I arrived to human stillness though I could hear water rushing through the mill race. The mill door stood open. It was late in the day. I should have come earlier. But Boshie would have ground extra bags of flour, and I could load two on the mule to balance the load and leave a note saying that I’d taken them and to make a mark against what I owed.
I tied the mule to the hitching post and when no one answered my calls, I pushed the door and went inside. Dust mites rose in the air toward the shafts of setting sun that came in through the upper windows. It smelled of grain and earth and the powder of flour crunched against my feet. The huge millstones stood quiet. I looked up toward the tower where the windows looked out on each side and wondered what the view from there might be, standing at the ledge, looking out. A ladder reached to it from the main opening. A loft with windows that was the office looked out over the grist stones and there was probably a stairway to the top of the tower from there. The ladder would be a long climb up, a difficult one, but the view would be spectacular.
I was about to decide if I was up to that ladder climb when I felt a breeze behind me and turned.
“I maybe could think this was destiny, my finding you here,” Jack said as he pulled the door shut behind him. More dust mites rose up.
“I was just getting some grain loaded.”
“You were thinking of climbing that ladder to the window ledge,” he said. He smiled and the tension I’d felt with his presence lessened.
“I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for the climb.”
“Risky thing to do, but then you always did like a little risk.” He moved closer to me. I swallowed. “This is your lucky day,” he said, reaching past me toward one of the interior posts, his breath just inches from my ear. “I have a key to the office and we can take the stairway from there. It’s a much easier route to the view of paradise.” He held a key that had hung hidden behind lengths of rope.
Doing it the hard way was my way. But the day ran late. Why not do it the easy way? He had a key.
So we took the steps up to the office loft. Jack opened the door and at the back a stairwell twisted its way up to the window that looked up the creek. I climbed the steep steps. Actual glass was used in this window, and my fingers felt cool against it when I brushed a circle into the grain dust. The perspective was spectacular, with the sunset pouring over the rain-coated trees. The willows sported red and the ferns had just the hint of rust color at some of their edges. I could actually see beyond the treetops to the sky. The world of Olympia lay that way. Fort Steilacoom, where Andy had been born, bustled miles beyond. Another world. A better world. There was something more, something worthy of all this effort to just live.
I lost all sense of where I was for the moment. It seemed that the view promised something greater than what my life had shown so far. Hope rose up in the forest mists, a hope of life filled with moments of joy yet to come.
“You can see the northern lights from there sometimes,” Jack said. I turned to look down at him. He stood below me as there was only room for one person at the window ledge. “Dancing colors, late at night. Early morning. Quite a sight.”
“You’re a poet,” I said.
“Makes me want to paint it, but I doubt one could capture the vibrancy of the colors. At least nothing I’ve ever attempted satisfied.”
I almost told him that I shared his love for drawing, for capturing on paper something in the world that could nurture later. Instead I said, “You’re here at such hours?”
He shrugged. “It isn’t easy for Boshie and Mary always having someone about.”
I looked down through the staircase and saw the bed then on the redwood floor. My fingers began making circles on their own. I noticed drawings on the walls I hadn’t seen before either, drawings of faces with strange features, heavy lines around eyes, swirls of hair that moved off one sheet of paper and onto another. They were tacked up nearly covering the wall by the bed. Jack’s work. Jack’s dark and heavy work.
I took one last look at the view, the promising view, then stepped back from the window ledge. He reached up for me and took my hand to help me. He didn’t release it but instead pulled me to him. Not in a possessive way as he had in front of the saltbox, but with a gentle firmness, offering security.
The drawings stared at me. The bed reminded me of an animal trap covered with deceitful familiarity and harboring something troubling beneath it. “This isn’t a good place for me to be,” I said.
“Good is a relative word,” he said. “I can help you load the mule of the flour. That way it won’t be a wasted trip.” His breath was sweet as though he chewed mint leaves.
“I wasn’t thinking it was wasted,” I said. “I loved seeing the view from the window. Thank you for that, for showing me that. I hadn’t realized there was a stairwell. Did John design the mill? I can’t remember who—”
He put his fingers to my lips. “Quiet, Emma Giesy,” he said. I let him pull me to his chest. “Just let yourself be cherished for this moment.”
He moved his hands across my back and held me firm. And in that space of safety, I succumbed to comfort.
Not that we did anything untoward. He did not even try to kiss me. He just held me and I felt myself sink into his arms, the first time since Christian’s death that I’d felt comforted without an expectation.
I really don’t know how long we stood there, my head on his chest, my fingers fanned up toward his collarbone, then pushed together as though in prayer; between us yet, my hands. He stroked my hair, the back of my head, and I blinked back tears. It was all I wanted, just this salve; the reassurance of a man’s hand against my head.
I closed my eyes to the pictures on the walls.
“Andy’s watching Kate and Christian,” I said finally. “I really need to go home.”
