“We have visitors,” I told Andy.
I guessed that it was Jack, making himself at home. He’d probably told Mary and Boshie he was laboring at the coast when in fact he was hanging around, trying to make himself useful. I felt a mix of irritation and anticipation. I didn’t want to have to deal with any of his “maybe could” offers, but fire in the fireplace meant we could have a warm supper for us all. I was certain that was where the anticipation came from.
We approached the house. Of course it might have been a traveler just assuming a welcome, as so many did where settlements were few and far between. I’d left the latch string out, suggesting invitation. I pressed against the door. The inside was dark but for the little window light and the fire. I smelled venison and beans.
“Gut evening,” the visitor said, and when my eyes adjusted to the inner darkness, I recognized him and his voice. There stood my brother Jonathan, an apron tied around his waist.
“Papa wrote you could use some help,” he said. “So here I am.”
“You’re better than early rains,” I said as I crushed myself against his chest.
“I’ve been called many things, Sister, but never better than rain.”
I removed my bonnet and Kate’s too while Jonathan served us a hot supper that tasted better for the gift of it. Over the meal my brother met Christian for the first time. It was good to hear him and Andy exchange words, and just the sound of his voice, a gentle man’s voice in the house, felt like music to my ears.
Jonathan took Andy to school in the morning. Work still called my name, but I could stop in between chores and sit for a moment with my children. I even napped, something I hadn’t done since Christian was born. I prepared a big meal, hot food with fresh biscuits fixed in the dutch oven, for the “men” when they arrived home at dusk.
They made better time than our little troop had and arrived in higher style: Jonathan and Andy rode home on one of the colony’s mules. “They made a loan to you,” I said. “That makes for an easier day, doesn’t it Andy?”
“Would have done it for you too, if you had asked,” Jonathan said, stepping off the mule.
“The mules are always in use for the fieldwork,” I said. “I didn’t want to be a bother and make someone have to come and get it.”
Andy led the mule to the half barn as Jonathan put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his side and kissed my forehead. My brother had one blue eye and one brown eye. That mix always fascinated me, and when I looked up at him both those eyes had a twinkle in them. “You make everything so difficult. All I had to do was ask for the mule. People want to be helpful.”
“You’re his uncle. They would do things for you.”
“Emma …”
“You know they took Andy to Aurora without my knowing it.” I shook myself free of his one-arm hug.
“Maybe they should have said something, but what they did caused no harm, not really. Except that now you push yourself until your clothes nearly fall off your bony frame, for what? To make sure they know you are up to doing the impossible? That’s not the way we Wagners do it,” he said. “We persevere, ja, but we cut our losses before they cut us.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Meaning?”
“You have choices, Emma. They are not all bad.”
“Ach,” I said, dismissing him as I walked toward the house.
“For one, your life and that of the children’s would be easier if you lived with Barbara and Andreas. They would extend such an invitation, I know this. The community would add a room perhaps, that you and the children could call your own. I know this is important to you to have your own place. But then Andy would not have to travel so far to school; you would not have to drag the children out each day. You would be close to others so your spirit could be filled with friendships. You could stay and work with your mother-in-law, together raise your children.”
“And who would keep up my cabin?”
“Maybe Karl would move into it. Or Jack Giesy. They could manage the land. The cabin isn’t what matters, Sister. It’s the people; they’re who matter.”
I scowled at him and Kate looked up at that precise moment, her eyes drawn from the wooden blocks that Jonathan had brought her. She scowled then too, mimicking me.
I made my face look calm. “And my other choices?” I said.
“You could come back with me to Aurora Mills.” He silenced me with his open palm to the air. “Think of this. You would have all the help you needed with the children. You could have people close to give to you but more, you could help others. This is what your life misses now, Emma. Christian was devoted to making other lives better, and that kept him a good and faithful servant. You’ve turned … inside yourself, leaving no room to look after others.”
