A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Read online

  “Well, we could ask,” Kitty suggested. “She might not join us on the Sabbath, but maybe on another day. We wouldn’t always have to stitch at the Keil’s. Your parlor is very inviting, Sister.”

  I didn’t want a competition! “So, Jacob is good with children,” I said, urging us back to the subject at hand.

  “He has a droll sense of humor and sometimes teases me about a subject,” Matilda said, “but I always think he’s serious, so I give him reasons why he might not want to think that way, and he laughs. I know then that he just said the words to see me get all rattled. He said he likes to see the ‘spark in my eyes.’”

  She placed her needle into the soap square where she kept it, saying it made the needle go more easily into cloth. “He enjoys working on buildings,” she continued. “He has a fine eye for finish work, where the banisters are smoothed or curlicues of wood fit into the corners. Back in Willapa, I saw some very nice chests he’d constructed in their family home.”

  “I suspect he doesn’t get to do much finish work here,” I said. “They must have two dozen buildings started and in various stages of completion, but not enough for a family to move into a finished house.”

  “Our men do the best they can, Emma. You mustn’t be so critical.”

  “I just stated facts,” I told BW. “No judgment intended.”

  “Jacob says that’s discouraging, but he still likes the work. He likes to grow things too.”

  “I want to talk to him, then, about making some shelves for me,” I told her.

  “Didn’t you make your own shelves in Willapa?” Barbara asked. “I heard that from Jack.”

  My stomach knotted at the mention of my husband. “Ja. Little shelves I made myself. I’m thinking of more like a…cupboard. Maybe on either side of the fireplace.”

  The women turned to look at the brick.

  “A painting would be nice there,” Kitty said. “You used to draw portraits, Emma. How come you don’t do that anymore?”

  “No time,” I said.

  “You could do that now, instead of quilting,” Kitty continued. “Or hang up your painting you did of Christian, at least.”

  “I’m not sure I could look at his picture every day without feeling sad,” I said.

  “You’re a married woman, Emma. You mustn’t hang on to the past so,” BW said.

  “Your children might like seeing it,” Christine pointed out.

  Kate nodded agreement.

  I hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll consider it, but I still want cupboards, and I’m going to see Jacob about them. And maybe Mr. Ehlen. He makes very nice baskets.”

  “And music reeds for the band’s clarinet,” Kitty said. “Kate told me that,” she added when I raised my eyebrows, wondering where she’d gotten such news.

  “I could put one of those baskets beside the hearth and fill it instead of a cupboard with dried weeds, I suppose.”

  “I like Mr. Ehlen,” Kate said. “His arm is so interesting, how it swings like that. It’s like a leash attached to him. Lorenz plays with us girls at school, along with Andy. He doesn’t act all smarty the way Henry T does, because he knows Latin and Greek and his father is the music instructor. Andy knows those too, and he’s not smarty.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Kate worked on a tiny needlework of a dog’s house that I’d drawn for her. I’d made the house with two front doors, like our home, and had promised her that on the back I’d paint a picture of Po, Karl’s dog. I hadn’t quite given in to having the dog move into our house as yet. None of the colonists let dogs sleep in their homes despite how we all indulged them with special crackers and such. When both sides of Kate’s needlework and my drawing were complete, we’d put it on a leather thong and she’d wear it around her neck—something special I hoped Louisa or Helena wouldn’t find too worldly. We might even make a few as Christmas gifts with other subjects: flowers or fruit.

  “I think cupboards there would fit,” Matilda said. “You could put a basket in the bottom shelf and still have room for china or one of your oyster shell paintings. Yes. A cupboard would be nice.”

  “That’s what I’ll do then. First thing tomorrow I’ll have a talk with Brother Jacob Stauffer, and we’ll see about a marriage,” I said. “I mean, a cupboard.”