He nodded, his chin tapping gently on my head. I was aware of his height, his bigness. I felt so small beside him. He inhaled, a deep, long breath, and something in the sound of it or maybe in the way he held me made me acknowledge that the world is full of wounded souls. I pulled away. He preceded me down the winding stairway from the office, locked the office door behind us, and we took the stairwell past the redwood flour bins to the main floor. Outside and in silence, he hefted the sacks of flour into the panniers on either side of the mule’s rump, then put his foot out so I could step into the clasp of his palms as a stirrup. I grabbed the reins then swung my foot over the back of the mule, lifting it high to keep my skirt from catching at the packs. I remembered his grimace when I’d done that at Christian’s funeral. He did it again now.
“A woman does what she has to,” I said. The animal’s ears twitched as I settled onto his back.
“Maybe could be,” he said.
“Thanks, Jack,” I lifted the reins. “For the help with the flour. And the view.”
“I thought maybe I startled you when I first came in,” he said.
“Ja, well, you did. Truth is I’m never quite sure … about you, Jack Giesy.”
“I’m an uncomplicated man,” he said. He cocked his head to the side. “Maybe could be you’re not accustomed to such as that.” He stepped back, swatted the mule on his rump, then let me and the mule pass.
The twilight was enough to see by, and the mule made his way along the trail, surefooted. I patted his neck, ducked beneath low-hanging branches. I realized I didn’t even know the mule’s name. It struck me as odd that I would think of that now. Other questions came too: Had Jack walked to the mill? I’d seen no other mule around. Or maybe he slept there often, to have so many drawings up, and such strange ones. His life carried a bit of emptiness in it too: a man alone, moving from site to site to work, but without a place to call his own. Did men need such things? Many of the Bethel bachelors lived together in Keil’s house, and no one seemed to think they’d even want a home of their own. Maybe it was a woman’s dream, that desire to make one’s nest, fix the quilt on the cot the way she wanted and not have to negotiate with someone else ab
out it.
For just a moment an image flashed of me, sitting on that quilt on Jack’s bed in the mill office, sitting beside Jack Giesy, not frightened but desired. Was that the promise the mill view offered? Or something more? I didn’t know. I kicked the mule into a faster trot.
The winter months wore on with their usual sheets of rain. Andy rigged up a stick marked by inches and kept it standing in a tin set on a stump out near the half barn. “Three, Mama,” he shouted. It couldn’t be. I’d just emptied it the morning before. But it had rained so hard the whole day that at times I thought the barn was gone because we couldn’t see it. Each time I left the house to milk the cows, the path became more mired in mud, so I made new paths. The old ones just didn’t work anymore.
In December, Henry and Martin came to take the cows away until spring so I wouldn’t have to milk them nor worry about churning the butter. We’d do well with goat’s milk, and Martin assured us we could have butter whenever we wished. With fewer chores to do, I’d have time for drawing. But I found time to create new excuses for not doing so too.
There were Christmas presents to make and eggs to scrape, letters to write. I wrote cheery things to Jonathan about how well we were doing, and to my family in Bethel I made it sound like my begging them to rescue me the year before had been a momentary lapse. On Christmas Day we made our way to my in-laws’ without incident. The men brought out their instruments and we tapped our feet with pleasure to the music. While there I learned of the arrival of Edwin Woodard, Sarah and Sam’s first child. For a few hours, I left all three children with Andreas and Barbara and rode the mule, whose name I learned was Fritz, to Sarah’s. She was radiant and her son wailed a healthy cry until she fed him from her breast.
“He’s a fine boy,” I said. “Look how big his hands and feet are. He’ll grow up to be a strong man.”
She nodded. “Like your Andy. I wish you’d brought him. All the children.”
“Letting them have time with their grandparents is a good thing,” I said. “It keeps the lid on the teapot that is our life with them. I never know when the fire will get kindled again and things will boil over.”
Sarah understood and despite the changes in her life, like a true friend, she still made room for me. “Did you bring them, your drawings?” she asked as she stroked Edwin’s fine hair. I shook my head. “You won’t go forward if you don’t put your foot out,” she said.
“I’m not ready to get that foot stepped on just yet. Maybe this winter, when the rains keep us inside, I’ll make more. The mill makes a good subject.”
“You already have some you could send with Sam,” she said. “What are you afraid of?”
I didn’t know.
“I’ll bring you one in honor of Edwin,” I said.
“We won’t sell that one, Emma. You know that.”
“I’ve come to accept that there’s no future in the drawings.” It was the first I’d admitted that even to myself. “It won’t make me independent. I’ll still have the obligations of my husband’s family. Even if I had the money to hire help so I could make my own way, I wouldn’t want to travel without the children, so what would be the point? I just can’t see a future with any kind of creativity in it, Sarah. I’m just to raise my children. That’s my life now. I’m not complaining, just explaining.”
I made it sound beleaguered. Not every life was meant to have peaks of joy scattered throughout it. Or maybe my peaks had all come within the first years, when I was a desired woman, a wife and member of a scouting party that had carried out a worthy task. My peaks had been the births of my children, though even Christian’s had been laced with melancholy.
“Your life could be more,” Sarah said as I left. “If you’d let it.”
“I can’t let go of Christian’s wasted death,” I said.
“You have to forgive yourself,” she said.
“Me? I didn’t do anything. It was that old man. And Keil.”
“It’s hard to receive good things when your hand is a fist against the world, Emma.”
