A Tendering in the Storm (Change and Cherish Historical)
“Ja. You could, but then I don’t know many men for whom that’s a priority,” I said.
He laughed.
Christian called to him and he stood, put on his hat and tipped his fingers to it. “My thanks to you, the infamous Emma Giesy,” he said, then ducked his head to go out of the door.
Infamous Emma Giesy. Where had that come from?
I stood in the open doorway, shouting directions and pointing at which cows I thought would be good for us to keep. They all looked pretty similar, with wide bony back hips and neat short horns at their heads. Ayershires they were, a sturdy animal known for both meat and milk, though sometimes prone to opinion. They’d fit in well.
Their selection made, Christian, with Andy close behind, led the two cows toward the lean-to, where the goat resided. At least the cows were docile. I’d heard of some of the wild cows with long horns that roamed the Territory, orphans from Spanish herds brought north some years before. At least these with Christian could be led. We’d have to work on the barn soon though a stanchion would have to do for now. The winters were wet but mild and the mules had fared well just standing out under big cedar trees. We’d raise the barn in the summer when oystering wasn’t so demanding.
The hogs would be a little different to manage. “I’ll ask Boshie and Karl if they can build a moveable corral,” Christian said. “I don’t want the hogs wandering too far. Bears could get them, or they’ll meander away and we’ll never get them back.”
“I can return later and help,” Jack offered. “But wouldn’t it be better to just keep all the hogs in one place? You’re raising them in common. Separating the cows because it’s just easier for a family to handle them two at a time, that I can see, but the hogs, well, why not keep them all together?”
I looked at Christian.
“Maybe it would be better for you to take the hogs on. Rudy might be willing to manage them all.”
“I believe you’re mistaken, Jack,” I said. “We’re not a branch of the colony at Aurora.”
“Not the way I heard it,” Jack said. He stretched. “But whatever way you want to go, Chris, it’s fine with us. We’re only what six, seven miles from Rudy and the rest?”
“Indeed. Take the hogs,” Christian said. “There’s too much going on now to ask Martin or Rudy to come here and build while I’m at Bruceport. Rudy’ll do well with the hogs.”
My husband avoided looking at me. He handed Jack the pack of food I’d prepared for them, then set about arranging a standing place for the cows. I heard him and Andy talking softly to the animals. When I walked out to get Opal, the goat, to milk her, I made sure I didn’t look at them. One wrong look back and I knew I’d say something I could only later regret.
Christian returned that day to the Bay, and I kept my words to myself, not wanting to start talking to hear what I thought, not wishing to stumble into an argument that couldn’t be resolved before he left. I kissed him good-bye and told him to have a safe trip and wondered when I’d see him again. “Next month, for certain,” he said. “It’s too much time away from you and the children.”
I also didn’t ask him to explain the present tense of his last words, a sentence that sounded like he was having serious second thoughts about being away, oystering. I decided to keep my own counsel or talk with Mary later to see if I could sort out how I felt about the “common fund colony” that had returned like a counterfeit coin promising riches but taking a toll instead.
Did Mary and Boshie see their work at the mill as contributing to the common fund? Maybe until the redwood was paid for or the time devoted to splitting the spruce wood. Maybe all was just an exchange until people got on their feet, not the return of the common fund. I refused to believe we were somehow just a stepchild of Keil’s colony.
In the kitchen later I spoke out loud, though I knew Andy didn’t understand. “How will we have something to leave you if your father keeps with the old ways of the common fund?”
I stomped the stick in the washtub, thumping so hard that the pepper mill fell off its shelf. I picked it up and slammed it back onto the shelf, causing the lid on the saltbox to jar open. I took a deep breath. I needed to calm down. Ach, even the seedlings I’d nurtured through the winter shivered with my outrage in their potato skins filled with dirt.