  I thought Matilda would faint, with the color that drained from her face. “Oh, you can’t, Emma. You mustn’t say anything at all about marriage. Father Keil won’t permit it, and besides, Jacob might think I put you up to it, and what if he’s horrified by my pushiness? He could leave. I might never see him again.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better than this…waiting and wondering?” Almira said. “Sometimes not knowing is much worse than knowing and having to live with the next step. I hate not being able to take that next step.”

  “There’s always a next step to take,” I said. “Even if it’s just to get your mind clear about what matters.”

  “Then having the courage to act on that,” my Kate said. I stared at her. She stitched as though she didn’t even realize what she’d said. Are these words I often say out loud? Well, they are good ones for a child to remember.

  “I’d be mortified beyond belief if Jacob wasn’t really interested in marriage; and what if he were, and then Brother Keil said no outright to him? That would be so humiliating for him. I can’t imagine Jacob’s defying him.”

  “It would be good not to defy the leadership,” BW said. She would defend her John.

  “He comes from sturdy Stauffer stock,” I said. “He can think for himself.”

  “Emma, maybe you should let the Lord decide Jacob and Matilda’s course. Maybe there’s a reason He hasn’t brought them together,” BW added.

  “Ja, his father defied Keil and stayed in Willapa. As did John,” Matilda added.

  “I find men sometimes need…guidance to bring what they want to the surface,” I explained. “They’re so…deep that they sometimes don’t realize what they want or need until we women rub off the hard surface to get to that soft, all-important inside.”

  Silence filled the space, broken only by the sound of needle pushing through cloth.

  “It’s a good idea to find out where you stand,” BW said finally. “But it’s also true that there’s a risk. She should know that.”

  “Anything worth having is worth a little risk,” I said.

  “Another one of your facts,” BW noted, “not meant as judgment?”

  “Nein, it is a judgment, one we must never forget if we’re to live with abundance. No flower ever blooms unless it’s willing to risk wind and rain while it reaches for sun.”

  The very next day, while the rain wept like a widow, I donned my rubber slicker and trudged up the hill to Keil’s house, where I imagined Jacob would be. The men weren’t doing much construction with the weather so foul, so they practiced their music and sat around working on miniatures and wooden toys. The turners continued to turn out furniture in the village shop, but at Keil’s, the men told each other stories they neither believed nor remembered, apparently, because they kept repeating them through the years, laughing in the same places as though they’d just heard them. I stomped mud from my feet, slipped off my wooden shoes, and pulled up my dark stockings before entering the gross Haus.

  It really was like a hotel, I decided. No one ever knocked at the front door. Who would hear it? Who would know to come to the door? I wondered why I’d been so intimidated by Keil’s Elim, the gross Haus of Bethel when we lived there. I was young then, a child of seventeen. Behind Keil’s Elim walls, decisions had been made about my life over which I had no control. The irony was that back then, I’d still made things happen that had changed many lives, including my husband’s, including my children’s. Here, despite Keil’s power stripping me of the presence of my sons, it seemed Keil had less influence over men than he’d had in Bethel. Other men pushed to make decisions, and made them, when Keil attempted to slow progress by disappearing behind his workroom doors, lost in
one of his moods.

  Today, I didn’t need to be concerned with Brother Keil first. He’d already changed my life here in Aurora. It was Jacob who mattered.

  Once inside the hallway, I felt immediately steamy beneath my slicker. Christine was right. They kept the house very hot: fireplaces blazing, so many people.

  It was Christine who came up the steps. “I thought I heard someone come in,” she said. “Are you looking for Louisa?”

  “No, Jacob Stauffer.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I remember.” A smile formed at the corners of her mouth. “Would you like me to go get him for you?” Her tone said she hoped I wouldn’t. Her face looked pinched yet flushed. Probably from the work she’d been doing in the kitchen.

  “I can climb those stairs as well as you,” I said. “I assume he’s with the bachelors?” She nodded, and I started up the three flights.

  I did knock on the door at the top floor.

  “Who is it?” A male voice said. A fiddle stopped playing.