“Ach,” I said. “You just don’t understand.” But then, neither did I.
With the rain and the rise of the river I begged off of the New Year’s Eve celebration, even though it promised to be festive with this new decade inviting us out of the old: 1860. We read of rumors of war back in the States. A new president would take office soon. Those changes felt far from our daily lives.
I half expected Jack to knock on our door on New Year’s Eve but he didn’t. I hadn’t talked with him since our encounter at the mill. He’d been at the Christmas gathering but we kept our distance. Perhaps our last encounter proved too intimate for him, too exposed as he simply stood beside me rather than attempted to lead me here or there the way men tend to do. It was pleasant to remember just the safety of that moment when he held me with no demands, nothing to indicate that he needed, wanted, or would take more.
We waited out the rains, watched for the dusting of occasional snows. Andy and Kate played games and we read stories from the almanac. I even read a few stories from the Bible my sister Catherine had pressed into my hands before Christian and I left Bethel. I’d put Christian’s away, to be given to Andy one day. Andy liked knowing that Luke was a doctor, “like I want to be one day, Mama,” he told me. It was a new admission for him, a wish he’d never expressed before. Maybe his time with Martin had influenced him well. I told him he’d make a good one and I meant it, though I wondered how we’d ever make that happen.
Kate liked the book of Luke too, especially the story of the woman who’d lost her coin and couldn’t find it. Kate misplaced everything, it seemed. We were always on a search around the house, the loft, the half barn, or wherever she might have been, seeking her stocking doll. Andy proved the tidy one. And Christian appeared to be in between. I liked the lost coin story too, for it showed a woman at the hearth, looking for something that mattered to her even though she already had other coins. She kept seeking. I wondered how she’d lost that coin. She must have been a good manager to know just how many coins she had. Maybe it had fallen from her purse. It had rolled away, perhaps, was missing through no fault of her own. The woman understood that. Things happened that separate us from what we loved through no fault of our own. But the woman kept searching until she found it, and then she had a festive party with her friends.
“Mama finds me, ja?” Christian patted my hand, taking me back from my own losses to this room filled with warm scents of food I’d prepared, of my children freshly bathed in heated rainwater and ready for bed. “Find me, Mama.” Christian moved to hide under the bed, sure that the story was something about hide-and-seek.
“Ja, I’ll find you,” I said. “If you ever get lost.”
During the days, deer munched outside our window, then startled if we opened the door. Near the river, we found otter slides and sometimes the air was so quiet, the trees so still, that in the distance we could hear the crunch of a large animal, maybe an elk blazing its own trail through the wilderness. Karl Ruge visited once or twice, the pleasant smoke from his pipe staying in the cabin for hours after he left. A few times I bundled up the children and we walked to Mary’s to see how Elizabeth and Salome grew. We found Karl there, reading and smoking that pipe, and Boshie when he wasn’t at the mill. But no Jack.
I split my own kindling that winter. My arms gained muscle and I began to feel healthy again. The little outrages that flushed my face happened less often. A sheen returned to my skin that had been missing in the months since Christian’s death, and I thought it might be the result of my body finally adjusting after my last baby’s birth. Or maybe as I made sauerkraut, or added vinegar to the warm potato salad I prepared nearly every day, and watched the children take pleasure in the rolled cakes I made, I’d come to some level of peace in this widowing life. I even wondered if I’d one day not think of myself first as a widow, then a mother, but once again as a woman. Perhaps I too was a missing coin, cherished, waiting to be found.
 
; 20
Louisa
MARCH 1860
Many days pass by without my writing in this notebook.
We learn of illness at the Willapa. Not the fever and ague that people suffer from here but of some lung discomfort. Emma has let her sons stay with Andreas and Barbara again, though I understand it is she who is ill and not the children. Little Kate apparently remains with her, and Mary and others stop by to look after them, though I cannot imagine that this suits Emma well. I know I hate being ill almost more than anything for it means others must tend my needs, so while I feel sick I also feel a burden. Well, worse is when the children fall ill. I struggle even more when my husband ails as he has this past winter. I suspect it is his worries that bring him down. He sees what must be done but hasn’t been accomplished yet. He wants Aurora ready for those coming from Bethel, and yet he needs them here to build. His need to be ready weighs on him while his need to have more help, to build up the businesses here, presses on him too. His leadership is a balancing, just as the way one pieces a quilt requires measuring this and that in order for things to come out as they should.
I would offer to assist him with his worries, but he would not see of it. And truth is, I am not much able to help with financial things. Jonathan Wagner carried that skill from what I overheard as my husband talked with our son, August, before he and Jonathan headed back to Bethel. My husband hopes these two boys, well, men now, can spur along the sale of homes in Bethel so people will give up the comforts there to serve each other here. Jonathan can perhaps help the Wagners too, as their daughter, Louisa, injured herself at Elim while at a dance. She fell from the second story of our old home and now has trouble standing at times. My husband says bad things happen there because of the delays, but I believe bad things just do happen. They are part of the ebb and flow of life. I do not attach all suffering to sin as does my husband, though these words to him I’d never say. No need to add to his burdens.