A dam is already on the creek, so there’s a mill race too, Dr. Keil tells the others and I overhear. Twice each month, at first, he took the riverboat from Portland to Oregon City and then, by prearrangement, one of the carpenter teams would come to pick him up in a wagon and drive him from there to Aurora Mills. He often took our little Aurora with him. I would have liked to go along but with so many children to tend to and the laundry I took in, it was best I stayed here in Portland.
We all visited for the Fourth of July. It was a joyous time. How I love the music! I think I could endure most anything in this life as long as there is music to return to. Dr. Keil composed a march the band played and it was a happy tune, not the dirge that we’d listened to all across the continent following Willie’s casket.
There I am again, always thinking about Willie. But the rains have begun in Portland, so I think of him more often. It was in this month of November last year that we buried him. I still can find no cause within myself for his death; I know it must be my fault, my error, for my husband is perfection. That he has never accused me openly is a mark of that.
I did not cry, not then, not when he died. Some might have thought me cold. I’m not. I am practical. Death can be hastened by man’s action, but death visits everyone. Still I will someday ask why Willie went before me or his father. Somehow this does not seem divine, but then I have no wish to question God. I’m sure there is a reason.
I plan for Christmas here in this Oregon Territory, for the delivery of Belsnickel’s kind gifts. We’ll find fruit perhaps or maybe some small wooden toy for each of the little ones. The band will play. Perhaps we will all go out and stand in the gross Haus and sing even if it is not yet completed. It will feel like church. We need to work to finish up the Haus so we can move forward and build the church. My husband says we must prepare the farmsteads, plant the orchards in the places where the men have cut the timber. Much to do before we build a church, and even then it will not be so grand as the one we have in Bethel.
I do wonder how they fare in Bethel.
Dr. Keil named Andrew Giesy, Christian’s younger brother, to be in charge of Bethel when we left. This surprised me as I expected Andrew to travel west as so many of his brothers did. Maybe my husband had spoken his reasoning and I missed it. I did seem to miss things during those days.
Jack Giesy has been here of late. He makes me laugh and sometimes I forget that he is already thirty years old or more and should have put aside childish pranks like changing sugar in the bowl for salt when I was not looking, or staying up all night “drawing pictures” he tells us. When he doesn’t tip his flask too much he is a kind companion for the little ones. He likes to keep them awake late, though, and often misses breaking fast in the morning while he snoozes. Once I heard he tossed a cat against a wall when it ventured near his face as he recovered from his partying. Disturbing. But he has a cheery smile. Willie would have had a smile like that, if he had lived.
Why can’t I let him go?
I can’t speak to Dr. Keil of such things. They are trivial in the world of import and detail he attends to. A flash of feeling so intense swells up into my face sometimes, making it hot and my breath short all at the same time. I want him to stop being Dr. Keil and Herr Keil and our leader and to just be the father of our children, my husband who would hold me through this pain.
But this too is envy, selfishness. “Why do you worry, woman?” he told me one night when I felt the tears coming and asked if he might pray with me for something soothing to fill the gaping hole within my heart. “Why do you worry?” he repeated, adding, “I am doing our Father’s work.”
These were scriptural words spoken by our Lord to his parents when they had thought him lost but he was instead teaching in the temple.
I am a weak woman. Soft. Thinking only of myself. I am commanded not to worry so long as my husband does the Lord’s work.
Despite the routines of my day, there are surprises, small treasures I take as signs that God is with us: enough grass to feed our stock; a child pulled back from a fast wagon racing through the streets of Portland; a leggy yellow flower brought by Jack Giesy and tucked into my apron at the waist.
While we brought no sheep with us—a decision I thought an error as we would need the wool for weaving clothes—I had brought lanolin along, and mutton tallow laced with lemon. Neither ever went rancid and at night I rub the cakes on the feet of the children and our own, soothing the blisters on our feet. Even a good cobbler can’t make room for every corn or callus. I give out my healing salve as needed. One night as I fell onto the quilt beside Dr. Keil and spoke my tired prayers, I told him, “I am pleased I brought the mutton salve for our blisters.” It was such a little thing to bring me pleasure, this packing something that could serve. “So many say it helps even with wind-chapped hands.”
“No need for it,” my husband said. “Have them step in their own urine and let the air dry their feet and chapped hands. Each will be clear by morning.” He rolled over and I heard him snore within minutes.
I lay awake wondering if there was something sinful in offering up a simple joy. There must be. Otherwise, why would my wise husband find need to offer an alternative to what I’d said? Yes, urine would soften hands, but was it so wrong to be pleased that lanolin could do the same? Hadn’t God provided that as well?
I must put these pages away. I’m tired and that’s when doubt abounds.
5
Emma
Kindling Your Own Fire
I didn’t mind not having anyone around but my children. I liked tending to their everyday needs and preparing for my husband to come home. I could make my own decisions about what to eat or what task to do next without having to please a man’s stomach or his clock. In the evening, I lit my candles and burned them for as long as I liked without anyone complaining that I interrupted their sleep with my drawing or reading. All in all, it was the best of both worlds: I had a husband and children to love and care for, and I had time for myself within my own home. I wondered if women married to soldiers carried such thoughts, wanting their men with them but not minding that they could rule their own roost and collect eggs when they wished while their men were gone.