  “Emma Giesy,” I told them. “I’d like to talk to Jacob Stauffer.”

  “Oh, ja, now you’re in trouble, Jacob,” I heard muffled laughter behind the door. The teasing continued, with sentences I couldn’t quite make out, so I said, “I’m old enough to be his mother. Must I act like that to get you to send him out here?”

  “You’re not old enough to be my mother,” Jacob said as he opened the door. He turned back to cast some sort of look at the men who laughed, then closed the door. He moved us into the hall, so we stood in front of the window that offered frangible light as it continued to rain. “What can I do for you, Frau Giesy?”

  “I’ve some work I’d like you to do at my house,” I said.

  “One of the few houses finished.”

  “Not totally. There are things to do that I’d like you to take care of for me. I’m not sure how I could pay you. Brother Keil might not think the work I want done is…worthy of an exchange on the ledger. But perhaps I could launder your clothes or patch them—”

  “Fräulein Knight does that for me. Sometimes.” Just the mention of her name brought color to his neck.

  “I’d not interfere with whatever arrangements you have with Matilda Knight,” I said.

  “Oh, no arrangements. No, nein. Nothing like that. Maybe your gooseberry pie. Now that I’d trade some work for.”

  “Would you now? And my…bread. I could bake you a loaf of fine crusty bread.”

  “Those would do,” he said.

  “Can you come by after your workday today?”

  “Ach. This isn’t work I do here. It’s filling up time. You offer a much better way to do that. Eating gooseberry pie, I mean. And doing what I must to earn it.”

  “Of course, that’s what you meant,” I said. “Shall we head back together now?”

  “Ja. I’ll get my slicker and maybe my hammer. I may as well begin the finishing now.”

  Begin the finishing: wasn’t that what my life was about now? It was a thought I could latch on to.

  Later, back at my house, I came upon Christine as she finished her bath. She’d been so quiet in the kitchen, I thought she’d gone up to the bedroom. I hadn’t heard her talking to the girls across the hall. Kate said she was hungry, and I had a piece of cold salmon in the icebox (something else Helena probably thought a furbelow) that would be good for her to eat, instead of the sweets my daughter craved. I moved lightly down the steps.

  The door was ajar. I was certain no one was in the kitchen. But when I opened the door fully, Christine stood there unclothed, her feet in the copper tub we reserved for bathing. She stared at me, then we both looked at each other, startled.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, it’s my intrusion.”

  She reached for a flannel sheet she used as a towel, and when she turned, I could see that scars like spring branches mapped her back.

  Jacob spent several days building my cupboards in place. He’d done the work, a fine job of it too, and took extra time, I thought, to smooth the wood with beeswax. He told me I should only build them part way up the brick sides, so that one could still see the craftsmanship of Brother Yost’s brickwork above it. He worked only on days when someone besides Matilda was there. “I don’t want to compromise Fräulein Knight’s reputation,” he said. Almira chaperoned them, along with my girls, now that the weather kept all children out of school. Almira had them stringing dried berries and popcorn for the Tannenbaum we’d be trimming as Christday approached. She reported laughter between Jacob and Matilda, and quiet conversations, and long periods of silence during which she assumed Matilda tended to her tailoring and Jacob gave elbow grease to his beeswax efforts. Whenever she peeked in, she told me, “They were like two pegs in a puzzle who never got closer than their own set place.”

  I’d baked the promised pies and bread, and then Jacob had gone back to his other work, without a word to Matilda about their future.

  I’d thought that where interest and opportunity intersected, action must follow. Surely there was interest on Jacob’s part. We women had all agreed about that. And I’d provided opportunity.

  We were in the kitchen when Almira said, “You have to be explicit with men. They don’t see things the way we do.”

  Matilda said, “Maybe marriage isn’t in Jacob’s future. For years I never imagined it would be in mine, and I was fine. Until I met him.” She blushed. “His life before he met me was probably full and well ordered, and he doesn’t see any need to complicate it with a wife.”

