A Tendering in the Storm (Change and Cherish Historical)

  We sold colony property to raise funds for the journey west. My Willie and Jonathan Wagner prattled on at length about this grand adventure. Eighteen our Willie was when he died, and we carried him across the continent to bury him in Willapa, kept inside our Golden Rule Whiskey and lead-lined coffin. Friends suggested we make a barrel to place him in, but my husband insisted on the proper coffin.

  To lose a child, well, what can be said to help a grieving mother? Willie longed for newness and change and so he has it now. I do not think this is anti-scriptural. After all, we went west at my husband’s insistence, so it must be scriptural to make change.

  I suppose Dr. Keil is not really the Lord’s true brother, or else he’d be able to read my thoughts and know that I worry for our children’s safety as we huddle in this thin wooden house in Portland in the Oregon Territory. I worry for my own safety too, and most of all for my husband. It is what a wife should do.

  I miss Bethel but this is something I would never tell my husband. He has enough to worry over. Each day consists of his tending. His secretary, Karl Ruge, decided to remain at Willapa, an ache in my husband’s side, of this I’m certain. There’ll be few letters going back east now, at least until we have something more hopeful to say.

  I must not let him think I feel hopeless, but I do. My son is dead. I live in someone else’s house in a strange city where the smell of horse dung overpowers that of spring flowers. My children are hungry and must wait until the end of the day to see if someone in this West Coast Portland will pay me for my washing of their clothes, and then pay me correctly since I speak no English and wouldn’t know. Or we wait to see if an ill person will feel well enough to pay Dr. Keil in grain or rubbery vegetables for his herbal treatments. He is such a wise and loving man and feels great weight that he could not rescue our son Willie from malaria. Now, I have little hope of even visiting his grave since we have separated from those at Willapa. I can only hope that maybe Christian’s mother or John’s wife will keep the grave up. I doubt Emma would even think of such a kindness.

  Oh, I mustn’t malign her. That’s un-Christian of me. She has her own cross to bear with that willfulness of hers.

  While I scrub on the washboard, I remember Willie. He was to ride in an ambulance on a small cot for comfort, and thus we planned to walk beside him. That’s what comfort means in Greek, my husband tells me, “to come along beside.”

  Willie begged us not to leave him behind. He could have stayed with the Wagners or a dozen other families and come with the group Dr. Keil hopes will come next year, when we are ready for them. Much depended on Christian’s successes at Willapa and the returning scouts were all hopeful. So much timber, they said. We could have a mill in no time and sell the lumber easily.

  I directed my daughter Amelia about which quilts to take, how to wrap some of our precious things like dishes in the flour barrels. They weren’t fancy dishes. We kept a separate barrel for Dr. Keil’s glass cups in which he mixes herbs. Gloriunda and Louisa, my namesake—well, a portion of my namesake—brought clothes to show me and I’d nod, leave or take. My parents named me Dorothea Elizabeth Louisa Ritter, but Dr. Keil preferred Louisa and so that’s what I’m called, my daughter too, for the Prussian queen, our beloved queen.

  There was so much to sort through. It’s all still packed in barrels. We’re still not home.

  “God heals,” Dr. Keil says. I know that is so. Didn’t my husband heal me of a weak leg? I limp some, but the leg is healed. My faith was enough to heal. I didn’t want to remember Brother Will’s death.

  One never knows how another will respond to such deep and separating grief even when one has lived with the other for more than twenty years. My husband believes that deaths of children are a mark of sinfulness of the parent. My heart pounded at Willie’s deathbed while I waited for Dr. Keil to turn to me and ask, “What have you done?”

  Those were God’s very words to Eve.

  I’d heard my husband ask a grieving mother this; listened while a father wept in search of what sins he’d committed that had fallen onto his own flesh and blood. My husband would take those parents in his wide arms, both pulled into his woolen vest, and beg God’s forgiveness for what neither of them could name. And they would go away, those parents, adding guilt to grief. They never heard a sermon letting them believe that God’s lap was large enough to take them in, sin and all, and give them rest. My husband never failed those parents, exactly. He didn’t continue to rail against their sinful ways, but he did agitate them, I believe, especially when they could never find the cause, or when they had trouble imagining a God who would punish an innocent over the foul acts of the innocent’s elders.