This was his family’s influence. They saw this community as a branch, just as Nineveh had been a branch to Bethel. We were all to be one happy family here with Keil as the trunk of the big, happy tree. Maybe that was why his family didn’t chastise Christian too much for taking risks with the oysters. They assumed he’d bring resources to help them with their needs. Maybe that was why they teased me, knowing that I was the Dummkopf, the one kept in the dark, the only one who didn’t know anything about it.
But we’d put our own money into oystering. Well, Christian’s physical labor was our part. Karl had put money in and so had Joe Knight, money he’d earned laboring in San Francisco.
Maybe I was the only one who assumed that we chose to remain as independent people, not replicas of Keil’s vision. That might explain why there was no rush to build a church; any church would be constructed in the main community, now Aurora. Maybe that was why there was so little push toward a school even with a superintendent. The main community would offer that.
Well it was not to be, not here, not under my kneading hands. Nein. If I was in the dark, then I would be like a mushroom and grow there, learn what I needed. I’d get Karl to think about offering a regular school schedule as soon as the weather changed. April to September were good months for schooling; Andy was still too young, really, to take the mule on his own to the stockade and back, but John Giesy’s children were old enough and the Stauffers and Schaefers had school-age children. John could order the schedule, free children for harvest, then offer school for a few more months until the rains came in earnest. I’d talk to him. And I’d ask Andreas and John to consider regular preaching on Sundays, like a real community. Sarah and the others might come if we acted like people who knew where our bounty came from and took time each week to express our gratitude.
When Christian returned in April, I already had the garden dug up and the small seedlings I’d nurtured through the winter set into the prodigal soil. I’d planted tiny flower seeds, too, totally impractical. He and the mule worked a larger field and we planted potatoes. It was already decided, he told me, that though it was expensive to have wheat brought in from Toledo on the Cowlitz, wheat raised by the Hudson’s Bay Company, that’s what we’d do. Growing wheat on the Willapa was toil in disaster. The grist mill already handled seventy-five bushels a day. “Sam says oats can make it, but you saw for yourself the small heads of the wheat you grew last year,” Christian told me.
But I wanted a harvest to call my own.
“Ah, woman, you are stubborn. You cannot change the seasons to your wishes.” But he let me plant wheat. I’m sure his brothers called it “Emma’s indulgence.”
That spring I had little time for complaining even to myself. The cows needed milking twice a day and the cream skimmed and kept cool in the river. I churned butter, hands on the plunger and my foot rocking Kate as she sat in the rocking chair fighting sleep. I was secretly glad I didn’t have the pigs to tend to as well.
When Christian was gone, Henry or Rudy sometimes brought over meat that I smoked, keeping the fire going at just the right flame. I asked after everyone’s health and was told all were fine, even Jack, they said, who had gone south to the Columbia to pick up the next load of wheat. “He didn’t stop on his way through,” I said.
“It would be unseemly,” Henry said. “A young man visiting with his cousin’s wife while her husband’s away.”
“I only meant I could have offered him something to eat,” I said. “Shown the Diamond Rule.” My words must have bristled if the raised eyebrow of Rudy and the way he looked at Henry were any indication. But then they were both safe in my presence, doing nothing unseemly. It just took two of them to deliver a ham
.
Weeding took hours, and keeping my eye on the ever-moving Kate and Andy meant I had little time not already devoted to simply surviving. When Christian came home, I sighed with relief, though it meant cooking bigger meals and washing clothes whether I felt like it or not. But by the next morning, his presence was enough to buoy. Just knowing he was there, within the call of my voice, gave me rest. I did raise the common fund issue with him, finally, one day in June.
He sighed. “It is the best way here, Emma. We should have good return on the oysters this year, a good return. Some of what we make must go to Herr Keil, as they too struggle to build up the colony and have so many more to worry over. We agreed to pay back what the colony loaned us. You remember.”
“Ja, but not beyond that. I didn’t believe we would simply go back to where we were before,” I said. “We set out on a different path by staying here.”