“Ach, no,” I said. “I only look after my children. Should I sacrifice them in order to help someone Herr Keil thinks needs tending? Is this why you came here, to talk me into coming to Aurora? Because I’m not welcome there and never will be. Herr Keil made that clear to me when he said we’d failed him by choosing this place. To leave it would but confirm his view of our error, and I’ll not do that to Christian, I won’t.”
“Christian is dead, Emma. And Aurora would be better for your children.”
“They don’t even have a school there.”
“Ah, Emma. Then we go back to allowing your son to stay with Andreas, to make his life easier. And yours.”
I asked him why he didn’t take Andy with him if that was what everyone thought my soon-to-be six-year-old son needed, to be living with the guidance of a man rather than his mother.
“I travel too much. I shouldn’t even have traveled here as they have need of me at Aurora. But Herr Keil suggested I come.”
“You said Papa told you to come.”
“He did.”
It occurred to me then that Jonathan was here not to offer me support, but to do business with the colonists, talk about farming and harvests and contracts for butter or cheese, look into fields that would serve sheep or goats or hogs, all for the good of the colony. The Aurora colony, of course. Helping his sister and his niece and nephews, well that was secondary.
“I’m sorry you had to take time away from your colony duties,” I said. “I can take Andy to school tomorrow and I’ll ask if the mule can be made available to us until the end of the term. We’ll take care of things here.”
“Emma. I’m here. I’ll stay until the term is over. You’d still have to take the children with you. Andy’s not quite old enough to go it on his own.”
“Maybe he is. Maybe he just needs to learn young that you have to take care of things yourself. Ja, he can ride the mule. Then you won’t be inconvenienced and you won’t have to feel guilty that your niece and nephew are spending their days walking back and forth and going nowhere, as you suggest.”
He shook his head. “You’d slap a hand rather than grasp its strength.”
I pitched his thought away. He didn’t know what it was like to live on the outside, to be a woman alone and dependent on the generosity of others. He didn’t know how weak and empty it made a person feel to take hold of a strong hand and not know when it might gruel rather than guide.
It was my cough that made me relent and let Jonathan continue to take Andy to school. By the end of the week, the rains came and with it congestion that filled my lungs until I sounded like the wild geese that flew overhead, barking with their plaintive cries.
Jonathan described my symptoms to Martin who said the catarrh could be helped with powdered ginger made into a tea. I was to lie beneath as many quilts as we could spare and “sweat the inflammation out,” Jonathan told me. I was grateful my brother stayed through this ordeal. I recovered, but the best news was that the term then ended and we had no need to travel anywhere for a time.
We might have enjoyed the remaining days with Jonathan before he headed back to Aurora Mills except that Jack Giesy made himself known again. He arrived to fetch me for Mary??
?s delivery. I felt well enough to go. I still coughed some, but nothing as I had.
As I readied my few things to take, my brother and Jack talked about crops and weather and people they each knew back in Phillipsburg, Bethel, and Harmony. They had an immediate camaraderie even though they’d shared little time together for years. A part of me envied that. We women were always eavesdropping, rarely a part of the sharing. Jack talked of boat building at the coast; Jonathan spoke of the wine-making at Aurora. Then Jack chided Jonathan, telling him he should find himself a good woman and my ears perked up, wondering if my brother had been courting. When Jonathan teased him back, I wished I’d kept my eavesdropping to myself.
“I’ve got myself a chosen one,” Jack said. “She just doesn’t want to accept it.” He looked over at me. “But she will.”
I wished Jack hadn’t offered to walk me back to Mary’s, but obviously the man lived there. Jonathan assured me he had the children in hand and then he smiled, those two-colored eyes shining. “Don’t you two get lost along the way.”
“Ach, jammer!” I said.
“Methinks the Fräulein complains in jest,” Jack told him.
“I’m a married woman,” I reminded him. “That’s Frau to you.” I stepped out into the rain.