The first week after Christian returned to the Bay, I reveled in that aloneness. It slipped into the late evening after the children slept in their beds. The days were filled with weaving mats or pulling heavy needles through tanned hides to make winter breeches. I ground cornmeal for mush, milked the goat, filled the hollowed log with the grass of last summer. It would have been a pleasure to have a cow through the winter, but Christian said that tending the animal would have been too much for me with the little ones underfoot and the goat to milk as well. On the cold, rainy mornings when I could bring the goat inside to milk her, I agreed with Christian, though good butter would have been a salve against milking in the morning chill.
In this house I felt no fear from the outside world. It was built with love and the door was sturdy with a latch from the inside. During the day I left the latch string out so anyone coming past would know this was a friendly place. Sarah said that was the custom here. If the string was pulled in, it meant no one should knock or stop by. Not that I expected anyone to visit, but I heard that the Shoalwater people sometimes stopped to trade milk for fish or fresh bread for berries.
From my in-laws’ house, we’d moved the trunk my parents had sent out with them. Its rounded top stood at the end of the rope-mattress bed that fit in the back corner of the house. The men had made a bed along with a rough table and chairs cut out of smaller tree stumps to add to the table chairs the Giesys brought for us. One finely made rocking chair sat at the hearth. Mary has its mate in her home. It was another bonding of us two women. She and Boshie lived but two miles from us, close enough to call for in time of help; far enough distant we never feared eavesdropping on each other’s lives. It was the perfect arrangement, and we had chosen it all ourselves.
At my leisure I could read my sister
Catherine’s letters and write back, though I did the latter more infrequently than I might have. I wasn’t sure why.
Karl Ruge made his way to visit once in a while after the misty rains began in earnest in November. He’d split wood for me. If he saw me dragging out a pail of ashes to my soap pit, he would lift it from me saying, “By golly, I’m not so old I can’t lift a bucket. Even if I am so old I’m ready to kick it.”
“You’re not that old, Karl,” I told him. He was but a few years older than Christian. I wished he wouldn’t bring up his age. He’d grin and sometimes stay to smoke his pipe while I heated hot tea and he spoke with Andy. I knew he stopped by for Andy’s lessons, but sometimes he’d bring me the loan of a book. I preferred the titles in German, for I could read and disappear inside the story. The English ones made difficult reads but Karl said I could keep the books for as long as I liked. Once he brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin and when I finished reading it, he said we could discuss it together, to see if I had captured the meaning in a book written in English. Imagine, a man willing to discuss a book with a woman! A book about people and lives and change and not just about Scripture! What would my mother-in-law say? Unseemly came to mind. Well, just the idea of it spurred me on to test myself against the English words. I stoked the fire later than necessary to keep its reflected light upon my page.
Still, a house without a husband reeks of separation. I thought about Christian often through the winter months and spring and seemed to see him everywhere. Andy had his deep-pool eyes and he held his hands on his hips, elbows out, when I scolded him. Christian often stood that way too when I raised my voice. I had to turn away to keep from smiling when Andy reminded me of his father. I had to be stern at times, for Andy’s safety. He played too close to a honey tree, ran without looking into the denser trees and could become lost within them. It is a parent’s role to be dour at times. For protection of the ones we love.
Kate’s hair was blond at birth but now at a year old, it was coming in with a kind of reddish tint and in the sunshine shone like her father’s hair. I often talked to the children about their father, what he might be doing, what he was eating for supper, that he was probably already in bed while my Andy persisted in asking questions just to keep himself from falling asleep. “Does he cook?” Andy asked. I wondered. I’d heard that fur trappers took native wives; maybe Christian had found a Shoalwater woman to cook for him and Joe. I’d have to ask. I didn’t know how I felt about that.
The children carried Christian’s kindness in them too. On more than one occasion when I hadn’t returned to the house from milking the goat as fast as I wished, I’d see Andy bent over his sister, patting her little hand while she cried, hungry, sitting on the floor. He was not the least bit mean or jealous, that boy; he had a naturally giving heart.
Christian was missing these moments, and yet I felt closer to my husband with him gone than I ever had when we’d been separated before. I’d been annoyed when he left me behind after we were married, heading into Kentucky to recruit for Herr Keil. If he’d been a bug I’d have smashed him with my slippers when he left me to birth Andy alone at Fort Steilacoom. But now while he was at the Bay, I carried a low flame for him, one that flickered with longing when I thought of him, one that I knew would ignite when he came home and blessed my face with the brush of his mustache. Until then, something in our joined spirits kept us linked though physically we lived apart. How strange a marriage is.