“Was it so bad to know the weight was shared by others?” he asked. “To know we can care for widows and children, those in need beyond ourselves, is that so hard? It’s the way to live the Diamond Rule, making life better for others.”
“We were to care for our own first,” I said.
“Emma. That isn’t what you told me long months ago. You said we should reach out more to others. How else would the world read the story of our faith, if we just kept it to ourselves, our own little community?”
“Is that why you’ve taken in a housekeeper?” I asked.
“What? Who said that?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“They tease you, Emma. I’ve no housekeeper. If you saw our hut you’d believe.”
“Well, good. But this common fund made up of only former Bethelites does keep us as our own little colony. It doesn’t reach out to others. People don’t even come to the church services because they feel it’s all us Germans. Andreas won’t use English. How unwelcoming is that for our neighbors? I don’t think any of the other settlers are sending their children to the school, either.”
“John tells me you had words with him about that.”
“Ja. I did.”
“But because we take care of each other, we can give to others. Not just the tithe, but beyond the tithe. John will come around. My father will speak in English if there is someone there to hear him. Don’t you see that, Emma? We are a generous people, passing good things on.”
“So Joe’s investment, his own money, he returns that now to the colony?”
“If he wishes. Karl too. But our share of the earnings, a portion each year, will go to pay Wilhelm. The rest, into a common fund. It is the best way I know how to take care of my family. I could not be away so much, Emma, if it wasn’t for the others carrying my weight here.”
“I haven’t asked them for anything!” I said.
“They tend the hogs. We’ll have good bacon and hams through the winter. They grind the grain and bring it. They helped build this very house. They bring you game.”
“I could shoot my own game if you’d teach me how. But then how would I get the ammunition if not from your brothers? Or would you provide it for me? If I begged? If I used the proper words, nothing unseemly?”
“Whatever you need you may receive by just asking.”
“You will not allow a discussion of this?” I asked.
“Indeed. Discuss all you wish. But the decision is made.”
I gathered up willow branches for the mats and took them out to dry in the sun. Nothing had changed. Nearly four years of working side by side with my husband, holding his hand when he thought to drown in disappointment, praying for him, doing all I could think to do and still, he made the decisions. I was still just a woman, a wife, a mother, allowed to have an opinion but, like an unwatered seed, never see it grow into harvest.
The late-afternoon sun soothed my face as I sat with my back to the wall. With a stick, Kate patted at a spider as she sat. The goat followed Andy through the grasses while Christian lifted the bucket and went out to milk the cows. I closed my eyes. There had to be a way. I wanted more for my children than having to beg every time I had a desire. Andy was a smart child. He’d be a good student who might one day want to go far away to school, the way my uncle had, the worldly ambassador. How could I fuel my children’s dreams if all we worked for poured into a pool others could take from? And if they could give when we asked, they could also withhold, those Giesy brothers. Just as Keil could. The man still ruled us even though he was miles away!
I started weaving a basket from the fronds left over from last year’s mat-making. The baskets I attempted through the winter months were poor results fit only to hold the roots I dug. They made good storage at least but wouldn’t be anything I could possibly sell. I lacked talent. I lacked gifts. The weather worked against my wheat. How could I be independent?
I got up and went into the cabin, put the fronds back up in the loft. They’d continue to dry there. When I came down the ladder, a letter lay on the table. Christian must have brought it from Bruceport, though I hadn’t seen it that past evening. It was from Catherine. Dear, lovesick Catherine. At least that’s how I saw her. Jack was much too charming for Catherine, too old for her as well. He was a bit of a buzzard with a songbird’s voice.
But I read the parts about Papa now having property in his name. So not all that he earned had gone into the common fund in Bethel. I tried to remember what he might have sold or where he might have worked to earn his own money. Somehow he had found a way to earn resources that didn’t go into the colony. So it was in my Wagner blood to do something innovative. Christian hadn’t said that anything I might earn had to go into the common fund. And didn’t he give me that twinkle in his eye when I teased him about his territorial marshal pay? Maybe he would withhold something for his own. Maybe he wouldn’t object if I did as well.