Fortunately, the rains were steady enough to dissuade conversation. The patter against my oil-slicked hood—Christian’s old one—served well to keep my head dry and my mouth shut.
Mary’s baby, a girl, born without incident, they named Salome. Elizabeth looked on in wonder at this doll whose arms moved with jerks and starts that matched her legs. “She’s dancing, Mama,” Elizabeth said.
“Like a good German girl should,” Boshie told his daughter. He ruffled Elizabeth’s hair and gazed with tender eyes upon his newest daughter and his wife.
The love I saw pass between them, the raising of their spirits by this newness in their lives, made my heart ache with its emptiness. I’d had no one to share Baby Christian’s new life with, save the children. No one who looked upon me the way Boshie looked at Mary. I supposed I never would again.
19
Emma
Waiting to Be Found
There is something to be said for customs that keep men and women separated unless chaperoned by those who care about their souls. I remember when Christian courted me back in Bethel, my parents walked before us, where they could quickly turn around if I called out. When he came into our home, my parents sat at the far end of the room, working, but with one eye always on the two of us, making sure nothing untoward might happen. They felt responsible. It annoyed me as a young girl but now, at twenty-five years of age, the widowed mother of three, feeling lost and alone in an uncertain world, I longed to know that someone I loved and trusted looked after my interests, that someone else might know what was best for me and cherish my soul in their hands.
Fatigue now framed my future. I was tired of a life promising only the drudgery of every day, of keeping my children alive rather than contented. I failed to even have the energy to paint, to get my drawings to Sam Woodard to see if they might sell. Even the path toward something better took too much from me and I chastened myself for my sloth. If I hadn’t had the children to feed, I would have failed to eat, for it didn’t seem worth the effort to feed the emptiness. My life was a walk in the deepest beach where if the blowing sand didn’t cover me, the pounding surf soon would. It had been only two years without Christian. It seemed like dozens, and the almanac of living loomed before me without a hopeful story in between the calendar of days.
I suppose in part the sight of Mary and Boshie and the comfort of their family proved the crowning blow for my state. The whole time Jack and I walked back the night of Salome’s birth, I thought of Mary and Boshie and of Christian, and then about the man walking beside me with no chaperone to even care what we did. I waited for Jack to do something, say something that would strike the flint of his interest, give me a reason to snap at him, at anyone, to relieve this irritated frame of mind.
But he chatted little through the rainfall, and when he did it was to point out a drier place to step along the trail. He whistled a marching tune. Once, when I slipped, he reached his hand out and caught me, but instead of holding it as I thought he might, as I hoped he might so that I could challenge his forwardness, he let me loose, faced forward, and kept whistling.
Maybe because Jack had been the only man to offer interest to me, maybe that was why I half expected him to do so now, while we were alone, no children, no one else to monitor what was said or done. We were two grown adults. What did it matter to anyone else what two grown adults said or did to each other? No chaperones necessary when the woman was a widow, her virtue already molded into wisdom she could carry on alone. I didn’t feel wise so I said nothing.
Then just before we reached the bend where the cabin would be in sight, Jack stepped in front of me. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Consider, Emma Giesy. Consider how long you want to work as hard as you have chosen to do these past years. Consider how two are stronger than one, as Ecclesiastes notes, and three strands are best of all. You and I would be those two strong strands, and the third would be our children.”
I thought he’d translated that verse with a theological error, that the third strand was meant to be God. It was why marriage was a sacrament for Karl Ruge, a Lutheran, and many other communities of faith. Marriage wasn’t such a sacrament for the colonists. Karl had officiated at marriages back in Bethel as though it was just a matter between people and the state. But I suspect that Karl prayed for them and saw his role not just to say the words but to weave people together, forever, in God’s sight.
Still, Jack offered his children as a third strand woven together within our marriage. He appeared to say that he’d accept Christian’s children as his own, as though they were his responsibility too. Maybe he understood their importance to me. It was a side to him I hadn’t considered.
