Decisions. Which ones did I have left to make? I could decide when my children came back home to me and set the date as Christian’s April birthday. I’d force myself to be well and able to do for my own family. Though I was still weak, I had the Schwader girl, who was staying with me last, saddle her mule and then asked her to take me to the Willapa stockade and to the Giesys and my children.
Andy ran in from the river when he saw us approach. Kate jumped off a stump she’d been standing on, and even Christian waddled to me. I could not describe the joy I felt at seeing them and having them run toward me, wiping away the fear that separation might make them wish I’d never come.
I slipped from the mule, caught my balance with a lightheadedness. Then I took steps toward them as they threw their arms around me. My children, back in my arms.
“You don’t look too well yet,” Barbara said when I stood, my knees like Spätzel. I used Andy’s shoulder for steadying. “Martin, look at her eyes. They’re sticky, ja?” I sneezed, and instead of the German phrase that meant “God bless you,” she said in Swiss-German, “Health to you. Cheers, and smart you are!”
“I don’t feel so smart as all that,” I said. “It’s just the spring foliage making my nose itch.”
“Still, you shouldn’t push too hard.”
“It’s Christian’s birthday, and I’m here to celebrate and take them home.”
“Oh, I don’t think that will be a good idea,” Andreas said. “School starts just this next week and you don’t want to go through what you did last fall, pushing yourself to get Andy here. That might even be why you’re so ill now. You’re a pretty fragile soul, Emma Giesy.”
“I gave birth to that boy in the wilderness, so I’m anything but fragile.”
I’d expected resistance, but I hadn’t thought about school starting or how I’d counter that. He was right: I couldn’t maintain the pace of last fall. At least not for a while yet.
“I think Andy’s old enough to ride the mule,” I said. “If you’ll make the loan of Fritz to me.”
Andreas tapped his fingers on his cane. Martin stood beside him in silence. Barbara said, “We’ll be in need of the mules for the spring seeding. Andy would have to walk all that way by himself. You wouldn’t want that.”
“I saw bear tracks this past week, big as washtubs,” Andreas said. “Just through the school term. You take Christian and Kate. They’ll be handful enough for you while you’re healing. Have you even spent a night without help since you took ill?”
They redefined every human foible into weakness. I didn’t have a mule to call my own, but that was to help me out so I wouldn’t have to winter him. I had no cows, but that was so I wouldn’t have to be troubled to milk them nor someone else be forced to come by to do the same. If I became ill, well, it must be because I overworked—but how could that be when I did so little? Everyone else did it all for me. Other people got sick. Andreas needed a cane. Mary caught a cold, though I suppose even that was my fault. Even my effort to meet the butter contracts were considered insufficient compared to what everyone else already provided for me. I wasn’t holding my own, and now my son would have to struggle to get back and forth to school because of my selfishness, my need to be in charge of my own family. That’s what they were saying.
A fire roiled inside of me. My fingers moved in their circles, so I hid them in fists.
“Andy,” I said. “Your grandfather’s right. You’ll be better off staying here through the school term.”
“But—”
“I’ll come back for you. You’re not to worry.”
“Can I come home when we don’t have school?” His eyes pooled with tears. One slid down the side of his face and he brushed at it. “Can I come home on the day before Sabbath? And come back when you come to worship?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
“Such a long way to go for just one day,” Barbara said.
“Ja, it is. But sometimes being home for even a little while, where he can play with his brother and sister, sometimes that struggle is worth it.”
“I’ll bring him to you,” Martin said. “So you won’t have to worry about the bears or whatnot, and you without a mule.”
“That’s generous of you, Martin,” Andreas said. “With my mule and fieldwork time.”
“Consider it part of my contribution to tending widows and children,” Martin said. He sounded a little testy, something I’d never heard before. “That’s what we’re doing all this work for, isn’t it? To be of help to each other?”
“Ja, you’re right. I shouldn’t have talked so,” Andreas said. He patted Martin’s arm, seeking forgiveness.
I finished the afternoon holding my children while from time to time they ran to play with the others. They always came back to check on me as though I were part of a game and served as home base. I longed to leave, to take Kate and Christian, but that also meant less time with Andy. I barely heard the conversations going on around me. I was not a part of this community, not a part of the Giesy family, not in the way Christian once imagined we’d be. If he had lived, it would have been different, but he hadn’t. It was time that I accepted that.
I sneezed again and Barbara said, “Cheers, and smart you are!” It wasn’t a blessing. It was a challenge and a charge.
If I was ever to have control over my children and my life, I needed to get smart.
It was July before Andy came back home to stay. Martin had brought him once or twice on the weekends as he’d offered. His father’s quick retort to him on Christian’s birthday made me think that Martin might be longing for something more in his life too. He was a fine healer and I’d never imagined him as one who would toil the earth to make his living, or should I say his contribution. I hadn’t realized until that day that he probably took care of his father, as the elder Giesy had deteriorated with both age and the grinding of his bones. Andreas needed help to stand and sit. Barbara seemed healthy and strong, but who knew what aches and pains she might seek remedy for when others weren’t about. Louisa, their youngest, was nineteen now and like my sister Catherine, I assumed she hoped to find a mate. Instead, she too looked after her parents, cooked and cleaned for them and her brothers, and Karl Ruge during the school term, and now my son too. Helena might have assisted had she not chosen Keil over her father.
