It was spring, when the unexpected can be more innocent than romantic, when creativity proves delightful rather than calculated.
I could see why people fell in love in spring.
I decided to fall in love too, but with sketching and drawing. I planned to talk with Sarah Woodard about my idea and see if she and Sam could help. They knew everyone in the region, and Olympia would be the logical place to try to find customers. How I’d get there and what I’d do with the children, I pitched those thoughts away, but the germ of the idea was there, that tiny irritant inside the oyster shell that might one day grow into a pearl. I’d begun to think of the future with more than just dread. I didn’t know when that actually happened, just that it did.
Big Jack arrived carrying an egg etched with this new infant’s birthday on it. It had fancy lettering, almost like the Fraktur that marked our German documents. It was beautiful, with the flowing letters scratched onto a kind of chestnut-colored egg, and an intricate border on the top and bottom. I had no idea who’d made it. Jack had knocked on our door, placed the egg in my hand when I opened the latch. His palm was as wide as a butter paddle, dwarfing the delicate egg. He said nothing, just turned on his heel and left.
A present, most likely from Christian’s grandparents. I felt a twinge of guilt keeping my children from visiting time with them.
In early May, Sarah brought me a laying hen. It had been a long time since I’d seen her. We put the chicken in the smokehouse and together we made a little roosting nest for her, though Sarah assured me the chickens would roost in the trees at night if left out. “They’re like seagulls that way,” she said.
Back in the cabin, Sarah held the baby to her and sang softly. I knew she longed for a child of her own, but though she was nearly twenty and had been married to Sam for nearly five years, this had not happened. I wondered if it felt strange for her to see me with three children all without a father while she and Sam, all ready and willing, still had none. She bowed her blond hair to my son whose eyes had closed.
“He takes to your singing,” I said. “I can’t carry a tune in a candlestick.”
Sarah smiled and when she looked up, I saw tears in her eyes. She sat in the rocking chair while I heated tea. It was May but still chilly. I lifted Christian from her arms and placed him in the baby board I’d used for Kate. Sarah lifted her cup, and that’s when she noticed the scraped egg on a shelf I’d tacked to the logs. I’d placed the egg on a little stand I’d made of twigs. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “Did you do that work?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know who did it, but Jacob Giesy brought it by.”
She laughed then. “I should have recognized it, though this is a little fancier than what I’ve seen. He makes charcoal drawings on rocks and signs his name.” She looked at the egg more closely. “See. Right here is a little JG.”
I’d thought the lettering was just a part of the decoration, but she was right. I hadn’t remembered seeing any such rocks with charcoal drawings on them, but then I hadn’t gone very far from my hearth. “He draws well?”
“Oh yes. He made a likeness of our old dog on the side of the warehouse. It would wash off in the rains, so I asked if he’d do one on paper and he obliged. I think at first he thought I’d be upset with him, or Sam would. He hadn’t asked if we wanted that picture on the warehouse.” She set her cup down and turned the egg around in her hand. “Was it a baptismal gift?”
“No. We don’t celebrate baptisms,” I said. “Dr. Keil doesn’t think it a necessary sacrament for either children or adults.” Karl Ruge, who remained a Lutheran, did consider infant baptism important, though. I would ask him about that. “Maybe I should have Christian baptized. If for no other reason than that Keil wouldn’t want it,” I said.
“Oh, Emma.” Sarah laughed. “When we have a child, I’ll want him baptized.” She stood over my son as he slept. “It means he’ll be forever in God’s hands.” She fluffed Christian’s reddish hair, pulled it between her fingers so it stood up like a cock’s crown.
I wasn’t of the opinion that being in God’s hands was always that comforting. I studied the egg. “I didn’t know this about Christian’s cousin,” I said. “I assumed someone else had done the etching.”
“Jack’s very talented. He speaks good English, or at least I can understand him.” I was still trying to imagine the artistic side of Jack when she added, “Sometimes he’s a bit … unpredictable, but very generous too, it seems, to have given you this special gift.”