He lifted my chin. His fingers were warm despite their being wet from the rain. He had a solid jaw, gentle lips he opened now, just wide enough to slip a pumpkin seed through them, if he’d had one to chew. “Emma,” he said, “the time for playing has passed. You’re a grown woman. Time to step up to it.”
He kissed me then.
His lips were thinner than Christian’s but the pressure he placed against my own felt firm. When I moved my head back, uncertain as to what churned within me, the pounding heart one of hope or shuddering with fear, his lips came with me. I pushed him back gently. His face stayed close to mine, so close, but he released my lips. “I know you compare me,” he whispered. “This is a natural thing. But in time, I’ll make you forget Christian Giesy. I’ll replace whatever you cling to about him with something real. Alive. You won’t be carrying around the memory of a tired love of an old man. If you admit it, you long for a young man, one meant to meet your challenges. That’s me.”
He didn’t say he wanted to take care of me for the rest of my days. He didn’t say he cherished me. He didn’t say he loved me. It was as though he’d confessed to wishing to win a competition, a race he ran with a dead man.
I gave no answer, just said we needed to get back. I walked past him, half expected him to grab at me and twirl me around, but he didn’t. He was quite the gentleman after that. At the cabin, he came inside, talked with Jonathan, and then nodded his head at me. He slapped his hat against his jeans leaving water like a dog shaking itself of the rain. He smiled.
He seemed harmless there in the presence of my brother and my children. I took in a deep breath. I wasn’t ready yet to risk that this Jack who stood before me, gentle as a lamb, was the real Jack who would stay that way forever. I wasn’t yet that tired.
Jonathan left the following morning to return to Aurora Mills. He made one more encouragement that I consider letting Andreas and Barbara keep Andy, or that all of us move in with them, or perhaps all of us come live with him. But I discouraged him from thinking that any of those options would ever come t
o pass. I didn’t tell him about Jack’s vision for my future.
I missed my brother, put the longing into work. I pulled the last of the cabbages and buried them beneath the grass hay in the lean-to beside the half barn. Then, because the flour was a little low, I decided to tend to that myself, not wait for “the men” to take care of it.
On my own, I made my way to the mill. I still had the mule we’d borrowed and decided to use it to bring home a sack of flour that would tide us over for the winter, then return the animal. It had rained in the morning, so I waited until the November mist lifted in the afternoon. Often we had sunbreaks in the late afternoon, and this day proved no exception. Andy said he’d watch the little ones, and though he seemed young to do so, he had an old man’s soul and I knew somehow the children would be safe, perhaps behave even better for him than they did for me.
There were many things that caught my eye as I rode. I vowed to come back and draw, then chastened for making commitments I failed to keep, even to myself.
The mill had weathered into gray over the years, and mosses already dotted the shingles of the lower portion of the roof. The oyster schooners carried redwood for ballast as they sailed north from San Francisco, sold it for a profit, and then refilled their cargo holds with baskets of oysters they marketed when they reached that city. Maybe if Christian had lived they’d have branched out and owned their own ships. But likely Christian would have just used the money to pay off Keil and contribute to the colony. Always for Christian, it was the colony that mattered.
Still, seeing the structure in the distance brought a comfort to me. “Oh, Christian,” I said out loud as the mule twitched its ears. “How I miss you.” Christian would have loved taking his sons to the mill, would have cherished seeing how the lumber weathered to this settled, sturdy gray. He would have scowled at my doing this work, riding the mule, gathering supplies for the winter. He’d have claimed it as his duty, his obligation as a husband and father, and he would have expected his family to have tended me in such a way there was no need of my doing it for myself. Of course for one to give there must be a recipient. “They would have done it,” I told the bird that flitted through the air, “if I wasn’t so stubborn, if the cost wasn’t so great to let them place me into obligation.” Repayment was always required of any charity received, of that I was certain.