Louisa was a good girl, though I didn’t think she took much interest in the almanacs or books, and that saddened me. I wanted Andy to be enthused by stories and not just focused on the work of learning. If he wanted to one day be a doctor, he’d be filled with science and medicine and studies far beyond anything I could ever help him with. But he’d be a complete man, one able to come up with solutions to problems no one else could if he matched his scientific mind with art and music and stories. The arts were the keys to imagination’s door. Louisa didn’t have much imagination. She’d been a silent caregiver the nights she spent with me and went to bed before the sun had even set. Perhaps she longed for rest the most: rest was her key to survival.
I knew the fall school term would begin after harvest and Andy’d go back to school, back to Andreas and Barbara’s. Andy knew it too. One evening while we sat beneath the cedar tree taking in a cooling breeze before the mosquitoes came to call, he asked, “Isn’t there any way I could stay here with you, Mama, and still go to school?”
“You are with me.” I hugged him. “Look what a fine artist you’re becoming. I believe that’s a woodpecker you’ve drawn.”
He tapped the pencil lead against his lip and I saw myself in that behavior. “Couldn’t you come live with Opa and Oma while I’m in school? I miss you so very much.”
“There are just too many people there already, Andy. And we have Opal to care for here. I know it’s hard, I do. The shape of the bird you’ve drawn is perfect. Have you been practicing?”
“Opa says drawing is a useless thing,” he said. He tapped the lead against his lip. “He says Jack wastes his time with pencils. He doesn’t wan
t me to draw things when I’m there.”
“But music is fine. The men’s band, that’s fine, but not art?”
Andy looked confused at my outburst. “He says I need to have a man to influence me.”
“Oh, does he?” Yet Jack Giesy’s influence would be with the arts, and Andreas disapproved of that.
“With Papa gone I don’t have that,” he said. “That’s the real reason Opa wants me to stay with them. Because I don’t have a papa anymore.”
“Smart you are,” I said under my breath. They could claim they kept Andy due to my health or the distance or Andy’s young age or the lack of a ready mule. They could say whatever they wanted, but my son was right about the cause of their attention. I sneezed and Andy said in Swiss, “Cheers, and smart you are, Mama.”
I knew in that instant just what I needed to do.
It was three years and one month from the date of my husband’s death when I sought out Jack Giesy with a purpose. It took me several days to find out where he was, and I did that searching on my own so as not to start rumors before they were facts. I couldn’t ask many questions. I used the pretense that I looked for my letters and wondered if Jack still had them.
A part of me dreaded what I had to do, as Jack would see it as a win. He’d made an offer that sounded like a business proposition and I’d declined, because I didn’t want my life to be a business arrangement but more because marriage had not been in my envisioned future. But neither had becoming a widow. Things changed. One had to decide what one cherished and what was subject to transformation.
I’d decided not to kindle my own fire but begin to depend on someone else. And I’d be able to tell my sister Catherine all about Jack Giesy now, so she could stop wondering. I felt a tiny twinge of guilt when I thought of my sister and her interest in Jack Giesy, but hers was a girlish longing and it would pass.
Jack must be staying at the mill. I had the children with me as we pushed a wheeled cart there. I pulled the bar and the children pushed and we stumbled over the tree roots out onto the trail, then picked our way through the forest road. We made a terrible racket, which was good. It would keep the bears and mountain lions away.
When the mill came into view Christian looked up in awe. “So big,” he said. He rode inside the cart and tried to stand up. I motioned him to remain seated.
“You haven’t been here before, have you? Your papa helped build this mill.” It offered a kind of peace as I remembered the vista I’d seen from the upper windows. A new perspective, that’s what the mill represented. I noticed unused redwood lumber stacked beside the mill and a thought came to me in seeing them. I’d ask Boshie if I could have a few of the boards to add something new to my home.
“Mama?” Andy asked, touching my hand. I blinked and gave attention back to my children. We went inside and I signaled that the children stay close to me as the big stones ground noisily away. I found Boshie and asked if he could help load our cart with two sacks. He scolded me, saying he would have brought flour by, that it wasn’t necessary for me to come all that way and to bring the children too.
“I was looking for Jack,” I said. He raised one eyebrow. “He has some letters of mine that he forgot to deliver.”
“Ah. Well, he isn’t here now. There was talk that he might go back to Bethel. They’re having trouble getting things ready to come west, and people are worried about a war there.”
This had not occurred to me, that he might go back to Bethel. His offer might not even be an option any longer. I blinked several times in my thinking.
Maybe I should talk with Martin. He was kind and generous, and perhaps he’d like moving into a cabin some distance from the demands of his parents and brother. Or maybe Karl Ruge. Why didn’t I consider Karl as a mate? He could meet the criteria that my in-laws might require, perhaps even better than Jack Giesy “maybe could.”