  I’d done nothing wrong, nothing I could remember. My husband was perfect, called so by God to lead us all. So where did that leave us with this gaping hole of pain that had once been a mother’s heart meant to love a son? Dr. Keil says there can be no pain without sin, no suffering without evil.

  With Willie’s death, I prayed that Dr. Keil would find another way to hear the Word, some other understanding than that if a child dies it is because a parent sinned. I wanted my grief and Willie’s death to lessen another mother’s pain, not add to it.

  I waited for his charge, but none came. He shook his head as though he couldn’t understand it. I could. Life and death are tethered together. That I understood didn’t mean I wished it wasn’t so.

  All that was one year past. I spent the anniversary of my son’s death scrubbing clothes of people I didn’t know. I wanted someone to talk to, to share my grieving with, but Dr. Keil did not speak of Willie once we buried him at Willapa. It’s not good for a mother to weigh her daughters down with her grief. And so I held it to myself, wondering if the time would come when we’d be living closely again with other colony members, close enough that we shared our meals, and expressions of grief could be shown in between the slicing of potatoes and the serving of our men.

  “Ah, Emma,” I said out loud, “I hope you’re strong.”

  The thought surprised.

  It is time I stopped my writing in this diary and look instead to the comfort of my children and their father. Tending to each other is how we’ll all survive. Dr. Keil has found a site not far from Portland where he says we will eventually move, all of us, even those in Willapa. He calls it Aurora Mills, for our daughter. I want to celebrate my lovely, patient, faithful daughter’s having a town named for her, such a sign of fatherly affection. But I feel a mother’s regret for her too. There is much weight carried in a name. If things do not succeed, well, she will bear that weight.

  Ah, these are unfaithful thoughts. Of course Aurora Mills will succeed. It is my husband’s following of God’s plan. It must succeed: my daughter’s name is attached to it.

  Still, if it does not, I’ll tell my child that perhaps the town was named “Aurora” not so much for her but for the Latin word for dawn. There is always dawn even after the darkest nights.

  3

  Emma

  No Sin to Stand Out

  Christian’s brothers, my brothers-in-law, were known to be good thinkers, hard workers, men who contributed well to the coffers of the common fund. Martin, with a penchant for healing herbs (not unlike our Herr Keil), lived with his parents along with Christian’s sister, another Louisa, so my children and I got to know them best as that’s where we boarded. The Wagonblasts without relatives here felt a bit lost. They left in the summer. I didn’t know where they went.

  Rudy and Henry came up from Portland next, staying with Mary and Sebastian (whom my son called Uncle Boshie) though the bachelors intended on building their own house. The brothers might have stayed with Christian’s parents, but I was there. Associating with me, I suspected, was like spitting on the spider when it was still hot: people wanted to avoid the spray.

  I hoped they’d work on our home but instead they began to build the mill along a little creek that flowed into the Willapa not far from the claim Christian and I had purchased.

&
nbsp; Building the mill was quite an event. They split spruce for the walls and floors but ordered lumber for the second story and bins from a kind of tree called redwood that came all the way from California. John Giesy said the redwood formed ships’ ballasts and would last forever and resist insects. My in-laws had brought the grist stones from Missouri and left them in San Francisco, so a contingent sailed south in the summer to bring them north to install them in the mill. Boshie named the tributary Mill Creek, of course, though I was always partial to wondering what the natives might have called it. Names of places are important, I always thought, and Mill Creek lacks the particularity of a stream like the Cowlitz. Christian couldn’t help much as he was busy oystering, but even Karl Ruge, the old teacher, augured holes for the pegs to keep the floor notched in place.

  The mill rose up out of the blackberries and willows, topped the trees near the river, then formed a peaked roof with a window at the top. What a view there’d be from the mill. While I chomped at my bit so our house could be built, I knew that the community needed the mill, and I was pleased at least to be a part of the venture, offering my Strudels and wapato dishes to keep the men fed.

