A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Page 20

  “My sons interest me!” My voice cracked. “My. Sons. Interest. Me.” A coastal storm of grief swept across my heart. “Am I seen as so frivolous that I’d give up my sons for a house? How could you question that? How could…they?”

  “As do your daughters interest you. Devote yourself to them now, Emma. You’ll see Andy and Christian. You’ll be a part of their lives. Let the community raise them up and educate them.”

  “The way the tinsmith or the turner is a part of my life?” I said. “Someone they see in passing? If there’s a small need, then I might be allowed to fill it, but mostly I’m decorative, to look at from a distance?”

  “More than in passing, Emma.” He stood, tried to touch my shoulder, but I jerked back from him.

  “Don’t touch me.” I stepped back. “I trusted you.”

  “And I kept your trust. I brought your boys to you. They’ve been here with you for two years, Emma. Safe. And they’ll be here for many more. Just not the way you thought it would be, but when has it ever been what you thought it would be? Christian’s death changed everything.”

  “Coming here changed everything.”

  “It was the path you took,” he said. “A good path, made from difficult circumstances. See the good in this, Emma. There is some. You are making your sons’ lives better than your own.”

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see the anguish.

  “I’ll have the boys come by tomorrow. Christian’s been asking for you. I told him, ‘In the morning.’”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I can face them.”

  “You’ve got to be stronger than they are in this. You’re the adult; they’re children. Your explanation will help them deal with this change.”

  I wanted Martin to have to face their questions. Let him bear the brunt of their confusion. If they had confusion. Andy showed no distress at all. Maybe that was what eclipsed my heart.

  I stood with my back to Martin, feeling the coolness of the usually closed-off room. “Send them,” I said. “If they’ll come, I’ll do my best to ease their distress.”

  Martin left then, and I stayed with my back to the door, hoping no one would come in to try to comfort me or ask me questions. I needed time to grab on to something firm. Fabric. Wool. My God.

  “Come, Mama.” I heard the door open. It was Ida’s voice. “We’ll show you our lab-rinse.” She pulled on my hand. Not now.

  “Mira says to call it a puzzle path,” Kate said from behind her.

  “I can’t go with you now,” I said. “I’m already walking on one.”

  “Did you know what they did to me?” I asked Karl, later in the week that seemed a month of foggy days.

  “Ja, I heard some changes were recommended.”

  “Recommended? You think I had a choice?”

  “We all have choice,” he said. “If only about how to respond to the unpredictability of life.”

  “Oh, I suppose I should be asking, ‘How do we see God in this?’ Well, I don’t.” My sarcasm caused his eyebrows to lift.

  “Ah, Emma,” he said. “Life has not treated you well; but now you will have the opportunity to show your sons and daughters, even your sisters and brothers and your own parents, how you tithe your tragedies.” His pipe, recently smoked, lay on the table, and the scent brought a comfort.

  I had the girls with me. Ida played with one of the wooden toys that Martin had made for her. The sight of it no longer comforted me as it once had. “I was so blind,” I said. “Why didn’t I see this coming, Keil’s maneuvering, John’s and maybe even Helena’s influence? I keep missing things,” I said. “It’s as though I never learn.”

  “Can we take the puppy to the grass?” Kate asked Karl. She held a plump black and white mongrel in her arms and had brought the dog in from outside.

  “Ja, sure. I call him Potato using the English. Po for short,” Karl told her. “Watch him so he doesn’t get too close to the edge of the bridge. He doesn’t know there’s danger there.” Ida dropped her wooden horse and followed her sister outside. I noticed then the bowl Karl had set out for the dog.

  “Po keeps you company,” I said.

  “Ja, sure. One of the stage drivers dropped him off for me, thought I might be lonely and need a little companion. He guards the toll hut at night when I’m not there.” He smiled. “Sister Louisa doesn’t like dogs inside. You should get a dog, Emma.”

  “I have Opal and Clara. They’re trouble enough.”

  “But a dog licks your face, he’s so happy to see you, and curls at your feet while you work. He even acts apologetic when you step on his foot.” He smiled.

