I could have received their gifts of time and labor without feeling embittered by my need. I remembered a sermon Keil had once given about true Christian community requiring honesty among its members, especially about our weaknesses. Once shared, each could support the other, he said. He quoted something from James about our confessing to each other, then praying for one another so that we might be healed. What courage that would take, I decided, to confess how I felt about God, my life, everything here that kept me in an anxious, often angry state. And praying? I hadn’t done that for some time. It would take courage to confess or pray. I didn’t feel safe here without Christian, and safety is surely the first requirement for a healing heart.
I’m not sure when I admitted to the growing resentment of the women that their husbands had to tend to me and my children in addition to their own. They said how good it was they got to act on the Diamond Rule by helping me. But I could tell. Mary mentioned more often than needed Jack’s willingness to stop by. I’d already told her Jack made me uncomfortable. Christian’s sister-in-law, John’s wife, noted how busy her husband was with the school and the mill and so many other things, and wouldn’t it be nice if someday I found someone else who would take me as his wife. She said it all in the same breath and then asked my forgiveness if she spoke too soon after Christian’s death.
“Yes,” I said. “It is too soon and will always be.”
“You’re young,” John’s wife said. She patted my hand. “A whole life awaits you.”
It wasn’t a life I looked forward to.
My mother-in-law sent shivers through me when she noted that in some parts of the world when a son dies, his oldest son is given as a ward to the father’s family, a grandparent or an uncle. “This has happened even among fine Americans,” my mother-in-law told me as she calmly stitched her husband’s pants. We worked side by side at her table. “Meriwether Lewis, who came across the land with the American Clark over fifty years ago, he was raised by an uncle after his father died, even though his mother was perfectly capable. Of course if she’d remarried right away that might not have been so.”
“Are you suggesting I can’t bring up my own son?” I asked.
“It was just an observation,” she said. “How Americans do things.”
I tried to remember if such a custom had occurred in the old country, or even as part of the colony. But of course in Bethel, all lived close to each other, so it wouldn’t be difficult to have a fatherless boy influenced by his uncle while still living in his mother’s house. Maybe that’s all she meant.
Still, I found myself feeling ill after that conversation with my mother-in-law and vowed to do much more of the work here in the cabin myself. The men could stop by to do their duty to the Widow Giesy, but they’d see that I already had chopped wood aplenty, that the goat was already fed, that I’d put bacon grease on her udder to be a healing balm, that I’d kindled my own fires just fine. They’d leave and could tell their wives that their help wasn’t needed, that they didn’t have to stop by the widow’s place this week at all. With the cows dried up, Boshie would put them in with their two animals. John already had the mule.
It was a fantasy, of course. Maybe if I hadn’t been carrying this infant, maybe then I could do it all. But I could barely swing the axe. Keil had been right about one thing: my small frame worked against me in this landscape. He expected it to mean I’d have trouble delivering an infant, my punishment for being Eve’s daughter, still seeking more. But so far, that punishment hadn’t happened. My two babies had arrived with relative ease.
I avoided the men when they came to help, set by the door the packed bags of Strudels or dried fruits I’d prepared for them in return for their effort so I would be less indebted. On Sundays, when otherwise we might have made our way to the stockade for Andy and Kate to see their cousins and relatives, I rested at home with my children cluck-henned under my arms, and I read to them from the almanac, or we made cookies and decorated them with dried fruit. If anyone asked, I claimed the weather kept us away.
I did have difficulty putting Karl’s suggestion from my mind. Perhaps my parents might come out to help if I asked. My longing for them surprised me. But truth be told, I suspected that within a very few weeks of their arrival I’d be wishing them gone, as uncertain for the cause of my agitation as I had ever been. A contrary woman was my Americanized name.
My second son and third child arrived as I expected on April 4, nine months to the day after his conception. I awoke with a familiar ache in my back and milked a bleating Opal that morning, suspecting this might be the day. The day before, I’d brought wood in so we could heat water, and I made a huge pot of beans for the children to eat. I talked to Christian, said things out loud, and reminded him that once all those male doctors had insisted I was wrong about the date of Andy’s birth. But I was sure this time, I really was, just as I’d been before.
When my water broke late in the April afternoon, I sent Andy for Mary. But by the time she arrived, I held my baby in my arms. It seemed right that I delivered this child alone. Doing so affirmed my strength. Kate sat off to the side, quiet as a mouse. “You have a new brother,” I told her after I’d cut the cord, then washed the child and wrapped him in the gown I’d made from one of Christian’s shirts. The scent of my husband was still in it, nearly a year after his death. Kate ran her finger over the baby’s forehead, looked up at me and smiled. “Mine,” she said.
“All of ours,” I told her.
I named the baby Christian. He had a fu
zz of reddish hair, not unlike the wisps of red that sometimes showed in his father’s beard. “Your father would have loved you dearly,” I told my youngest son. That night, with the baby satisfied by Opal’s milk, I felt my eyes fill to overflowing. “You’re missing all this, Christian,” I said. “It isn’t fair. You should have lived and not me. You were the better person, the finer parent. But you were so … good, too good, and look at how we’re left now?” I kissed the tears from my son’s forehead. Andy came to me and pressed his head against my arm. Kate slept.
This was my family now. Christian’s life did go on, but not with him in it. With this Christian’s presence in my life, I’d have no time for wondering about the meanings of words. I’d have no time for anything but keeping three children alive and showing without doubt that I didn’t need an uncle or a grandparent to fill a father’s void. I didn’t need anyone at all.
Renewed purpose filled my days. I dried lovage to sweeten the cabin and ground the root into powder to pepper my venison stews. The cabin smelled fresh; food nourished. Spring meant renewal to me, and with it a change in how Christian’s memory filled my days. Christian and I had married in the spring. Baby Christian smoothed the rough edges of the loss. I thought of my husband a little less, not every waking moment as my baby was my first morning thought now. I heard myself laugh out loud once when the baby blew bubbles, again when he greedily consumed the goat’s milk fed through the finger of a glove. I didn’t blame myself for not being able to produce milk on my own. It was the way of things for me, something I needed to accept. I adapted. That too was a sign of strength.
When the goat took Andy’s handkerchief stuffed at his waist and shook it as though it were a flag, running away when Andy tried to grab it, we all laughed.