  “My parents picked my husband for me,” Almira said. We all looked at her. “He was tall and articulate and had a passion for Scripture, and my parents were certain that my marrying him would mean marrying up. Of course, they had no idea that he had already accepted a call to come to the mission field, a long way from Virginia. I think he saw in me a strong young girl who could survive in the wilderness, alone, more often than not. I’d be away from my family, with no one to complain to if things got difficult. Otherwise, he might have married some young, pretty thing, but I met his needs. In the beginning.” She swallowed and looked away, and I wondered if she thought of the girl who was central to the divorce.

  “We do meet their needs,” I said. “It’s part of our duty. But it’s their duty to meet ours too. Once the marriage is blessed. Christian was that kind of man. It’s a good thing about the Giesys. At least some of the Giesys.”

  “Tell the story of meeting Papa,” Kate said.

  “My papa story too,” Ida said.

  “Oh, you’ve heard it a dozen times,” I said. I avoided looking at Kitty, hoping she wouldn’t point out to Ida that Ida’s father wasn’t the same as Kate’s. I hadn’t actually made the distinction to my girls. I wasn’t sure Ida even knew who Jack was in her life. “We’re working on getting Matilda and Jacob together,” I said. “Let’s see how we can do that.”

  “Matilda should be like Sleeping Beauty and prick her finger with a spindle,” Kate said. “Then Jacob could come wake her up.”

  “With a kiss,” Ida said. She made a face.

  “Who is Sleeping Beauty?” Almira asked.

  The girls filled her in, including the bloody details. “The king had banned all the spindles, because the frog had told him his daughter would prick her finger and fall asleep. Mama says he tried to cheat fate. But some old woman didn’t hear them, and she kept spinning and the princess—”

  “Who was a curious sort and who loved a little risk,” Kate interrupted.

  “Found her,” Ida finished. Ida didn’t have all the details down, but I was grateful once again to Karl for securing German books for them to read, written by the Grimm brothers, even if the stories held sadness in them.

  “Sleeping Beauty is a story of wishes fulfilled: the king and queen got the daughter they’d longed for, and even though they lost her for a hundred years, the princess was eventually rescued by her prince,” Kitty said. “It’s such a hopeful story.” She sighed.

  “H
ave you already kissed Jacob?” Kate asked. Her eyes grew large.

  “That’s a very personal question,” I told her. “And not polite to ask.”

  Matilda smiled. “I have not.”

  “I hope you don’t have to wait a hundred years, Matilda,” Kate said.

  “No matter what happens,” Matilda said, as she looked around at us as though memorizing each of our faces, “it doesn’t mean I haven’t already been rescued by love.”

  “Christine,” I said. “Sit with me.” I patted the bench beside me, covered with one of my quilted pillows. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she’d stepped across the stoop between the kitchen and the parlor, likely to see if the room was empty. I noticed that since I’d walked in on her, she’d kept constantly to the company of others, had taken no time to sit in the parlor alone, and was never alone with just me.

  “I can come back later,” she said. “I see you’re reading.” She nodded to the Bible I had in my lap.

  “It was my husband’s. Sometimes I like holding something I know he once held.” A clock I’d purchased from the store ticked as it sat on Jacob Stauffer’s finished shelves. “Join me,” I said. An oil lamp cast shadows across the woven rug.

  I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, or if I even should.

  “You’re wondering about the scars,” she said as she sat. “You’ve been kind not to bring it up.”

  “I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t interrupted your bath,” I said.

  “I’ve appreciated your not asking.”

  “But now I am.”

  She fidgeted with the chatelaine that hung from a ribbon around her neck. “Helena has a keen eye, and I knew if I stayed there, before long in the evenings we shared, she’d notice and ask questions, maybe even have me expelled.” Her black eyes grew suddenly large. “You aren’t going to do that, are you?”

  “Because you were once beaten? No. And I don’t think Helena would ask you to leave for that reason either.”