  “I don’t have much time for sitting around with a dog curled at my feet,” I said.

  “They make you make time,” Karl said.

  I watched the girls and the dog through his open door. Yellow leaves from the alder trees drifted down, and the vine maple had turned blood red. Elderberry bushes and ferns painted the riverbanks in green. “You’ll miss those stage drivers when you’re back to teaching,” I said.

  “Ja, they brightened my days. I brightened theirs,” he said.

  “Won’t you miss this, being in the classroom all the time when the school is all finished?” I turned to look at him.

  “Ja, by goodness. Po and I have a good life right here. A nod to a sad face looking out of the stage window can change a passenger’s day. They’re dusty and tired and always running late. But the dog makes them grin. I ask after the drivers’ families, and they like that. People sometimes go all day long without anyone hearing them or remembering what they said the last time they came through. But”—he put his palms out—“everything changes, Emma. Now I will teach the children again. It’s how life is, ja? I will cherish my time with them.”

  “Should I fight them, John and Keil and even Martin? Should I take my children and disappear into the night? Would you help me again?”

  “What is it that you want for your children, Emma? What do you want for yourself?”

  I’d been asking those questions ever since my conversation with Keil. I sat down on the narrow bed Karl took his naps on. It was the only place to sit besides the chair Karl occupied. I ran my hands over the quilt that covered his bed, my fingers following the zigzag lines that stitched together odd-shaped pieces of cloth. His old worn pants, a shirt. I recognized pieces of calico in the Log Cabin quilt made from dresses Mary Giesy stitched for her girls. Mary must have made it for him when he’d lived with them in Willapa. She was a generous soul.

  “When I was younger, I dreamed sometimes of being the first in a footrace, with many dozens of others coming in behind me,” I said. “I imagined accolades as I crossed the finish line.” I had never told anyone, even Christian, of this dream of mine. “I had visions of people clapping and cheering for me because I’d done something…grand. Sometimes, I’d wake from the dream and I could still hear their cheers echoing as I entered my day. While their voices faded, the uplift, like a hawk catching the wind and soaring toward the sun, stayed with me when I took out the ashes, helped my mother clean the lamp globes, peeled mounds of potatoes, changed my sisters’ napkins. I thought I was called to something purposeful and important. The insignificant things I did each day were only a prelude to the symphony that would be my life.” I picked at a piece of loose thread in the quilt’s stitching. I’d bring my needle and thread next time and restitch the seam for Karl. “Now here I am. My sons have been taken from me. I’m separated from a husband whom I never should have married. What I do here every day could be done by…anyone in this communal place. There’s nothing unique in it. And the daily music of my life is a funeral dirge, nothing grand at all.”

  I heard the girls laughing outside and happy yips from the dog in its play. The day felt hot, and perspiration beaded above my lip.

  “There’s something you do that is both important and yet unfinished,” Karl said. I looked to see what he referred to. His eyes turned toward the sounds made by the girls. “They need your eff
orts, Emma. And didn’t you raise your sons to be good thinkers, independent, and kind? They don’t forget that. You’ll still influence that in them. You’ll still see them.”

  “Christian, maybe. He might remember me fondly. But Andy is as lost to me as his father is.”

  “Ach, self-pity does not become you, Emma.” He picked up his pipe and drew on it, then tapped it as though to light it again. Instead he said, “Christian and Andrew are alive and healthy because of your care for them. Andy wants to heal people one day, and you are a part of that dream. Christian finds joy in the outdoors and in helping others. Your girls are smart and generous. These are of your doing too. Yet you have work left to do.”

  “But I wanted my life to mean something,” I said.

  “To be ahead in the race.” I nodded. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I looked away, as though to check on the girls. “Was it being in front that gave your dream its boost, or was it knowing others ran with you in a worthy race?”

  I hadn’t thought of those distinctions. “If I’d been the only person in the dream crossing the finish line, it wouldn’t have meant as much, I guess. But weren’t the others there providing the applause because I’d done something…significant? Why would they applaud over something simple and mundane like sewing a patch on a pair of pants or fixing a stew? That’s all I do now.”