  My brother Jonathan did not come to help with the mill, not even for a visit. Nor did Christian’s distant relation Jack, who’d headed for Portland within days after his arrival. I’d have nothing to tell my sister Catherine about him the next time I wrote. I was not sure where her curiosity about this Giesy cousin grew from, but each letter from her asked if I had seen him. He was much too old for Catherine. The Giesy brothers said Jonathan and Big Jack were busy helping to build at Aurora and making cider vinegar. Herr Keil already had an industry going from those bushels of apples he’d purchased. He turned the skins into cider to sell back to the Willamette Valley settlers for twice what he’d paid them for the apples. Shrewd would be a word for him. Christian would say inventive.

  Martin brought a comfort, though. My own supply of herbs had been used up the past two winters, and Martin shared his with me. I was grateful for the tansy that we hung near the food to keep the flies away. We spread some on the floor, too, and I think it kept out spiders, at least a bit. Martin didn’t speak much to me, but he had Christian’s gentle ways. He’d step aside if I came through the small room carrying Kate and even picked up the tin plates after a meal, washing them in the bucket—what they call pails here in the west—as though it wasn’t a woman’s task at all.

  Karl Ruge and Mary Giesy and some of the others met on a clear Sunday morning at the stockade after the mill was finished. John Giesy said we’d use the stockade for a school too, but this day Karl read from Scripture mentioning the word Andrew, and my little Andy perked up at the sound of his name. It was a good gathering time of worship and expressions of gratitude. I missed Christian most during these times. I could always stare at him on the men’s side if the messages bored. His absence made me impatient for his presence.

  Afterward, we sat in the shade watching while the men took turns splitting cedar bark into shingles we’d use to roof our houses and replace those leaking canvas tarps.

  “Keil’s not building his house yet in Aurora,” Rudy told us. “He sent a dozen men and one woman to cook for them out to Aurora Mills, but that gross Haus will be temporary. It’ll be big and the bachelors and some of the families can come out and start laying up houses on the property. Get a store going so we can bring neighbors in to sell to them and meet our own needs too.”

  One woman. I wondered who she was and whether, like me, Keil had sent her out as punishment for being independent, though I turned that into triumph.

  “Doesn’t he fear people will want to stay in Portland, maybe not follow him to Aurora?” I asked.

  “Nein,” Rudy said. He stopped to wipe his brow of sweat. Karl Ruge motioned for the frow, offering to give Rudy a break, but John Stauffer, one of the scouts, stepped in to spell him. I handed Rudy a tin of water. He drank his fill.

  “Ja, he waits until he has his usual comforts, I suppose,” I said under my breath. Then louder, “He wouldn’t want to be there to encourage the flock or gain an understanding of the time and effort that such building of a community takes. It might change his mind about building a colony from scratch.”

  “Ach, don’t talk so dumb,” my father-in-law told me. His words stung. “He knows about building up colonies from Pennsylvania to Missouri and now here.”

  “Not here,” I said.

  “He went to Aurora Mills for the Fourth of July celebration,” Rudy noted. “Most everyone from Bethel traveled out from Portland to see where one day soon they’d be living. Our band played.” He said “our band” as though we were still a part of it. “They had good food and dancing. A hearty time.”

  I felt a pang of something. Regret?

  “Next year we’ll have such a celebration here,” I said. “With steaming wapato mixed with herbs.”

  “There were speeches, too,” Frederick told us, “about the candidates for the presidential election and the locals, too.” I’d forgotten there was to be an election, even one in this Territory too, I supposed, though I didn’t know who might challenge whom. I wondered what Christian thought about the candidates. Martin added that the group learned news of a man named John Brown and a war that people called “Bleeding Kansas” and the repeal of our Missouri Compromise, meaning slaves’ lives were still in peril.

  Martin spoke as though he didn’t want to upstage his older brothers. “It was good we left Missouri. Things will get worse there.”

  “Not so sobering now, Martin. Talk about the good things,” Rudy said.