Ach, there is always a way. Begin to weave; God provides the thread. How could I have forgotten?
The Fourth of July celebration was the greatest joy of my days in Willapa. Christian came to get us and we all went back with him to Bruceport. I liked the sense of a bustling town, with street vendors serving pork on sticks and hard-boiled eggs for sale right on the street. A band played, though not our German one. We’d heard the Giesys playing when we stopped at the stockade just to say hello as we made our way back to the Bay. His brothers didn’t seem to mind that we weren’t staying for the Giesy celebration; at least no one said anything to me that suggested that. At Bruceport people made speeches standing on the steps of Coon and Woodard’s Store and Public House (Sam Woodard had a branch he owned here). I saw a few women and Andy made eyes with tykes his age. Christian pointed out where the justice held court. I listened to talk of events back East and the obstinacy of Governor Stevens. Posters about the martial law still hung on a board outside the wooden hut that passed as the sheriff’s office. One hung upside down.
When Christian bent down to remove a stone from inside Andy’s boot, I noticed his thinning hair and a tiny mole I’d never seen before at the back of his head. He needed to wear his hat. I wondered where he’d left it.
It was a slow-paced day with few worries. Karl Ruge would milk the cows and tend the goat and mule. That night, we placed our blankets and mats on the beach, far enough from the incoming tide but not too far to see blasts of fireworks sent out over the water and the long island that separated the Bay from the sea. We set the lantern behind us. Andy pressed his hands to his ears with each loud sound, but he grinned. We heard what we thought were “probably a few happy Americans celebrating,” Christian said. “Or gun shots.”
“Will you have to keep the peace?” I said. “Take someone to jail or something?”
“Not likely,” my husband said, pulling me toward him. “They’ll wind down and sleep it off come morning.”
The mosquitoes buzzed about our heads, but I’d put a mud paste on the children’s faces and hands and at their ankles, making sure they kept their shirts and pants on. We’d pitched netting over us like a tent and kept the
fire going. When the children fell asleep and the mosquitoes were carried off by an ocean breeze, I asked Christian if we could walk just a little way along the beach. “To see if we can find a glass jar or some other shipwrecked treasure,” I said.
“We’ll stumble around like drunkards more likely.”
I laughed at him and he indulged me once again, allowing me to hold the lantern as I scanned the driftwood exposed by the light as macabre shapes. What was so clear in the daylight was so easily obscured in the night. Christian sniffed the salty air, then pinched his nose to wipe away the drainage. It was an act of his I detested, but I let it pass without comment. I must do things to annoy him too, I thought. There was no sense in making this pleasant time a misery.
We found no treasures, nothing delivered from a distant sea. We walked past piles of discarded oyster shells. “A settler built a kiln one year and tried to burn the shells into lime,” Christian told me. “But he decided the hard-shell clams yielded a better lime. Might be something to consider down the road. Lime makes a fine fertilizer, which we’ll need in time as we use up the land.”
My husband the innovator, always thinking of the future.
Back at the netting, I recognized that I had found a treasure: my treasure was the companionship of my husband and sleeping family. It seemed the time to give Christian my Fourth of July gift. I pulled the rolled parchment I’d brought with me out of my bag. “What’s this?” he asked when I handed it to him. He sat up, hunched over it in the lamplight.
“It’s a drawing I made of you,” I said. “A likeness.”
He didn’t say anything as he stared. I thought he might have been disappointed.
“I’ll get paint one day and it’ll look better,” I said. “And the light isn’t good here. But Andy recognized it when I showed him. And I made a little tiny sketch of it in my letter home, and Catherine knew exactly who it was though she couldn’t read the medal. There.” I pointed.
“Who told you about the medal?” he said.