  “Is it?” he said. “Maybe the people cheering were there to inspire the dream in the first place. It could be, Emma, that what we imagine as other people doing unusual things in our dreams are really just us. Maybe you were cheering yourself on.”

  “You think I’m self-centered too, then, like Keil implied.”

  “Nein, nein. Take no offense here, Emma. Remember how Shakespeare tells us, ‘to thine own self be true’? You are uplifted crossing the line; but you are also the one making it happen and celebrating the victory, a goal line, Sehnsucht, that longing that will not cease. I believe such longings are given to us by God. You don’t need to depend on others to say it’s so.”

  I couldn’t help recalling that vivid dream I’d had years before where Christian and I dove under the water, and I asked if he knew where we were going, and he’d said no, he’d lost his compass. I’d awakened worried. Could it have been me, feeling adrift and lost without a compass, and not Christian at all?

  Sehnsucht. That which calls us toward something we cannot ignore, to return us to relationship with God. Maybe it wasn’t winning or doing something grand that mattered, but rather being in a race that filled my heart and allowed me to one day hear, “Well done,” at the end. It wasn’t a thought I would pitch away.

  “Go like this, Mama,” Kate said. The girls had taken me to the open place where they and Almira had formed their puzzle path. Animals had scattered the pinecones, making the narrow paths difficult to follow. “Mira says after we walk it enough, we won’t need the pinecones. Our feet will be like chalk and make the pattern.”

  “We could bring rocks. Or branches. The wind can’t sweep branches good,” Ida said.

  “Well,” I corrected. “Wind can’t sweep branches very well. I don’t really have much time, girls.” I’d seen Jonathan earlier in the day, but he’d avoided looking at me and kept talking to the men at the store. I ought to go visit my father and mother, at least tell them what transpired, so they don’t hear it as gossip. I’d kept myself busy, doing. It kept me from thinking of my loss. A sniggle of memory reminded me that when I didn’t grieve what I’d lost, I sometimes made poor choices. Marrying Jack was one of those.

  I’d think of hopeful things. Helena had asked if I was going to the fair. If I did, I had food to prepare, things to arrange, questions to answer: Should I take the girls? Would going affirm for Keil that I was easily swayed?

  But I was here now, being tugged at by my Ida. I sighed. “So tell me what I’m supposed to be doing on this trail.”

  “Watch,” Kate said. “And smell whatever we can smell. And feel the breeze on your arms, Mama. Butterfly kisses, ja?” Kate walked faster and was soon on one of the switches that led her back toward us.

  “Listen too, Mira says.” Ida held my hands but walked in front of me to stay within the narrow borders, so my arms rested on each of her shoulders. We walked a little like Brita did, waddling from side to side, with my feet in step with hers. “What do your ears see, Mama?”

  “They see…birds singing,” I said. “And someone’s dog is barking far away.”

  “That’s God talking,” Ida said. “Mira says God talks to us when we walk.”

  “If we don’t talk so much,” Kate chided.

  I didn’t think God had the voice of a barking dog, but then these days, everything was open to question.

  This trip to the field was a break in the routine we’d fallen into, Kitty, Almira, Matilda, and I. We rose early and fixed a morning meal for all. Then I headed for work at the hotel and Matilda stitched on an order she’d gotten from the tailor shop. She still didn’t know if she’d stay, but for now, she’d found work that satisfied.

  Almira had been sleeping less. In her first days with us, she’d wake up close to the midday meal and then fall back to sleep again before dark. Now she rose earlier, heated water for the laundry, on Mondays at least; then she and Kitty would swirl the sheets and towels and underdrawers with their sticks, carrying the steaming clothes to the wringer that by then Matilda would be ready to operate. Kitty would snap the clothes, then hang them on the line to dry, well out of the reach of Opal. Then she’d leave for her time at wherever she was cooking that day—at the Keils’, the construction sites, or the hotel—while Almira watched my girls and Matilda returned to her needles and threads.