I’d thought he’d been merely the delivery person who at last understood that I didn’t want him around. Why on earth would Jack give my son such a precious gift?
My fingers fidgeted.
“I wonder if maybe you and Sam might have some ideas about how I could earn money on my own, sketching people or painting portraits or making drawings of their homes that they could send to their families back East. I know there are no printers here, none needing lithographers, but maybe in Olympia?”
“I’ll ask Sam. But I think it would mean you’d have to … travel. I’m not sure how you could do that, with the children so young. And you a woman alone.”
“You’re not going to tell me that it might be ‘unseemly,’ are you?”
“Never,” she said. She lifted an eyebrow. “But I’m certain there are those who would.”
“Ja,” I said. “But maybe, since so many have been telling me they don’t mind helping, maybe they’d keep the children for me when I made such trips. They can act the Diamond Rule by doing so and send their husbands over to milk and feed without worry about what the Widow Giesy might do to them.” Sarah frowned. “They wouldn’t have to be long journeys, a week or so at a time.”
“How could you be separated from him for even a day?” Sarah said, nodding toward Christian.
“If it meant I could provide for them on my own it would be worth it in the end.”
“You say that now, but I don’t know. Don’t you remember how it was when Andy stayed with his grandparents after Christian died?”
“That was different. I was confused and frightened. I’m more certain now of what I need to do.”
Kate came over then and I made a cat’s cradle for her out of string. Andy asked to use the corn mill that Karl Ruge had brought us at Easter. It made grinding corn so much easier, and we could use just enough for the corn drink or the mush we wanted for breakfast. He swung his little arm round and round, dropping corn kernels into the hopper. They clinked like tiny pearls dropped into a tin cup.
It would be difficult to leave my children. Sarah was right about that. But Andy would be old enough to come with me.
“Maybe you could make some drawings that Sam could show to people,” Sarah said. “That way you wouldn’t have to leave here. You could draw our place or maybe the children’s portraits. Or the trees. That might be a place to begin. You wouldn’t have to worry then about tongues wagging over your leaving your children behind.”
She was right, of course. This next year must be devoted to my children. But I could make some portraits in between. I’d have to borrow money for the charcoal and paper, but I could pay it back when I sold something. “Would Sam make a loan to me for the supplies?” I asked.
“I’m sure he would. But you might also think of asking Jack. He seems to have a good supply of paper.”
I didn’t ask Jack Giesy, but I did find another way to take the next step. I wrote to my parents. I told them of Christian’s birth and drew a small picture of his face, his eyes like Christian’s, his mouth with a wide space between his nose and the top of his slender upper lip. “Room for a fine, bushy mustache one day,” I told them. “As his father always had.”
Asking for the money was the easy part. I told my father what I planned to do and that I thought I could make a living this way, so I wouldn’t be so dependent on the colonists here in Willapa. My father had somehow accumulated independent resources or he couldn’t have purchased property in his name. He
’d understand that kind of inventive thinking … at least if I’d been a son he would. I’d have you send the money to me when the other colonists come out, I wrote. But that might not be for a long time from what Catherine tells me, so perhaps you could send it to me by ship.
Then came the hard part, the expressing of my real need. The children should know all their grandparents, not just Christian’s. The future may hold changes for me, travel if I’m to do this work successfully. I could do it more easily if you came to visit and perhaps even stayed. I’d know then that the children were in good hands.
Would I move across the country to an unknown wilderness in order to help my child? Would I move my family if my father or mother needed me? Would I make such a sacrifice for my children one day? Yet here I was, asking this very thing.
If they agreed to come, I’d be sinking deeper into debt.
14
Emma
Keeping All Together
I marked the first anniversary of my husband’s death by going to his grave. I took the children, of course. I decided we’d also spend the day with Christian’s parents, as they’d seen little of us through the spring and now into the summer. Maybe with a little time together I could shake the agitation of my mother-in-law’s comment of some months ago, about the eldest child being given to the grandparents to raise. Enough time had passed, surely. I could be generous with my children’s time.