  “Like my John being named school superintendent,” my sister-in-law cooed. I didn’t even realize there’d been an election for that.

  “Ja, ja,” Henry said. “Or that Christian has been named a territorial marshal. From all that fuss in the stockade, we hear.”

  “He earned top votes as the territorial representative, too,” John said. “Twenty-two votes.”

  This was news to me too, that Christian had been given some sort of commission, an important job in the Territory, been elected a representative, and I’d known nothing about it. He’d been named a justice of the peace the first months after we were in Willapa and even made Sarah and Sam Woodard’s common-law marriage official, but at least he’d told me about that.

  “When did—”

  “It was a festive time, that Fourth of July.” Rudy said, taking the topic elsewhere. He laughed with a high-pitched giggle and began rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet in preparation for a story. “That Big Jack,” he shook his head as though indulging a teasing toddler, “he gets himself some fireworks, ja? We don’t any of us know where he got them, but he sets the fireworks up behind the privy and waits. He might have had a pint or two of our whiskey behind there with him, you know Jack. Well, he peeks around and sees one of the girls go inside. He lets her settle down like a hen on her nest, and then he counts and sets the flame. What an explosion! It nearly caught the grass on fire, and it sent all the blackbirds in the oak tree flying up in a squawking haunt. Such a laugh we got from that: the noise, the birds, the girl squealing.” He shook his head, still smiling. “And then her charging like a bull through the door with her drawers lassoed around her ankles so tight she fell on her face.” He slapped his knee with glee.

  “That doesn’t sound very funny to me,” I said. I held a yarn ball for Kate to grab for as she sat on my lap.

  “Big Jack didn’t think it was funny neither, because he got tangled up in some blackberry vines trying to come out and watch what was happening. He ended up stuck behind the privy and never even saw the fuss. He just doesn’t always think things through, that Jack. And she wasn’t that hurt, Emma.” Rudy chuckled, then took the frow back from John. I watched my mother-in-law shake her head with a smile on her face.

  “Well I hope she was all right,” Mary said.

  “Martin gave her some bee balm tea to relieve her nausea—”

  “And h
er flatulence,” Rudy joked.

  Henry ignored his brother’s interruption. “And the borage compress Dr. Kiel made for her relieved the swelling on her chin.”

  “Lucky she didn’t have her tongue between her teeth when she fell,” Rudy said. “She’d have ended up as the silent Schwader girl!”

  “At least she has teeth. Those apples Keil bought helps with that.” Henry wiggled what looked like a loose tooth.

  “And Dr. Keil was there to fix things,” Martin said. “He’s a great, good man whose timing is divinely apportioned.”

  Divinely apportioned? Martin’s declaration of adoration of Keil made me look twice at him. Maybe Big Jack wasn’t the only Giesy who just didn’t always think things through.

  That autumn, we harvested the oats we’d planted. We winnowed the grain, then took the heads by mule to the mill, where Boshie ground it. Our first. Our own. We’d have to buy our wheat, though. The climate proved too cool too long to place our hope in raising wheat. Sarah said it rained ninety inches a year here. I couldn’t imagine that was true. Still, it was strange to have grown our own sustaining food in Missouri. Not here. Oats might do. Maybe millet.

  The men hunted together and we smoked venison and bear meat and salmon filleted on sticks the way we’d seen the Indians do it, but we did it on our own, all of it.

  I suppose it’s somewhat prideful to be always touting doing things without the help of others, but when one has been under the thumb of a leader strong as an oak but just as unbending, it’s difficult to resist the celebration of what we accomplished without him. I couldn’t remind Mary and the others enough that here we surrendered to no one.

  Sometimes, when I heard the we and us of the Giesy brothers and his father talking about Keil’s colony, I did wonder if they saw the colony as “separated” in the way I did. I kept my tongue quiet. I wished to avoid arguments while I lived under their roof. The Giesys, too, tended to ignore me unless I asked a direct question, even when we were gathered together for family meals. They weren’t unkind, really. They treated women and children as grass beside a main trail; sometimes it got stepped on, but it didn’t really matter to the journey.