  By the time I arrived back in the late afternoon, the clothes would be nearly dry, and I’d take them down, folding them into the basket. The next day, we’d heat the irons and press the sheets and towels and plain, dark dresses, each of us taking a turn with the flat iron as the day and evening waned. Sometimes we took laundry overload from the bachelors staying at the Keils’. We often brought baskets from the communal laundry house to wash and iron. I noticed that Matilda looked at the laundry marks closely, and I asked her once if she was seeking out JS for Jacob Stauffer. She’d blushed.

  Wednesdays we baked or dried berries. Thursdays we did extra gardening, which in the fall meant putting the soil to rest, digging up potatoes with our pitchforks, burying cabbage and melons in straw. Fridays we took the rugs out to beat them and opened windows and aired out the house, cleaned the lamp globes, and mended by lamplight at night while one of us read out loud to the others. Saturdays we heated water for baths and prepared whatever we might want to eat on the following day, so we didn’t have to cook or fire up the stove on Sundays—at least every other Sunday. Soon there’d be the big productions of slaughtering the hogs and rendering lard, but that would take nearly all the colony and was an almost festive time of gathering, a welcome break in everyday routines.

  Today was a Sunday when Father Keil did not speak, and so the girls had insisted that I let them lead me to their “lab-rinse,” as Ida called it, to “have church” instead.

  “I’m slowing down, Mama,” Kate told me. “If we walk too fast, we miss things.”

  Almira had taught her well. I kept my eyes on the ground so as not to step on Ida’s heels. Leaves brisked across our path. A squirrel chattered in the trees beyond. I didn’t initially see what caused Ida to stop abruptly, then break away and run.

  “Andy!” she shouted. “Come on the lab-rinse with us.”

  He stood at the end of one of the turns. Ida skipped over the pine cones and imaginary lines and wrapped her arms around him. He hugged her back and let her lead him. “You follow me, and Mama will follow you,” she told him. “We go in, and then we go out. It’s fun.”

  I thought of hopscotch, a game we’d played as children in the dirt with squares and stones. I’d played it for hours with my sisters on Sabbath days when working wasn’t allowed, grateful that quiet playing still was. Thi
s walk reminded me of that, except I didn’t really have to concentrate, the way you did when standing on one foot and leaning over to pick up the pebble in hopscotch. My mind could wander.

  It didn’t now.

  I’d encountered my son for the first time since the decision had been made for him to live with Martin. Still, there was a bit of precarious balancing going on as we moved along the path.

  He walked in front of me. I followed him, keeping my hands to myself.

  Ida chattered, giving him instructions for listening and watching. Kate rolled her eyes at me as I looked at her across one of the lanes where she was coming back out from the center, while we still entered in.

  “Now we pray,” Ida told us. We stood in a tight circle at what was apparently the end of the route to the inside. We’d go out the same way we came in. “Pray for us coming in. Pray for others going out. That’s what Mira says.”

  “Who’s Mira?” Andy asked.

  “Questions later,” Ida said, as she lifted her finger like a teacher correcting.

  Andy’s eyes met mine, and I saw in them a look of brotherly compassion but of yearning too, a look so intense I swallowed. I hoped his eyes weren’t mirrors reflecting mine. “We’d best do as she says,” I told him, surprised that my voice carried nothing harsh or defensive in it.

  Ida was quieter on the way out, and I found I could bring to mind the names of those I loved and cared for, as my child had suggested we do: Matilda and her hopes with Jacob, Almira, Kitty, my parents. Even the foster sister, Christine. I still called her “the foster sister” instead of “my sister.” Brita. I added Louisa. Helena. My children, all. I could pray for those I didn’t even know, those far beyond our borders: the stage drivers Karl spoke of, soldiers on the battlefields, their families, leaders making choices. That last prayer brought me to Keil and John and Martin. I sent a prayer up for even them, amazed that I could.

  At the end, I felt refreshed in a way I hadn’t been when I started on this walk.