We made the trek walking, then climbed the bare hill to the cemetery. Someone had built a small fence around the two graves, probably John, since he seemed to be in charge of so many things now that Christian wasn’t. A warm breeze brushed against my face and Baby Christian’s reddish hair. Andy acted solemn but Kate was a typical Kinder, running about and doing somersaults near the cedar sapling I’d planted.
From a distance I could see the stone that marked Willie Keil’s grave. I wondered when they’d set the stone and felt an immediate sense of guilt that I had no such marker for Christian. That I’d not known of the occasion when Willie’s stone had been set also discomfited. Perhaps the family was protecting me, not wanting to invite me on the occasion of a grave marker while I still carried a child. More likely, they thought I’d be uninterested in anything having to do with Keil.
But then we approached Christian’s grave, and it had a marker too. Not a stone one, but wood, laid flat. Someone had cut his name and birth and day of death into it. No one had bothered to tell me of its setting, either.
The whole community probably clucked their tongues even now that it had taken so long for me to comment on this gesture, which could only mean that I hadn’t spent much time grieving at my husband’s grave. True, I hadn’t spent much time at this grave. In fact, this was the first time I’d come since the day he’d been buried, and that only because it was the anniversary date, a time designed to be the end of mourning. I could only hope. Sarah said a husband’s family set the time of mourning for an Indian widow, established ways she must behave during those years. It had sounded constricting when she’d told me, but at least the rules were clear and there was an ending time.
I imagined Christian’s family thinking ill of me that I’d stayed away. They wouldn’t understand the difficulty I’d had in traveling seven miles with the children. I didn’t always have the use of their mule. Walking and carrying three young children wasn’t an easy task at all. They might think of that.
Still, if I made my way to Olympia to paint or draw, the family would say that I could travel when I wanted to.
After we put dried flowers on Christian’s grave, I took the children down the hill and over to where Andreas and Barbara lived. I waited for the inevitable comment about how long it had been since I’d visited them, but instead they opened their arms wide to the children.
Henry continued to work in the fields, but Martin waved when he saw us and moved toward the house. He wiped his hands on his jeans. He had a pleasant face, this brother of Christian’s. He was tall, almost too thin, and leaned into his walk as though to resist a wind that might otherwise blow him away. He shook Andy’s little hand and smiled into the open face of Baby Christian. He nodded his head to Kate, too, who was sitting on her grandfather’s knee.
“Emma’s brought the boys to stay for a bit,” my mother-in-law said.
“That would be gut,” Martin said. “For her to stay too.”
“Just for the afternoon,” I told them. “We need to go back before dark.” I gave Barbara some salal-berry cakes I’d carried with us. I’d dried them and stored them through the winter. These were the last that I had, but soon the bushes would be filled with the small berries as purple as a bad bruise, and I’d make more cakes again.
“Oh, ja, but it stays light till after ten now,” Barbara said, unwrapping the berry cakes from the leaves they were wrapped in.
“So we have time to catch up on news,” Martin said.
“I don’t have much of that,” I said.
“Time or news?” he asked. He smiled.
“You don’t come to the Fourth of July celebration,” Andreas said. He looked tired and moved a cane I hadn’t remembered his using. It must have been a difficult winter for him too, having lost his oldest son to death. Andreas wouldn’t have stayed at Willapa without Christian’s being here, and I wondered why they remained now. Probably because his brother John was here and his other sons.
Barbara said, “We’ll give you news, then. John says the children should go to school from June to harvest and then stop, starting again in October until the rains come too much. Andy should stay here for that. You want him educated, ja? The travel would be hard for him and Martin enjoys his company.”
“He’s never been separated from me,” I said, wishing now I hadn’t taken the time to come here, wishing I hadn’t even considered being generous and sharing my son with this family. It always seemed to end with suggestions for how I could do things better.