So calculating I was. So … pragmatic. Herr Keil would be proud of my practical process; it was so much like his own.
“If you see Jack, tell him I’m looking for those letters, will you?”
Only Jack had made an offer. Only Jack demonstrated a willingness to take another step with me. Was it a step into a calm or into a storm? That I didn’t know.
I looked at him anew and saw the bigness of him. He must have been working in the forests felling trees, or maybe he’d been building boats again. His neck and arms were well-muscled. He was tan and he walked purposeful as a mule heading back to his barn. I was outside using a drawknife against one of the redwood boards Boshie had given me.
“I hear you’re looking for your letters.” He removed his hat, then slapped at his thighs with it, leaving dust motes in the air. “When Boshie said you’d asked about them, I checked my pack and there they were. Imagine.”
I put the drawknife down and brushed my skirt of the wood curls, then put my hand out. He held the letters just above my reach. “I didn’t even open them,” he teased. He sniffed them. “Don’t smell of perfumes, so they’re from men.”
“Aside from my family, there are no men who would be writing to me,” I said.
“Pity.” He continued to keep the letters above my head. I could see that the seals had been opened and then pressed back but not tight. He’d read them all right.
“Jack. Please,” I said.
“Oh, look at that lower lip pooch out like your Kate’s.”
“I like you better when you talk to me without the teasing or jockeying,” I said. He kept his hand raised. I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “I guess you can carry them around for another five months. I’m sure it’s old news by now anyway.” I turned to go back into the cabin.
“Can’t you take a little teasing, always so serious?”
“If you didn’t come over here to give me the letters, why did you come?”
“For entertainment,” he said. “I haven’t had much of that in the woods.”
“I hate to disappoint you then,” I said. I held his stare. “You’re like some schoolyard bully having his way.” I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling like my mother. She used to do that, cross her arms and tap her fingers when her children behaved badly. “It occurs to me,” I said as I tapped my own fingers at the elbows, “that some men like to be treated as though they were children. Are you one of them, Jack Giesy?”
He took one quick step toward me and slapped the letters against my shoulder. “Here,” he said, holding them like they were a glove and he’d just challenged me to a duel. “Take ’em, fine lady.” He used a deep Missouri drawl, exaggerating the a in lady, but he let me take the letters.
“Thank you. That’s better. Now, would you like some tea?”
He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You’re not setting me in the corner with a dunce hat on?”
“Oh, Jack.”
“I’ll take some tea. Maybe there’ll be something entertaining happening here after all.”
Oh, I can see now the complications I ought to have seen then, but I held fast to just one point of view, one perspective, and it wasn’t of the divine. I had one direction I thought that I could take, as I did when I felt compelled to go west with Christian, when I didn’t tell him that I carried his child, didn’t advise him that I’d already met with Keil and pushed my agenda. This time I’d considered other options, though not a one of them would work. This was the only real out, this alignment with Jack Giesy, whose marriage to me would grant me a level of independence from the Giesy family of my husband. More, it promised the presence of my sons.
I told Jack that. Looking back, the explanation might have been an error in judgment, but I wanted to be as honest with him as I could be about our arrangement.
“And what would be in this for me?” he asked.
“You’d get the land,” I said. “Once married, it would be yours, of course.”
“You’d give it up just to have your boys living with you?”
“I’d have no choice. The law would say it was yours, my husband’s. And yes. I think
that’s what Christian would want.”
He held a small oyster shell the size of Kate’s little palm and just as pale. He plopped it back and forth between the palms of his hands. “Look at this.” He motioned Andy to come to him. “See that little tiny hole? That’s from a drill, a little snail that attaches itself to the oyster and drills right down through the shell to suck out the meat.”
“I know. My papa showed me,” Andy said.
“Ja? Did he tell you to watch out for them?” Andy shook his head. “They look harmless and they’re so small you wouldn’t think they could cause any problems to a shell as hard as an oyster’s is, but they do. Worse than starfish.” He handed the shell to Andy, who took it to Kate and Christian for further study. Jack turned back to me.
“And I’m to assume you want this relationship to be what, like brother and sister then?”
“That would be my preference.”
“It isn’t mine,” he said.
“Unless there’s comfort that moves in or lights a spark.”
“Such already exists for me,” he said. “And it’s a woman’s duty if she weds.”
“I know. But you can understand, can’t you? I mean, you did make the offer some time back and were willing then to make a go of it without apparent care if I returned affection for you or not. You’ve spent a little time in my presence, and though I was ill you were willing to stay with me, to take care of me. It wasn’t so bad then, was it, just being in the same place together, making things work?”
“The way this maybe could work is if we try to make it a true marriage.”
Oh, I should have prayed then. I should have prayed that if this was my own doing and not God’s, that He please get my attention, make me know and tell me whether I was smart here or not, taking some action that I’d later say was wasted. I should have prayed that my sons would be well tended no matter where they lived, that perhaps my being in their lives was not the most important thing for them. I should have begged for God to show me the path so that I might act according to God’s plan. That’s what I should have prayed.