When Christian came home every other week or so, he stayed but a few days, so it was as though we had a honeymoon. I giggled when Christian first used that word. It was December and we’d had a rare respite, a patch of clear sky that revealed a full moon shining on the river outside our home. The children were fast asleep. Avoiding the muddy path, we walked through the timber to the river’s edge. The air smelled fresh as new cut flowers and was so full of moisture from the dripping trees that I wiped my face with my shawl, thinking it must be misting. Clouds could roll in and drown the moon in an instant but we wouldn’t know until the rains began again, as we couldn’t see the arrival of storms or clouds. The hills and trees kept us from anticipating much. I pulled my shawl around me to ward off the chill. Even the insects had flown to their bunks. The river gurgled, carrying its cargo of rain and tree branches and needles and lichen to sea. We could hear splashing, likely where a tree-fall cut the water, forcing the stream surge to go around it. Under the canopy of trees, our voices carried.
“Honeymoon,” Christian said as we stood together. “The word means sweetness as in honey and the moon means the sweetness leaves like the moon fades. It’s a part of life. The ebb and flow of things. A good descriptive word.”
“I’ll pray our marriage will be a harvest moon, then, filling us up with good memories. Then when it threatens to fade, we’ll have the return of the honey to look forward to.”
“Indeed, you would find the hopeful part of the waning moon,” he said. “But it won’t just threaten to fade, Emma. It does fade.”
“Two honeymoons a month would keep us from noticing the darkness in between,” I said.
“The Americans call two full moons in one month a ‘blue moon’ and say something is as ‘rare as a blue moon.’ Indeed,” Christian continued, “a happily married man, for instance, or so my father says. Little does he know.” He kissed my nose.
“Look at us,” I said. “Our waning did not last. We are renewed here.”
“But it is not our doing, Emma. God controls, not us. Remember the scripture: ‘Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow.’ ”
“Well that’s just … dour. The idea that all we get for kindling our own fires is the hand of God giving us sorrow. What kind of hand is that?”
“One to help us when we’re grieving,” he said. “To remind us that we cannot do anything on our own. We will grieve. We are not asked to move by our compass, Emma.”
“But we have to kindle our own fires. We have to read the compass. We can’t wait around for others to do it for us. Look what happened with Keil. We waited for him to fan our flames here, and he doused them with buckets of outrage. We looked to him for our compass and see where it took us! He’d take us south to Portland and Aurora, but we went to the sea and found oystering to rescue us.” I pulled away from him, disappointed that he couldn’t see how pushing ahead, following the course we had, had rescued us. Oh, God had a place in it, but we made it happen, didn’t we?
“No matter what we do, there will be sweetness and there will be bitter. To think differently is to find disappointment in God where none is warranted. I worry over you, Emma, that you try too hard to see all good things as coming from your effort. When tragedies happen—and they will as sure as the moon wanes—then you’ll blame yourself. This will not be good.”
“Ja, like you blamed yourself,” I said.
It was an unkindness of me, to poke in my husband’s freshest sore. Loving someone was in part knowing their deepest wound but choosing not to poke it or to pick at the scab. But did the man think that his deciding to work on the coast had nothing to do with me? Did he think that every good idea came only from God, or that God couldn’t speak through another? Didn’t God make us all creative creatures?
Still, I should have countered what I said, apologized. Instead I pitched the thought away.
Worse, he reached for me with tenderness. I shrugged my shoulder.
“Stick to the tenth verse, Emma,” he said. “We pay a price if we try to do things ourselves. Indeed, we must kindle God’s fire to light our path in darkness, trust in Him, not anyone or anything else. ‘Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.’ ”
He pointed toward a black form wiggling along the riverbank then. “Otters,” he sai
d. “They play even at night. They’ve not a worry in the world. We can be like that if we but trust.”
He’d forgotten how sad he’d been. He’d forgotten how defeated he was before I convinced him to try something different. Ja, it was easy for him to trust now. He sounded more like a preacher or maybe a marshal or some legislator to me than my husband.
Rains began then, having slipped past the moonlight while we talked. The drops softly pattered my woolen shawl. When he took my hand to help me as we walked the muddy path back to the house, all I wanted was to pull away.
Christian still oystered at the Bay when our little community celebrated Herr Keil’s birthday (and Louisa’s) on March 6, just as we’d done back in Bethel. I confess, I resented the celebration for the Keils’ birthdays. The Keils didn’t live here, hadn’t wanted to live here, and weren’t a part of this community, even if they had buried their son Willie on the hill. Equally annoying, the celebration occurred on a Friday, not even a day when we’d otherwise have gathered at the stockade for worship, so I had to make the lengthy trip with the children and stay over, then return the following day to milk the goat.
Living seven miles south of the stockade made it no simple journey. Not that I’m complaining, just explaining.
Before I left, I rose in the dark, carrying the lantern to the lean-to where Opal rested. I wished I could milk her later instead of earlier since I wouldn’t be back to milk her until tomorrow. Her little bag would be swollen for sure. I had to have time to skim yesterday’s cream and leave today’s milk in another tin Christian had made for me. When that was finished, I packed a few items, brought ingredients to make a special dried-berry dessert, then woke the children and they dressed. We ate a simple breakfast of oats with molasses and then I saddled the mule—on loan to us from Andreas—hanging the lantern by a rope over the animal’s neck.