“That’s not so,” Barbara corrected, “when his father—”
“They’re planting teasel,” Andreas said. “To card the wool. Down at Aurora Mills. That’s news.”
“It grows wild along the river here,” I said. “We just need wool to card. No one ever brought up sheep.”
“We have sheep here,” Henry said. “Rudy brought them.”
“There’s talk of building a teasel factory in Aurora,” Martin said. “It’ll be a good sheep production place. And they’re beginning to build furniture to sell to nearby settlers. It’s a busy place there.”
“I suspect one day some of our young men will head that way if things pick up,” Andreas said. “Rudy bought a sheep farm there.”
“They have a cemetery,” Barbara said. “Can’t have a village without a cemetery.”
“Speaking of cemeteries, who made the wooden marker for Christian’s grave?” I asked. “I’d like to thank them and apologize for taking so long to do it.”
“Imagine growing teasel. Stuff is like a weed back home,” Andreas said.
“The Shoalwaters use it to brush their hair,” I said. “I’ve seen them once or twice doing that by the river.” They sometimes came to trade with me, offering up fish for my bread. I didn’t tell my in-laws that. “About that marker,” I tried again, but then the conversation took a troubling swing.
“Those Indians will be in trouble for not staying on their reservation,” Andreas said, “if they’re coming so far south as your place. Could be dangerous. You should live back with us.”
“Ja. Why don’t you leave Andy with us for a few days at least,” Barbara said. “We miss seeing him, and you have the baby to look after.”
“Andy’s a big help to me,” I said.
“Ja, that’s as it should be,” Andreas said. He tapped his cane on the floor. “But he must miss having a man around to show him things.”
“Karl Ruge comes by,” I said. My thumb and forefinger made circles against each other and I bit the inside of my cheek.
“What kind of wood did they use for Christ
ian’s marker?” Martin asked. “That might tell us who did it.”
“Wood? I don’t know. It looked like cedar. It was nicely done.”
“It’s too bad you’re so busy,” Barbara said. “Maybe whoever did it would have asked you to be there when they set it. But they know how much work it must be to come this way. We so seldom see you.”
“I’ll ask around if you’d like,” Martin said. I nodded.
“What’s the point of living near your family if you don’t take advantage of them?” Barbara continued. She handed Andy a cookie and a big glass of milk. He sat on the chair, his legs swinging beneath him. He looked happy and I realized I hadn’t seen that smile much since his father had died. Maybe I was selfish in not letting him come here more often.
“I was under the impression that I took too much advantage,” I said, “having to have so much help since … Christian’s death.”
“Well, that’s what we do for each other,” she said. “We take care of each other. And having a little time for Andy to spend with his Oma would just be a nice way to repay.”
“I should have made a marker for my brother,” Martin said.
“You might think about how you could be generous to others since you want to not be beholden to people.” Her words were sharp.
“We really need to be getting back,” I said.
“What’s your hurry?” Barbara said, softer now.
“Generosity, that’s a good thing in our colony,” Andreas said. “But why they want to plant teasel, ach, that’s beyond me.”
Surely I was strong enough to resist any real effort by them to lure Andy from me. I’d never heard of anyone in the colony having their child raised by another against their will. But it reinforced my view that showing few signs of needing them was the better course of action for our future.
My fields were plowed and planted into oats, not wheat, as the men suggested. They’d harvest the crop on my land just as they did on their own. Whatever they sold would be brought to the common fund of the family; whatever was milled would be shared with the families both here and probably at Aurora. I had no say in it. I stayed out of their way. When the cows had their calves and they were weaned, Boshie brought them back. He kept the calves, the increase, so the bulls could be sold and the heifers kept to expand the herd. The increase was payment for his tending them through the winter. I could once again have the milk for butter and to supplement the goat’s milk for the children, and of course to meet whatever butter contracts we Willapa people had.